AGNES
WHEN HE WAS HOME, JIMMY SPENT MOST OF HIS TIME IN HIS room or in the foyer trapped between the mirror and the phone. Asked why, Ma narrowed her eyes like she did when she warned me to stay away from Buskit’s River at night. “Just don’t turn into a teenager.” Sounded like a spell cast by the wicked witch in one of the fairy tales Zaidie used to read me.
“Not me, Ma,” I promised every time. “I’m never gonna be no teenager!”
“Any . . .” Zaidie corrected from wherever she was. Sometimes just inside my head. “And yes, you are. Soon, too!”
The next time I caught Jimmy moping by the phone, I turned to her. “What’s he doing out there?”
“Probably working up the courage to call that girl again,” she said behind her hand. “Even though he’s already tried at least seven times.”
“More like eleven and she’s not just a girl, Z. She’s the girl,” Jimmy said. “Most beautiful, most spectacular, most . . . most everything.”
Zaidie made her voice lower. “Most snobby is what she is.”
“Debbie?” I squinched up my nose, remembering how the girl who used to meet Jimmy behind the Grainer School had looked at me the day I followed him home.
“I forgot that chick a long time ago. Besides, she ain’t nothin’ to this girl. Right, Z?”
Zaidie rolled her eyes. “Um . . . I guess you have to be a boy to see it.”
“Jane Miller,” she said to me behind her hand. “He can call a hundred and eleven times; she still won’t come to the phone—and she’s not even pretty.”
Good thing Jimmy had stopped listening. He picked up the phone and put it down twice, tuned to nothing but his own heartbeat. Finally he dialed.
“Hello, Mrs. Miller? It’s Jimmy Kovacs? I was wonderin’ if . . .”
It didn’t get much further than him saying his name like that—as if he wasn’t exactly sure he’d got it right. He was replacing the receiver when Jon burst in with a packet of snapshots he’d taken when he went on vacation with Jeffrey’s family.
Oblivious to Jimmy’s mood, Jon pulled his favorite picture on him. “Look, Jimmy, it’s waves! At the beach.”
“That’s where you usually find ’em, Shad.” Jimmy stared at the phone like he could still hear Mrs. Miller’s voice in his head.
But then he must have noticed Jon’s sagging shoulders. He flipped through the pictures quickly. “Nice. Glad you had fun, buddy.” Abruptly, he started up the stairs.
“But you didn’t even look at my horseshoe crab.” Jon’s disappointed voice trailed after him, but Jimmy had stopped hearing.
“Agnes and me want to see, Jonny,” Zaidie said, patting the couch. “Bring them over here.”
Wedged between us, Jon named the things in his pictures as he passed them to us—even though Zaidie had been to the beach many times with Cynthia or her aunt Cille and I knew what they were from TV and books: sandcastle, seaweed, the jetty, what he called a horseshoe crab even though the crab didn’t live there anymore.
I looked at that one extra long. “So it’s really a horseshoe crab house.”
Jon snatched the picture away. “No, it’s not. Tell her, Zaidie.” He glowered at me. “Your body’s a house.”
“Maybe it is,” Zaidie laughed, passing me the next picture. “Yours, too, Jonny.”
I held on to that one so long Jon tried to snatch it away. “What are you starin’ at? Haven’t you ever seen a starfish?”
I clutched it tighter. “But why’d the star get turned into a fish? Did it do something wrong?”
“Maaa! Agnes is making fun of my pictures!” Jon wailed. Then to me, “You better stop or I won’t let you see the one of my Dairy Queen.”
“Stop teasing your brother, Agnes,” Ma said, without looking up from her book.
I didn’t bother to tell her that I wasn’t teasing or making fun. I really wanted to know.
A FEW WEEKS later, when everyone was watching TV, I sneaked into Jon’s room to look through his pictures again. It wasn’t the star that got turned into a fish or the horseshoe crab’s house I wanted to see, though. It was something even more mysterious: waves. I looked at them so long it felt like they were tumbling toward me.
Finally, Zaidie came to the foot of the stairs. “Agnes! What are you doing up there? Jon and me are gonna play Clue.”
Before I could stop myself, I shoved the picture of waves under my shirt and took it to my room, where I hid it in my secret box.
“I’m Miss Scarlet!” I yelled, claiming the red piece as I slipped my treasures back into the closet, guilty as the culprit in our game.
By then it was late August and Jon had forgotten all about clams and sandcastles. He never even noticed that I’d swiped the ocean straight out of his room. But every day when I was alone, I took out my box like I did at Mr. Dean’s and stared at the photo. As if there was something I needed to see. Something just outside the black-and-white square. I turned the picture over to see if it might have slipped onto the other side.
