“Anyways, I was so rattled up, I went and told my roommate about the flutter—and about Jimmy. Well, everything. ‘This baby might be all I have left of him,’ I told her. How could I give him away? But what else could I do? Where the hell would I go?”
“You mean the bitch? That’s who you told?” Agnes asked. “What did she say?”
“Nothin’. Not a single damn word.” Jane’s eyes drifted to the duffel and ours followed. “She just dragged that out of the closet and helped me pack, the both of us bawlin’ like idiots.”
For a full five minutes, we sat there in stunned silence, our eyes fixed on the giant bag that almost seemed to be breathing in the middle of our parlor. No matter what we thought, how could we argue with the flutter?
“You said he,” Agnes finally said. “What makes you so sure it’s a boy?”
Jane looked at her with the same weary expression she’d given me that day in the alley when she taught me about Trojans. “It’s what they call maternal instinct, honey. When you’re older—a lot older if you know what’s good for you—you’ll find out.”
“But there’s one more thing I still don’t understand,” I interrupted. “Why’d you come here? You know Jimmy’s not coming home in . . . a long time, and even if he was, you said you don’t want him to know.”
“It had nothing to do with that ass—” she began, but when Agnes and I winced, she spared us. “The only reason I came was . . .” She picked at her nails for a minute, as if considering the answer. Or as if she really didn’t know. “Well, where else?” She finally shrugged. “Isn’t this the place you go when you ain’t got nowhere’s else?”
Not knowing how to respond, we turned to the brownies and finished the whole plate, even though we were already full. Then Agnes and I got up and dragged the duffel bag up to Jimmy’s room.
We were coming down the stairs when Ma pushed the front door open, all riled up over this new actor—Dustin Hoffman—and the movie she’d seen. “The best movie of all time,” she said.
“Almost as good as the popcorn,” Agnes whispered to me, and then we both giggled. The theater was more crowded than usual, so Ma had to use her paper bag twice, but after a while, she’d gotten so lost in Mrs. Robinson that she forgot the people around her. “And Joe Jr. only shouted out once in the whole two hours,” she added proudly.
At that point, though, she must have caught something on our faces because she stopped where she was. “Everything all right around here?”
“You were only gone a couple hours, Ma. What could go wrong?” Agnes said. When Ma went to hang up her pocketbook on a hook, my sister caught my eye.
Agnes headed for the parlor first, and then I led Ma in.
“Look who stopped by,” I said, like I was as surprised as she was to see Jane nesting in the center of the couch.
I was scared of how she might react. After their visit with Jimmy, she and Dad had a few harsh words for the girl who had broken his heart.
“We knew you wouldn’t mind so we invited her to stay for supper,” Agnes said.
“Hmph.” Ma looked from my sister to me and back. Without so much as a greeting for the pregnant girl, she headed toward the kitchen.
Jane looked like she might need the paper towels again, so Agnes went and sat beside her. “Give her time,” she said, taking Jane’s long bony hand. “It took her a while before she knew I was supposed to be here, too.”
And sure enough, after she reminded me it was my turn to set the table, Ma called from the kitchen. “If that . . . girl’s staying, you better set her a plate.”
Chapter Nineteen
A Jade Elephant
AGNES
IT WAS JUST PAST FOUR A.M. WHEN I WENT TO THE CLOSET AND DUG out my treasure box. In the light of my room, the elephant was more a drab green than the vibrant jade I imagined in the fluorescent lighting at social services. More than anything, I wished I had never gone there that day, wished I’d never seen the collection on Julie’s desk or the feather on her wall.
Sometimes all we can do is forget.
For so long, I couldn’t remember who had told me that, but now I saw Ma’s face hovering over me after I woke from another dream about my sister back when I first came.
It’s the move, she said to Dad when he padded into the room. A lot of times, it brings it all back. But don’t worry. She’ll settle down when she’s been here awhile, won’t you, Agnes? Were those the exact words she said? I can’t be sure, but the touch of her hand on my cheek, the tenderness she held back in the daytime, that was indelible.
