Even though the car is gone and I have to go inside, I don’t forget the pennies shining in a puddle on the street. And I don’t forget the girl with the brown legs, either. I can’t see her face, but I don’t forget.
Most of the time I only have that dream when my eyes are open. That night, though, after Ma tucked me in and Zaidie read me a book, I fell asleep and dreamed the girl with the brown legs and me were wrapped up together in the same bed. So close I could taste her very black black hair in my mouth.
But when I woke up, the legs wrapped up with mine were pale, and the hair was yellow and the scream I made on the street followed me from the dream right into Zaidie’s room, where she was shaking me.
“Agnes! It’s a nightmare, Agnes! Look, I’m right here with you! Right here. See?”
Part II
1962
Chapter One
A Stone in My Pocket
JIMMY
PEOPLE AROUND TOWN NAMED THE RIVER AFTER MY BUDDY Jools’s family—partly because it was near their house, and partly because it’s really not a river anymore. It’s more like a half-dried-out creek where people throw shit the trash man won’t take—old tires, smashed-up bikes, garden tools, stuff like that. There’s even a refrigerator with the door off, lyin’ on its back, in the middle, weeds swayin’ through the rusty holes. Spend enough time here, though, and you almost get to like the stink of the place.
Anyway, me and Jools were down by Buskit’s River like we were most every day when school got out. Okay, sometimes before. It’s not like we intended to skip class. Nah, most of the time we’d just sneak out for a smoke between wood shop and math; then I’d look at him, he’d look at me, and next thing you knew, we’d be headed for Buskit’s.
It was pretty much an ordinary day on the riverbank—me thinkin’ about a girl so far out of my league we ain’t even playin’ the same sport while Jools sits there sketchin’ his creek. Some of his drawin’s are pretty good, too, especially the ones at the end of his book. Ma and the girls think so, too, but when Zaidie tried to talk him into showin’ them to the art teacher, he looked at her almost resentful. Like she could never understand how the stuff kids said, the way they laughed, rung in his ears even when he was sleepin’.
“This ain’t art, Zaidie,” he said. “Art’s pictures of . . . of beautiful stuff. Not crap people throw away. Besides, the pages are all dirty from the riverbank. Mr. Ferrante would laugh me outta town if I brought them into school.”
He pointed at the bits of mud and weed stuck to some of the pages, a smudge of green water on others. More than a few also had a ring from the bottles of Wild Irish Jools clipped from his mother. Then he shot me one of those resentin’ kinda looks, like it was my fault for askin’ him to bring over his sketchbook.
“But look,” Zaidie insisted, flipping through the pages. “You made ugly beautiful here. And here and here.” She pushed the sketchbook at Jools, tryin’ to make him see more than what was on the page. As if she was attemptin’ to show the kid who he was. “I bet that if you brought these to Mr. Ferrante, he’d put them in the spring art show.”
But by then the echoes Jools heard in his head had drowned out everything else. “In a art show? Me?” He stormed out of the house like she’d insulted him or somethin’.
He musta been hearin’ echoes that day by the river, too. Outta the blue, he set down his sketchbook and started apologizin’ for being a crappy friend. Even had tears in his eyes the way he gets sometimes, especially when he drinks his Wild Irish.
I aimed a rock at a rusted-out bucket—and hit. “Another three-pointer for Kovacs!” My hands were in the air like I just banked the winning shot in the game. “Man, that kid’s on a roll!” In eighth grade, I played center for the school team, but these days, this was the only place I shot. Whatever was getting him all emotional, I didn’t want to hear it.
Jools didn’t let it drop, though. “You know, the other day when Larry Wood threw you against the locker?”
“Larry Wood—who’s that?” As if I didn’t know the name of the kid who’d been tormenting me since the opening bell of ninth grade. Without thinkin’, I rubbed the shoulder that still hurt.
“Tuesday, when we was walkin’ to English, remember? Him and Ace Feroli was comin’ out of Mrs. Ruffino’s class—” Nice kid and good with a drawing pencil, my buddy Jools, but the school didn’t put him in the lowest track for nothin’.
I focused on the bucket that had landed cockeyed in the river—and missed. Proves what thinkin’ about stuff like that will do to you.
