DAHLIA
TURNS OUT THAT WHILE I HUDDLED INSIDE THE HOUSE, CONFINING the world to the shape of my picture window, nothing stayed put. Businesses changed names, houses were fiddled with till you could barely recognize them, lives and buildings were swept away, replaced by fields of glittering glass or markers in the graveyard. What shocked me most was the damn smell of the place. Even that was different.
“What’s that?” I asked, sniffing as I reached the corner of Hope Street. I didn’t realize I’d stopped to clutch my heart until the girls laughed.
“It’s honeysuckle, Ma. What did you think?” Zaidie picked me a sprig from the bush and attempted to press it to my face. I shoved the tender thing into my pocket and pulled away.
“Hah. Only time I ever smelled that was from a bottle.” I thought of the Muguet des Bois I splashed on myself in high school, Bobby leaning in to inhale my neck: Sweet, he said in my ear. I shuddered.
“When did the Juneaus start growing that?” I said—as if it was all their fault. The whisper I heard, the breeze on my neck as if Bobby had come back to nuzzle me one more time. All the things I could never tell anyone.
“The Juneaus?” Agnes said.
I took in the name on the mailbox: ANDREWS. “Hmph.” I kept walking, touching the stone wall as I passed. “Well, at least the rocks haven’t changed.”
Even Dahlia’s Place—renamed Cafe Roma after my family sold it—had turned into Sheehan’s Irish Pub. But walking past it, I still inhaled the pungent scent of my mother’s marinara; I felt myself at fifteen or sixteen, pushing through the door in my work shoes, putting on the green apron in the back, joking with the customers as I bussed tables. I took a deep breath, filling my nostrils with the stench of stale beer and something else—a jolt of my old strength.
“Someday soon you’ll go anywhere in the city without thinking twice,” Zaidie said. “And you won’t even need us.”
“But we’ll be there if you do,” Agnes quickly added.
“Hmph.”
The first few steps away from the house were always the hardest, but the further I got from the maledizione, the easier it got. For thirty-four days I kept going, even when I was sure I couldn’t. One house and then another, one step, one heartbeat . . . The girls tugged me along with their voices, their faith, like I was a damn toddler.
“You’re doing good, Ma! Great! Just a few more feet. One more house. Yay!”
“You did it!”
Dear Lord.
I had made it six blocks and two houses from home when on the thirty-fifth day I came upon a sign halfway up Maple Street. A nice green sign painted in gold lettering with a border to match:
SILAS P. WOOD, C.P.A.
If the girls weren’t there to hold me up, I tell you I would have dropped on the spot. It must have been five minutes before I was able to speak. “Silas? W-when did he come back to town?”
“That’s been there long as I can remember,” Agnes stammered, shooting her sister a confused look. “We’re so used to seeing it, I guess we don’t even notice it anymore.”
“Silas Wood,” Zaida interrupted. “That’s Larry’s dad, isn’t it?”
“I think so.” Agnes then clamped her mouth shut, but not before I caught the glance that passed between them.
“Larry?” I repeated.
“A kid who was in school with Jimmy,” Zaida said, knowing I wouldn’t dare to ask further.
When I felt myself beginning to shake, Agnes took my hand. “We should go back,” she said. “She’s had enough, Zaidie.”
“Yes, I need . . . to go home.” Why, oh why had I ever let them talk me into this?
But Zaidie remained unmoving as she spoke to Agnes like I wasn’t there. “If we go home now, you know what’s gonna happen? She’ll never cross the porch again.” Finally, she faced me, hands on her hips and all: “Then you know what happens?” She cocked her head at the sign. “They win.”
I jerked my hand away from Agnes, trembling even harder. “Dear God, Zaida, don’t you understand anything? They already won. Twenty-nine years ago, they took everything I had. And then some. I was foolish to think I could—”
When Zaida shook her head, I remembered the vocabulary word from my old Reader’s Digest quiz that always made me think of her: implacable. Yes, that was her, all right. Implacable. And merciless. Heaven help me.
