Agnes, on the other hand, stood frozen in the center of the room, as if the sound of Jon’s screaming and the sight of him clutching Ma’s gray dress had taken her somewhere no one could follow.
I think Nancy was the one who stepped forward and wrenched Jon away, but I can’t be sure. All I remember clearly was how Michael Finn dragged him from the house, a howl trailing him like smoke that would never be dispersed. But what would haunt me most was the way his eyes had scanned each of our faces and the house he would not see again.
“His things?” Nancy repeated.
“Forget them,” Michael said.
Standing as still as Agnes, Ma covered her mouth and lowered her head, her eyes closed.
As they reached the sidewalk where Josie Pennypacker had keeled over, Jon broke free from Michael’s grasp. But he must have known that there was no place to run.
Still sobbing, he turned to me. “You gotta c-c-come, too, Zaidie. Y-you—you promised our mama. You told her you’d always take care of me. You can’t make me go by m-myself.”
I thought he’d forgotten the times when, jealous of his bond with Jimmy, I’d reminded him I was his real sister. I told him how I’d gotten up with him in the night when our mother was sick. What she’d made me promise.
“Ma’s my mother,” he always replied. “And Jimmy is too my real brother. Realer than you.”
I opened my mouth to explain all the reasons I couldn’t go: because Jimmy and Agnes needed me, because no one knew how Ma would carry on after this, because Dad couldn’t do everything. But were any of those the real reason?
Or did I just want what Jimmy called my own life—Cynthia and my friends, cheerleading and the bench at Beth Shalom where I sat with Holly Simon’s family? And most of all Henry. The way he’d made me feel at the dance that night when he stood there with his hands in his pockets, or the day before when we lay on our backs and opened our arms to the sky in the yard. I thought of how Michael Finn had dragged me to the mirror to make me see how much we were alike. How deep did it go?
“There’s still time to change your mind, Zaidie. I didn’t cancel your plane ticket,” he said, coolly victorious. Again, I saw the smile, the dare he’d brought with him. This time, though, I understood it.
I turned to my brother. “We’ll—we’ll figure something out, Jonny, I promise we will. You have to go with him today, but Dad will . . . he’ll do something to get you back. Ma will get a lawyer like Jimmy said and . . . and . . .”
Again, Michael Finn took his arm. This time, when Jon wailed, his cry had words: “I hate you, Zaidie! You know that? I hate you forever! You and Ma—all of you.”
My only solace was that Ma had retreated to her room and closed the window so she didn’t hear him.
After they left, I followed the car till I got tired. Then I went to my room and cried for my lost brother, but also for the part of myself Michael had forced me to see. The part that had chosen myself, what I wanted. Just like him.
IN THE WEEKS that followed, the phone rang every night at precisely six, just like usual.
“Zaaaa-deee!” Agnes called like usual when she picked up the phone. “It’s that boy. Do you want me to tell him you’re not here?” She didn’t even try to cover the receiver like I’d taught her, but it no longer mattered.
“Tell him not to call here anymore. It’s over,” I finally told her—loud enough that he could hear me.
“You’re breaking up?”
I hated the water that filled my eyes. “For crying out loud, Agnes, just tell him.” Then I tore the tie tack from the shirt I was wearing and ran out of the house. When I reached Buskit’s River, I hurled it as hard as I could.
Chapter Eight
Get Up
DAHLIA
ONCE YOU’VE TRIED IT, THERE’S NOTHING SIMPLER THAN DYING. You just lie down where you are—in the woods or on the sidewalk or right there on your own messy sheets. Then you close your eyes and wait for the world to grow dim. Everything that seemed to matter—whether to make the meat loaf or the chop suey for supper, how to get your oldest to stop running with the rats, or what to do with the youngest girl, who was as bright as anyone—maybe brighter—but didn’t care much about school—all of that rises like a cloud and drifts away.
The mole you’ve been watching on your husband’s hand after reading the “Seven Signs of Cancer” in McCall’s may bleed or grow—or it may sit there, harmless as a garden frog. Like the troubles of the Bauer clan on Guiding Light, the hour passes, the screen grows dark, and things reveal themselves for what they really are: vapors.
Once they took my baby away, I went to my room and closed the shades like I was switching off the set. Poor Agnes came and stood at the door.
“Are you coming down, Ma?”
I didn’t open my eyes. I couldn’t.
“Zaidie ran off chasing that car, and she didn’t come back,” she persisted. “Do you think she—”
“Give me half an hour,” I finally said to make her stop.
But she must’ve seen me laying out straight, hands folded like I was in my coffin. The back door slammed, and I heard her running down the sidewalk, calling her sister’s name. Princie, taking advantage of the open gate, followed, announcing her freedom with a series of joyful barks. And all the while I lay like the dead, unable to get to the window and yell about the asthma like I usually did: Do you want to end up in an oxygen tent?
Nor did I worry what mayhem Princie might wreak. The more, the better, far as I was concerned. Was I supposed to care that Gina Lollobrigida had her white dress ripped from the clothesline when the boy I’d carried around the house till he was two, holding on to his baby scent as if I’d never set it down, had been torn up like someone’s morning glories?
Later, Zaidie came in, taking the stairs two at a time as if it was possible to outrun what’s inside you. The door to her room was barely closed when the sobbing started up.
But the dead have no comfort left to give. I switched on the little transistor Louie got me for my birthday. The static it produced would have been perfect if it didn’t make me think of the disappointment on Louie’s face when he gave it to me.
“You bought this—for me? For heaven’s sake, Lou,” I’d said. “These things are for kids.” No sooner were the words out than I saw that look and regretted it. Well, I was done with all of that, too. The guilt over who I was and who I could never be, what I could or couldn’t hear. I slept to the static like it was a lullaby.
At six, the sound of Louie’s work boots came tromping up the stairs. On another day, the heaviness in his step would’ve killed me. He stopped halfway up—like he couldn’t bear to look at me, either.
“You coming down to make supper or what? The kids are hungry, Dahlia.”
And then, after a minute of my deathly quiet: “Christ almighty.”
When he walked back down, the heaviness was still there, but there was anger in his step, too. The closest that a man like Lou comes to it, anyway. I was glad of that. Rage, at least, kept you moving.
STILL, HIS WORDS echoed. The kids, he’d said, but what he really meant was the girls. Jonny was on a plane to a place I knew only through my jigsaw of the Rockies, and Jimmy had left before breakfast and hadn’t come back all day, not even to say goodbye to his Shadow.
“I was supposed to be their big brother,” he’d said the night before. “How many times did I tell them they didn’t have to be scared of no one? ‘Anyone messes with you kids, come to me.’ Bad part was they believed it. Thought me and my stinkin’ bat were a match for anything. Even worse, I believed it myself.”
When they pulled Jonny off me, his howl was a cold wind that cut through all of us—even the ones who weren’t there. I felt it in Lou and the girls, but mostly in Jimmy.
I didn’t know where he’d gone—to Buskit’s River or to Duane’s or out to that old shack in the woods where the town drunk used to live; I didn’t know whether he was running or walking or riding his bike. Nor was I sure if
he was telling his friends what happened or laughing extra hard about some teenage joke like nothing was wrong in the world. The only thing I knew was the burning inside his chest, the heat behind his eyes. Even worse, I believed it myself.
“I’m not hungry,” Zaidie called down when Lou asked for help with the supper. How long before she realized that man, her father, was right? He could give her a better life. How long before she reached for it with two hands?
I lay on my sheets and heard a pan clattering onto the stove. “Any Franco-American in the pantry, Dad?” Agnes asked, extra loud for my benefit.
“How the hell should I know?” Louder still.
Eventually, Zaidie was made to come down, and I heard their chairs clatter into place at the table. Only after she went out and the TV came on did Agnes start pestering Louie. Full volume, of course. “She didn’t even tell you where she was going, Dad. In the night. You’re just gonna let her walk out?”
A silence like mine filled the house—as if death was contagious.
But Agnes was having none of it. “And where’s Jimmy?” she pressed. “Ma woulda called the Bousquets by now.” She lowered her voice, but it rose up anyway: “Do you think she’ll come down tomorrow? If you talk to her, Dad, I know—”
“Damnit, Agnes, watch your show.”
I switched on the static and fell asleep.
Later, when Louie was snoring in the couch, Agnes brought me a plate of cold noodles and some of the fresh milk that had made her grow. As if that might cure me, too. She flipped on the light and sat awhile, too, talking about the things that used to matter. “Did you hear Zaidie come home? Said she went down to Buskit’s River.” Here she paused, waiting for a reaction. “At night, Ma—when it was dark. Princie was lost, too, but me and Dad found her. She stole the O’Connors’ dog bowl again, though.”
Jon’s gone and you’re talking to me about dog bowls? I hollered inside. And what about Jimmy? You, above all of them, know how he is. Sensitive, much as he tries to hide it. The sweetest of the sweet, like you say when he brings you those Sky Bars. Kid’s been blaming himself for things that weren’t his fault since he was two. How do you think—
Why was she coming up here, trying to make me eat? Drink? Feel?
“Turn out the light when you go,” I told her.
That night, mad and heartbroke as he was, Louie still put his hand on my thigh when the lights went out. After twenty-two years, it was the only way he could fall asleep. It didn’t take long before he lost his patience, though. “Your boy was out all night, you know. You’re not the only one hurting here.”
He waited, but all I had was the silence of the woods.
“Can you give me a rough estimate of how long you plan to lay up here like this?” he asked a few days later. “Cause the house down there? It’s fallin’ apart.”
If I had the strength, I would have told him that when it’s your time to lie down, it doesn’t come with a plan. It just comes. I would have told him something else, too. How the pain I experienced the first time I died came back every time I fell asleep—the real, physical pain—like I was feeling those fists all over again. Then the yellow leaves fell around me, thicker than ever.
“Not long, Louie,” I murmured, too low for anyone to hear. “Not long at all.”
The next day Anna came and filled up the space I’d left the way the living do. Filled it with motion and smells. Lemon Pledge, and Pine-Sol, homemade gravy simmering on the stove and manicotti in the oven after the pie came out.
As she swept and did the wash, she had plenty to say to me, though she pretended to be addressing God. “Buon Dio, what-a wrong with her? She need-a come down and take care her bambini like a good mama. Mi Luigi, too. I’m too old for all-a this, Gesu. And look-a the mess she make around the place! These puzzle and books? Who need that giunca?”
She tossed them in the trash, probably hoping to rouse me. But instead of being moved to fight, I agreed with her. Junk it was—all of it. My whole life. Nothing but giunca.
Every day Agnes came into the room and tried to get me to eat or to talk or to worry like I was supposed to.
“It was Dad and the kids who wanted you, you know,” I finally said, hoping to drive her away. “If I’d had my choice—”
“I know,” she said, without blinking. “So are you comin’ down or what?”
I heard other things, too: Louie’s heavy step, the sound of him snoring in his chair or beside me, Jimmy coming and going. Anna yelling for him to “keep away from those bullos who lead you the wrong way, to help you Papa now; he need-a you—and Dio mio, talk to you mama! She listen to you, Jeemy; you know she do. She love you more than anyone—even her marito.”
“Don’t you know this is America, Nonna? Talk English, for cryin’ out loud,” Jimmy said. The door slammed as he went out, listening to no one in any language—not even Princie, who barked like she sensed danger.
I DON’T KNOW how long I stayed in my bed like that—unable to eat or listen or care. A week? Two? It might have been a month. All I know was that when I finally put my gray dress on, it hung on me like it belonged to another woman. And it did.
It happened like it did before. Though I hadn’t been physically beat, my body ached itself dry and every night I dreamed of the yellow leaves covering me like a blanket. The voice, when I finally heard it, seemed to come from nowhere, too. Just like the first time.