But like I said, there was no stoppin’ Jools—especially not on the day after his Ma got her check. He took a long pull from the Richards Wild Irish he stole from her stash.
“Listen,” I started off. “Number one, that kid don’t bother me half as much as he thinks he does. And two—there ain’t nothin’ you coulda done about it anyhow—except get your own ass whupped. Ace Feroli ain’t no one to mess with, you know.”
“If you were takin’ a poundin’, I shoulda took one, too. That’s what friends do.”
I gave him a sideways look, wonderin’ what I’d done to deserve that kind of loyalty. Back in middle school, when I played basketball and baseball for the school teams, and had girls like Debbie D’Olympio hangin’ around, you wouldn’t have caught me dead with Jools Bousquet. Oh, I didn’t throw pebbles at him at the bus stop or make B.O. jokes when he passed like a lot of kids did. But I wasn’t about to sit at the lunch table where he hunched over his sloppy joe all by himself neither.
The worst part was knowin’ my sisters would have—Agnes cause she never gave a damn what anyone thought, and Zaidie, well, she was just kinda born wanting to do the right thing. Her and all the heroes she had taped on the walls of her room. I thought about that a few times when I passed him sittin’ alone, or tryin’ to pretend the pebbles didn’t hurt, but I never stopped. Somethin’—maybe it was the stench of Buskit’s River—scared me away every time.
Everything changed the day I walked through the high school doors, though. It was like Jesus was standing there telling you which way to go. Sheep this way, goats over there—and just like in the Bible, there’s no arguin’ with the verdict. Instead of sheeps and goats, we called the groups rats and colleige.
Mosta my old teammates, and all the girls like Debbie D’Olympio, went colleige. Within a week, even my friends Brucie and Kev were splashin’ themselves with Canoe, and putttin’ on the colleige uniform, too—pastel button-downs with chino pants, these shoes they called desert boots. They even had a certain kinda belt.
As for me, what can I say? The hand pointed the other way.
The day she realized my old buddies weren’t comin’ round no more, Ma slammed around the kitchen, cursin’ Kev. How many times did I have that kid for dinner when I barely had enough to feed my own? Then she went on about how she never trusted Bruce anyway.
But me, I saw it different. I mean, how can you blame someone for something so set it’s practically in the Bible?
Still, Ma kept a button-down in the closet, just hoping that one day I’d wake up and be someone else. Poor woman. You shoulda seen the look on her face the first time I opened the door to Jools Bousquet’s B.O. But soon as she tried to lecture me about runnin’ with the wrong crowd, she walked straight into a mirror. If there was a bigger outcast in town than Jools, it was Ma herself and she knew it.
The next time he showed up, she was ready with his favorite Spam sandwiches with pickles and catsup and a lecture about how thin he was; he needed to eat.
Mangia, Nonna corrected her, like the word was more powerful when you said it in Italian.
Then Ma told him how he was saying his name wrong. “I knew some Boose-kays when I was in school. French, right?”
But Jools just shrugged and said people musta figured Buskit was a better name for his family. Them and the junk river by their house.
“Why’s Wood always botherin’ you anyway?” he said that day on the bank. “Ya’d thin
k he had his hands full with student council and football, all that colleige stuff—”
“His family hates mine for somethin’ that goes way back. Larry probably don’t know no more about it than I do.” When he didn’t say anything, I tried to make a joke. “Frankenstein musta screwed up one of their cars or somethin’,” I said, though everyone knew it was Ma the Woods hated.
Jools was lookin’ out on Buskit’s River of junk, but then he turned his face, and there was somethin’ in his eyes I never seen before. That dumb love he had for me, yeah, that was there. But somethin’ else, too. Pity. He tried to pass me the bottle.
I stared at the green glass with the stupid rose on it. The truth was I’d never tried it. Not when Kev stole a half-drunk bottle of his old man’s whiskey the summer after ninth grade, and not at any of the rat parties, either. “Nah, thanks. Not my brand,” I always said. “So what is your brand, Kovacs?” a kid had taunted the last time kids got together out by the sugar shack. “Fanta? Yeah, I bet you wouldn’t say no to a nice orange soda.” I could still hear them laughing, but the next time someone passed me the bottle, I tightened my jaw. Not my brand.
