Stony River Page 9

  “Then we’ll have to eat them here.”

  Miranda’s never tasted a candy bar. She sucks it until the chocolate coating dissolves and drips down her chin. Doris laughs and hands her a tissue. Wipes her own mouth with another.

  Miranda says, “Sister Bonita would say I’m adding to Christ’s sorrows right now.”

  Doris laughs again, a howl that silences the room for a few seconds. “You’re gonna be okay, sweetie. You’ve got a scrappy soul, like me.” They sit and hold hands without speaking until visiting time is over. Doris’s hands are warm and soft, her long fingernails painted red—so different from Sister Celine’s serviceable hands with their bald nails clipped short and square.

  Miranda doubts anyone laughs at how Doris speaks. She wouldn’t permit it. Beginning tomorrow, Miranda won’t either. And she’ll demand to see Cian. James used to say Samhain Eve was a night for letting go as well as for grieving, a time for starting over.

  When Doris goes, she leaves behind a red lipstick smear on a tissue and a timid stirring of greediness for life in Miranda.

  SIX

  OCTOBER 31, 1955. In white cotton nightie, black lace bed jacket and mantilla, the Spanish Princess hopped over pavement seams, hurrying to school without her once-upon-a-time friend at her side. Tereza would have looked more authentic in the costume with her coloring, even though Daddy said you could find blondes in Spain, just not many. What about fat blondes, Linda asked. He’d shaken his head and given her a fierce hug. That was before Friday night when she told him she hated him.

  He’d objected to her leaving this morning without a proper breakfast—“Your brain needs more fuel than cold leftover potatoes”—but she wanted to reach school early enough to catch Mr. Boynton alone. She didn’t care what Mr. Roger-not-so-Wise said right now anyway. Just as he could be disappointed in her, wounding her heart whenever he said so, she could be disappointed in him. If the Good Samaritan’s daughter had asked him to help a friend whose stepfather was about to lash her with a belt, the Good Samaritan wouldn’t have said, “Not our business.”

  She’d tell Mr. Boynton not to expect Tereza in school today, possibly never again. She would tell what she knew even if she got in serious trouble, which she hadn’t been in since kindergarten, when she spent more time in the naughty chair than anyone else. For no good reason! Miss Glannore had written “Linda is inclined to be heedless” on her report card, making Linda’s mother sick with humiliation. Linda tried harder to please Mother after that, bringing home cards that reported: “Linda is a joy to teach; Linda is a bright, helpful child; Linda will go far.” Although she’d figured out how to avoid trouble at school, the rules at home kept changing. But she was more afraid of not doing right than of breaking a rule because God would have worse things to say in Heaven than her parents could on Earth.

  Tereza was the heedless one, if you wanted to know. She didn’t play by the rules and didn’t listen to anyone. She often showed up with raw welts on her arms and legs, due to her getting “mouthy,” she’d say, like you might explain away a rash from too many tomatoes. Tereza seemed to accept the cost of doing what she pleased. Linda wanted to admire her for that, for being true to her beliefs like a Christian facing lions, but she doubted Tereza’s beliefs fit into the same category.

  Linda had done the right thing Friday night, despite what Daddy said. After he said “Not our business” she’d run into the street, yelling at Jimmy to stop. (It was hard to think of him as Mr. Dobra.) He’d glanced at her long enough for Tereza to scurry away. When he pulled back the belt as though to whip Linda, Daddy came to life, like Superman getting over a dose of kryptonite. He stepped between her and Jimmy, put a hand on Jimmy’s chest and said, “That’ll be enough of that.” Jimmy’s cheeks went splotchy with anger and he straightened to his full height, as if ready to sock Daddy. But then he seemed to lose air. He slapped Daddy’s hand down and strode away.

  “Such a foolish thing you did,” her father said as he ushered her into their house. “You could have gotten hurt.”

  That’s when Linda had shouted “I hate you,” fled to her room and locked the door.

  The next morning she’d found her mother out of bed for the first time in ages, in a quilted blue robe that stopped above puffy knees on pasty, wobbly legs. Her cheeks looked dented. She was dropping pancake batter into a sizzling pan, stinking up the kitchen with Crisco fumes. “Tuna casserole and rice pudding tonight,” she said. “What do you think about that?”

