“You know you can always—” Dad began, but Mom shook her head, and he stopped.
“It’s not the same, Dad,” I said, “talking to you on the telephone in Los Angeles.”
Dad looked down at his plate with the crumbs on it and didn’t say anything, and I felt truly horrible.
“Of course,” I hurried on, babbling insanely, “you being far away isn’t the same as Shelly being dead, I’m not saying that. Only there are some similarities, that’s all.” Worse and worse. Where was I?—and where had I been when I started this awful conversation?
Dad got up. “I’ve got some work to do,” he said. “See you later, Sarah. Amy—” He looked at me. “I don’t know what else I can say to you about all this.”
He walked out of the kitchen.
“That wasn’t very nice of you,” Mom said. “He’s really sad and tired, Amy. We all are.”
Well, I could have reminded her that she was the one who was always worrying out loud about California, so who was she to tell me I wasn’t being considerate of Dad’s feelings?
“I think you’re more upset about Shelly than I’ve realized, Amy. I’m sorry.” She got up and stretched wearily, smiling a self-mocking smile. “I haven’t been very grown-up about it all, I guess.”
Oh no, I thought, not a heart-to-heart—nothing was harder to take. I went to work on more of the bread, thinking longingly about a story Dad had told once about how Marlon Brando stuffed bread in his ears so he could sleep in a noisy motel room. I really would have liked to have stuffed bread in my ears to shut out what Mom was saying.
Of course the point of the story was that Marlon Brando hadn’t been able to get the bread out of his ears the next morning and had to be taken to the doctor’s.
“On top of everything else, I’m scared to death of this move,” Mom said, keeping her voice down. “We mean to come back when we can, but I know people who’ve gone to Los Angeles with the same plan and never come back. They live forever in a place they hate!”
“So why are we going?” I said.
Mom walked over to the window above the sink and looked out, so at least her back was to me.
“Your father’s not sure it’s right, either,” she said. “I should be helping him think it out so it will work. And it can work, of course it can—we’re not Silly Putty, we’re smart, able people. I can find some kind of work out there. I’ve even put some feelers out.” She walked over and patted my hair. “And you’ll make new friends.”
“I like my old friends,” I said.
“Will you write to Rachel?” she asked.
“No,” I said angrily. What a dumb idea! Especially now. “We’re hardly friends anymore anyhow. I won’t even miss her.”
Her hand hovered. I ducked my head away.
“You should be happy about that,” I said. “You’ve never liked Rachel.”
“Huh,” Mom said, plumping down in her chair again. “I can’t say that I do, actually. I’m glad you’ve enjoyed her friendship, but I can’t approve wholeheartedly of a kid who says she’s going to change her name from Rachel to Raquel as soon as she gets her nose done. Are you planning to finish that whole stick of butter tonight?”
I shoved back from the table. “What?” I said, meaning about Rachel, not the butter.
“Oh, it’s not her fault,” Mom said. “Her parents started it, changing from Beckstein to Breakstone. Breakstone. I ask you! Is that New England Gothic, or what?” She grinned, a real big grin, for the first time since Shelly’s death.
“You sound like Uncle Irv,” I said. “Or Aunt Jennie. What’s the big deal? This is America, lots of people change their names. You can be what you want to be here, that’s the whole idea.”
Mom cocked her head and considered me gravely, and the panicky tightness in my chest went away. We had somehow moved off the dangerous ground of grieving and feelings. We were into that place where she and I had always been able to talk comfortably.
“Sure,” she said, “but it’s a struggle, Amy, not a casual, routine sort of thing. Shelly told me once she thought that was the American puzzle: how to deal with your forebears and their values. Not that it’s an original idea, but you know, doing social work she had a lot of contact with the newer waves of immigrants, so it was always right there in front of her.”
“What was?” I asked. Shelly hadn’t talked much with me about her work. I always thought of her as somebody who took me to the movies, or to the Botanical Gardens in Brooklyn or the little Conservatory Garden up at the north end of Central Park where we sometimes had had picnics on the weekends.
