I woke up with a headache, sweat soaking my sheets. The day was overcast, but I could tell by the heat that it was not early. Why hadn’t anybody gotten me up for school? The house seemed oddly quiet, no sounds coming up from the kitchen or my grandparents’ room. Maybe Dimma and Brickie were still drunk. I lay there for a moment, thinking about the night before: the Fiesta, the great music and dancing, Elena riding off on the motorcycle, the crazy, apocalyptic conclusion to the party, and whether any of it meant anything new. I heard noise from the street, adults talking, and car doors slamming, and guessed that maybe the grown-ups were out there cleaning up the party mess, which was supposed to be our job after school.
When I went to the open window, I saw groups of adults—Brickie and Mr. Shreve among them—standing in front of the Goncharoffs’. A police car and an ambulance idled in the street. My heart clenched. Up and down Connors Lane, neighbors stood silently in their yards, staring. The Goncharoffs’ front door gaped, but I couldn’t see any of the family. I didn’t see Max or Ivan, who I knew normally would be rubbernecking at any event involving emergency vehicles. I ran down the stairs and out into our front yard, where the Fiesta dishes and our decorations lay trashed and sodden. Dimma’s precious walnut chairs were black from the rain, and she stood in her housecoat, hugging herself as if she were freezing. She grabbed me as I tried to run past her, falling to a crouch with her arms around me. I thought I was about to get spanked because of the ruined chairs, and I struggled to get away. “John! John, look at me, sweetheart,” she said. I stopped, frozen with dread, and she held both my arms tightly.
“What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” I cried. “Dimma, what’s going on?”
Dimma said, “Something terrible happened last night, John.” Her voice trembled, something I’d never heard before, and that alarmed me even more. “Your friend Elena died last night.”
A strangled, desperate laugh came from my throat. “You’re joking, Dimma!” But Dimma’s face was contorted with sadness, and tears filled her eyes. She held me tighter and kissed me. “My poor, sweet boy,” she whispered.
“No she didn’t! No she didn’t!” Using every ounce of my strength I broke away from Dimma, hurtling toward the street.
Dimma, weeping now, called, “John! Come back! Please stay here! There’s nothing you can do.”
I ran past the adults, and Brickie, who tried to grab me, to Ivan’s house, calling, “Ivan! Ivan!” Halting on the porch, I looked wildly around for Ivan or Elena. There, huddled on the floor against the wall, I saw my friends. Max, sniffling, had his arm around Ivan, whose dirty, tearstained face was white with what? Fear? Horror? “It’s not true, is it? It’s not true! Say it’s not true!” Max looked at me miserably but said nothing. Ivan stared off, shaking uncontrollably. “What happened? What happened to her? Did…did he…hurt her?”
Ivan looked at me then and said wonderingly, “She…she sat in The Throne. Why’d she do that?” and began sobbing. I wanted to shout out, “How could he kill her for that?” But I could only collapse next to Ivan, hugging him tightly. I began crying, too. We stayed that way for what seemed a long time. Nobody bothered us; the men were busy talking to one another and to the police, writing things, doing things. The neighbor ladies—Mrs. Friedmann, Mrs. Shreve, La Senhora—stood shocked and teary-eyed in the lane. I thought I could hear, way back somewhere in the house, Maria’s weeping.
The ambulance drove off, and I understood then that inside it was our darling Elena. Max, watching the ambulance, began softly humming “Taps,” but he couldn’t get past the “gone the sun” part before the dirge choked in his throat. A policeman and a man in a jacket and tie came onto the porch and they began winding yellow tape around the railings, closing the area off. The cop went into the house. Before following him, the other man spoke kindly to Ivan, and said that he was a detective. Then he told us not to touch anything. “We haven’t had a chance to examine the scene yet.” He said that Ivan should go inside—this made me shudder—and Max and I should go home and be with our families. But we weren’t going anywhere unless we went together.