That was Ma’s fault, too. She started in on me when I was about nine. I called it her “Promise me one thing” lecture—and for some reason, I was the only one that got it. Every time she saw anyone drinkin’ on the TV, it was her cue to take off her glasses and stare at me all serious.
“They make it look glamorous, Jimmy, don’t they? Everyone joking and happy. Well, that’s not the truth of it for a lot of people.”
And then, she’d say her line: Promise me one thing . . . like it was a sacred vow.
Only once—the week before I started high school—did she mention James Kovacs Sr., though I knew he was smack in the middle of the room every time it come up.
“You think he’d be getting himself in the paper all the time if it weren’t for the booze? And what about your mother? Why do you think she gave you up—because she wanted to? Promise me one thing . . .” This time, though, she took one of her stupid rocks out of the basket she kept next to her headquarters and handed it to me.
I stared at the stone like it was a snake, but Ma didn’t take it back. “Take this and any time you’re tempted to give it a try, remember what you promised.”
I’d said yeah, yeah to her before—mostly because I wanted to be left in peace. But that day, looking into the eyes that, even without her glasses, seen me clearer than anyone, I took the stone and I meant it. If fate thought it could destroy me with booze like it done to James Sr. and my first Ma, I wasn’t gonna make it easy.
That day by Buskit’s River, though, knuckles achin’ from how much I wanted to smash Larry Wood, I felt the blame for everything that was wrong with my life shifting to Ma. Why did I have to put up with him and his friends? And she had the nerve to tell us how to live? Someone who hid in the house and let us take the crap that was meant for her? My fist tightened around the rock in my pocket.
It was like a match sparked inside me. The fire leaped higher as I remembered all the times when she needed to be someplace, but couldn’t come. Every time I nailed a home run in Little League, I used to look up in the bleachers to the place where the parents sat, searchin’ for the face I knew wouldn’t be there.
So yeah, I was blamin’ her for all of that—and a few things I couldn’t even name.
Heck, at that moment, it seemed like everything wrong in the world had Ma’s fingerprints on it. Who was she to make me promise?
I wiped Jools’s spit off the bottle and brought it to my mouth, but it was as if she was watchin’ me all the way from home, seein’ me through the blur like she did when she took her glasses off.
Jools looked down at my hands, noticin’ my balled-up fist for the first time. He hunched his shoulders in on himself the way he did, and turned his face back to the river of junk, lettin’ that curtain of hair hide him.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the stupid rock I’d been carryin’ around for a year and raised my arm. This time I wouldn’t miss. But somehow my hand wouldn’t let go. Instead of heavin’ the rock like I wanted to, I threw the bottle in my right hand, nailin’ the bucket. It shattered so hard it sent out sparks.
Poor Jools looked like he was about to cry. “Shit, man. What do you think you’re doing? That was half full!”
Chapter Two
The Girl in the Waves
AGNES
WHEN HE WAS HOME, JIMMY SPENT MOST OF HIS TIME IN HIS room or in the foyer trapped between the mirror and the phone. Asked why, Ma narrowed her eyes like she did when she warned me to stay away from Buskit’s River at night. “Just don’t turn into a teenager.” Sounded like a spell cast by the wicked witch in one of the fairy tales Zaidie used to read me.
“Not me, Ma,” I promised every time. “I’m never gonna be no teenager!”
“Any . . .” Zaidie corrected from wherever she was. Sometimes just inside my head. “And yes, you are. Soon, too!”
The next time I caught Jimmy moping by the phone, I turned to her. “What’s he doing out there?”
“Probably working up the courage to call that girl again,” she said behind her hand. “Even though he’s already tried at least seven times.”
“More like eleven and she’s not just a girl, Z. She’s the girl,” Jimmy said. “Most beautiful, most spectacular, most . . . most everything.”
Zaidie made her voice lower. “Most snobby is what she is.”
“Debbie?” I squinched up my nose, remembering how the girl who used to meet Jimmy behind the Grainer School had looked at me the day I followed him home.
