“What did you do?” Norbert says to Anthony, crying.
“We saved her, Norbert,” Anthony says. “What do you think we did?”
Pushing them away, Norbert continues to straighten out Cee-Cee’s clothes and pull up her tights. He pushes her hair away from her face to try to make her seem as good as new.
“There was a stranger in a blue ski jacket, Norbert,” Roadie’s voice is shaking like he’s about to cry. “We chased him away.”
Jeremy Patrick wipes tears from his face, too.
“We fought him off and made him run away,” Anthony says. “Why don’t you go find him, peanut dick?”
Hefting Cee-Cee up off the ground, Norbert steadies himself with his elbow against a tree for balance. Prancing until he is loping forward in wide, uneven strides, he carries her toward the house, using his huge unwashed body to shield her from the wind. Jewels of sweat form on his forehead. A string of mucus hangs from his nostrils. His determined tongue wedges between his chapped lips.
“Don’t worry,” he says when they are on their way through the woods back towards Cee-Cee’s house. “I know where you live.”
Far away, Baby Pauly struggles against the weight of the ice cold water. Enter me and you shall not drown.
Cee-Cee knows he is sinking, but she cannot speak.
Norbert strains, panting and sucking air through his nose as he lumbers unevenly through the woods. He practices saying his own phone number out loud. Cee-Cee listens closely to the sound of his breathing (rattle-huff, rattle-huff), hanging on where his neck is thick and rubbery. They pass the pitted back yard and the dented garage. Cee-Cee’s eyes are fastened on Norbert, pimply and sweaty and absolutely pure: his is the face of God.
At the house, Glory bursts out of the back door, home just in time. She runs into the cold to reach them.
“Where is everybody?” she shouts.
Norbert hands Cee-Cee over. “In the woods.”
“What happened?” Glory cradles her daughter. “Did she faint?”
Norbert shakes his head. “I don’t think it was the angels this time.”
By evening, word has spread: the Romeville Snatcher was spotted in the woods behind the Bianco house. He hurt the little Bianco girl and made off with Baby Pauly, who is still missing. Women from the neighborhood lock their children at home and gather in Glory’s kitchen with casseroles. Relatives no one has seen for years help Nonna cook food for the long night ahead.
In the meantime, with the sun going down, the melted slush has turned quickly to ice. By now a brand-new sprinkling of snow has covered up all the tracks in the woods.
“Please find my baby boy,” Glory cries.
Frank’s former colleagues from the Caxton Air Base form a posse, saddling their belts with flashlights and reflector tape.
“We’ll catch him.” They clap Frank on the back. “We’ll string the sick bastard up once and for all.”
The cops come in and stand around the kitchen, drinking hot coffee and talking to each other.
The head cop points a pencil at Roadie. “One more time, kid; take it from the top.”
Roadie blinks, tightening his grip on the kitchen chair.
The cop prompts him. “You said you were playing in the snow and you lost track of the little girl. Then you saw her talking to a stranger?”
“She has these seizures, and it’s like she’s in a trance; sometimes she wanders off,” Roadie says, “And there was this man in a blue ski jacket.”
“Did he say anything?”
Roadie looks around. “No.”
“No?”
“We couldn’t hear what he said.”
The cop reads from his notes: “But you say he came from the direction of the Interstate. And you didn’t see him until he was hurting the girl? Then he sees you coming and picks her up and starts to walk away with her. Is that right?”
Anthony nods.
“Then what?”
Jeremy Patrick looks down at his lap.
Anthony clears his throat. “Our little brother ran after him, yelling for him to stop.”
“And that’s when he put your sister down?”
Roadie nods.
“You recovered the little girl, but you lost the little boy?” the cop checks his notes again.
Anthony clears his throat, his lip twitching slightly. “We don’t know where Pauly went. He probably got scared when he saw the stranger. There was a lot going on.”
Roadie grimaces. The cop nods, writing a note in his pad.
“Then one Mr. Norbert Sasso came and found the girl in the snow, so he picked her up and carried her home. Is that right?”
Roadie nods.
“You were running after the stranger when Mr. Sasso took the girl home, and you started searching for the little boy. Is that correct?”
“But we couldn’t find Pauly,” Anthony said. “So we came home and that’s when Glory called the police.”
