Miracle Girls (9781938126161)

by Caschetta, M. B.

  Table of Contents

  Half-Title

  Title Page

  Copyright Information

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The First

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  The Second

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  The Third

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Book Club Discussion Guide

  Miracle

  girls

  Engine Books

  Indianapolis

  a novel

  Engine Books

  PO Box 44167

  Indianapolis, IN 46244

  enginebooks.org

  Copyright © 2014 by MB Caschetta

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are

  either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

  Also available in hardcover and paperback formats from Engine Books.

  ISBN: 978-1-938126-16-1

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014935318

  For Meryl and

  for miracle girls everywhere

  In memoriam

  Mary Mastroianni

  (1912-2007)

  And Thou that art the flower of virgins all

  Of whom Saint Bernard loved so well to write,

  To Thee at my beginning do I call;

  Thou comfort of us wretches, help me indite

  Thy maiden’s death, who won through her merit

  The eternal life, and from the Fiend such glory

  As men may read hereafter in her story.

  —Geoffrey Chaucer

  Prologue to The Second Nun’s Tale,

  The Life of St. Cecilia

  THE FIRST

  Soon Cee-Cee Bianco will climb into the back of the family station wagon stalled at the end of the driveway. Her puffy down jacket slung over pajamas, bare feet wedged into a pair of red plastic cowboy boots from Woolworth’s.

  Fingers pink from the cold.

  When she faces forward, presents are stacked in the passenger seat, bits of red ribbon still half hanging on. When she looks behind her, the driveway runs into a stretch of endless highway, a bright swirl of sun and snow.

  Clutching her little bottle of medicine, she thinks about Frank’s advice. Drink this when you feel one coming on, honey.

  The doctors blame her visions on asthma and allergies. Nonna’s priests say it’s all in her head.

  With one hand in her pocket, she shuffles a miniature deck of cards, practicing. Ta-da!

  For a minute, nothing happens. Nothing but snow.

  Then her brothers come out of the house, kicking onto the front porch, elbowing and calling each other names. They pound on the car window until Cee-Cee unlocks. They jostle for space, shoving her over so they can pile in the back, and sit oldest to youngest: Anthony, Roadie, and Baby Pauly.

  Cee-Cee is always last.

  “Move it over, stupid!” Anthony says.

  She is named for the virgin martyr who survived a burning bath and three bloody whacks to the neck, then refused to die for three days. To be a saint, Cee-Cee knows, you have to be tough.

  Pressed to the door, she feels a purple bruise blossom on her arm.

  She closes her eyes to shut out the noise and does not open them again until Baby Pauly is shouting in her ear, pointing to Glory who is about to leave again.

  No one ever thinks of calling Glory Mama.

  But for now Cee-Cee is still just a regular girl—ten years old—on Christmas morning, her favorite day.

  It’s the same every year.

  Glory gets mad at Frank and throws a shoe. “You think this junk buys love?” she shouts, stumbling over boxes of toys. “You think it makes you a better father?”

  Frank always ducks. “Watch it, will you?”

  Baby Pauly and Roadie stop hitting each other with their new Bobby Orr hockey sticks still wrapped in plastic. Anthony looks up from a box of chocolates.

  Cee-Cee sits in front of the color TV and sings, “Happy Birthday, Baby Jesus…” to the tiny baby in the manger that Nonna gave her. She rocks back and forth, making the figurines hop around so the Wise Men do a dance.

  “Cut it out,” Anthony says, throwing a raisin-nut cluster at his sister’s head. “We’re not that religious.”

  Glory stops yelling at Frank long enough to shake Cee-Cee by the shoulders. “I swear to God, Cecilia Marie Bianco—” But music from a special report comes on the TV.

  Suddenly everyone is staring at the screen.

  A photograph shows a girl with wavy red hair, freckles, and a gap in her smile where Cee-Cee can see the faintest flash of tongue. Eileena Brice Iaccamo, the newscaster says in a somber voice. Kidnapped. She was last seen wearing a pink sweater.

