I pretended not to notice and reached for another delicious meatball in red sauce.
Then these words came shooting out of her little body-because really, Nana Fazio could almost be considered a midget-and she marched over to our side of the table and slapped Johnny across his shoulders with her belt. “You don’ talk like that. Thas the little girl’s mama, you don’t say nuthin’ about her mama dyin’, capisce?” Nana shouted at Johnny in this voice you could never imagine would come out of someone so small. “You goombah!”
It went library quiet ’cept for the drip drip of the kitchen sink and a faraway lawn mower. And then from outta nowhere, Troo looked up from her plate and started singing, “Que sera, sera. Whatever will be will be. The future’s not ours to see. Que sera sera.”
All eyes went to Nana Fazio with the belt in her hand. They were all probably thinking like I was that Troo had just taken her life into her hands. Nana leaned down real close to Troo and I thought she was gonna put the hex on her or smack her like she had Johnny, but instead, she looked at Troo with her black olive eyes and said, “You, you kid, you lika Doris Day?”
Troo cleared her throat and said, “Actually, I think Doris Day is the best thing since sliced bread.”
Nana slowly, slowly smiled. Now I knew where Fast Susie’s pointed eyeteeth came from. “Me, too,” she said. “I lika Doris Day, too. You and your sorella can eata here whenever you wanna, as much as you wanna.” Nana reached across me and dug the big silver spoon into the white bowl and slapped three juicy meatballs onto my plate.
What a genius my sister was!
Troo wanted to sleep over in the Fazios’ attic that night and I couldn’t disagree with her. The last time we went home, the door was locked. Besides that, Troo and me both knew if Nell caught us she would force us to have one of those Toni perms that we both thought made you look like you just got off the boat.
Red light, green light was called off because it looked like it was gonna rain again, so we spent most of the night listening to Fast Susie tell us stories in the attic that had no light except for a dirty bare bulb way high up in the ceiling.
Fast Susie was sitting cross-legged on the stained gray mattress, facing me and Troo. “So then, after the grave robbers dig up those dead bodies, they take them over to Dr. Frankenstein’s castle in a little three-wheeled wooden cart.” She was using this voice she had that was husky. “And it begins to rain and the grave-robbin’ men are ugly and skinny and cough all the time and are drunk with dirty hair.”
Thunder rolled past the attic window and made it shake, and then a few seconds later there was pitchfork lightning that I could see perfectly, and it reminded me of our farm.
I looked over at Troo. She was rubbing the arm that had gotten broken in the crash and was hanging on to Fast Susie’s every word.
“And then Dr. Frankenstein puts the body on this black table in his lavatory and he gets a saw to cut the bodies aaall up!”
The lightning flashed again and lit up the whole attic, which was full of boxes and suitcases and the thing I was keeping my eye on. This body that had no arms or legs and was standing over in the corner next to the window. Fast Susie said that Nana used it to make clothes on.
“And then”-Fast Susie made her voice drippy with creepy-“and then, Dr. Frankenstein sewed all these dead body pieces together and made this monster…” She waved her arms around. “And Dr. Frankenstein put this monster down on this other table and hooked all these gadgets up to him and then lightning hit the castle and electricity came into the gadgets and went into the monster and Dr. Frankenstein yelled out, ‘It’s alive. It’s alive!’ ” Fast Susie jumped up and started walking around with her arms stiff in front of her and chased me and Troo, who screamed, and I did, too, until somebody yelled up from downstairs, “Shut the hell up, we’re tryin’ to sleep down here.”
After the Frankenstein story, Fast Susie showed us her bosoms and told us we would both get them too and, holy smoke, would the boys ever like us a lot! She said we could touch them if we wanted to. I didn’t. Later Troo told me they felt like a water balloon but warmer.
When the rain started pelting the window, I tried to fall asleep, but that attic heat felt like a too-heavy blanket laying all over me and all I could think about was that Frankenstein monster murdering the three of us while he grunted, “Me… me… me… like you.” Boy, that Fast Susie could make a story sound so real. I got the sweatiest I had ever gotten, hearing that monster’s clunky shoes creaking on the attic steps. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I rolled off that stinky old mattress and decided that even if Hall was snoring drunk, I needed to get home.
According to Fast Susie, Frankenstein couldn’t run very fast because his legs belonged to two different people, so I figured I could outrun him because of my long legs. That was one thing Daddy always said, that I was really good at running. “You fly like the wind, Sal.” That’s what he said. You fly like the wind. I felt bad about leaving Troo behind, but if anyone could keep her safe it was Nana Fazio, who would take her belt to anybody for just about any reason, including Frankenstein. So I snuck down the Fazios’ attic steps and out their back door into the alley, carrying my tennis shoes in my hand, being as sneaky as I could.
Music was almost always going on day or night on Vliet Street, no matter what. But that night, after the storm moved away, it was black and quiet except for the crickets and that dumb dog that belonged to the Moriaritys that always seemed to be barking two streets over. I went back through the Fazios’ yard and past the Latours’, who were their next-door neighbors. And just for a second I thought I saw something moving around in the Latours’ yard. Something was over there. I looked away real quick and then back again real quick, but everything seemed okay. Just a swing on the play set getting pushed around by the wind. But behind me, the bushes that grew over the Spencers’ back fence were rustling like something had gotten in there with them. Like Frankenstein. I got so scared to be alone in the dark without Troo that I started to walk faster. And then I thought of disappearing-into-thin-air Dottie Kenfield and dead Junie Piaskowski and what Mary Lane had said about Sara Heinemann being missing, and maybe it wasn’t one of her big fat lies after all, so I walked even faster. There was a hushing sound in my ears that was so loud I could barely hear the footsteps that had come up behind me. But they were there all right. So was the shadow that the garage light made look long. And I shoulda turned around and seen who it was right then and there. Or I shoulda run back to the Fazios’. But I didn’t. Because I got sorta frozen with fear like I always did on the high dive up at the pool because, like Troo always told me, when God handed out bravery I musta been in the bathroom.
I was pretty sure I knew who was following me. It was the guy that I secretly thought all along was the murderer of Junie Piaskowski. I’d thought it since the day they found Junie, but I didn’t tell anybody because they would just cluck their tongues and say something about my imagination and so it just wasn’t worth it. Everybody talked about how he especially liked little girls. That was who was coming for me. Officer Rasmussen.
I started to run and I could tell by how fast his feet were thumping that he was running, too. I got goin’ so fast I almost fell over and I was almost home but I could tell by his breathing he could just reach out and grab me, but then I heard him stumble and say, “Shit.” I ran through the Kenfields’ gate and rolled beneath those pricker bushes they had next to their garage. He was right behind me. The gate creaked open, then slammed shut. I heard his footsteps, first on the path and then on the grass. He came right up to where I was hiding. If I wanted to I could’ve reached out and touched his argyle socks, pink-and-green ones that I could see in the Kenfields’ back porch light. The socks were in thick black shoes with a spongy bottom that you could buy up at Shuster’s. I could hear him breathing in and out, in and out. And finally, softly singing, “Come out, come out, wherever you are, Sally.”