“What was what?” Mom focused on me again. She’d kind of lost it there for a minute. “Oh—what Shelly said. She said that in the old country, whatever that country was, people were defined by where they and their families had lived for generations, and they expected to go on living there pretty much the same way, as the same kind of people. Once you uproot and come to America where everybody moves around all the time, then all of a sudden your identity isn’t automatic anymore. All of a sudden you have to think about it and choose it for yourself.”
“By changing from Beckstein to Breakstone?” I said.
Mom said, “That’s what you can do in this country: dump your whole past, or try to. No wonder our best books and plays are all about families, parents and kids, ethnic roots. Always chewing it over, doing it over, working it out. Except it never does work out. It just keeps weaving along.”
A startling idea hit me. Maybe Rachel would celebrate getting her nose done, when it happened, by changing not only her name but her actual religion. Maybe she was hanging out with Claudia to learn how to be a Catholic.
“Tell you one thing,” Mom said “If Rachel does become Raquel, the chances are even that her kids will turn around and decide to be more orthodox than your Uncle Irving’s rabbi.”
“Why?” I asked, baffled.
“Just remember,” she said, “you heard it from me first. She’ll name her son Jason, and he’ll change it to Joshua and grow earlocks.”
Another boy I knew had changed his name: from Kevin the Corner Kid to Kavian Prince, the Promised Champion. I wondered what Mom would make of that.
I said, “Do you remember Kevin Malone?”
“Of course I do.” Mom looked surprised. “That poor kid—no wonder he was wild, with that family of his. What made you think of him? I thought you’d repressed your memories of him completely.”
“I didn’t expect you to remember.”
“Sweetheart,” she said, “I have a reason to remember; not a good reason, I’m afraid. Open the fridge, will you? I’m dying for something cool to drink.”
We split a big can of tomato juice with a slice of lime in each glass. Across the courtyard a neighbor’s TV sent out flickering blue light, like foggy signals from another world.
Mom said, “Remember when I went down to the corner houses to complain about Kevin stealing from you?”
“Sure,” I said. “It was great. You said, ‘I am going to go talk to those people,’ and you did it, and nothing bad happened. It worked.”
Mom looked unhappy. “It worked all right, but something bad did happen. I just didn’t think you needed to know about it. Shelly came across the case records a few years ago. She told me about it. Kevin showed up at a hospital that same night with a broken arm and two cracked ribs. Not long afterward he ran away for the first time. Then, later, he was actually taken out of his home.”
“Taken?” I was intrigued. “I thought he was arrested and locked up in juvenile jail; that was what everybody said. And nobody was sorry, either, none of the kids in our building anyway.”
Mom jiggled the lime slice around in her juice glass. “He was locked up, but that came later. His first disappearances were to foster homes. Those broken bones weren’t the first or the last his father gave him.”
I shook my head, thinking about Kevin keeping my pin to commemorate a day when his father hadn’t beaten him up. “I never susp
ected, back then.”
“It’s not the kind of thing people talk about with their kids,” she said, “a drunk who beats up his wife and his children.”
“The mother, too?”
“That’s what Shell said.”
I thought about Dad, working on script pages in bed, arranging his ticket back to Los Angeles on the phone. I thought about not having a father around much, versus having one around all the time who hit you. I felt almost ashamed of my good luck when somebody else had had such bad luck. Even Rotten Kevin.
Rotten Kevin, who might hold a heck of a grudge, I suddenly realized. Kevin’s father put him in the hospital because I complained to Mom, and Mom complained to Kevin’s mother, and Kevin’s mother must have said something to Kevin’s father. Our prince might have some unpleasant surprises in mind for me in the Fayre Farre.
But no—that didn’t make sense. Mom said Kevin’s father had been abusing them all along. I hadn’t made his father beat him up. Now, if Kevin was as logical and smart as I was, and could figure that out . . .
That was when I knew I was going back to the Fayre Farre. To help, I thought. Besides, the place wasn’t full of people grieving for Cousin Shell or worrying about moving to California or loading their feelings onto me.
