Bad Luck Girl (19 page)

“What do you want? You could’ve left me alone easy enough or stayed hid. Why’d you want me to know about you?”

“To find out what you’d do,” she answered. “Why else? Everybody watchin’ the Bad Luck Girl. Everybody waitin’ to see which road it’s gonna be, ain’t they?”

“Yeah, and everybody and their uncle’s got an opinion. What’s yours?”

“Hee-hee. Everybody and their uncle. That’s a good one, comin’ from you. But it’s a fair question.” She tapped her jutting chin thoughtfully as her dexterous fingers counted stitches on her delicate needles. That was when I realized what was wrong. That hand—that free hand that pulled the
spider yarn and jabbed and gestured—that was a third hand, and there were two more closing the white shawl neatly around her, as if to keep out the chill.

It took every nerve I had in the whole of my body not to shrink away.

“I think as long as you remember who you really are, you’ll do all right,” Aunt Nancy said, counting stitches with two of her hands, while the other two held her needles, and another looped spider yarn around its index finger. “The question is, will you do that? Yes,” she said to herself. “That is most certainly the question.”

“Does this question have an answer?”

Her star eyes glittered at me, and I felt very small and very light, as if one of her spiders could have picked me up and carried me off.

“I believe it does.”

“You wouldn’t be interested in sharing it by any chance?”

“You’ll hear it when you need to, gal.”

I was getting real fed up with magic people. Couldn’t even one of them talk in a straight line—spiders, coyotes, fairies, Halfers, none of them. I stepped hard on my temper, and leaned in for good measure, to make sure it stayed down.

“Well, if that’s all, then, ma’am, with your permission, I’ll just be getting along.”

“Looking for your beau?”

“He’s not my …!” I stopped and pulled back hard on my words, and my embarrassment. “I need to make sure he’s okay. It’s a big city and you never know who’s around, do
you?” I made sure I was looking straight at her when I said that last bit. But inside I was thinking how I’d been found. Everybody knew about Jack at least as well as they knew about me. They might be out looking for him too. I needed to know he was still okay.

Aunt Nancy gave an odd little puckered grin and for the first time, I felt something ease inside me. “Better give the boy his privacy just now.” She pointed one of her needles toward the fire.

In the next eyeblink, I wasn’t looking at a fire anymore, I was looking right through it, and on the other side, I saw Jack. He was standing in a cemetery, his head bowed. That place was filled with death and the knowledge of death, and it was old and close and deeply familiar. The headstones were huge, narrow slabs covered with the blocky writing I couldn’t read and six-pointed stars that had been blackened by soot and years. So had the paved paths between them, and the grass on the graves.

Jack stood in front of a set of three gravestones. Unlike most of the others, these were still clean and polished. Jack had his back to the path, and his head bowed. He was praying.

“… toosh’b’chatah v’nechematah, da’ameeran b’al’mah, v’eemru: Amein …”

Those were his family’s graves. Jack had lit out of the house without saying anything so he could visit his dead.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I whispered to Jack’s image. “Don’t you trust me?”

“Maybe he should be asking you that,” said Aunt Nancy.

She was right. I hadn’t even stopped to think that Jack might have gone out to visit his parents’ graves. Of course he’d want to do that. I would have. But I’d be darned if I was going to let the old woman behind me scold me into shame. “I do trust him,” I muttered.

“Sure you do. You trust him just like you trust your mama and daddy. So much you didn’t tell none of ’em where you wanted to go or what you was thinkin’ ’bout this mornin’. Oh, no. Miss Callie knows best. She can go out on her own, just fine. Nobody needs to know
her
business. She can go out and leave her Mama alone and it’ll be all right. She’s got
important
things to do.”

“That’s not fair!”

“Ain’t it?” She puckered up her shriveled mouth and counted her stitches with four of those long-fingered hands. “Well, well, you don’t say so?”

On the other side of Aunt Nancy’s fire, Jack stiffened for a second, like he knew he was being watched. I pulled back, guilty. I was intruding. Aunt Nancy was right. I didn’t like it, but I couldn’t deny it. I should have waited and trusted. After all this time, I should have known him better.

Behind me, Aunt Nancy’s needles clicked twice, and Jack’s shoulders relaxed.