BY THE TIME I went to see Julie, I’d already forgotten almost everything. I’d held tight to who my sister was for me—Mau Mau—and lost Maud-Marie. But after the case worker read from my records, I could no longer keep it back. Now, if I dreamed about her, I didn’t see the girl in the waves at the beach or the one beside me in the car, our four legs striped by the same sun; I saw Maud-Marie thrashing wildly, shrieking, and in the background someone else—me—crying like I’d never done before or since. Crying because there was nothing I could do to help her. Nothing we could do to help each other. Was that when I had become the kid they described in the files, the one who moved from house to house, misery to misery, as if nothing could touch her?
I put on my clothes, determined to walk to Buskit’s River and chuck Julie Rocher’s elephant as far as I could the way Zaidie had done with Henry’s tie tack after Jon left.
Zaidie rubbed at her eyes when I climbed into bed beside her. “What—Agnes? Don’t you think you’re a little old for . . .” But then she scooted over toward the wall. Though she had pulled the shades tight to keep out the early-morning light, I could sense her folding her hands behind her head, staring upward, the way she did when she was pondering something.
“Boy trouble?”
“I wish. That would be a lot easier.” I found her hand in the dark and placed the elephant inside her palm. She fingered it like it was braille.
“Okay, I give. What is it?”
“Just hold on to it.”
As she turned the elephant over and over in her hand, I told her about my meeting with Julie Rocher. About the file and the shifting labels they’d given Maud-Marie.
Before they settled on mentally retarded, they’d called her bipolar. Possibly schizophrenic. When Zaidie reached for my hand, the tiny elephant cut into my skin.
“Why didn’t you tell me, Zaidie? All those years ago, when you read the file, why didn’t you—”
It was a long time before she spoke into the dark. “Tell me something you remember about her,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be anything she did or even a specific memory. Just the first thing that comes to mind.”
I stood up and switched on the light so she could see the truth of the river on my face before I spoke. “This is what I remember. No matter who she was or what they said was wrong with her, I loved her like she was . . . my own self, Zaidie. Does that make any sense?”
“More sense than anything you’ll read in the file. If you want to know why I didn’t tell you, that’s why. You already knew the only thing that mattered.”
After that, we cried for a while. At first about Mau Mau and then about all the other people we’d lost. When we washed our faces and turned out the light, it was as if they were all streaming past us in the dark. I held Zaidie’s hand like I used to, the jade elephant between us like all our unanswerable questions, and we slept until the morning could no longer be kept back. A new day that demanded we get up and live it.
TWO DAYS LATER, at breakfast, Zaidie waited till Ma left the room, and then—real nonchalant, as if this was an everyday occurrence, she asked Dad if she could borrow the car. I wasn’t sure who was more shocked—Dad or me.
Eyes wide, he set down his coffee cup. “My car? Today?”
“Yup. Agnes and I have to go somewhere.”
“We do?” I said. “But Coach Lois . . .”
“You spend your life at the pool, Agnes. You can afford to
miss one practice.”
Dad mumbled a few words about talking to your mother before he moved on to absolutely not. And how the hell would he get to work? But then he looked across the table at the daughter who had never made such a request before and glanced up at the clock. He clambered to his feet. “Well, no dawdlin’ then. You need to get me to the garage by eight sharp, and no hot-roddin’ around, either.”
Hot-rodding? Zaidie? The two of us tittered, and even Dad almost laughed.
After we dropped him off, we stopped at the N. P. to pick up a couple of colas. It was already so hot that the profusion of pink petunias Joe Jr. had planted out front wilted five minutes after he watered them.
Mr. O’Connor cocked his head in the direction of the Buick parked askew outside the window. “Since when did Louie let you kids use the car?”
Zaidie counted out the change from her purse. “His way of saying he’s going to miss me, I guess. I’m leaving for California in two weeks, you know.”