“Boy, it’s late,” I said.
Mom agreed. She pointed out that I had school tomorrow, and she had two buyers coming in early, so it was off to bed with both of us.
With one of us, actually. But she didn’t need to know that.
Eleven
Passing for Paula
IN MY ROOM, I BRUSHED my hair out in front of the mirror. Not smooth blonde hair like Rachel’s or slick black hair like Claudia’s, but long, thick, kinky brown hair with red highlights, like Cousin Shell’s. Only on her it had looked really good.
On me—
Anyway, where I was going I was a princess in mourning, and I wanted to look nice, if not royal. I knew what I wanted to wear on this trip into the Fayre Farre—my last, maybe. Good pants, a silky cotton T-shirt under a soft corduroy shirt with a pretty floral print, running shoes, and my wine-colored windbreaker with lots of pockets with velcro closures. I was risking the ruin of some more of my favorite clothes, but Kevin had looked really good the last time I’d met him in the Fayre Farre, and Rachel always looked super.
No pack, though I considered taking my small one: I didn’t mean to stay away long enough to need it.
And the rhinestone rose, pinned to my collar, of course.
I wrote a note for my parents (“Gone to do some thinking, sorry if I’ve been awful lately—don’t worry, I’m safe and sound, home soon, love Amy”) and left it on my pillow. With any luck, I’d be back before morning and they would never know I’d gone.
I tiptoed down the hall, let myself out the side door, and ran down the fire stairs—fifteen flights to the lobby—and out.
Breathless and tingly—what if the doorman had seen me? What if he called Mom up on the house phone?—I took buses uptown and then across the park, and then walked quickly up Central Park West toward my old block.
It felt sort of exciting, to be going—well, home, in a way—back to the place I had lived as a little girl, in the days when I didn’t know anything about Kevin’s family. A family that Cousin Shelly would have described as dysfunctional. Now I had an idea what that actually meant.
My old street was so changed, it added to my sense of eons of time having passed since those days. New trees had been planted in the dirt squares along the edge of the sidewalk. Everything was so neat: the lids chained to the garbage cans, the curbs painted with thick enamel for fire zones and loading zones and the bus stop at the corner.
Lights glowed in the curtained bow windows on the third floor of Kevin’s old building. The rest were dark. I realized that I had never known just what floor his family had lived on.
I walked up the steep stairs and into the little vestibule of Kevin’s brownstone. As I had expected, the inner door was locked. Sometimes if you punch the downstairs call buttons and jabber in a high voice into the speaker grille, somebody will buzz you in. But then when you don’t show up at their apartment they know somebody’s wandering around in the building. After dark, people get extra nervous about that.
So I unpinned the rhinestone rose and waggled the sharp end in the keyhole of the inner door, meanwhile shutting my eyes hard and visualizing the little stones glowing with LOCK-OPENING POWER from the Fayre Farre.
The door swung open and a creaky voice said, “What’s the matter, Paula, forget your keys again?”
I jerked back the pin and hid it in my pocket.
A tiny, withered old man stood there squinting at me through milky-looking eyes. He had red pinch marks from glasses on the bridge of his bony nose, but luckily for me the glasses were not on the scene just then.
“Well?” he said. “I can’t be jumping up and down all the time just to let you in, you know.”
I nodded enthusiastically. “Mmmf, mmm, ’anks,” I said, trying to sound like a Paula and quickly sidling past him.
“Just as long as you didn’t leave those keys laying on the bakery counter again, like you did the last time,” he said, carefully shutting the door behind us. “Got no time or money to change the locks again, you hear me?”
“Mmmf,” I said, heading for the elevator.
He shook his head and hobbled away into the front ground-floor apartment.
I got into the elevator and pressed B, for basement. The sword was buried treasure, sort of, and where else could you bury something in a New York building?
Kevin’s basement was changed beyond recognition.
I’d been in there once, on a dare from one of the kids in my own building. That one visit had made me briefly famous and admired among my friends.
