All the Children Are Home

by Patry Francis

  “I tried to warn Dahlia myself. But when I called, her mother just accused me of stirring things up. Said they had enough trouble with the Woods already. If I could have explained, I know she would’ve listened. I mean, she’s a mother; she had to. But she slammed the phone down before I got a chance and refused to pick it up again.

  “So I tried Murph—Margaret Murphy’s house. Dahlia’s best friend. The sister who answered must have thought I was calling on Bobby’s behalf. Murph wasn’t home, she told me, and she hadn’t seen Dahlia in a week. Then she hung up on me, too. That’s when I remembered the restaurant where Dahlia worked. If I’d had a car like Bobby, I would have made it in time, but by the time I got there, she had just left.”

  By then, the defense attorney was on his feet once again, asking to approach the bar. “Where is this going? The witness obviously saw nothing.”

  “We’re getting to that, Your Honor,” the prosecutor insisted. “Where did you search for Miss Garrison next?” he asked when he was allowed to continue.

  “Well, I had a hunch she might be headed for the Murphys’ house over on Cushing Street—her and Murph were pretty much inseparable, and there was something I heard in her sister’s voice. I knew she was lying when she said Murph wasn’t home.”

  “And was your hunch correct?”

  Phil nodded. “She was a couple of blocks away when I spotted her. I called her name, but like the rest of them, she must have thought Bobby sent me. She walked faster. Even though I was pretty tired, I still would’ve caught her. But just about then, I saw the car stop . . .”

  “And did you recognize the vehicle?”

  “Yes. All the kids at school were jealous of that blue Chevy.”

  “And did you know who owned it?”

  “It belonged to Silas Wood.”

  At that, the courtroom gasped. The judge again sounded the gavel.

  “After Dahlia got in, I chased them as far as I could till they made the turn for the highway. Then I—I didn’t know what to do so I called the police.”

  “Were they of any help?”

  He gave a terse shake of the head. “‘We’re not in the habit of arresting people because of what they might do. They gotta actually do something, son.’ And when I mentioned Silas’s name, he actually laughed at me. ‘The mayor’s boy? Is this a prank?’”

  At that point, Phil had forgotten the rules. He looked directly at me.

  “I’m sorry, Dahlia. I would’ve kept going. I would’ve found someone with a car, even if I had to go to my dad. I would’ve kept looking, but I had no idea where they were taking you.” His eyes glittered with tears. “I just didn’t know what to do.”

  Thank you, I mouthed to him.

  I think there was another objection then, but it didn’t matter. That moment, more than anything, the sheen in Phil’s eyes, the words I could only breathe, had convicted Silas and everyone knew it.

  RUMBLING ALONG IN the car these many years later, I closed my eyes and let out a long sigh.

  From the start, I’d known I couldn’t go back to the girl I was, but I still believed some kind of justice could come out of it. And I had no idea how dearly my family would pay for bringing down the Woods. How much it would cost me.

  It was too late to head off to nursing school that year like I’d planned, but I thought I could leave town and forget. Maybe we all could—like Phil and his family eventually did. But the hospital bills wiped my parents out, and after everyone boycotted the restaurant, there’d been nothing to start over with. It broke my father, turned my mother meaner than ever.

  But it was the hate that got to me more than anything. The force of it. It felt like something physical, like those kicks I took in the woods, the blows that killed the babies we never had. It murdered something in me, too.

  As if he read my mind, Louie reached over and covered my hand with his own. Just the way he’d been doing for twenty-eight years.

  “To be honest,” I said, “if you hadn’t started leaving those rocks on the porch, I wouldn’t be sitting here.”

  “Most likely you’d be riding in some Cadillac with a doctor or a lawyer; that’s where you’d be. Smart and pretty as you were—”

  “No, listen to me, Lou. I’m telling you about the day you called me out of the darkest woods.”

  In the mirror, I caught sight of his eyes.