  “That girl goes to my school,” Roadie says.

  Frank says. “Another one?”

  “More kids go missing in Romeville than anywhere,” Glory says. “I read it in the paper.”

  Frank shakes his head. “Sickos.”

  A bunch of Vietnam protesters with long messy hair come on the TV next. They shout, holding up two-finger peace signs and shaking them at the camera.

  “Look!” Baby Pauly points at a pair of nuns carrying signs.

  Roadie nudges Baby Pauly aside with his foot. Now everyone can see the nun shout into a reporter’s microphone about the terrible war.

  “Hey, it’s Sister Bertrille,” Frank says, the Flying Nun. She’s wearing a full habit.

  “What is wrong with those women?” Glory says.

  “Damn holy rollers.” Frank can’t stand God or Nonna or Nonna’s friends, who are mostly nuns and priests, especially when they show up on the news. “They think prayer is what’s saving them from communism?”

  Glory switches off the TV. She kisses the top of her daughter’s head. “Take a stab at normal, baby. Do it for me.”

  After Frank goes to work the next morning, Glory pulls everyone out of bed to pack it all up and put it in the car: even the toys that aren’t broken, even the sweaters that fit. Cee-Cee puts a new doll in the pile, eyeing G.I. Joe still in his box.

  Now he will never get to kiss Barbie.

  Glory confronts Baby Pauly. “Who’s going to teach you to skate?”

  He pulls a hockey puck from under his pillow and hands it over.

  “Everything’s closed today!” Anthony warns. “Snowstorm’s coming!”

  Anthony watches TV in his underwear. He is failing the ninth grade again. Everyone else is dark with ink-black hair, but Anthony has a jagged line of reddish-brown bangs framing his white face. His skin is so veiny and blue it makes you think of skim milk. Even his eyes are blue. His fingers and toes are always flinching like there’s a colony of ants burrowing under his skin.

  Even at night when everyone is asleep, Cee-Cee can feel her brother twitching.

  Spurred on by Anthony’s bad attitude, Glory stacks the repackaged Christmas gifts by the front door, ordering Roadie to pile t
hem in the front seat of her car.

  “Nowhere to go, Glory!” Anthony says. “You’re out of your mind.”

  Glory grabs an armful of coats from the closet. “You think you’re the last Pepsi in the desert, Anthony Gerard?”

  Cee-Cee pulls on a random jacket over her pajamas. She feels Anthony’s eyes on her, like always.

  “St. Agnes married Jesus when she was only thirteen. And they chopped off her head,” she tells him. She can see Agnes’ headless body in a blinding white wedding dress, the happy look on her face as it rolls to the floor.

  Anthony won’t stop watching Cee-Cee.

  Over his shoulder the clouds roll past the window; they look like giant fluffy cats. Finally he turns and follows Glory into the hallway.

  “Doesn’t look like the desert to me, Glory! Looks like a blizzard.”

  Glory herds her children toward the door. “If you’re so smart, Anthony, then why don’t you try being the grown-up?”

  The bank where Glory works is closed, and probably most of the roads. Still Cee-Cee does what she’s told, escaping out the front door.

  “Trust me, people!” Glory says. “J.C. Penney’s is always open.”

  In the back seat of the station wagon, Cee-Cee keeps her eyes closed, listening to the sound of her own heart beating above the noise of her brothers settling. The driver’s side door slams shut with a waft of perfume, followed by the sound of Glory’s fists pounding the dashboard.

  “Damn you, Franco Bianco!”

  Out of gas is nothing new.

  Most mornings Frank shaves and puts on a tie. Sometimes he lets Cee-Cee lather her face too; she pretends to shave with a butter knife. Before he leaves, he and Cee-Cee go around the house for a quick game of hide and seek, but they don’t look for someone who is hiding. They look for Glory’s hidden money.

  No matter where she stashes the extra cash—zipped in a pillow, taped under the toilet tank, squirreled behind a loose panel in the basement—they always find it.