“That’s not how it works, Ma,” she said. “People don’t just beat you once. They come back to do it over and over. In your case, every single day for the last twenty-nine years. Till now, that is.”
“You don’t understand,” I repeated. “I need to go—”
“No, Ma. You’re the one who doesn’t understand.” Zaida’s voice lowered to almost a whisper. “Do you know how many times Frankenstein’s Texaco’s been vandalized?”
“That’s—that’s . . . not true. Louie would have—”
“Oh, he would have? Do you think Dad tells you about half the crap he takes? Half the stuff we kids . . .” Here she stopped herself, as if knowing she’d gone too far. “He’s been protecting you for as long as you’ve been married. We all have. But every year, at least once, the Woods make sure to remind us.”
I gaped at her. “Remind you? What are you talking about?”
“That they’re still winning.”
“This isn’t the time, Zaida,” I managed to say between gasping breaths. “Can’t you see I need—I need to go home.” I thought of the half-drunk cup I’d left on my card table that morning with an almost desperate longing.
“She’s right, Zaidie. We can—” Agnes said.
But again, the implacable one shook her head. “This is exactly the time. This is where we’ve been walking to every day without knowing it. This building. This moment.” She gestured at the sign before returning to me. “Come on, you still have four houses left to go.”
“Good Lord,” I said, reaching for Agnes. “Can’t she see—”
But something Agnes saw in Silas P. Wood, CPA’s window had caused her to turn.
Her eyes fixed, she let her hands fall to her side. “It’s only four more houses, Ma.”
“Agnes—I thought you understood.”
“I do, but you know what I see up there in that window? I see Silas Wood—him and Larry and his whole family, looking down at you. And not just you. Us,” Agnes said. “Dahlia Moscatelli and her crummy foster kids.”
“Stop, please, Agnes—”
“That’s what he thinks of us, Ma. What all those Woods think of us. Them and their friends, too. No matter what we do, we’ll always be nothing but low-life Moscatelli kids.”
“They’re sure you’ll turn back,” Zaidie added. “One glimpse of their mighty name and you’ll scurry home to your cell and slam the door. That’s what they think.”
“I told you, Zaida . . . I made my peace with that . . . I—” I squeezed my eyes shut.
But when I opened them, I was mysteriously drawn to the window the girls were forcing me to look into. It was empty, which was their real victory: They didn’t even have to be there to scare me away.
My anger steadied me. “You say Jimmy knew his boy—Larry?”
Agnes nodded. “Larry went away to college around the time Jimmy got sent to Vietnam, but Jools told us—” She paused, obviously worried how much I could handle.
“Go on. Jools told you what?” For a minute, I forgot everything, the six blocks I’d have to walk to get back home to my chair, the name etched in gold lettering.
Everything.
“Back when they were in school, Larry made Jimmy’s life pretty miserable; that’s all.”
Was that when Jimmy had become a rat? I wondered. Dear God, why hadn’t anyone told me?
“Like I said, winning isn’t something people like that do once,” Zaida added. “It’s something they do every day. They need it.”
“It’s their oxygen, Ma. Their life’s blood. Just like it was for Mr. Dean,” Agnes said. But when she looked me in the eye, she was no longer the frightened girl watching for the yellow car. She was Agnes, who could swim like a dolphin, and she was truly free.
“Imagine that,” I murmured to myself with something like awe. I glanced up the street toward the corner. “Four more houses, you say?”
Walking slightly ahead of the girls for the first time, I reached the third house and stopped abruptly. “Are the lions still there?”
“Lions?” The girls glanced at each other.
“You mean the statues in front of the old mayor’s mansion?” Agnes swiveled toward Zaida. “It’s a historical site now.”
“Yes, they’re there. Someday, we’ll—” Zaida began.
