Aunt Ida’s back door was open. Music snaked from the basement. The kitchen was hazy with cigarette smoke and stale beer, dishes drying on a towel. She took the basement stairs two at a time because she couldn’t fall. Not when she was this angry.
“She’s not home.” The words burst out before the bottom step. “Something’s wrong.”
She expected Ray, Tommy, and Leo to stare at her dumb faced, but it was just Ray and a bunch of strange guys in greasy T-shirts. Some of the bravery huffed out of her.
“She’s not home,” she said again, ignoring these other idiots.
“Gentlemen, this creature is my cousin.” Ray smiled, inviting his friends in on a joke as sweat beaded on her forehead.
“Maybe she’s having a nice time.” He smirked, another meaning lurking in his words. The guys laughed, and it was a horrible, forced sound.
“I wish I was having a nice time,” one said, bursting out in smoky hysterics.
She glared at Ray and his stupid curly hair. She wanted to destroy him. Everything he was built on. She mustered the malocchio, summoning up all the hate she felt and shooting it toward him, hoping it was stronger than his stupid gold horn or red ribbon. Gia wouldn’t get any help here. She needed her dad.
She pulled at a curl on Ray’s head. It sprang back as it always did.
“When we were kids, he used to scrunch up his nose and squeal like a pig when we pulled his curls because they look like pig butts. Remember, Ray?” she hissed. He slapped her hand away, but his friends were laughing, hooting it up. Gia was giddy as she thundered up the steps, Ray at her heels.
“I’m telling my dad,” she shouted, but Ray was on her now. His long legs closing the gap between them. She was almost at the curb when he grabbed her arm, squashed it in his whole hand, worse than her father’s blood pressure machine.
“Let go, asshole!”
“Stop.” He squeezed tighter. Gia tugged, trapped. He might let up if she stopped, but she couldn’t stay stuck on this disgusting chemical lawn while Lorraine needed help. She could see her house: if she couldn’t pull free, she could pull him with her.
“Listen,” he said. “You’re not telling your father anything.”
Her arm was numb. She wished it would snap off like a lizard tail. She was out of time.
“You’re a waste.” She spit Uncle Frank’s words from long ago, her voice rising. “You’re a waste! You’re a waste!”
There was a hysteria in it, a chant. The more she screamed it, the truer it got. Even his own father had seen it. They were nothing to him, and he should be nothing to them.
“Lower your voice,” Ray hissed, but she couldn’t hold it back now. It rose from her throat like a ribbon of smoke toward the sky. Waste, waste, waste. Like all the thrown-away garbage on the street his father carted off. A big nothing.
Ray’s hand shot out and slapped her, making her eyes sting with tears, making her nose run. She touched her nose gently. There was no blood on her hand, just the web of lines it had always been: life lines, love lines, health, blood, rooted to her past, present, and future—until her palm flashed out and smashed the underpart of Ray’s nose. He dropped her arm, and Gia broke free. Blood ran down his face. Their blood. It felt like a spell. She promised herself that she would take a lemon to Mass on Christmas Eve and pierce it with needles, because he was her enemy. The idea beat through her head in a frenzy as she ran, the air rushing her face as clouds rolled over the moon and the first raindrops splashed against the sidewalk where they used to have lemonade stands and ride bikes and shovel for money when the snow dumped down in heaps. Gia pushed faster, farther from Ray and whatever game they were playing now.
“Bitch!” Ray screamed. It echoed through the tunnel of houses, but Gia didn’t stop. She pushed through the front door, past her mother in the living room, who tried to warn her that her father was sleeping, but that was the whole point. It was time for everyone to wake up.
Bucketloads of water dumped in every direction. The windshield wipers couldn’t keep up. Gia slumped and pulled her knees to her chest as her father drove even more slowly. They would never find her in this. The fight ebbed out of Gia as time stretched on. It felt hopeless now. I’m sorry, she prayed to Lorraine, wherever she was.
The lines were white and yellow in the headlights, the only thing they could see ahead of them, dotting a path to nowhere.
“Let’s head back.” He leaned into the wheel. “She might be back.”
“Fine,” Gia mumbled.
“Hey,” he said. “You did the right thing.”
But it didn’t feel like the right thing. Not even close. Believing Ray was like swallowing a mouthful of vinegar and trying to keep it down.
