A Frenzy of Sparks: A Novel

by Kristin Fields

  “I don’t know how to fix bikes.”

  “Something else.” Ray stubbed out the cigarette on a shingle, let it roll into the gutter.

  Her brain did laps trying to figure out what Ray wanted. The neighborhood dripped. End-of-day sun peeked from behind the last storm clouds, washing out Ray’s pale skin and the dark half moons under his eyes. He had the same slick daddy longlegs build as Leo, venomous but smart enough not to bite people. No one cared about a dangerous thing if it didn’t threaten them.

  “Just tell your friends to come see me. And make some new ones. Not the usual losers.”

  “How . . .”

  But Ray pointed to the open window, where the vacuum revved and a shadow passed. Aunt Ida didn’t wave hello. Not to Gia; she paled in comparison to beautiful Lorraine, who took such good care of Aunt Diane, or her sons, who would go to college, the first in the family, while Gia brought dead things home from the marsh. It was mutual. Being around Aunt Ida was like watching a vase too close to the edge of a shelf.

  “Dock three on Friday night. Tell them to say your name.”

  “For what?”

  “Keep it mysterious, Gia.” Ray winked. “It’ll work out better that way.”

  Three strokes turned the kayak. She paddled up the street, knowing this must have something to do with the basement and wasn’t good. But money meant gas for the boat. If she saved up all year, she could be on the water every day next summer. Plus, she wanted to make her own way. Nonna had only been four years older when she’d stepped off the boat on Ellis Island and made a new life.

  The water washed everything clean—all the chemicals, the grease in the street—the sun drying away whatever was left. The sparrows were safe in the newly washed trees, and Gia’s lungs felt clean, too, but as she tugged the kayak onto the porch, a dead rat floated out from underneath, bloated and belly up. Sticks and a plastic bag clung to it on either side. Nonna would’ve called it a sign. Dead things always were. And now Gia wondered if something invisible was coming again, as it had for the sparrows.

  That night, Gia curled up with Silent Spring. It was still early, but her father was sleeping. She skimmed chapters, certain she’d find a clue about the feeling she’d had since earlier, her skin coated with something she couldn’t see. A silent threat. Low tide crept through her window, sulfurous and rich with plants that grew beneath the surface, as the street water rolled away with it.

  Someone knocked lightly. Gia straightened her sheets and closed her book as Agnes slipped inside with a small, tired smile and settled on the foot of her bed in her outside clothes. The same blue blouse and brown skirt that touched subway seats. Low-grade nausea spread through Gia as the fabrics rubbed together, a mingling of germs beneath a tin box on her mother’s lap, tied with a bow.

  “Ready for school tomorrow?”

  Gia shrugged.

  “It’s always come so easily to you.” Agnes looked off through the dark window, partially blocked by Gia’s pleated uniform hanging from the curtain rod. “You’ve probably read more books than I ever will.”

  It was better sometimes, with Agnes, to listen and wait for the point of this unusual visit, realizing she’d never seen her mother read a book, only the newspaper on occasion or the circulars inside. Reading was a tool like a fork or a knife.

  “Eighth grade is important. It’s the last one before high school. In only five years, Gia, you’ll be an adult. It seems far away, but it’s not. I want you to be ready. More than I was, and so . . .”

  Her voice trailed off. She toyed with the navy ribbon on the tin. At least it wasn’t pink.

  “I want you to try.” She stared at Gia intently. Try to grow up. Be more like Lorraine. “If I see that you’re trying to become the young lady we expect you to, I will talk to your father about the boat.”

  Gia sat up straighter, eye level with Agnes instead of slumped into her pillows.

  “I know how much it means to you, and you know how much cooperating would mean to me, so . . . there you have it.” She slid the tin to Gia, nodding for her to open it.

  A peace offering was always a trap. She untied the ribbon and shimmied the lid open to a watercolor set. Beyond dotting scrap paper with bingo markers, Gia had never painted.

  “Since you like the water so much, I thought you might like to paint it.”

  The tiny brushes and pots of dry paint were an entry into sewing and decorating cakes, typing, crocheting blankets for babies, something her mother could brag about to her canasta friends. She didn’t want to paint the marsh; she wanted to examine it, collect from it, experiment with it, learn how it worked, protect it. But her mother was promising the boat. Gia forced a tepid smile.

