JOELLE IS STILL OUT ON the porch, beginning to feel the cold and wondering what her next move will be, when she sees a shadow depart from the sidewalk across the street and come toward her. She recognizes it at once.
“Tonto!”
“Buenas tardes.” He approaches carefully through the prickly hedge. “I thought I’d just come by for a minute and . . . find out how you are,” he ends lamely.
“I’m alive, as you see.” She wants to smile but finds herself frowning. Her guard has gone up. It’s obvious he didn’t “just come by.” He’s been out there on the street lying in wait, spying on her, hardly better than the Secret Princesses. She can’t stand being tracked that way.
“How did you know where I lived?” she demands.
Carlos shrugs. He looks at her, not angrily as she deserves. His patience always surprises her.
“Look, I’m in the middle of something,” she says more kindly. “It’s not a good time.”
“I saw all the cars in your driveway. I guess you have company.”
“I guess I do.”
“Okay,” he says, and turns to go, but some awkwardness in the way he moves, a peculiar angle of his head, sends Joelle a message. She knows him well enough to read him. Something has happened.
“Carlos, wait. What is it?”
He looks back with reluctance, not eager to be shot down again.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m having a crazy day.”
“Me too,” he admits. “I’ve been getting some things straight with my father. Last night when I came back from the park, I couldn’t sleep. He was awake too, and we started talking.”
The park. To Joelle, it seems an age ago. She has to struggle to get on his wavelength. “Did you talk about Daniel?”
Carlos nods. “It was being with Queenie last night. I kept thinking about the Crying Rocks.”
“Did you tell your dad that you remembered . . . ?”
“I told him,” Carlos says. He takes a deep breath. “Joelle, he said it couldn’t have happened that way.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I heard couldn’t have been Daniel. He was hurt too bad.”
“How does he know?”
“He said Daniel’s jaw was broken. He couldn’t have opened his mouth to make a noise like that. He couldn’t even speak. It puzzled my dad later, wondering what I could have heard. He never brought it up, though. He didn’t want to remind me of the accident. He was hoping I could forget.”
“Well, you almost did.”
“He never blamed me, either,” Carlos says, sounding as if he can’t believe it. “In fact, the opposite; he said I’d been brave. When he was carrying Daniel out, he said I hung in and was tough.”
“I’m glad you talked,” Joelle says. “You must feel a lot better.”
Carlos nods.
“What does he think you heard?”
“He didn’t say. I was a little kid. He probably believes I imagined everthing.”
“Did you?”
“Well, did I?” Carlos asks her straight back. “You were there, you heard those cries. Did you imagine them?”
“No. And they had nothing to do with the wind.”
“So what were they?”
They stand silent on the porch, looking out at the darkening street. Into Joelle’s mind comes that hulking mass of glacial boulders, and the swamp beside them, and the forest behind. She hears Queenie’s voice say again:
“A ghost is a ghost. It can do what it wants.”
She turns toward Carlos. “Relatives of mine have come to visit.”
“I saw them out in the backyard. They’re the guys from the funeral, aren’t they? The ones who look like you?”
“Right.” Joelle glances at him. “You didn’t say they looked like me before.”
“You would’ve been mad. You don’t like people telling you things like that, remember?”
“They’re Narragansett Indians. Did you know that?”
“I might have,” Carlos says. He’s being extra careful.
“They’ve been filling me in on some things.”
“I won’t ask what,” Carlos says, moving away. “I know it’s your business.” He walks fast toward the sidewalk.
“Wait,” Joelle calls, “I want to tell you about Vernon. Do you have to leave now?”
“I have to,” he answers over his shoulder. He’s been burnt once too often. She can see he doesn’t want to risk it again.
“But I’m not sure what I should do.”
“You’ll figure it out.”
“Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow?”
“Maybe.” He doesn’t look around.
“Thanks for coming over!” Joelle shouts after him. This time there’s no answer. She watches as the dark outline of his departing body blurs into the street shadows and disappears.
* * *
When the uncles return from the chick shed a half hour later, knocking cautiously on the back door, Joelle is waiting for them in the living room with the lamps turned on. The sun has gone down. Outside it’s that blue gray dark of early evening, and Carlos was right—she’s figured things out. There are a number of matters that have yet to be addressed. Joelle intends to shed light on all of them. First and foremost:
“Where is my sister Sylvia?”
The uncles are coming through the kitchen, grabbing up handfuls of pretzels from the bowl on the counter, when she puts this question to them.
“Now, Joelle. Don’t be rushing things,” Uncle Jerry says. “We were thinking of going out for a bite, down to the Red Dragon. Do you like Chinese? We’d be honored to escort our niece to dinner.”
