Diamonds in the Shadow (16 page)

T
HE AMABOS HAD BEEN LIVING
with them for more than three weeks when Mom turned on the TV and the weather forecast was for snow. “It's about time,” she said. “We're having such a wimpy winter.” She couldn't look out the windows, because they were covered as if in a wartime blackout, so she flung open the back door to put her face right into the wind. Then, with difficulty, she slammed the door on the gale. She was drenched by rain. “I guess it isn't snowing yet,” she said, laughing. “It'll turn to snow during the night. Is anybody's bedroom window open?”

Celestine and Andre would never dream of opening a window. Alake's fingers never touched anything, that the Finches knew of, and Mopsy liked her room cozy (stale, in Jared's opinion). Only Jared was a big fan of fresh air. His windows were always open. He trotted upstairs.

He had forgotten Mattu's boxes of ash.

Water had blown in and pooled on the wide window shelf. The bottom of each precious box was dark and buckled.

Horrified, Jared slammed the window down. There was no way to pretend this had not happened. Why did he have to be in
charge of refugees and their stuff, especially disgusting stuff like dead people's ashes?

It seemed reasonable to move the boxes to a dry place. Jared lifted one and the bottom fell out. The cremated remains of a grandparent slopped around in a gritty puddle. Jared even got bone mud on his fingers. He wiped them off against the dry top of the box. The cardboard was so weak that this ripped the side seam, and the rest of the contents spilled onto the carpet.

Jared turned on his desk lamp to illuminate the extent of the disaster.

The bone pieces that were still dry were gray and irregular like gravel. But the wet bone bits gleamed. They were pretty. In fact, they were enchanting, which did not seem like a quality bones would have.

Jared forgot to be queasy. He picked up the largest wet piece. It puzzled him. Wouldn't bone have a sort of perforated look? Wouldn't it be all but weightless after cooking in a fire? Jared held his wet pebble up to the lightbulb. A streak of color and fire shot out.

It's a diamond, thought Jared. A rough diamond.

Jared ran his fingers through the bone mud. Mattu had smuggled uncut diamonds out of Africa. Dozens of them.

Victor discovered coffee shops. There he could sit for hours in air-conditioned comfort, sipping coffee and watching people.
Many customers spent their time staring into folding computers and typing on tiny keyboards. Victor asked for a demonstration. The person he asked was so fascinated by his own computer that he did not even look up. “Sure,” he said, scrolling through the front page of a newspaper and clicking through sports and a celebrity video and a piece about the war zone in the Middle East. He threw a smile in the general direction of Victor. “You can find anybody or anything on the Internet,” he said.

“You can find people?” said Victor.

“Easy.”

“I do not have a computer and I do not know how to use them.”

“No problem.
Go
to the library. The computers are free. The librarians do it for you.”

Jared had definitely never imagined playing in dead people's ashes. If that was what this was. More likely, Mattu had scooped some ashes up from some old campfire, and calling them “my grandparents” was a brilliant lie by a clever smuggler.

Jared smoothed away the fingerprints he had left in the mud.

The pebble—or raw diamond—or weird shiny glowing bone—was oddly warm in his palm. He slid it into his jeans pocket and ran downstairs.

Everybody was in the family room.

Celestine was working hard on her new hobby—clipping
grocery store coupons, which she studied constantly, drawing up new and exciting shopping lists. She loved the arithmetic of whether canned tuna was cheaper at Super Stop & Shop or the Food Mart. She was eager to save fifty cents here and twenty-five cents there. Every day she came home from scrubbing toilets and asked when that unknown wonder, her paycheck, was going to arrive. Would she do that if she knew she had a fortune in diamonds?

Andre was watching an old basketball rerun. Jared couldn't stand the thought of sports that were not happening right this second. It made him crazy to look at ballplayers in weird old-fashioned shorts and tight little shirts and worthless sneakers. But Andre, who would never hold a ball again in this life, was breathless with excitement, rooting for the team he'd chosen. In his lap lay the precious piece of paper from the medical center with the date and time of his next doctor's appointment. Andre loved those appointment sheets. Would he love them that much if he knew he had diamonds?

Yes, because having hands was better than having diamonds. So Andre might actually know about the diamonds. Yet when Celestine read her grocery list aloud, Andre looked up, bright-eyed and eager. Vegetables! he seemed to be thinking.

Was he also thinking, And when we cash in our diamonds, we'll buy an estate in the country and a great car, and we'll eat all our meals out?

Jared couldn't see it.

Alake was just too screwy to be included in diamond smuggling. Although with the fabulous new hairstyle Mopsy had given
her, she looked intelligent and thoughtful instead of lost and dumb.

Alake was sitting next to Mopsy, who was deep in a teaching moment, reading aloud from her favorite picture book, trying to make Alake say
“Tyrannosaurus rex.”
Alake was not saying it.

Mattu was sitting on the floor in that squat/crunch/posture nobody but baseball catchers could achieve. His lips moved as he read his biology textbook. He did not hear or see the television; he was not aware of Mopsy's silly story. He was completely absorbed in the page, treating every word like gold.

… or diamonds.

If they all knew about the diamonds, wouldn't they be more of a team? Jared could imagine them saying to each other, We're out of here. You be the son, you be the daughter, we'll be the grown-ups. We'll get to America, cash in our diamonds and lead the good life.

But why would anybody choose Alake? And if you were planning all that, wouldn't you rehearse? Wouldn't you at least coordinate escape stories?

It was a mystery. But in some ways, all families were mysteries. Maybe even all people. Look at the mystery of Brady Wall. He had turned into a completely different—

Turn in
, thought Jared.

Diamonds or no diamonds, papers or no papers, Jared could not turn his family in.

Because somehow, the Amabos had become his family.

One summer, Jared had gone to camp on a lake. There had
been swimming and canoeing and water polo, but what he remembered most was that he forgot his family existed. His whole life was camp. When his parents and baby sister showed up on Visitors' Day, he was shocked. Who were these people?

The people who mattered lived with him at camp.

When you lived with somebody, they mattered.

Jared cleared his throat. “Mattu, I left the window open and rain blew in. It soaked into your boxes. I tried to move them to a dry place but the boxes split. I'm really sorry. We have to transfer the ashes into new containers.”

Did this announcement have an impact on anybody? Celestine's pencil was no longer moving over her grocery list, but maybe she was done. Andre gasped, but it could have been at the game. Mattu's eyes grew huge, but they did this fifty times a day. Alake was always motionless anyway.

“The ashes of your grandma and grandpa?” shrieked Mopsy. “Oh, Mattu! This is so awful!”

Mom, always practical, said, “Tupperware, maybe? Until we buy real urns?” She threw open the cabinets and produced two round plastic containers with bright blue lids while Mopsy got the DustBuster.

“No,” said Jared. “You can't vacuum it. You'd mix the ashes with dust and lint.” Not to mention, he thought, that the pebbles, which might or might not be diamonds, are too heavy and wide to go through the slot.

It's my fault, thought Mopsy. I weakened that box. What if I have to admit it? What kind of disgusting person goes pawing around in somebody's grandparents' ashes?

They all swarmed upstairs after Mattu, but when Mattu reached Jared's door and saw the mess, he put out his arm to block the Finches. “This is my responsibility. Please wait downstairs. Thank you, Mrs. Kara, for the new—” He blanked.

“Tupperware,” said Mom, as if it were a password and now she'd get to stay.

Had Mattu been calling her mother Mrs. Kara all along? Mopsy hadn't noticed. There was so
much
to notice that she didn't notice
enough.

Reluctantly, everybody left Mattu alone with the ashes of his grandparents.

Downstairs, Celestine was now adding a column of numbers, using her favorite new toy, a tiny purple foam calculator. Andre was cheering his team. Mopsy was never going to understand cheering a rerun. Those were Andre's parents up there in a puddle. Shouldn't he react a little more than this?

When Mattu finally rejoined them, Mopsy had a hundred questions. “What happened to your poor grandma and grandpa, anyway, Mattu?” she began.

“They were clubbed to death.”

She had not expected an answer like that. Maybe she hadn't even expected an answer. She was nauseated by the physical closeness that clubbing meant. The killer's eyes would have looked into the victim's eyes. The person trying to flee would
have watched his killer's fingers tighten on the stick. You'd have to pack a lot of muscle into the swing of your club to commit murder. What had the club been made of? The only club Mopsy had ever seen was used in golf. She blundered into the next question. “Was it the same day you got your terrible scar?”

“His scar is not terrible,” said Mom, who liked to pretend that awful things were just fine fine fine. “Mattu is a very handsome boy.”

It occurred to Mopsy that marriage to her mom must be annoying. Mom could never allow anything awful just to be awful. Mopsy looked at her father. He was staring down into his cell phone, no more aware of dead people's ashes than Andre was. Mopsy stopped caring about Mattu. What was she going to do about her father?

“Mattu, you're shivering,” said Mom. “Here. Have a blanket.”

They all had their own couch blankets, two or three yards of fat cushiony fleece. Dad, who was always hot, and Jared, who was always hotter, never touched their couch blankets, which stayed neatly folded year after year. Mom and Mopsy, on the other hand, had favorites.

Mattu accepted a huge length of scarlet, which he flung grandly around his shoulders, a tribal prince in royal robes. Alake not only watched him, she actually looked back at the couch blanket pile. Mopsy picked out her personal favorite, a swath of hot pink, and wrapped Alake like a package.

Alake wore her blanket to the dinner table.

“No,” said Mom. “You need your hands to eat, Alake, and
you're going to eat tonight. I'm sick of you not eating. Give me the blanket.”

“Hang on, Alake,” said Jared. “I've got this big thick sweatshirt I never wear because I hate it. It's perfectly acceptable for dinner-table wear, and it's just as fleecy on the inside.”

Mopsy knew what it would be: the mauve Metropolitan Opera sweatshirt Grandma had given him for Christmas. Jared would die before being seen in it. When he came downstairs and tossed it to Alake, Mopsy said, “I don't think it's a good gift if it's something you hate, Jared. I think a good gift has to be something you love.”