The Long Way Home

  “A few hours. The pains started around midnight.”

  Dana nodded and looked away. “Do you want anything to eat?” she asked at last.

  “No. Thanks. Wait with me, though, will you?”

  Dana and her mother sat silently on the living room couch in the early morning light, Dana facing the street so that she could watch for Adele and Mrs. Burger. She was surprised that Julia hadn’t come downstairs yet, but her sister’s behavior had been unpredictable ever since Abby had tearfully told her and Dana and Peter about their tight finances, and about all the changes that lay ahead for the Burleys.

  When five minutes had passed and no one had arrived, Dana turned from the window and said, “Now do you want something to eat?”

  Her mother managed a smile. “No, thanks, lovey. Really, I’m okay.”

  What her mother meant, Dana knew, was not that she was truly okay, but that she was okay without food. Her pregnancy, which had seemed endless, had been marked as much by the fact that the baby growing in her belly would never know its father, as it had by the fact that Abby had barely been able to eat a bite of food. For months she had lived mainly on soda crackers and milk, and Dana felt a pang every time she remembered privately accusing her mother of drinking at Saul’s dinner party. Now she knew that her mother’s illness on the ferry had been due to the baby — morning sickness, which in Abby’s case had been morning, afternoon, and evening sickness.

  Dana turned back to the window and at last she saw Mrs. Burger hurry by, almost running. Dana had never seen her run. Letti Burger held on to her little pink velvet hat with one hand, clutched an overnight bag with the other, and hustled up the steps to the town house.

  “Mrs. Burger’s here,” Dana announced. “Oh, and here comes Adele, too.”

  “Thank goodness,” said Abby, struggling to her feet. She placed one hand on the arm of the sofa and heaved herself upright, leaning backward as she did so, which always made Dana nervous.

  Dana flung open the front door before Mrs. Burger had a chance to ring the bell. “The baby’s coming!” she exclaimed, and flung herself into Adele’s arms.

  The next few minutes were a jumble of hugs and tears and questions.

  “Did you call a cab?”

  “Have you spoken to the doctor?”

  “Where’s your bag?”

  “How much money do you have?”

  At last a taxi arrived, and Adele helped Abby out the door, calling over her shoulder, “We’ll let you know as soon as the baby is here.”

  Dana closed the door, turned to Mrs. Burger, and burst into tears.

  Mrs. Burger gathered her to her pillowy bosom.

  After a long time, Dana, still sobbing, asked, “Can I invite Patty and Marian over?”

  * * *

  The day seemed endless. The phone rang three times. Once it was Patty calling to say that her mother would bring her over to Dana’s house at one. Once it was Marian calling to say that her mother would bring her over at one thirty. And once it was a man who didn’t introduce himself, demanding to know just when Mrs. Burley intended to pay her very overdue and apparently very large bill. Dana handed the phone to Mrs. Burger and put her hands over her ears.

  “Want to play cowboys?” Peter appeared in the entrance to the living room in quick-draw stance, ready to aim his silver pistol, if necessary.

  Dana removed her hands from her ears. She forced a smile. “No, thanks. Where are Tail and Squeaky? Why don’t you go play with them?”

  “Yeah!” said Peter, and he loped out of the room.

  Dana sank down in the chair. So many things these days could send her into a spiral of worry. The phone call from the creditor was one. So was the mention of moving. She hadn’t known how quickly a person’s life could change. One moment you’re listening to your drunk father sing to the moon on the Staten Island Ferry, and the next your mother is telling you that your father’s bank account is nearly empty.

  “How is that possible?” Dana had asked when, several weeks after Zander’s funeral, Abby had taken the twins out to lunch in a coffee shop and tried to explain the Burleys’ shaky finances to them.

  Abby had pretended to scan the menu for several moments before answering. Finally she sighed and said, “Your father was making a lot of money — a lot of money — but it seems he was spending it as fast as it came in. And not just on us. It turns out that he’s been sending large checks to his parents in Maine.”

  Julia had put down her spoon and stared. “Why? Don’t they have their own money?”

  “They used to,” their mother replied. “But your granddad’s business failed. They moved to the smaller house, the one they’re living in now, but they could only afford that because your father was helping them out.”

