“Maybe the new family changed their minds,” I told Jon.
He was so absorbed in play he didn’t hear me. I leaped up from the bed and ran to the door to listen for a sign that things had returned to normal.
“Or Ma did,” I went on. “Maybe she called the department and told them—”
But before I could finish, the deadly silence from downstairs stopped me. “What do you think they’re doing down there in that bathroom all this time? Agnes hasn’t made a peep since breakfast.”
“Peep, peep,” Jon said in his conductor voice.
I pictured Ma sucking on her Newport the way Jimmy had demonstrated, but when I tried to imagine Agnes, I couldn’t. I returned to the window.
Just after eleven, Nancy’s Studebaker rounded the corner of the street. “Maybe it’s not her,” I told Jon. “A lot of people have cars like that.”
“This the coal car. It brings coal to that house right there. See?”
Sometimes one word can break your heart. I fought back tears as the Studebaker pulled into our driveway. Nancy climbed out wearing that green coat, her high heels clicking.
“You said you’d be here before nine,” Ma said, flinging the door wide this time. “As if this isn’t hard enough.”
Nancy murmured something that sounded like an apology, but I didn’t catch it.
Every cell in my body was listening for Agnes. When I heard the bathroom door open, I steeled myself. Would she cry or throw a tantrum like some kids did?
Silence.
In enthusiastic tones, Nancy rambled on about the Dohertys and the little girl who was right around Aggie’s age and how lucky she was. She was no more convincing than Ma had been.
I waited for Agnes to tell her that Aggie wasn’t her name, but she didn’t even do that.
Finally, Ma told her to get her jacket from Zaidie’s room. Just a day earlier, it would have been your room.
I stood at the top of the stairs, listening as the door opened and closed twice. “For goodness sake, not that jacket, Agnes. The one Dad—uh, Mr. Moscatelli bought you. And where are your new shoes?”
She was taking everything back, piece by piece. First the room, and now Dad.
Still, Agnes remained silent. Before I could stop myself, I was down the stairs.
Agnes stood impassively in the middle of the room, wearing the jacket with the dangling button. I hadn’t seen it since the day she arrived. She had also dug out her old Keds.
“Agnes, you can’t wear those. They’re too small and besides, the snow will get in through the holes,” I blurted out. “Where are the ones Dad bought?”
But Jimmy was right. It had all been a lie and Agnes knew it. She regarded me with the same stony expression she wore the last time I’d seen her in that jacket. I took a step backward, wishing I’d stayed upstairs with the door shut—or better yet, gone to school.
She didn’t speak until Ma came out from the room holding the paper bag, which Agnes had apparently hidden under the bed.
“Agnes don’t want.” She touched the center of her chest where her heart was but didn’t look to me the way she usually did when she corrected her own grammar. “I don’t want it.”
“Don’t be silly, Aggie,” Nancy told her. “You need your school clothes. And the winter coat Mr. Moscatelli was kind enough to buy for you.”
“I don’t want it,” Agnes repeated. Though her tone was flat, I recognized her determination. And apparently, so did Ma.
“It’s just some old stuff from the Goodwill anyway. I’m sure her new family will buy her something better.”
Without a glance in my direction, Agnes turned and followed Nancy toward the door.
They were almost at the base of the walkway when she came running back—moving so quickly I was afraid she would trigger her asthma. I opened my arms in expectation.
But no. She stood calmly before me as she unclasped the shamrock barrette and pressed it into my hand.
“But that’s yours,” I told her.
She shook her head. “Zaidie keep it.”
As she walked away, leaving as she had come, with nothing but the secrets she kept inside the jacket with the dangling button, I stood in the picture window, clutching the barrette so tightly it left marks on my hand just as her nails had done the first day we walked to school together.
Only after she’d gone did I realize she’d left her secret box in the closet.
Chapter Five
Already
AGNES
YOU WEREN’T EXACTLY WHAT WE HAD IN MIND. NO OFFENSE.” Kathy stroked her bottom lip with her thumb just like Mommy did. “You’re too sickly for one thing. And no one told us you were slow.”
