Brick shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“You’ll stay in the park while I go to the library.” Mariel stopped walking for a moment. “I’ll find directions to Windy Hill for you.”
She thought of everything.
“There’s a book of maps on the back table,” she said. “It’s like connecting the dots, going from one place to another, you know? That’s all it is.”
He felt a weight come off his chest.
“And if I get caught,” she said, limping along next to him again, her face turned up, “Ambrose will just walk me to school. I’ll skip out again at lunchtime.”
They crossed Washington Avenue, hurrying, as she glanced back and then went on again. He could see what an effort it was for her, the limp growing stronger, her face a little pale under her freckles.
He followed her, houses on one side, not as pretty as the ones on Midwood Street, the green trees of a park on the other. A few black cars were parked here and there; a few kids passed them on the way to school. Then in front of them were the gates to the park.
“Prospect Park,” Mariel told him. “An everything place, like the everything table in my bedroom. Woods and parade grounds and a lake with a house almost like a castle, even a merry-go-round.” She pointed. “And another kid playing hookey. See there. He doesn’t go to school some days either.”
Brick looked over at him. The boy was sitting on a bench, not paying attention to them, it seemed, not paying attention to anything, but then he raised his hand in a half wave.
Mariel kept going around the path, then leaning closer, almost whispering. “And there’s my place.” She gave his arm a little tug, leading him now, going as fast as she could.
A few minutes later she stopped. “Here.”
“But what is it?” he asked.
“A band shell. They play music here on Sundays,” she said. “It’s the best hiding place.” She held up one hand. “I think I felt a drop of rain.”
How could he hide without someone seeing him? he wondered.
It was as if she knew what he was thinking. “Once Ambrose walked around it looking for me,” she said. “I just kept going ahead of him, crouching down, just as if I were a merry-go-round.” She fanned her face with one hand. “Hot, isn’t it? Someday when I’m grown up, I’m going to tell him.”
Brick shook his head. “Won’t he be angry?”
“I’ll be grown up then,” Mariel said, sinking down on the grass. “But I don’t think so. I think he’ll laugh.” She bit her lip. “Ambrose is”—she raised her shoulders—“there when you need him.”
He sank down next to her, looking up at the gray sky through the leaves of a bushy little tree, putting Claude’s book inside his bag of lunch, out of the rain.
He ran his hands through the grass, feeling the spikiness of it, the damp earth underneath. He told her about the river in Windy Hill on a day like this, the trees leaning over to dip their branches into the warm shallow water, the gurgling sound of the river as it ran across the rocks, the pattering of the rain on the leaves.
He was hit with a wave of homesickness, remembering his bedroom window, the apple trees outside in neat paths, Mom downstairs in the kitchen, laughing with Pop.
Home.
“Listen, Billy Nightingale. Brick?” She turned her head. “For your hair?”
He raised one shoulder. “It’s the color of the bricks in our icehouse.”
For a moment they sat there, the rain pattering against the side of the band shell. He watched her fingers tap on her dress and then she clasped her hands together. He wondered what she was thinking.
“I’ll go to the library now,” she said. “When I come back you’ll know the way to Windy Hill.”
15
Mariel
Mariel passed the candy man on the way to Grand Army Plaza. He was bent over, the weight of his square pack on his back, an umbrella over his head. He tossed Mariel a peppermint and she managed to catch it with one hand. A little kid, too young for school, stood under an awning on one of the stoops. He held out his hands. “Hey, girlie,” he said. “How about sharing?”
She looped the peppermint toward him, watched him scramble for it, then turned the last corner and went up the library steps, holding on to the railing, slick with rain.
A memory. The green lace curtain clutched in her hand. Someone had tossed a piece of candy to her. But her head felt as if it had been stuffed with something thick and damp like rolls of cotton. So she didn’t reach out and the candy fell in an arc down and down.…
Inside, the library was cool and dim, the squares of windows streaming with rain. In the center of the bulletin board was a picture of two kids smiling, and a sign: FRIENDS GO BACK TO SCHOOL.
Mariel ran a finger over the words. She had a friend for the first time in her life. She practiced saying it in her head. Friend. My friend.
No one would ever know about it. By this afternoon he’d be gone.
She’d know, she told herself, she’d know forever.
She skittered past the desk. The librarian’s head was bent. She didn’t even look up to see a girl out of school.
Mariel went down the long aisle filled with books on both sides. She knew the library, the children’s section, the adults’. She had spent years here. Everyone out playing. Mariel has germs.
On Saturday afternoons, she had looked at the books of world maps with their strange names: Ceylon, Singapore, Burma. And the maroon one of her own country, a page for each state: Maryland, Montana, Nebraska. She had flipped through, getting closer to her state all the time.
And there it was, the triangle of New York.
Windy Hill was just a small dot on the top. The first time she had looked it up, it had taken forever to run her fingers from one corner to the other. And when she finally spotted it, she had shivered. It was almost as if she were there in Good Samaritan Hospital, and back even farther, somewhere with the green lace curtains trembling in the breeze.
