Missing Sisters -SA (6 page)

It was brilliant. It was flawless. All that was left to figure out was how to get rid of Garth.

In her excitement she forgot to be scared of the shaky ladder and dropped into the gloom and murk of the attic with an energetic thud. She barreled along the halls and pounded down the worn front stairs, almost running into Garth.

“The king’s dead,” said Garth excitedly.

“We don’t have a king, Einstein, we have a president,” she said, diving for the phone in the hall to call Patty and tell her of the plan to get Billy to the party without his hoody friends.

The little girls had been set on a blanket in front of the TV. They had their thumbs in their mouths and were looking stupidly around. Garth jollied them up by doing a little dance that consisted of lifting his feet up lightly and dropping them quickly, as if stepping on coals. “The black people have a king, and he’s dead,” he sang.

“Will you keep it down?” said Miami in an aggrieved voice. Her finger went wheeling around the rotary dial and then froze halfway through the number. She had turned away to give her voice some privacy and looked down the hall past the bulge of coats hanging on hooks, into the kitchen. There was a smell of macaroni and cheese and Meister’s excellent all-beef homemade franks boiling on the stove. In the steam, sweeping up from the open pot, stood Mrs.

Shaw. The heels of her hands were pressed deep into her eye sockets. Her shoulders were shaking. A little wail, not unlike the kind Fanny and Rachelle made when they were annoyed, came out of her mouth. “Holy Mother of God,” said Miami. “Will you look at that. Yikes.” She set the receiver on the cradle and leaned back to be out of sight. She’d never seen Mrs. Shaw cry. Mrs. Shaw was cheery. She believed in the power of positive thinking. A smile was her umbrella. She kept her sunny side up, up. Not only that, she blathered on about it. She was proud of being upbeat. She liked herself that way. She thought it might catch on with Miami, who was naturally a little sour, a handful of burrs in a family bouquet of wildflowers.

But Miami had been with the Shaws what, five, six years now? And Mrs. Shaw had never so much as had her eyes mist over. So what was this private display of blubbering? It was embarrassing. When Mrs. Shaw reached for a paper towel to blow her nose, Miami slipped into the living room. She cuddled the little girls, who were unused to her attentions and stopped being annoying and began to coo and bubble over her. Garth was saying, “Maybe I’ll be the black king when I grow up.”

“That’s awfully confident, to assume you’re going to grow up,” said Miami. “You won’t make it to six the way you’re keeping on. I’ll see to that. A great big rock rolled off the roof into your wading pool this summer. Good-bye, Garth.”

“Oh,” said Garth, used to Miami’s sarcastic tone of voice, knowing she hardly meant it,

“that’s what you think. You just don’t want me to come to your party. But I am.”

“But sweetheart honey-bunny sugarlips doll, you don’t want to come to my boring old party.”

“Oh, yes I do,” said Garth firmly. “And you can’t stop me. Just because you think you’re so hot.”

“I am,” said Miami. “Hot as hell. I love myself.”

“I’m telling,” said Garth. “Mommy!” he screeched. “Miami sweared!”

“No, don’t go in there—” Miami raised herself to her knees, tumbling the toddlers off her lap. But Garth had barreled toward the kitchen. He slowed down at the sight of Mrs. Shaw. Then, stupider or braver than Miami, he catapulted himself into Mrs. Shaw’s arms and gave her kisses one two three.

By the time Mr. Shaw got home from work at last, Miami had worked out what was going on. Some Negro guy had been shot and killed. Martin Luther King, Jr. “He’s not a king, his
name
is King,” she’d finally snapped at Garth, whose normal placid way had been stirred up by the fuss.

“But he’s like a king, that’s why it’s on the news,” said Garth. “A black king. Like me.” Mrs. Shaw finished crying and began talking. Miami preferred the crying. This was a mammoth lecture: numbers forty-seven and twenty-five and eighty-eight all rolled up in one.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: A brave campaigner for the rights of American blacks. A man of God.

All people are created equal. “I have a dream,” said Mr. Shaw, looking soberly at Garth as if the little twerp had a clue to what was going on. “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skins but by the content of their characters.”

Garth looked at his skin color. Miami preferred hers: pale, although Garth could wear deep purples and reds that made her face look washed out.

Mrs. Shaw was wiping sauerkraut off Rachelle and Mr. Shaw was doing the same for Fanny. “We may have to postpone your party, dear,” said Mrs. Shaw.