“Agnes have the asthma. Can’t run.”
“That’s not the kind of slow I meant. But you know what they say: ‘Beggars can’t be—’” When the words of the cliché failed her, she shrugged. “Beggars are lucky to get anything so they should just keep quiet.”
We were alone in a bedroom that was at least twice the size as the one I’d shared with Zaidie. The furniture was all white; there were pictures of ponies on the wall, and we slept in beds with matching bedspreads.
“Why our beds have roofs?” I asked. Would the rain come through the ceiling the way it did in the corner of the attic before Mr. Dean climbed up the ladder to fix it?
“Not roofs. Canopies, silly.” Again, Kathy stroked her lip. “We were hoping for someone who looked more like me so Mommy could dress us up in the same clothes and take pictures. Like real sisters.”
I didn’t tell her I had a sister. Already. In the three days I’d been there, my new word seemed to describe my whole life. Don’t need a bed with a roof. Already have a bed in Zaidie’s room. A seat at the table, too, and a special blue plate with a crack in it that looks like the letter Y, too. Dog? Already have Princie, best thief in the world. If I said any of that, Kathy would cry. Then Mommy and Daddy would whisper about sending me back—and not to the Moscatellis, either.
Kathy leaped up from the bed. “Do you like Good and Plenty? I have some in my doll house.”
I allowed her to pour the pink and white candies into my hand, and when she sprawled across the bed on her belly, legs kicked up behind her, I did the same.
“Mommy says you’re a dwarf. Are you?”
“Agnes don’t grow right or talk right or look right,” I said, quoting Mr. Dean. Then I remembered what Ma taught me about lies. “Agnes just small,” I said. “I . . . I small. I . . . am . . . small.”
“I’m already taller than the sixth graders.” A worried look crossed Kathy’s face. “And, um, bigger.”
“Big okay. Just like small. Zaidie telled me that.”
I expected Kathy to jump up and yell: Mommy, she’s talking about Zaidie again! Or to stamp her feet hard on the floor and cry. She was supposed to be my sister! You promised!
This time, though, she was too worried about the word big to notice. She got up and went to the doll house and retrieved a white box. “A few Junior Mints won’t ruin our supper. Long as we don’t eat the whole box.”
I held out my hand. “Jimmy gived me these one time.”
Again, she ignored the mention of the people I wasn’t supposed to talk about. She flopped back down on the bed. “Andrea James says I don’t have any friends cause I’m fat.”
“Andrea James lie.”
“What makes you so sure? You never met her, and besides, Mommy says you don’t know practically anything. No offense.”
“People who talk mean lie. Ma telled me that.” It wasn’t exactly what she’d said, but it was what I’d heard. And yes, I was sure of it.
Hope rose up in Kathy’s eyes, but it fell just as fast. “Too bad she doesn’t know anything, either. Mommy says that lady you call Ma is an old slob, and once, a long time ago—”
“Your mommy lie, too. Then.” (If only Zaidie could hear me using the words she’d taught me!) “And Agnes is not slow.”
Kathy leaped from the bed and b
arreled toward the kitchen. “Mommmyyyy! Agnes said you’re a . . .”
I tuned out the rest as I allowed Zaidie’s voice to fill my head. “I . . . not . . . slow. I . . . am . . . not . . . slow . . . either!” Every time I corrected myself, I touched the center of my chest and smiled. “See?”
“What’s she saying up there now? Is she talking about those people again?” Mommy asked. And then more loudly, “Let’s hope I don’t have to call the department.”
The Junior Mints were beginning to melt so I went into the bathroom to wash my hands, closing the door on Mommy’s voice. If the Moscatellis didn’t want me—like Mommy told me every day—would I have to go back to Mr. Dean?
When my hands were clean, I went to the front window. I hadn’t seen the yellow station wagon since I’d landed at the Dohertys’ but I knew he hadn’t forgotten me. I stared into the coming night.