  “When I got out of the hospital, Doc Magee sent me home with sleeping pills, and something else for my nerves. They helped for a while, but after the trial, after all the threatening calls, the stones thrown through the windows of the house and the restaurant, the way people looked at me whenever I went outside— There’s nothing ugly as hate, Louie, though you don’t know till you experience it yourself. And once that arrow burrows deep enough, there’s no getting it out. No running away from it, either.

  “There seemed like only one way out. Every night when my mother gave those pills to me, I stashed them in my jewelry box instead of taking them . . . I’d just about saved enough when you walked up those steps and knocked on the door.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Flutter

  ZAIDIE

  AS MA VENTURED FURTHER INTO THE WORLD SHE HAD ONCE disowned and Agnes spent more time at the pool, I became the one who stayed home. There was still school and my part-time job at Hanley’s, but otherwise, I lived in the walls of the gray house on Sanderson Street. I lived in three suitcases that were lined up, small to large, in the corner of my room. I lived at the top of the treacherous flight of stairs that led to the attic. And most of all, I lived in the typewriter on the old desk Jimmy had given me.

  Flufferbell had taken to following me around the way she had once trailed after Ma. She regarded me suspiciously whenever I added another item to my suitcases, meowed in protest if I went to the closet for my shoes, and howled every time I crossed the maledizione. Soon I would leave her for good and we both knew it. With no money for a plane ticket to come home on holidays, I might not be back for a year. Maybe longer.

  Sometimes I felt as lost as I’d been the day I came.

  Alone in the attic, I filled journals and typed out long letters to my brothers—some of which I mailed—others too filled with unanswerable questions to foist on anyone.

  When those questions got too big to fit into a notebook or an envelope, I turned to fiction.

  I called my first story Betrayal. Wasn’t that my inheritance—the weight I couldn’t set down or leave behind no matter how I tried? Just like Jimmy carried his parents’ alcoholism and Agnes her abandonment, my father’s repeated treacheries—and the secret fear I might be like him—trailed me wherever I went. Alone in the attic, I gave them to “Colleen,” a character named after a dark-haired model in Seventeen. But without my permission, Colleen’s life, my life, refused to be about any of that. Somehow, it kept turning into a Love Story.

  The only question was when it began. Was it the day Ma opened the door to Jon and me, first hesitantly, and then wide? Or before that, when I, at five years old, had risen from bed at three in the morning to comfort my screaming baby brother, my mother instructing me on how to prepare formula from her sickbed? Writing about them, I was keenly aware of how much I missed them. But more than that, I was overwhelmed with gratitude that I’d had them while I did.

  And then I was pulled back further, back to New Jersey when Sylvie and Michael Finn and I had lived together as a family. I must have typed a hundred pages before I realized that no one ever knows for sure where and when the spark ignited their Love Story. Or why. Or where it’s heading. We can only pick up the thread where we are and continue. Best we can. Day after day. I kept typing.

  Between the clanging of the rickety fan I had dragged up to the attic after Flufferbell clawed a hole in the window screen and the transistor radio that kept me company and the tap of my typewriter keys, I didn’t hear the banging at the door, even though it was coming from a girl who knew how to use her fists.

  Apparently, she was aware of w
here I spent my days because she pinged my window with a rock. Thrown one bit harder, she might have shattered it. When I switched off the radio, I heard her yelling, “What the hell, Z? You gonna come down and open the friggin’ door or what? I been banging for a half hour.”

  Even if I hadn’t recognized the voice, I would have known who it was. Not only had she appropriated Jimmy’s nickname for me, Jane had even mastered his syntax.

  She plowed in, dropping a large duffel bag in the foyer with a thump as soon as I opened the door.

  “Holy hell, what’s in that thing?” I asked. We seemed to have dispensed with stuff like hello.

  “What does it look like? Everything I own.”

  Then, before I could ask what it—and more importantly she—was doing in our foyer with everything she owned, Jane Miller, toughest girl I knew, sank down onto her bag and began to cry. I looked wistfully in the direction of Ma’s headquarters, momentarily wishing I’d never encouraged her to go out. At least she would have known what to do.

  “It’s like ninety degrees out there, Jane. Can I get you something to—”

  She blew her nose angrily. “A beer would hit the spot. And what the hell are you looking at? You never seen a chick cry before?”

