A Frenzy of Sparks: A Novel

by Kristin Fields

  Edelweiss, she wrote finally, thinking of them in the living room with the couches pushed back, dancing in socks. It was the only word she could think of.

  The next day, the phone rang again early, and Agnes jumped up so fast she threw the chair back with the motion. It landed on its back like a dead bug.

  “Yes? Yes, he’s here. Gia, get your father. It’s the station.”

  But Eddie was already halfway down, swinging his bad leg over the steps with his full weight on the banister, sweaty and disheveled from several days without a shower. He really did look like he had the flu. Gia stepped back.

  “Martino.” His voice came from an unused place. Then he coughed, and Gia realized his lungs were hurting from the smoke just like hers. He looked in Gia’s direction as he listened, without really seeing her.

  “Thanks,” he said finally. He put the phone down in the receiver and rested his head against it for a moment before looking toward Agnes, who was biting her cuticles down to the quick against the refrigerator.

  “They booked him,” Eddie said heavily. “Ray. Possession with intent to sell. No bail. He’ll go to trial or take a plea, but he’s looking at time.”

  A line of red welled near Agnes’s nail.

  “And if you think that’s too harsh—”

  “I don’t,” Agnes snapped, staring past the dusty seashell collection on the window to where Aunt Ida’s house would be. “I hope I get to pick his jurors.”

  And with that, Agnes was up the stairs in a flash, moving at the speed of a typewriter ribbon again, and upstairs the shower hummed, and Agnes got ready for work because it was early enough that she could still make it on time if she was quick about it.

  Two days later, a family moved into the first finished house. The moving van pulled up on Saturday morning around the time Gia was walking to Big Lou’s to ask for her job back because she didn’t know what else to do with herself anymore. At least at Big Lou’s she could put the money she earned in the grocery jar, help her parents. The truck unloaded new furniture wrapped in plastic while a woman in heels with a flippy Jackie Kennedy haircut pointed toward this room or that from the porch or opened the windows to air the place out.

  “It smells too new in there,” she said, laughing, ignoring the burned-out shell two houses over. Gia guessed there’d be cookies baking in the oven before the last box was unpacked. That night, there were two cars in the driveway, both new and shiny, that came and went at odd times. By Monday the woman was out there again with landscapers, pointing at the sandy stretch that should’ve been a lawn, and by Tuesday there was fresh sod in December, the lawn a brilliant summer green. It didn’t matter if it didn’t last. They’d replace it until the real lawn took root, as many times as it took.

  The following week, a big tree appeared in the window, covered in white twinkle lights. On Christmas morning, a kid in pajamas with a coat thrown over them rode a new bike with a bow into the street, speeding up real quick, burning rubber to stop, until his mother called him back. Gia was glad she’d forgotten about Christmas Eve, and it was too late to stab a lemon at midnight Mass for Ray. He had enough punishment coming his way.

  When that kid rode his bike down the driveway, Gia understood what Ray’s biggest mistake had been. He hadn’t seen the changes, hadn’t seen even what Antonio had, that the neighborhood was changing and it wasn’t theirs anymore. It would be Wonder Bread and new cars and automatic laundry machines and crime, yes, but not in their own backyards. The drugs Ray had brought in were like the citronella candles her side lit to keep mosquitos away on nights when the moon was perfect and the breeze was warm and everyone had just come back from a swim, only there wouldn’t be any more swimming, and the old houses would eventually be knocked down, replaced with the new. The new people were like the men in white suits who’d swept away the sparrows, only this time, her people were the sparrows: day laborers and city workers who’d done OK in America but never made it, hadn’t quite moved far enough away from the bricklayers the new side couldn’t stand. It wasn’t their neighborhood anymore, and Ray had helped them take it away.

  She felt bad for Ray in prison, only there had always been a cap on how far they could go. She just hadn’t seen it.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Gia came home from school and slid her bag of books to the floor. It’d been easy to go back after the new year when everything was starting fresh. Everyone knew. No one asked questions. She was oil in a water bowl and preferred it that way. Only Sister Gregory had put a hand on Gia’s shoulder during a spelling test her first week, left a copy of Cormac McCarthy’s The Orchard Keeper on the corner of her desk.

