On their way downstairs with the piano, Frankie and Uncle Eric met Frankie’s father on his way upstairs. “It’s time to go, Frankie. Your mother is waiting on the porch.”
Uncle Eric stomped a foot. “You’re leaving?” he huffed. “But Frankie was just going to play us a song.”
Frankie’s father shook his head. “Frankie will not be participating in your circus, Eric.”
“Circus?” Uncle Eric exclaimed. “That’s what you call this?” Uncle Eric waved his cane in all directions. “I spent six days getting this ready. Do you know how hard it was to find twelve quail that would fit on that china? I took one of Anna Rasputin’s doll plates around to four butchers and then a farm. Four butchers and a farm, David.”
Frankie stood and watched. Uncle Eric’s blue eyelids looked heavy. Her father had his feet on two different steps as if he might pounce. “Why can’t you just do things the regular way?” her father said. “Why couldn’t there have been a normal turkey? And why all these people, Eric? Answer me that.” Uncle Eric patted his pockets with the crook of his cane. Frankie knew he was looking for a cigarette. “I’ll tell you why,” her father continued. “It’s because it’s never about anybody but you. It’s about what you want. It’s about drawing attention to yourself. It’s not about Thanksgiving or family. It’s about Eric. The Eric Show.”
Frankie looked at her uncle. She wondered what he might say. How he might make her father feel terrible for what he’d just done. But Uncle Eric said nothing. He simply lifted the toy piano off his shoulder and into the air with one hand and then threw the piano down the stairs, over Frankie’s father’s head and onto the first-floor landing, where it jangled and splintered in a way that almost made Frankie laugh. It was exciting to see her father scared, even for a flash. Frankie’s father reached up and yanked her down by her dress sash to the step his back foot was on. Uncle Eric pulled out a pack of Viceroys and pointed at his brother. “Get the fuck out,” he said. “And Frankie? I love you.”
On the ride home, Frankie’s mother and father were silent. Neither of them moved, not one millimeter. It was as if the car drove itself. In the backseat, Frankie sat, replaying the piano scene. Up it went, her father cringed, down it came, exploding in a plinking pile. Frankie smiled wide in the dark in her brass-buttoned coat. She placed her hand over the lump that was the hidden quail.
When Frankie’s mother saw her in the doorway of her hospital room, she succumbed to a spasm of sobs that Frankie at first mistook for uncontrollable laughter and that her father, quite clearly, had grown accustomed to. Maybe even tired of.
“Frankie is here, Catherine,” her father said, as if reintroducing them at a dinner party. “She’s come to see her brothers.”
Frankie’s mother convulsed in the wheelchair on the way to the NICU. “They’re …,” she struggled, “so tiny, Frankie. Say a prayer,” she choked. “Oh, God. Say your prayers.”
Frankie was revulsed by her mother’s brokenness, by her desperate pleas for the pointless type of prayers that had no beginning or end. She touched her mother’s hair absentmindedly to pretend she was not appalled, but her curiosity over James and Jasper outweighed her compassion, and she tried to make up for this by showing her mother the fringe of her socks. Frankie did not like fringed socks, but her grandmother had insisted she dress as if for a recital. On Monday, her grandmother had sent an orderly out to buy a pair of patent leather shoes and dress socks on her lunch break, and Frankie had been instructed to go to the grandmother’s jewelry box and give the orderly a gold watch for her efforts.
“See my socks?” Frankie said, smiling, looking past her mother’s contorted face. “See my shoes?” Where were these brothers? was what Frankie really wondered. How terrifying would they be?
To Frankie’s delight, they were horrendous. Beetles under bell jars. Featherless starlings fallen from a nest. Their skin red and shiny, their matchstick arms like roasted chicken wings stretched out to reveal pitiful armpits, their closed eyes bulbous and alien. Nurses turned them this way and that way with latex gloves, adjusting the tape and tubes and gaping diapers, but nothing made them look better or better off. When Frankie watched them, she imagined all the times she had twisted a coin in a candy machine only to forget to cup her hands under the silver spout. She remembered all the times a gumball had escaped her, rolling under the desk at a car wash or on the tarry carpet of an old restaurant. All the times she had been forced to beg for a second quarter. And now, see? Her mother would have to ask for two. Frankie watched her brothers breathe, their tiny ribcages pumping to the beat of a frantic song. Scary, scary, scary. Very, very, very. Frankie could tell one of them was worse off than the other—Jasper it seemed from the sign on his little greenhouse. Frankie decided to root for him. Go, Jasper, she thought. Beat James. She knew this was terrible and she bent down to check that the lace of her socks was still folded neatly.
“I know it’s hard to believe,” her father said unconvincingly. “But one day your brothers will grow up to be big and strong. Bigger and stronger than you.”
Frankie was done looking at them. She tapped her new shoes against the tile floor of the hospital hallway to show her parents she was the same as she had always been. “Can I go to the gift shop?” Frankie asked. “I have four dollars.”
Her father nodded, and after they wheeled Frankie’s mother back to her room, downstairs, in the hospital store, Frankie bought a tiny blue T-shirt that said Early Bird.
“Who’s that for?” her father asked.
Frankie put it on her naked doll as they walked to the car in the heavy August heat. Go, Jasper, she thought. Beat James. “It’s for my baby,” she said.
The second place Frankie’s father took her that day against his will was to his brother’s, back to the Thanksgiving neighborhood where rainbow windsocks blew horizontal from porches.
“If I had my way …,” her father began, as he searched for a parking spot.
“You’d rather take me to the zoo,” Frankie finished for him. “Why don’t you go back to the hospital?” She changed the subject. “Before something bad happens.”
Frankie’s father slouched at the wheel, and she felt a small surge of victory in her stomach. “You can just drop me off,” she said. “I know which house is his.”
But her father parked and walked her up the stairs to the purple bungalow where Uncle Eric met them on the porch. He wore a silk bathrobe and a pair of red velvet slippers. He held an unlit cigarette and a new, jaunty magician’s cane in one hand and placed his other hand on top of Frankie’s head. “We’re going to have a big time,” he said. “You and me, Sugar. A grand old time.”
Frankie left the men on the porch and went inside to snoop. She overheard her father say, low and tense, “Don’t pull any of your shit.”
In Uncle Eric’s living room, Frankie watched a working stoplight in the corner cycle through its red-yellow-green. In his downstairs bathroom, she saw that the toilet water was blue. She flushed it once to see if it was blue again and it was and she was thrilled. In the kitchen, in the refrigerator, Frankie found a pink cake with one slice missing. “Happy Tuesday—itch,” Frankie said aloud, with her hands on her hips.
“I ate the W,” Uncle Eric confessed from the doorway. “And it was delicious.”
Frankie turned. She suddenly felt shy but refused to show it. “My brothers will probably die,” she said. “They’re like two worms in the sun.”