Brickie came up onto the porch and went into the house for a moment. He came back and squatted down with us. “Why don’t you boys all come over to our house for now? We’ll get you some breakfast, you can watch TV, and things might seem a little…more normal. There certainly won’t be any school today.” Brickie reached out to Ivan and took his hand, gently pulling him up. “We’ll just take it easy, okay? Ivan, I told your dad you were coming with us.” He hugged Ivan to his side. “Try not to worry, son. Not right now. Let’s just get through the day.” As they walked to the lane, the neighbors began drifting off, stopping to give Ivan hugs, which he silently tolerated.
Max and I stood to follow. Max, catching up to Ivan and Brickie, threw his arm around Ivan protectively. Coming behind them, I glanced at The Throne with a mixture of feelings—I wanted to either burn it down or make it into some kind of shrine to Elena—where she last had been our living, loving, laughing goddess. Then I spotted something jammed back in its cushions. Glancing around to make sure nobody was watching, I hurried over, and from the cushions I pulled out Ivan’s green prescription bottle, marked with the skull and crossbones. It was empty and the cap was gone. A paralyzing sense of alarm came over me. I guessed that nobody had seen it yet because it was well camouflaged by the green foliage print of the upholstery. Sniffing it, I detected the faint odor of vinegar. I shivered, the hair on my arms and neck standing up, but I couldn’t think and just pocketed the bottle. Catching up to Brickie and the boys, I turned, checking again to see if anyone had come out of the house and seen me. There was no one, only Elena’s swing slowly drifting forward and back, forward and back.
Brickie and Dimma fixed Ivan and me a big breakfast: scrambled eggs, bacon and sausage patties, buttered toast, chocolate milk, and orange juice. Max’s parents had made him come home to go to school. Ivan hardly touched a thing on his plate, and Brickie said, “Ivan, try to eat something. You need to keep up your strength.” Ivan didn’t reply, but he finally ate a piece of toast and drank some chocolate milk. I didn’t have much of an appetite, either, and Brickie for once didn’t badger me. He and Dimma sat at the table and chatted pleasantly to each other, which I knew was fake because Dimma was rarely downstairs so early and they didn’t talk much in the morning anyway. Estelle arrived, and she must have heard what had happened from the neighbors, because before she even set her purse down, she came over to Ivan and rubbed his head, hugged him, and said, “Poor little fella. God bless you, baby.” Then she hugged me, too. I was dazed, haunted by what was in my pocket. After a while, I said, “May we be excused?” and Dimma allowed us to take our chocolate milk into the living room to watch TV.
I turned on Looney Tunes. Ivan and I sat close to each other and stared at the screen. I wanted to talk to Ivan, but more than that I wanted Ivan to talk to me. Finally, I reached into my pocket for the green pill bottle. I held it out. Ivan looked at it, and then looked at me, his red-rimmed blue eyes filling with tears. “Ivan, what happened to the vinegaroon?”
He put a hand in his pocket and drew out the cap. After a second, he said, “He must have got away.”
“What do you mean, got away? How?”
“Why did she have to sit on his Throne?” He began crying a little bit.
“I don’t know,” I said. Then, petrified, I asked, “Did you put the vinegaroon there?”
“It wasn’t for her!” he wailed. “I didn’t mean for it to bite her! When I was going to bed, I heard someone walking around, and I thought it was…him, and that he’d go out to smoke his cigar, so I snuck down to the porch and put it in The Throne for him. But she sat there! She told me at the Fiesta that she wasn’t coming home—she had to get away from him, but she’d come back for me soon.” He blubbered, “I just wanted to hurt him, not kill him. I think.”
I was speechless for a moment with horrified comprehension. Then I asked, “Nobody knew about the vinegaroon but us, right?” I took the cap from him and put that and the pill bottle in my pocket. I tried to think, but I wanted to cry.
“It’ll be okay, Ivan,” I said, although I knew it wouldn’t be. “It was an accident. We’re just little boys.” But what I felt was that we were something else now, yawing away from our innocent earthly lives, a dark unknown before us.