All three of them—Roadie, Jeremy Patrick, and Anthony—are nodding, staring blankly at the cop.
Frank sits in the kitchen, wet-eyed but sober. He half wants to join the men in hunting jackets, his friends, who are searching the woods, and half needs to stay where he can hear the story again.
“The temperature’s dropping,” Uncle Moonie says. “We’re running out of time.”
The policemen who stand in the hallway drinking Nonna’s coffee discuss their strategy with Moonie.
“It’s really starting to snow hard out there,” one of them says.
Vinnie hangs back by the door, checking his watch. Soon it will be too dark outside to find anything, let alone Glory’s kid. He feels responsible; he’s the one who drove their mother to the mall to get cash for the presents. She’d asked him to wait, it would just take a minute, but he shouldn’t have, since he was late for picking up his partner. He dropped her at the bus station without asking where she was going.
“What about the little girl?” the head cop says to no one in particular. “We’d like to interview her.”
Frank steps forward. “She’s upstairs. She’s got a fever.”
“It’ll only take a minute.”
Lying in bed, Cee-Cee sees Baby Pauly floating quietly in the cold pond. Drink from me and you shall not thirst. Her stomach hurts, and she is bleeding a little between the legs, but no one knows it yet. No one has examined her. Glory put her to bed without even taking off her coat. She sent Nonna up to help as soon as she arrived with her army of Sisters for backup support.
Now Nonna pulls out a large black satchel, more doctor’s bag than purse. Cee-Cee is so happy to see her that she opens her eyes wide and tries to smile.
Behind Nonna three women dressed in dark suits and sensible shoes are praying; they are the prettiest of Christ’s Most Precious Wounds, Nonna’s friends from the TV.
Small and squat in her gray wool dress, Nonna squints her eyes as if God Himself has sent her. “Who did this?”
Cee-Cee forms her lips into an O, silent and dry, but her voice is still missing. Her mouth only gulps at the air. She wants to tell Nonna about the hundred virgins and Jesus appearing like a rock star in the trees, but she can’t make a sound.
Nonna snaps the covers back to give Cee-Cee the once-over. “Speak!”
Cee-Cee moans. Her legs are two wooden sticks in dirty tights.
“Jesus,” Cee-Cee says.
The Sisters stutter for a moment, look at one another, then resume their prayers: “Hail Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy; hail, our life, our sweetness and our hope…”
Somewhere out there Baby Pauly is holding his breath.
“No,” Nonna frowns. “Who gives you evil eye?”
By the time the cops come upstairs with Glory and Frank, Moonie and the boys, the chorus of Sisters is quiet, and Nonna is deep into a solo prayer.
“In nome del cielo, Delle stelle e della luna, Mi levo questo malocchio, Per mia maggior fortuna!”
She drips olive oil from her fingertips into a bowl of wat
er, whispering in Italian as she makes the sign of the cross over the bowl, her own forehead, and her body. She drops more oil in the water, repeating the ritual several times.
No one moves.
Eyes closed tight, Nonna waits, and then waves a knotted hand over the bowl, crossing herself in a flurry of motion. Just when it looks like she’s going to dive into the oil again, she shouts: “Mal’occhio!”
Glory steps forward, disrupting the nuns, to touch her mother’s arm. “Let me see, Ma.”
They gather around the bowl.
“The oil didn’t separate,” Glory says. “That means it’s a curse—the evil eye.”
Nonna gives the bowl to a large line-backer of a Sister. “Wash,” she says. “No drop.” She leans over Cee-Cee, shoving a thermometer under her tongue.
Propping herself up on an elbow, Cee-Cee looks around the room, two bright spots moving over each and every face. She sees a kind face under one of the short veils. Amanda smiles and steps forward.
“I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” she whispers, taking Cee-Cee’s hand.
In the hallway, Roadie asks the question everyone is wondering: “Is she going to be okay?”
No one knows the answer.
Nonna leans forward, snatching the thermometer. “Something to say?”
Cee-Cee’s ribs are brittle branches bearing up under a rising white light from inside. Bones bowing, lungs swelling, heart filling, lip pressing against lip. Beloved enough to rival the moon, Cee-Cee smolders in her skin, understanding at last what the angel meant: She has become her namesake: spotless virgin.
