“Yeah.”
“Furniture’s still there.”
“They’re renters. It’s the Puppos. One of them’s a criminal. She was in jail. Just got out. They rent from us. We live next door. I heard you.” He bit off the top inch of Popsicle.
“It’s Pupko,” I said. “When?”
Mashed words came through his mouthful of orange slush. “When what?”
“When did they move?” She had spent the night with me.
“Today.”
And was gone when I awoke. “This morning?”
“Yeah. The criminal and her sister. They was pulling a U-Haul. I seen it.”
The minute she got out. It was all planned. Did she know I’d come looking? “Where did they go?”
The smile was back. “Don’t know.”
I walked out the gate. He backed up to the curb, watching me. I thought of smacking the Popsicle from his hand. But I didn’t.
I was suddenly feeling the sting in my raw fingertips. I began the walk home. I heard him call, laughing, “Hey, you ain’t got no shoes on!”
By the time I hit Marshall, I was running. I had remembered something: her birthday gift for me. I had never opened it, or any of the others, for that matter. She had stacked them neatly in a corner of my room.
Hers was on top. I ripped it open and burst out bawling. It was a hair ribbon. Bright green.
—
The next day I entered seventh grade at Stewart Junior High School.
63
Sports. Clubs. Activities. Studies. I threw myself into school.
Word had gotten around about the birthday party massacre. “Hey, Cannonball,” I heard in the hallways, “can I come to your next birthday party?” I laughed it off.
I saw the flinch in schoolmates’ eyes when suddenly they found themselves face to face with Cannonball Cammie O’Reilly. And then the surprise in those eyes when I merely walked by—maybe even smiled!—without a punch, a scowl or a nasty word.
Reggie, bless her, was as forgiving as ever. She hugged me on the first day, outside geography class, and gave no hint that she remembered me dragging her off to Fiore’s to meet Mrs. Pinto. She never mentioned Marvin Edward Baker again.
In fact, I made peace with all the Jailbirds. I invited them to a pizza-and-pillow sleepover at my place—and everyone came. Even Glenda Schmoyer! I greeted her at the big door with a gift, all wrapped up. She opened it. She howled with laughter. It was a toothbrush.
In those first months of junior high school I seemed to be gaining a new friend every day. By the time the last scab fell from my fingers, nobody was calling me Cannonball.
Of course, I had long since retired from shoplifting, litterbugging and terrorizing little kids and their mothers.
The one sour note was Danny Lapella. He would not speak to me nor even look at me. I didn’t blame him. Sometimes I wished he would slug me. That would feel better. But I knew he would never do it.
Something else was bothering me—or maybe I should say not bothering me, for it was more an absence than a presence—and it took me a while to figure out what it was.
64
Every night I flopped into bed, exhausted. I had never been so busy in my life. Even weekends were filled with school stuff and friends. My visits to the women’s yard now happened only on Saturday mornings.
This is not to say that I was too busy to think about Eloda. On the contrary: I thought of her from the time I got up in the morning till I went to bed. Motherwise, you might say I was worse off than ever: I now had two of them to miss.
—
Then one Saturday in November, I returned to the apartment from the women’s yard. I was sitting on the living room sofa. For once I was doing nothing. I was alone. Just sitting there. And I started to cry.
I had no idea why. I hadn’t been thinking or feeling anything in particular. The tears simply came out of nowhere. Not a heavy, blubbery cry. A soft cry. And then after a minute or two it was over, like a sudden summer shower.
I got up from the sofa. I let myself out. I climbed the steps to the Tower of Death, something I had not done since before school began. Gone were the lopped salamis I’d hacked with the Civil War sword. A squad of new ones, wrapped in burlap and twine, hung from the ceiling. The air up there was chilly. Winter was coming.