“Oseh shalom bim’romav hu ya’aseh shalom”
—he bowed his head again—
“aleinu v’al kol Yis’ra’eil v’im’ru. Amein.”

Jack stood silent for a bit. Then he let out a breath it felt like he’d been holding for a long time. He picked up two
stones off the gravel path and carefully placed one on each of the first two tombstones. Last of all, he took the marble Papa’d given him out of his pocket, and laid it on the third tombstone.

“Oh, Jack,” I breathed. Because he couldn’t have said more clearly he didn’t trust Papa if he’d shouted it from the rooftop. It hurt. I understood it, but it hurt bad.

Aunt Nancy snapped two of her knobby fingers, and the fire was just a fire again. “Now, if you take my advice, you’ll leave that young man to himself a bit and get on home to your mother.”

I almost asked why. Almost. She was looking at me again, and letting me see her star-filled eyes. “I’ll do that. Thank you.”

She clucked her tongue, but thoughtfully this time. “You remember who you are, Bad Luck Girl, and you’ll do all right.”

“I don’t know who I am.”

“Yes, you do. You just afraid to admit it.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, because there was no other answer. “Thank you, ma’am.”

Aunt Nancy shook her head and clicked her needles and I walked out of there and up the steps as easily as I would out of any other cellar under any other building anyplace in the world. The papers were still rattling aimlessly around the fence. There were bugs buzzing low around the dust.

Not bugs. Words. The words and the papers were still alive, and now that I’d come out, they all came flocking up to
me, rustling and humming, waiting for me to tell them what to do. The papers crept over my shoe tops and words landed on my shoulders and the backs of my hands.

This was not good. I could not go home like this, with a bunch of words and papers crowding around me like the strangest cluster of stray kittens ever seen. I knew Aunt Nancy was in there laughing at me. I shut my jaw hard enough to make my teeth click. I couldn’t hang around here. I had to get back to the house and Mama, fast. People like Aunt Nancy did not say things just to hear themselves talk. Something was going to happen, and I had to be there. I had to think of something. I could probably wish the whole bundle of paper and ink dead, and maybe I should, but that felt wrong somehow. I mean, I was responsible for it being alive in the first place.

An idea hit me. I pulled Jack’s notebook out of my pocket and opened it. “All right, all of you, inside.”

They did it too. The words plastered themselves to the pages and the papers folded themselves up into tiny scraps and slotted themselves between the notebook pages. It was a minute’s struggle to close the book, but I managed and stuffed it back in my pocket.

I let myself out the yard gate this time, and onto the shady street. It was only when I closed the gate firmly behind me that I started to run.

My ankles hurt. My cheeks burned. I was wheezing like a bad engine and still a couple of blocks from the Hollanders’ when I heard the crowd. Up ahead out of sight, people yelled and swore and called names, and there were a whole lot of them.

They were around the corner, where I needed to go. I stopped and leaned against the lamppost, digging the heel of my hand into my side to slow down my spreading cramp. I tried hard to think of a detour. But I didn’t know any of these streets and didn’t want to try my magic just now. That had taken me enough strange places today.

I sucked in a long, whooping breath, and ran around the corner.

Up ahead, the sidewalk was one mass of people. Men and women shifted around so they could jam closer together. They were booing and yelling. Some had fists in the air, or pointed fingers. I swerved into traffic, ignored the honks,
and jumped over the curb onto the sidewalk. The roar of the crowd behind me redoubled.

“Shame on you, Ben Hollander!” screamed someone. “Shame on your family!”

I tripped hard and almost fell. The crowd was screaming again. I was close to tears, but I turned around anyway, and this time I made myself look at what was happening.

The crowd had gathered in front of one of the narrow clapboard apartment buildings. The door had been flung open and Ben Hollander was coming down the stairs, shoving a woman in front of him. She stumbled across the porch, and I saw she had a bundle that could only have been a baby clutched tight to her chest. The cigar-chewing boss man, Sweeny, was there too, standing guard on the porch with his arms folded.

“Go on wid youz!” bellowed Sweeny over the heads of the crowd. “You ain’t gonna pay, you ain’t gonna stay!”

Ben pushed the woman and her baby down the porch steps, straight into the arms of some of the women who had gathered as part of the crowd. He had a bundle of clothes under his arm, and he flung them right out into the crowd. They booed loudly and he brushed his chin at them. Sy was there too, coming down the stairs lugging a mattress. He heaved it over the side of the porch, which set up another roar from the crowd.

