Boy, Snow, Bird(71)

“What? These people got an African woman to nurse what? The baby gorilla?”

“Yeah, I said something similar. And I asked Olivia why she was telling me this, and she said her point was that one can waste a lot of time marveling at the decisions of white folks. She said there’s nothing any of them do that can surprise her. Then she went right on signing her charity checks. That’s Olivia Whitman, can’t stop giving. I think she might hate herself, but I can’t help her out there. I feel so little love for her. I want to, but just when I’m getting there, she says or does something that makes me go nuts.”

I said: “Don’t let her see. At her age . . . I don’t know. It’d probably finish her off.”

Snow had given me a black eye. And Arturo asked me a leading question before I even attempted an explanation. “Did you fall over?” That was what he asked. Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly what happened. It became an odd little running joke between Snow and me for the next few days. As she passed me, she’d whisper into my ear: “Did you fall over?”

And then there’s Mia. Mia and what she’s been doing behind my back. She only came clean when I phoned her and told her about the rat catcher. I couldn’t work out who’d told him where we were. Olivia and Agnes and Gerald didn’t know his name, and even if they did, what would their motive have been? For half of a sleepless night I thought it had to be Arturo. Arturo knew the rat catcher’s name. Arturo could have tracked him down. This thing he has about completing things, having the whole gang there for the head count—

Mia interrupted me. “We need to talk,” she said. “I’ve got an all-nighter to pull, but I’ll come over when it gets light.”

She was true to her word. She arrived as I was making coffee, slouched in a chair in front of the stove, too decaffeinated to stand. The first coffee of the morning is never, ever, ready quickly enough. You die before it’s ready and then your ghost pours the resurrection potion out of the moka pot. Snow was there with me, smoking her breakfast cigarette and telling me something about her job. Her tone suggested she wasn’t looking forward to getting back to work; I wasn’t one hundred percent sure what she was saying. I was merely making listening noises. I do remember that she said she’d helped Bird get ready for school. It’s been a long while since Bird’s requested help getting ready for school. I don’t know what tasks would be involved in helping her get ready at this stage of her advanced ability to comb her own hair, get her own books together, and eat her own cereal, so I thought it was a good sign that she’d allowed Snow to think she was helping. Mia was carrying a red folder. She passed it to me, kissed Snow, and asked her, “Remember me?” Snow’s smile was perfectly vague and perfectly tender, and she said: “Of course.”

“And how’s your Aunt Clara?”

“She’s back in Boston now, and doing just fine, thank you.”

She left us; she had errands to run. Agnes wanted her to buy fuchsia wool.

Mia stopped smiling as soon as she’d gone. “Give me a break,” she said. “That girl cannot be for real.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. “I don’t know. Maybe this is actually as sincere as she gets.”

“I’ll take that under advisement. What happened?” She brushed my bangs to the left. “Don’t tell me Arturo . . . ?”

“No, Mia. But if I ever want to make him cry, I’ll tell him ‘people’ think he has the makings of a fine wife beater. I tripped over a chair. I know, I know. Why is my life so exciting?”

Mia’s folder contained a single sheet of paper. It was a xeroxed birth certificate. Name: Frances Amelia Novak. Date of birth: November 1, 1902. Place of birth: Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

“Where’d you get this?”

She lifted her coffee cup to her mouth and set it down again. “I went looking for your mom, Boy.”

“Why would you do that?”

“That doesn’t matter as much as the fact that I found her. I found her.”

“It was you who brought the rat catcher after me.”

“I told him where to find you, yes. Sit down, Boy. Sit down and hear me out. I thought he deserved the chance to tell you what I’m about to tell you. He had one last chance and he didn’t take it and he’s not going to bother you anymore.”

Frances Amelia Novak. Date of birth: November 1, 1902. “I’ve got to get to work. Tell me later.”

“No, now. You need to know this now. Mrs. Fletcher will understand.”

Mia was bleary-eyed from her all-nighter, and when she jerked her head, three neon pins escaped her hair and scuttled across the floor. I still wanted to trust her. “Start with why you did this.”

“Okay. I wanted something to write about. The way you’re looking at me, people have looked at me that way before. One guy called me a bloodsucker. That’s not it. It’s more like my mind’s stacked with all these incongruous items, other people’s stories that I’ve been telling pieces of. And the people don’t come back for their stories, but that doesn’t make them mine. The Mia Cabrini pawnshop, I call it sometimes. But since the termination . . . my termination, I should say, but that sounds like the termination of myself, doesn’t it . . . I’ve got to write something. That or get a hole drilled in my skull to let the fog out.”