  After Leo had left, Agnes had cleaned. Buckets of soapy water turned black as she washed everything: the tops of cabinets, moldings, fan blades, the inside of the Tiffany light above the kitchen table. They steamed the rugs, nested the pots and pans in the cabinets, mopped, organized food in the pantry. Gia dumped her dresser drawers, made a giveaway pile for church, refolded her clothes. Agnes opened every window, cool air seeping through until everything had absorbed it, even hours later when the windows were closed. The door to Leo’s room stayed shut.

  And when they were done and it was still quiet, they carried the buckets and cleaning supplies over to Aunt Diane’s and did the same. Lorraine had thrown the windows open and closed her eyes when the air had rushed in, breathing deep, memorizing the cold smell of salt water. Gia wondered if washing away dust was a quiet way of saying goodbye.

  They weren’t trying to scrub Leo away, more like bring the house back to life, but it still felt empty. Even today, like watching the first stars come out at night or a sunrise in the morning. Empty and everything.

  Gia warmed milk in a saucepan and spread peanut butter on toast. The smell of cleaning soap was still strong. Breakfast dishes were upside down in the drying rack. Her father ate regular food now instead of broth, and his stomach was doing fine. There was no need to look for Leo in the middle of the night, but Gia still woke up at odd times, the house quiet around her, settling with an unfamiliar purposelessness. Eddie walked with a limp now, and the effort to hide it on the job sent him straight to bed at night, even though he was still on desk, just wasn’t complaining about it anymore. They were still waiting on the fire report as bulldozers loaded what was left of the two houses—one on their side of the canal, one on the new side—into overflowing dumpsters, but Eddie thought they were in the clear now.

  Peanut butter stuck to the roof of her mouth. She drank her warm milk and opened her notebook on the table. She was so far behind. Reading felt too slow now, the words swirling as she tried, sentence by sentence, to focus. She could see, almost, Leo’s point about things being heightened when he was high, more vivid, covering a stronger palette of emotion that made everything else dull in comparison. She did not want to admit it, but he was right. Everything was dull.

  Something fell in the living room, a soft thud, like a paperback from the arm of a couch. Her skin prickled, alive again.

  “Mom?” Gia called out.

  Silence. Gia pushed the chair back quietly, took a knife from the butcher’s block.

  “I’m here,” a small voice from the couch said. Her mother.

  “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  But her expression stopped Gia cold. Her legs were curled beneath her, in her favorite brown skirt and ruffled sky-blue blouse, as she stared at a spot on the ceiling, biting down on her index finger hard enough to leave teeth marks as blood rose beneath them. The light was fading outside, but the lamps were off, turning the room the color of a rinse cup for paintbrushes. The thud was a shoe that had hit the carpet after slipping slowly from her mother’s foot. It was impossible to tell how long her mother had been sitting like this, if she’d even gone to work.

  She should shut the curtains and hide this. Call her father.

  “Should I get Lorraine?” Gia hovered in the doorway, afraid to touch her mother’s side of the room. Silence.

  �
��Or Dad?”

  Gia twisted her hands, wringing the skin, fighting the bone and muscle beneath, her chest a spiderweb of tension, weaving, weaving, weaving.

  “Are you sick?”

  Agnes turned, her gaze slowly settling on Gia, her face muddy in the fading light. “The police called.”

  Gia’s stomach lurched. There were gaps, her father said, in his bulletproof vest, places his tactical gear didn’t cover, but a bullet was better than a knife, cleaner. The police radio terms he’d taught her sped through her head: DOA, 10-31, 10-35. What if they’d taken him off desk? He was limping, couldn’t run if he had to. Or if they knew about that house—picked him up at the station and cuffed him in front of everyone. They’d found blood under the floorboards or too many footprints on Mr. Angliotti’s lawn. Or the wound Lorraine had dressed with gauze and peroxide had gotten infected and spread to his blood.

  “Is Dad . . . where’s Dad?”

