39

At eight-thirty the next morning, dressed in shorts and long-sleeved top, I was resting my butt on the hard wooden bench of the Huntington Avenue Y’s gym, listening to the smack of sneakers on floorboards, the referee’s shrill whistle, sporadic yells, and brief bursts of applause. Mainly I heard the cheers of the rival squad. We were down a game.

And I was decorating the bench.

My nose and cheekbone were fine. An ice pack wrapped my left ankle, more or less secured with an Ace bandage. I’d played only the opening two points. I must have slipped on the damn staircase at Arlington Street station, maybe when I’d lifted Paolina. I hadn’t noticed the pain, not till this morning.

Kristy had given me a long look when I’d limped in. Ordinarily I hate missing a practice, much less a match—and this was the championship, and here I sat on the bench. I stretched out a hand and rested it on Paolina’s knee. She turned and gave me a tentative smile.

“Maybe you can go back in,” she said earnestly. I reached over and tucked a strand of shiny hair behind her ear so I could see her better.

“Maybe.”

“I’m sorry you hurt your ankle.”

“It’s not your fault.”

Her hand crept into mine. She was okay. A bruise or two, hidden by her striped shirt. A scraped knee under blue-green pants. Her fingers toyed with a goldfish pendant, suspended on a black silk cord, the twin of the one I’d found in my house. She was physically okay, but much, much too quiet.

While I was changing in the locker room pretty Edna had asked about handsome Harry, the Olympic scout. Would he be watching today’s game, cheering for me?

I hadn’t told her Harry Clinton was locked in a cell at Charles Street Jail. The wire hadn’t worked well on the station platforms. Too far underground. But Mooney had gotten the message to move to Arlington from the broom man at Park Street. And up on the staircase in Arlington, only ten feet beneath the street, my voice had carried loud and true. Harry Clinton had emerged at Berkeley Street to the hostile stares of six cops and two FBI men. With no hostage in tow.

He wasn’t talking about the killings, not to the cops at least, except to say that they must be the work of a crazy man, and since he wasn’t crazy, he couldn’t be the murderer. Not crazy. This from a man who’d chopped off Manuela’s hands to prevent her identification, and then repeated the pattern so the later deaths would seem like the work of a ritualistic killer who chose his victims at random.

Smart didn’t rule out crazy.

Ramirez was in Boston City Hospital with a broken collarbone. The kid who’d gone down had a shattered kneecap.

“It’s just I thought I saw him today,” Edna said, double-tying her shoelaces, a puzzled frown creasing her brow.

I wondered if she’d ever link the Olympic scout with the mug shots of Harry Clinton on the front pages of both dailies.

James Hunneman was at police headquarters, practically stuttering in his eagerness to talk. The factory owner swore he didn’t know a damn thing about murder. He was only bribing Clinton. It had been going on for a long time.

He’d always gotten cheap labor from Clinton, no questions, no papers, dollars changing hands. When the new law took effect, making him vulnerable to fines for employing illegals, he’d started paying Clinton more, to avoid INS raids. He made ends meet by sticking some of the illegals in his brother-in-law’s rental apartments on Westland. Canfield charged what the traffic would bear and kicked back a percentage to Hunneman. Still, Hunneman thought it was getting out of hand. He could barely make a profit. American workers wanted more and more. Unions and benefits. Health care, for chrissake.

Hunneman’s lawyer tried to get him to shut up at this point, but he was a man with a grievance and he wanted to set the record straight.

And Manuela, and the other women who so suddenly disappeared after supposedly getting their green cards?

Well, he blustered, he wasn’t in business to ask questions. He didn’t give a damn. They were just a bunch of illegals.

I hoped he’d see the inside of prison for a long time to come, he and his brother-in-law both. It wasn’t enough. If there was a hell, I wanted them booked for an endless shift, stitching and stuffing pillows in a sweltering, unventilated closet.

