Don’t get me wrong; I’d thought about saying it a few times myself—especially when I caught her looking at me with those hungry eyes of hers. But you have to be careful about giving Emergencies—or yourself—the wrong idea.
Sure, Agnes was settled in like a member of the family and all, but as long as there was talk about getting her to a home closer to her mother, I held back.
THAT NIGHT WAS the high school dance, though, and well, you would have thought Jimmy was going to meet the queen. Boy spent twenty full minutes in the bathroom looking at himself. When he came out, it wasn’t just his hair that was gleaming; it was like the whole world had a sheen to it.
“I love you, Z,” he yelled to Zaidie, before telling Jon the same thing. Shad, he called him like always—short for Shadow. Then he’d picked up Agnes and whirled her around. “You, too, Sky Bar. I love you.”
“Damnit. Can’t you ever call anyone by their right name?” Louie snapped. But I knew what he really meant: Be careful there, son.
It was too late, though. Soon as Jimmy set her down, Agnes touched the center of her chest like she did when she first came and was claiming a new word as her own.
“Jimmy loves me. Me,” she told Jon, talking like she’d just won one of their endless competitions.
“So?” Jon countered, sounding confused. “He loves me better. Right, Jimmy?”
The dance mustn’t have turned out like Jimmy hoped because for the next few days, he was under one of those dark spells that gets cast on kids that age. It didn’t break till one night in the middle of supper when Agnes decided to give the words back to him: I. Love. You. Jimmy.
Like each word was a sentence, or more than that—a whole book. And the way she smiled when she said it? It was as if something trapped inside her all her life had been set loose. Heaven help us.
Jimmy looked up from his plate of teenage miseries and laughed out loud. “Wha’d you say, Sky Bar?”
This time she stood up and repeated it like it was the Pledge of Allegiance, hand across her chest and all. Even Louie had to laugh. Well, almost.
Anyway, once it was loose, there was no stopping it. Within the week, Agnes wasn’t just saying those words to the family, she was telling the whole foolish world—from the mailman to that bitch of a fourth-grade teacher (who rewarded her with a trip to the principal’s office for inappropriate behavior) to Flufferbell—and always with that blazing smile.
First time she said it to Josie Pennypacker, the old woman hunched up her shoulders, wrapped her cardigan sweater around herself tight, and scowled. “Are you talking to me, little girl?” Like she’d cursed her or something.
Then, just as she had with Jimmy at the table, Agnes stood up straight and said it louder.
“Probably gone inside to call the cops,” Louie muttered when the old woman walked away, mumbling.
But a couple of days later, Josie showed up at the door with a lumpy-looking cupcake on a plate. “Made it from scratch.”
“Hmm. So I see.” I left the inside door shut as I regarded her sorry-looking creation.
“It’s for the little girl. Agnes,” she emphasized—as if I might eat the damn thing myself.
“I didn’t think you knew her name.” Up until then she’d referred to our kids generically. The teenager. The blondie. The noisy little boy. The Indian.
I opened the screen and took it. A nice treat for Princie, I figured. But before Jon and Agnes had brought the dog back from the park, Josie was at the door again—this time with a whole tray of crooked cupcakes.
“I don’t suppose I could give to one and not the others. There’s a couple on there for you and Louie, too.”
Dear God. What had Agnes gone and done now? Reluctantly, I accepted the plate.
Was I surprised when they turned out to be the best I ever had, or when Josie started remembering the kids’ birthdays with two bucks and a card. She even came flying out of her house to defend Jonny when that bully, Tommy Collier, tried to steal his volleyball.
In return, Jimmy kept her walkway shoveled in the winter, the three younger kids went out to search for Flufferbell whenever she took off, and Agnes told her she loved her every day for the rest of her life—even though Josie ran away every time.
Like I say, sometimes the truest thing about a person never makes the obituary.
BY THE TIME school was out, the body and the terrible white of the sheet they used to cover it were gone. The pack of neighborhood gawkers had mercifully disappeared, too. I couldn’t have the kids getting the news from strangers so I lined them up on the couch—the girls, the surly teenager (Jeez, can’t you just tell us whatever it is?), the restless boy (But Ma, I have to get ready for the Derby!). Sensing it was some kind of family event, Princie took her spot between Jon and Agnes and watched me attentively.
Course they all got quiet when they heard. Even Princie, who must have caught the feeling from the rest. But soon you could see Jimmy hardening himself against it like kids do at his age, while Jon and Zaidie puckered their mouths up the exact same way and began to cry.
Jon only stopped blubbering as he realized the impact it might have on him. “But why did she have to die on the day of the Pinewood Derby?”
That earned him a nudge from Zaidie. “Stop being so selfish! Think of poor Miss Pennypacker.”
Meanwhile, Agnes, who was closest to Josie of us all, just folded her hands together like they taught her to do in school when she really needed to pay attention and looked down, eyes dry as bone. I could tell she was drawing on what she knew, the mean truth she’d tried to tell Josie that day on the porch: Sometimes they just don’t come back.
If death is a surprise to most people (Such a shock! my mother always said whenever it had the gall to come near), it was something my kids knew all too well. In fact, no one even had to die for them to understand. They were used to people walking through doors and vanishing without a trace. Poof. No explanation. Not even a pretty write-up in the paper or a guy standing on an altar who claimed to know where they’d gone. Or why. Or to promise you’d see them again someday because maybe you would, but most likely not.
Gone is gone, see? as Zaidie explained to Jon when his hamster got eaten—probably by Flufferbell. I wondered if she was thinking of the mother, who she’d seen lying beneath another terrible sheet, just like Josie.
All you could do was fold your hands and look out on the world the way it was and somehow, somehow try to keep them in the only place where they could be reliably found: inside you. And oh yes, you could—and if you were Agnes, you had to—go out on the street and give your I love you to someone else. Didn’t matter whether they deserved it or not.
Glowering at me like I was the one who killed the woman, Jimmy grabbed that hoodlum leather jacket of his. “I’m going to Jools’s. No need to wait up.”
I was about to remind him he hadn’t had supper and wasn’t likely to get any at the Bousquets’ place. Besides that, he was sixteen—he still needed to ask.
But before I could speak, Jon let loose with a stuttery yell, “B-but, tonight’s the—the Pinewood Derby! You—you—you promised, Jimmy, you—”
Jimmy turned around, hand still on the doorknob. “For Pete’s sake, Shad, did they have to do it on a Friday night? I got my own life to live here. Supposed to be a parent who takes you, anyways. Why don’t you ask your mother?”
I’m telling you the way he said the word mother, the way he looked at me, I wondered if those Woods had gotten to him somehow. Told him God knows what.
There was no time to think about all that, though—not with Zaidie sobbing into her hands and Jon downright wailing over Josie Pennypacker or the Pinewood Derby or the both of them rolled into one.
“Maybe Jeffrey’s dad can take you—”
“They’re already taking their c-c-cousins, Ma. There’s no room in the car.”
“Well, Dad, then.”
“But Dad hates Cub Scouts. And he thinks the Pinewood Derby’s stupid. Says so every night
. And ’sides that, he’s had a long day.”
“Don’t worry, Jonny. Dad won’t let you miss it. Not after all the hard work you kids have put in.”
When Zaidie and Agnes looked up from their separate forms of grief, I could tell they were both thinking the same thing: Louie’s not gonna like this.
SURE ENOUGH, LOUIE grumbled his way through dinner. “Nope, not doin’ it.” He set into his meat loaf, arguing with himself. “Is it my fault Jimmy backed out on him? Whose idea was it for Jon to sign up for the stupid Cub Scouts anyway?” (He shot me a look.) “Whole thing’s nothing but trouble.”
He paused to gulp his water. “Useless busy work. He wants a badge? Send him down the garage to help out and I’ll be happy to give him one.”
But when Jon’s lower lip began to judder, Louie pushed his plate away and got up—just as we knew he would.
Jon rushed to hug him—probably about to blurt out the words that sent old Josie scurrying every time, but Louie stopped him.