To prove it, she must tell them the truth.
“What’s wrong?” Glory asks her mother. “What's happening?”
Flopping back on the pillow, sweaty hair sticking to her face, Cee-Cee answers at last.
“I know where Baby Pauly is.”
It takes less than five minutes for the women to bundle Cee-Cee in coats and blankets.
Uncle Moonie picks her up and sweeps her out the door.
Night has frozen into a new shape, barely recognizable from what it was in the daylight. Now the ground is frozen. Now the trees scrape and twist like old women with their heads uncovered. It is a cold grief that separates the new night from the warm afternoon; the trees bend to mourn and whisper.
Snow swirls in the wind, icing everything to a dangerous slick.
In the distance, a train makes its way past Utica, heading through Romeville to Albany with cargo for the capital. Carried at Uncle Moonie’s shoulder, Cee-Cee squeezes her legs together tight under the blankets to staunch the pain there. Concentrating on his hunting cap, his broad shoulders, she tries to ignore the bitter churning of her stomach. She winces with each step back through the forest.
One leg plastic. She chants to distract herself. One leg good.
She can hear Roadie, Jeremy Patrick, and Anthony marching behind, ice crunching under their feet. Several men follow a few feet behind with an army of flashlights to light the way.
Glory and Frank are somewhere nearby.
The crowd murmurs and breathes as if to create heat. Cops whisper about the coming storm like weathermen, propelling Uncle Moonie forward at a quicker pace.
Vinnie the cop speaks into his radio: “People don’t just disappear.”
Cee-Cee points her finger out toward the pond.
Cold squat structures hide in the dark: the knitting mills and canning factories, soap- and iron-works, Romeville-Turner Radiator Co., even the Air Depot where Cee-Cee was born. Somewhere out there, over all of the buildings, a neon sign shines, and Paul Revere rides through the town sounding his silent warning.
Slowing from the cold, Uncle Moonie shifts Cee-Cee in his arms. She can still hear the Sisters praying: “O Clement, O Loving, O Sweet Virgin Mary. Pray for us, O Holy Mother of God…”
At the canal near the Locomotive Works, they turn and head further west. In a clearing near a large rock, Cee-Cee tugs on Uncle Moonie’s hat. Bending, he slides her gently to solid ground.
“Just point, honey,” he says. “The pond may not be solid.”
The grown-ups gather round, their individual flashlights forming one solid beam of intense heat on Cee-Cee’s face. She inches slowly to the pond.
Be careful, they shout. Only their lights follow her now.
Baby Pauly’s heartbeat is loud in her ears. Stepping closer, Cee-Cee clears the freshly fallen snow with her boot.
The light burns her skin. The cold bites her fingers.
The face of God is chapped and lathered with drool, each eye spinning like an independent orb, a blue world set free.
I am the river of life, the angel delivered God’s message. Drink from me and you shall not thirst.
Behind the blaring light, Glory is sobbing.
Enter me and you shall not drown.
The crowd leans in, silent, except for Nonna’s loud praying.
Cee-Cee stands firmly at the edge of the pond, as the new storm’s snowflakes dance and drift, lit up by flashlights.
Leaning ever so slightly forward, Cee-Cee points beyond her feet where a red smear of jacket can be seen under the crystallized ice. “He’s under there.”
Snowflakes stick to her skin.
Nonna falls to her knees, crying out a prayer. Father Giuseppe offers a novena, and the three Sisters of Christ’s Most Precious Wounds pray for the snow to stop dropping, for the soul of the little boy frozen under the ice.
Cee-Cee drinks in the crisp night.
She is a tiny torch, an ember for God. If the search party switched off all of the lanterns, leaving her in the dark, her words would shimmer: a prediction, a message, a miracle.
Her mouth is filled with light.
“He’s alive,” she says.
THE second
Mary Margaret wouldn’t mind sticking a fork in her stepfather’s neck.
She eyes the perfect spot, a crease near his collar where the stubble grows like ugly speck-sized insects. For sure, this man, her mother’s husband—a complete stranger before he moved in and adopted her––is the reason her mother’s babies keep dying.
Half-brothers and sisters, Mary Margaret reminds herself.
It happens while she’s asleep in her room: he sneaks into the nursery, pillow tucked under his arm, and smothers them dead. Crying buckets at their graveside is his ingenious plan to throw everyone off track—almost everyone.
