I had gone back to those days I lay beneath the yellow leaves. I’d let myself remember the morning when someone or something called me out, told me to get up, and led me to the highway. But never, never, had I returned to the night it happened. Never.
Unconsciously, the girls reached their hands across the hole in the couch to each other. Their hair, their eyes, the light and the dark of them, were shining. Never had they been so beautiful to me—or so vulnerable. Was I really going to foist my nightmare on these poor girls? My children, for heaven’s sake?
But now that it had risen up, demanding to be told, who else was there? Louie would have dropped like Josie Pennypacker if he was forced to listen to the details. Should I go down to Joe O’Connor’s silly market, sit Saint Joe and Anna down, and let them know just how damn imperfect this world could get?
Like she often did, Zaida read my mind. “It’s okay, Ma. You can tell us. I’m almost eighteen, you know—the same age you were. And Agnes—well, she probably went through worse before she was five.”
Yes, worse. So many of my kids.
“Mr. Dean always told me that everything that happened to me was my fault. Mrs. Dean, too. They said I deserved it and more,” Agnes added. “It was only after I told my story to all of you that I knew how wrong they were.”
“Now is the time,” Zaida said, like she did when we were standing under that green sign. “Go on, Ma.”
LIKE I SAID, Bobby and me had broke up in the spring. Right after that pretty prom picture you might’ve seen in the attic, it happened. I know he took it hard. People said he hardly left the house all summer. There were rumors he changed his mind about going to Boston College like his brother. He was talking about a school out in Texas. Maybe even joining the military—like he couldn’t get far enough away. His father didn’t just object. He forbid it.
I still shuddered every time I thought of the man at the table.
Anyway, I had just got off work and was heading to my friend Murph’s that night when Silas pulled up. He said Bobby wanted to see me one more time before we both left. He had something for me.
I paused, seeing that blue Chevy with the open door, Silas at the wheel. There weren’t a lot of nineteen-year-olds with cars in those days and I was still young enough to be impressed by what the Woods had. Who they were in town. But that wasn’t the reason I got in.
There was so much unsaid between Bobby and me, I wanted a chance to try. I wanted it so bad I didn’t see what I should have seen.
Agnes narrowed her eyes. “What was that?”
Silas’s face. The hardness of it. Later, those leaves falling on me, I would peer back in that car and see it clear as day, but that night . . . Well, like I said, all I was thinking of was Bobby. I jumped in the car. I didn’t even question where he was taking me till we left the city and headed for the wooded area outside town.
“Has to be some place where no one who could report back to my father might see you, okay?” Silas explained.
I nodded my head in the dark car. “Okay.”
We drove deep in the woods till we came to a clearing. There, he handed me a flashlight and pointed to a narrow path. “He’ll meet you down there. Not far, maybe a half mile.”
“He’s not here yet?”
“You know Bobby—always running late. Don’t worry; it’ll only be a few minutes.” As soon as I got out of the car, he put it in reverse.
“You’re leaving me—alone?” I called after him.
But he just backed out, taking out a few bushes in the process.
If I had any sense, I would have been afraid, but in those days there was this dumb strength running through me all the time—whether I was putting on my apron at the restaurant after being up all night studying for a test or getting up to give a speech at school. The only thing on my mind was what I would say, how Bobby and I would act. Still, I was grateful for the chance.
I looked at my watch: 7:05. Silas had told me the plan was to meet at seven. No doubt Bobby would be there soon. The light was still streaming through the trees as I started down the path. Ever since I was small, I’d loved to play in the woods. I’d find a fallen tree, sweep out a corner with a branch, and imagine I was in my own private kingdom. Nowhere had I ever felt more safe.
As I got closer to the second clearing, the place where I was supposed to meet Bobby, the tree came into view. My God, I wish you could have seen it! It was so beautiful it stopped me where I was, stopped me and then pulled me forward. It was early for the leaves to turn, but that one was already shimmering with color.
In the dazzling light, the leaves were pure gold. I could hardly wait for Bobby to get there so I could show him. That was what was good between us—especially in the beginning. Every song we played for each other was the best tune ever; a new pizza place wasn’t just good, it was fantastic. If we only remembered that, I thought . . . I don’t know . . . Maybe we could separate as friends. He could move on to his own life in peace.
I looked back down the path where I’d come—still not scared, though I was alone in the unfamiliar woods, just worried that he might not get there in time to see the spectacular gold tree before the light turned. That’s when I heard the approaching car.
“Bobby!” I called out when the door opened. “I’m down here.” And then, unable to resist, “You have to see—”
But before I finished, I heard a second door open. And then a third. “Bobby?”
Sitting in the parlor, I swear I heard those footsteps on the path. The unfamiliar voices. Felt the fear taking hold. Trembling right there in my own chair, I wasn’t sure I could go on.
“Was he with them?” Zaida asked.
It was a while before I could answer, but the girls waited, pulling me deeper with their eyes. I shook my head.
IT WAS HIS cousin and a couple of other kids from out of town. Boston, we thought, though no one ever found out for sure. Thugs, they were—all of them—the Woods, too, for all their polished silver and fancy ways. At first, they stopped there in the clearing and stared at me, like they’d forgotten what they were supposed to do. One kid—the youngest of the group—he looked like he wanted to bolt himself. He turned from one to the other of them. “Chick hasn’t done nothin’ to us. Maybe we should—”
“Bobby,” I repeated. “My—my boyfriend will be here any minute and—”
“You hear that?” a heavyset boy said, turning to the other two. “She thinks Bobby’s comin’ to rescue her.” He laughed, and then without warning, his fist was in my jaw.
I didn’t know it was possible to be hit that hard. I went down, hitting my head against the trunk of the golden tree on the way.
It wasn’t just the pain, but the . . . the intent of it. The power it had. The knowledge that this—hate, this violence—was there, around us all the time. I just hadn’t known it. Up until then, I’d walked through the world like a damn fool, scared of nothing.
I looked over at the girls, expecting them to be horrified, but all I saw was courage. What had been such a shock to me was something they’d been forced to reckon with all their lives. Agnes in the attic. And Zaida, struck in a different way when she was abandoned with her dying mother and baby Jon in that apartment.
“Did the other boy—the younger one—did he help you?” Agnes asked. No matter how harsh life treated that one, she always searched for the way out.
I shook my head slightly, looking down at myself lying at the foot of that golden tree, the way they say you do when you die.
THE ANIMAL INSTINCT must have kicked in. Him and the big one took turns kicking and hitting me until finally, the third boy, who had stood back from it all—Walter, I heard them call him—came over and tore my blouse.
Without thinking, I covered my bosoms there in the parlor, as I was unable to do the night of the attack.
“We’re not supposed to do that, Walter. You heard him. He was strong about that,” one of them said. “Just rough her up; that’s it.”
“Hey, she
ain’t looking too good,” the beefy one who started it all said. “There’s blood coming out the friggin’ mouth. Son of a bitch. I told you not to kick her so hard.”
“Me? You were the one who—”
Yes, that was another funny thing I remembered—that he called it the mouth, instead of her mouth, as if he, too, was looking down at me from a great distance. Like I was no longer human. And I suppose I wasn’t to them.
“Shit,” someone else said. Were there more than three of them? Or was I just hearing echoes. “I told you to scare her, not . . . not this. The girl’s dead, or you did anything else to her, you don’t get a red cent. That was the deal. Go on, get the hell out of here, the three of you.”
Who was the girl they were talking about? Was it me? That’s how far away I was. And that voice. Where had I heard it before? My head throbbed, reminding me I was still there in my body.
“You heard me—go before you end up getting charged with something.”
I struggled to open my eyes, but it felt like they were weighted with heavy coins. I heard the footsteps again, moving away. The one that was left, the voice, bent over me and tried to cover me with that torn blouse, almost as if he wanted to help. But then he stopped.
It was his eyes I felt before anything else. Next thing I knew his hands were on me, everywhere. “Bitch,” the voice was saying, as he tore at my pants, pushed himself into me. “Messed up Bobby so bad he wants to scrap college and go off to fight the war. Probably get himself killed and doesn’t even care. All over a little nobody like you?” I think he was crying by that point. Crying for himself—not for me. See, I was a corpse to him. Less than that.
The sun was going down, taking with it the gold of the tree. I tried to pry my eyes open enough to see, but they were swollen almost completely shut. Still, there was enough light to make out Silas’s face looking down on me, and he caught the slit between my puffy lids.
“Even think about telling and next time it will be worse,” he said, though at that moment, neither of us could have thought I’d live to see a next time. Then he ran away like the others and left me there alone.
I’D GOTTEN SO lost in the dark dream, the story I hadn’t told anyone, not even myself, I almost forgot who I was speaking to.
When I looked up, Agnes was on the side of my chair, her arm sloped over me, hand holding mine with a different kind of force. The opposite of what I felt in the woods. Zaida sat on the floor, her face wet with my own unshed tears.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you all that . . . but once I got started, it just came.”
“It’s all right,” Zaida said, wiping her cheeks and chin with the flat of her hand. Then she laughed at herself, which felt like a relief to us all. “I’m such a dope.”
“We knew anyway, Ma,” Agnes told me. “Not the details, of course, but we knew . . .”
Zaida nodded.
“That wasn’t the end of it, though,” I said, not wanting to leave them there with Silas, not wanting to let him win another minute.
By then, memory was pouring through me like light through that tree.
After the pain and the cold of those nights when the animals howled and the temperatures dropped, the tree was still there. It wasn’t gold like I thought when I first saw it, either. It was plain yellow, but when the leaves began to fall on me, to cover me—how can I describe it? It was as if they were blessing me. That’s when it came on me, that great peace I told you about. The peace they say you have at the end. In all my life, I never felt anything like it.
Agnes nodded as if she felt it, too, as if she could see that tree I wanted to show to Bobby clear as day.
Chapter Fifteen
Before
AGNES
MA WAS AFRAID WE WERE TOO YOUNG TO HEAR, THAT WE’D crack if we looked too deep into those woods, saw her walking that path, heard the sound of those car doors closing, first one, then another and another. She thought the fist that knocked her to the ground would reach through the years and shatter our tender bones. But the truth was we’d lived with that story all our lives. We just didn’t know its name.
I had them, too. Befores, Zaidie called them, like they were places on the map. A whole country of them with a capitol and its own flag. Even after I told the Moscatellis about my life in Mr. Dean’s attic, there were things I could never say. And in their own way, they kept me a prisoner just like Ma. I couldn’t talk about Mau Mau, couldn’t even say those two syllables out loud. But I still called for her in my sleep, still whispered her name whenever I stopped to pick up a penny on the road. People like Nonna call it prayer.
And it wasn’t just my lost sister I kept secret. I remembered—no, I felt myself sitting in Mr. Dean’s attic window, waiting for someone who used to come, but didn’t anymore. Yourmother, they called her. As soon as she got out of her taxi, she’d be yelling the name no one else used: Ahn-yess! And when she saw my face, she always laughed. Not the way you laugh at a joke. No, it was more like the happiness that bubbled up inside her was so powerful she had to release it. Glory, Saint Joe called it when he heard me laugh the same way. Yup, the glory is what it is. You just got a little more of it than most people. I wasn’t much for religion like Nonna or Zaidie—and neither was Joe when it came down to it—but somehow that sounded about right.
Whenever I thought of my mother and her glory laugh, I’d go to my room and take out my treasure box. Then I’d touch the gifts she had given me, one by one, looking for answers. Where had she gone? Why didn’t she come back? And finally, the question that made me snap the box shut every time: Was she okay?
But once I hit high school, I was so preoccupied with swimming and friends and everything that was changing inside me, I hardly thought about the mother who was living in the house with me, never mind the one I’d lost.
And then from nowhere, there was something else. The thing I feared more than anything. The one that had taken away all the glory the dope hadn’t managed to steal from my mother. A boy. Much as I fought it, he was there when the teacher called on me in geography. Miss Juniper, are you with us today? There when I swam laps, faster and faster—to escape him or to reach him—I wasn’t sure which. At the end of the pool, I was startled to find Coach Lois with her stopwatch, beaming: Your best time yet.
AT FIRST, HE treated me like Zaidie’s annoying little sister—the way he had when I was ten. He complained I was too slow getting changed. (Didn’t I know Caroline was waiting for him? That she wasn’t particularly happy about him driving Zaidie’s kid sister around . . . that he had better things to do?) As we got to know each other on the daily twenty-minute ride, Caroline’s name filled the car—as if to remind me what this was and what it could never be. As if to remind himself.
“I have to stop at the flower shop,” he said one afternoon. “It’s a whole year for Caroline and me. Aside from Zaidie and Charlie, it’s the senior class record.”
“Can I help? I love flowers.”
Inside Meninger’s, I held up a pale yellow rose. “This is the one.”
“It’s supposed to be red for a girlfriend. Don’t you know anything?” he teased.
“About love and stuff? Not much.” I wrinkled up my nose at the thought. “But if it was me, I’d rather have the yellow one. It’s the color of—I don’t know—a promise.”
He laughed—but bought the yellow one.
Whenever I turned up the radio to hear Smokey Robinson or the Temptations, he grimaced. “Really, you like that goopy song?”
I cranked it louder. “What does goopy even mean?”
“Look it up in the dictionary. Probably says, ‘Agnes’s taste in music.’ For someone who’s not interested in love, you sure like songs about it.”
The flash of his white teeth when he laughed made me laugh, too. Just like I had when the one who didn’t come around anymore stood at the door and let loose her glory.
And then one day, he took the long way home and stopped at the N. P. “Just got thirsty all of a sudd
en,” he said, handing me a Pepsi. Though soda was forbidden on my training diet, I didn’t say no. When we reached the house, we sat in the car and drank it slowly in my driveway. Was that when it started? Or was it the day I caught him singing along to “My Girl”?
“Now see what you’ve done? You’ve got me singing goopy songs myself.”
“You like it, too. Admit it.”
He grinned. “I wouldn’t go that far.”
BUT A FEW days later, when we reached the house, he stopped me as I reached for the door handle. “Wait,” he said. “I need to ask you something.”
I looked at him, my hand still on the handle.
“Okay, this is gonna sound dumb, but . . . how’d you get that way?”
I checked myself up and down, wondering if my colors were mismatched or something. “What way?”
“It’s just—I never met anyone like you before. Not in my whole life.”
“You mean—an Indian?” I was used to people telling me that, asking about my tribe and how I ever landed in Claxton. Sometimes it made me feel the way I did in Mr. Dean’s attic. Like the last one left. But part of my secret was not to show it.
“No, not that. Just the way you are. It’s like you give it all away, everything—every minute. Nothing holds you back. I never met anyone like that before.”
I laughed. “You’re crazy, you know that?”
But then I jumped out of the car and bolted for the house, almost tripping on a boulder that had been in the yard since I was six.
Inside, the mirror where Zaidie and I stopped every day to see if we were pretty enough stopped me. This time, though, I saw what Henry saw. The girl who wasn’t afraid of anything. The one who was unlike anyone he’d ever met. Had he really said that?
Once again, I felt the glory bubbling up.
A FEW DAYS later, I reminded him that we needed to deliver the anise cookies Nonna had tucked inside my school bag. For Giuliano. “Tell you boyfriend to drop them off on the way home from swim. Last time I see Giuliano, he look too thin.”
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