“Hurry up and get that car of yours before I change my mind. And soon’s that race is over, we’re leaving, understand? Got a truck waiting for me in the bay tomorrow with a problem six mechanics ain’t been able to figure out.”
Agnes had been angling to tag along ever since she’d seen Jon’s racer flashing across the floor, but had been told repeatedly it wasn’t for the likes of her. “You’re supposed to go to Girl Scouts like Zaidie,” Jon explained with an exaggerated patience that almost made me laugh. “You’re supposed to sew and sell cookies. Right, Zaidie?”
Ignoring him, Agnes went to the closet for her shoes. She was at the door, her shamrock barrette clipped to the side of her head all lopsided and hopeful, before anyone else.
“Absolutely not,” Louie said. “Tell her, Dahlia.”
“If she really wants to go so bad, what’s the harm, Lou?”
Louie shook his head. “Come on, then. With any luck, they’ll throw us out.”
Chapter Four
The Girl Beneath the Yellow Leaves
DAHLIA
NONE OF THE OTHERS HAD DONE THEIR CHORES SO I LET ZAIDIE off, too. She seemed happy to escape to the room where she had begun to live a life apart from us, just like Jimmy did at Buskit’s River. Don’t think I hadn’t noticed.
It was fine with me—at least for that night. I hoped the clatter of the dishes might drown out the sound of Jimmy’s voice in my head, the way he’d looked at me. Like he knew everything I’d spent my life trying to hide.
And maybe the water from the faucet would rinse away what I’d seen that afternoon, too. Poor old Josie under that terrible sheet, her whole life nothing more than a sorry heap. I suppose that was what really made Edna and Gina Lollobrigida carry on the way they did. The truth of it. When I thought of the old woman standing at the door with her lopsided cupcakes, face shining with the flame Agnes had lit inside her, I almost started bawling myself.
Soon’s I turned off the water, I heard the strains from the record player Zaidie’s aunt had sent her for “Hanukkah.” Same song over and over, too.
Johnny Angel, cause I love him and I pray that someday he’ll love me. She was only twelve, for heaven’s sake. What exactly was she thinking about up there? Could there be some boy at her school . . . ? Before I allowed the thought to take hold, the needle scratched across the vinyl and started again.
That did it. I stormed up the stairs and burst through the door without knocking as the simpering idiot on the record whined: Together we will see how lovely heaven will be.
Why, oh why had I ever let them talk me into taking a girl?
“I thought you were doing homework. You should have stayed down and helped with the dishes if this is all you have to do with your time.” I pulled the plug on the record player as Shelley Fabares’s voice skidded into oblivion.
Zaidie glanced in the direction of her desk, books lined up just so. “Already done.”
I couldn’t help noticing the way her color deepened, like she’d been caught at something. Growing up, I suppose. It wouldn’t be long before she responded to my outbursts with anger like Jimmy’s. Or mine toward my own mother.
I gave a perfunctory check of her geography assignment. Above the desk, right next to a picture of Marie Curie, she’d hung the chart where she tracked her life: homework done, pages read, even how many strokes she’d brushed her hair.
Her outfit for the next day—a plaid pleated skirt and a white blouse—were already over the back of her chair, slip, socks, underpants, and all. On my best day, I’d never been so organized.
I rubbed my hand over the smooth grain of the desk. “Your brother did a nice job, didn’t he?” My way of apologizing.
Zaidie’s smile still had some of her sadness over Josie, which made me regret breaking whatever comfort she found in her music.
“Best present I ever got,” she said, repeating what she’d said on Christmas morning.
The compliment was for Jimmy—always the adored one—not me or even poor Louie, who dragged the damn thing home from a rummage sale on Parkington Street.
“Guess how much I paid for it?” he said that day when he lured me out in the garage for a look.
I traced the nicks and scratches with my hand, my eyes settling on the broken drawer. There wasn’t even a handle. “Too much, whatever it was.”
Louie’s face caved in a little. “There’s not a lot of extra for Christmas this year, so when I saw this—well, I thought Zaidie might like it.”
