The Long Way Home

  “There’s a museum in Pauling.”

  “The fishing museum is fine, but it isn’t the same as the Met, Julia, and you know it. Plus, I miss the stores and Broadway.” And I miss walking along the streets that Dad once walked along, thinking that my feet might be stepping in the exact same spots where his stepped. “I’m just not happy here.”

  “So you’d rather abandon us.”

  “I’m not abandoning you! How many times do we have to have this conversation? I’m going back to a place I love.”

  “Mom feels like she failed you, you know. And Peter is really mad. That’s why he hasn’t said good morning to you yet.”

  “I — I truly don’t know what to say.” Dana put a trembling hand to her mouth. “We’ve been talking about this for so long. Mom and I have talked. Mom and Adele have talked. Adele wants me to come live with her.”

  “But Mom doesn’t want you to go. Not really.”

  “Why are you telling me this today, Julia? Why didn’t you tell me last week or last month? You waited until now so you could make me feel guilty.”

  “I did not!”

  “You did, too.” Dana looked at her watch. “My train leaves in an hour.”

  “Fine. Go get on your train.”

  Dana stood up. She hefted the suitcase, lugged it out of the bedroom and through the kitchen to the door at the top of the steps, and set it by her other suitcase. Every possession she owned, all stowed in two suitcases. She turned around and found herself facing her mother.

  Abby gave her a small smile. “We’re going to miss you, lovey.”

  “I’m going to miss you, too.”

  “I know you are.”

  “I won’t miss you!” Peter shouted from his spot in front of the television set. Dana could hear Captain Kangaroo having a conversation with Mr. Green Jeans.

  “Yes, he will,” Abby whispered.

  Dana nodded. “I know. And I really am going to miss all of you. It’s just that I feel like I have to do this. New York is part of me. Plus, I’ll get to go to an arts school. An arts school. It’s a dream come true.”

  Abby smiled at her again. Then she clapped her hands. “Everybody into the car!” she said.

  Julia’s crabby voice drifted out from the back bedroom. “I’m not going.”

  “Yes, you are,” said Abby firmly.

  “No, I’m not.”

  Abby opened her mouth, closed it, then opened it again and said, “Peter, please turn off the television. Everybody but Julia into the car.”

  Peter insisted on carrying one of the heavy suitcases down the steps to the street below. Dana followed him with the other, and Abby brought up the rear with Nell. The suitcases had been stowed in the car and Dana was pulling her door closed when suddenly it was jerked open again. She looked through her window and saw Julia.

  “Move over,” said her twin, and slid in beside Dana and Nell. She sat silently, arms crossed, while Abby steered the car through town.

  At the tiny train station outside of Ipswich, Abby bought Dana’s ticket and spoke with the porter. Dana stood on the platform with Peter and her sisters.

  “I’m mad at you,” Peter announced.

  Julia continued to refuse to speak.

  “Are you mad at me, too?” Dana asked Nell.

  Nell shook her head. “Nope. I like trains.”

  Julia looked at her little sister in disbelief. “She’s not coming back, you know.”

  “I am, too!” exclaimed Dana. “I’ll be back at Christmas. Maybe before.”

  “See?” said Nell.

  “You don’t even know what we’re talking about,” muttered Julia.

  “Could everyone please stop arguing?” said Abby. She handed Dana her ticket. “For heaven’s sake. The train will be here in five minutes. Let’s not spend Dana’s last moments here in this mood.”

  “But I want her to stay,” said Peter.

  “I know you do, lovey.”

  Nell was the first to hear the train whistling its way around the bend before it pulled into the station. “It’s coming!” she cried.

  Dana hugged her family — first Peter, then Nell, then her mother, and finally Julia.

  “Love you,” Dana said to her twin.

  Julia turned away and marched off in the direction of the car.

  The porter picked up Dana’s suitcases as easily as if they were empty.

  “Remember,” said Abby. “You change trains in Bangor and again in Boston. Find a porter to help you.”