  While Frank puts on his shoes, Cee-Cee acts as lookout, spying through the front window for her father’s ride, the only taxi in town. She gives Frank the high sign when Il Duce arrives, cutting his lights and coasting up the driveway. They listen to the engine softly humming.

  Right on time, Frank always whispers. Just like the real Mussolini.

  He gives Cee-Cee a wink and puts an index finger up to his lips. It’s no secret Frank’s lost his job, but everyone plays along.

  Cee-Cee knows his first and only stop is Blanche’s Iron Door, an old Marine Midland bank converted to a bar. ’Cause that’s where the gin is flowing, Glory likes to say. After Blanche’s husband died, Blanche changed the name and got Frank to hang an old vaulted bank door on the wall in the far corner above some tables, securing it with rusty wire.

  In the car, defeated, Glory rolls down her window. “Bastard!” Frank is famous for leaving an empty tank.

  Cee-Cee imagines the white puff of Glory’s curse clouding up and rolling out the window in all directions as if her voice might reach Frank, who is by now long gone.

  Sometimes when the school nurse calls to send Cee-Cee home with a fever, Frank pays Il Duce to pick her up and drop her at Blanche’s. At the bar, he bunches up his coat for a pillow and makes her lie down on an empty pool table. Blanche covers her with a red-and-white checkered tablecloth, plastic on one side, fuzzy on the other.

  “My Norbie will sure be glad to see you lying there like a princess,” Blanche will say.

  Norbert Sasso is huge and sweet and especially slow when it comes to thinking. He shows up eventually with his big moony face and his tongue unfurling like a flag. Sometimes he’s alone and sometimes he’s fast on the heels of a girl with ponytails and scraped knees, which is how Cee-Cee met Mary Margaret in the first place.

  “This is my best friend besides you,” Norbert said. "Her name is Mary Margaret Cortina."

  The girl focused her sharp eyes on Cee-Cee. “What if someone wanted to play and knocked you off the pool table with a cue stick?”

  “Hasn’t happened yet.” Cee-Cee propped herself up on an elbow, feeling her fever lift. “Do you play pool?”

  Mary Margaret shrugged.

  “Cee-Cee’s protected by angels,” Norbert said.

  Mary Margaret scrunched up her nose. “Do you believe that crap?”

  Norbert rubbed his hands together at his forehead.

  Cee-Cee shrugged. “Why not?”

  Later Blanche said they should give Mary Margaret a break for being in a bad mood because her mother keeps having babies that die.

  “We could be friends,” Mary Margaret said, making Cee-Cee’s heart ache with happiness.

  In the car, Roadie, fourteen, produces a wrinkled twenty-dollar bill from his coat.

  He has wiry hair perched on his head with a life of its own; from the side he looks like a bird about to take flight.

  “Where did you get money?” Anthony says.

  Glory sounds excited: “Who cares where! Why didn’t you say something, honey?”

  “Found it in the lint catcher,” Roadie says.

  “Good place!” Glory snaps her fingers.

  Cee-Cee stashes the information away for the next time she and Frank play hide and seek for Glory’s money.

  Now Glory leans into the back seat and gives Roadie a wet kiss. Roadie’s black eyes come alive when Glory pays attention to him, making him look soft and watery, more like the father he’s named after: Franco Christopher Bianco Jr.

  Glory shakes Cee-Cee’s arm. “Snap out of it! You boys make sure she doesn’t have a problem. Nobody leaves this car but me!”

  Before Cee-Cee can get a quiet moment to think about the latest missing girl, Baby Pauly is jostling her, pointing. Cee-Cee opens her eyes. She follows his finger past the front yard where the highway meets Route 177.

  All four Bianco children turn to watch Glory as she steps into traffic. They see her in flickers: crisp green parka, black flyaway curls, brown suede boots with the fringe hanging down.

  On the broken shoulder of Route 177, she leans into a cop car as if God were not watching.

