The Year of Shadows (2 page)

Nonnie and I each had tiny cots that came with sheets already on them. I wasn’t sure where the Maestro had bought them, but I didn’t trust strange sheets, so I took them down the street to the coin laundry and remade the beds.

That put me in an awful mood. Buying the detergent and paying for the laundry had cost us a few bucks, and every few bucks was precious when you didn’t have a lot to begin with.

Nonnie and I also each had a quilt. Mom had made them during one of her crafty phases when she’d spread out all sorts of things over the kitchen table after dinner—fabrics, scissors, spools of thread, paper she’d brought home from her office.

The Maestro came into our bedroom while I was spreading out the quilts over our cots.

“You should get rid of those ratty old things,” he said.

“This is my and Nonnie’s bedroom.” I kept smoothing out my quilt, not looking at him. “And you should get out.”

He was quiet, watching me. “I have some money for you. If you want to go get some things for your room, school supplies. School starts soon, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah.” I took the crumpled twenty from him. “You should get out.”

After a minute, he did.

When the beds were made, I found some boxes in the rehearsal room that didn’t look too old or beat-up. I also found a couple of old pianos, rickety music stands, chairs with shattered seats. All the broken stuff.

I refused to live out of my suitcase. It was too depressing. I stacked my clothes in one box and Nonnie’s clothes in another box and arranged them at the ends of our beds, on their sides with the flaps like cupboard doors. Then I shoved our suitcases under the beds so we wouldn’t have to look at them.

I lugged a couple of music stands to our bedroom and put them beside each of our beds, lying their tops flat like trays, so we could have nightstands. On my “nightstand,” I carefully arranged my sketchpad and my set of charcoals and drawing pencils. It all looked so sad, sitting there next to my fold-up cot in my bedroom that had ugly concrete walls because it was never meant to be a bedroom.

Nonnie came up behind me and hugged my arm. She could always tell when I was upset.

“Maybe we need more color in these rooms,” she suggested.

“Yeah. Maybe.”

I couldn’t stop thinking about our old house uptown, the pretty red-brick one with the blue door. The one we’d had to sell because the Maestro had taken a pay cut and we couldn’t afford to live there anymore. Because the orchestra didn’t have any money, so the Maestro couldn’t get paid as much as he used to.

Because he’d auctioned off everything we owned so he could plug more money into the orchestra to keep it alive.

I hated the orchestra, and Emerson Hall, and everything associated with either of those things—including the Maestro—more than I could possibly put into words.

So I drew the hate instead. I drew everything. That’s why my sketchpad got a place of honor right beside my bed.

“I’ll be back later, Nonnie.” I shoved the Maestro’s money into my pocket, tied one of Nonnie’s scarves over my hair,
and slammed on my sunglasses—the glamorous, cat-eyed ones Mom had bought for me. Like those actresses from the black-and-white movies wore, like Audrey Hepburn and Lauren Bacall. Mom loved those movies.

“They’re so elegant,” she’d say, hugging me on the sofa while we sipped milk through crazy straws. “You know? The way they talk and walk and dress. It’s like a dream.”

“Uh-huh.” I didn’t get what the big deal was about Cary Grant. I thought he talked kind of funny, honestly. But I’d say whatever Mom wanted to hear.

It made me kind of sick, to think about that now. How did I never see it, right there in front of me? That someday she would leave me?

I shut my eyes on that thought and pretended to squeeze it away. I didn’t like feeling mad at Mom, like if I got too mad, she’d sense it. She’d be right outside with her suitcase, ready to come back to us, and then she’d feel how mad I was and change her mind. She’d walk away, forever this time.

It was easier to get angry at the Maestro. After all, if it wasn’t for him, Mom might still be around.

“Where are you going,
ombralina
?” Nonnie asked as I headed out the door.

“Shopping.”

If the Maestro wouldn’t take care of us, I would. And if he wouldn’t give me and Nonnie a real home, I’d do my best to make us one.

There was this charity store right off Arlington at Clark Street. It had a soup kitchen and a food store, clothes, and household goods. I walked there as fast as possible, huddling beneath my scarf and sunglasses. If I had to go there, no way was anyone going to recognize me. The thought of going there made me want to smash things, or maybe just huddle up in Mom’s quilt and never come out.

I’d never had to shop at a charity store before. No one I knew had ever had to either. I’d have to go back to school in two days being the girl who shops at a charity store. On top of the girl whose father is going crazy, who draws weird pictures all the time, who lives in a symphony hall like some kind of stray animal.

The girl whose mom left.

