All the Children Are Home

by Patry Francis

  “Shit, Buskit, you shoulda let me know it was you. Scared the piss outta me for a minute.”

  Jools looked as spooked as I was. “Tell you the truth, I wasn’t sure what I was walkin’ into here, either, man.” He sat on an old tree stump someone musta dragged inside a long time ago and helped himself to my last cancer stick. “Just cause of a crazy hunch.”

  “A hunch?” I’d never even told him I used to come here, never mind the story of how Richard J. Cartier passed his spirit into my eyes that day.

  “Not mine. Your sister’s. Girl came up the house a little while ago, lookin’ for you. Said she had a feelin’ you were out here.”

  “What? She’s supposed to be at swim practice.”

  “Not Agnes. The other one.” With his hand, he drew the shape of an hourglass.

  “Damn. It was Z who come lookin’ for me?” I said. And then, “Watch yourself with them remarks about her body. She’s still in high school, you know.”

  “Sorry.” Jools dropped his head a little lower than it was already. “Ain’t every day a girl who looks like that comes knockin’ at my door.”

  “So what did she want you to do about it?”

  “Bring ya back, I suppose. At least let ’em know you’re okay.” He looked around the cabin that was slowly being reclaimed by the woods. Like we all are, though not everybody knew it yet.

  “Well, here I am—okay as shit,” I said. “Guess your job is done.” I pointed at the door.

  Nodding, he lowered his head another few inches. Then he looked at me like he did back at school, before we decided to skip another class or just walk out for the day. “Not really the best way to put it,” he said, with the sly half smile he used to give me in those days.

  “What?”

  “I mean, shit really ain’t all that okay.”

  I don’t know who started laughing first, but before long the two of us filled that cabin with the sound. Then all of a sudden we stopped same as we started. Like we planned it. When he looked up, I could tell he knew all about James Kovacs Sr.

  Probably read it in the stupid Gazette just like Brucie.

  I reached for the newspaper I’d set beside the vinyl seat and tossed it on the fire, watching the newsprint turn blue before it crackled and disappeared. Call it his funeral service.

  Jools looked away. “Sorry, man.”

  And then he did the only thing he knew to do. He pulled a bottle from the pocket of his coat. Not the Wild Irish he used to drink, but Old Crow this time. He unscrewed the cap and took a pull before he held it out to me.

  I kept my eyes on Jools the whole time—as I reached for it, as I put it to my mouth, as I felt the burn run through me, lighting me up inside like the fire that made short work of James Kovacs Sr.’s story.

  To Ma’s way of thinkin’, Jools might as well of signed my death warrant that day, but when I looked in his face, I swear all I seen was love. Same as what had been on hers and Dad’s every time they told me James Kovacs Sr. wasn’t nothin’ but a bum.

  Chapter Four

  Zaidie Writes a Valedictorian Speech

  AGNES

  WHEN I FINALLY GOT KICKED OFF SWIM TEAM, IT WAS ALMOST A relief—both for me and for Coach Lois. There was no need to mention the missed practices, the chronic tardiness, my general lack of seriousness. She didn’t even bring up the clincher: A week earlier, she’d caught me out in the alleyway puffing on a joint with a couple friends. Nor did I try to explain that I was just goofing around. If I actually inhaled the stuff, I might have had an asthma attack. No, instead she just talked about making space for another girl. “Someone who really wants to be here.”

  I closed my eyes, which made me feel as if I was still in the water, the way I always did for the first hour after I climbed out of the pool. How could I describe the sensation? Was it freedom? Power? Peace? If I knew the answer to that, maybe I’d be the swimmer Coach Lois thought I had it in me to be.

  “It’s okay, Coach. I’ve been thinking of getting a part-time job anyway,” I said. “Thanks, though. You taught me so much about . . . well, just so much.”

  Tongue-tied and strangely flushed, I got out of there fast as I could.

  Jimmy rarely made it in time to watch my practice like he used to, but that day he was waiting in his car when I came out. In the past, he would have known something was up right away. Those days, though, his mind was too cluttered to think much about me.