  Dana nodded. She followed the porter onto the train. The moment she had taken her seat, she peered out the window and waved wildly to her family. Abby was dabbing at her eyes with a hankie but she waved back. Nell waved, too, jumping up and down, and Peter waved solemnly. The whistle blew again, the train started with a jerk, and Dana glided out of Ipswich.

  * * *

  The ride was long and uncomfortably warm. Dana sat by her window and fanned herself with a magazine. In Bangor, she bought a sandwich at the station. A porter helped her with her luggage and waved her on to the next train. Dana tipped him with money her mother had given her, and he said, “Good luck, little lady.”

  A second sticky ride followed the first one. Dana bought a Coke in Boston, and at last was on her way to New York City. As the scenery changed from rocky coastline to village to town to city, she relaxed in her seat, but when the first skyscrapers of Manhattan appeared on the horizon, she drew in a sharp breath and sat up straight.

  “Pennsylvania Station! Last stop, Pennsylvania Station! New York City!” called the conductor, making his way through the cars.

  Dana felt her heartbeat quicken. The train spun along in underground darkness, emerged into a lighted labyrinth, and finally ground to a halt. Before she knew it, Dana and her suitcases were being jostled through a throng of hurrying, absorbed New Yorkers. Home at last, thought Dana as she struggled along.

  She spotted Adele at the top of a flight of stairs and lurched toward her. They embraced for a long time.

  “I missed you so much!” exclaimed Dana.

  “Ditto,” said Adele with a grin.

  Half an hour later, Adele opened the door to her apartment with a flourish. “Home sweet home,” she said.

  There were the pink and blue walls, the beaded, red-shaded lamp, and the birdcage, which now housed a spider plant that trailed its vines between the bars and down toward the floor.

  “That’s your corner of the room,” said Adele. She pointed to the daybed, which ordinarily was fixed up to look like a couch, but had now been transformed into Dana’s bed. Beside it was a chest of drawers awaiting Dana’s clothing and photos and trinkets. “I’m sorry you don’t have a bedroom,” Adele went on. “This is the best I can do.”

  “It’s perfect,” said Dana. “It’s absolutely perfect. Thank you, Adele.” She sat down with a sigh. “I’m going to live in New York forever.”

  Dana awoke to the sound of the television. “Adele?” she mumbled, pulling her pillow over her face.

  “Sorry, but I have to find out what’s going on. Anyway, it’s time for you to get up. You don’t want to be late for school.”

  Dana removed the pillow and smiled. This was true. She did not want to be late. Manhattan High School for the Arts was the first school since Miss Fine’s that she actually enjoyed attending. She liked everything about it — her new teachers, her new friends, her classes. At MHSA she would be able to pick a major — a major, just like in college! — and that major might be oil painting or sculpture or design.

  Dana sat up in her bed and peered across the living room at the grainy black-and-white images on Adele’s television set. Her aunt was standing next to the set, adjusting the antennae and squinting at the screen.

  “Any changes since yesterday?” asked Dana.

  “It’s hard to tell. I don’t think so. I wish President Kennedy would address the nation again. I feel more comfortable when I hear words coming directly from his mouth.”

  “I just don
’t think there really is going to be a nuclear war,” said Dana cautiously. “Do you?”

  Adele shook her head and shrugged. “Nobody thought the United States would drop an atomic bomb on anyone,” she replied, “but we destroyed Hiroshima.”

  “And Cuba is a lot closer to the US than the US was to Japan.”

  “Yes. But I do have faith in President Kennedy.”

  “Oh, me, too,” said Dana. But her stomach crawled with nervousness. The Cuban missile crisis was the scariest thing she could remember happening to her country. The Soviet Union and Cuba were conspiring to launch nuclear weapons at the United States — from Cuba itself, which was only a little over a thousand miles from New York City. “But if there were a nuclear war and we thought Manhattan was a target, what would we do?” asked Dana. “Would we try to leave?”

  “We have a long way to go before we start worrying about that.” Adele switched the television off quickly just as a newscaster intoned, “In the event of an actual nuclear war . . .”