  “Maybe this would be a good year to spend more time with Lorraine. She could get you a job at the bakery. It’d be fun, chatting with the girls there; they all seem nice.”

  Make new friends. Ray’s words echoed.

  Agnes shrugged as if this were a casual idea, but she’d probably already spoken to Lorraine. Gia bit her bottom lip. It didn’t sound fun at all. Maybe to Agnes, who’d worked in a factory at thirteen, sewing buttons on shirts, and gone to night school for typing. She wished her mother were thirteen and could wear Gia’s school uniform, do all the things she thought Gia should. Then she’d see how fun any of it actually was.

  “Maybe,” she said.

  Agnes patted Gia’s foot under the blanket. Then gave it a little squeeze, as close as either of them would get toward a hug.

  “Oh.” She paused by the door, light spilling onto her stockinged feet. “Next time you put a skull near my seashells, I’m docking your allowance.”

  For the first time that night, Gia’s face lit up in a real smile. She forgot about the subway clothes as she buried giggles in the quilt.

  A stick bounced against the screen.

  “Come to the tennis courts.” Tommy was red faced through the window. “Ray got bottle rockets.”

  “I’ll get Leo,” Gia said, forgetting he was grounded.

  “He’s already there. Lorraine too.”

  “Coming.” Gia crept down the stairs and closed the screen door quietly. The neighborhood was still: bikes put away off front lawns, the canal rippling without moving boats, early dusk lighting with stray fireflies. They ran the whole way, feet pounding, talking between puffs. Gia could’ve left meatball Tommy in her dust but slowed down because he’d come to get her in the first place. That counted for something.

  The park sat at the tip of the neighborhood, the farthest anyone could go before they ended up in the water. Hardly anyone used the broken picnic tables. The cracks in the tennis courts were full of weeds as tall as Gia, where tennis players should’ve skittered across. The guy who’d founded Howard Beach had owned a glove factory and a goat farm, had built a bunch of little houses and a big hotel in the 1800s, intending the residents to be glove-wearing, tennis-playing people, but it hadn’t worked out that way.

  “We got roman candles. Bottle rockets. Whistling moons,” Tommy puffed just as the first whistling moon popped off up ahead, screaming into the bay. What’d he make, a list?

  “Wait for us,” Gia shouted. Lorraine was sitting on a picnic table behind the chain-link fence holding a sparkling roman candle in one hand and a bottle in the other, while Ray and Leo lined up more bottles on the court. Tommy and Gia walked the rest of the way across the overgrown grass, picking their way around broken bottles, stray bits of frayed tires, balloon strings.

  “Let me get some.” Tommy held out his hand to Lorraine. She handed him the roman candle. “Not that.”

  “How old are you anyway?” she teased, handing him the bottle. Tommy took a swig, fighting back a cringe before passing it to Gia.

  “You even drink it?” Gia asked. “Let me smell your tongue.”

  “That’s disgusting.” Tommy backed away, swinging through the gate to the tennis courts, too full of the last night before school started and bottle rocket glow to care what Gia said.

&
nbsp; Leo and Ray snapped a flame to each rocket, lingering longer than necessary near each one, while Tommy hung back with his red face and pudgy belly, supervising like Uncle Frank. He was too scared to light any himself but Gerber Baby smiling with the excitement of what other people were brave enough to do. Aunt Ida bragged about what a good engineer he’d be, designing mechanical parts, but Tommy wasn’t smart like that. Never would be. The best he’d do with graph paper was color in the boxes real nice.

  “Poor Tommy.” Lorraine sighed.

  Rockets whistled into the sky, one after another, screaming through TV dinners and last-minute summer book reports. She was grateful to step outside the wheel before it started again, so much so that she took the bottle from Lorraine and gulped a stinging mouthful to make it last longer while Lorraine’s roman candle burned out in a frenzy of sparks.

  “Don’t you wish you could take off like that?” Lorraine traced the arc in the sky. “Look down at all this and think, OK, doesn’t matter. Fizzle, fizzle, pop. You’re done.”

  She didn’t. Not really. She just wanted to snap a lighter to those wicks and watch them take off.