I stood in the middle of the circular room, slowly turning, sensing I was here for a reason—but why? I beheld the familiar attic trappings of my childhood, my second bedroom: the old wooden file cabinets, the hangman’s noose, the tub of yarny rag dolls, the NO SPITTING sign. I touched the wooden drawer that held Thomas Browne’s letter. I opened another drawer and took out my mother’s shoe. I cradled it. I kissed it and returned it to the drawer. Everything seemed the same as before. I stood still. I closed my eyes. Perhaps if I stopped looking, it would come to me. It did not.
I left the high room. I was halfway down the tower stairs when I heard a voice. It seemed to come from the wall stones that circled me. It was a man’s voice, and it spoke the familiar words with such authority that I knew it must be Thomas Browne: The bad time is over.
I stopped. I listened for more. I leaned my face against the pale green stones. But the voice was gone, returned to The Letter.
I descended to the apartment. I put on a jacket and went outside. Small, dry white flakes skipped across Airy Street. A brief flurry? Or the first snowfall of the year? Time would tell. This time I did not run. I did not hurry.
Along the way I began to feel so light it seemed I might fly with the flurries. I knew now what I had been looking for and had failed to find. It was, of course, the gloom. The gloom and the anger that had incarcerated me all my life behind walls no one could breach nor stringball fly over. The only home, the only life I had known. Now I understood that when Eloda had sent me to The Corner, she had set me free from my own prison.
At The Corner I did not cry out this time or throw myself down. I stood close by the brick front of 203 West Oak and I felt my mother there and I closed my eyes and I whispered to her: “The bad time is over, Mama. The past is done. I have a future now. I’m okay.”
And then I walked home.
65
Months passed.
One day I spotted Danny Lapella in a hallway mob between classes. I thought: Enough! I grabbed him. I shook him. “Talk to me,” I demanded. “Hit me. Do something.” We stood like that while the mob surged around us. Then we both cracked up.
Years passed. Junior high. High school.
In ninth grade Danny and I went to the prom together. Double-dated with Reggie and her boyfriend-of-the-month.
In tenth grade we found out we were better at friendship than romance. In fact, we took it a step beyond ordinary friendship. We appointed ourselves honorary brother and sister.
Every August twenty-ninth the Jailbirds celebrated my birthday in my jailhouse apartment. And slept over.
I became captain of the field hockey team. Reggie starred in our high school play, The Curious Savage.
Tommy D and Arlene Holtz broke up. Not that the Jailbirds much cared. By then we had stopped watching Bandstand.
Somewhere along the line Reggie pronounced me fit to dress myself. I finally applied the Passion Pink lipstick she had bought for me at Woolworth’s that summer.
Carl the cook did his time and moved on. No more pie-of-the-week. The new guy tried but it was never the same. On the day Carl left, I pleaded with him to do another crime, just enough to land him back in jail till I went off to college. He laughed, walked out the door and went straight.
One day in tenth grade Reggie held me back as we trotted out of the locker room for gym class. She squeezed my hand. She leaned in and whispered, “Thank you,” and gave me a peck on the cheek before running onto the field. By the time gym class was over, I’d made the connection. This was Marvin Edward Baker’s execution day. They said he was stoic, made no fuss. They said when the electric-chair switch was flipped, the lights in Rockview flickered. Some said it was the angel of An
namarie Pinto, a shudder in her wings.
I became as comfortable on Mill Street, in Mogins Dip, as in my own neighborhood. Dinner with the Strongs became a weekly thing. My father even joined us a few times. We laughed endlessly over the day I “kidnapped” Andrew. Missy and I became great friends. Andrew became, and still is, the little brother I never had.
The rattle of a passing milk truck still got my attention, but less and less. And glass bottles were giving way to cardboard.
Most agreeably of all, I discovered Chester T. O’Reilly.
I discovered that he was more than a father and a warden. He was a person. With a history all his own and great stories to tell. He could even be pretty cool sometimes. I discovered that I was not the only one in the family who lost someone irreplaceable when the milk truck came.
I discovered that he was perfectly capable of running the prison himself. So I let him.
