Sean hung his legs from the edge and pointed his toes to the floor. “He was darker and had long hair. And he liked the peace sign. And he was in love with your mother when she was a teenager.”
“Did she tell you what happened to him? Did she say why he never came home?”
“No, I don't know. I guess our plan didn't work out so good.”
She glowered at him. The furnace shut off and the ducts ticked as they cooled. Norah sat close beside him on the bed, keeping time with the pendulum of her leg. He watched her kick, vaguely disturbed by the nakedness of her feet and ankles. Because of her glasses, she did not look at him head-on, but craned her neck about thirty degrees to the right. He followed the angle, twisting to meet her eyes, and challenged her. “Why don't you just ask your grandmother yourself?”
“Because she already thinks that I am hers.” When she parted her lips, the scent of gingerbread filled the space between them. “And I might just want to stay here with her.”
No longer able to bear her closeness, Sean went to the window and pulled hard on the cord to the blinds, flooding the room with brilliance. “There is no easy way to miss it,” he said. “Six more weeks of winter.”
THE BIRDS SANG in their cage all morning long. An even dozen in a three-by-four case complete with artificial branches and covering leaves, the house finches were Simonetta Delarosa's babies. She came to the flower shop every day to coddle them with gourmet seed and bread moistened with milk, and had given each pair linked names from her favorite operas: the zebras were Romeo and Juliet; the Gouldians, Otello and Desdemona; the owl finches, Figaro and Susanna; the society, Vio-letta and Alfredo; the spice, Ferrando and Dorabella; and the star, Guglielmo and Fiordiligi. Enraptured by the dazzling sunshine, the mates behaved as if a new spring had begun, flying and singing and preening for one another so much that Simonetta, long inured to their habits, took notice and sat by the cage and watched them carry on right up to the point when the visitor arrived.
As soon as he stepped through the doorway, the birds hushed and hid beneath the greenery. The man removed his hat and gloves, brushed his silver hair back with the flat of his palm. From behind the wire cage, Simonetta smiled at him, and Pat nodded through the glass of the walk-in cooler, where they kept the cut flowers cool and moist. The stranger circled the room, stopping to sniff at a bunch of tiger lilies, to finger a single violet face of a blooming dendrobium. He crouched next to the birdcage to peer inside. Simonetta tried to show him her treasures, but the birds cowered in the shadows no matter how she coaxed.
“They act like they're afraid of you.”
“A stranger can sometimes have that effect on little creatures,” he said. “Portents of uncertainty in their ordered world.”
Pat wiped his hands on the front of his apron and advanced from the back of the shop. “Is there anything you're looking for?”
“No, no. Just coming in from the cold. Though those are beautiful orchids.”
“My favorites. They come and go like magic, but while they last, they're like miracles.” With a gaze approaching love, Pat considered the potted plants. “You from around here?”
The hint of a smile curled at the corners of his lips. “No. I'm with the State. I'm looking for someone. A runaway.”
Rising to stand by her husband, Simonetta twisted her fingers together. “From the State? Who are you looking for?”
“A little girl,” he said. “A runaway from an institution up north. I've come to find her and take her home.”
The Delarosas drew closer, pressed shoulder to shoulder, and he stared at them, watching for their faces to betray their emotions, and then he laid his hat atop the cage to work his hands into his gloves. “A clever child, she might latch on to anyone. She might appear like an answer to a prayer, but every answer brings new questions, and every wish the hope for one more wish.”
“We don't know any little girl,” said Pat.
As the stranger placed his hat back on his head, he said, “You keep an eye out for her.” And bringing two fingers to the brim, he bowed slightly and departed. The finches roared and sang in panic and threw themselves against the iron bars, and not until late afternoon could Si-monetta manage to soothe the last of them, a star finch cowering in a high corner, and return the poor creature, thimble heart racing in her hand, to a safer perch.