That’s when I knew Louie was right all along. It had been him calling me out of the woods that day. Him pushing me forward as I dragged myself through the thick brush, my ribs throbbing, my head dazed by the concussion. He was the one who wouldn’t let me fall until I reached the highway where I was found. I just didn’t recognize it then. How could I have?
The voice came from back then, too. Back when Louie was young—at the beginning when we still believed we could make a good life in spite of everything. That I could forget. Before we’d seen all those broken kids come through here. Way back to the time when we thought we could take in our three—and then it was four—and raise them up as if they had no past. Back when we believed two people—even a pair like Louie and me, for heaven’s sake—might be able to save someone. When I thought how foolish we were, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
But the voice wouldn’t let me do either. Get up! it ordered me. Get up and walk and don’t stop.
Don’t you know I can’t, Louie? I’m weak and dizzy and dear God, I’ve lost every shred of faith. Not faith like the kind that drives your mother through the house, beads clicking behind her. Just the faith to lift my arm, or to take another step. I can’t.
Get up!
WHEN I OPENED my eyes, I was in my own bedroom. I wasn’t alone like I thought I was that first time, either. Louie was right there standing beside the bed. And behind him were the girls—Agnes in the doorway, my poor heartbroke Zaida, just outside.
Louie’s voice wasn’t the same as the one I’d heard in my dream. It was made deep by the years and everything they contained, but it came through clearer than ever. He pulled back the covers and spoke again. “Enough is enough, Dahlia. Get up.”
“You have to, Ma,” Agnes said behind him. She came into the room, opened the closet, and pulled out the gray dress that would never fit me right again.
But it was Zaida who got to me. Even in the shadows of the hallway, I could see the sheen in her eyes, the narrow bones that had gotten narrower since I first lay down.
“Please?” Her voice was a whisper that no one heard but me.
Part III
1966–1968
Chapter One
Lilacs in November
ZAIDIE
Dear Jon,
Today you would have been twelve.
I TORE THE SHEET FROM MY NOTEBOOK AND CRUSHED IT INTO A ball. The next page was blindingly empty. Somehow my brother was twelve. A seventh grader in a school I’d never seen, waking up every morning to a house, a life that was locked to me. Did he still order the pizza with baby fish,
then pick them off and taunt the nearest girl? Could he catch the lonely sound of a train when it was still miles away? Was he happy?
Maybe I had it right, after all. Today the brother I knew would have been twelve. Ma would have baked his favorite chocolate chip cake and invited Jeffrey to dinner. Then a ragged chorus of Moscatellis would have sung to him and cheered his most secret wish as he blew out the candles.
All I knew about him now was contained in the evolving signatures on Michael Finn’s annual Christmas greeting.
Agnes pointed at the reindeer on the first card when I opened it in our room.
“Doesn’t he know you’re Jewish?”
“Oh, he knows, all right.”
Inside, he’d written Love, Dad (two words that felt like more of a taunt than the reindeer). Beneath it, Jon’s name was scrawled in familiar eight-year-old penmanship. I traced it with my finger. Had he forgiven me for letting him go alone? Or did “Dad” force him to sign?
The next year it was Love, Dad and Evelina with my brother’s name tacked on like an afterthought. Jonathan, he was calling himself now. Who was that?
This December, there had been another addition: Love, Dad, Evelina, and Marisa, it read, with Jonathan’s name set even farther apart. Still, I was filled with jealousy over this new sister, the stepmother with the exotic name.
A generous check fell from the cards as soon as I opened them, but I never cashed it. “A hundred dollars!” Agnes cried when I tore another one up. Then she listed all the things we might have bought—roller skates with a real key! when she was eleven. Birthstone earrings from Menard’s Jewelers and fancy school clothes from Jordan Marsh as she entered middle school. This year she’d been dreaming of tickets to see Herman’s Hermits. “For a hundred dollars, we could hire a limo and sit in the front row, Zaidie!”
“It wouldn’t hurt to deposit it in your college fund,” Ma put in. “If you were a little friendlier, he might call next time and maybe you could—we could—”
All the Children Are Home Page 15