“You are here all alone?” Rania asked.
Mercedes nodded.
“How old are you?”
“Sixteen, miss. How old are you?”
Rania smiled. Her top teeth looked too large for her mouth, Mercedes thought, and they protruded slightly. But this fact didn’t alter the beauty of her face. “Such a rude question to ask a lady.”
Before she thought to hold her tongue Mercedes said, “You asked me.”
“So I did. I asked you. You had the right. But I won’t be foolish enough to answer.” She looked intently at Mercedes, her face serious. “I think,” she said, “you are in trouble. With this boy, Wish. Is that right?”
Mercedes looked from Rania to Amina.
Rania said, “Wish has gotten you into trouble and run away from you.”
“No.”
Rania started over. “He left before you knew about your trouble. And you have come to tell him.”
“No,” Mercedes said. “Nothing like that.”
The two women beside her exchanged glances. Rania said, “What will you do if you find this boy?”
“We’ll get married.”
“And what will you do,” she said, “what will you do if you don’t find him?”
Mercedes said, “I—” Realized she’d never allowed herself to consider the possibility. She said, “I’ll wait for him.”
Rania nodded. “I hope, in that case, that you find him. I would hate to see you waste your life waiting.”
The crowd at the supper table was raucous; they talked with their hands and shouted. Mercedes couldn’t say from one moment to the next if they were arguing or joking. She barely touched her food. She felt completely wrung out and was still shaking with a chill. Her father dead and buried and she couldn’t possibly go home. She bowed her head over her plate and began crying again.
“You see,” Sammy said, gesturing with both hands. “I did nothing.”
“Shut up, Samar,” Maya said.
Rania and Amina took Mercedes up the stairs and tucked her into a single bed. Amina sat beside her until she settled, drifted mercifully into sleep.
The house was quiet when she woke. Sunlight through the window where the curtain was drawn back. The peacefulness of it lulled her a moment. She turned over and nearly dozed off again until she placed herself. She threw the bedsheets off. Still wearing the dress they’d given her after stripping her out of her own clothes.
Amina and Maya were hanging laundry off the back bridge when she came downstairs. Rows and rows of clotheslines weighted down with laundry behind the houses. Drift of coal smoke, the steady noise of traffic.
Mercedes watched them until they took note of her there. She said, “I think I’ll take a walk.”
“Where to?” Maya asked.
She shrugged. Could just see the nub of Signal Hill above the line of laundry. “Up there,” she said. Just to have a destination.
Maya said, “Amina will show you the way.”
Mercedes had been hoping to sneak off alone but didn’t know how to say so without insulting their generosity. “That would be nice,” she said.
The road to Signal Hill was surprisingly steep and meandering. Military vehicles lumbered past them. Soldiers waved and whistled from the bed of a truck struggling against the grade and the girls had to slow their pace to put some distance between them. The mid-morning sun lit up the houses clinging to the Battery. The bare rock as red as wet clay.
“My mother says this light is the closest she’ll ever get to Lebanon,” Amina said.
“Where is Lebanon to?”
“Do you know where Jesus is from?”
“From Bethlehem. From Galilee.”
“It’s over that way.”
“The Holy Lands?”
Amina nodded her head.
“Why did you leave the Holy Lands for this place?”
“We’re Christians.”
“That don’t seem reason enough.”
“Things were bad for us there. That’s all I know. I was just a baby.”
They didn’t say another word until they reached Cabot Tower and looked back out over the city. The harbour crowded with steamers and navy vessels, two-masted schooners with their sails raised to dry in the sun. Mercedes had always thought of the Holy Lands in the same way she imagined the Garden of Eden, a real place but lost in time now. Inviolable, inaccessible to living, breathing human beings. Things were bad in the Holy Lands, Amina had said. It made Mercedes’ own troubles seem trifling and altogether hopeless.
“What are you going to do now?” Amina asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. She wished she had Agnes to talk to, to suggest a way forward. All around them red-rock cliffs sheered hundreds of feet to the ocean and she felt the dark tug of that drop. It was a momentary notion but altogether compelling.