When I still couldn’t find it, I begged Dad to take me there. “Just one time, Dad. Before summer’s over.”
“To the beach?” He snorted as if it was another planet. “You think I have time to sit around baking on the sand like a damn rock?” He walked away muttering about savage amusement.
Nonna, who was visiting that day, scooted closer to me on the couch. “I take-a you myself, piccola, but the sun no good for me.”
Then she told me about a bad mole the doctor had to cut off her forehead. “Righta there.” She pushed back her hair to show me her scar. Was it my imagination or did it look like a tiny starfish? I traced it with my finger.
“But when I was little like you? Every Sunday in summer, mi mama make eggplant sandwiches, pack up some succo di pesca, and we take the train to the beach.”
When she talked, the waves were in her eyes, clear as the starfish in her scar. “Luigi used to like it, too,” she said, looking toward the kitchen, where Dad had disappeared. “He just forget. It happen when you grow up.”
“But you’re grown up, Nonna.”
She put a finger to her lip like she did when she was about to tell me something that was just between her and me. “Me, I get so old, piccola, I remember all over again.”
I snuggled closer. “I’m not your piccola anymore, Nonna. Remember what Dr. Genova said? I’m practically average now.”
IT WAS TRUE. At my last checkup, the doctor had slapped his knee and beamed, pointing at the size chart. “What did I tell you, Anna?”
Two years earlier, Nonna had taken me to see the man she called the smartest doctor in America, despite Ma and Dad’s objection. “He’s not even a pediatrician, Anna.” (Ma) “Man’s a quack is what he is! She just likes him cause he talks Italian and flirts with her—a seventy-five-year-old woman for chrissake!” (Dad)
Their protests only made Nonna more determined.
That first time, Dr. Genova spent so long reading my records, looking from me to them and back again, I started to think Dad was right.
“A dwarf?” he said out loud when he was done. Then he ripped up the paper and slapped the file shut. “What idiot wrote that?”
“Hah. A professional never calls another doctor an idiot,” Ma said back at home.
“I told you he was a quack!” Dad added.
But Ma must have been thinking about it because the next time Nonna came over to drop off sausage and peppers, she brought it up. “So your Eye-talian doctor friend thinks Agnes might not be a dwarf after all?”
“Everything they write about my piccola is wrong; that’s what Dr. Genova say. Except the asthma. She really have that.”
But Ma wasn’t convinced until he came for a house call the first time. Before he left, he stopped to put a puzzle piece in the field of tulips Ma was working on and to check out the books stacked beside her chair. Then he looked her straight in the eyes like people almost never do. A little too long, too—according to Jimmy, who had still been awake. “It’s Dahlia, right?”
She nodded.
“Call the office in the morning and make an appointment, Dahlia,” he said, starting for the door.
When Dad heard he didn’t even say Mrs. Moscatelli like he was supposed to, he stopped calling him a quack and started calling him your mother’s boyfriend.
Two days later when we were going back to the doctor’s, Ma followed us to the door. “If she’s not a dwarf, why’s she so small? How about you ask your doctor friend that?” she told Nonna.
Dr. Genova didn’t give the answer right away, though. Instead, he looked me over good like he did before. Then he told her to feed me lots of fresh milk and hug me eight times a day; he bet I’d grow like a weed. He winked at me. “No, not a weed—a sunflower.”
“Eight, you say?” Nonna took out her pencil.
“That’s right, Anna: Not sette. Not nove. Otto.” But his eyes weren’t on her; he was still looking at me the way Jimmy said he’d stared at Ma. Like a man who found sunflowers everywhere.
Nonna was almost finished writing down what he said when he took the paper and added something in his own clear handwriting: FAILURE TO THRIVE. “Give this to Elizabeth at the library and see if she can find something for Dahlia to read.”
Ma kept the library book for so long she had to pay for it, and whenever she was reading, she always stopped and looked at me like she had the night we had the Franco-American. Or the way Dr. Genova eyeballed me in the office.
“What, Ma?” I’d say, but she just put her glasses on and went back to her book.
The next time Dad accused Ma and Nonna of having a crush on Dr. Genova, I piped in, “Me, too! I have a crush, too!”
“See what I mean? That quack put a spell on the three of yas!” But then he gave me an extra hug—just in case I hadn’t gotten my eight.
It was fall when Ma walked into my room and caught me looking at my picture of waves. I tried to stuff it under my shirt again, but it was too late.
“Jon let me keep this one.”