“No, not someday, Zaida. Today. Now.”
“It’s a good mile from here, Ma, and you’ve already walked pretty far.”
“You think I don’t know where it is?” I said. By then I had resumed walking. “I could practically tell you the number of heartbeats it takes to get there.”
“As long as you feel strong enough.” Zaida was a step behind me, with Agnes beside her.
“You said it right. If I don’t do it today, I’ll never set foot off the porch again.”
The girls thought I was driven by courage like they were. Like they had been their whole lives. They were wrong. They thought this determination was something that came over me when I looked at the Wood name in gold letters and didn’t blink. That was wrong, too.
What gave me my strength was the other name she’d said: Jimmy. And behind him were all the rest: Louie, Zaida, Agnes, Jon—even the kids who’d only been with us a few months. While I’d hid myself up in the house, the Woods had done their best to punish everyone I loved. I walked to the end of the street and turned left toward the west side like the place was on fire and I was the only one who could put it out.
Einstein or one of those types said that time bends; that sometimes an hour’s not an hour; it’s more like a minute. Other times it stretches into a week, or infinity.
Something of that nature. Well, that day, I, Dahlia Moscatelli, discovered distance is the same. A mile can be so far it might take a woman traveling by foot twenty-nine years to cross it—or so close that all she had to do was close her eyes, take a breath and she’s there.
I can’t explain it, but between the moment I stopped at the third house on Maple Street and the one when I found myself standing in front of those stone lions, I saw nothing; I smelled nothing; I didn’t even think anything.
I wished I could say I didn’t tremble when I saw the place, that my breath didn’t catch inside me when I looked up that long driveway to the house on the hill, but that would be a lie.
Sensing it, the girls came to my side. “Are you okay, Ma?” Agnes seized my hand.
“I’m going to call Dad and tell him to bring the car,” Zaidie said, merciful for once. “It’s a long walk back and you’re . . . you’re tired, Ma.”
Trapped in Mr. Einstein’s bendable universe, I hardly heard them. Hardly saw their anxious faces. What I saw was Bobby Wood, holding my hand, as we walked up that driveway for the first time. What I saw was the door to that magnificent house opening, and the family gathered around the dining room table.
You’re late, Robert, his father said. You almost missed grace. Though I could tell he wasn’t sure about me—not at all—his smile was an irresistible blaze.
When I finally looked away from that table, the handsome young boy was gone; I was a middle-aged woman with streaks of ash and snow in my hair, and good heavens, I was blubbering again.
“I knew we shouldn’t have come here,” Agnes said, her eyes full of the heartbreak she held close all these years but never released.
“It’s not your fault; it was me. I’m sorry, Ma. I just—I didn’t want Agnes and me to go away to college and leave you there, sitting in that chair.” The resolve on Zaida’s face was replaced with a watery mess of grief and makeup. “And Jimmy, he needs to see you.”
Though I wasn’t given to that sort of thing, I pulled her to me right there on the street and felt her heart, her sorrows, her mascaraed tears, but most of all, the great life force she always had, pulsating against mine.
“There, there, now,” I said, patting her back like it had all been a nightmare. Only this time I’d been the one living in a dark dream. “No more sorries. All you’ve done”—I paused to pull Agnes into our circle—“all the two of you have ever done since you come into the house was lead me back to myself.”
Then I stood apart from them, and wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, done with the coward.
THOSE TWO MILES home, we must have been a sight: A grown woman walking through the streets holding hands with her teenage daughters like she was lost or blind. Crazy Dahlia Moscatelli, people would say, talking about me like they did about Joe Jr. But I didn’t care who gawked. The truth, if they had eyes to see, was I’d never, in all my life, been less lost. Never less blind.
At home, my cold coffee was right where I’d left it. While the girls took their places on the couch, with Flufferbell a silent witness, I sat down on my chair and told them everything I’d kept to myself for twenty-nine years.