  “Who?” Baby Pauly asks.

  Cee-Cee wipes her coat sleeve against the window, watching white flakes chipping away from the sky. “You know who.”

  Glory sways a loose hip into the wind.

  “That cop that’s always flirting with her, stupid,” Anthony says.

  “No gas, no flow, no go, man.” Roadie mimics what they can all imagine Glory saying to the cop.

  Baby Pauly presses his face against the rear way-back window, where Glory keeps a spare tire and jumper cables, then drops back into his seat next to Cee-Cee. His cowboy boots are just like Cee-Cee’s, but he wears them on the wrong feet.

  He chews his lip. “Is Glory going to get arrested?”

  “Wipe your nose, Pauly!” Anthony’s mean voice makes Baby Pauly and Cee-Cee freeze, hearts beating in tandem. It’s hard to say which is worse: Bossy Anthony telling them what to do, or Silent Anthony sneaking around the house at night.

  Cee-Cee can feel fear bubbling up in Baby Pauly’s chest.

  They are not a family that’s very lucky with cars. Frank is always crashing into lampposts and trucks. Once he ran someone over, but the lady managed to lie down flat in the grass between the tires. Best magic trick ever was how he told it. Glory only lets Baby Pauly and Cee-Cee ride bikes up and down the driveway.

  Now Baby Pauly looks at Cee-Cee, panicking.

  His soft sloping profile is the mirror image of his sister’s face. Glory loves telling people that they’re twins—identical—even though Pauly is eleven months older than Cee-Cee.

  It’s good to be the same, Glory tells them. Then you never have to be alone.

  Frank hates when she dresses Cee-Cee and Pauly in matching outfits: a blue-suede cowboy and cowgirl suit, or bow-tie and shorts that match Cee-Cee’s sash and skirt. Baby Pauly’s eyelashes are dark and feathery, curling up at the edge like a girl’s.r />
  Frank thinks he acts too much like a baby.

  The cop car pulls into the driveway, an eerie light pulsing out a red glow over the snow banks and the white house with its peeling paint.

  “Don’t worry,” Cee-Cee whispers. “Close your eyes and we’ll be invisible.”

  Baby Pauly immediately does what his sister says.

  Their plan is interrupted when Anthony gets out of the station wagon and slams the door, letting in a cold gust of air. Cee-Cee and Baby Pauly watch as the bright green arms of Glory’s parka flap in the snow. She reaches out, but Anthony slips past her and stomps onto the porch, letting himself into the house with his key.

  Glory bounds back over the snow toward the station wagon where the rest of her children are watching the cop park his car. He steps out into the snow, shiny boots glinting. They see his miniature reflection go gliding across the rearview mirror: slicked-back hair, dark blue uniform, bright metal badge pinned to his coat.

  Baby Pauly can’t take it any more: “KIDNAPPER!”

  “Cut it out, Pauly,” says Roadie. “No one’s going anywhere.”

  Baby Pauly looks at Cee-Cee, then back at the cop, then once again at Cee-Cee.

  “Save us,” he whispers.

  But there’s nothing she can do.

  At least it’s not anyone they know, not somebody’s father, or the janitor from school, not the boyfriend of one of the lunch ladies, or the cheating husband of Baby Pauly’s favorite room-mother. This is just a guy Glory met at work, as if the only people making deposits at her bank teller window are men who flirt. They are always tall and sometimes loud with cigarette breath; they are never kind like Donny Osmond or Jesus.

  Sooner or later the women show up, usually wives, but sometimes girlfriends. Glory calls them the Mrs. So-and-Sos. Sometimes they pound on the door in the middle of the night, or turn up at the movies and ask questions. A few of the nicer ones find Cee-Cee on the playground during recess or in the parking lot before school. They take her aside and button her sweater, tighten her braids, pull up her socks. Once in a while one of them slips her a baloney sandwich on the sly, or gives her some good advice: Don’t talk to strangers, honey; plenty of little girls get stolen that way.