“We have to go bury the bottle, okay?”
“Okay.” He wiped snot and tears from his face with his T-shirt.
With new alarm I realized that the vinegaroon might still be on Ivan’s porch, or in his yard somewhere, and could bite somebody else. We needed to go over to the Goncharoffs’ and find him, but the police were surely still there. Not to mention Josef.
“Please don’t cry, Ivan,” I said. “Let’s drink our milk, and then maybe we can go look for him. I bet he’s hiding under some rocks, and he won’t come out in the day. Nobody knows about him. But we’ve got to find him.” It dawned on me that if the police found the vinegaroon, the Heist would be exposed as well.
Our doorbell rang, and Brickie went to open it. The cop and the detective who’d spoken to us on the Goncharoffs’ porch came in. They began talking softly with Brickie, but I couldn’t hear what they said, and tried to ignore them. Brickie ushered the men into the living room and introduced them, and I jumped up to shake their hands, hoping they’d think we were good boys. Ivan just stared at the TV, but he had a good excuse for forgetting his manners. “They’d like to talk to you boys for a few minutes,” Brickie said.
“Okay.” I prayed that Ivan wouldn’t fall apart.
The detective said to him, “I’m so sorry for your loss, son. I know you were very close to your aunt.” Ivan tried to smile a little. “We just want to understand what happened to her. Did you know about her asthma?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Have you seen her have an attack?”
“Yeah. Lots of times.”
“What did she do when she had one of these attacks?” He was writing things down.
“She…she coughed a lot. She had an inhaler,” Ivan said. “And some pills.”
“Do you know what kind of pills she had? Do you know if she had the pills and inhaler with her last night?”
Ivan thought. “No. But she usually had that stuff in the sleeve of her robe.” The detective nodded, scribbling.
I spoke up. “The pills were Miltowns. All ladies have them.”
“Okay,” the detective said, suppressing a smile. He looked to the policeman.
The cop asked, “Do you know anything about the bruises on her face and arm?”
Ivan and I looked at each other. It suddenly came to me that if Ivan incriminated Josef, and Josef went to jail, what would happen to Ivan? Had Ivan thought of that?
Ivan said hesitantly, “Yeah, she told us she hit her face on the swing. Last week. She said one of our dogs jumped up on the swing and made it happen.”
“Okay. Do you think there might be anyone who’d want to harm your aunt?”
In a rush I said, “There’s a kid we call Slutcheon. He didn’t like her because she was helping refugees, and some of them lived in his neighborhood, on Quincy Street, and his dad wanted to get rid of them.” Here Brickie’s eyebrows went up.
Ivan nodded, adding, “The girl next door hates her because her boyfriend has a crush on her.”
The detective, scribbling, asked, “Do you know anything about any of the men your aunt dated? How about the guy who picked her up on a motorcycle yesterday at the party?”
“I never saw him before, I don’t think,” Ivan said. “Sometimes when she came home with guys, I was asleep, or it was too dark to see who they were.” Then, to my horror, he blurted out, “Sometimes she got into fights with my father.”
The detective looked interested. “Some of the neighbors have mentioned that. But would you say that these…fights were anything other than sort of normal family arguments?”
“He…he might have slapped her,” Ivan said. “He didn’t like her dates, but I’m not sure why.”
“Okay.” The detective wrote that down. “I think that’s about it. Thank you, boys.” He put his notepad in a back pocket. The men went to the door with Brickie, where they talked for another minute and left.
My grandfather came back to us and asked, “You boys all right?” We nodded. Brickie looked at us for a long moment. “Okay. We can talk about this later. As you were, then.”
When he was gone, I cried, “You shouldn’t have said anything about Josef!”
“He said the neighbors told him anyway. And he deserves to go to jail.”
“But Ivan, if your dad goes to jail, what will happen to you?”
He thought, then shrugged. “I guess I’ll go to an orphanage. Who cares, as long as I’m away from him.”