  By the time I’d poured her a lemonade, she had moved into the parlor and was sitting in the hole on the couch. The duffel bag rested in the middle of the floor like a large, feral animal. I almost tripped on it.

  After she downed her drink, she held out the glass for a refill. “I just hitchhiked from somewheres north of Boston. And I had to walk from Main Street, where the trucker let me out. A good mile and a half.” She cocked her head at the duffel bag. “That thing’s heavy as a mother.”

  “You hitchhiked? From where? And why didn’t . . . your parents pick you up?”

  “If I had to drag that thing across the Sahara I wouldn’t call them. Are you gonna get me some more lemonade or what?”

  I started for the kitchen.

  “And while you’re in there, think you can fix me something to eat?” she called after me. “I was so nerved up this morning I couldn’t even think of breakfast.”

  “My mother should be back in a little while.” I scanned the street hopefully as I set a ham sandwich on the coffee table.

  “Not unless the movie’s a bomb, she won’t.”

  “The movie?”

  “When I passed the Colonial, I saw your ma and that crazy kid that used to work with Jimmy buying tickets to the matinee.”

  I’d forgotten. A week ago, Ma had gone to the movies with Joe Jr. on his day off like Jimmy sometimes did. Another new frontier for her, and she’d only had to breathe into the paper bag she carried once, she bragged.

  The movie was okay, but that popcorn, my goodness, Louie, it was out of this world, she said at supper. Everything’s a damn wonder to you these days, ain’t it, Dahlia? he grumbled.

  “He’s not crazy,” I said to Jane. “He’s just . . . he’s Joe Jr. is who he is.”

  “Now you sound like that asshole Jimmy. Anyways, I only came here cause I wanted to talk to you and I knew your ma and Agnes would be out.”

  I looked at her nervously. “Me?”

  “If anyone can understand my predicament, it’s you, Z.”

  Though I still wasn’t sure what she was driving at, my mind flashed uncomfortably on the talk we’d had in the alley outside Rusty’s Hideaway and that fateful little packet she’d handed me.

  My eyes must have been round as soup plates. “Predicament?”

  She stood up and open her arms. “Notice anything different?”

  Poking out from her baggy clothes, her arms were as skinny as ever, but wiry with strength. Different? Her face was more angular, and in spite of her tears in the hallway, there was a new flintiness in her eyes.

  “You cut your hair?” I asked weakly.

  At that, she lifted up her shirt, revealing the hard round lump beneath it. “Most of the girls at the house are twice as big at five months. I carry small.”

  Girls? The house? Five months? I didn’t know what to ask first. And why was she still holding her shirt up? Was she proud of that mortifying sight? Or did she just want to force me to look at it, the way she had pressed the Trojan on me in the alley?

  “I made brownies yesterday,” I finally said. “You want one?”

  “Two. And a big glass of milk. We’re supposed to drink—”

  “So I’ve heard.” Though she’d finally dropped her shirt, it was like she was still forcing me to see. Still making me hear those words: five months.

  Meanwhile, where was Ma? Sitting at the Colonial, a bucket of the most amazing popcorn ever in her hands, entranced by some dumb movie. I practically ran for the kitchen.

  When I emerged with a plate of brownies (adding a few Lorna Doones since she was eating for two), I found Jane leaning back on the couch. Her eyes were closed as if, weary from her adventure, she’d drifted off to sleep, the traitorous Flufferbell curled up on her lap. Now that she’d dumped her horrible story on me, she was smiling as serenely as the Madonna.

  I cleared my throat and thumped the plate on the table in front of her as loudly as I could, but what woke her was the sound of the front door flapping open.

  “Ma!” Agnes sang out. “I made my best time in the butterfly!”

  “Ma’s at the movies,” Jane answered, blinking awake.

  So now she was calling my mother Ma. She seemed to think she’d taken control of the house, too.

  “Get yourself a glass of milk,” she told Agnes. “I might as well tell yas both at the same time.”

  Agnes took a quick look at the ominous, giant duffel, dropped her swim bag beside it, and obeyed.