  “Again!” Gia shouted, bolder as the liquid warmed her stomach. The boys reset, frayed jeans dragging on the baked clay. Lorraine leaned over, her eyes a little glazed in the dim light, and kissed Gia’s cheek.

  “What’s that for?”

  “For being you, dummy. Just ’cause. Guess what? Ray’s teaching me to drive next week.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Wanna come?”

  “OK.”

  “Then I’m gonna save up for a car and take a road trip. All the way to Florida.” Lorraine tipped her head back and closed her eyes, wiggling her toes in imaginary sand as a plane took off, louder than all the rockets combined. Lorraine’s eyes popped open.

  “I wanna go too,” Gia said, wishing for orange groves and palm trees, but the plane drowned her out. The boys lit the next round, swigging from their own bottle as the sticks fizzed and took off, one after another. The quiet moment when they’d flown as high as they were going before exploding in the sky was the best.

  Leo threw an empty bottle. It shattered on the tennis court. And suddenly they were all throwing bottles. Even Tommy. The bottles popped, cracked, rolled, glass scattering. Gia dug in the grass for more bottles to throw, and there were always more. Beer bottles. Forties. Coca-Cola. The court sparkled with glass, a sky of stars on the ground. They laughed as another one crashed down. No one cared about bottle deposits. Not since they were little kids and piggy bank change was exciting. There were a lot of things, Gia realized, a sudden sadness creeping into her fuzzy thoughts and frenzied laughter, that weren’t exciting anymore now that she wasn’t little.

  Leo climbed the fence. It shook under his weight, but he climbed fast without shoes and threw a bottle from the top just as a siren whooped and a flash of blue and red lit the purple sky. They couldn’t get in trouble now. Not when they were outside the world.

  “Shit,” Ray mumbled.

  Leo jumped down, his bare feet landing on glass, but he didn’t even cringe. The cops pulled to the curb. Two uniforms. No one they knew. A flashlight beam hit Gia’s face, shining on the mess they’d made of the court.

  “Run,” Ray hissed. Gia burst through the gate, scattering away from the rest of them, arms and legs swinging.

  “Stop,” someone shouted. But the world zipped past, motorcycle fast. They were going for the boys, but Gia zipped past this house and that, all the way to the swimming canal, before splashing in, the water cold and sudden. What a stupid thing, running from cops, but the water hid her, far from slow Tommy, who’d cry at the station until Aunt Ida picked him up, from Ray and his smart words, or from Leo, who’d hot-wire that cop car not to get caught, but Gia had her water. She hummed quietly, trailing her fingers as her shoes weighed at her feet, feeling like a wild and dangerous creature in her own right, until the water couldn’t warm her anymore and her fingertips pruned.

  Only the boys hadn’t gotten away. Gia hid in the rhododendron bushes in Mr. Angliotti’s yard as the cop cars, two, sat dark on the street. Two porch lights snapped on, and two sets of parents waited on the porch as two boys got walked up a paved walkway, and one got walked up a path of overgrown stepping-stones. It was the distraction she needed to slip around back, her wet clothes dripping on the ground as she found new ones in her drawer. The cops were still downstairs talking to Eddie in the doorway. She caught the words courtesy and bring him in and contraband and inebriated while Leo waited at the kitchen table.

  The door closed. Gia watched from the top of the stairs as Eddie scruffed Leo and prodded him up the steps while Leo tripped over himself. He stumbled to the bathroom with a dumb half smile on his face, where Eddie started the shower and shoved Leo in with his clothes on. Leo curled into himself, the smile falling away as his jeans soaked through. It was ugly.

  “That’s enough, Eddie. He’s freezing.” Agnes twisted her nightgown, working the fabric into a crumpled ball, squeezing, releasing.

  “Make a pot of coffee, would you? Black.”

  Agnes looked between Eddie and Leo, who was curled in a ball, shivering. He didn’t have much fat on him, and the cold seeped into his bones. Chicken skin, Nonna would’ve called it, rubbing a sun-warmed towel over them. Gia scurried back to her bedroom, but she wasn’t fast enough. Agnes stared at Gia’s wet hair, at the wet prints to Gia’s room. For a quick second, there was hurt on her mother’s face that made Gia sorry; then it hardened. She’d blown it. Any chance of her mother asking for the boat was over.