  He leaned over and cracked the passenger door, obviously impatient to be somewhere else. “What took so long? I thought you were never comin’ out.”

  “No one said you had to pick me up. In fact, I’d rather walk.”

  Still, I climbed in and fiddled with the car radio, switching it from the hard rock he liked to top forty. As “I’m a Believer” filled the car, I waited for Jimmy to complain or for the sunny strains of the chorus to drown out the clamor in my head. But Jimmy was too preoccupied to notice and no matter how loud I turned up the music, I still heard Ma’s voice. Still saw her disappointed face. I might be all right with quitting—okay, being kicked off the team—but how was I going to break it to her?

  I needn’t have worried. Soon as we pulled into the driveway and saw the family on the porch, the rest of the day evaporated. Even Spider Johnson, who’d been our mailman for as long as I could remember, was all hopped up.

  “Your sister got something from that college in New York,” he called out. “We been waiting for you. Better hurry up; I still got mail to deliver.”

  “Good old Spider,” Jimmy muttered. “You’d think he was the one going off to college.”

  I laughed. Ever since Zaidie started receiving catalogues from places like New Mexico and Hawaii, the mailman had been fired by her dreams. Later, I would flip through the catalogues, studying the exotic locations, the endless subjects that it was possible to learn about in this world, just like he did. And after we went to bed, Ma pored over every word, took in every photograph like it held the secret of life.

  Spider had been waiting on the porch for us the day the catalogue from Berkeley arrived. “You really think you might go out there to Califo-ni-a?” he said, pronouncing the word without the R.

  “My first choice,” Zaidie told him.

  “This week anyway,” Jimmy added.

  Spider didn’t hear him, though. “I always wanted to see those redwoods. Promise you’ll send pictures.”

  This letter was different, though, starting with the heavy white envelope and the official logo in the corner, beneath the words DIRECTOR OF ADMISSIONS. Even her name, typed in black ink, had weight: ZAIDA G. FINN.

  “Don’t open it yet!” Jimmy yelled, pivoting toward Ma. “Not till Ma gets the Polaroid. This minute here’s one for the history books.”

  “What if it’s a rejection?” Zaidie flushed as Ma headed inside for the camera. “Did any of you think of that?”

  “Not a chance,” Jimmy said, and we all nodded in agreement, even Spider. “Open it!” we sang out as Ma raised the clunky camera.

  And just like that, the day turned from the one I thought it was when Coach Lois took me aside and lowered the boom to the crazy wide smiles captured in Ma’s pictures—mine and Jimmy’s, Spider Johnson’s, and in the center of it all—Zaidie holding that blazing-white letter.

  But the face I would always remember best was the one that never made the pictures. The one behind the camera. Ma studied the letter long after Spider went back to his route and Zaidie went off to tell her friends.

  “Columbia University—and early admission, too.” She fingered the expensive-looking paper, the raised seal at the top of the letter like it was braille. “Imagine.” Even though she’d been dreaming of days like this as long as I could remember, she seemed stunned.

  “Everything you done finally paid off, Ma.” Jimmy slung an arm over her shoulder. “You should be damn proud.”

  “I wish I could take an ounce of credit, Jimmy. But no.” Ma set down the letter, shaking her head. “Zaida did this al
l on her own.”

  LATER, AFTER EVERYONE had gone to bed, I slipped into the room we used to share and told Zaidie about Ma’s reaction. It was a while before she spoke.

  “Did she really say that?”

  Whenever things were particularly good or bad—or just more confusing than usual—I knocked on the door of the room we used to share, slipped into her single bed, and checked on the moon outside the window. Our moon.

  “Agnes, you’re too old for this. You’re squishing me,” she always said. And then she moved over. This time was no different. I could feel her brooding beside me, thinking of what I’d told her.