  “Is it okay for you to be up, Mother?”

  Daddy, who sat at the kitchen table with his coffee and crossword as if last night hadn’t happened, looked up at Linda and shrugged helplessly. “I couldn’t talk her out of it.”

  Even if Mr. Boynton hadn’t been Linda and Tereza’s homeroom teacher Linda would have gone to him. He was the only seventh-grade teacher gutsy enough to do something about Tereza. On the first day of school he told them they would receive one pencil for the year and that was it, too bad if they lost it. Linda was outraged at the injustice at first, but when Mr. Boynton explained he was toughening them up for eighth grade where the teachers would be even stricter, she realized he was brilliant.

  Mr. Boynton’s nubby wool jacket hung over a chair. He was at the other end of the room, briskly erasing Friday’s homework from the board. Fluorescent light ricocheted off his bald spot. Linda coughed. He whipped around.

  “Linda! Or should I say, Señorita? You look radiant.”

  She flushed with pleasure. Occasionally, when he called on her in class, she sensed he saw through her hideous plaid eyeglass frames to someone he could love if she were older and thinner. Now his olive eyes, magnified by perfectly round tortoiseshell glasses, gazed at her unblinkingly as she told him that Tereza had fled from her stepfather’s belt Friday night and hadn’t been seen since. He swallowed hard, making his bow tie wiggle, as Linda explained how she’d looked for Tereza everywhere she could think of. And how Mrs. Dobra searched the neighborhood, too, calling as if Tereza were the Lost Sheep. Linda didn’t admit she’d been too cowardly to check out Crazy Haggerty’s. But neither did she brag about marching into the White Castle where she’d nearly died of mortification asking those hoods Tereza hung around with if they knew where she was.

  “Have her parents reported her missing?” Mr. Boynton asked.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I think only one of them wants to.”

  Mr. Boynton’s eyebrows shot up, pushing little folds into his shiny forehead.

  Linda had gone to Tereza’s apartment building after breakfast Saturday morning. Mrs. Dobra answered on the second knock, cigarette between two fingers, purple shadows under her eyes. “Linda!” she said, as if she were starving and Linda a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “Did Tereza bunk with you last night?”

  From the door, Linda could see Jimmy at the kitchen table and feel his mean eyes on her. “Quit going on,” he called out. “You know she always comes home.”

  Mrs. Dobra ushered Linda to the porch so they could talk. She looked scared. “I was out this morning before Jimmy was awake. Up and down every damn street this side of the highway and all along the smelly river, calling for her. Jimmy might be right she’ll be back but I don’t know. This time feels different.” The soft, husky voice, so intimate and trusting, drew Linda in. She couldn’t picture Mother traipsing around the neighborhood for her.

  Later, Linda’s mother had said, “She lets her get away with murder. What did she expect?” Mother didn’t approve of women working outside the home, leaving their kids to “run hog-wild.”

  “What do you think we should do, Linda?” Mr. Boynton asked.

  “Call the police.”

  Mr. Boynton stood and went for his jacket. “Let’s go see Mrs. Warren,” he said.

  Linda was no stranger to the principal’s office. She went often to mimeo tests or deliver messages to teachers. Only students bright enough to miss classroom time were chosen. Linda tried not t
o act smug when she was called because, as had been impressed upon her in Sunday school, “Pride goeth before a fall.” (It was so hard to wait for the rewards of the meek.)

  This morning, while the principal and Mr. Boynton conferred, Linda waited on the hard pine bench outside Mrs. Warren’s office, watching the school secretary type, admiring the speed at which she made the carriage move across the page—clackety, clackety, ding! Linda wondered if she liked working for Vinegar Lips, as some kids called Mrs. Warren because of her sour expression. Linda’s stomach flipflopped, imagining what the principal and Mr. Boynton were saying about her, but she was determined not to waver.

  Mr. Boynton had to return to his classroom. When Officer Nolan came, he interviewed Linda in Mrs. Warren’s office. His voice was kind and lines radiated from the corners of his eyes like pencil-drawn sunbeams. He might have been one of the policemen she and Tereza saw at Crazy Haggerty’s, but she couldn’t be sure because she wore her glasses only when she had to.