The ride back was slow, even after the rain let up. On their block, water glittered in the streetlight.
“Shit,” he mumbled. He reversed to drier ground, parked, locked the doors. “Hop on.” He lowered to one knee so she could climb on his back, and Gia did because it was late and she was tired and the night was not over, and she had failed so badly it made her afraid of whatever was under the dark water. On the surface, it reflected houses and cars. Underneath was different.
Her father sloshed through, soaking his pants and shoes. Gia stared into the water, at her own distorted face, tracing layers of fault: Had she not thrown a fit and gone swimming, Antonio wouldn’t have seen Lorraine. Had she not been jealous of her mother adoring Lorraine, she would not have sided with Ray. Had she not wanted her boat, she would have told Ray to piss off. Three deadly sins. She was a bad person at her core, like a shell dropped from a seagull’s beak, rotting in the sun. And yet she was being carried on her father’s back. Safe. Accounted for. With food in her belly and a warm bed to sleep in, things her parents had worked for and she’d taken for granted. Just be glad it isn’t you. She wrapped her arms tighter around her father to keep from slipping any deeper into the terrible thing she’d become.
But when they rounded the corner, a small shape walked along the sidewalk ahead, shoes in hand, head down, the curls lost, following the streetlights. One flickered and went out. Lorraine was lost in the dark.
Her father slowed down, almost to a stop, water rippling against his ankles.
In the dim light, a bruise was darkening on Lorraine’s upper arm. One of her shoes fell and disappeared under the water, but Lorraine didn’t notice. Her hair hung around her face. She looked down a few steps later, stopped, noticing there was only one shoe now, and let the other fall. It plunked into the water. When they were kids, they had stabbed toothpicks with newspaper sails into watermelon rinds and launched them off the front porch. Only the boats had floated. The shoes sank. Lorraine opened and closed her hands, walked to her front porch, where Aunt Diane was waiting, leaning her weight on the railing to hold herself up. They went inside without closing the front door. Everything dripped with a sadness so strong there was no name for it. Not like the smell of rain.
“Go get your mother,” Eddie whispered. There was no room to be jealous; she raced upstairs and shook her mother’s shoulder, watched as her mother waded across the street in her nightgown like a ghost in the streetlight, as Lorraine had been.
They waited on the porch, her and her father. He lit a cigarette, and she flicked the ashes, waiting for Agnes to come out. But she didn’t. Nor did the light in Lorraine’s room turn on. The water in the street rolled away, and somehow, Gia woke up in her own bed the next morning, where she balled the sheets under her nose and breathed in the clean laundry smell, wishing last night had been a dream.
Downstairs there were pancakes cooking, heavy with butter and syrup, though the sun was not up.
“Morning,” her father said, alone in the kitchen, pushing aside his coffee mug and folding the newspaper into an imperfect rectangle. He looked every bit as black and white as the newspaper print, his face covered in stubble, freshly splashed with cold water he hadn’t bothered to towel off, his anchor tattoo tethering him to the table.
; “We need to talk.”
Gia couldn’t ask if Lorraine was OK because she already knew. She poured a glass of water because it was comforting to hold between her hands and waited for the questions to come.
Chapter Ten
Eddie got ready for his usual tour on Saturday, but he paused by the door as he strapped his holster around his waist, grabbed his star-pointed hat from the coat tree.
“Did I ever show you this?” he said, pulling two yellowed pictures from the inside liner. One was of Agnes with the same green tint all the old photos had, leaning on a railing at the beach in a sundress. Rockaway maybe. He told Gia he’d taken it all the way to the South Pacific in the lining of another hat.
The other was of her and Leo bobbing behind the boat in floaties because they couldn’t swim yet. Leo was missing his front teeth. Gia’s hair was in a ratty wet ponytail at the top of her head, water sparkling around them. Knowing he carried them with him was like being scooped out of that water, teeth chattering, and wrapped in a sun-warmed towel.
“What are you going to do, Dad?”
She’d told him everything, and yet the morning had passed with Eddie in the kitchen, cracking eggs into a bowl, holding one up for her to see. “Look at that,” he’d said of the two yolks from the same egg. “Twins.”