“I forgot that chick a long time ago. Besides, she ain’t nothin’ to this girl. Right, Z?”
Zaidie rolled her eyes. “Um . . . I guess you have to be a boy to see it.”
“Jane Miller,” she said to me behind her hand. “He can call a hundred and eleven times; she still won’t come to the phone—and she’s not even pretty.”
Good thing Jimmy had stopped listening. He picked up the phone and put it down twice, tuned to nothing but his own heartbeat. Finally he dialed.
“Hello, Mrs. Miller? It’s Jimmy Kovacs? I was wonderin’ if . . .”
It didn’t get much further than him saying his name like that—as if he wasn’t exactly sure he’d got it right. He was replacing the receiver when Jon burst in with a packet of snapshots he’d taken when he went on vacation with Jeffrey’s family.
Oblivious to Jimmy’s mood, Jon pulled his favorite picture on him. “Look, Jimmy, it’s waves! At the beach.”
“That’s where you usually find ’em, Shad.” Jimmy stared at the phone like he could still hear Mrs. Miller’s voice in his head.
But then he must have noticed Jon’s sagging shoulders. He flipped through the pictures quickly. “Nice. Glad you had fun, buddy.” Abruptly, he started up the stairs.
“But you didn’t even look at my horseshoe crab.” Jon’s disappointed voice trailed after him, but Jimmy had stopped hearing.
“Agnes and me want to see, Jonny,” Zaidie said, patting the couch. “Bring them over here.”
Wedged between us, Jon named the things in his pictures as he passed them to us—even though Zaidie had been to the beach many times with Cynthia or her aunt Cille and I knew what they were from TV and books: sandcastle, seaweed, the jetty, what he called a horseshoe crab even though the crab didn’t live there anymore.
I looked at that one extra long. “So it’s really a horseshoe crab house.”
Jon snatched the picture away. “No, it’s not. Tell her, Zaidie.” He glowered at me. “Your body’s a house.”
“Maybe it is,” Zaidie laughed, passing me the next picture. “Yours, too, Jonny.”
I held on to that one so long Jon tried to snatch it away. “What are you starin’ at? Haven’t you ever seen a starfish?”
I clutched it tighter. “But why’d the star get turned into a fish? Did it do something wrong?”
“Maaa! Agnes is
making fun of my pictures!” Jon wailed. Then to me, “You better stop or I won’t let you see the one of my Dairy Queen.”
“Stop teasing your brother, Agnes,” Ma said, without looking up from her book.
I didn’t bother to tell her that I wasn’t teasing or making fun. I really wanted to know.
A FEW WEEKS later, when everyone was watching TV, I sneaked into Jon’s room to look through his pictures again. It wasn’t the star that got turned into a fish or the horseshoe crab’s house I wanted to see, though. It was something even more mysterious: waves. I looked at them so long it felt like they were tumbling toward me.
Finally, Zaidie came to the foot of the stairs. “Agnes! What are you doing up there? Jon and me are gonna play Clue.”
Before I could stop myself, I shoved the picture of waves under my shirt and took it to my room, where I hid it in my secret box.
“I’m Miss Scarlet!” I yelled, claiming the red piece as I slipped my treasures back into the closet, guilty as the culprit in our game.
By then it was late August and Jon had forgotten all about clams and sandcastles. He never even noticed that I’d swiped the ocean straight out of his room. But every day when I was alone, I took out my box like I did at Mr. Dean’s and stared at the photo. As if there was something I needed to see. Something just outside the black-and-white square. I turned the picture over to see if it might have slipped onto the other side.
When I still couldn’t find it, I begged Dad to take me there. “Just one time, Dad. Before summer’s over.”
“To the beach?” He snorted as if it was another planet. “You think I have time to sit around baking on the sand like a damn rock?” He walked away muttering about savage amusement.
Nonna, who was visiting that day, scooted closer to me on the couch. “I take-a you myself, piccola, but the sun no good for me.”
Then she told me about a bad mole the doctor had to cut off her forehead. “Righta there.” She pushed back her hair to show me her scar. Was it my imagination or did it look like a tiny starfish? I traced it with my finger.
All the Children Are Home Page 9