Joe Jr. seemed to appear from nowhere. “Eleven days,” he said, consulting his watch, as if he was expecting it to tell him the exact number of hours. “Eleven days till Zaida gets on a plane for college, six till Agnes flies off to swim in the nationals. Mrs. Moscatelli told me yesterday. Imagine.”
He even had Ma’s inflection down.
“So you going to tell me where we’re going?” I asked once we were back in the car.
Zaidie put on her sunglasses and smiled. “Nope.”
She kept driving until we reached the edge of town, out past the Egg Auction where she’d been traumatized for life by a row of chickens on a conveyer belt headed for decapitation. She came to a jolting stop in front of the iron gates of a cemetery.
“Sorry. It came up on me faster than I expected.”
“A graveyard? The first time in history Dad lets one of us use the car and this is where you take me?”
She was already on the sidewalk, opening the gate. Driven by something I couldn’t see, she moved purposefully through the field of stones while I trailed behind, reading the markers. I recognized the family names of several classmates.
Despite the drought, it was lush and green, and tucked beneath a canopy of pines, noticeably cooler. “Nicest spot in town on a day like this. Too bad the, um, residents can’t appreciate it,” I said. When she stopped before a small flat stone in the back corner, however, we were reduced to hushed silence.
SYLVIE MENDELSON FINN
October 2, 1926–March 14, 1957
Now it was my turn to take her hand. “Oh, Zaidie . . .” And then a moment later, “How did you find her?”
“There’s only one Jewish cemetery in town. And once I walked through the gate, I remembered so much—like you when you heard about Maud-Marie.”
“But when? And why didn’t you tell me?”
“It was after Jon left. That terrible time when—what did you say about watching your sister scream? You realized there was nothing you could do to help her anymore. Nothing you could do to help each other. I suppose it was true for all of us.”
I stared down at the stone. “So you came here and told her.”
“Sometimes, yeah, I did. And you know, there were days—ordinary afternoons like this one—when it really seemed like she heard me. But mostly, I just sat here and wrote to Jon. I tried different spots, but my best letters, my truest ones, always came from here. It was almost as if they were from both of us—our mother and me.”
“Wait a minute. You’ve been writing—to Jon? My God, Zaidie, how long?”
She looked up from her mother’s name. “Every day since he left. Never missed a one.”
“And did he—”
A long moment passed before she answered my unfinished question with a quick shake of the head. “No, he never wrote back. For all I know, he burns the letters soon as they arrive. Or Michael Finn just throws them away. But I keep writing—day after day and year after year. At this point, it isn’t only for him. It’s for me, too.”
Wordlessly, we began to clean off the stone, to pull the dead leaves from a limp geranium that had been left there.
“You know, sometimes I try to imagine him at thirteen,” I finally said. “But I keep picturing the little kid—that crooked run he had.”
Though I was talking about Jon, I was also thinking of Maud-Marie.
“Someday you’ll find her again,” Zaidie said, responding like she often did, to words I hadn’t said. “Then you’ll learn the truth about what really happened to her.”
“You really think so?”
She nodded. “And you know what else? Someday, when we’re done with growing up, we’ll get on a plane or a bus—or hell, we’ll just walk to Colorado if that’s what it takes. But we will be with Jon again.”
She stood up and brushed the dirt from her clothes. Then, staring down at the finality of the dates on the stone, she said, “There’s only one thing that could stop us.”
Chapter Twenty
Migration
DAHLIA
SO NOW WE’RE RUNNING SOME KINDA HOME FOR UNWED MOTHERS? Is that what we’re doing here, Louie?”
We were lying in the dark, him on the edge of sleep, me stewing. Jane had been camped in Jimmy’s room for more than a week, that hulking bag of hers resting deep in the closet—with no sign of leaving. Ever, I liked to emphasize when Louie and I argued about it.
“The kid’ll be ten . . . twenty . . . dropping off his own pregnant girlfriend. For heaven’s sake, Lou, where do we draw the line?” Louie walked away every time—except the once.