21
All by itself, the front door opened with a creak after two quick knocks, and a three-note hello came ringing from the threshold. Norah and Mrs. Quinn rose from the table, their dinner going cold the moment they departed, rushing to greet their prodigal guest. The girl footed it more quickly, skittering to a stop just in front of the woman and her suitcases. Straightening from the waist, her Auntie Diane rose like a colossus, nearly six feet tall, her silver hair swept straight back in a thick mane, her face hard and divided into planes and sharp angles broken by a magnificent nose and fierce hazel eyes; shoulders thrown back, her spine a pole perpendicular to the surface of the world, her short boots planted as wide as her hips. Her coat, pink as a rose and with mother-of-pearl buttons, quilted her to the ankles, and fur-trimmed gloves gave her hands the appearance of brushed nickel. Norah had just enough time to take her all in before Margaret caught up to her. The sisters gasped, a small sigh of joy in recognition, and as they stepped toward each other, Norah pirouetted from their path, stood by silent and watchful as they embraced. Diane unclenched first, grasped her sister's biceps, and pulled away to consider her more carefully. The women smiled identical smiles, embraced again, holding four beats, long enough for Norah to begin bouncing on her toes. A draft sucked in the front door, which closed with a bang that startled them all.
“It's cold as the bishop's bum. I had forgotten what a godforsaken frozen tundra you live in, Maggie. You look good—what's all this talk about being tired?” She pivoted her head and stared at the child. “And who is this darling child? The sudden granddaughter you mentioned over the phone. The mysterious fugitive from way out west. Norah, is it? Norah Rinnick, I presume?”
“Quinn, actually. Norah Quinn. And you must be Great-Aunt Diane.” She stuck out her right hand.
“My heavens, Norah Quinn.” She turned to her sister. “She's every bit as you described on the phone. You're quite the shock, Norah.”
“A miracle,” Margaret said. “An answered prayer.”
Diane pivoted around to the girl. “Well, since we're family, I must ask you for a hug. What do you say to your Auntie Di?”
The girl took a half step forward and found herself enveloped in a swatch of pink cloth, her face smashed against a great bosom concealed beneath a brassiere that felt like a birdcage. “Like Princess Di?” she asked, her voice muffled and small.
Diane's laugh erupted from deep inside her chest, and Norah was pitched backward by the percussion. “Just like Princess Di. The two great beauties of the modern age.” She peeled off her gloves, handing them to Norah, and then with practiced formality, she disrobed coat and hat and burdened the girl. Norah staggered to the closet while the sisters linked arms and headed for the kitchen. “Be a dear,” Diane said to the girl, “and take my bag to the room reserved for princesses.” As she hauled the suitcase around, Norah eavesdropped on a bit of their conversation. “Oh, she is a dead ringer for him …” Him. Rinnick
They warmed the plates in the oven and ate an overdone dinner a half hour later. Talk revolved around fatigue from the long drive north, snow at Somerset, but once through the tunnel smooth sailing; the terrible coldness of the winter, neither woman ever remembering temperatures so low for so many weeks in a row; the wretched state of the economy, Ronald Reagan, the collapse of the steel industry. To her astonishment, Norah was not the center of discussion. For the moment, she had ceased to exist. The sisters lingered at coffee, not yet willing to address the matter of the recent addition to the family.
After dessert, she went upstairs to bathe, and over the rush of running water, Norah could not spy so easily, though she tried listeni
ng through a glass pressed against the floor. All she could hear was the ocean. Washed, and dressed for sleep, she swept downstairs to say goodnight, finding the two women relocated to the living room, sitting at right angles to each other under a single lamp which cast a pale halo fading to black in the far corners. Like conspirators hatching a plot, they dipped close to each other, their faces moving in and out of the light and shadows, their voices near whispers and dripping secrets.
“Why, we were just talking about you, Norah,” Mrs. Quinn said. “Are you clean as a whistle and ready—”
“Ready to blow?” her sister asked.
Norah wolf-whistled, and the women laughed. Mrs. Quinn held out her arms, and Norah hugged her, kissed her cheek, and then hesitated before Diane, uncertain of the protocol.
“I'm not going to bite you, child. At least not hard. Come here.” She smothered her with a bear hug and a wet kiss on the ear. “I could eat you up.” She held the child with one hand on her back and stroked her hair with the other. “We were talking about your mother, actually. Do you know neither one of us has seen her in nearly ten years? Just before you were born—”
“She ran away from home.”
