DAHLIA
THE DAY I FILLED OUT THE APPLICATION TO BECOME A FOSTER mother I tried to tell them: boys only. I can still see the lady who came to do my home interview, looking up from her forms.
“Excuse me?”
“I’m just, um, better with them,” I explained, feet crossed neatly at the ankle. If I had any idea how desperate they were for homes, I wouldn’t have been so nervous. Even put on a scratchy pair of nylons.
The truth was I knew too much about how things go wrong for girls. Oh, they start off bright and hopeful enough. Take my poor Zaidie—inhaling all those biographies, a picture of her latest hero tacked on the bedroom door every week, even thinks she might become the president of the United States, for heaven’s sake. No idea how the world would take back its promises one by one. You? A foster kid? A girl thin as a spindle, not even pretty? Did you really think we meant you when we said you could be anything you wanted to be? Sometimes she reminded me so much of myself I had to look away.
“There’s no place on the application form for that, Mrs. Moscatelli, but I’ll make a note,” the lady said, pretending to jot it down. “Better . . . with . . . boys.” She put her pen away and packed up to go. “All right, then.”
I followed her onto the front porch. “And no hoodlums, either,” I called after her. “In fact, no teenagers at all. Little ones are what I want. Well-behaved little boys.” I didn’t think it was necessary to add that these nice little boys should also be Caucasian.
She climbed into her car and opened the window. “No teens. No problem cases,” she repeated, nodding. “Got it.”
Little did I know that once they had me in the system, they’d do what they wanted. Just like they did with the kids. No problem cases? They must have had a good hoot over that one.
In the past eleven years, we’d had girls who blocked the toilet with their tampons because no one ever taught them better, and more delinquents than I can count, including the one who busted a hole in the garage window with his fist, leaving blood stains on the cement floor that will never go away. Colored kids, too. That always got the neighbors riled up, even though the twins who stayed with us for almost six months were probably the best behaved boys we ever had. Most didn’t leave blood stains, but they might as well have for all we could forget them. And finally this—a sickly Indian with a growth problem no one ever took the time to figure out. Another girl, to boot. In the middle of all my worry, I was damn furious.
On the phone, Mrs. Doherty had insisted she call the department. “It’s my responsibility—at least, for the next sixteen hours.”
I imagined her consulting her watch, estimating to the minute how long it would be before Nancy arrived to take Agnes away.
“The cops, too. You need to get a hold of the Claxton Police Department. Make sure you tell them it’s been three hours.”
“My husband has friends on the force. How will it look if I . . . In any case, I’m sure the department will phone—”
“Good heavens. She’s six years old and she’s out there somewhere in the dark. Call every number you can think of. And if they don’t find her, call again.”
“Well.” Within a minute, the shame and fear I heard in her voice had spun itself into resentment—a turn I knew all too well. “If your son had only stayed on his own side of town, none of this would have—”
“You can blame Jimmy or me or anyone else all you want later, but right now, you need to call the cops.” I slammed down the phone harder than I intended.
Zaidie was the first to get her coat on when Lou and Jimmy went out to search. “Not you. You stay here with your mother,” Lou told her, more gruff than necessary.
“But I know her best. I know where she’d—”
“Just Jimmy and me, I told you.” Harsher still.
Finally, he turned to me like he always did. The universal translator. “We’re going to be looking through the fields and alleyways she mighta passed. Last thing I need is . . . her slowing us down.”
Both Zaidie and I heard the catch in his voice. In his mind, he was already surveying the vacant lots. We shuddered at the same time.
“But she’s my sister,” Zaidie whispered pitifully after they’d gone.
Defiantly, she opened the door and let Princie out—even though Louie had expressly forbidden it.
“Go ahead, girl. Find Agnes!” Zaidie told her. “Find. Agnes.”
Princie stopped and barked once, almost as if she understood. Then she took off in the direction Lou and Jimmy had gone, almost knocking Lou’s mother over as she climbed out of her car.
“Dio mio! Watcha my ricotta pie,” she yelled after her, shaking a fist with one hand as she balanced her pie with the other. “Stupid cane bastardo!”
I sighed. My mother-in-law had the uncanny ability of showing up at exactly the wrong moment with one of her pies. As soon as she heard Agnes was missing, she pulled out her beads and started with the praying and pacing.
“Dear God, Anna, can you do that in the kitchen? My nerves are shot to hell as it is.”
I’d never spoken to her like that before. She stopped, the way she had the first time Louie brought me home. Then as now, she gave me a good looking-over, deciding if all the rumors she’d heard about me were true. She took her beads into the kitchen.
I could still hear her, though. Spoken in emotional Italian, it sounded more like high opera than the rosary. Whenever she passed the stove her beads clicked against metal, marking the time since Agnes had gone missing. Made me jump every damn time.
Meanwhile, Jon had taken out two cars, his and Agnes’s favorites, and crawled under the table where they had played the last time she was here, narrating the race for both of them. His form of prayer, I thought.
My way was to take up a bit of my long-neglected mending and to sit by the phone, pretending I wasn’t watching it. That I wasn’t willing Lou and Jimmy to walk through the door with Agnes, smiling with everything in her. When she was with us, that smile seemed like the most ordinary sight in the world. Even annoying at times. Only now did I see it for what it was: one of those miracoli Anna went on about.
Zaidie didn’t allow herself any easy comfort. Never had since the day she first walked into the parlor, holding on to her poor brother’s hand tight enough to cut the circulation, their mother only a week dead.
“No abuse or anything—not like the usual cases,” the case worker said, filling me in. “These kids were well taken care of. The lady just got sick.”
“And the father?”
“Apparently ran off with a young girl when his wife got pregnant with the baby. The mother just moved here a year ago, hoping to start fresh. A few months later, she got the diagnosis.”
“If it’s such a good family, there must be someone—”
“An aunt in New Jersey, who only just heard about the kids. Otherwise, well, it was a mixed marriage. Baptist father, Jewish mother—both strict. From what I understand, neither side had much to do with them.” She shook her head. “Sad—given how it all turned out.”
“As long as no one expects us to take them to Synagogue.” I shuddered. “Or church.” Another silent shudder.
“The mother was non-practicing, and they haven’t even been able to find the father.” She handed me a card: LUCILLE MENDELSON, D.D.S. followed by a New Jersey address and phone number. “That’s the aunt. You can expect her to visit from time to time.”
“A lady dentist?”
“Says she’d take them herself, but with her work and all—”
“So it’s likely to be long-term.” I reached for the baby, already thinking how I would carry him into the sun, love him until he forgot the sorrows of his mother’s house. As for the girl, they would have to find a placement elsewhere.
“We stay together, Jon and me,” Zaida said. Only six years old but watching me with those narrow eyes of hers. “I promised Mama.”
Like all Emergencies, she knew more than most adults about the bargains life drives—hard, unfair, implacable—to use a word I learned from a quiz in my Reader’s Digest. She was a match for them, too. In spite of how I felt about girls, I couldn’t say no.
AND THIS WAS the price of it. Sometimes I think she knows me better than I know myself. I hadn’t even gotten the needle threaded before she was after me. “But what if she doesn’t call the cops like you said? What if no one does, Ma?”
When Anna’s rosaries hit the stove on cue, the needle punctured my index finger. I watched the blood pearl. “For goodness sake. Now see what you made me do?”
Zaidie continued to stare at me as if I hadn’t spoken. Waiting.
I put my finger to my mouth and tasted the blood. “If she doesn’t make the call, the department surely will. And besides, Dad and Jimmy probably already—”
“They been gone almost an hour. They woulda found her by now if she was on the route. And—”
“She’s a ward of the state, Zaida. The department will take care of it. Haven’t you got homework?”
“No one in Agnes’s whole life ever did what they were supposed to do for her, Ma. Why would they now?” She pushed the phone in my direction. Like I said, if life was implacable, Zaida Finn was more so.
Apparently, Anna was listening all along, too, because the rhythm of the prayers she was reciting with feet and fingers and tongue abruptly ceased. She stood in the doorway, looking so small and hunched it was impossible to believe she had given birth to the towering man people nicknamed Frankenstein. But the authority in her voice and in the hand gesture that sliced through me like a sword belied her size.
“You hear the girl, Dahlia? I would call the polizia myself, but my English not so good. While you wait, that piccola out there alone in the dark.” She hesitated for a minute, beads in hand, and spoke in a lower voice. “You gonna let those people keepa you afraid your whole life, Dahlia? Madonne. That Chief Wood—”
“For God’s sake, Anna! Enough.”
In thirty minutes, we’d both violated the unspoken pact that had kept the peace between us for twenty years. I’d let slip what I thought of the God who abandoned me when I needed him most, and she’d blurted out what she thought of the way I lived my life.
Even worse, she had spoken the name I had worked so hard to banish from my mind. Out loud. When my hands began to shake, I buried them in my mending.
It was Jon who convinced me. Crawling onto my lap, his eyes were as serious as they’d been when he stood at the door at fourteen months old. He held Agnes’s blue car on his palm like an offering. “I want to play with her, Ma. Please don’t let Agnes get hurted.”
Good Lord. As if I had that kind of power. I nudged him off my lap.
“Get them out of here then, Anna. Take them for a drive—to your house, for an ice cream cone—anywhere. If I’m gonna do this, I need to be alone.”
Zaidie studied me, looking deep as she could into the one part of my life she would never know. Then she went to the closet and got her coat. Hers and Jon’s, too. “Come on, Jonny. We’re going to Nonna’s house.”