  “What will happen to them?” Dana wanted to know.

  Abby had shaken her head.

  “What will happen to us?” Julia had asked.

  This was when the twins’ mother first mentioned cutting back. “No more extras,” she’d said. “Not until I see how much money will be coming in from your father’s royalty checks. There doesn’t seem to be a savings account, though, and that isn’t good.”

  So the extras had gone first. No more spur-of-the-moment trips to Rumpelmayer’s. No more evenings spent dining at the 21 Club and going to shows on Broadway. Fewer taxi rides and plenty more rides on the subway. (Peter loved the subway. “Wild West train!” he would exclaim. He insisted on wearing his cowboy boots anytime the Burleys got on the subway.)

  The first phone call from a creditor had come in March. Several weeks later Abby had taken Dana and Julia aside again, only this time the discussion was held in their kitchen, where they could eat for free. Dana’s mother had stared at her coffee cup for a very long time before speaking. At last she’d said, “Girls, do you understand that grown-ups sometimes make mistakes — big mistakes — but that this doesn’t mean they’re bad people?”

  The twins had nodded their heads.

  Abby paused before saying, “In your father’s case, he simply wasn’t thinking ahead.”

  “Thinking ahead about what?” Julia had asked.

  “About our money. Your father was spending money he didn’t have yet, certain that big checks would be coming in and that he could pay our bills then. But now he’s gone and the bills keep coming in and . . . and soon there’s going to be another mouth to feed.”

  Dana had dropped her spoon onto her plate with a clank. “What?”

  “You’re going to have a baby brother or sister. Probably in August.”

  Julia had jumped to her feet and hugged her mother. Dana had burst into tears and fled from the kitchen.

  * * *

  Now it was August and the baby was on its way. And the Burleys’ house was for sale. After lunch Dana waited, alone, on the steps outside for Patty and Marian to arrive. When they did, the girls sat in a row and looked solemnly out at Eleventh Street.

  “Has your aunt called yet?” asked Marian.

  Dana shook her head. “Nope. No word. Mrs. Burger says sometimes it takes a while for babies to be born.”

  A long, dull silence followed. Dana clasped and unclasped the plastic barrette that held her ponytail in place.

  “What about school?” said Patty finally.

  Tears filled Dana’s eyes. “I can’t believe I won’t be going back to Miss Fine’s with you.”

  “But where will you go?”

  “Public school. The one around the corner, I guess. Unless we leave this neighborhood when we move, and then we’ll go to whatever school is nearest.” Dana swiped at her eyes. “You’ll probably have a new best friend by the end of the very first day of school.”

  “Never!” Marian proclaimed, and she took Dana’s hand.

  “Besides, we live right nearby. We’ll still be able to see you after school.”

  “And on weekends,” said Marian.

  “I guess,” Dana replied. “But you know it won’t be the same.”

  Everyt
hing, every little thing, it seemed, was about to change. New baby, new schools (and maybe no school at all for Peter, if the public school didn’t have a special class for children like him), new apartment, new everything. And now there were secrets. Dana had overheard her mother talking to Adele one night and saying that if they moved to a small apartment, they might have to give Tail and Squeaky away. She had heard her mother say that she’d need to find a job. She had heard her ask Adele whether she thought she should pack up the kids and move back to Barnegat Point. But Abby hadn’t mentioned any of these things to the twins or Peter yet.

  Dana and her friends continued their sad, silent vigil on the front steps. After a while, Julia joined them, plopping down next to Dana, her chin in her hands. Not long after that, Peter joined them as well.

  “Stick ’em up?” he said hopefully to Julia, but she shook her head.

  “I hear the phone! I hear the phone!” Dana cried ten minutes later. She got to her feet and rushed inside, followed by Peter, Julia, Marian, and Patty. “Is it Adele?” Dana asked Mrs. Burger, who was standing by the telephone table in the hallway, the phone smashed against one ear, her finger plugged into the other.

  Mrs. Burger nodded. “Uh-huh,” she was saying. “Uh-huh. Okay . . . Yes, of course I’ll tell them. We’ll see you tonight.” She hung up the phone.