“
What
?”

“You heard me.”

“Why?”

“There’ll be a memorial service for Dr. King.”

“He’s a
doctor too
?” said Garth, mouth open with joy.

“He isn’t a personal member of our family!” cried Miami. “What’re we gonna do, fly to wherever they just kill like that and act like crazy people? I’d be so embarrassed!”

“The cathedral will have a service, I’m sure,” said Mr. Shaw, who worked for the Church in some mysterious capacity having to do with banking and budgets. “They’re already lining up something for Saturday evening. Sorry, sweetheart, but your mother’s right. We must go and pay our respects and pray for his soul. He’s a good man, a hero, and he needs our prayers.”

“If he’s so good, why’s he need
our
prayers?” Miami was getting loud, and the little girls began to whimper. She was going to dig her heels in over this! “It’s not fair! It’s my birthday party on Saturday! You promised! He isn’t even a
Catholic
!”

“Honey, it can’t be helped. We’ll have your birthday party next weekend.”

“But that’s the beginning of spring break!” And the O’Haras would be going to Pennsylvania over spring break, Miami already knew. “It
can’t
be then! It has to be Saturday!”

“This is an emergency, and in an emergency everybody has to pull together and make sacrifices,” said Mrs. Shaw. Her tone was changing. “It will mean something to Garth that we go.”

“You don’t care, do you, Garth? You can come to my party. Promise!” A last-minute change of tactics. “You’re my favorite little brother. I’ll let you have all the hot water in the bath tonight.”

“You were going to smush me with a giant rock,” said Garth.

“I was only
joking
,” said Miami, grinning broadly, with painful brightness, as proof.

“It doesn’t matter what Garth says,” said Mr. Shaw. “Honey, try to be grown up about this. We’re going to go as a family to the memorial service. Dr. King deserves our honoring him that way. It will be important to Garth, later on, to know he was there and we were there with him. That’s what Dr. King was working for. That’s what we’re doing.”

“We’re
not
!”

“Discussion is over,” said Mr. Shaw, more tired than annoyed. “That’ll do, Miami Shaw.”

“I hate you all,” said Miami. “With a very special hate. You have just ruined the rest of my life. Thank you very much with whipped cream and a cherry on top.” She pushed away from the table and ran back to the tower. No one called after her or followed with a worried look to see if she was going to pitch herself out the window. What did they care! Just to spite them she wouldn’t even do it. She’d stay alive and inflict herself on them for the rest of their natural days.

The big, fat, stupid jerks. Garth more than anyone.

Two evenings later Mr. and Mrs. Shaw and Miami and Garth drove downtown to the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. Patty had come over to baby-sit Fanny and Rachelle.

Miami huddled as far into her corner of the car as she could. She wore a scarf on her head even though the teachers said you didn’t have to do that anymore. She didn’t want anyone she knew to see her.

Garth was already over the novelty of a black king and could feel in his bones a long, boring church evening ahead. At first he had tried to jolly Miami up by dancing, but Mr. and Mrs. Shaw were so drawn and sorrowful that soon he just gave up and looked morose, too.

The church was packed; folks crowded into the aisles and the choir loft. It wasn’t even a holy day of obligation or a Sunday. Miami didn’t listen much to the readings or the sermon, but she stood on the kneeler to see around as far as she could. The place was full of nuns. Some had the new modern habits, but a lot of them were sticking to the old crowlike gowns and bibs. There were even a couple of dark, sensuous-looking sisters in pale blue veils with gold embroidery, whose habits were wrapped like sheets around their waists. They wore brass bangles and had red dots on their foreheads. If I were ever dumb enough to want to be a nun, that’s the kind I’d be, thought Miami.

Every Catholic in Albany must be here. There were black people and white people, and yellow, and everything in between. Mrs. Jenkins, the witch from next door, was two pews over.

The O’Haras, all nine of them, were there. Billy included. So that was all right; he wouldn’t have been able to come over with the geography book anyway.

They all sang together. Even Miami sang. “We shall overcome,” they sang, and held hands in church. She held Garth’s hand. “I still hate you,” she whispered to him in a loving tone.

“I hate you, too,” he said, “but don’t you hate this even more? It’s so
boring
.” They squeezed each other’s hands in joyful contempt. Mr. Shaw and Mrs. Shaw were crying, the Bobbsey twins of South Allen Street. The whole thing was totally embarrassing. “Oh deep in my heart, I do believe that we shall overcome someday.”