I hadn’t had much hope for that desk, but after Jimmy refinished it and Jools polished up an old handle he found in Buskit’s River, it looked almost new.
I stared at the record player, hoping I hadn’t scratched up Johnny Angel too bad. “Well, since your work is done, I suppose you can play your music awhile. Only not so loud. And not that same song over and over. Let me hold on to what little sanity I have left. Please.”
“Sorry, Ma.”
I was the one who should have been apologizing, but instead, I turned back to the chart and pointed at the last thing to be checked off. “You haven’t brushed your hair yet.”
“That’s next.”
ON THE WAY downstairs, I touched the gray mess I pulled into a bun every day like the old ladies did. Probably didn’t hit a hundred strokes in a week. I liked to tell myself Louie didn’t care about things like that, but a couple of times when old Gina Lollobrigida slunk past our window, I’d caught him watching. Even blushed a little like Zaidie when he realized I saw. “Christ almighty, Dahlia,” he said. Like that was my fault, too.
I’d barely reached the bottom of the stairs when strains of a new song stopped me.
When people ask of me what do you want to be now that you’re not a kid anymore . . .
There’s just one thing that I’m wishing forrr . . .
I wanna be Bobby’s girl; I wanna be Bobby’s girl.
I almost turned and marched right back up the stairs, but then I remembered Zaidie’s face after I scratched Johnny Angel.
Instead I went to the picture window and looked out at the spot where Josie had been, but was not now. Then I wrapped my cardigan around myself extra tight like she used to do—not sure if I was protecting myself from what was outside or the saccharine voice that was drifting down the stairs.
Like my kids, I’d seen too many people I loved come and go to be surprised by death’s tricks. It wasn’t just the babies who clung to me one day then disappeared into a social worker’s car and were never seen again, or my own dead father lying in his coffin, either.
NO. TRUTH IS I’d been dead myself once. I’d lain down in the unfamiliar woods where it happened and stared at the sky until I couldn’t stand to look at it anymore and then I’d closed my eyes and let the smell of the earth take me. It had been a cold summer and the yellow leaves were already starting to fall. If I lay there long enough, I knew they would cover me like the terrible white sheet covered Josie.
For a while—they said it was three days, but because
I was dead, it happened outside of time—I wanted that. Yes, even as I drank the rainwater that kept me alive, I wanted it.
But then something inside me—later Louie would claim it was him, his voice, though I hardly knew him at the time—called me. Get up and walk and don’t stop till you find the road out, the voice said.
And somehow, with seven broken bones and a bad concussion, I did. Barely made it to the highway before the sky collapsed on me again, but it was far enough.
First face I saw was my mother’s. “You’re going to make it,” she said, squeezing my hand. There were even tears in her eyes. If I had squeezed back, maybe we could have fixed everything that was wrong between us.
I pulled away and turned my face to the wall. How could I tell her she was wrong? That Dahlia Garrison, the girl who stood up in front of the whole school without a trace of fear, who thought she might become a nurse—even a lawyer—had died out there in those woods when she closed her eyes to the sky. Died and been covered in yellow leaves. Now someone I didn’t yet know, the one Louie called out of the dark, lived in her place.
Staring out the picture window, I almost let myself go back to all of that—to the hospital room where my mother gave up weeping for me, and to the woods where a foolish young girl was buried forever.
But wouldn’t you know—just then, a thin, bedraggled Flufferbell came marching down the sidewalk like a soldier back from the wars, howling for food so loud she drowned out the past and the future—even the sound of that infernal song. And where did she stop, but right outside my door.
Dear God.
Chapter Five
The Maledizione
ZAIDIE
THE DAY AFTER MISS PENNYPACKER PUT HER HAND ON HER chest like she was about to make a sacred promise and dropped dead, Nonna came over with her holy water to bless the spot. She also made a pie in honor of the occasion: crostata al limone. Even the name was more delicious than the American kind.
Everyone was distracted so I took a double slice onto the porch, where I watched Nonna sprinkle the sidewalk and pray in Italian.
All the Children Are Home Page 11