I was still very concerned about the missing vinegaroon, but more cars had arrived at the Goncharoffs’, so we had to wait. Estelle surprised us with potato-chip sandwiches and Cokes. “Don’t be gettin’ the idea that you boys gonna get these from me again,” she said. They were especially delicious, a little spicy, and she told us that she’d put some crumbled bacon and a splash of Tabasco in the Miracle Whip, “Give it a little pep, don’t y’all think?” She gave Ivan’s burr head another affectionate rub. “I hear yo party was a great success. I’m proud o’ you boys.”
I said bleakly, “It was fun. But now everything’s ruined.”
“Well, we cain’t always understand God’s ’tentions, but you boys gone be all right.”
Ivan ate his whole sandwich. Exhausted, we fell asleep on the sofa for a short while. When I woke, I felt normal until I remembered everything. Ivan was already awake and said, “I hoped I’d wake up and it’d all be just a nightmare.”
“Yeah. Me, too.”
The pill bottle felt like it was the size of a Coke in my pocket, and a strong sense of purpose took hold of me. “We can’t look for the vinegaroon yet, but we’ve got to go bury the pill bottle,” I said firmly. “Right now.”
We passed through the kitchen, where Dimma was sitting, doing her crossword puzzle. She looked up and said, blowing some Chesterfield smoke sideways, “Did you have a nice nap? I know you both needed one.” She smiled gently at Ivan. “Wasn’t that sweet of Estelle to fix your favorite sandwiches?” He nodded.
“We’re going to dig up some worms. Max’s snake needs them,” I said.
We headed out the kitchen door to the backyard and looked around. “Let’s bury it in the fountain.” My mother’s Lady of the Lake looked extra sad without any petunias, and I thought of my mother, and whether she’d understand what we were doing, and what we’d done. I got a shovel from the basement and began digging, going deep into the grass and dirt, soft after yesterday’s wild rainstorm. Ivan sat on the flagstones around the old pond and watched blankly. After digging down about two feet, I pulled out the green pill bottle, capped it, and threw it into its grave.
As I began filling in the hole, Max appeared, home from school. He looked anxiously at Ivan, and went and sat with him. “I brought you this.” He handed Ivan the new Flash comic book. Ivan smiled and thanked him but didn’t open it.
“What are you guys doing?”
I took a big breath and answered, “The vinegaroon got out on Ivan’s porch last night, and we’re burying his pill bottle because it smelled like vinegar and we don’t want anybody to know we stole it.” I hated to have to give words to the awful story. I stopped what I was doing, leaning on the shovel like a gravedigger. Max looked from one of us to the other, trying to digest this.
He asked, “So why didn’t Ivan tell me this morning? Where is the vinegaroon?”
“Ivan didn’t tell you this morning because he was too upset, and I didn’t know what happened.” I went on. “He put the open pill bottle there for Josef, not for her.” I could not say her name. “We don’t know where the vinegaroon is now, but we’ve got to find it before it gets someone else. And so nobody will know we stole it. But there’re too many people at Ivan’s house.” I wasn’t sure Ivan was even listening; he was looking off in the distance as if he were a million miles away.
Max’s jaw fell open. After this had sunk in, he said, “You…you mean…” He was too stunned to go on.
“That’s the story,” I said.
Max’s face grew pale. I resumed filling in the hole, and when I was done, Max came over and picked up hunks of dug-up grass and neatly placed them on top. He tamped it all down with his Chucks. Then he said, “I just thought of something. When I was coming over, I saw Rudo in Ivan’s yard. He was barking and scrabbling at the ground in front of the porch. Maybe it was the vinegaroon?”
This got Ivan’s attention. “Oh, no! He might try to eat it!”