  “Go to your room. I’ll deal with you later.”

  Gia hardened too. Of course. Leo first. As always.

  The unreal feeling ebbed as coffee brewed downstairs and the shower water finally stopped. Gia felt right back in the world again, with all of its sharp angles.

  Chapter Six

  Gia woke up with a mouthful of cotton and a headache above her right eye. It drummed through her dream about bottle rockets underwater, the muffled sound traveling for miles while her mother sat on a rock and painted the fireworks with the watercolor set, Gia’s head beating in time with the ripples on the water. If that was what a few sips from that bottle could do, she did not know how Aunt Diane drank through them all day long. Her head must be close to cracking open.

  Or Leo, who was down the hall brushing his teeth for school already, swishing and spitting into the bathroom sink louder than necessary while the electric mixer whirled to life in the kitchen.

  “Let’s go.” Her father rapped on the bathroom door. “Move it along.”

  Both their feet pounded down the steps, and then her father was counting in the yard, up to fifty and over again. Gia sat up. Her alarm was set to go off in two minutes, but she silenced it early. No ringing. No, thank you.

  Her door opened, and her mother rattled in with a glass of water and a cupped hand, her mouth set in a thin line. She charged around the room, kicking dirty clothes on the floor into a pile. This was a crackdown if ever she’d seen one.

  “Up. Now.” The cup of water was in Gia’s face, along with two aspirin that stuck to Gia’s dry tongue, releasing an acrid taste worse than the rock in Ray’s basement. She would absolutely not swallow these chemicals. Not a chance. “You’re not off to a very good start.”

  “It’s one minute to seven, and I was already up.”

  Her mother crossed her arms and clucked her tongue, an old habit, borrowed from Nonna. Gia’s head hurt too much to care. The police hadn’t even taken her home. She’d come home all on her own, wet, but that wasn’t even unusual.

  “I want all these clothes picked up and put in the wash. It smells like a pet store in here. No more wet clothes on the floor. Be down to breakfast in fifteen minutes.”

  The teakettle whistled on the stove downstairs, and her mother hurried off. Gia blinked away the sun as a new round of counting started from the yard. Leo was doing push-ups while Eddie stood over him, sipping from
a coffee mug in his favorite black-and-white tracksuit. From high up, his scalp was visible through his hair, and it creeped her out to see the lumps in his skull. Leo’s T-shirt was plastered to his back. His arms wobbled, but when he finished, Eddie demanded fifty more until Leo puked in the grass.

  The whole thing felt like an episode of The Twilight Zone.

  Gia made her bed, put her uniform on, everything she would’ve done anyway without being told. She even opened the bag of makeup and did what she could. The concealer erased the dark circles under her eyes, but the eye shadow made her look punched, so she wiped it off and rolled lip gloss on until it was sticky enough to catch bugs, pleased with herself for trying. She took an osprey feather from her drawer and put it in her pocket for good luck.

  Downstairs, her mother put two pancakes on everyone’s plate without any syrup and drank coffee by the kitchen sink, staring past the seashell collection on the windowsill to the house across the street, where the Salerno kids were taking first-day-of-school pictures in front of a hedge. Gia hadn’t done that since third grade.

  “You see?” her mother said when Leo came back inside dripping sweat into a puddle on the floor. “That’s what we should be doing today. Nice pictures. Not having our kids dragged home like criminals for making trouble in the park.”

  “But I wasn’t dragged home,” Gia protested. “I didn’t even—”

  “Not another word.” Agnes cut her off. “Not one. You hear me? I’ve had enough of both of you. And wash your damn plates.”

  She slammed the mug down on the counter. Coffee sloshed over the side, but her mother didn’t wipe it up, nor did she sit down and eat her pancakes. She grabbed her things by the door and headed off to the train, an umbrella dangling from her wrist even though it was sunny, as Mrs. Salerno shouted “cheese.”

  Gia’s face burned. Why was she being lumped in with Leo? If this was because she wasn’t excited about the stupid watercolor set, then fine, let Agnes throw a hissy fit. And she wouldn’t eat the pancakes either. She stabbed a fork through one just to ruin it, then squeezed a stream of maple syrup into her mouth.