After a while, Kathy came and stood beside me. “Mommy made cube steak and mashed potatoes for supper. Gravy, too. And crescent rolls from a can like on TV. Don’t you love those?”
It was Wednesday, the day Ma cooked the best supper: Franco-American, milk she made from powder and water, and that bread you can roll into little balls. I heard Jimmy and Zaidie arguing about whose turn it was to do the dishes, and Dad’s voice: Pipe down. I saw the empty place where I should have been and the blue plate with the crack in it.
But the scents coming from Mommy’s kitchen made my stomach moan; Kathy needed a friend because she didn’t have any; and I didn’t want to be sent back to Mr. Dean’s, so I said yes. Yes, I loved those rolls that were shaped like the moon outside my window at home. I followed Kathy to the dining room and sat in the seat that was not mine. Would never be mine. When Kathy smiled at me, I was almost sorry I couldn’t be her sister.
EVERYTHING WAS BETTER at the Dohertys’. That’s what the lady who brought me here told me. The yard was bigger, and the house was nicer, and every day after school Mommy took us somewhere in the car. Kathy had flute lessons on Monday and we put bathing suits under our clothes and swam at a place called the Y on Tuesdays—even though it was winter.
The first time, I sat on the edge and kicked my feet in the water. The teacher tried to take my hands and pull me in, but I pulled harder. No.
“Don’t worry; I won’t let you go,” she said. I knew she wasn’t lying because she called me Honey like the ladies at the hospital did.
So Mommy had to tell her how I wasn’t like other kids on account of I had the asthma and some worser things wrong with me. Though she kept her voice low, I knew what she was saying. That’s when I jumped.
The water was deeper than me, but Kathy gave me a red circle to hold me up and everyone clapped when I kicked my way across the pool. Like she’s been doing it all her life, the teacher said.
By the second week, I didn’t need the circle anymore. “She must have had lessons before,” the teacher told Mommy. All I knew was that in the water, I jumped and danced and ran like the other kids did on the playground or in the yard. The next day, I could still feel it moving around me, holding me up.
“When we go back to that river again?” I asked at breakfast. That made everyone laugh like I had said a joke.
“Hush now,” Mommy told Kathy, patting her hand when she saw how serious I was. Then she explained how it was a pool, saying it like that. Extra loud.
But I didn’t give in. “For me, it a river.” Then I patted my chest the way I did when Zaidie reminded me to say the word I. As if I was talking about myself and not just the water.
Mommy and Daddy looked at me and then at each other, like they wondered where I came from and what kind of secrets I had inside me, the way Zaidie did sometimes.
I wondered that, too.
“Did you learn to swim in a river somewhere?” Mommy finally said, like it was a bad word.
“Yes,” I told her, though that was one of the secrets about myself I didn’t know.
Then I counted how many days it took till we came back to Tuesday, numbering them by the things we did. Only I didn’t call it Tuesday. I called it River Day.
Wednesdays were for shopping and on Sundays we all had a bath and went to church. On the other days, we visited people who gave me and Kathy cookies and stroked my hair the way I used to do with Princie.
“So shiny!”
“That’s what I call blue-black!”
“She’s a lucky little girl,” the lady who said my hair was the color of a bruise told her.
“Much better off than running the streets like those poor Moscatelli kids,” another one added.
Mommy cocked her head in my direction and put a finger to her lips. “Little Miss Big Ears,” she said into her palm. Somehow everyone seemed to know about Ma. What she’d done.
“Can I go out to play?” I asked when they talked about that—even though it was so cold my face burned when it hit the air. Never argue with liars—not even in your own head. That’s what Zaidie said when she knew I was thinking about Mr. Dean.
Alone in the yard, I wished I could tell her about the Y. How I remembered something about myself that I almost forgot. Zaidie would have liked my new clothes, too. Mommy bought dresses from stores where the clerks wrapped them up in tissue paper before putting them in a bag and called her by her name. On the way home, we stopped at another place where she searched for ribbons and barrettes clipped to little pieces of white cardboard to match. And when I told Kathy about my shamrock barrette, she said the ones from the store were better. Because they’re new, silly. Sometimes people don’t even know when they’re lying.