  “The Florida police.” Agnes flattened against the couch, staring out the window at where the parakeets were on the telephone wire again, green against a purple sky. And Gia could not help it, but she was glad it was not her father, that he was at work behind a stack of papers with a coffee cup leaving a ring on a file folder, stuck on desk, his badge over his heart.

  “January always gets a nice sky,” her mother said, lost in the window world.

  Whatever Leo had done was worse than before, worse than the fire or the marsh. Whatever it was, her blood was cold, and she felt empty, dread spilling over her insides. She wished she could go back to her toast and homework, back to normal again, instead of feeling the ache in her spine where he’d slammed her with that stick.

  “I’m calling Dad.” Gia moved for the hallway phone.

  “No.” Her mother shook her head, still staring out the window, where birds flew in small circles without gravity or the same weight that anchored Gia to the living room. “No.”

  “Mom?” She didn’t want to know, but she would have to. Whatever it was had already happened.

  “The police found him this morning. He overdosed. On the beach.”

  Each sentence was a separate, impossible fact. Gia’s head buzzed, ears ringing. It was good that they’d found him, the police with their badges and star-pointed hats, carrying pictures of their children in the lining, their mothers or fathers or wives. Their children. Like her father. Someone like her father had found her brother.

  “So he’s in the hospital?” Gia rushed on. “Or he’s coming home?”

  But her mother only stared.

  But he couldn’t. Not Leo. Not her brother, who’d taken down fences on his motorcycle and only gotten scraped, who’d once fallen off the roof but caught a gutter on the way down, who could hold his breath underwater for longer than anyone, long enough to untangle ropes under boats. He was always fine, scaring everyone else with his dangerous things. And yet her father had threatened this, and now it was true.

  “How do they even know it’s him? He doesn’t know anyone there. No one knows him.” There was no air in Gia’s chest. “How could they know if they don’t know him?”

  “It’s him, Gia.” Her mother’s voice was flat.

  “But how do they—” Leo’s smiling Confirmation picture sat on the mantel. He was in a suit, the only time he’d ever worn one. He couldn’t be gone when he was smiling in that frame. When he was in Florida with palm trees and the ocean. Cuban sandwiches. Orange groves. Days of endless summer. Baskets of hush puppies and fat slices of key lime pie and flowers bigger than human heads. They’d checked, pressing their faces alongside blooming hibiscus, pressing sand into buckets with ocean water for sandcastles. He was there to heal.

  Her mother was staring off through the window.

  “January blue,” she said. Gia could not take it. She grabbed her coat and rushed out. Cold air slapped her face hard enough to make tears sting. Then she was on her bike, riding down the street. A car rounded the corner, but Gia cut it off. The driver honked, yelled something Gia didn’t hear. Handlebar streamers fluttered like telltales on a sail, and Gia pedaled faster, thighs burning, until she was at the dock, only there were no boats in the water now. They’d been dragged to land and stuffed under tarps for winter.

  She threw her bike down and dangled her legs off the dock, ignoring the bird shit on the broken boards. The tide was out, and moss grew at the high water mark. Gia shivered. He was supposed to be a better person one day and put this behind him, but he couldn’t do it. He was weaker than she’d thought, weaker than he had let on. Gia peeled back bits of wood and dropped them into the canal, where they dipped and floated.

  Would it be different if she’d said something sooner? Or led Leo out of Ray’s basement? Come on, she might’ve said, let’s catch a movie. Let’s bowl. Let’s go to New Park and see who can eat the most slices. But he wouldn’t have listened. She couldn’t pretend he was that kind of person now just because he was gone.

  Gone. Gia held the word on her tongue. Gone like one season to the next or the years Gia was little. Gone like first or second grade. The pets they used to have. Gone like Aunt Ida and Uncle Frank, even though they were still down the block. Gone like Pop Pop, his home across the ocean. Nonna and her signs. Her boat. Even Lorraine. She could add her brother to that list now, only it didn’t fit. It didn’t make sense. Because he’d always been there, her brother, all the way back to when she’d been in her mother’s stomach—he’d been running up and down the steps, sleeping in the same bedroom down the hall.

