Every Single Second (17 page)

She slipped between the barricades. A sea of strangers overflowed the narrow street, spilling onto the sidewalks and little front lawns. Nella kept searching for a familiar face, but the only one she found was Father Gomez, who stood near the Manzinis’ front door. The family was gone—they left the day after it happened, to stay with relatives in the suburbs. Next to Father Gomez was a man in a big-brimmed black hat, and other men and women with somber faces. A short black man in a robe led a choir that swayed as it sang. All around her, people joined in, but Nella didn’t recognize the hymn. It was mournful and beautiful, making her think of a river. For a moment she fell under its spell, but then she was afraid. These strangers had to hate Anthony. Invaders, she thought, just as someone put a hand on her arm. Nella spun around, heart racing. A woman with a round, sad face was holding out an unlit candle.

“Here, sugar,” she said.

“Oh,” said Nella. “Thank you.” Then heard herself repeat,
“Mille grazie.”

Father Gomez took the microphone. His accent was heavy and the microphone squealed, so it was hard to understand most of what he said, but people nodded politely, and when he called on Our Heavenly Father to heal us in our suffering and pain, the round-faced woman beside her whispered, “Amen.”

Nella stood on her toes, hoping Sister Rosa was here too. But no. She was banished to the rest home. The other white people looked like they were from up the hill. Some held signs.
STOP THE VIOLENCE
and
HATE BREEDS HATE
and pictures of guns with red lines through them. Near a bed of flowers with a statue of St. Francis in the middle, Hairy Boy had his arm around Turtle Girl. She was crying, and so were other girls Nella could tell were students.

The landslide. People from up the hill had come sliding down. Against the laws of physics, people from down the hill had come surging up. Nella’s neighborhood had gotten scraped away.

Father Gomez gave the microphone to a woman who introduced herself as their city councilwoman. Her voice was as clear as Father Gomez’s was muddled.

“My friends, we gather here tonight to mourn a young man who had all his life ahead of him. D’Lon dreamed of graduating from college. He dreamed of marrying the woman he loved, and making a home for the two little boys
who meant more to him than life itself. He dreamed of a future shining with possibilities.

“But those dreams have been cruelly snatched away. Now we will never know who D’Lon Andrews could have become, or what he could have accomplished.”

A man near Nella lowered his head into his hands. Someone behind her whispered a prayer.

“Yet another young, promising black man has gone to a violent, premature death. My friends, tonight we gather here in deepest sorrow and pain.”

A young woman and two little boys stood off to the side. D’Lon’s fiancée—Nella recognized her from TV. And those were the boys in the photograph shown so often. The older one, wearing a too-big football jersey, gripped his mother’s skirt. The younger, Vinny-sized one crouched to pick up something bright lying in the grass. A toy—it must have belonged to the Manzinis’ daughter. He looked at it with surprise and delight, like it fell from the sky just for him.

“We gather here tonight in sorrow, but not entirely in shock. We have seen tragedies like this far too many times before. Each time we hope and pray it will be the last time, and yet here we are again. How can we let this keep happening? How can we refuse to learn?” The councilwoman held out her arms. “This is a question we cannot afford to
continue asking. This is a question that we need to answer.”

All around Nella, people murmured. The bag of Nonni’s underwear and candy tried to slip from her arms but she caught it.

“My friends, D’Lon is gone, but tonight, I can hear his voice. While we falter and fumble for words, I hear him calling out to us. I hear him begging us to work together to eradicate prejudice and misunderstanding, and to replace them with equality and compassion.”

“Amen,” voices answered. “Amen!”

“I hear him asking us to mend these terrible divisions between us, and put a stop, once and for all, to violence. I hear him calling out,
Bury the hatred! Promise your children this will never happen again.
”

“Anthony doesn’t hate anyone,” Nella whispered.

Another hand touched her and made her jump, startled and afraid. But it was just a girl about her age, who held her lit candle to Nella’s unlit one. “Pass it on,” she said as the flame bent and leaped.

Nella turned and touched her candle to the next person’s. The flame passed from hand to hand, flickering in the dark, and now the choir was singing again, and everyone was joining in, voices rising and blending. Nella heard the voice of the girl beside her, and behind her another voice that twisted and twined upward till it burst on the
air like some great, fragrant flower. All around her, people sang.

This hymn Nella recognized. She could sing too, but her throat had gone dry. Instead, she turned around. Candle in one hand, Nonni’s underwear and candy in the other, Nella stumbled through the crowd. The singing was a powerful river rising all around her, trying to sweep her up. Looking back, she saw the Vinny-sized son playing with the toy he found. His Bobby-sized brother put a finger to his lips and frowned. Nella’s heart thunked against her ribs. Tears dimmed her eyes. Her feet pretzeled and she bumped into a man who caught her elbow.

“Sorry,” she said. “So sorry!”