Amina put her hand on Mercedes’ arm, as if she saw the thought pass across her face. She said, “Wish isn’t from town, is he?”
“No,” Mercedes said. “He’s from Renews.” It was a moment longer before she saw what the girl was suggesting. “You think that’s where he went?”
“Someone might have news at least.”
“I don’t,” Mercedes said, still trying to take in the simple common sense of the idea, “I don’t know how to get there.”
“Let me talk to my mother.”
Rania set her folded hands under her chin, her eyes on a point over the heads of the two girls. Everyone else around the table gone silent while she considered.
“It isn’t right to let a girl run wild around the country,” she said.
Amina put a hand on Mercedes’ arm to keep her quiet.
“Has Wish got family out there?” Rania asked.
“His parents are dead for long ago,” Mercedes said. “He lived there with his aunt for a while after his mother passed on.” That was everything she knew of Lilly. It made her suddenly apprehensive, seeing how deliberately Wish had neglected her in their conversations, looking ahead to meeting the woman.
Rania nodded. Said, “Let me think about it.”
Mercedes bit her lip. Looked to Amina, who was smiling down at her plate. “But,” she said.
Amina pinched her thigh to shut her up. When Mercedes reached to push her away they locked hands under the table, Amina glancing sidelong to warn her, reassure her. Bullying in exactly the same fashion Mercedes would have treated her younger sister.
“I’ll think about it,” Rania said again.
Amina squeezed Mercedes’ hand once more and got up to clear the table.
The men left the house in a group while the dishes were being done. They carried black cases so oddly shaped that Mercedes could not begin to guess what they held.
“Do you like to dance?” Maya asked her.
The dance hall was the largest room Mercedes had ever been inside. She could just see a stage at the far end over the crowd. A drifting fog of cigarette smoke hung in the air and it looked as if the band was standing behind a gauze curtain. Most of the men in the room wore uniforms of one kind or another, Canadian or British, a handful of Americans. A table was cleared for them at the front, just below the stage where the Basha men stood in white tuxedos and black ties. Their hair was pomaded flat against their heads. The bass drum read
The Basha Orchestra
. Sammy nodded at them over his guitar.
Amina had done Mercedes’ face before they left the house, applying blush and eye shadow and lipstick in front of a dresser mirror. Mercedes had never worn makeup and she was startled by the change. No one from the Cove would recognize her, she was sure. And the physical transformation seemed to suit her circumstances.
Rania ordered soft drinks and leaned across to shout into Mercedes’ ear. “If you want to dance, I will find a gentleman to take you out.”
Mercedes didn’t recognize the music or the choreographed motions of the dancers. The crowded room made her feel claustrophobic. The coloured lights and smoke put her in mind of the hell her grandmother was fond of describing. She said, “I don’t want to dance.”
“You say that now,” Rania said.
The song ended and Tony Basha spent a few moments talking to the audience. Mercedes strained to make out what he was saying, but the amplified muffle of his voice was indecipherable through the noise of the crowd. Tony extended an arm to a corner of the stage and a young man in uniform walked across to join the band, a trumpet held at his thigh.
She leaned into Amina. “Who is he?” she asked.
“Johnny Boustani. He’s an American.”
Rania said, “He’s a good Lebanese boy.”
Johnny Boustani looked completely out of place in his drab uniform, standing sideways to the microphone so he looked not part of the band or the audience but in a world all his own. He was smiling to himself and he waited as the song rolled ahead without him, the trumpet held loosely at his hip until the second before he started to play.
Mercedes knew nothing of music beyond the hymns she’d heard in church and the scatter ballad sung
a cappella
in the back kitchen. She had no idea what to call the sound coming from Johnny Boustani’s instrument. Listening to him reminded her of the first time she’d tasted an apple when she was five years old, a minor sensual epiphany. The music was that sweet and clean.
When he finished his set with the band, Johnny Boustani came to the table. “From Pennsylvania,” Rania said and she repeated her earlier assessment. “A good Lebanese boy.”
Johnny nodded and smiled without saying a word. He looked much younger than Mercedes had first thought and he sat with his shoulders hunched high as if he was warding off a chill.
“Johnny is here with the U.S. Army Engineers,” Rania said. “To put in the base.”