  Of course, Jane couldn’t resist pulling up her shirt and giving Agnes a taste of the shock I got. It seemed like the thing had grown since she sprang it on me.

  Agnes turned about as pale as a brown-skinned person can. “Shit. Sorry. I mean—congratulations?” she stammered. “When did you find out?”

  “I started to have my suspicions right around the time your asshole brother decided to go out and beat the crap out of that guy. Now you know why I was so pissed.” Her eyes flashed. “I couldn’t friggin’ believe it. I mean, we used a safe every time . . . Well, all but that night we were out late walking in the graveyard.”

  “The graveyard?” By then, Agnes looked as if she was the one with morning sickness.

  “When the spirit hits, it hits, honey. Anyway, the dead don’t mind; that’s what Jimmy said.” She almost smiled before she remembered how pissed she was. “My mother figured it out before I did. She came home with one of those tests.”

  “Does Jimmy know?”

  “Why would I tell that asshole?” Jane said, but again I saw a watery glimmer in her eyes. “After the shit he pulled, he wouldn’t see the kid till he was six—even if I was allowed to keep it.”

  Suddenly, it all made sense. “You said you were staying at an, um, a house?”

  “Same place I went last time.” Agnes moved in closer and I went for the paper towels, because by then, Jane was crying so hard Kleenex weren’t going to cut it.

  “At first, I refused. I’m twenty-one now so it’s not like they could make me. And you know, I almost had my mom on my side, but between the first pregnancy and then my job at the Hideaway, and most of all Jimmy, my stepdad had already about had it with me.

  “‘Once was a mistake,’ he yelled at my mom, making sure the whole house heard him. ‘But twice? That’s a pattern.’ Even I couldn’t deny he had a point.

  “He started following me and my mom around the house, asking how I thought I would support a child on my waitress money. And where I planned to live. ‘Not at this house, with my daughters,’ he bellowed, making it clear I’d never been one—even in the beginning when he pretended. ‘I can’t have that here. I won’t, Iris.’” Jane unfurled a few more towels from the roll and mopped her eyes.

  “What could Mom say? She’s been giving in fo
r nineteen years. At this point, it’s the only thing she knows how to do—and besides, deep down she knows everything in that house is his. Everything but me, that is. So one night she comes into my room. ‘We can’t be selfish, Janie,’ she says. ‘Think of what’s best for the baby. And once it’s all over, you’ll still have your whole future ahead of you.’ Same shit I heard the last time. The only difference was that this time my stepdad had agreed to pay my tuition if I wanted to go back to school. Once again, I saw my shiny ticket . . .”

  She paused for another raucous blow of her nose. “That’s not why I agreed, though.”

  Agnes and I stared at her.

  “I did it because I wanted to get back at Jimmy for ruining everything when I needed him most. Someday I’d write him a letter and tell him I’d given his son away just like his mom and dad had done to him. The way I felt having to do this all over again? He’d feel it double.” Staring at the floor, she nodded her head. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

  My eyes pivoted, almost involuntarily, toward the duffel bag. “But then you changed your mind?”

  “It was last night. I was in my room with the bitch of a roommate they give me. Anyways, I had just started to fall off to sleep when I feel this . . . this flutter. Course, I knew what it was, from . . . before. But I don’t know, all a sudden it was like Jimmy was with me. Like he hadn’t done what he done, hadn’t been sent where he was sent. Nope. He was right there with me.”

  She paused, unconsciously putting a hand on her belly, as if she was back in that room. Just her and the flutter. “You know what he used to do sometimes?”

  My sister and I shook our heads in unison, afraid she was going to tell us more about the graveyard. I was even more scared when she got up, closed her eyes, and took my face in her hands.

  “This,” she said, with the kind of solemnity Nonna talked about her Communion.

  After a minute, she released me and returned to the hole. “Yeah. He’d put his two hands on my face and hold it like it was the most precious thing in the world. Then he’d tell me how friggin’ beautiful I was. Me. Jane Miller. And you wanna know the crazy thing? He meant it. No one ever did that before, and let’s face it—with the mug on me? It ain’t gonna happen again.