  “Was that Adele?” Dana asked again.

  “Do we have a brother or a sister?” said Julia.

  Mrs. Burger gave them a sad smile. “A sister. And she’s fine. So is your mother. The baby’s name is Nell.”

  “That was our grandmother’s name,” said Dana. “Mom’s mother.”

  “Hey, Peter,” said Marian, “you’re a big brother now!”

  “Yeah,” replied Peter.

  “Let’s go to the park,” said Patty. “Could we go to the park, Mrs. Burger?”

  Dana didn’t wait to hear the answer. “I think I’m going to go to my room. You go on without me.”

  She turned away. She didn’t want a baby just at that moment, thank you very much. And she didn’t want to move or change schools or give Tail and Squeaky away.

  She wanted her father.

  As she climbed the staircase, she felt a hand slide into hers. “I’ll come with you,” said Peter.

  “Brrr!” said Dana, and drew the covers around her tightly. “It’s freezing in here.”

  “Shh” was Julia’s reply. “Let me sleep. The alarm didn’t go off yet.”

  “I can practically see my breath.”

  “SHH!”

  Dana peered at the clock that sat on the table between her bed and Julia’s. The alarm was going to ring in two minutes. She slid out of her bed and placed a tentative hand on the radiator under the window. Stone-cold. Dana slapped the radiator. Their building’s super must have thought his tenants were Eskimos. And by the way, super was a ridiculous name for a man who turned on the heat only when people began banging on the pipes, and who hadn’t wanted to rent an apartment to Abby because he didn’t like the idea of “a retard” living in the building. There was nothing super about the super at all.

  Dana put on her robe and slippers and tiptoed out of the bedroom. She peeked into the next room and saw Peter slumbering in his bed, Tail and Squeaky sprawled across his feet. Jammed next to his bed was Nell’s crib, where the baby slept with her bottom in the air, cozy in her flannel sleeper. In the tiny living room, Abby lay on the couch, her arm shielding her eyes from the light that shone through the window.

  “When are we going to get curtains?” Julia had asked one evening, when the Burleys had been living in the apartment for nearly two months.

  Her mother had shrugged and sighed. “I can’t think about that right now.” Abby had been sitting at the dining table, which was in the living room, since the kitchen was barely wide enough for one person to stand in at a time, let alone to accommodate a table. She’d been counting the change from her wallet, which she’d dumped onto the table.

  “Don’t we have enough for curtains?” Julia had asked, and in answer, Abby waved her hand toward the pitiful amount of change and glared at Julia.

  “Sorry,” Julia had mumbled.

  Now five more months had passed and the windows in the apartment (all of them) still lacked curtains. Dana took one last look at her mother on the couch and turned back to the room she shared with her twin. The alarm rang and Julia pounded it into silence. In the next room Nell awoke and burst into tears.

  Dana ducked into the bathroom, turned on the hot water faucet, held her hand under a stream of frigid water, and glared at herself in the mirror. “I hate my life,” she muttered.

  * * *

  “Everyone out the door! March!” commanded Abby. “You’re going to be late for school.”

  “I don’t care,” said Dana, but she hustled out the door anyway. Julia ran down the stairs ahead of her, Abby followed with Nell in her arms, and Peter stumped down behind all of them.

  “Wait for me,” he said breathlessly. He paused to glance at the door of apartment 2B, where a boy named Lawrence lived — a fifth grader in their new school who called Peter “Petard” when Abby wasn’t around. Peter quickened his pace and caught up with his mother at the bottom of the stairs. “I stay home today?” he asked hopefully.

  Abby gave him a small smile. “No. You have to go to school, like Dana and Julia.”

  “But I want my old school. I don’t like this one.”

  Join the club, Dana wanted to say.

  “Did you find your current event?” Julia asked Dana as they set out along West Eighty-Eighth Street.

  Dana avoided a pigeon pecking at a bit of blueberry muffin. “I forgot.”

  “Miss Kent is going to kill you!”

  “No, she won’t. I’ll say that Alaska and Hawaii have become our two newest states.”

  “That happened last year. You were supposed to find something from yesterday’s newspaper. Miss Kent asked for a current event.”

