“Let’s make up,” I said.
“How? I don’t hear you apologizing.”
Our reflections rippled in the water, stretching to breaking point, and swam away from each other in pieces, then the pieces shivered together again, stretched to their limit, burst.
“Let’s do it the way kids do it,” I said.
“The way kids do it?” She was looking at my reflection, not at me.
“You know… when you treat a friend badly and you both know it and the only way to get them to forgive you is to let them hurt you.”
“What? That wasn’t how I made up with my friends,” she said with alarm.
“Oh. Maybe it was just a Lower East Side thing.” (Maybe it was me who’d taught my classmates that this was the way to make up.) “Anyway. Hit me.”
She blinked rapidly. “No.”
“I recommend it.”
“But I don’t want to. So.”
“Look… the way it was when I was a kid, the person you’d treated badly had to hurt you back, or there were two possibilities. The first was that you continued to like them but you lost respect for them, because in the world of kid think, not taking revenge can be a sign of weakness. The other option, and this is something that continues into adult think, is that the other person’s not taking their moment to hurt you made you stop liking them as much. You started to fear them, because it seemed like they were waiting for a better chance, a chance not just to hurt you, but to devastate you. The only way for there to be both liking and respect is if you hit me now and we call it quits. Do you get what I’m saying?”
I could see I’d somehow sold her on the method, but still she hesitated.
“I’ve never hit anyone before.”
I drew her arms up out of the water and brought her right hand down against my cheek. She pulled back sharply, scattering soapsuds. “Okay, it’s done,” she said.
I shook my head. “Come on. That was nothing.”
She tried to run, and knocked a chair over — Arturo called out “Everything okay in there?” and we called back: “Yup!” and “Absolutely!” It was like a two-legged race around the room, a race against nobody, but I wouldn’t let her go, I had her by the wrists and I used both her hands to strike at my face until she began doing it for herself. That girl slapped me so hard my ears rang, and she said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” even as she hit me. She simmered down, sank onto a chair, and I folded up onto the floor and rested my chin on her knee. According to the clock on the wall five minutes had passed.
“I hate Olivia,” she said. I looked up at her.
“I believe you.”
“I asked her if she was surprised that you sent me to Boston. I said I bet she’d expected it to be Bird who was sent away. She said, ‘Surprised?’ and she told me about a white woman who went to Africa back in the thirties. While they were out there, the woman’s husband shot a gorilla dead. They didn’t realize it was a female gorilla until they saw the baby gorilla she’d been trying to protect. They felt guilty, so they brought the baby gorilla into their home and got an African woman to nurse it—”
“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.”