I knew what this was. This was an eviction. Some landlord had hired Sweeny, Ben, and Sy to toss the family and all their things into the street. That woman, whoever she was,
didn’t own the house, so if she couldn’t make the rent, she could be thrown out anytime. Or maybe she had owned it and missed the payments, so the bank was foreclosing. I couldn’t see the woman’s face for the crowd, but I knew exactly the kind of confused, lost look she’d have. I’d seen it on neighbors’ faces back in Slow Run when the sheriff came to take their keys. Sick to my stomach, I bit my lip and turned away. There’d been nothing I could do then, and there was nothing I could do now. I had to get back to Mama.

Except it turned out Mama was already there.

“Benjamin Hollander, you stop this at once!”

Mama’s voice rang steady and clear over the noise of the crowd. So loud, clear, and unexpected, in fact, that the crowd shut up. All together, that suddenly silent crowd turned to see my mama striding up the sidewalk, a shopping basket slung over each arm.

Oh, no. Not now. Not this time. Please, no, no, no, NO!

Mama hadn’t noticed me yet. She just marched up the street like nothing was ever going to stop her. Even from where I stood, I could see the set of her jaw. All her attention was focused on the Hollander brothers as the crowd parted and she climbed those steps. I scrunched down to make myself as small as I could. I ducked and squeezed and shoved between the people in the crowd until I came up close to the porch.

Mama still didn’t see me. She stood in front of Ben. Simon was in the doorway, a pile of bed linens in his bulky arms.

“What do you think you are doing to this poor woman?” Mama demanded. “Simon! You take those things back upstairs at once!”

“Mrs. LeRoux,” said Ben carefully. “This ain’t none of your business.”

“And it shouldn’t be any of yours,” she said right back. “Now get back upstairs with that, Simon.”

Simon Hollander’s cigarette drooped and so did his shoulders. He turned around and, I swear to you, he would have done what Mama said, if Sweeny hadn’t been there.

“Who is this broad?” Sweeny yanked his cigar out of his mouth and spat. “Get your ass off this porch, lady. This is a legal eviction.”

Slowly and delicately, Mama set down her full market baskets. “If this is a legal eviction, Mr. Sweeny, you can show me the papers.” She held out one neatly gloved hand.

Sweeny’s face flushed a purple color that couldn’t be healthy for anybody. “I told you to get …”

“And I told you, if this is a legal eviction, you must have the papers to prove it. Let’s see them.” Mama wasn’t moving. But the crowd around me shifted, muttering and closing ranks.

“Papers!” someone shouted, and the rest of them took up the chant. An ugliness ran between them, fire hot, stone hard, and sickly sour. “Papers! Papers!”

“Mama. Mama, please,” I murmured and leaned hard on the words as I pushed my way between the people gathered in front of the house. “Don’t do this.”

She couldn’t possibly have heard me, but she turned all the same, and saw me standing by the steps. “Callie!” She frowned. I waited for her to move, to get off that porch and come down to me. But she didn’t. “You go home now, there’s a good girl. Mr. Sweeny? I’m waiting.”

I knew what she was doing. This was what she always did. Whether it was feeding hoboes off the trains or buying up things from the “dime auctions” when a neighbor went bust, this was what Mama did. She tried to get her strong back between people and their trouble. But this wasn’t Slow Run. I shoved my way through the last line of bodies and up the steps. Nobody here knew us. It didn’t matter she’d been able to sweet talk that Mrs. Burnstein or that Old Man Grenke. We were strangers in a hard, strange land, and if things got bad, nobody was gonna care what happened to us.

Especially not Mr. Sweeny, who stalked up to her, his chin trembling from the buildup of pure mean inside.

“You’re crazy, that’s what you are!” Sweeny swiped at the air with his cigar. “Benny, get her and the brat outta here.” He stood back, and he waited.

Ben shook himself and slouched into the space Sweeny had left open in front of Mama. “You should just go now, Mrs. LeRoux. Me and Sy, we got to finish our business here, and we cannot have no trouble.”

Mama ignored him. And me. I climbed up onto the porch and tugged at her elbow. But it was like pulling at a statue.