She had picked up a pencil that she found on the table and drawn a line under Windy Hill, a line so faint that no one would see it, but she’d know it was there.
“I hope you’re not marking up that book,” the librarian had said that day, standing in back of her suddenly, sounding disappointed.
Mariel had erased the line, but there was still the tiniest smudge so she could always find it.
The book was waiting for her now, ready to show her how Brick would get home.
She peered around the library stacks, making sure the librarian was still too busy to wonder why a girl was at the library instead of in a classroom. Then she reached for the book.
It didn’t take her long to realize that Brick wasn’t going home. Not today, and not soon, certainly not soon enough to help his friend Claude harvest apples.
Her disappointment for him was so great she could feel it in her throat and in her chest. She pored over the map book with its spidery lines, counting off the miles in her head and then on a piece of paper that she found on the table. More than two hundred. Certainly more.
She traced it with her finger. Over a bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Another bridge. Then up, and a zigzag and farther up, following the Delaware River.
It wasn’t a place you could walk to easily. If you walked even ten miles a day … could a person walk that far? she wondered … it would take almost a month.
And where would he sleep?
Where would he find something to eat?
And by the time he reached Windy Hill, a place much colder than Brooklyn, wouldn’t the apples be frozen?
She thought of Brick’s face, the freckles, the brown eyes, the thick red hair falling over his forehead. How could she tell him? How could she ever say he couldn’t go home?
She wrote it down carefully, the names of the lines, the bridges, the zigzags, even though she knew it was useless. Then she shut the map book in front of her and pushed back her chair.
Somehow she had to tell him.
<
br /> 16
Brick
He hated to leave that spot near that small bushy tree. He wished he knew what the tree was called. He reached up, pulled off a leaf washed by the rain, and put it in his pocket. Claude would know.
He looked across the park. The boy was still on the swing, going back and forth as if it were a sunny day. It was as if he didn’t care about the rain pelting down on his head.
Mariel was there again without a sound. She sank down on the step, her head against the wall of the band shell, her hair flat and wet against her head. She closed her eyes. “Have to catch my breath.”
He sat waiting; he could see the folded piece of paper in her hand. “You have it,” he said.
She opened her eyes and looked down at the paper, too. “I have it,” she said slowly. “But I was thinking. The rain will make it hard for you. Slippery …”
“The rain will make it easier,” he said. “Not so hot walking. Don’t worry.” He wanted to tell her about the rain, how Mom loved watching it from their porch after supper. And when it stopped she’d listen to the crickets and katydids as they began their clicking and sawing again like strange instruments, in time for a moment, then out, then together again, thousands of them. “Stronger after the rain,” she’d say, “like a summer orchestra.”
Next to him Mariel’s face was sad, her mouth drooping just a bit. She was sorry he was leaving. He felt it, too. After today he might never see her again.
He reached for the paper, sliding it through her fingers, feeling her pull against him a little. It was almost as if she didn’t want to give it to him.
“Please …,” she began.
Something was wrong, worse than his leaving. He could see it in her eyes, and her fingers had begun that fluttering. “What is it, Mariel?”
She shook her head.
“Is it Ambrose?” he asked. “Something with Ambrose?” He wondered why he felt bad about Ambrose, why he hated to disappoint him by leaving. Claude would have liked Ambrose; Pop would have liked him, too. But then, thinking about it, he was sure of something. If Ambrose knew the story, the whole story, he’d understand. Ambrose would have done the same thing.
He opened the paper, looking at the map she had drawn, the directions in her small, even handwriting. “The bridge first,” he read aloud.
She rubbed her hands against her dress. “It’s a long walk to Windy Hill,” she said. “You must have come farther in that car than we thought.” She spoke slowly, looking away from him, the way Claude had the day he left. She stared at the center of the band shell. “Even to get to the Brooklyn Bridge is far.”
“Which way is the bridge?”
She pointed over her shoulder.
He searched for the top of it in the distance, but all he could see were the trees in the park, huge trees against the gray sky.
“Far …,” Mariel said. “Even if you could walk ten miles a day …”
“I can walk farther than that. Much farther.” He looked down at the paper, at the wavery lines she had drawn for roads, starting at one end of the page, trailing along the edge.
“Weeks,” she said. “More than two hundred miles.”
“I don’t have weeks,” he said.
Her fingers fluttered. She moved her hands down behind her back. “If only we had money, we could get you on a bus.”
He stared at her for a moment, then turned away. He shoved the paper in his pocket and headed for the park entrance, going fast, faster as his feet hit the path.
Two hundred miles, a thousand miles? He had to get home.
17
Mariel
“Wait,” she called, and went after him, tripping over their lunch bags, leaving them. She knew she couldn’t catch up to him. Before she was halfway down the path, he went through the gate and ran along the sidewalk on the other side of the iron fence.