I could tell Ma knew I was breaking the one rule, but she didn’t correct me. “You’re still missing that beach, aren’t you?”
I closed my eyes. “Missing.” Though I wasn’t sure I’d ever been there, it didn’t feel like the wrong word.
Ma stroked my cheek the way she did with her baby Jon sometimes, but never with us girls. “If you’re still here next summer, I’ll find someone to take you. I promise.”
I pushed her hand away and the words with it. If you’re still here. Whenever the case worker talked about getting me back to my mother, I ran into the backyard to throw the stick to Princie. The idea of leaving the Moscatellis felt more impossible all the time. And yet, something leaped inside me when I thought of the one who looked like me and had my laugh, the one who gave me the treasures in my box. Would she really come for me someday?
THE TREES WERE flaming red and orange the Sunday morning when Nonna showed up wearing a pair of cat-eye sunglasses like the ladies in the movie magazines have. She announced we were going to the beach.
“Cripes sake, Ma; it’s sixty-two degrees. Have you lost your mind?” Dad said. Then looking even more alarmed, “And where in hell did you get those putana glasses? Sure you’re not meeting up with the quack?”
“Maybe I am.” Nonna strutted around the living room. “And watch-a youself. I’m-a still your mama.”
Ma flung open the curtain. “Doesn’t mean they have to swim, Lou. It’s a beautiful day for a picnic on the beach if you ask me.”
Dad laced up his eyebrows. “Why do I sense a plot?”
“I make up a nice basket,” Nonna said. “Eggplant sandwiches and pickle eggs. Some a those anise cookies the kids like, too.” She lowered her cat-eyes and showed the ones that were brown and faded. “Who wanna come? Jonny? Zaida?”
When Jimmy and Jools came slouching down the stairs, she pounced on them. “You boys come to the beach, too. You and your friend need-a some sunshine, Jimmy.”
“Thanks, Nonna, but we got plans.” These days Jimmy said the same thing when anyone in the family asked him to go somewhere.
But Jools stopped. “Heck, it’s been a long time since I been to the beach, Jimmy. And this time of year? Ain’t like any girls’ll be there to see us hangin’ out with your grandma or nothin’.”
“I don’t think so . . .” Jimmy tried to say, but Jools had already started up the stairs to get the sketchbook he’d left in Jimmy’s room. “Sometimes I wanna draw somethin’ besides that ole river. Ya know?”
THE ONLY OTHER people on the beach that day were two old men combing the sand with their magnet sticks, but it took me a while to see them cause first of all—the sky. It was bigger here. So big that all you could do was open your arms wide as you could to take it in. And the water that had been black and white to me for so long was the color of the beach’s name: Green Harbor. It sparkled like the lost jewelry the old men hoped to find in the sand. Even the waves were different. When they rushed at me like they did in the picture, they made noise.
Jimmy nudged Jools. “Look at Sky Bar. I think she seen the promised land.” But Jools already had his sketchbook out and was staring like he saw it, too.
Jimmy spread out the blanket Ma gave us. Then Nonna told Zaidie and me to “set the table.” She’d even brought real silver and cloth napkins like we used for holidays.
“Because it is,” she told Zaidie when she mentioned it. “A very special holiday, right, my piccola?” She winked at me like Dr. Genova did when he said I was a sunflower. “Now set-a the most beautiful table you can. After lunch, I take off my stockings and you kids roll up you pants and we put our feet in the water.”
Zaidie found an old pickle jar, which her and me filled with seaweed for a centerpiece while Jon hunted for six special rocks to mark our places. “I’m taking mine home to Ma,” he said when he found a particularly smooth white one. From his voice, I could tell he was sad that she could never come to the beach.
The peach juice and sandwiches tasted better than they did at Nonna’s house. I didn’t even mind the sand crunching in my teeth or the taste of ocean that got into everything. But before I finished my first half, the same thing that had made me steal Jon’s picture came over me. In a second I was on my feet and running for the waves, kicking off my shoes and pulling off my sweater as I went.
“No, piccola!” Nonna shouted. “That water ice cold! You papa will— You ma—”
Zaidie was yelling, too, something about my asthma. “Agnes, what are you doing? You’re not supposed to run!”
But like Jimmy when he was thinking about Jane Miller, I heard nothing but that thing inside me and the waves that were talking to it. Without stopping once, I jumped into the best feeling of home I’d ever had anywhere. Even in my own room with Zaidie.
“Look!” I heard Jonny yelling from the edge of the water. “She’s swimming! Agnes is swimming!”