  Mrs.Warren told Officer Nolan about Tereza’s stepfather chasing her with the belt. The officer asked Linda if she knew why. She wasn’t allowed to say whore and she didn’t know for sure why Jimmy was mad, so she repeated only his ungrammatical “I know where you been” and said she thought he would have hurt Tereza badly if he’d been able to catch up with her. The officer took notes when Linda mentioned the number of marks on Tereza’s arms and legs in the four months she’d known her. He took down Tereza’s description and the direction in which she’d fled.

  “Linda thinks Tereza might be hiding in a vacant house,” Mrs. Warren said, her head helmeted in tight curls, dyed (everybody said) daffodil yellow.

  “Which house?” he asked Linda.

  “Mr. Haggerty’s,” she said. “The grand house on Lexington Street?”

  “Oh, that one. It’s boarded up. I ordered it myself.”

  “That wouldn’t stop Tereza,” Linda said.

  “How come?”

  She told him she’d checked the log where she and Tereza had hidden things and discovered the crowbar gone. She told him Tereza wasn’t afraid of the house that sat all by its lonesome and might have broken in to stay warm; she hadn’t exactly been bundled up when she ran away.

  The officer asked Mrs. Warren if she’d called Tereza’s parents. “They don’t have a telephone,” she said, her elbows on the desk, her fingers forming here’s the church, here’s the steeple. “We don’t usually send a truant officer around until a child misses three days in a row. They have a son in third grade. I checked and he’s not here either.”

  “He was okay yesterday,” Linda said, although that wasn’t completely accurate. After church she’d gone over to see if the Dobras had heard from Tereza. Allen was keeping vigil by the front window, arms crossed, hands under armpits, a miserable look on his face.

  “He don’t believe Tereza ran away,” Mrs. Dobra said, clutching Linda’s hands so tightly it hurt. “Says she would’ve been back to take him to the movies if she could’ve. He’s sure the bogeyman snatched her. I couldn’t get him to sleep last night.” She asked Linda to take him trick-or-treating the next day so she could stick around in case Tereza showed up. Since it wasn’t fair to hold it against Allen for getting Jimmy’s beaky nose and wingy ears, Linda agreed.

  Officer Nolan asked for Tereza’s address. “Think anyone’s there with the boy?”

  “Mrs. Dobra usually isn’t home till four. Mr. Dobra later.”

  He took Linda’s address, too. “I may need a statement from you and your father.”

  Linda’s heart thumped. Daddy would scold her again for not minding her business. “Will you look for Tereza at the boarded-up house?”

  “You bet,” he said with the kind of head-patting smile she despised.

  “That girl who lived there,” she said, a bit crossly. “Miranda?”

  His eyes widened. “You knew her?”

  “No. Her name was in the newspaper.”

  “Oh, I suppose it was. What about her?”

  “Where is she now?”

  “With people who will take care of her.”

  So-called grown-ups never told you what you really wanted to know.

  11:05 AM. Ma would’ve been at Catalog Club, in the north end of town, for hours by now. Her job was to fill baskets as they traveled down a conveyer. Like Lucy and Ethel with the chocolates, except Ma couldn’t stuff the baskets in her mouth. Tereza headed out for the two-mile jaunt to downtown, disguised in Haggerty’s hooded black robe, the bottom scissored off so it wouldn’t drag on the ground. Buddy’s jacket warmed her underneath. She’d stitched the stuffed socks together into a fat, lumpy belt and pinned the belt to her shorts, using a needle, thread and diaper pins from a sewing box she’d found on a bathroom shelf. The belt cinched her waist like a too-small swimming tube. She’d kept out two rolls of bills, now in the pocketbook on her shoulder under the robe.

  The world outside felt bigger. She turned for a last look at the blind plywood eyes and yawning mouth of the house. She felt released, like a balloon slipping from a kid’s hand, floating up to get lost in the clouds. She zigzagged to town, avoiding the school and the highway crossing where she knew a cop would be on duty. She wouldn’t go to school ever again if she could help it. She’d never understood what she was supposed to be learning anyway, couldn’t see what difference it would make to how her life turned out.

