Dedication
In memory of my granddaughter
Emma Drew Francis
forever loved and missed
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Part I: 1959
Chapter One: A Place Called the Moscatellis
Chapter Two: The Dangling Button
Chapter Three: Franco-American Spaghetti
Chapter Four: Shamrock Barrettes
Chapter Five: Already
Chapter Six: The File
Chapter Seven: The Biggest Word in the Sky
Chapter Eight: The Fifth Time
Chapter Nine: The Trouble with Girls
Chapter Ten: The Coward
Chapter Eleven: Three Faces and a Clatter of Pennies
Part II: 1962
Chapter One: A Stone in My Pocket
Chapter Two: The Girl in the Waves
Chapter Three: Killed by a Cat
Chapter Four: The Girl Beneath the Yellow Leaves
Chapter Five: The Maledizione
Chapter Six: Chickens on a Conveyer Belt
Chapter Seven: My Father’s Victory
Chapter Eight: Get Up
Part III: 1966–1968
Chapter One: Lilacs in November
Chapter Two: Come On, Agnes
Chapter Three: James Kovacs Sr. Makes the Paper One More Time
Chapter Four: Zaidie Writes a Valedictorian Speech
Chapter Five: The Magnet
Chapter Six: All Saints
Chapter Seven: The Inferno
Chapter Eight: Why I Stopped
Chapter Nine: Louie Takes a Walk
Chapter Ten: Freedom
Chapter Eleven: A Gun Appears in the Story
Chapter Twelve: A Basket of Stones
Chapter Thirteen: Einstein and Me
Chapter Fourteen: The Golden Tree
Chapter Fifteen: Before
Chapter Sixteen: The Most Beautiful River I Never Saw
Chapter Seventeen: The Last Brave Thing I Ever Did
Chapter Eighteen: The Flutter
Chapter Nineteen: A Jade Elephant
Chapter Twenty: Migration
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Patry Francis
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
DAHLIA
I USED TO THINK THAT IF I JUST STAYED HOME I WOULD BE SAFE. SO WHEN the chance come, I struck a deal with a boy so homely and tongue-tied no one else would have him: I’d put some kind of supper on the table and sleep in his bed every night and he’d bring me jigsaws, and teetering stacks of books from the library and never ask me to leave the house again. Louie was just nineteen. And me—I was even younger, though I hadn’t felt like a girl in a long time.
Then one night I woke up to a particular kind of lonesome, one that couldn’t be answered by him or the people who kept company with me on the TV, or the ones that moved between my books and my head and sometimes deeper. It was the ache that wants a child, and no matter how I tried to shoo it out, it wouldn’t leave.
That’s when I found out there was no safe place. That even locked up in my six rooms, I’d never stopped traveling. And what’s more, there was some kind of unseen direction to it all. What it was—and why—well, I wouldn’t begin to understand that till the kids were practically grown. And most I don’t expect to know in this lifetime.
But once I got a glimpse, everyone looked different. Louie and the boy my loneliness drug to the door and all the rest that followed. It was like there was a radiance to them. I only wish I’d seen it sooner. I only wish everyone could see it.
Part I
1959
Chapter One
A Place Called the Moscatellis
AGNES
THE DAY SHE CAME TO TAKE ME AWAY THE SKY WAS PURE WHITE. I sat on my crate by the window, wishing for snow so I could watch the kids next door play in it. Every time they opened up their mouths to taste it, I opened mine, too. It made me forget the bad thing I had done. But the snow never came, and neither did the kids.
I took out the secret box I hid in a corner of the attic, and I touched my presents one by one: a glass stone so clear the blue showed through when I held it up to the window, a broke whistle, a wishbone, and a tiny doll with hair the color of mine. I tried to open her eyes to see if they looked like me, too, but they were sewed shut forever.
When I heard Mrs. Dean calling my name on the stairs, I snapped my box shut and put it back in its hiding place. The door flung open.
“You better come down. Someone’s here for you.”