The people in the stands came alive as Kristy made a terrific dig, and my replacement, a black woman named Nina, spiked a kill. Fourth game even at eight all. I yelled encouragement. It felt funny to watch. The perspective was wrong.

“I’m all mixed up in my head,” Paolina mumbled, leaning against me.

“Let’s talk about it.”

“Not now. You wanna watch.”

“Well take a walk. I’ll test my ankle.”

I leaned over and murmured to a teammate. If everybody else broke a leg, she could find me wandering the first-floor corridors. I took Paolina by the hand and we went out the big double doors. The noise of the game receded behind us.

“What’s all mixed up in your head?” I asked after we’d walked awhile in silence. The ice bag thumped against my ankle.

“Does your ankle hurt?”

“Only when I tap-dance.”

“Mom said not to tell you about the factory.”

“Is that what’s bothering you?”

“I gave Amalia your card. She was in the bathroom, crying, and she said no one could help her. I remembered how I always used to cry when I was a little girl, and I said maybe you could help her like you helped me.”

When she was a little girl. When had a ten-year-old ceased being a little girl?

“I wish I could have helped her,” I said. “She didn’t tell me enough.”

Paolina said, “She was crying. I hate it when grown-ups cry.”

We were near a staircase, and I sat heavily on the third step up. I leaned forward and probed my swollen ankle with tentative fingers.

“If she’d told the truth,” Paolina said hesitantly, “would you have helped her? No matter who she was? No matter if she was illegal and everything?”

“I’d have done my best. I might not have helped, but I’d have tried.”

“What if—what if she had a secret that was too awful to share?”

“Sometimes if you tell secrets, they don’t seem so bad,” I said.

She twisted the wire fish that dangled around her neck, ran her fingers over the black silk cord. “Mom lied to me,” she said, “about my dad.”

“Tell me about it,” I murmured, almost afraid to talk for fear she’d shut me out again.

She went on and I breathed a little easier. “I just wanted to tell the truth and not hurt anybody.”

“That’s tough,” I said. “Sometimes you can’t tell the truth and not hurt somebody.”

“I thought if I went to—to that man, he could help me because he worked for Immigration and everything, and because you liked him. I thought he was okay.”

She stared at the floor. Her fingers were busy with the fish again.

“You saw him the night you stayed at my house with Roz. You took his card off the hall table.”

“You kissed him,” she said accusingly.

This was not the time for a lecture about spying from staircases. “I thought he was okay too. I made a mistake about him.” I said gently, “The good guys don’t wear white hats and the bad guys don’t wear black.”

“But then how can you tell?” she asked.

My mother always told me I couldn’t trust anyone. She had a hundred ways to say it, couched in her own mother’s useful Yiddish phrases. There were so many, all about the uselessness of strangers. The one that summed it up was, A goy blayht a goy. A stranger remains a stranger. A Gentile is always a Gentile.

If you trust people, you could wind up bedding Harry Clinton.

Or loving Paolina.

She wasn’t crying, but it cost her a gallant effort not to cry, and I wanted to tell her to let go, not to put on any brave front for me.

“Why did you need to talk to the Immigration man?” I asked.

She took a deep breath and continued in a shaky voice, “Because I’m illegal. I’m not an American.”

“Oh, Paolina.” I rested my hand on her head. Her shiny hair felt soft.

“My dad isn’t from Puerto Rico. He’s somebody I never met. I don’t even have a picture of him. I never heard of him until we went to Bogotá.”

“How did you find out?” I asked. I wanted to probe to the bottom of the wound, to make sure she talked it all out. But I kept my voice gentle and easy.

“We stayed with my aunt,” she said, “my tía Rosa, but one night we went to this big house, this enormous house on the top of a hill. A woman in a uniform, like a nurse, answered the bell, and Mom said I should go with her. She took me down a long hallway, lit with candles, to the kitchen, and we had mint tea and cookies. She told me how to get to the bathroom, but I got lost. Maybe I took the wrong staircase. It was such a big house.”