She finally made her way out of the crowd, and there stood Angela. The streetlight fell across her face. Her skin was the color of a plant trying to grow where no sun reached. But most disturbing of all was her hair. It fell in a single uneven braid down her back. Her part was crooked. She stared at Nella’s candle.

“I . . .” Nella wanted to explain, but how could she? She didn’t understand herself. “I . . . I didn’t mean to go. I just, somehow I did.” She blew out the candle. “It’s not like I think . . . I know he didn’t mean it, Angela. I know he’d never.”

Angela looked tired, too tired to argue. Or maybe she
didn’t care anymore what Nella thought.

“Are you . . . are you okay?” Nella asked. Even for someone whose specialty was the wrong question, this was awful.

The singing faded away. Silence took over. People bowed their heads. The candles shone in the dark. The silence had a solid, impenetrable shape. Nella and Angela stood on the outside of it, looking in.

Or Nella did. When she turned around, Angela had disappeared.

At home, Mom and Dad were watching the news. They didn’t notice Nella hovering in the doorway, where she viewed the vigil all over again, this time through the eyes of the camera. It zeroed in on the fiancée’s stricken face, the son gripping his mother’s skirt. It showed the councilwoman raising her hands to the sky and saying she heard D’Lon’s voice still speaking. It showed an old man with tears rolling down his lined face.

It showed what it chose to and left out everything else.

“This neighborhood’s decades-old history of segregation and racial strife has come back to haunt it,” said the reporter, who tonight wore a black suit. Behind her, the crowd started to sing. “Meanwhile, civil rights groups are calling for stiffer charges against Anthony DeMarco Jr., who remains in jail.”

Dad clicked the remote. He sat rigid, staring at the blank screen, till Mom slipped her arm around him.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m here. I’m always here.”

Dad leaned into her and let his head rest on her shoulder. Mom rubbed his back and said soft, soothing things, the way she did to Nella and her brothers when they were scared or hurt. Seeing her father like that made Nella’s heart twist, and she was back in that crowd, surrounded by people she didn’t know, their beautiful, aching voices rising up to heaven, trying to push away what couldn’t be moved.

What the Statue of Jeptha A. Stone Would Say if It Could

M
y merry bird is unnaturally quiet.

It’s as if she perceives some disturbance in the celestial sphere.

NONNI, TIME TRAVELER

now

W
here was the pleasant lake of Pleasant Lake Nursing and Rehab Center? It couldn’t possibly be that muddy pond ringed with goose poop.

In the elevator, Dad took Nella’s hand, something he hadn’t tried to do in years.

Nella let him.

The hallway was crowded with food carts, an industrial floor washer, empty wheelchairs. When Nella glanced into the rooms, she saw bony bare feet at the ends of beds. In one doorway, a man or a woman, she couldn’t tell which, sat in a wheelchair and stared. Nella’s dread deepened.

Dad still held her hand, and she was glad.

“Grarrr,” said Nonni. “Waa gwaa.”

Like a hawk flapping a broken wing. A powerful witch who’d forgotten her spells. One side of Nonni’s face still drooped, though not as badly. She made more noises. A chair scraping the floor, or distant geese honking—that was what it sounded like, not words.

How could Nella tell she wanted water? How could she understand? She just could, the same way Bobby understood Vinny. She reached for the plastic pitcher on the bedside table, but Nonni shook out more garbled sounds. Nella knew: the water was too warm. An aide pointed her toward the lounge where there was a refrigerator. The ball game played on a TV, and a man in a ball cap snored on the couch in front of it. Nella stalled as long as she could, not wanting to go back. Nonni helpless was way worse than Nonni furious.

Dad looked relieved to see her. Nella put the straw to her great-grandmother’s dry lips. Without her lipstick, she was so colorless she all but disappeared into the pillow. No way she was going to accuse Nella of anything. She was much too weak. Maybe she couldn’t even remember what happened.

Her hand on the covers was a map, her veins twisting blue rivers. Nella watched her eyelids flutter, and hoped she
was dreaming of somewhere else. Perching in the persimmon tree with her brother, Carlo, or grinding up spices for homemade sausage. Nella hoped Nonni was time traveling, far away from this place.

“I couldn’t understand a word out of her,” Dad said in the car. His voice was choked with sadness.

Nella remembered what he said about Vinny.
Words don’t matter
. But he was wrong. Without words, you were only partly connected. Too much had to stay locked inside.

A voice. Nella had never known how much having a voice mattered.

THIS VOICE INSIDE

then

E
nglish is a ridiculous language,” Nella said. It was an afternoon a few months after she and Clem had met. “Like infinite and infinitesimal. One means huge and the other means microscopic. How can that be?”

Clem, doodling in a sketchbook, shrugged.

“What are words, anyway?” Nella went on. “If you listen to a language you don’t know, it’s pure gibberish. