“Jools has always been skinny, Nonna, and, sheesh, Henry’s not my—”
“Fa. You think I don’t hear you out in the driveway when I come here? Go—and tell Giuliano next time I send him manicotti.” Nonna waved me away before I could tell her that whatever she thought she’d heard was wrong.
No one answered the door at the Bousquets so I left Nonna’s package on the stoop.
When I turned around, I was surprised to find Henry behind me. “Feel like taking a walk by the river?”
Not waiting for an answer, he started toward the path. I hated Buskit’s River—suspecting it was where Jimmy first started drinking—but it was one of those days when you first feel spring coming on. There were even a few crocuses in bloom. I picked one, imagining the delicate flower in one of Jools’s drawings. Then I followed Henry. We walked until we came to a part of the stream that was still uncluttered by junk and sat down, him on one rock, me a few feet away on another. He tossed a pebble into the stream. “Okay, you want to tell me what’s wrong?”
“Wrong?”
I didn’t even know my mood had changed, much less that it was visible until he pressed me. “You’ve been different ever since we ran into Mike Sampson, outside school.”
At that, the force of the secret I never let myself feel surged up inside me.
“Did you hear him? He was making fun of Jay Rodale, calling his brother a junkie because he got arrested last year.” I crushed the crocus between my fingers. “My own mother . . .”
“You have a mom? I mean, I didn’t know . . .”
“What did you think—I was dropped here from outer space? Yeah, I have a mother who actually gave birth to me. A sister, too. I mean, another sister.”
He watched me like he was waiting for an explanation. As if I had one.
“She just—she couldn’t take care of me is all. Cause of the dope and things. That’s what the file says, anyway.”
He was quiet awhile. “What about your dad?”
I peered into the water that was higher than usual. “Don’t know much about him except that he’s lighter than me. A white man, probably. And a fool. That’s all she told me.”
In the silence that followed, I felt myself growing hot. And small. Miniscule. Who did I think I was talking to—Jimmy? Did I really expect someone like Henry to understand files, and dope fiends, and fool fathers with no names? The kid lived in a brick house with a fancy iron fence to protect him from all of that.
On the way home, I turned up the radio to drown out the silence. “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” . . . my song and Zaidie’s. Somehow hearing it always gave me courage.
Henry switched off the engine and stared through the windshield when we reached the house.
“Well, the guy can’t be that foolish,” he finally said—stopping me before I could escape. “I mean, you’re his daughter, right?”
I looked at him, dumbstruck.
“And next time Mike talks like that, I’ll deck him.”
I laughed. “You?”
With his wrestling muscles and skill on the mat, Henry was strong enough to tackle Mike or most anyone else in the senior class, but I doubted he’d ever been in a fight in his life.
“OK, I’ll tell him to stop, then. Stop, please.” He grinned at me and it was like peering at myself in the Beautiful Mirror all over again.
Without thinking, I scooted across the seat and hugged him. Okay, it was impulsive. But it still might have been okay if I hadn’t topped it off by telling him I loved him. Yup, just like I did as a kid when I used to go around blurting that out to everyone, from friends at school to the neighbors. Because I did. Or because they needed to hear it. But this was Henry Y. Lee I was talking to! Henry Y. Lee I had wrapped my arms around, like he was my brother or sister or the girls from my team after a victory.
Face flaming, I jumped out of the car as fast as I could. “I didn’t mean . . . I . . .” I stammered.
“I know,” Henry said. But by the confused way he was looking at me, the mixed-up way we were looking at each other, I wasn’t sure either of us knew anything anymore.
“See you tomorrow,” we both mumbled at the same time. I was in such a hurry to get away I dropped my geometry book on the driveway. I didn’t go back to it till I heard his MG pull away.
So okay, I wasn’t about to say that again—maybe not to anyone ever. But it didn’t matter. The words were out. After that we stopped by Buskit’s River every day on the way home, and every time we told each other more. Dumb stuff that didn’t matter, but other things, too.
Even though I was tired from practice and homework, and every story I released into the air made me feel scared and ashamed, I didn’t stop. No matter what I said, Henry kept walking, nodding, taking more of my life—more of me—into himself with every step.
After a while, he began to talk, too. “Sometimes all we can do is forget,” I murmured, when he told me about what his family had gone through in China. Isn’t that what Ma told me? But when I felt the river in my eyes, I knew that we might bury, but we never forget. Not really.
When I wondered aloud whether he’d told any of this to Caroline, he just shook his head and repeated what he’d said before. “You’re different.”
“YOU’RE COMING HOME awful late these days,” Ma said one afternoon when I walked into the kitchen for a glass of juice.
“I’m training for a competition, Ma.” I peered into the refrigerator so she wouldn’t see my face. “Coach Lois is working me extra hard.”
“Hmph.”
She turned from the sink where she’d been washing dishes and dried her hands with a dish towel. Then, before I could get away, she removed her glasses.
“You’re only fifteen, you know—and that boy—he seems to bounce from one girl to another. Isn’t he going with Zaidie’s friend? That’s right. The Jewish girl.”
As if she didn’t know. “Jeepers, Ma. He’s given me a few rides; it’s not like—” I tried to say.
“And he’s going away to college in Pennsylvania or somewhere soon anyway. He’s toying with you is all.”
“It’s a few hours away, not the moon, Ma. Not everyone stays in the same town their whole life, you know.”
“I just don’t want to see you get hurt.”
“I . . . I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I stammered, escaping for my room. But when I passed the mirror in the foyer, the truth was on my face.
THE NEXT DAY, more confused than ever, I was relieved to see the rain. This time there would be no chance for a walk. However, Henry quickly produced two umbrellas.
“Always plan ahead, that’s my motto,” he said, pulling up a street on the south side. Usually we went to Barkley’s Woods or Buskit’s, or one of the other wild places that still dotted the city. This was something new.
“You have a motto?”
“My dad says everyone does, whether they know it or not.”
“I guess mine would be something like, ‘See what happens and take it from there.’ We couldn’t be more opposite if we tried. Listen, I’ve been thinking—”
But before I finished, he got out of the car and stood on the sidewalk, holding out an umbrella.
“It’s pouring, Henry. Where the heck are you taking me?”
He smiled mysteriously but didn’t answer.
We were halfway up the street before he spoke again. “If that was really your motto, you never would have made honor roll this year. And you wouldn’t be at the pool every day, week in, week out.”
“True, I guess,” I said. And then, a little while later, “I like the way you think about things before you say them. I never do that.”
He grinned. “That’s for sure.”
He led me past the tailor shop his grandparents had once run. It was still called Lee’s, though his grandmother was dead, and his grandfather spent his time tending a small garden behind Henry’s house and reading Chinese newspapers.
“It used to embarrass my dad how hard the
y worked, even when they were old and they didn’t have to. Especially my grandmother.”
“Why’d they do it?”
He shrugged. “It was what they knew—and they were proud of it. Grammy used to brag she was the best seamstress in town.”
By then we were standing in front of the building. “You want to know the worst thing I ever did?”
“No,” I laughed. “Who do you think I am—Nonna’s priest?”
“Don’t joke. It’s pretty bad.”
He began to walk again, as if looking up at the shop was too painful. “It was my grandparents’ anniversary, okay? A big one. Fortieth or fiftieth, I’m not sure, but anyway, we were having a party at my house. Grammy always took her shoes off at the door before she came into the house. Then she’d put on these little slippers she carried with her—even though my dad thought it was old-country. Anyway, that day, he sent my cousin and me out to clean up the neighbor’s dog poop from the yard, and . . . I don’t know how it happened, but someone dared me to scoop it into Grammy’s shoe. By then there were a bunch of kids around and they were all laughing. Even my brother.”
“So you did?”
“I thought I could clean it out before it was time for her to go, but us kids got involved in a game of hide-and-seek and . . .”
“I bet she gave you a good whaling,” I said, imagining what Nonna would have done.
“I wish she had. Grammy was like you in a way. Up until that day, I’d never once seen her shed a tear . . . I had just come in when she put her foot in the shoe.”
I stopped short on the sidewalk. “And?”
“She froze. Then when all the kids looked in my direction and she realized it was me—her favorite sunzi—she started to cry . . . silently, though, the water pouring down her cheeks. If she yelled at me, even wept out loud, it would have been better, but she didn’t make a single sound.
“All I wanted to do was make the kids laugh. I never thought how she would feel . . . or that I’d ruin her anniversary. A few months later she was dead.”
“You’re not blaming yourself for that, are you? Henry—”
“You don’t understand. Grammy’s life was nothing like mine. All she did was work. She hardly ever had a day to dress up in a silk dress, to stand there in candlelight, hear people toasting her.”
By then the rain was coming down harder, lashing us in spite of the umbrellas. “So now that you know, do you still want to be—whatever we are?” he asked. Was I imagining it or did his color deepen?
It was how I had felt when I told him about the mother I hadn’t seen since I was five, my fool father. Dropping my umbrella, I let the rain pelt me. “You have to ask?”
Then, despite all the times I’d promised to check myself, especially around Henry, I stepped under his umbrella and kissed him. At first, the boy who planned ahead clung as tightly to his umbrella as he’d clung to the future that had once seemed clear. Then he let go of everything, and kissed me back, both of us with our eyes wide open.
After we chased the tumbling umbrellas down the rainy street, we drove home with the Four Tops filling the MG and parked discreetly a block from the house to kiss one more time. Bernadette, you’re the soul of me . . .
“Wait.” He seized my arm when I was getting out of the car. “I . . . I just wanted to look at you one more time.”
I laughed. “It’s not like you won’t see me tomorrow.”
“Too far away.”
As if it was a place, not a time.
I thought of how he’d told me I was different; and for just one minute, everything that had ever shamed me or made me feel set apart became beautiful. How had he done it? But all of that happened in another country with another flag. Before the night Mr. Dean followed me home and I ran into that telephone booth to call Jimmy.
Before the moment when my brother climbed out of the Falcon, holding his bat.
Before Zaidie began packing up her life, piece by piece, for California.
Before Ma opened the door, left the house, and told us the truth about the golden tree.
Before—it seemed like a hundred years before—I had the dream that would change my life. It was another dream about Mau Mau, but this time it was different. I was different. I couldn’t hide from my sister’s fate anymore.
I WAS GLAD that it was also before Henry had a chance to break up with Caroline. More than ever, I was aware of the towering mountain of hurt that stands in the center of this world. How could I, knowing what I knew, add another pebble to it? How could I risk being its next victim? Even a solid couple like Zaidie and Charlie had been broken apart by the tornado that hit our house that spring. Heck, Ma and Dad had nearly crumbled.
Henry must have seen the change in my face, because he didn’t try to touch me when I got into the car. I was too distracted to turn the radio on so we drove in silence until I was nearly home. Finally, he switched on Stevie Wonder.
I reached for the dial. Silence. The last thing I needed was another seductive voice crooning to me about love.
Though Henry was a cautious driver, he veered to a stop so sharply that we ended up half on the sidewalk outside my house. In the past, I would have told him about Josie and the maledizione, but I had shared too much already. Besides, I figured, it was better if he didn’t know.
“Okay, you wanna tell me what’s going on? I thought we—”
“You shouldn’t be giving me rides every day like this. It’s not fair to Caroline.”
“That’s over. It’s just . . . I’ve been making excuses when we were supposed to go out and I haven’t even kissed her since . . . I have to talk to her, but it’s tricky with all the senior stuff coming up and—”
Again, I stopped him. “No.”
“What do you mean—no? Agnes—”
“It was a mistake, Henry. All of it—starting when my sister called and asked if you’d pick me up. From now on, if I need anyone to protect me—which I won’t—I’ll ask my family.”
I reached for the door handle, but he stretched out his arm and held me in place, a kind of fury in his eyes. “A mistake? All the things we said to each other? The way we felt? And don’t try to say it was just me—”
“Let me out of the car, Henry.”
He released my arm, but held me even more forcefully with his eyes. “So you think I’m just gonna go away and forget it all? Is that what you want me to do?”
“Yes, that’s what I want.”
“See you tomorrow,” he called after me before he gunned the engine and took off.
Somehow I managed to hold back the river until he was gone.
FOR THE NEXT two weeks, he was at the pool every day, even though I pretended not to see him. Then one day I looked up from the water, and the bench where he usually sat was vacant. The space outside where he parked the MG, too. I stood there a minute, looking at that empty spot, taking it into my bones the way Henry and I had taken in each other’s stories.
So I did what I always did when I gazed into the contents of my treasure box too long and thought of all the vacancies in my life: I kept moving.
Walk faster; swim harder; don’t turn around. It was what I’d been doing ever since the day I spilled the pennies on the road. The day the car drove away with my sister wailing inside it. For a long time it had worked, too, but not anymore.
Maybe I needed a new motto.
Chapter Sixteen
The Most Beautiful River I Never Saw
AGNES
AFTER I SAW WHAT HAPPENED TO MA WHEN SHE TOLD THE truth, I knew I could no longer hide from Mau Mau. I had to know what happened to her. What had caused Zaidie to hide her face from me when I asked? Was she really taken to an institution like Mr. Dean said?
Dad was dozing on the couch like always; Zaidie was upstairs studying and Ma was alone in the parlor, reading one of her Reader’s Digest condensed novels. I pulled up the chair Jimmy used to use when he helped her with her puzzles and sat in front of her card table.
She kept
reading.
I cleared my throat. “I think I’m coming down with something.”
“Hmm.” And a moment later: “Again, Agnes?”
After a quick appraising look, she returned to her book. To convince her—and myself—I made plenty of noise rattling around in the medicine chest and took to my bed early.
“The grippe’s been going around school,” I called from under my blankets the next morning when I heard her padding down the hall. “Zaidie already took my temperature.”
On cue, Zaidie stepped out of the bathroom. “A hundred and one,” she sang out.
One of the only lies I ever heard my sister tell.
Ma stood in my doorway. “Hmph. I just hope it’s not like that cold you had earlier this year. The longer you stay home, the harder it gets, you know.”
“For crying out loud, Ma, I have the grippe . . . I’m not like you.” As soon as I said it, I felt like Henry after his grandmother put her foot into that shoe.
“I’m sorry,” I murmured, but she was already gone.
AFTER EVERYONE ELSE left the house, I wrapped a blanket around myself and went down to sit in the living room. Ma brought me a glass of the dark ginger ale she always gave us when we were sick and switched on the TV. Even though I didn’t exactly have a fever—or any other sickness I could name—the predictable rituals made me feel better.
In the morning, she usually made some motion to clean up or do the wash, but when we were home sick, she stopped the day to keep us company. She sat before her puzzle—that week it was a map of the world—while I sipped the peppery-tasting drink through a straw and watched her reassemble the continents, piece by piece.
“Remember that golden tree you told us about?” I said out of the blue. She set down her puzzle piece.
“Well, I saw something like that once. Only for me it was a river.”
“A river?” The lines appeared between her eyes. “I hope you don’t mean that dirty stream that runs by the Bousquet place.”
“No, a great, powerful river. The kind they call mighty. Except I don’t know where it is. Maybe I didn’t even see it; I just heard about it.”
All the Children Are Home Page 29