I remembered the place well: bare cement walls, shiny black leakage gleaming on the cracked floor all the way from the jammed storage room to the dirty hole that housed the furnace and the boiler. A stained mattress had been propped against one wall; I had seen a rat scuttle up over a crazy stack of crates and dive into a hole in that mattress.
Not to mention the smell, mostly old cooking and stale beer.
Now it smelled of furnace heat and dusty water pipes, and the walls were painted lavender and blue. The boiler room and the storage space both had metal doors with locks. Where the mattress had leaned stood a washer and dryer and a deep white sink with a mop draining in it. The floor was surfaced with green tile.
The passage to the back, once dark and packed with bundles that might have been garbage or people’s belongings, was now lit by a wire-caged bulb and lined with neat plastic trash cans.
I held up the rose pin. It glowed faintly when I turned it toward the sink.
I went over for a closer look. The sink was not very promising as a hiding place. It looked as if it got a lot of use. Users would find anything hidden there, wouldn’t they?
But where would you hide something in a sink anyway? Down—the pin’s beam indicated—underneath.
I hunkered down to see if anything was taped to the underside. There was nothing, only the pipes, and the wall behind them which the painters had not bothered with since you couldn’t see it unless you were down where I was. In fact, there wasn’t even a plaster coating here, like on the wall above. I could see a few dark red bricks, set unevenly with pale crusts of mortar squeezed out along the seams.
I turned the faint beam of the rhinestones—were they really shining, or was I imagining it?—toward the wall. I moved the brooch back and forth slowly. Water dripped monotonously into the sink above my head.
One of the bricks took on the glow of the magic light: special effects in Kevin’s old basement! Gingerly I ran my hand along the edge of the brick. Crumbly mortar fell away onto the floor. The brick rocked slightly when I pressed it.
My heart was bumping along: I didn’t much like the idea of feeling around in some dank, black space for a sharp-edged weapon. Never mind the possibilit
y of giant waterbugs. Was this the place? You couldn’t fit a whole sword into the length of a brick, so maybe the blade had a detachable handle? Humble guise, Kevin had said—a folding umbrella? Too big.
Behind me the elevator descended with a whine of machinery. It stopped on the ground floor and stayed there, and then up it went again.
I dropped the rose pin back in my jacket pocket and pressed the velcro shut. Then I scrunched down by the wall and eased the brick out by sheer friction with my fingertips. It came with a grating sound, and it was so much heavier than I’d expected that I almost dropped it. I leaned it on end against the wall.
There in the back of the cavity, in plain view, was what had to be Kevin’s magical Farsword. It was a little package no longer than my middle finger, all wrapped up in discolored white cotton cloth and tied around and around with a piece of green plastic lanyard.
I stared, itching with curiosity but scared, too. The stained cloth reminded me of, well, mummy wrappings, and isn’t treasure always booby-trapped against robbers? Trust Kevin to forget to mention the ax blade that would drop out of the ceiling and chop my head off when I released the secret lever by removing the package.
I grabbed it. Nothing awful happened. I eased a loop of the ancient lanyard around the end of the little bundle, and then the whole thing came loose.
Folded up inside was a familiar shape: a red-handled Swiss Army knife.
I laughed. The great Farsword!
It wasn’t even one of the fancy models, loaded with options so when you open everything out it looks like a mechanical porcupine. There were just two blades. Somebody had scratched a name—"Dan"—on the plastic grip on one side and rubbed in ink to make the letters show.
Poor Dan. I wondered who he’d been, and how his knife had fallen into Kevin’s grubby paws. Kevin had been lucky, for once. The only thing that hadn’t been changed down here was probably this old-fashioned slop sink, previously hidden behind a mattress. So nobody had found his treasure hole.
Relieved that I wasn’t going to have to smuggle a giant sword into the Fayre Farre past all kinds of Famishers and whatnot, I wrapped the knife up again, stuffed it into another of my jacket pockets, and tried to replace the brick in its niche. It was a tight fit. I had to keep the brick level and straight to push it in all the way.