He slipped the pictures back into the lining of his hat. He’d shaved, and his skin was fresh and pink, offsetting the unusual coldness in his movements, the calm that made Gia afraid there was a more dangerous plan brewing than just the schoolyard fights that usually settled someone being wronged.
“Do you know why we moved here?” he asked instead. Gia stared. “Because we wanted to see the sky and smell the ocean instead of rooftops and garbage, that’s why. Because we felt alive here.”
And nothing would threaten that. Fear fanned through her in waves that left her nauseous. Gia was afraid for any perp he chased down an alley today or any doors he kicked down, because they would all be the Ray he couldn’t catch.
“Let’s go. I’ll drop you at the bakery.”
The bakery. How could she still go after everything? She stared at her father with her same frozen face, her bare feet stuck to the linoleum, sweating off a faintly metallic smell.
“You gave your word,” he said. “That’s all anybody has in the world.”
The shame of believing Ray’s words washed over her again. She changed. The short ride was silent minus a flock of laughing gulls calling in the distance as Gia wished for the bay and her boat, the steady chop of water. Mr. Angliotti bent for a newspaper near the tree stump. It felt stupid now, hunting for chemicals, when there were so many more invisible things to be afraid of. She hopped out just as Big Louis was unlocking the metal gate over the bakery’s front window.
“She’s sick,” Gia lied. “I’ll cover for her.”
Louis was already sweating yellow stains through his T-shirt. Unlike her father, he hadn’t shaved, and stubble collected on each of his chins, making dark shadows. A bit of butter stuck to the corner of his mouth. Gia pushed away her disgust.
“What good are you? You don’t know nothing yet.” But he let her in when the gate rolled open with a clang and showed her the register, assuming she knew enough about cookies not to screw up orders too badly even if she wasn’t tall enough to see over the glass display case. And then the other girls filed in, and Gia drifted into a powdered sugar background, filling boxes, refilling trays, her hands drying in the plastic sanitary gloves, the whole thing a kind of penance without Lorraine that she didn’t even deserve.
“Oh, you’re home.” Agnes sat up, forcing a brightness she didn’t feel, brushing away the damp streaks on her face. “How was it?”
“Fine,” Gia lied. Her fingertips burned from bakery string, but it was honest work, unlike the money under her mattress. She would stuff it in the poor box at church. Or give it to Lorraine. Fill up the freezer with Aunt Diane’s TV dinners. A pot of chicken broth boiled on the stove.
“I’m going to take this over . . .” Agnes trailed off, shuffling away.
“Is she . . .”
“She will be. Just give her a few days. And not a word, do you understand? Not to anyone. Especially not Ray.” She spit his name with such hate and followed it with the sign of the cross. Gia took one small step forward and wrapped her arms around her mother’s waist. Agnes held her back, rested her head against Gia’s, until the pot splashed a few warning drops over the rim and forced them apart.
That night, Gia couldn’t sleep. She curled up on the couch in the dark and watched Lorraine’s house across the street in case Antonio came back. Or even Ray. She had one of Leo’s old baseball bats until her mother came in and took it away.
“Think about it,” she said. “If they see someone small like you coming and snatch this bat, you just gave them your own beating weapon.”
She was right. Gia said nothing as Agnes stuffed it back in the closet, wondering how many fights her mother had seen growing up in the Lower East Side. Together they sat on either end of the couch, but Lorraine’s house was quiet all night.
Until sometime after midnight. Agnes had dozed off, breathing deeply, the house settling around them. Even Gia opened and closed her eyes in fits and starts until the two shapes rounded the corner, zigzagged down the street.
“Mom.” Gia nudged Agnes, her foot icy against Agnes’s warm calf. Her mother shot up, fumbling in the pocket of her robe without taking her eyes off the window.
“Get down,” Agnes whispered. The two shapes were still small in the window. One of them stopped, hoisted the other. One walked while the other dragged along beside. Was this what always happened late at night, and she’d just never noticed?
“Mom,” Gia whispered. The object in Agnes’s hand slowly took shape. The barrel, the click as it loaded. She’d only seen it once or twice, her father’s off-duty gun, and both times he’d made a point of unloading it in front of her, dropping the bullets out and snapping it shut while Gia sat on her hands. She didn’t even know where they hid it, only that it was not a toy and she was never to touch it. But now it was awkward in Agnes’s small hand, pointed at the window, as the veins in her mother’s neck throbbed in the dim light.