SEPTEMBER

T
HIS IS WHAT
I got at the Clark Street charity store:

1) a pack of multicolored construction paper, for decorating our ugly gray walls

2) soup, pasta, milk, bread, a bag of potatoes

3) two pairs of flip-flops for me and Nonnie, for when we showered at the Y a couple blocks over (there weren’t any showers at Emerson Hall, just toilets with rust around the rims)

4) for Nonnie: a new green scarf with gold flowers on it

5) for school: a couple of spiral notebooks, folders, pens, pencils

I felt a little bad about buying the scarf for Nonnie. I guess it wasn’t totally necessary; she had dozens, and I could have used that money to get some spiral notebooks with designs on them instead of the plain ones. But Nonnie didn’t have a lot going on in her life. She played with her scarves and slept and read the three books she owned over and over, and played Solitaire with a deck of cards that had a bunch missing, so
I’d had to re-create the missing ones on index cards.

Plus, Nonnie was so small. She seemed smaller, older, and more wrinkled in the buzzing fluorescent lights backstage at Emerson Hall than she’d ever seemed before. It scared me. Kind of like how I got scared when I let myself think about where Mom might have gone. Was she happy? Or was she small and lonely, like Nonnie would be if she didn’t have me?

The day before school started was a Monday. After lunch that day, I went to The Happy Place, a tea shop across the street from the Hall.

Mom started taking me there for muffins and juice when I was little, and I’d kept going even after she left. It had bright yellow walls, a bright orange door, blue lamps, and
THE HAPPY PLACE
written in swirly black letters above the door. On either side of it was Antonio’s Shoe Repair, which had been boarded up for over a year, and a dingy gray apartment building, so The Happy Place stood out like sunshine.

“Mr. B?” I called out, stepping inside. Gerald the parrot cawed at me from his perch in the corner. I waved at him and he bobbed his head, dancing around on one leg.

Mr. Barsky popped his head up above the counter. “Why, Olivia,
ma belle
!
Bonjour, ma petite belle!
And how are you zis fine Monday?”

Not even Mr. Barsky’s silly fake accents could make me smile today. See, he used to be an actor. He’d never “made
it,” as they say, but he claimed accents were his specialty, so he put on these accents all the time and pretended to be different characters. This guy, the French guy, was Ricardo.

“Isn’t ‘Ricardo’ a Spanish name?” I’d asked him once.

He’d leaned close and waggled his eyebrows. “Ricardo is . . . a mystery, Olivia.”

“Hey, Ricardo,” I said, slumping onto a stool at the counter.

“Why, whatever is ze matter, mademoiselle?” Mr. Barsky flung his towel over his shoulder and started rummaging through the pastry displays. “When people wear expressions like yours, I always say, ah! Time for
une crepe
! Or,
un biscuit chocolat
!”

Mrs. Barsky came out of the kitchen with a big steaming pitcher. She clinked when she walked because she liked to wear miles of beads around her neck. Today they were a shiny ocean-green color. Her hair was silver and stuck up everywhere, and her nails were painted ten different colors, one for each finger.

“Olivia!” Mrs. Barsky said. “What a pleasure. It’s been a while. What’ll it be? Raspberry tea? Mango juice?”

“Actually, I can’t have anything.” I looked around, starting to sweat. There were only two other people here, two guys by the window chatting over some book. “I was wondering if I could work here? Just for a while, maybe.”

I didn’t want to keep waiting on crumpled twenties from the Maestro. Besides, who knew how long he’d keep giving them to me?

The Barskys looked at each other, and then at me. Mr. Barsky closed the pastry case.

“You need a job?” Mrs. Barsky asked.

“Well. Yeah.” I cleared my throat, trying to figure out how I could somehow melt into the cracks in the floor so no one would ever have to look at me again. “See, we sold our house this summer. We moved into the Hall, backstage, and we just have these suitcases, and the orchestra’s running out of money. You know, with The Economy and everything.”

I wasn’t too sure what The Economy involved, but everyone had been talking about it lately, and I knew it was something about no one having any money. Whenever grown-ups talked about it, a shadow fell over them, like they’d just heard terrible news.

“Oh, Olivia.” Mrs. Barsky said that in this sad, sighing voice. I couldn’t look at her. Instead, I pulled one of my charcoals from my bag and started scratching a doodle on a napkin. I took my charcoals with me everywhere.

“It’s just that I have to buy groceries, you know? And things for school, probably. And the Maestro doesn’t help too much. I can wipe off tables.” I dug the tip of my charcoal into the napkin. “I can wash dishes, sweep. I could probably bake cookies or something too.”