Someone? Was it the one who used to bring me presents? I didn’t dare ask.
Downstairs, a lady I’d never seen before sat on the edge of the couch. She patted the spot next to her and made a face like a smile. “Hello, Aggie.”
I stood in the middle of the room, looking at the floor till she got up and crouched beside me—so close I could smell the stuff she sprayed on herself when she got out of the tub. She was talking, too, but all I heard was Mrs. Dean’s voice inside my head. You touched my Jean Naté, didn’t you? Don’t lie to me!
The lady said something about the ’vestigation, that word Mr. and Mrs. Dean had been saying every day. It made my bad hand ache worse. “I’m here to take you to a new home. Just temporarily. Do you know what that means?”
I studied the pink swirls in the carpet, trying not to think of the day I lied about the Jean Naté or the other thing I did. The worser one that started up the ’vestigation. Did she really expect me to answer?
“You’ll be staying with the Moscatellis until we can find you a more permanent family.”
The color of her coat reminded me of the tree outside my window when the daddy next door came home from work and the light poured through. I wanted to touch it, but I knew better.
Mrs. Dean had folded my clothes into a pile and packed them neatly into a paper sack with a red lollipop on top. It was the first sweet she’d ever given me. When she held out the bag, I closed my eyes and dreamed the word no.
“See what she’s like?” she told the lady in the summer-green coat, pressing the bag into her hands. “Good luck to the next family if they think they can do better.”
The lady must have heard my secret no because when we were leaving, she set the brown bag on the floor just inside the door. “How about we leave all that right here, Aggie? What do you say?”
I squinted at the lollipop and her pink mouth talking to me and the white day outside and nodded. Then I stopped and pointed at the attic stairs until she understood.
“Is there something up there you want to bring with you? Something of yours?”
Mrs. Dean was still listening from the living room. “Everything she owns is in that bag. She’s got nothing of her own.”
But when I didn’t move, she let me go upstairs to look. “Long as she doesn’t try to steal something on the way out.”
She made Nancy let her see my secret box after we came down.
“Where on earth did this junk come from?” Her face knotted up like it did when she was going to tell Mr. Dean on me. Only he wasn’t home. Finally, she shrugged and handed it back. “Belongs in the trash if you ask me.”
AT THAT POINT, everything I knew about myself came from the Deans:
Mr. Dean was the first one to tell me I was an Indian. “See those people getting their asses kicked?” he said, pointing at his TV when I came downstairs to pee. “Well, that’s you.” Since I didn’t know anyone else who looked like that, I was pretty sure I was the last one left. Me and the one who gave me my presents. Only I hadn’t seen
her for so long I was pretty sure the people in Mr. Dean’s TV got her, too.
Yourmother, they called her, like she was something bad and I was the one who did it. Yourmother was a whore who didn’t care two shits about me and I was going to turn out just like her. A dope fiend, too. You know what that is, Agnes?
That’s when I learned you don’t have to know what words mean to understand them. I nodded at Mr. Dean. Yes, I knew.
I didn’t grow right or talk right or look right, but it didn’t matter because nobody would ever want to talk to me or look at me anyway.
My father was no one. No one didn’t know I existed and if he ever found out, he’d either piss on me or strangle me. One or the other. If it was him, Mr. Dean said he’d choose door number two. That always made him laugh.
Something called the asthma lived in my chest. It slept for weeks, but if I caught a cold or tried to run or got scared, it squeezed until I couldn’t breathe. I stopped running, and I gave up being scared, too—at least most of the time. But sometimes the asthma went right ahead and attacked anyway. Then they took me to the hospital where I slept in a tent and ladies who thought my name was Honey gave me medicine. I learned my colors from their Jell-O. Green was the best. After I went back to the Deans, I tasted it in my mouth every night before I fell asleep. Green. It wasn’t just the best color; it was the best anything.
I didn’t tell anyone my name wasn’t Honey and it wasn’t Agnes, either. It was Agnés. When I spoke it to myself, it sounded like the whispery noise the trees make when they talk to each other. Ahhhn-yess.