“Go on, honey.”

“I kept walking around, looking at things. There was a big blue-and-yellow parrot on a stand in one hallway, and I talked to him but he didn’t talk back. I kept thinking I’d find the kitchen again, and then I was on this balcony, in a tiny room that looked over another room, a room with almost as many books as a library. And I heard my mom talking. I should have yelled down to her. But I didn’t. I listened.

“She was talking to this old man. He had white hair and he was dressed all in black. She called him my grandfather, but he wasn’t her dad, because I’ve seen pictures of Mom’s dad in the scrapbooks. And I couldn’t figure it out, so I stayed and listened to everything they said.

“They had a terrible fight. Mom wanted money. She said he owed it to me. And he called her names and said maybe I wasn’t his granddaughter. And even if I was, he hated his son and he wouldn’t give her any money. And later I asked Mom questions about the old man and whether he had any children because I thought maybe my real dad was dead or something.”

How could Marta have been so foolish as to imagine Paolina didn’t know?

“Is he dead?” I asked.

“I wish he was. I wish I never knew about him.”

I could hear distant cheering from the gym, but I didn’t connect the sound to volleyball. I didn’t even wonder who’d won the fourth game.

Paolina said, “I pretended I was like you, like a detective. I asked my cousins and other people down there.”

“And what did you find out?” I asked.

She bit her lip and tugged at her necklace. Then she said, “My father, my real father, is named Carlos Roldan Gonzales. He’s one of those guys you read about in the papers with all the drugs. He used to just be a Communist or something, but now he’s mixed up with drugs, and the police and the army chase him all the time, and everybody wants to kill him. Everybody hates him, and that’s who my father is.

“Mom didn’t even tell me. She let me think Dad was my father, and he’s not. I don’t think he adopted me or anything. I’m not American, even. I’m like the women at the factory. I don’t know who I am.”

Her shoulders heaved and the tears started. At first she tried to stop them, sniffing them back, then she gave it up and cried like the small child she was, with grief and abandon.

“Paolina, honey, listen to me.” I waited until she looked me in the eye. I should have given her a tissue. I never carry tissues when I need them. “You’re the same person you were.”

“No I’m not. I’m not the same. Look at me in school. Will everybody have to know? Will I get deported? Will I have to live with my father? I thought that man would know because he worked for Immigration, but he didn’t care about anything except that I saw him at the factory.”

“You’re not going away. You won’t get deported.”

“Why? How?”

“We’ll have to think about it and find out what’s really true and what isn’t. There are a lot of things we can do once we find out the truth.”

“But—”

“Listen, the important thing is that you know who you are. You play drums in the band. You’re my little sister. You’re not your mother and you’re not your father.”

“But I’m like my mother. Lilia says I look like my mother.”

“So you think you have to be like your father too?”

“I guess, but I don’t want to be bad.”

“Oh, Paolina.” I stared at the floor and the ceiling and the walls and tried to find the words that would make it better. I touched the tiny gold fish on the black silky cord.

“Remember the fish,” I said slowly. “How I thought it was a little stick man and you told me it was a fish. Well, to some people it’s more than a fish. It’s a symbol, a Christian symbol, a very old one. But it’s something even more basic. It’s gold wire twisted into a shape. Whether I think it’s a fish or I think it’s a man, it’s still gold wire.

“What I’m trying to say is, you’re you, whether you think you’re different or not. Nothing has changed since you overheard that conversation except the way you think about yourself. You thought you were a gold fish because one man was your father. Now you think you’re a stick man because somebody else is your father. But what you’re made of is the same.”

The swelling and the pain in my ankle seemed to decrease after that. I played eight minutes in the fifth and final game. I kept glancing over at Paolina, sitting on the bench, waiting for me. She had the very faintest of smiles on her face. We lost the game 15–12. It felt like a victory.