I discovered that even as I got older and stayed up later, he was always in the same easy chair in the living room before I went to bed. I discovered that when I said, “Night, Dad,” and kissed him on the cheek, I made him the happiest person on earth.
I discovered that it was he, not my mother, who had named me Camille.
I discovered that we could talk to each other. Not bicker. Not argue. Talk. And laugh. Talk and laugh so much that our dinnertimes got longer and longer. I couldn’t shut myself up. We never laughed louder than the day I went on and on about the agonies of trying to decide which boy to like. My father finally clamped his hands over his ears and said, “Where’s the old silent treatment when I need it?”
I discovered that my father was a great actor. Years went by without my suspecting that he was waiting for the right moment to spring on me the biggest surprise of my life.
66
I was seventeen. Eleventh grade. January. We were talking over dinner, as usual. My father was telling me about growing up in Trenton, New Jersey.
“I was a hellion,” he said. “I was in the principal’s office every other day. I was a teacher’s and parent’s nightmare.” He painted his neighbor’s dog. He gave himself a Mohawk when he was eight. We agreed that his misdeeds were all the funnier when you considered what he grew up to be.
Since the spirit of confession seemed to be upon us, I decided to fall in. I told him about the time I let the Jailbirds run loose in the exercise yard. The warden got a kick out of that.
And then I said, “And that same summer, one day I smoked a cigarette in front of Eloda. In the laundry room.”
At first his face was a blank. I didn’t think he’d heard me. He just stared. In time he put down his fork. He smiled at it. He smiled at me. He said, “I know.”
I didn’t believe it. “You do not,” I countered. “You never said a word. She never told you.” He just kept smiling. I peeped, “Did she?”
He nodded. “She did. She told me everything.”
“But you didn’t yell at me. You didn’t throw me in the clink.”
He reached across the table and took my hand. “I figured you were just trying to get her attention.”
Wow. That went straight to the heart. I couldn’t speak.
“Sometimes I wondered,” he said, “if this day would ever come. How long has she been gone now?” A blink. A flinch. The realization that there were two shes in my life. “Eloda,” he said.
I didn’t have to think. “Over four years. Dad, what are you talking about?”
He pushed back from the table, as if to widen his view. I had the strangest feeling that he was now picturing Eloda at my shoulder. “She said, ‘Don’t tell Miss Cammie until she cops to the cigarette.’ ” He gave a chuckle, remembering. “Considering all she did for us, that was a condition I could live with.”
“Well, great,” I snipped. “I’m so happy you can live with it. Meanwhile I don’t even know what we’re talking about.”
“Hey—” He threw up his hands. “I was just following orders.”
“Dad.”
“You have to promise me one thing.”
“Anything. What? What?”
“You won’t blame me for waiting so long to tell you? I was just—”
“Following orders. I promise. Just tell me already.”
“I’ve been working on this for four years. Changing the order around. Practicing.”
“Dad!”
So he told me.
67
“April twenty-ninth. Nineteen fifty-nine,” he said.
I waited for more, but that was all. “Okay,” I said. “So?”
“Remember that date.”
“April twenty-ninth. Nineteen fifty-nine. Got it.”
“Okay. Just hold it. We’ll come back to it.”
“Okay already.”
“So…she started working as our trustee housekeeper in January of that year. Remember?”
I chuckled. “The hair. That name. How could I forget?”
“Right. So…let’s skip ahead. Fire in the bathtub. Ring a bell?”
I gasped. “She told you that, too?”
He put on a look of casual snoot, like, Of course—I know everything about you. “So one day she comes to my office. She just walks in and she says two things, right out. She says, ‘Miss Cammie set a fire in the bathtub.’ And then she says, ‘I want to be more than a housekeeper.’ ”
“What did she mean by that?” I said.
“Exactly what I asked her. Her answer was only three words. I’ll never forget them: ‘She needs me.’ ”
She needs me.