Mine was never the story of all that, though. Not the room with the window where I lived at the Deans’ house or the paper bag with the red lollipop on top I tried to leave behind or all the ways it found to follow me.
No, mine was the story of the river. I had never seen it or heard its name, but it was the only thing that never abandoned me. When I sat on my crate and watched the kids next door, it ran and leaped. When I kept quiet so I wouldn’t wake Mr. Dean or scare the asthma, it sang in the dark; and when I thought I was all alone, it reached out and stroked my face.
Everything will be all right, the river said, and somehow I believed it. I always believed it.
Chapter Two
The Dangling Button
ZAIDIE
I PEERED THROUGH THE CURTAIN AT THE PAIR COMING UP THE walkway. “They’re here!” Ma kept her eyes on the TV as if she didn’t hear me.
The first thing I noticed was the solitary button hanging by a thread from the kid’s corduroy jacket. It was a boy’s coat like the one Jon wore in the spring, though hers was at least two sizes too small. She was holding on to a cigar box as if she expected someone to take it away.
“It’s a colored kid, Ma.”
After rousing herself from what Jimmy called her headquarters, Ma snuck a look out the side window. “Dear Lord.”
The last time we took in a colored, Jimmy had to beat the tar out of Mark Zarella for calling him a bad name. Not that Jimmy didn’t use the word himself sometimes—just not about our kids.
Ma held the handle of the inside storm door and talked through the glass like she still hadn’t decided whether she was going to let them in or not.
“Two weeks, Nancy,” she said. “Tops.”
“Good afternoon to you, too, Mrs. Moscatelli.”
When the theme for The Edge of Night came on the TV, Ma’s eyes turned toward the sound. At that point, no one was paying any attention to the kid with the dangling button. Her expression was blank, as if it didn’t matter where she went. I’d seen that look before.
Ma gave her a once-over the way she might examine a roast in Edward’s Market and turned back to the case worker. “You said she was six.”
“It’s freezing out here. You gonna let us in or what?” Nancy exaggerated a shiver.
“Damn right it’s cold, and that sorry excuse for a jacket wouldn’t keep a doll warm. Where’s her stuff?”
“Don’t worry. I already requisitioned the department. In the meantime, I thought you might have some of the kids’ old clothes around.”
“Oh, that’s what you thought, huh?” Reluctantly, Ma opened the storm door and allowed the two to enter.
“You told me she was six,” Ma repeated. “A six-year-old white girl. Like I don’t catch enough guff from the neighbors already?”
Nancy dropped the file she was carrying on the card table where Ma did her jigsaws, disrupting the yellow sun she’d worked on all morning, and helped Agnes out of her skimpy jacket.
“Look at that beautiful hair,” Nancy said. “We’re guessing her father might be Italian.”
“And he might be the Pope, too.” Ma shook her head. “Louie’s not gonna like this.”
By then, the boys were flanking Ma and me. They stared down the Emergency like an opposing army.
Jimmy swept back a wing of brown hair with the flat of his hand. At thirteen, he was beginning to suspect he might be handsome, but he wasn’t sure. “And you said we were done taking in Emergencies, Ma.” He smirked at me. “At least this one won’t be sleeping in my room.”
“Louie’s not gonna like this at all,” Ma repeated. It wasn’t clear whether she was speaking to Nancy, to the girl with the dangling button, or to herself.
Jon, who was in his mimicking phase, removed his thumb from his mouth and shook his head. “Louie not gonna like this.”
Jimmy sauntered over to Ma’s table and flipped open the folder. “Agnes Josephine Juniper,” he read. “Sounds like someone’s grandma. And look, she really is six, Ma. It says right here. Date of birth: April 4, 1953. Are you a midget, kid?”
Fortunately, the girl with the dangling button was as oblivious to my brother’s insults as she was to everything else. Was she deaf?
Instead of punishing Jimmy like she would have done to me, Ma lifted her eyebrows in Nancy’s direction. “Well?”