She went as far as the gate, still calling, but he was gone. She stood there in the rain, feeling it plaster her hair to her cheeks. She didn’t know where to go. Not back into the park. Maybe she’d never go into the park again. But not to school either, not home, not even her chipmunk-safe room. She pushed her hair back. She had never felt worse.
“What about your stuff?” the other boy called.
“Our lunch bags? I don’t want them.”
“Can I keep them?”
She waved her hand over her shoulder. “Yes.” She couldn’t eat, couldn’t imagine being hungry again.
Her legs were heavy, her limp worse than usual, and there was a sharp ache in her knees. She went outside the gate. Brick would be blocks away now, going in the direction of the bridge. She trailed her fingers along the black spikes around the park, seeing the boy just inside, opening one of the bags.
“Can I keep the book, too?” he yelled.
“Go ahead.” She looked back. He held up a heavy book.
Claude’s book?
“No,” she called. “Not that.”
“You said.” His face was angry. “Finders keepers, anyway.”
“Not the book.” She said it in a Geraldine Ginty voice, a not-to-be-fooled-with voice. “Give it back or else.”
“Or else what?” the boy began.
She couldn’t think of what she’d do, but it would be something. No matter what, she was going to have that book. She started back into the park.
The boy rooted through the bag to see what else was inside. “Just the book,” she said, “I don’t care about the rest.”
“All right,” he said, his voice sullen. He tossed it to her. It landed on the wet grass and she scooped it up, rubbing it against her dress, drying it. She felt the thickness of it, the soft leather cover, saw the words in another language. What would Brick do when he realized it was gone?
She tucked it under her arm, trying to protect it from the rain; then she started for home, passing Ambrose on the street, his hat down over his eyes. He didn’t even see her, although he could have. It was after school now, and kids were outside, jumping off stoops into puddles, sailing Popsicle sticks into sewer gratings. And luckily Ambrose turned the corner away from the bridge.
Mariel walked through the lot on the boulevard, its weedy smell strong in her nose, and moments later when she reached her own street, she didn’t even remember how she had gotten there.
She went in the back door, stepping on the killer vines, silly game, and climbed the stairs. A picture of her mother came into her head. That red sweater, the bracelet dangling.
Her mother there in the middle of the night, but Mariel was too tired to open her eyes.
“Tomorrow, we’ll have a wonderful surprise, Mariel, you’ll see.”
And in the morning, someone had lifted her out of the machine. It was a long round machine, easier to see now that she was on the outside instead of the inside. There was a hole in the top for her head, and a mirror so she could look around. But now the machine was turned off. No more whooshing. And she was in a chair, safe.
“Don’t be afraid. See, you’re breathing on your own. How does the world look?”
“Good,” she had whispered, almost not making a sound, surprised there was no feeling against her chest, surprised that the machine wasn’t breathing for her.
But everyone had heard her whisper. “Atta girl. Great girl …,” one of the nurses had said.
All those faces, and Loretta saying, “You see, you can do anything, Mariel.”
And the ache in her knee now. She pressed it down with her hand as she stood at her chipmunk-safe bedroom door, looking at her everything table, her bed with the white chenille spread, and above the bed …
She leaned her head back against the door. Above the bed …
The two-dollar bet money.
“It’s yours anyway,” Loretta had said. “You can do anything.”
She could take the money. She could find Brick.
And her mother, too?
She reached for the frame, lifting it gently off the hook, and went into the kitchen to rummag
e around in Loretta’s junk drawer. She picked up the hammer.
It took only one good smash to break the glass, and then she turned the frame upside down over the garbage pail and shook it until the shards of glass were gone.
She knew time was going and finding Brick would be almost impossible. Loretta’s words: “Only one bobby pin in the whole house to hold on my cap. It’ll be like finding a needle in a haystack.”
For another moment she stood there. “You can do anything.”
She took the two-dollar bill with its gold seal out of the broken frame. She closed her eyes, touching it.
She reached for a pencil and a piece of paper on the table.
Dear Loretta. I’ve gone to find my mother. I have the two dollars. Brick and I will take the bus. I love you. Mariel.
She stood there for another minute thinking about Loretta. Loretta’s hot temper. She picked up the pencil. P.S. Throw a pot in the sink, but don’t be angry with me!
What else did she need? She pulled out cookies and peaches, slapped together two sandwiches, and dumped them on the table.
In her bedroom, she put on her straw hat with the daisies, snapping the elastic band under her chin, and pulled a sweater out of the drawer. She folded the money into her patent leather pocketbook, hurrying, going faster than she ever thought she was able to, and went back into the kitchen to stuff everything on the table into a bag with her sweater, and Claude’s book wrapped in waxed paper. She pulled her umbrella from the stairs in the hall. She was ready.
She walked down the stairs, stepping on killer vines all the way. Outside someone was listening to Lorenzo Jones on the radio. She stood there, trying to think, trying to plan.
It would take Billy Nightingale a long time to cross the bridge into Manhattan. It would take her forever. But somehow she had to be at the end of that bridge waiting for him as he crossed.
18