“That's right, muppet. Do you know why she never came back?”
“No, ma'am.”
Dissatisfied by the answer, Diane held the moment, chewing her thoughts. “Well… her mother and her auntie miss her.”
“I miss her too.”
22
HUGE, read the first note. The postscript made him laugh and earned them both a twenty-minute detention. AND SCARY. When Sean unfolded the paper tossed his way, he knew that Norah was describing her great-aunt Diane. Caught sniggering by Mrs. Patterson, he was invited to share what he found so amusing with the rest of the class. He demurred, blushed, stammered into trouble. The teacher unfolded the message and misinterpreted the words as directed toward her.
After the dismissal bells trilled, Sean and Norah remained behind, fixed at their desks, waiting out their punishment, while at the front of the room, Mrs. Patterson graded papers, glancing up every so often, a bemused stare tempering the gravity of the situation. The red second hand on the clock face—MADE IN THE USA, ALLEGHENY COUNTY SCHOOL DISTRICT—slowed, wavered, threatened to stop entirely. Norah could count almost to ten between the ticks, and bored into mischief, she tried to attract his attention by clearing her throat, tapping her fingers along the pencil well on the desktop, sighing. He dared look back once, panic in his eyes, and for the last five minutes simply bowed his head and tucked it into the cradle of his folded arms. Excuses for their tardiness in getting home played out in the recesses of his mind. Never before had he been punished by a teacher, never asked to stay one minute after school.
Sentences served, they were dismissed with the admonishment to go and sin no more. Dragging their coats and bags behind them, the pair left the classroom to empty corridors stretching out to the front door. The school seemed alien and foreboding, and he pushed ahead, anxious to disassociate himself from the troublemaker. He pretended to be interested in the displays along the walls: the first graders’ crudely fashioned poems to winter; lopsided snowmen built from cottonballs, spit, and glue; the second graders’ paeans to Groundhog Day, now forlorn after the actual date had passed. The third graders’ papier-mâché masks of African animals, his own clumsy antelope and Norahs toothy leopard. She called for him to let her catch up, but that only served to spur him onward. When he heard her flying toward him, he started to sprint, but before he had broken the traces, she was upon him, spinning him around so quickly that his bag flew from his hand and his coat whipped to the wall and dropped to the floor.
“I told you to wait up,” she said.
“Get offa me.”
“Are you mad because I got you detention?”
He met her stare with malice in his eyes. His face bloomed red and he spat out the words: “Go away. You're nothing but trouble since you got here.”
“Sean, you're making a big deal—”
“Everything was fine till you showed up.” Angry lines crossed his forehead as he flushed a deeper red, and he pinched his hands into fists. She struck quick as a snake, sinking her teeth into his shoulder, biting hard enough to break the skin beneath his shirt. Even as he jerked away, she clamped on and would not let go until he screamed out in pain and surprise.
“There!” she yelled at him. “There, now you have a real reason to be mad at me.”
Fingers clamped on his shoulder, he stammered his reply. “What did you do that for? That hurts. You had no right—”
“I just wanted to talk with you and you ran away. I'm sorry, but you're not going to let Mrs. P ruin us being friends, are you?”
“You really bite hard.”
“Sorry—”
“I'm still mad at you. I have to come by your house every morning and take you to school, and then you're all weird, and you know all these tricks and you won't share and you cheat and you keep secrets.”
“I'm trying to apologize.”
“Sorry isn't enough.”
“You don't understand right now but you will. If you just help me.”
“Why should I help you? You bit me. Why would you bite me?”
“ ‘Cause you made me mad on account of a tiny problem, a bump in the road.”
“But I never get in trouble. My parents would kill—” He caught the words as they tumbled from his mouth, choking on the memory of his father.
“Don't tell on me, okay? You can win next time we play chess.”
With a grudging reluctance, he eased into his coat and shouldered his bookbag. A silent truce formed between them, and taking care to match strides, they walked to the front door. Outside a light snow fell dry and small. Norah pulled up her hood and tugged on her mittens.