“There have been some growth issues, but she’s not going to be here long enough for you to worry about it.” The dismissive flip of Nancy’s hand indicated that Agnes’s size was the tip of the iceberg.
“Do you want to see my Ginny doll?” I said in a voice loud enough to drown out Ma’s reluctance, my brothers’ mockery, and the case worker’s weariness. I attempted to take a hand the kid was holding behind her back, but she winced and pulled away. That’s when I noticed the cast.
“Sorry,” I stammered. And then to Ma: “I—I didn’t know she was hurt.”
“Another thing no one bothered to tell us.” Ma glared at Nancy.
“We’re looking at ten days here; I promise. Aggie here’s had a rough time of it and you’re the best home I’ve got.”
Ma drew her mouth into a straight line, irritated by the obvious flattery. “So you’re giving me a colored kid who doesn’t have a coat or a pair of mittens to her name. Now I hear she’s got stunted growth and a broken hand—and God knows what else.”
“Not colored. Indian.”
“In this neighborhood, she’s colored. And even if I had the time to run back and forth to doctors, we’ve only got the one car.”
Nancy’s eyes flickered over the room, taking in the toys that were scattered everywhere, a bowl of unfinished Cheerios Jon had left on the coffee table that morning, and the rug that hadn’t been vacuumed in weeks, as if to ask what exactly kept my mother so busy. Finally the case worker’s gaze settled on Ma’s headquarters: a ratty armchair, a card table for her jigsaws, the small TV with foil-lined rabbit ears, and a staggering pile of books on the floor. Reader’s Digest Condensed books mixed with the ones she made Jimmy bring home from the library. Raise Your Child’s IQ with Classical Music, How to Stop Thumb Sucking, and the dog-eared Start Planning for College Now.
Research for a doctor degree in useless information, Dad called them.
Ma opened her eyes wide the way she did when anyone implied she was a less than perfect housekeeper: Go ahead and say it.
Like everyone else who was the recipient of that
look, Nancy thought the better of it. “By the time her next appointment comes up, she’ll be with her new family—speaking of which, I’m due for the home visit in about—” She consulted a rhinestone watch I had been envying since her last visit. “Gosh! Fifteen minutes ago. How about I give you a buzz tomorrow and see how she’s settling in?”
Again, Ma glanced wistfully at the TV set where two of her favorite characters were kissing on the screen. I always thought the only reason she allowed Agnes to stay was because she didn’t want to miss her soap.
Almost as a second thought, Nancy turned to the child. “You be a good girl, okay, Aggie? Don’t give Mrs. Moscatelli any trouble.” She didn’t appear to expect an answer.
“Agnés,” the kid corrected her matter-of-factly. It was the first word she’d spoken since she arrived. Everyone, including Nancy, was stunned.
“At least she’s not mute,” Ma said.
“No, just retarded. Kid can’t even say her own name right.” Jimmy looked at the Emergency like a steer at the fair. “A retarded midget.”
“A retarded midget,” Jon parroted, nodding.
“And you told me her name was Agnes. A six-year-old Italian named Agnes,” Ma said. “Hmph.”
“Agnés is the French pronunciation. Maybe from her father’s side,” Nancy said hopefully. “Parlez-vous Francais, Agnés?”
Ma scowled. “If she stays here, she’s going to be Agnes—and she damn well better speak English.”
The girl skimmed our faces with her dark eyes but said nothing in either language. Finally, her gaze settled on me. “Agnes go pee.”
No one seemed impressed that she knew enough to accommodate Ma. “It’s down here.” I cocked my head in the direction of the bathroom.
“The house doesn’t usually look like this,” I explained as she followed me through the rooms. “Ma hasn’t been feeling too good lately so she hasn’t been able to clean much.” It was what I always said when I brought a friend home.
Agnes, however, seemed as unimpressed by my excuse as she was by the chaos. Maybe Jimmy was right about her intelligence. He should have said slow, though. That was only polite.
All the Children Are Home Page 1