  Adele looked pointedly at the clock. “Up and at ’em,” she said. “I’ll start breakfast while you get dressed. Coffee and toast okay with you?”

  “Yes,” said Dana, who’d had her first cup of coffee the night she’d returned to New York and who now drank it several times a day, a fact she thought was better kept from her mother.

  * * *

  Forty minutes later, Adele locked the door of the apartment, and she and Dana started down the stairs to the ground floor, Dana carrying her portfolio, her book bag, and her purse.

  “We’re going to start working on self-portraits today,” Dana announced. “You know what? Back when we were going to Allen MacNeil, everyone had to take art, and there was this boy in my class named Todd. And when our teacher told us we were going to paint self-portraits, Todd said, ‘Who am I supposed to paint? I don’t know anyone who wants their portrait painted.’”

  “No!” said Adele, laughing.

  “Yup. Really.”

  Adele held the door open for Dana and they turned left and walked to the end of the quiet, tree-lined block. Two blocks later they reached Seventh Avenue.

  “It’s like a different world here, and we’ve only come two and a half blocks,” said Dana. The street was lined with office buildings, coffee shops, and hotels. Lane after lane of taxis raced by, bus gears ground, and Dana could feel the vibration of the subway below the sidewalk. Crowds of people rushed along, bumping into one another and not apologizing. Horns blared, a garbage truck wheezed past, and a man with bare feet brandished a cane as if it were a bandleader’s baton while he sang loudly, “A girl fell in the toilet bowl, the toilet bowl, the toilet bowl. A girl fell in the toilet bowl. . . .”

  At this, Adele grabbed Dana’s elbow and pulled her along the street. “It’s kind of shocking, isn’t it?”

  “The man?” asked Dana.

  “Well, everything.”

  “I guess so. But I still love it. All of it.”

  They had reached the bus stop. “Here comes my bus,” Dana said. “I’ll see you tonight.”

  Adele thrust a bill into her niece’s hand. “Can you pick up some hamburger at the market on your way home?”

  “Sure.” Dana kissed Adele and stepped onto the bus, juggling her possessions, and noting, before she had even paid the driver, that there were no empty seats. She shrugged and positioned herself by a man who was engrossed in his newspaper. She tried to read the front page. When her eyes fell on the words crisis and nuclear, she turned around and gazed out the window.

  The crosstown bus heaved and jerked its way to the east side of Manhattan, and presently Dana jostled her way to the door and stepped into the quieter neighborhood of her new school. She had walked three blocks when she heard a call of, “Dana! Dana!”

  She looked over her shoulder. Hurrying toward her, portfolio bumping against her legs, wild black hair flying around her shoulders, was Loretta Johnson.

  Dana grinned. “Hi,” she said, and paused to wait for Loretta to catch up with her.

  “Did you do the math?” asked Loretta.

  “Yes, but I don’t think it’s right. I’ll bet you got all the answers, plus the extra credit question.”

  “Well . . .”

  “This is an arts school,” said Dana. “How come we still have to take math and English and history?”

  “You want to be well-rounded, don’t you? You have to be well-rounded if you want to get into college.”

  “I haven’t thought that far ahead.”

  Loretta shifted her heavy book bag. “I have,” she said. “Got it all mapped out. I’m going to be the first person in my family to go to college. After that I’m going to illustrate children’s books.”

  Dana winced. Now was the moment when she should have told Loretta about Father, and about the fact that she’d already illustrated a book. But Father and the publishing parties, the days of wearing ball gowns and drinking Shirley Temples while she walked arm in arm with Zander, all seemed to be part of someone else’s past. Living in the city again brought back memories, but not much more.

  Dana heard another shout, and she and Loretta paused to wait for Emily Reynolds and Tanya Wen to catch up with them. (Dana was relieved that she wouldn’t have to bring up Father after all.) They walked in a noisy group, chatting fast, interrupting one another, stopping to pull drawings out of their portfolios, until at last MHSA came into view.