Mary Margaret’s mother keeps count of the dead babies in a small red notebook she stashes in her nightstand table. On afternoons when Mary Margaret is bored, she thumbs the pages: Little Rosalie was violet, a wildflower found in her crib, dead. Tiny Antonio was streaked and waxy, pale as the evening sky before dawn. Angelina was atmospheric blue, barely blue, wrapped in a cloud on her way up to Heaven. Baby Rocco was Mary Margaret’s favorite, the first baby she remembers; he came along shortly after she’d made it safely out of diapers. He was rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night, mouth-to-mouth performed at every traffic light, kept alive for another six months until one day Mary Margaret found him dead in his crib—dead for real. Blue as a car seat.
So far she’s seen more tragedy in her life than most adults.
She pushes the obvious and dangerous questions aside: Why hasn’t someone come in the night to kill her? Why has she been spared?
In Ithaca, people got sick of seeing Mary Margaret’s family rush into the hospital with bundle after bundle of trouble. Once an emergency room doctor told them to move closer to the hospital—a different hospital, he said. Leave it to Mary Margaret’s stepfather to come up with Romeville, New York, a bumpkin place for prudes and tattle-tales, a rickety rail stop on the way to Albany, famous for some dumb sign of Paul Revere who never lived here. Everyone knows the Midnight Ride took place in Boston.
Mary Margaret stabs a piece of meat and says, “As soon as Cee-Cee Bianco gets to Our Lady, I’m having her sleep over with me.”
Mary Margaret doesn’t mind going out on a limb.
&n
bsp; Her mother raises an eyebrow, leaning forward with a hand on her still distended belly. Mary Margaret’s most recent half-brother is a quiet no-name baby, cooing and gurgling in a playpen at her mother’s feet.
Her stepfather waves a fork. “Isn’t that the kid from the newspaper?”
“Saved her brother from that pond, Russ,” Mary Margaret’s mother says. “Hardly any old kid.”
“Raised him from the dead!” Mary Margaret adds. “Now she lives down the street with her grandmother.”
“Marina Petramala, Russ,” Mary Margaret’s mother says, but her stepfather only grunts. “You know, the one from the church. Think that little miracle girl will be going to Our Lady?”
“Sister Amanda says she’s smart enough,” Mary Margaret says. “The other Sisters say she’s going to skip a bunch of grades and be in the sixth with me.”
Her mother nods.
“Cee-Cee Bianco snuffs out evil,” Mary Margaret lies. “She told me. Snuffs it out the minute she sees it. Evil deeds and evil people.”
Her stepfather keeps chewing his steak, not even looking up from his plate.
That’s how stupid he is, Mary Margaret thinks.
Catholic school is delayed for weeks while Cee-Cee burns with a fever in Nonna’s spare bedroom. Even with her connection to God and her faithful troops of old women praying in Italian, Nonna can’t stop Cee-Cee’s temperature from spiking.
Father Giuseppe and the Sisters stop by with communion and holy water, waiting to hear a confession or explanation, but Cee-Cee cannot lift her head to see or open her mouth to speak.
Amanda, Sister Robert-Claude, and Brother Joe sit at Cee-Cee’s bedside in rotation. Even cranky Sister Edward comes and prays once in a while, though she thinks the whole thing is a hoax. Sister Edward leans forward when the room empties out and whispers, “Are you faking, Little Miss? Because I think you're faking.”
People come in shifts. Coffee is brewed, Bibles cracked. Voices blur together and wash away.
The night at Pilgrim’s Pond comes back to Cee-Cee in a fevered dream: the white light, the sky, Baby Pauly yanked out of the ice like a frozen fish. She sees it over and over: how the police officers slap Baby Pauly’s bloated body to the ground, how they poke and prod for signs of life. How for the longest time, he lies so still in the snow, blue and motionless. Cee-Cee prays until at last he sputters and chokes. Enter me and you shall not drown. To everyone’s surprise, a cork of ice pops out of Pauly’s mouth, expelled by a rush of water. And then just like that Pauly James Bianco is a little fountain for Jesus, spraying forth air, spraying forth life. He burps out the final dribble of water until there’s nothing left for him to do but breathe in.
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