  “How’d you get the paper anyway? We don’t have one at home.”

  “I went to the newsstand and read one there. Miss Kent didn’t say we had to bring the paper to school.”

  “Oh. Well, I don’t have a current event and I don’t care.”

  But Dana did care that she and Julia weren’t at Miss Fine’s anymore. She cared that the teachers they had known and loved since kindergarten were nearly eighty blocks away. She cared that she hadn’t seen Patty and Marian since January. She also cared that Peter couldn’t attend his beloved Wings Academy any longer. She did like the fact that she and Julia and Peter all went to the same school, but she cared that Peter’s room was called the special class and that kids like Lawrence routinely stood outside of it and imitated the students. “Guess who I am?” she had heard Lawrence say to one of his friends the day before. He had squinted his eyes and stuck his tongue thickly out of his mouth. “Duh, I don’t know what one and one is. Do you?”

  His friend had burst into laughter. “Petard!” he exclaimed.

  Dana turned a corner. Her new elementary school glared at her from across the street. From behind her, Abby said, “Okay, kids. I’ll see you here this afternoon at two thirty sharp. Don’t be late.”

  Dana made a face. Her mother said this every single morning, as if it were possible for Dana to forget the new family routine. Then she looked into her mother’s face and saw the lines around her mouth and the purple circles under her eyes. She reminded herself that while she had to put up with Lawrence and Miss Kent, her mother had to work from three o’clock in the afternoon until eleven o’clock at night, six days a week. During the day, she took care of Nell and cooked meals and went to the market and cleaned the apartment, and then she worked at the hospital for eight hours, came home, and slept on the couch.

  “We won’t be,” said Dana, just as Julia said, “We haven’t been late once. We’ll see you right here. With Peter.”

  Dana took Peter’s hand. She led him up the steps and into Allen MacNeil Elementary School. J
ulia followed them. At the doorway to the special class, Julia hesitated and Dana shook her head at her, disgusted. “Never mind,” she said to her twin. “You go on.”

  Julia scurried away.

  “Okay, Peter!” Dana said brightly. “Here you go. Look, there’s Mr. Thompson.”

  Mr. Thompson, the only male teacher at Allen MacNeil, except for the boys’ gym teacher, had been hired, Dana thought, because he was big and muscular and could corral the older boys in the special class if they got out of hand.

  Peter was afraid of him. And of the bigger boys.

  “I stay with you?” he asked, clinging to Dana.

  “Sorry. I mean, I’m really sorry. But I have to go to my classroom and you have to go to yours. Julia and I will pick you up at the end of the day.”

  “Two twenty-five,” said Peter, who, if nothing else, had learned to tell time from Mr. Thompson.

  Dana hugged her brother and opened the door for him. He ducked away from a fifteen-year-old boy, who had grabbed a dictionary and was hitting himself on the head with it, and took a seat at a table far from the rest of the students.

  Dana slid behind her desk just as the final morning bell rang. She heaved a great sigh. Another day had begun. Sometimes she didn’t know how she would last until the end of the term. Sometimes she didn’t know how she would last until the end of the day. She folded her arms across her desk and buried her face in them.

  * * *

  The bright spot in Dana’s day was art class. One blissful forty-five-minute class with Mrs. Petrowski, who always greeted Dana with a smile and sometimes with a hug, and who allowed her to draw or paint whatever she wanted, while the other students laboriously drew bowls of pears that looked like dishes of garden slugs. Today Mrs. Petrowski hugged Dana and whispered to her, “Special treat. Why don’t you go outside, sit on the school steps, and draw what you see on the street?”

  This was how Dana wound up taking a pad of paper and a handful of charcoal pencils outside and sketching the things she loved about New York City. She drew a woman leaving a bakery with a bag of bread under one arm. She drew a cat sitting in an apartment window, eye to eye with a pigeon on the other side of the glass, a pigeon that seemed unmoved by the presence of the cat. She drew the sun shining on a tree that was growing on the roof of a building. When Mrs. Petrowski checked on her forty minutes later, Dana rose to her feet and bounced up the steps. “Thank you!” she exclaimed, and held out her sketches.