Whatever took hold of me, it must have been catching, because the next thing I knew he was peeling off his jacket, ditching shoes and socks, and running into the waves, too. Zaidie followed. Nonna was yelling and cursing in English and Italian, but no one heard her.
“Come on, Jools,” Jimmy cried. “Like you said, it’s not like there’s any girls to see us makin’ fools of ourselves.”
“Shit, Jimmy! This water’s freezin’-ass cold!” Jools yelled, forgetting he wasn’t supposed to swear in front of us kids. But instead of reminding him that his kid sisters and brother were there, Jimmy just laughed. “First one to dunk gets a dime for Tucker’s.”
The next time I looked up at the shore again, Nonna was shaking her head, but she had stopped yelling, and from the look on her face, I could tell she was remembering again. A minute later, she peeled off her stockings.
It would have been the best day of my life if all of a sudden I didn’t catch sight of what I’d been looking for in Jon’s pictures. Right there in the waves and real as anything was another best day. I was playing in the water with the girl who had brown legs like mine, only we were both smaller. She was throwing water and laughter at me just like Zaidie and the boys were now. The girl was saying something, too, but I couldn’t hear it because of the waves and because of my new brothers and sister and because of all the other stuff that had come between us before.
Mau Mau, I screamed. Except silent, like I always did when I called for her.
A minute later I noticed all the kids were watching me as I stood still in the water, seeing what no one else in the whole world could see, like I did on Franco-American night.
“You okay there, Sky Bar?” Jimmy asked. So I did the only thing I could do. I turned back to them and to the shiny green that surrounded me and to Nonna, who was smiling at us from the edge of the water, and when I looked again, the girl in the waves was gone.
THAT NIGHT, THOUGH, I got out the secret box I’d never shown to anyone. Then I flipped on the light and brought my very best present into Zaidie’s bed. Lying in the palm of my hand, it looked like an ordinary penny, but it wasn’t. It was the one I’d picked up from the puddle the night they took her away.
I wanted to tell her about the girl I’d seen in the waves and how it made me remember the thing I had made myself forget. Mr. Dean was standing in the attic door the way he did the night he took the hammer to me, only this time it wasn’t cause I peed. I was calling for Mau Mau. I wouldn’t stop no matter how many times he told me to.
He took a step closer, his hand raised up in the air, and I swear—I wanted to shut the hell up—I did. But it was like that feeling I had when I jumped in the water. Nothing on earth could stop me. Mau Mau, I yelled louder. Mau Mau!
But instead of whooping me like I thought he was gonna do, he dragged me to the window, opened it up, and pushed my head into the cold night air. You know what your precious sister is, Agnes? She’s a retard; that’s what she is. Locked up in an institution and everything. So go ahead, howl all you want. She ain’t never gonna come.
Though I didn’t know what a retard was or that other thing he called the place where she went, I knew by his voice it was something like a dope fiend or an Indian or nobody. Words he said when he wanted to tell me why no one wanted me. I tried to shake my head, but he was holding my neck so tight I couldn’t.
No, she’s not, I tried to say, but when I opened my mouth to call her name, the cold air rushed in and the asthma started to wake up and I couldn’t make a sound.
After that, I tried to forget, but those words, like the other ones, they followed me. Retard! kids yelled at each other on the playground or sometimes in our yard. And whenever I heard it, I felt that cold air from Mr. Dean’s window choking me again. Then once after Dad wrecked a tire on a nail Joe Junior left in the road, Ma said the O’Connor boy belonged in the place where Mr. Dean said Mau Mau had gone: an institution.
“No, he doesn’t!” I didn’t even know I was yelling till everyone stopped eating and stared at me. “And . . . and you shouldn’t say that, either.” But no one, not even me, knew why I was so upset. Or why I jumped up and ran outside without clearing my plate. Not till today when I saw the girl in the waves. Not just her legs or her hair, but all of her.
Zaidie took the penny from my hand and closed her own fist around it for a minute so she could feel what it meant.
I knew she had looked at my file cause I’d heard Ma yelling at her about it, so I asked the question I didn’t dare to ask anyone else. Even myself. I said it so low that no one would have heard me but Zaidie: “Where did they take her? Where did my sister go?”
But she just looked sad and handed me back my penny. “Sorry, Agnes, but I don’t know; Ma took the file away before I read that part.”
For once I wished she was a better liar. And I wished I hadn’t turned the light on because then I wouldn’t have seen the tear that slid down her face.
I went back to bed and switched off the lamp and I didn’t ask that question again for a long time. I didn’t take out my penny, either, but some nights, I still woke up with my fist closed around the emptiness.