  “Well, she’s wrong,” she finally said. “First of all, Ma never wanted to take credit for anything. She wanted the glory—and everything else—to go to us. And second—she’s more a part of it than I like to admit. Yeah, I did the work, but every test I took, every paper I wrote, she was there with me. Her face when she opened the report card, or when I handed her a paper with the word Excellent across the top was my rocket fuel. Her life was so hard, and after Jon left—” Like all sentences that included my brother’s name, this one was left unfinished.

  I reached out and covered her hand with mine.

  “You know what it says in the Talmud? Every blade of grass has an angel that stands over it, whispering, Grow, Grow. That was Ma. That was the work of her life.”

  I lay still in the silence, feeling her mind work as she went on.

  “You don’t do anything by yourself in this world, and if it’s worth anything, it’s not just for yourself, either. You’re either lifting up the people around you, or you’re pulling them down, whether you know it or not.”

  “Who said that—Helen Keller?”

  “No, Ma—even if she didn’t use those words.”

  Though she didn’t know it, though she was still months from being chosen, that night, as we lay squished together in her skinny little bed under our own private moon, Zaidie had begun to write the speech she would deliver as valedictorian. “The Most Ordinary People in the World,” she would call it.

  I shifted uncomfortably, remembering the scene by the pool. The resignation in Coach Lois’s voice had been the worst of it. “Too bad there’s not much credit for Ma to claim in my case,” I said. And then I told her.

  Like she always did, Zaidie grew quiet for a few moments before she responded. “It’s probably for the best. You didn’t want to do anything with it anyway,” she decided, pragmatic as ever. “And you’ll need those extra hours to focus on school. Pretty soon you’re going to be putting in your own applications.”

  “Not everyone wants to go to college, Zaidie. Joellen Guarino got a good job down at the Claxton Savings and Loan after she graduated. And in case you haven’t noticed, I’m a C student.”

  “C-plus. And that’s only because you get Ds in the subjects you don’t like. English and Social Studies you bring home As without hardly trying.”

  I groaned. “I think I heard enough about trying for one day, okay?”

  But once she got started, Zaidie was as relentless as Ma. “You just have to get a couple of grades up a little and be ready for your SATs. And since you’re not swimming, you’ll need something else to round out the application.”

  I had drifted off to sleep when, a half hour later, the light flicked on. I swiped at my eyes. Again, I’d been dreaming that I was in the water.

  “I know what you should do!” she said, sitting up in bed.

  “What I should do . . . about what, Zaidie? It’s like two in the morning.”

  “You should run for student council next year. With your talent for making friends, you’d be a shoo-in, and colleges go crazy for that leadership stuff.”

  “Hah. According to Coach Lois, that’s my downfall; I’m too social.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s how we become—I don’t know—who we’re meant to be. By turning obstacles into assets. It’s the Moscatelli way.”

  I laughed. “The Moscatelli way? Dad goes to work and fixes cars all day, while Ma sits around, watching TV and doing puzzles. As for me and Jimmy, I don’t want to talk about it. Is that the ‘way’ you’re talking about?”

  “Maybe it is. Did you ever think that maybe Ma was re-creating the world she hoped we would see every time she did one of those puzzles? That her whole life, everything she ever read about or thought about has been to figure out who her kids were and what we needed? And Dad shows us the way every morning when he gets up and laces up his work boots. The man just keeps going. Day after day. No matter what.”

  When she spoke those words at her graduation a few months later, she would receive a standing ovation, but at two a.m. in our old room, they were greeted only with the majesty and the stillness of the night.

  It was too late for all this talk, her endless grand thinking, but like always, I took in every word. All of it, starting with my talent for making friends. This time, though, I didn’t know who was right—her or Coach Lois.

  “You’d rather socialize with the competition than beat them,” the coach complained more than once. “And you wouldn’t be late all the time if you came by yourself instead of taking the long way with that pack of girls.”

  There were six of us who walked home together after school, down Main Street, stopping to look at the Capezios we coveted in the store window, to flirt with the boys who circled around us, or to buy a candy bar at Kresge’s.

  Knowing my problem with tardiness, Ma had given me a watch for my last birthday. But all too often, I still arrived at the Y breathless and late, the ghost of my asthma rumbling in my chest.