Before they opened the door, he stopped to ask in earnest. “I won't tell anyone, but you have to tell me who is following you. You said that night that someone might want to take you away. Where to?”
“I don't know what he wants,” she said. “But I am afraid. I don't want to leave.”
They stepped into the empty yard. All of the buses and children were long gone, and just a handful of cars remained in the lot, their windshields dusted with powdered sugar. The snow ticked against hard surfaces and, in the hush of afternoon, sounded like waves of static. Heavy clouds diffused the light, softened every angle, and flattened perspective. Sean felt as if he were moving through a picture, the flakes white hatches on a gray background. Even Norah, next to him, looked like a paper doll.
“She's very tall,” said Norah. “Aunt Diane. And intimidating somehow. Maybe it's the way she talks. You can almost hear the gears spinning in her head. She's thinking, boy. And I'm going to have to think faster and harder to keep up. And I'm going to need your help with her questions. You know what she called me? A fugitive.”
“Like from the FBI?”
“Maybe I'm a Most Wanted Girl?”
They slowed to let a car pass before crossing the road to the trail through the woods. When they reached the other side, Sean grabbed her by the wrist. “Hey, maybe it's your mother who's the fugitive—”
“My mother would be nothing of the kind. Still, I'll need your help with Auntie Di. Come over tomorrow after school. We're still partners in crime, eh, amigo?”
“Just so long as there's no more biting.”
She could not resist a smile. Taking her knapsack from her shoulder, she crouched on the sidewalk, unzipped a compartment, and rooted around the explosion of tissues, pencil stubs, and broken crayons. With a gentle hand, she scooped a small object and held it carefully in her palm, presenting to him a blue cup, delicate as porcelain, salvaged from a children's tea set. A pair of birds in flight, sharing a banner in their beaks, had been painted in expert hand on its surface, and but for a chip that marred its banded lip, it was a perfect miniature.
“This is for you,” she said. “I've carried it with me for years, the only memory of my former
life, but I'd like you to have it to say that we are friends. When I am troubled, I whisper a prayer into the cup and fill it with my wishes. You need it more than I do.”
He hid the present from his mother, grateful for once that she came home hours later. In the silence of his room, Sean considered Norah's token, held the tapered bowl to his lips, and thought of all his wishes. He could not bear to whisper father into the cup, struck silent by the absurdity of her claims, by the failure of any prayer to bring about the desired answer. Why whisper when his heart shouted to no result? Still, he was glad for the gift, touched by the selfless gesture, and the teacup found a place of honor beside the circus cookie boxes filled with his collections of found objects. Later that night in the bathroom, he gingerly removed his shirt and stared at the red wound in his reflection. Sore to the touch, the ring seethed purple, and when he turned to get a better look Sean recognized the pattern her teeth had made. In the mirror, the bite mark looked just like a pair of wings.
23
The sisters circled around the subject of Erica, as they always had since her disappearance. From the very beginning Diane had suspected the truth, but she had remained circumspect those first few weeks in 1975 when nobody could be quite sure if Erica had run away or had been abducted or worse. The Quinns refused to believe theories proffered by the local police or later by the FBI, even after the confirmed sighting by the liquor store owner in Tennessee, the bedside description in Oklahoma, and the alleged confrontation with a waitress in a Texas café. Only when the evidence proved overwhelming could Margaret acknowledge to her sister that something terrible had happened to her daughter, and even then she maintained Erica's innocence throughout. After Paul passed away, the topic was rarely broached at all.
The summer following Paul's death, Margaret and Diane stole away together for a week at the shore, revisiting the beach house their parents had rented for a song when the girls were ten and eight. A weather-beaten clapboard, it seemed much smaller than they remembered, and the Atlantic too, less wild, less blue, everything diminished in scope and dwarfed by the decades of development along the coast. For four days they idled in the sun, doing nothing more arduous than soaking to the collarbone at low tide, watching the pipers dance to and fro, walking on the sand at sunset. On the fifth night, when the end of the respite began to touch their ease, Diane rustled a quarter bushel of steamed blue crabs, and they sat on the deck with their mallets and picks, a roll of butcher's paper to capture the shells, a six-pack of cold beer to wash down the tang of Old Bay.