“Your father knows I have it,” Agnes whispered back. “If anything happens, you run. Understood?”
Gia went cold. Her whole body. Straight through the frozen canal. She would not run. She would take the bat from the closet again. Or would she? Would she leave her mother with two men and an off-duty gun like she’d let Lorraine leave for that date? It was sickening to be unsure if she’d do the right thing when it mattered, but the two shapes were coming up the walkway now, and the off duty went under the couch because Leo’s arm was around Tommy’s shoulders, his legs jelly, as Tommy dragged him up the sidewalk.
“Call your father,” Agnes whispered, tightening her robe. “And not a word about the gun.”
Agnes opened the front door, and Tommy stopped for a moment, caught, unable to look Agnes in the eye as she positioned Leo’s other arm around her shoulders. How many times had Agnes dabbed at one of Tommy’s scraped knees, peeled the backing off a Band-Aid, or handed him slices of cake with an extra frosting flower, a candle of his own to blow out even if it wasn’t his birthday? And now he couldn’t look at her.
“What’d he take?” Agnes asked, but as soon as Leo’s weight came off Tommy’s shoulders, he turned for home, walking quickly down the front walk.
“Fifteen minutes,” Eddie promised over the phone. “Get him in bed.”
Agnes struggled under Leo’s dead weight, so Gia took the other side. He stank. Sweat. Piss. Alcohol. Something else. Gia wished she had her nose clip, a white suit like the workers when they’d taken the tree down and picked up the sparrows, in case they could catch what Leo had by touching him. His breath near her face was repulsive. She stared at the steps as they lumbered up, dumped him onto his bed. Gia scrubbed her face in the bathroom, her arms, her neck. She wet her hair and scraped at h
er scalp, praying whatever it was hadn’t already seeped through her skin.
Eddie thundered up the steps. There was a shuffle in Leo’s room, a clink of metal on metal.
“He’s not a criminal, Eddie. He’s your son,” Agnes protested, her mouth open in the doorway.
“I’ll deal with him in the morning,” he said, taking off down the steps again and back to his cruiser at the curb. It was still running. He was still on shift, Gia realized, and he’d just cuffed a passed-out Leo to the radiator. The car pulled away. Gia locked the doors, curled into a ball on the couch, too exhausted to watch Lorraine’s house any longer, and fell asleep to her mother pacing on the floor above until Leo woke up and banged the cuffs against the radiator. Gia couldn’t take it and called her father at the station again while Agnes pleaded with Leo that they didn’t have the key. Could he just stop yelling until Eddie came home? Whatever he needed, she would bring it to him if he would just stop.
“I’m off in an hour,” Eddie said. “Tell her to put the radio on and give him a bucket. Wait downstairs at Nonna’s.”
“Mom.” Gia carried a new bucket upstairs, set up the radio on the floor in Leo’s room. Agnes was sitting against the wall. There were fresh tears on her cheeks. Her eyes were puffy. And she was tired. They both were. It sat on Gia’s forehead, the need for sleep, and made Leo banging on the radiator, the cuff cutting at his wrist, less real.
“Gia, just get me a pin,” Leo pleaded.
“Dad’s coming home in an hour,” Gia said, tuning the radio, avoiding her brother’s eye. “Just knock it off. Mom, come on.” She slid the bucket closer to Leo. She did not want to be near him, did not want to look at his dirty clothes. She was embarrassed and disgusted, wished they could air this room out and air him away with it, clean up the mess of clothes on the floor, the crumpled sheets, the dust on the shelves, all of the broken parts he kept scattered around, the dirty plates and glasses. It was disrespectful after how hard their parents worked, her mother typing all day, her father working nights and days in danger, just for them to live here, and this was how Leo used it. Agnes was up, avoiding the pinups on the wall. It was uncomfortable, her mother in her bathrobe in front of those women in sheer fabrics, throwing their heads back with waves of glossy hair. Agnes must’ve caught Gia staring because she turned suddenly and ripped one in half, the pins popping out of the wall, and crumpled it into the garbage can, then another. She stripped the sheets off the bed and scooped the clothes on the floor into the hamper. Opened the window.
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