“Let’s go,” Agnes whispered.
The parakeets on the wire were in a line, swinging with the breeze. The phone was ringing in their house. Agnes hurried across the street while Gia gathered up the plates and blew out the citronella candle, the praying mantis hiding in the bush.
“Your father’s not coming home tonight. They’re rioting again. Burning everything in Bed-Stuy. Gia, bring the dishes and wash them before it gets too dark. And no sleeping outside. I want you in.”
Whatever summer spell Agnes had been under was over. The door slammed. The rabbits shuffled. Gia locked the hutch and carried the plates inside, wondering why anyone would want to burn anything on a night as hot as this.
That night, a fire glowed in the distance. Smoke hung in the air, and sirens wailed far away, hopefully not where her father was, her bad feelings toward him haunting her now. Heat lightning argued in the sky. “Have you seen Leo?” her mother asked the kitchen receiver, worrying the phone cord into a tangle. No, Aunt Ida must’ve said, because her mother said she hadn’t seen Ray either. Tommy was probably farting around at home like she was, feeling especially left out now that the sun was down and the boys weren’t home. It wasn’t full dark yet, but time went away with electricity.
Her mother hung up, and it was quiet again, full of a stillness that didn’t extend beyond the porch. She wished her father and her brother were home. She felt less safe without them. Agnes dialed another number.
A gunshot sounded in the distance, echoing through the quiet. Gia sprang up, gathered the rabbits from the hutch. They couldn’t stay there. She locked the front door and let the rabbits hop free in her room, tucking herself into the linen closet, something she hadn’t done since she was little. The heat and detergent smell were almost unbearable, but there was just enough room beneath the last shelf for Gia. The chaos outside didn’t fit here. It was just Gia and the dark until sometime in the night, when the power came back on and her brother tiptoed past.
“We got stuck,” he told Agnes over breakfast the next morning, the half moons beneath his eyes dark as the rain clouds gathered outside, low and gray. “The cops set up a roadblock, and we couldn’t get through.”
“From Rockaway?” Agnes repeated. Leo nodded, twirling a sweating glass of milk between his hands. Agnes pressed her lips into a line and cooked an egg, gas burning blue beneath the pan. He didn’t mention selling the bike or Ray speeding down Cross Bay.
“But I found a job,” he said. “Wasn’t that what you wanted me to do?”
Agnes said nothing. The clock on the wall was stuck at nine a.m. She flipped the egg as the edges curled, shut off the burner with a snap, and slid the overcooked egg onto a plate. The toaster popped. Say it, Gia wished. You know he’s lying. But her mother quietly gathered her things for work, sipping the last of her coffee, waiting for Eddie to be her voice, and slipped out of the house as if she had something to apologize for and not Leo.
“What kind of job?” Gia crossed her arms over her chest.
“Working for Ray. He’s got something for you too.” Leo dropped his plate into the sink without washing it. “Go see him.”
The rain started outside. Fast and heavy, finally breaking through the heat. The relief of it ran through her veins. She didn’t understand what Ray could possibly want, but Leo was already upstairs, the shower running. A dove cooed on the windowsill. She would have to ask Ray herself.
Chapter Five
It rained for nearly two days. The thundering of water on concrete changed to water on water. The sewers spewed until it was raining from above and below. Ducks swam past in the street, where the water was deeper than parts of the bay. Gia pressed the pleats in her uniform skirt, willing them to sharpen as her mother wished. Lazy pleats, lazy person. School meant a schedule full of nuns, her mother’s campaign to transform her intensifying. The pink razor had been repositioned in the shower, a bag of makeup left on her bed, the date of the fall dance circled on the calendar, making Gia wish she could wash out like driftwood and turn up somewhere else.
Lorraine waded over in a plaid pantsuit with plastic bags of school supplies. It was daring: a woman in a pantsuit. They divided the supplies up on the table—marble notebooks, number two pencils with perfect points, stacks of loose-leaf paper—and clipped them into last year’s binders. They’d done this for as long as Gia could remember, only there weren’t any crayons anymore, or markers, or stickers. It was more serious-looking stuff now.
“What is there to think about? You should go.”
Part of her wanted to see streamers hanging from the gym ceiling, trellis archways and pop-up walls, a crepe-paper forest of reds, greens, and gold, nuns making popcorn and spinning cotton candy.
“What do you even do at a dance?”
“You eat, dance, take small sips of spiked drinks if you’re lucky, talk . . .”
“Yeah, but . . .” The boy part threw her. Boys were booger-picking schoolyard fighters. With dances, they were something else, but what? Lorraine dragged her pen along a spiral notebook as Gia squirmed.
“You know, Gia, you really are pretty. You just don’t know it. But it’s useful.”
“Useful?” A Swiss Army knife was useful. Pretty didn’t come with tools.
“Yes, useful.” The front door opened, and the conversation shut with it. “You’ll see.” Lorraine doodled her name in a new notebook, giving Gia one quick raised eyebrow, as Agnes breezed in with groceries, opened cupboards, and pulled dinner things from the refrigerator.
“Your father is coming home,” Agnes sang out, unpacking groceries. “The rain finally put the fires out in Bed-Stuy, stopped the riots. You believe it started because some landlord sprayed a group of kids sitting on the stoop with a hose? Three days of riots and looting, terrifying, all because some guy didn’t want kids sitting on his stoop.” She shook her head.
Gia and Lorraine raised eyebrows. It was more complicated than that; people were sick of being told what to do. Ten years after Rosa Parks wouldn’t give up her seat on the bus, people still couldn’t sit on a stoop. It was the same for women, trapped under their bell jars, as Sister Gregory called them. She thought about Aunt Diane at the navy yard, welding along with the rest of them, sent home the day the war ended and told to learn typing. Of Lorraine, who’d be a nurse but never a doctor. Of the people who bought things on store shelves, believing they were safe, only for those same products to poison them slowly. It was unfair, and it seemed to Gia that the world was waking up slowly.
“Your brother. He’s home?”
“I think so,” Gia said. He’d eaten a whole box of cereal in front of the TV earlier, lifting dumbbells during commercial breaks, but she didn’t know where he was now. Agnes looked between Gia and the ceiling, where Leo’s bedroom would be. There would be a talk when her father got home.
“Is he sick?” Agnes scrunched her forehead. It was unusual for Leo to be home, grounded or not.
Yes, Gia thought. He has an incurable case of the idiots.
“And what is that you’re wearing?” Agnes’s already-scrunched forehead tightened as she looked at Lorraine. “It’s all connected?”