A chill went through me. Suddenly I was twelve again. Eloda’s words were so real I could see them hover over the kitchen table between me and my father. His hand came through them, touching me. “What could I say? She was right. I was trying my best, but it wasn’t enough. It’s not just that you were a handful. All kids are. You were…” He paused, feeling for the words.
I gave them to him: “Never happy.”
He nodded. “Never happy. She saw it, too. She said with the summer vacation coming up, you being home all the time, you’d be needing attention more than ever.”
“Smart lady,” I said.
“And then some. Yeah. Of course, I had already checked her out before making her trustee. But now…I double-checked everything.”
Her prison record was clean. She was never in trouble. He asked the women inmates about her. They all said the same thing: she spent a lot of time in the Quiet Room.
I jumped up from my chair. “I heard that from Boo Boo.” I clapped. “Dad—it worked!”
“Well, yeah…” He seemed suddenly shy. “Be nice to think so.”
He went next door to city hall and reread her file. He talked to the patrolman who’d arrested her. From all these sources came the story of a wild child. A Two Mills terror. Smoking. Drinking. Out all hours. Fast crowd.
It all came down to one bad night by the tracks. Eloda was whooping it up with friends in the alley behind River Road. She flicked away a cigarette butt that was still burning. It landed in a heap of oily rags behind Doke’s Transmission Repair. Within minutes the garage was blazing, and Eloda, stunned, her face in flame light, was telling a policeman: “I did it.”
“You’re kidding,” I said.
“No,” he said. “It’s true. The patrolman put it right in his report: ‘I did it.’ That’s when I knew I was onto something.”
All I could say was “Wow.” We shook our heads and shared a chuckle. Nobody (except Boo Boo) ever said “I did it” in Hancock County Prison. We lived with two hundred people who said “I didn’t do it.”
Not long after that, young, wild, hell-on-wheels Eloda was a guest of the county. One year. Involuntary arson.
And I remembered:
Number one law.
No more fires.
He went to see her older sister—Roxanne—on Swede Street. “Unpredictable” was the word the sister used. Roxanne said, yes, Eloda could be wild and foolish, but not in a bad way. She could have gotten
out of a lot of trouble just by saying, “I didn’t do it.” But she didn’t seem to know how to lie. As for the garage she burned down, that finally scared her. It was the closest she’d come to actually hurting somebody.
My father told the sister about Eloda’s idea to be more than a housekeeper. The sister wasn’t surprised. She visited Eloda in prison every week (I never knew), but it was from Eloda’s frequent letters that Roxanne learned of her incarcerated sister’s concern for me. Which was nice, my father said—but why? Why Cammie?
The fire in the bathtub, Roxanne told him. That really spooked Eloda because it was a fire that had landed her in jail.
And mothers, she said. Neither of them had a mother. The Pupko girls had lost their father in World War II. Killed in action. Their mother died when they were teenagers. Colon cancer. That’s when Eloda went off the rails. Never showed up for her high school graduation. Took off for parts unknown. When she came back to Two Mills, she was out of control.
And something Eloda wrote in a letter: I am afraid for her. She reminds me of me.
And I remembered: Cammie…trust me….I know you….
I told my father, “I got worse before I got better.”
He nodded. “I know.”
“I was a mess. It wasn’t just the cigarette thing.”
“I know.”
“Or the bathtub fire.”
“I know!”
We both burst out laughing, the way you do at bad times long past. We clasped hands over the table. We blew on memory’s embers.
“My birthday party—oh God—”
“I went to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I thought I’d have to step over sleeping bodies. They were gone!”
“I knocked Reggie to the floor. My best friend!”
“I know. Her mother called me. I know about the shoplifting, too.”
My heart sank. “I’ve always believed she didn’t tell you.”
“She didn’t. The police chief did.”
“Oh, Dad—how could you stand me? Dad, I trampled a little kid in a baseball game at the park. You should have heard what I said to other little kids. I slugged my friend Danny Lapella. I buried my baseball glove.”