SMITHEREENS

Underwater, Alice was no deafer than anyone else. Velvet silence. Liquid light. What she could see of the world was a broad-brimmed plate; she wore it like a hat. A hat decorated with scraggly pines, run around with ribbons of cloud, pinned with skewers of sunlight. Yet for all that, it had no weight. She jostled her hips this way and that way, as if doing a hootchy-kootchy dance, and the world wheeled overhead in perfect balance.

Then she shot up for air with a
whoosh
.

The world clicked back into place. The shallows of the lake were churned by a hundred splashing, shrieking girls. Their screams knotted together into a big ache in Alice’s brain. The counselors—nuns in training, mostly, though stylish in pedal pushers and culottes—paced the dock, blowing whistles whenever anyone’s life was threatened by too much watery exuberance.

“Fabia Lanahan! Stop doing that to Mary Jane Jones!” Alice flicked her hair expertly back with a toss of her head and grinned wildly at no one. Then she plunged deep into her element.

It was the third day of her two weeks at Camp Saint Theresa. The weather was good, the food disgusting and plentiful, and nobody else in her cabin came from the Sacred Heart Home for Girls. Some of them were such chatterers they hadn’t even realized yet that Alice couldn’t speak well. So she sat on the bunk at night, making a wallet from prepunched plastic leather stitched with plastic cord for Sister Vincent de Paul, if she ever came back. The cabin leader was a large woman named Sally. She believed in regular bone-crushing hugs, morning, noon, and night, and the girls submitted as a kind of penance. Other than having to satisfy Sally’s need to feel motherly, Alice found camp safe enough. Of the stink-hole bathrooms—no more than toilet seats perched above gaping holes—it was best not to think.

Alice wasn’t used to being on her own as much as camp allowed. For as long as she could remember, there’d been nuns hovering within a few feet, encouraging, reprimanding, consoling. A mobile forest of women shaped more or less like Christmas trees, though done in black and white instead of jeweled colors. (The nuns at the Sacred Heart Home for Girls had not yet embraced the new stylish habits, with their scandalously shorter skirts and civilian-style blouses.) Nuns were a fact of life, like crucifixes marking their holy quadrants on the walls, or telephone lines crossing the sky in imprecise musical staffs. Nuns persisted. They weren’t so much a motif in Alice’s life as an element of nature, like air or dust or birds.

So down, down, into the lake the color of liquid Prell, and Alice was like the pearl in the TV commercial that dropped slowly, silently. On its own agenda, as Sister John Boss would say.

Alice propelled herself like a frog, like an Egyptian doing the bent-arm dance as a swimming stroke. Alice could keep her eyes open underwater. She was as sharp as Flipper. There, for instance, through the gloom: There was Naomi Matthews pretending to swim with little pouncing hand motions hitting the water. Alice could see her feet touch down for nervous assurance every eight seconds or so. The big cheat.

She butted up into Naomi’s side. Naomi gave a little squeal even Alice could hear. Alice stood up, water streaming down her hair. “Oh, Naomi. Sorry.”

“Watch where you’re going, clumsy,” said Naomi. She was trying to swim without getting her golden mane wet.

“Swim tag! You’re it!” screamed Alice, and splashed Naomi in the face with water. She tapped Naomi lightly on the shoulder and darted away with a muscular side-stroke. But Naomi wasn’t biting. “Oh, Alice,
grow up
,” she groaned. “I’d like to take a calm swim for a moment if I can.”

“
Can
you swim?” said Alice daringly. “Don’t look like any kind of swimming to me.”

“Taking a break on your speech lessons for the summer, I guess,” said Naomi deftly. “I can’t quite make out your comment so bye-bye for now.” She fake-dog-paddled away. Even her shoulders rose like little porcelain doorknobs over the water. She couldn’t fool a blind person with that act, thought Alice scornfully. At least there’s one thing I can do better than Naomi.

Alice had been surprised to see Naomi here, at the jamboree barbecue that opened the two-week camp session. Naomi had triumphed in the Sacred Heart–Saint Mary’s joint production of
My Fair Lady
. Naomi had gone to glory in her half of the role, as Eliza Doolittle transformed into an articulate lady. Then she had moved out to live with the Harrigans. She’d taken all her things in a gray suitcase with the stitching coming out of the leather reinforcements.