“Communications,” he said. “I’m just a communications officer.” He was being self-effacing out of habit, Mercedes could see.
“I have a proposal for you, Johnny Boustani,” Rania said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You have some leave available?”
“Things are always pretty slow down at Communications.” He couldn’t help himself.
“How would you like to chaperone two young women on an overnight trip to the Southern Shore?”
“Which young women would I be chaperoning, exactly?”
“She will insist on going,” Rania said. “But I won’t allow her to go alone.” She turned to Mercedes. “Amina will go with you. And Johnny Boustani, if he agrees”—she smiled at him—“will accompany you both.”
Mercedes sat back in her chair, trying to disguise a look of consternation.
Who are these people?
she wondered. And beneath the worry, a growing sense of relief to be so unexpectedly watched over.
Johnny Boustani arrived to collect them in full uniform. Green melton jacket, cotton shirt and green woollen tie. The buttons on his jacket were polished and his boots gleamed black. But the army hat looked a little like an overturned dory on his head. It made him look like a boy playing at being a soldier. Rania offered a list of instructions to him on demeanour and comportment as they went out the door. Johnny nodded and said “Yes, ma’am” to every one.
They stood at the railing as the coaster sailed through the Narrows into open water. The girls both wore overcoats against the first real chill of the fall. Johnny wore only his army jacket.
“You must be cold,” Amina said to him. “Go on in out of the wind.”
He said, “How could I be cold in the company of two beautiful women?”
“You’re not going to make a liar of my mother, are you, Johnny?”
“Absolutely not. No.” He cleared his throat. “Anyone going to tell me what this trip is all about?”
Mercedes said, “How long have you been playing the trumpet, Johnny Boustani?” She couldn’t bring herself to separate
Johnny
from
Boustani
. It was the childishness of the rhyme she liked, how perfectly it seemed to suit him.
“I learned from my father. Can’t remember a time when I didn’t play.”
“You’re really good.”
His cheeks went red and he nodded self-consciously. “So are you,” he said. “What I mean is—” He turned away from the girls. “You’re real nice,” he said.
“You should go inside awhile,” Amina told him.
“Okay, sure. Here I go then.” He put his hands in his pockets and walked off toward the lounge.
When he went through the door, Mercedes said, “Is he in love with you?”
“Johnny Boustani falls in love with everyone,” Amina said. “Just so’s you know.”
There was a low bank of cloud skimming the headlands as the coaster turned into the harbour at Renews. A scatter of ragged rocks in the water, a low cliff face on the north side, juniper and dwarf spruce and club moss clinging to the highest rocks. The foot of the harbour coming into view behind it and then the houses of the north side, the white clapboard church. The storehouses at Gooderiche’s wharf.
Dozens of barrels of salt fish lined the dock, ready to be loaded aboard a ship for Europe or the Caribbean. Men staring at the three strangers as they went by, nodding at Johnny’s uniform.
“So,” Johnny said. “What’s next?”
“I don’t know.”
Amina said, “Maybe you should go talk to the priest.”
The church stood beside a small brook running toward the harbour. The windows on all three stories were pebbled glass, red and gold and white. A handful of votive candles alight inside the sanctuary, the high altar castled with spires, the tabernacle rising highest in the centre, winged angels perched on both sides. Amina and Johnny both genuflected before the altar and Mercedes mimicked them. Johnny walked to a door behind the altar and called into a room at the back of the church.
A young nun came to the doorway and looked them up and down.
“We’re looking,” Johnny said. He turned to the girls. “Who are we looking for?”
“The priest,” Amina said.
Mercedes said, “We’re trying to find Lilly Berrigan. I knows her nephew. Wish Furey. I was hoping.”
“The Monsignor isn’t here at the moment.”
The nun’s face was framed by her wimple so that nothing of her hair showed, her ears and her throat below the chin curtained behind white fabric. There was something about the arrangement that made the woman’s face look like an infant’s, Mercedes thought, and it was unnerving to be stared at so intently by her, to hear complete sentences come from her mouth.
“Father Power is at the rectory,” she said.
“Is Lilly still in Renews?”