  The closer to downtown she walked, the tighter her heart got. The nearly bare trees lining the street looked like twisted old men ready to pounce and steal her money. She folded her arms across her middle and clutched the money tube gripping her waist.

  She’d gone to town lots in the summer, usually with the guys and mostly to places that let you horse around: the diner, the soda shop, the five-and-dime. Today she braved a luggage and gift shop where anything noisier than the rustle of tissue paper was probably against the law. A briefcase in the window said twelve bucks. A present for her father, she told the perfumy saleswoman who smiled and whispered, “A lucky man.” She didn’t say boo about Tereza’s costume, maybe because she was wearing a witch’s hat herself. The briefcase came with a lock. In the shop’s bathroom, Tereza tucked the rolls of cash into it and abandoned the socks in a wastebasket. She locked up the necklace, knife and flashlight in the briefcase, too.

  She carried the locked case across the street to the only department store in town and headed to the women’s section for something grown-up looking. She took three suits off a rack and peered around for blouses. A nearly chinless woman in a pleated plaid skirt and red sweater set appeared from nowhere at her side, took the suits from Tereza and returned them to the rack.

  “Hey! I wanted to try them on.”

  “The children’s department is in the back.” The woman didn’t even look at her.

  Tereza hadn’t anticipated needing a story. What she came up with on the spot—that she had the Grace Kelly part of the wife who almost gets bumped off in a school production of Dial M for Murder and needed the right costume—wasn’t her best.

  Chinless scowled at her then, with eyes the color of mold. Tereza produced her pocketbook from beneath the robe and fished out some bills. “I got cash.”

  Chinless suggested that Grace Kelly would choose a slim black-and-white tweed suit (extra small for Tereza), a white blouse, a gunmetal gray double-breasted wool coat with big round buttons and fake pearl earrings. “A wig would be the crowning touch, pardon the pun,” she said, “but with your coloring, something more Dolores del Rio than Grace Kelly.”

  Tereza didn’t know any Dolores, but a wig was a boss idea. She opted for a black one with Ava Gardner waves, then picked out gloves, bra, skivvies, garter belt and nylons. A hundred and six bucks for the whole shebang.

  Chinless helped her do her makeup, going easy on the eye shadow. “You look good,” she said, “and older in that outfit. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were a young wife out for the day.” Tereza could tell she wasn’t bullshitting.

 
; She had Chinless bag up Haggerty’s robe, Buddy’s jacket, her old bra, shorts and sweater. Told her she’d wear the new clothes out of the store to begin getting in character.

  “Grace Kelly would not wear ballerina slippers with that outfit,” Chinless said.

  Tereza admired her for continuing to play along. She exited a shoe store, inches taller, in what the salesman called “an amazing pump.” Black. $10.95. Matching pocketbook: $3.50. The first roll was gone and the second shrinking.

  The amazing pumps took her to the train station three blocks away. Her plan was to take the Pennsy to Linden, first, to return Buddy’s flashlight and jacket. She’d have him meet her at a fancy hotel to show she didn’t need his help.

  “There a nice hotel in Linden?” she asked the old ticket seller with a missing middle finger.

  “I wouldn’t think so,” he said.

  “What about Elizabeth?” The stop after Linden.

  “Oh sure.”

  On the twenty-minute ride Tereza envisioned a bath hot enough to steam up a mirror and, later, a soft bed. After seeing Buddy, she’d get back on the Pennsy and get off in New York City. Finally see the Rockettes, the Empire State Building and the Automat. She wouldn’t tell him where she was going in case he blabbed to Richie. The realization that she could do whatever she wanted from now on gurgled up into her throat. She wanted to hug everyone on the train.

  The conductor pointed her to a hotel a five-minute stroll from the station. On a canopy over a carpeted entrance, the hotel’s name was lit up in fancy script Tereza couldn’t read. Green-and-whitestriped awnings hung over every window of the eight floors. Linda would’ve said it was grand. A man in a jacket the same green as the awnings stood at attention behind a wood-paneled counter holding a jack-o-lantern. He flashed her an Ipana-white smile.

  “A room, please,” Tereza said, dropping her voice to sound older.

  “A single.” She’d seen people check into hotels in movies.