Every Single Second (5 page)

Once, when Nonni was a small girl back in Italy, she and her brother, Carlo, woke up early and hungry. They were always hungry, Nonni said, smoothing the candy bag. Hungry all the time. It was too early to wake their
madre
, who worked so hard. So Nonni went to the ice box and got out the heavy jug of milk. Both hands, it took both hands to get it to the table. Carlo climbed up on a chair.

“Boys! They no can wait!” Nonni laughed. “Like your brothers, no?”

The milk had a thick, delicious layer of cream on top. Before Nonni could stop him, Carlo plunged his little fist into the pitcher, tipping it sideways. The milk poured out, gushing over the table and onto the floor. Like a waterfall. Like an act of God. Like fate.

“I no could move.” Nonni hunched her shoulders. “I was . . . was . . . hippo?”

“Hypnotized?”

“Hypnotized.”

Nonni cradled the bag of jewel-colored candy in her lap. Most of her stories ended with disaster—Nonni was big on death and destruction—but this one was somehow different. Nella pictured her, eyes wide, spellbound by the mess. She and her brother, like miniature gods, gazed down on the chaos they’d unleashed.

“It’s a good story,” she said.

Nonni nodded.

By now it was time for her talk shows. When Nella said Dad would stop in on his way home from work, Nonni waved impatiently, fixated on a woman who got her head run over by a mail truck but lived to tell.

Outside, the world was blushing, only green instead of pink. Nonni’s fig tree was still wrapped in winter burlap, but the air thrummed with the promise of spring. Standing on the porch, Nella felt a pang. Nonni used to be young. She really did. For a moment just now, she was a girl and an old woman at the same time. Nella remembered a drinking cup she got once for Girl Scout camp. With a tiny twist it collapsed flat as a coin. Time could be like that.

What was that thing Clem was so excited about? A jump second?

A small bird flew by, wings flashing yellow in the light.

Across the street, something shimmered on the sidewalk. The girl’s scarf—it must have slipped off her shoulders. When Nella picked it up, the warm scent of almonds filled the air.
Finders keepers,
she told herself. And though she should have learned her lesson about being greedy, and taking things that weren’t hers, somehow she was stuffing the scarf into her pocket, making a getaway, praying nobody but that beady-eyed sidewalk pigeon saw.

What the Statue of Jeptha A. Stone Would Say if It Could

I
was a man of substance and wealth. I dressed and ate well. My home was grandly appointed. Behold my monument, carved from the finest Italian marble by the finest craftsman. Notice how inferior the other monuments and statues are. Why, some of these poor saps even lack eyeballs!

I have been grandly memorialized, and with good reason. I was a man who commanded the utmost respect.

Hark unto me, Jeptha A. Stone! While I lived and breathed, I never would have tolerated a bird upon my pate.

Avaunt,
I would have cried
. Begone! Shoo!

Alas. My tongue is now stone.

And so I remain mute.

With a yellow bird singing merrily atop my head.

DISASTER DOLLS

then

A
ngela was always quiet, but in third grade she became a mouse.

That was the year they learned about lines. Number lines, assembly lines, time lines. In religion, they learned about the line between good and evil. According to their teacher, you couldn’t miss it any more than you could the Great Wall of China.

That year drew its own invisible line. Girls started acting differently. Some girls. They told jokes Nella and Angela didn’t understand. And they started getting stuff. Sparkly shoelaces. Glow-in-the-dark bracelets. Disaster
Dolls, like Hannah who survived a hurricane, and Tess who survived a tsunami. Each came in a shimmery plastic egg, with a little book. Nella had never cared much for dolls (why would she, with all those real babies in the house?), but when her classmates started bringing theirs to school, and showing them to each other at recess, she discovered she wanted one too.

“I’d get Fiona, the forest fire one,” she told Angela as they walked home with Anthony.

“Roger that.” Angela still talked to Nella, of course. Talked more than ever, as if saving up everything for her. “And the earthquake one. Ella. She comes with a little dog she rescued.”

By then Anthony was in high school, but whenever he could, he’d walk them home. His voice had gotten deep, and he had a new, deep smell, like the ground after a spring rainstorm. When Angela told him about Disaster Dolls, he laughed.

“Don’t let those girls tell you what to want. Don’t let them brainwash you.”

Too late. Nella’s brain was already washed. Still, she knew better than to ask for a new toy when it wasn’t her birthday or Christmas. The rule in her house was if one got a treat, they all had to. Any treat had to be times four (later, times five).

The situation was even more hopeless for Angela. Her father had reenlisted, but now he was back home. He’d gotten wounded, though you couldn’t see where. He had medicine, Angela said. Zillions of pills. Her mother nagged him to take them, which made him yell at her. Once he started yelling, he couldn’t stop. He yelled till he got hoarse. When Angela begged her mother not to make him mad, she told Angela to shut her stupid face.

This was a sister secret.

“He’s worst to Anthony.” They were pushing someone (who would it have been?) in the stroller. Bobby. It was Bobby, and Kevin was hanging on to its back like a sucker-fish. Bobby thought it was a wonderful game to pull off his hat, fling it on the ground, and watch Angela pick it up. Again and again she tugged it back over his ears. “Last night he grabbed the pencil out of Anthony’s hand and snapped it in two.”

“What did Anthony do?”

Angela slid her eyes away. “Nothing.”

That was somehow scarier than if they’d had a fight.

“Then last night.” Angela chewed her braid.