This, Joelle suspects, is another trick. The uncles have been plotting how to get around her out in the shed. It’s laughable to think the only ploy they could come up with was food.
“I am not that dim,” Joelle tells them. “Neither am I forgiving you for one thing. The only reason I’m letting you back in this house is that I need some answers. So, if we’re going to have Chinese, somebody better go get it. And by the way, don’t you all have families waiting for you somewhere? Did somebody invite you to spend the night?”
“Joelle, honey,” says Uncle Greg, “you don’t have any idea of what happens when us boys get reunited.”
“About once in a blue moon since Ma died,” Uncle Jodie says, shaking his head.
“Well, what happens,” Uncle Greg goes on, “is that we stay and powwow a good long time, till we feel back together again. For myself, I took off from the Pequot Museum till Tuesday. How about all of you?”
“I’m good through tomorrow,” Uncle Jerry says. “And for your information, I’ve got three boys and a girl over in Pawcatuck, all cousins of yours,” he adds to Joelle.
“I’m out of the yard till Wednesday,” Uncle Jodie chimes in. “Live up in Pittsfield, Mass., these days. Two kids in Connecticut with their ma.”
“Well, Vern and I signed out from the turkey ranch for all of this week,” says Roger. “Now that Vern’s back to being single like me, we’re thinking to take a little trip over to view the Paw Sox’s opening games. Just a couple of nights, Joelle. Nothing to worry about.”
Uncle Franko’s not so organized. He says he’ll have to call in sick to the R.I. Highway Department. Oh, yes, and he’s married with five.
While this summation is under way, Vernon goes in search of his wallet and heads off to the Red Dragon to get the food.
“There’s another question I have,” Joelle says as they wait. “Why did I need to ride a freight train from Chicago?” She turns to Uncle Roger. “Here you get your mother a first-class sleeping ticket, and you can’t even put me in a passenger car?”
“Good question,” Roger says. “I’ll shoot that over to Jerry. He set it up.”
“We had to get you out fast, is the answer,” Uncle Jerry says, shrugging. “We were one step ahead of the law.”
“You’re kidding,” Joelle says.
“I am not. You had foster care on your tail. Once you disappear into that system, it takes wild horses to get you out. See, by then, we saw how Vern wasn’t going to run interference to get you back after the accident. Even though he cared, he was too scared of losing his Mary Louise. So we all pitched in to take action.”
Uncle Roger nods. “We wanted you. You were part of our Sylvie, crazy as she was.”
Joelle looks away fast. There’s something about the way Roger has said this that, combined with the word “accident,” frightens her.
“The trouble was,” Uncle Frank continues, “we didn’t have good standing to take you in custody without some proof. It would’ve cost us time and money to convince people out there of what was what, if we ever could. So . . .”
“We stole you,” Uncle Jerry declares. “Snuck you out of the holding bin where they’d stashed you, put you on the freight, and rode you out of there. I had friends in a couple of convenient places from when I worked in Chicago those two years. We got you on board and that was that. The authorities never hardly blinked.”
“They let a little child just disappear?” Joelle says, shocked.
“Oh, honey, the way things were back then, they could’ve lost a truckload without too much trouble. You know, foster kids aren’t a high priority to the state politicians. They can’t vote yet.”
“But I still don’t understand. What happened to my mother? And where was Sylvia?”
The next second the front door flies open, and there is Vernon, arms piled high with Styrofoam containers. Everybody jumps up to help carry them into the kitchen.
“Looks like Vern got enough to feed a Continental army,” Uncle Franko declares.
“It’ll boil down,” Vernon replies, and everybody laughs.
“That’s for sure,” Uncle Greg snorts. “Over at the Pequot Museum we cart out a ton of trash a day, just from lunch and dinner.”
“This country’s sinking under a mountain of rubbish, and they call it progress,” Uncle Franko says, shaking his head. “I’d just like to know what and where they think they’re progressing to.”
In the midst of this chatter, Joelle is working away on trying to solve the mystery of Sylvie and Sylvia. She plugs the word “accident” into her equation of known facts and comes up with an image. It’s a high-rise city apartment building. Porches stacked up the side, one on top of the other. Third floor.
Uncle Roger, settling down next to her with a full plate of food, hears the result.
“My sister fell, didn’t she?” Joelle tells him.
Uncle Roger stops moving. He sits absolutely still, not looking at her.
“It wasn’t me who fell, was it? The story got mixed up. It was her.”
“It was her, not you.”