Brandishing the shovel, we sped around front, where I saw that the cars at the Goncharoffs’ were gone. But below the porch, there was Rudo, doing exactly what Max described, and, more frightening, the twins were with him, crazed putti dancing and giggling, encouraging his frenzy. Max shouted, “Ivan! Get the twins away! I’ll get Rudo!” Ivan ran to the twins and wrestled them away. Max yelled, “Rudo, NO!” He grabbed Rudo by his collar and dragged him off, holding him at a distance. Ivan screeched at the twins in Spanish, and they ran into the house. Then he and I tentatively approached the spot where Rudo had been digging. There were some loose chunks of concrete walk, but nothing else. “Please don’t let Rudo have eaten him,” Ivan prayed. Using the tip of the shovel, I very slowly lifted a piece of concrete. Nothing. I tried a bigger chunk, levered it up, and jumped back. “Gah! There he is!” The vinegaroon waved his claws at us and poised his whiptail. Before he could spray me, I had the big piece of concrete in my hands and hurled it down on top of him. It landed with a thud on the damp dirt. For a moment we stood silently, relieved about our rescue and the end of the vinegaroon. Then I slowly lifted the chunk again. He was completely crushed, a mass of brittle purple carapace and gluey insides, smelling of vinegar. I scooped him up with the shovel, saying, “We can’t bury him because Wiesie or the dogs might dig him up. I say we burn him.” Ivan took Rudo from Max, and, quietly opening the screen door, pushed him inside. We carried the vinegaroon off to my house.
Down at the stone fireplace at the end of my yard, we made a small pyre with dry leaves and sticks. I shoveled the vinegaroon, our hard-won trophy, onto the pyre and Max lit it. It burned slowly and smokily. Max said, “Too bad you didn’t get a crack at Slutcheon, old buddy.”
Ivan addressed the fire pitifully. “It wasn’t your fault, it was mine. You were just doing your job.”
“Ivan! Ivan!” Beatriz called, running down to us in her uniform. She ran straight to Ivan, throwing herself at him so forcefully that they fell down together. “Ivan! I’m so sorry! I thought about you all day!” Lying on top of him, she began crying. They struggled up, and Beatriz said, “Don’t worry, we’re going to take care of you!” Ivan, embarrassed, gave her a thin smile.
She wiped her eyes and asked, “What are you burning?”
“It’s the vinegaroon,” I said.
Beatriz looked astonished. “Why?”
“We need to tell her everything,” Max said solemnly.
“Well, you can,” I said. “Ivan and I don’t want to hear it again.” Max took Beatriz by the hand, leading her away. They stood together as Max explained our awful secret. Beatriz covered her face, sobbing. Max awkwardly put his arms around her, letting her cry. I’d never seen so much crying in all my eight years.
I said to Ivan, “Gimme your knife.” I took it and swiftly drew the little blade across my wrist. Then Ivan did the same. After a second, drops of blood appeared on our cuts. “You guys come here!” I called to Beatriz and Max. Beatriz was startled when she saw the blood, but I said, “We have to swear on our secret.” Max made his cut, then Beatriz, and we rubbed our wrists on one another’s, our blood mixing inextricably and for all time. It was a rite the boys and I had performed before, only with tiny pricks from fingertips, and not about so enormous a secret. We were trapped in a sticky spiderweb of lies, but it felt better knowing that the four of us were in the web together.
From the house, I brought Band-Aids. Beatriz had to go home. The boys and I went inside and watched more TV—The Mickey Mouse Club. We thought we were too old for it, but who cared. Then Mrs. Friedmann came to collect Max, carrying a warm loaf of challah. She gave Ivan a bosomy hug and said, “Dear Ivan, you don’t belieff zis now, but vun day life vill be goodt again.”
Dimma came from the kitchen. “Ivan, we’ve arranged with your father for you to stay with us the rest of this week. Maria will bring over the things you need, and you two will go back to school in the morning, all right? That might be best until things settle down.”
Ivan said simply, “Thanks.”
“Ivan, sweetheart, things will get better, I promise.”
“Okay,” Ivan said. I knew he didn’t believe any of it.