  “Anyone want to guess what she forgot today?” Ellen Morgan taunted.

  I laughed and stuck out my tongue, but she was right. There was always something. My friends Judy Katz and Kathy Doherty had taken to bringing extra bathing caps, goggles, and shampoo for me.

  Much as I wanted to agree with Zaidie, Coach Lois was right this time. Goofing around with my pack—even pretending to smoke a joint that made me cough—had cost me my sacred hour in the water.

  THE FIRST MONTH, though, I reveled in the freedom from Coach Lois’s eyes, which veered from me to the clock and then away. Free to stop for a Coke and fries at Junie Sweet’s, I lingered on the red stools until the boys filed in from basketball practice, their cheeks blazing with the coming winter and their own wild energy.

  It felt good to leave together, eleven or twelve of us filling the streets like we owned them. Next to Junie’s was a dive bar called Coop’s Tavern, and sometimes one of the boys would dare another to open the door and hold it till someone staggered out and chased us away. Meanwhile, the rest of us stood on the sidewalk, peering into that shadowy world where a lone drunk might be heard carrying on a passionate rant. Then we’d all laugh as we scattered down the hill into the gathering dark.

  In those moments I felt almost as free as I had in the water. Who needs swimming? I said to myself one day. Immediately, I felt a tightening in my chest. Better not to think about things like that, I decided, catching up with a boy named Joey Lynch. I’d been hoping he might ask me to the dance at St. Edward’s Parish.

  When everyone was out of sight, he noticed that I’d forgotten my mittens at Junie’s so he took off his own and gave them to me, holding my hand for an extra-long minute. And then he did it. He asked me to the dance. I raced all the way home, just daring the asthma to stop me.

  “My goodness, did something . . . happen?” Ma said when I came into the house. “You look—I don’t know—different.”

  And different I was. Every single day. But there was no explaining that kind of thing to your mother.

  Zaidie and I huddled in her room for days, discussing what I would wear to the dance and experimenting with new hairstyles—twists and beehives and flips, though my thick hair inevitably escaped the clips and bobby pins and cascaded down my back.

  Finally, she pulled out her best baby-blue cashmere sweater. It had been kept in tissue paper since her birthday. “This wo
uld look really good with your dark blue skirt.”

  “Are you sure? I thought you were saving it for something special.”

  “What’s more special than my sister’s first date?”

  The sweater, still in its delicate paper, sat inside my top drawer, and every day, soon as I got home from school, I looked at it. Still there, I told myself, unable to believe my luck. That soft blue sweater was Zaidie and the dance and Joey Lynch’s hand inside his mitten. His bright face in the cold.

  And then one day, it was something else.

  I WAS THE last one to leave Junie Sweet’s that afternoon. Me and Susan, my old friend from elementary school who had just tearfully confided that no one had asked her to the dance.

  “You can come with me and Joey,” I told her.

  “It doesn’t work that way, Agnes.” She giggled for the first time that day.

  “Who says? It’s my date and if I want to bring someone, I will.” I almost told her about that crazy stuff Zaidie called the Moscatelli Way, but then I thought the better of it.

  By the time we left, Junie was closing up, and all of our friends were gathered on the sidewalk outside Coop’s. They stood slightly back, listening as Joey Lynch held the door, allowing one of the old boozers to broadcast his madness onto the street. As usual, they were laughing, and for a minute, so was I. Then I recognized the voice.

  LATER, SUSAN, WHO had peered inside, would tell me Jimmy was the only one in the bar that afternoon—just him and his phantoms. But I was already gone.

  I ran farther and faster than I ever had in my life—past the voices that were calling me back and the old Falcon squatting there on the street like the most forlorn hulk in the world, past the street where the Deans lived and the Dohertys’ house with the green shutters on the corner of Grainer and the school, past the place where Joey Lynch had held my hand before he gave me his mittens, then on to Derocher Field, where Jimmy had hit that tenth-inning home run in the all-star game. The best minute of his life, he’d called it. I ran and ran till the asthma I had mostly outgrown caught me.