“And she didn’t make it.”
“No, she didn’t,” Roger says, a little catch in his voice.
Joelle nods. “I always wondered—how I could’ve lived through that fall with not even one scar to show for it. I used to look all over my body, and I never found any. Now I know why.”
She stares around the room. A tightness is rising in her chest. She dreads the next question, but she has to ask it.
“Sylvia wasn’t thrown, was she? That’s the story that came down, but I never believed it.”
The chitchat has stopped. Uncle Jerry and Uncle Jodie are standing in the kitchen doorway gazing at Joelle while uncles Greg, Roger, and Franko are sitting stiff as boards, their plates on their knees. Joelle guesses they were hoping to put this off until after supper.
“Did Sylvia get thrown, or didn’t she?” Joelle demands.
Vernon says softly, “She didn’t. They went down together.”
Joelle looks straight ahead. She takes a little sip of air and turns to Roger, sitting beside her.
“You mean, somebody else went too?” she asks, and Roger cannot answer. He glances across at Vernon for help.
“Joelle, there was no somebody else,” Vernon says. “Sylvie would never take her kids to somebody else, that was the problem.”
“So who went down?” Joelle says, even though she knows the answer. It’s right in front of her, clear as day, like the answers on the tests at school that never give her any trouble.
“My mother?” she says. “Sylvie took my sister down?”
Vernon puts his plate on the floor with a clatter and leans toward her.
“Joelle, this is what we found out, after. In the end, Sylvie wasn’t bringing little Sylvia to the doctors anymore. She saw there wasn’t anything they could do. But even more, what we think now is, she didn’t want to leave her girl in the hospital. Sylvia was real weak. Her heart was bad and she couldn’t breathe right. She had been in the hospital a lot of times before and she hated it. She was terrified of the hospital. Your mother was determined to keep her home.”
“She telephoned me a couple of days before,” Roger breaks in.
“Who?” Joelle asks him.
“Your mother. She’d call me every once in a while, probably out of habit from before Ma died. I was still living at the old house. This time, Sylvie told me things were going downhill fast with Sylvia and she wasn’t going to stop them. Sylvia had suffered enough. She asked me: Was there any way I could come out and take care of Sissie for a spell? She didn’t want you there, Joelle, when the end came. So I said, yes, I’d take some time off. And I was on my way. God knows, I was on the road, driving out there, when . . .”
Vernon clears his throat loudly, and speaks. “He would’ve been there the next night, as you all know,” he tells the room at large. “Roger was coming. Sylvie knew he was coming. Now, Joelle, this is what happened.
“A social worker came by Sylvie’s apartment to check up on how things were, and she saw little Sylvia and ran off to get help. And Sylvie wouldn’t let her back in the door, so this social worker called Emergency. Then the medics came and Sylvie wouldn’t let them in either. When they tried to break in anyway—”
“My mother made me stay in the bedroom,” Joelle says. Her voice surprises her. It sounds high and squeaky like a child’s.
“You remember this?” Vernon looks at her hard.
“I’m just now remembering some things.”
“Well, you were there, of course. Nobody was going to ask you what happened. You were too little.”
“She said I had to stay. I didn’t want to. It wasn’t my fault.”
“Your fault?” asks Uncle Roger, but Joelle hardly hears him.
Inside her mind she’s gazing far off to another time, to a place so well forgotten it was all but erased. It’s a room with a window that looks out over an open-air porch.
“She told me she was going out the window, onto the porch with Sylvia, because Sylvia had to go away, and she couldn’t go alone,” Joelle remembers. “Somebody was pounding on the door.”
“Well, that was most likely Emergency,” Vernon says quietly. The uncles are not eating anything. They’ve forgotten they have plates on their knees.
“I said, ‘I want to come too. I am supposed to take care of her,’ ” Joelle recalls, “but she wouldn’t listen.”
She sees the room’s four walls now, the big window and the two beds with their green quilted bedspreads. One bed is for Mother. The other is for Sissie and Sylvia, who always sleep together, even when Sylvia is very sick, just as they always do everything together. They have to, so Sylvia won’t be afraid and Sissie can keep her safe.
“My mother said she was the only person who could keep Sylvia safe now. I had to stay and wait. I didn’t want to. I wanted to go!”
“Your mother wasn’t thinking straight,” Uncle Roger says. “If she was herself, she never would have left you like that.” He shakes his head hard, as if he’s trying to shake something out of it.
“She told me not to cry or Sylvia would be scared, and I didn’t,” Joelle remembers. “I sat there and waited, and I never cried once. Even when they broke down the door, I never cried.”