She even thought their dog was better. “Cookie has papers, for crying out loud. And she went to dog school where she learned to sit and heel and never, ever to steal or to break out of the yard.”
I closed my eyes and remembered sitting in the hole on the couch, with Princie’s head resting on my lap, and all the kids squished in beside us, and I knew there was nothing in the world better than that. From then on, I stopped telling stories about the dog I already had and pretty soon, I stopped mentioning Zaidie, too.
I didn’t forget them, though. Every night when we kneeled beside our beds to say the prayers Mommy taught me, I imagined I was back there on the couch, and I said their names instead of the Hail Mary: Zaidie, Jimmy, Jon, Princie.
I wondered if they knew they were the best prayer of all.
Chapter Six
The File
DAHLIA
LOOKS LIKE THE LEANING TOWER’S GOT YOU STUMPED. YOU been working on that one for what—three weeks?” Louie pondered the puzzle pieces that were scattered across the card table.
I removed my glasses and stared at his fuzzy form as he rose out of his recliner.
When he wasn’t asleep in his chair by nine, I knew something was on his mind.
“If you ask me, it should be called the Beautiful Tower of Pisa. Look at it, Louie. Did you know there are seven bells, one for each musical note?”
“The rest of the world sees a building about to topple over any minute, and you talk about the bells. That’s you, Dahlia. To a tee.” He shook his head as he headed down the hall. “Full day at the garage tomorrow.”
He was still listing the jobs he had scheduled when the bathroom door closed.
I waited, and a minute later, he stepped halfway into the hall, toothbrush in hand. “Leave it alone; you hear me? For once in your life, leave it the hell alone.”
“I have no idea what—”
This time the door slammed, cutting my lie in half.
The water ran longer than usual and I imagined Louie’s thoughts running with it. All the things he never wanted to talk about circling the drain. He was forty-two that year, but when he came back into the hall, I saw a shadow of the old man he would become. In the morning, dressed in his uniform, face set for the day, he would be different.
“You think I didn’t see that file sitting right there on top of your ‘beautiful tower of Pisa’? I thought you were going to give that
back to the case worker.”
“It was a tough morning. None of us were thinking about the file.”
“So burn it, then. It’s not your business now. She’s gone to another home and from what you said, they might even adopt—”
I fell quiet for a full minute before I spoke. “Of all the kids that passed through here, I never saw one like her.”
By then, he’d reached the stairs, but he paused, one hand on the rail, and looked down at the worn tread of the rug while I took refuge in the Beautiful Tower of Pisa.
I fit a piece of the bell tower into the puzzle. “You know how scared she was of Mr. Dean? Well, the morning I tried to coax her out of the bathroom, I saw a different kind of fear. A worse kind. ‘Please, Ma,’ she said, talking like Zaidie taught her. ‘I want to stay here.’ And there it was in her eyes. The fear. As if for the first time in her whole miserable life, she had something to lose.”
He scanned the room the way an outsider might. “This house. Us? A family that didn’t even want her, for chrissake. Imagine if that was the best thing you ever knew?”
“Yes. Imagine.”
“What did you say to her?”
“The only way you get through it is to be tough, Louie. Merciless. So I told her I wasn’t her Ma, and she shouldn’t call me that anymore.” I paused, reliving it all. “After that, she went without a fight. Just walked into the room and took off all the clothes we gave her. When she came out, she was wearing what she had on that first day. That flimsy corduroy jacket meant for a boy. Her old holey sneakers. The fear was gone, too—but what replaced it—God—it was terrible.”
“That dead look she had when she first come. I can see it now.”
“It took everything I had not to go to her, but what could I do? Even if we could manage another one, it was too late.”
Louie started up the stairs, his tread charged with anger. “Next time the department calls with one of their Emergencies, tell them the Moscatellis don’t live here anymore. I mean it.”
All the Children Are Home Page 4