  The school dominated an entire block. Dana stopped in her tracks, stared at the building, and refrained from saying “pinch me” to Loretta, which she had said to her nearly every school day morning since they had first met and Dana had confessed that attending MHSA was a dream come true. It was a public school — no tuition — where Dana could study art with other kids who took it as seriously as she did, and with teachers who would encourage her as enthusiastically as Mrs. Booth and Mrs. Petrowski once had.

  “Come on, girl,” Loretta said to Dana. “Just say ‘pinch me’ and get it over with. You know you want to.”

  “Pinch me!” Dana cried, and she and her friends ran inside.

  * * *

  Dana’s morning classes consisted of all the things she wished she didn’t have to take, but knew she had to pass: English, algebra, and American history. After lunch, things improved considerably. She took classes in sculpture, painting, and commercial art, and had a private drawing lesson with a teacher named Monsieur Royale, who was inspiring but mysterious. He was an excellent teacher, who had two paintings of his own on display in the Met. If he was good enough for the Met, why was he teaching at MHSA? Dana had speculated about this with Adele one night, and Adele’s response had been “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” which Dana had taken to mean, “Don’t ask too many questions.”

  Toward the end of the afternoon, Dana stowed her book bag in her locker and hurried toward Monsieur Royale’s room. She was not twenty feet from the doorway when she heard a high-pitched siren whooping through the halls of MHSA.

  “Duck and cover!” someone shouted. “Duck and cover!”

  Dana’s heart began to pound. She hated duck-and-cover drills. Unlike fire drills, which were sort of fun because you were pretty sure the school hadn’t actually caught fire, but nevertheless you got to go outside for as long as fifteen minutes and miss, perhaps, a third of your American history class, duck-and-cover drills reminded Dana of all the things that currently terrified her. When you ducked and covered, you were protecting yourself from a nuclear blast. She imagined the flash that was supposed to come just before such an explosion. She hadn’t seen one, so surely this was another drill, and not a missile fired on Manhattan from somewhere in Cuba. But still.

  “All students who are in the halls, against the walls now!” called Monsieur Royale, who had rushed out of his classroom.

  Dana dropped the box of charcoals she’d been carrying and leaned against a wall of lockers, forehead resting on her crossed arms. She squeezed her eyes shut. She knew that the students who were inside
the classrooms had leaped out of their seats and crawled under their desks, which seemed even scarier than leaning up against a wall.

  “This is just a drill, right?” Dana whispered to the boy who was standing next to her, face buried in his arms.

  “I guess,” he replied.

  Dana held her breath and didn’t let it out until the all-clear sounded.

  “Go on to your classes,” said Monsieur Royale.

  Dana, shaking, followed him to his room, but found that she couldn’t concentrate on her work.

  “Settle down, Mademoiselle Burley,” he said kindly.

  Dana didn’t settle down until school had ended and she was walking back to the bus stop in a world that seemed unchanged — taxis, garbage trucks, hurrying New Yorkers, and no bright flashes lighting the sky.

  * * *

  Later, back in the apartment, a meat loaf baking in the oven, Dana sat at the drawing table her aunt had managed to squish into the living room. She thought about her self-portrait. Then she thought about a new assignment — a family portrait. That was going to be interesting. Should she include her dead father in the family portrait? Should she draw just herself and Adele, since they lived five hundred miles away from the rest of her family?

  Dana considered turning on the television as a distraction, but wisely decided against it. If there were more bad news, she wanted to hear it with Adele. She opened her box of charcoals and began sketching.

  “Well,” said Adele briskly as she and Dana were finishing dinner that evening. “I think we should call your mother tonight.” Adele sounded perky, as if she were suggesting a trip to Coney Island. “We’ll just check in with the Pauling crowd!”

  But Dana knew that a long-distance phone call meant her aunt was worried and needed to talk to her sister.

  Even so, Adele gallantly handed Dana the receiver while the phone was still ringing. “You can talk first,” she said.

  The phone rang once more and then a man’s voice said, “Hello?”

  Dana hesitated. Maybe Adele had dialed the wrong number. “Hello? Um, I’m looking for Abigail Burley. This is her daughter.”