“Sometimes there is no line, Dahlia. Isn’t that what you been telling me all these years?”
Dear God. There was nothing more aggravating than when he quoted me back to myself. I was about to say so when he sauntered off again.
In bed, however, there was no escape but into himself. He burrowed deep into the blankets.
“I don’t mind helping out, but she’s been here ten days now.”
That didn’t get a rise out of him, so I went on, speaking louder. “I’m sorry, Lou, but she’s no relation to us. It’s about time her own family—”
“And the rest of them are relations?” he said, seizing on one line and ignoring the heart of it.
“Jimmy and the girls were little when they came. And we decided to take them in; we asked for it. This one—”
“This one’s carryin’ Jimmy’s kid. You think I’m gonna sit back and watch him end up with someone like the Deans or the one who left Agnes laying in her crib for a year?” Though it was dark, I could feel the energy of his hand slicing through the air. “Over my dead body.”
In the past, I’d been the one to navigate Louie’s grunts and growls as I argued to let a child stay, or to make room for just one more. I put my hand on his and listened to his breathing until it grew steady again.
“And you think I haven’t considered all that? It’s just . . . Jimmy’s gonna be away so darn long. Once Jane gets her figure back . . . well, you know what’s gonna happen.”
“And the baby?”
“There’s plenty of help available from the state if she applies.”
“But the girl loves Jimmy. She says—”
“I know what she says, and right now she means it. But six years, Lou. Think of it. She’ll be bringin’ boyfriends here next—to Jimmy’s room. I guess that’s fine with you, though . . .”
Again, I butted up against his rocky silence. So he was going to make me confess everything, was he? Well, so be it.
“It was bad enough when they came for Jon, but after everything with Jimmy—I just don’t have it in me, Lou. Getting attached only to . . .”
This time he was so quiet I was sure he was asleep. It wasn’t till I turned away and started to drift off myself that he spoke.
“You know, Dahlia, every day I hear you braggin’ about all the places you been. How nothin’ stops you—not when someone slows a car to yell at you. Nothin’. Even when that kid pinged you in the back with
his slingshot, you kept goin’. A fella would think you weren’t scared of anything. But inside—” He took an audible inhalation. “—Inside, you’re more chicken than ever.”
I bolted up straight in bed. “Louis J. Moscatelli, are you calling me a coward?”
“You’ll have to answer that one for yourself.”
Again, he turned his back, and in less than a minute I heard the low rhythm of his snore.
If that wasn’t just like him.
While he slept on, I spent half the night trying to figure out where Jane would go if we kicked her out, the other half worrying how Jimmy would take it all. Meanwhile, what in the world would happen to the poor creature growing inside her belly in the next room? The one she planned to name James. “Not Jimmy, either, I want my boy to be called by his proper name,” she stipulated every time.
Sometimes, when she said it, I peered out the window, almost seeing the ghost of that two-year-old turning somersaults in the backyard.
“I don’t have it in me, Lou,” I repeated in the dark. “Do you understand? I don’t have it in me.” The same words he’d said to me the last time I’d taken to my bed. He snored louder.
And for all my thinking and analyzing and fretting, what did I come up with in the morning? Nothing but a thumping headache—same as always.
Louie shook his head when he saw me reaching for my Anacin. “Someday you’ll learn. What’s that thing Agnes’s coach says? Don’t anticipate; participate.”
“So now you’re quoting happy jargon from a coach? You of all people?” I stormed away, still nattering to myself. “What next, Louie? Norman Vincent Peale at the breakfast table?”
He almost smiled, but not quite. “Might not be a bad idea.” Then he grabbed his lunch pail and left me in my stew.
If that wasn’t just like him.
IT WAS WARM and breezy the night before Agnes flew out to Wisconsin for the nationals. Louie was trudging up to bed when she called us out to look at the sky. Jane claimed to be under the weather, which meant she planned to spend the next hour or two in her room bawling. And none too quietly, either.
All the Children Are Home Page 33