“What? What happened?”

“I woke up and my father was sitting on my bed. Just sitting there all hunched over, like a cold wind was blowing on him. I asked him what was the matter, but he didn’t
answer. He was there but he wasn’t.”

Like a ghost, thought Nella. Though there were no such things.

Angela picked up Bobby’s hat and stuck her hand inside. She made it talk like a puppet. “Sometimes I wish he’d go back in the army again!” said the hat. Angela immediately yanked it off. “No I don’t! I take that back!”

Angela’s father was a soldier, so that meant he was good and brave.

Angela’s father scared his kids and made his wife cry, so that meant he was bad and cruel.

Just because you did one right thing, did it mean you were good?

And if that was true, did doing one wrong thing mean you were bad?

Third grade was when Nella started asking questions like that. At school, her teachers still knew all the answers. But at night, in bed, Nella got confused. It was like another girl had come to live inside her. All day this girl curled up and slept, but at night she sighed and woke up. She stood on her toes and stretched her arms. This girl was greedy. She wanted so many things. Forest Fire Fiona, but other things too. Some things, she didn’t even know their names. That didn’t stop this girl from wanting them. She stretched, she strained, she reached. It was like she wanted
to leap free of gravity, leap clean off the ground!

Nella didn’t tell anyone, not even Angela, about this.

(Later, Nella would wonder if that girl was to blame for her clumsiness. Clem said it was invisible gnomes that made her trip seventeen times a day. But maybe it was that other, restless girl who’d woken up inside her.)

The Disaster Doll owners formed a club. If you didn’t have a doll, you weren’t allowed. Nella told Angela this was against the law. It was a free country. Angela put the tip of her braid between her teeth, a habit that was starting to get on Nella’s nerves.

One afternoon as Anthony walked them home, Angela suddenly began to cry.

“I asked Victoria to see her doll, and she said my family was so weird I’d contaminate it.”

Anthony froze. His face became a thundercloud.

“And she said Nella . . .” Angela bit her lip.

“Me?” Nella stood still. A small shock zapped her, head to toe. “Did she bad-mouth my father?”

What in the world made her say that? Everyone liked Dad. At church or the store or the social club, they made jokes like “This guy? He’s the last one to let you down!” and “Where he works? People are dying to get in!” Dad would pretend it was funny, like he hadn’t heard it a million times.

Still. Sometimes a ripple went out around him. Sometimes she caught people flashing him second looks that made her uneasy. Every now and then, Mom hustled her past a conversation with a we-don’t-do-gossip face.

(This was the year Nella realized their neighborhood was prime territory for a disastrous landslide. Anthony reassured her they were safe. If only he’d been right.)

“Those girls are the real natural disasters.” Anthony rubbed the scar over his eye. He made his voice light, though his face was still dark with anger. “Who wants to go to Franny’s?”

He paid for the doughnuts with quarters and dimes. He and Angela never had any money. So it was a surprise when, the next day after school, he told them he was headed down to Value Variety, and they could come if they wanted.

It was October. The day was warm but Anthony wore a bulky jacket. Valentine-red leaves drifted at their feet. In her head Nella repeated the names of the six daughters she and Anthony would have someday: Melissa, Miranda, Marybeth, Martina, Mia, and baby Molly.

“Wait out here,” he said when they got to the store. “Do not come in no matter what.”

This was the second surprise.

Nella and Angela stood close together, feeling nervous.
Back then, they were forbidden to come down here by themselves. When Nella’s family drove through with Nonni, she made them roll up their windows and lock their doors while she clutched her purse tight in her lap. Danger lurked on every corner, according to Nonni, though to Nella, it looked a lot like her own neighborhood. Houses with peeling paint and rusty awnings. No doughnut shop, but the Chinese takeout place smelled good. No Frank Sinatra or Mario Lanza playing, but even back then, Nella was sick of those guys.

“I wish Anthony would hurry up,” said Angela, shifting from foot to foot.

Nella tried to imagine living down here. She’d go to the public school, which everyone said was terrible, old and falling down (but wasn’t St. Amphibalus old too?). Nella wondered if the girls who went there wanted Disaster Dolls too. Or did they want different things?

“What is he
doing
in there?” Angela whined.

Putting her face to the store window, Nella glimpsed Anthony. Carrying a loaf of bread, he disappeared down the toy aisle. Minutes later, the automatic door swung open and he came out with the bread in a plastic bag.

“Get moving,” he ordered, not pausing.

He made them cross against the light, and took the hill so fast they couldn’t keep up. He didn’t slow down till they
turned into the iron gates of the cemetery and scrambled up the grassy slope at the foot of Jeptha A. Stone’s monument. Anthony was breathing hard. Nella’s stomach was in knots. What was going on? He dropped the bag of bread and pulled something out from inside his jacket.

“Pick,” he said, holding his hands behind his back.

Nella was always quicker than Angela. She tapped his left hand, and he held it out. There, in her beautiful shimmery egg, lay Forest Fire Fiona. In his right hand he had Vera, survivor of the volcano that had devastated her village.

“You got us these? For real?” Nella was in a fairy tale. Her wish had come true. By magic. By a handsome prince! The air around his head shimmered gold. “Thank you! Thank you, Anthony!”

Angela kept her own head down, not speaking.

“What are you waiting for?” Exasperated, Anthony pried the egg open and pushed the doll into his sister’s hands. “Here! It’s for you!”