CHAPTER 1

I broke into the house I grew up in to steal back my childhood. It was easy. The dog chomped on a greasy bone while I took what I came for. Eventually my stepmother noticed a manuscript missing, figured out where the hell the dog got that lamb bone, and swore out a warrant for my arrest.

Relatives were spilling onto Aunt Shirley’s front porch, plates piled with bagels and lox like any Jewish family back from the cemetery, when sirens came wailing and two black-and-whites screeched to a halt at the curb. At first I didn’t catch on. I was talking to Liz Stone. I was always relieved to see Liz—we’d been friends since we were eight—and I wondered out loud who the cops were after. Liz said, “you,” and we both laughed. Red lights lit my grandmother’s face, then cast it in shadow, then lit it red again. Uncle Harry’s mouth fell open and his cigar dropped out.

The cops couldn’t possibly want me. I was a white girl in Baltimore. I used to wave when the police drove by, like most suburban children in the sixties. I was no longer a kid, but I was barely out of my twenties and I still saw myself as obedient, dutiful, adoring—in short, a daughter. It was true that I was finally coming out of the shell I hadn’t even known I was in. And I did trespass and enter the house. But c’mon—two, then three police cars?

The service at the cemetery before the brunch had gone along as planned, for the most part. Friends and family gathered on a beautiful fall day for the unveiling of the headstone on my father’s grave. The unveiling ceremony was supposed to end a period of mourning, but while the designated amount of time had passed—the funeral was in February and it was now October—it still came as a shock when my sister Susan and I peeled the gauze cover off the stone and saw our father’s name etched in granite. Clyde Aronson, dead at 69. Every step I took into the future without him was a blow. I thought the old rabbis must have been onto something with their ritual, though, because that day in the cemetery I felt something new along with loss. I felt a sense of my own worth. I felt it when we chanted prayers in Hebrew under the trees in their autumn beauty, and I felt it when my father’s schoolteacher buddy Shep Levine recited Yeats. There were tears, and there was laughter of course, and then a line of cars leaving the cemetery gates full of my famished relatives hurrying to the brunch.

Aunt Vivian trotted across Aunt Shirley’s porch and threw her arms around me. “Oh, Joanna, I loved your father so much. He was my favorite brother. Don’t tell the other two.” She squeezed so hard my glasses dug into the side of my nose, but for once I didn’t want her to let go. “Where’s Brenda?” she asked, before releasing me. “I didn’t see her at the cemetery.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“No one knows,” said my mother.

Brenda was my father’s second wife, my stepmother, and it was Brenda who arranged for the unveiling with help from my mother’s family. My parents stayed friends after their divorce, and since Brenda Aronson (née McLean) was naturally unfamiliar with the Jewish ritual, my mother’s sister, Aunt Shirley, volunteered to make the food and Aunt Shirley’s husband, Uncle Lou, a member of the temple’s burial society, met with Brenda to plan the ceremony. Brenda was in charge, though. She was the one who picked the stone and set the date for October 25th, 1987. Why wouldn’t she come, then? Yes, we were fighting over the will, and I took the manuscript and some other things from the house, but I thought she had calmed down about that already.

Brenda was pleasant and harmless, Uncle Lou said, and I would have said the same thing, once. She was always a little odd, but in ways that could be attributed to shyness, or just the awkward nature of the stepmother relationship. I used to feel grudging sympathy for her. She had to know my parents were still in love with each other. When Susan and I were growing up, our parents spoke often about their epic love affair, drawing a tight circle around them even as they were trading insults and hurling dishes. So I knew how it felt to be left out. But then my father got sick, and Brenda and I took care of him together. You learned a lot about a person under those circumstances. I stopped feeling sorry for poor Brenda and started to think of her as the bad part of my father. The damaged part he excised and finally put outside of himself.

My glasses were crooked after Aunt Vivian’s embrace, one lens resting higher than the other, so I took them off and applied cautious pressure to the red plastic temples, then put them back on. I had a small face, dark hair, big features. I turned to my mother and pushed the glasses up on my nose. “That’s better,” she said. We were close now, my mother and I. Once Susan and I grew into adults, my mother wanted our friendship.

“Here, sit down, Joanna,” my mother said, scraping her chair over the concrete and making a space for me next to the pink porch railing.

“So what’s the story?” Aunt Vivian said. “Why isn’t she here?”

“I told you, it’s a big mystery,” my mother said. Then she put her mouth around a forkful of apple cake topped with vanilla ice cream. Brenda’s absence gave my mother an appetite. My mother swallowed and licked her lips.

I could hear my father. “Ice cream used to taste better,” he was saying. Even before he died, he was always talking to me in my head. I could see us sitting at the kitchen table on Cedar Drive eating Neapolitan supermarket ice cream out of smooth ceramic bowls.

“You think everything you used to get in New York was better,” I said.

“No. That’s not it,” my father said. He took a spoonful and swirled the ice cream in his mouth. “In the old days, when I was little, it was creamier.”

I tried to imagine him little, a small boy on the steps of a vast brick asylum I had seen in a photograph. “What about Breyers?”

“Nah. No-oo. I’m talking creamy.”

“Häagen Daz?” I said.

“Nah,” my father said. “I’m talking about ice cream they made fresh in the back of a candy store. Forget it, kiddo. Doesn’t exist anymore.”