  A plane took off from the airport and headed to sea. Gone like departing planes, like today would be. She needed her father. Gia closed her eyes, imagining this dock wasn’t New York in January, that the water was not mud green, that the maple trees were palms swaying in the warm sun, the water crystal blue. She could swim if she wanted to. Orange trees grew on sidewalks. The world was full of tropical flowers in pinks and whites, and little lizards warmed on the dock, the sun warming her too. That was supposed to happen for her brother but hadn’t. Why would it if her island hadn’t worked? It was disappointing to realize she’d been so stupid both times to let hope fester quietly under the surface.

  Had he known he couldn’t stop? Dogs and cats ran away to die. They made themselves disappear. Was that what Leo had done? Had it been easier away from home, like it was easier to be herself away from her family—all the best and worst?

  Gia hugged her knees to her chest, imagining her brother on this canal, his pants rolled up, barefoot, coiling rope on his arm, kicking off from the dock with a cooler, the sun reddening his nose, with a bucket of teeming bait. Or revving an engine he’d finished after all those stray parts had finally fit together, how confidently he’d pulled them apart because he could fix it better.

  Or fighting, flushed from the effort, limbs tangled, her pride at knowing he was the best, cheering on something she’d never do, though they’d been cut from the same cloth.

  They would have laughed about it one day, sitting on the front lawn while his wife carried coffee and cake to the folding tables, a little kid hanging upside down off his lap to look at the moon. Remember that time I left you on the island?

  The sky was indigo with feather clouds. Her mother was right. It was beautiful.

  And what hurt the most and felt most unfixable now was wondering how much she’d ever really known her brother, if at all. Now, she never would.

  There would be no more new memories, Gia realized sadly, only the same repeating ones, the most recent of which were not very good. She wished it were possible to pick and choose your memories instead of jumbling them together. To keep the better ones and let the rest go, wash them out to sea like her marsh did.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Mom?” Her mother was at the sink, pinning her hair into rollers, like any other night. Gia had not brushed her teeth, changed her clothes. No one noticed. Besides funeral things, her mother didn’t speak. No, they did not need a priest. No, they did not need a service. Sadness evaporat
ed off her like a puddle after a rainstorm, the air heavy with it, with more waiting underneath.

  And as for her father, well, she didn’t know where he was, but it wasn’t here. The station. Overtime. Anywhere but here.

  “Did you know this would happen?”

  If I give him money, he won’t steal. Maybe it wasn’t as dumb as it seemed, like feeding change into a pay phone before the call ended or into a sidewalk horse while a kid rocked on top.

  Her mother rolled another curler. Mint-green tubes were lined up on the sink next to scattered bobby pins. The contrast was unnerving.

  “Doesn’t matter,” she mumbled, not looking at Gia.

  “Why didn’t you say something sooner?” Gia begged. “Because a man is always right? If you knew better, why didn’t you say?”

  Her mother ran her fingers under a trickle of water. It was sickening. Even now, Agnes kept her thoughts in her head. Even now, her hair had to be perfect.

  “Answer me!”

  Gia swiped the pins and sent them scattering, bouncing on the bathroom floor. But her mother only pressed her eyes closed, balling her fists, breathing heavily through her nose.

  Agnes shoved the bathroom door shut so hard it crushed Gia’s pinkie. She was white light, blinding, as she pulled her finger from the door, balled her hand around it to quiet the throbbing under her nail and in her head. Kicked the door so hard it shot nerve pain up her leg, into her back. Gia screamed without words, just high and shrill with hurt. Not that her mother cared. Not about Gia. She wouldn’t have been the same loss to Agnes.

  Gia slammed her door, hating the pink wallpaper with tiny, delicate flowers, the white bedroom furniture with spindly legs, the window seat meant for a daydreaming girl with two neat braids down the back of her head, a different kind of daughter.

  Her poster of the World’s Fair Unisphere in all its metallic glory was a big middle finger to those petite wallpaper flowers. To the dresser’s mirrored tray, sitting neatly on the lace runner, with only a tube of lip gloss instead of pretty perfume bottles.