“Well, you are now, honey,” Uncle Greg says, and Joelle notices that she is. Without any trouble at all, with no fighting back or holding on, her eyes have filled up and overflowed. The uncles have become a wobbling, shimmering sea of heads and bodies. Then their arms are around her, and everybody is crying together for Sylvie and Sylvia. And for her.
* * *
Aunt Mary Louise would have been amazed to see how well her house took in the company that night. Those tiny rooms expanded to fit the uncles with no trouble at all. There could have been even a few more bodies squeezed in—and maybe this will come to pass, Joelle thinks, if any of the dozen or so cousins she’s been hearing about decides to pay a visit. Considering that she was running out of space before, filling the place up all by herself, it’s a remarkable alteration.
On her way through the living room to the kitchen the next morning, Joelle steps over the snoring forms of the twin uncles, Jerry and Jodie. They’re tucked into a couple of sleeping bags, using rolled-up sweatshirts for pillows. Uncle Franko is sprawled on the couch in his underwear, and Uncle Greg’s mass of black braid is sticking out from a snarl of blankets beside the dining table.
Uncle Roger is asleep upstairs with Vernon, the last six inches of his six-foot three-inch frame hanging off the bottom end of Aunt Mary Louise’s side of the bed. Joelle caught a glimpse going by in the hall, and it gave her a good feeling. She’s not sure what Aunt Mary Louise would think, but she likes seeing Uncle Roger there. His tallness is her tallness. Uncle Greg’s black tuft of braid looks a lot like her hair when she gets up in the morning. These men knew her mother when she was Joelle’s age. They grew up with her in the same house and spoke to her every day. They’re sitting on top of an entire world she’s going to get to know—and one that’s going to get to know her.
She’s on her way to school. School of all things! In the middle of all this. It’s Monday morning, and unlike Vernon and the uncles—who are not setting a very good example in this regard—she can’t call in sick or take time off. Not anymore. A day job you can fudge, but school marches ahead, with or without you. It’s up to you to hang in there. One thing Joelle’s been sure of for the last few months is that she’s going to carry on for Aunt Mary Louise. Now she has Sylvie and Sylvia to work for too. This morning, as a start, she’s planning to ace a Spanish test on irregular verbs. Standing at the kitchen counter, she’s eating a bowl of cereal and studying her Spanish textbook when:
“Joelle?”
It’s Vernon, unshaved, barefoot, staring at her from the kitchen doorway with red-rimmed eyes.
“What?”
“I just wondered how you’re fixed for today.”
“If you mean lunch money, I’ve got it.”
“I didn’t mean that.” Vernon lowers his voice to a whisper. “What I wonder is, how you’re doing with—”
“I’m okay,” she says quickly. “I might be late getting home this afternoon. I have to talk to someone.”
“Who?”
“Just somebody. Will anyone still be here?”
“Roger and Jerry and Jodie, from the look of it. I’ll get up a dinner. You’re taking it pretty well, then?”
“What do you mean?”
“I thought after you found out . . . well, you might be disgusted or angry or . . .” Vernon, in his usual roundabout way, is asking her for something. Joelle knows what it is.
“Do you think I should be angry?”
He shrugs. He looks desperate.
“I don’t know how I am yet,” she answers him truthfully. “It’ll take me a while to figure out. I’m still going to live here, though, if that’s what you’re asking. I don’t plan on moving in with any of these guys.” She gestures toward the sleepers in the living room. “Did you really believe I would leave?”
“I didn’t know.” Vernon hangs his head. “I have a lot to apologize for,” he mumbles. “I didn’t handle things like I should. I wish your Aunt Mary Louise were here to say what she thinks.”
Joelle takes in his misery and closes her Spanish book. “I know what she’d think.”
Vernon shakes his head.
“I do. She’d say it was okay.”
“Really?” Vernon glances up.
Joelle nods. “She wouldn’t leave either.”
Vernon looks about ready to cry. “How do you know?” he asks.
“Well, that’s the biggest mistake you made of all. You should think about it,” Joelle tells him. “You could figure it out if you tried.”
“I could?”
“Yes.”
He looks faintly hopeful, but also on the verge of asking her How? when a series of knocks sounds on the front door. From outside, an urgent voice rings out.
“Joelle! Where are you? It’s me! We’re going to be late!”
“I have to leave; that’s my tribe calling,” Joelle says with a grin. She puts out her hand and touches his as she goes by, maybe just to help her squeeze past, but maybe not.
“See you tonight,” Vernon says when she’s half out the door.
“See you,” Joelle answers. And that feels good too.