I wanted to know how my father got ice cream from a candy store when he had grown up in an institution. But he was no longer around to ask. He used to talk about how great the orphanage was—they rode horses, he had hundreds of friends—but even a child could tell he was hiding something. I excused myself and went inside to find Liz. The house was filled with people. Unveilings were typically small affairs, but my father had the kind of big personality that was sorely missed, and he drew a crowd. Whether you loved him or hated him, his death left a hole in the world. He’d been a high school English teacher, and I recognized two of his former students at the buffet table talking to Shep Levine and another teacher. My father’s old girlfriend Darleen and her husband were there, and most of my father’s family from New York, as well as my mother’s entire family, including her brother Nat who hadn’t spoken to my father in years. My sister Susan’s husband Larry was there, and my boyfriend Fred who had flown in from L.A. Everyone was there but Brenda.

Laughter rang out from the kitchen over the groan of the oven door. I found Liz in the dining room cornered by my father’s brothers. “It’s Joanna’s fault,” Uncle Alvin was saying, his voice like wet gravel. “Brenda’s upset. That’s why she isn’t here.”

“Joanna’s fault?” said Liz. She caught my eye and I came over.

“My fault?” I said. “Listen, I only took what belonged to me.”

“Not what she says,” said Uncle Harry. He had the same gravel voice as Uncle Alvin. My father had the voice, too. All three brothers spoke like they were gargling with rocks.

When my father was seven and Uncle Harry was five, they were the ones sent away and put in the orphanage. Now Uncle Harry was unsure of how to show his loyalty to his big brother—by standing with Brenda, or with my mother and me. He chewed solemnly on a piece of bagel, cheeks full, meaty lower lip in a pout. He had a tough guy’s baby face—a face frozen at five years old.

“C’mon. Let’s go outside and have a smoke,” said Uncle Alvin. “You got those Cuban cigars with you?”

“Fred,” said Uncle Harry, “c’mon out to the porch with us and try a nice cigar from Havana. Hand-rolled.”

Fred looked at me.

“Go ahead,” I said. “Smoke their cigars. They’re mad at me, not you.”

Almost everyone was outside, either on the front porch or in the backyard. The day was warm with a dazzling blue sky. The screen door clapped shut behind Fred. A few of us stayed inside, Aunt Vivian huddled by the coffee urn with Cousin Mitzi. “Joanna, what was that poem the teacher recited?” Mitzi said. She came toward Liz and me with a plastic cup full of coffee snapped into one of those brown plastic holders.

“‘The Wild Swans At Coole,’” I said. “‘The trees are in their autumn beauty, the woodland paths are dry.’ My father liked Yeats.”

“What does it mean?” Mitzi asked.

I thought about it. I stared out the window at my mother on the porch laughing at something my uncles were saying, and I tried to think of a short answer. There was a flurry of activity outside. The sound of a car door slamming, Fred rushing down the steps to the street, and my mother jumping up from her chair, hurrying inside.

Aunt Vivian grabbed my mother’s arm when she came in. “Evie, we were just asking about that poem at the cemetery.”

My mother nodded, trance-like. “Joanna,” she whispered hoarsely. All of the color had drained out of her face. Even her lips were pale.

“What’s the matter, Ma?”

Her eyes widened. “There’s a cop outside,” she said.

“What’s a cop doing here?” I said.

“Don’t be stupid,” she said.

Sirens, merely background noise seconds ago, wailed louder, then cut off on a whoop. Brakes screeched. Another car door croaked open. Susan brushed past us and into the den where her husband was watching a football game with Shep.

I still didn’t get it. It had to be a joke. “Looking for me?” I said.

Red lights danced on Aunt Shirley’s walls. My mother’s hand tightened on my wrist. She yanked me away from the window. I’d never seen her like this. She spoke through gritted teeth: “Why else would the police be here?”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Who else would they be coming for?”

My heart started banging on the offbeat. Brenda sent the cops after me. I couldn’t believe it. I thought I was invulnerable, protected not just by privilege, but specifically the new feeling of self-worth I’d never had before. Susan always felt it, like a sixth sense. But for me, that kind of entitlement was a novelty. I was not wanted. My father had to have a boy, and I had been his last shot. Only at the end of his life, he discovered a girl was just as good. He could talk to me, about more than ice cream. We could share the life of the mind. He could do that with a daughter, how shocking it was to learn. In those last dying months, with icicles dripping from the overhang and a blanket of snow out the window behind our easy chairs, he reached for my hand and held it. “Would you like me to leave you my books and papers?” he asked. It turned out I was his rightful heir all along.

Liz skidded into the foyer and pressed her face to the screen door. “Fred’s yelling something about a warrant. He wants to see the warrant. Way to go, Fred,” Liz said.

“Your boyfriend’s all riled up,” said Mitzi.

I heard clanking, scraping. Handcuffs, dress shoes clomping on concrete. I didn’t have much time. I had to make a move. Shep bolted out of the den and grabbed me in a bear hug. The light had gone out of his eyes. He turned my body toward the kitchen.

“Out the back door?” I said.

“Exactly,” said Shep. “Through the kitchen into the backyard, climb on top of the retaining wall, then up the hill and onto the neighbor’s property.” He released me and gave me a push. “Walk fast, but don’t run. Cut between the houses to the other side. Go. Go. Hurry.”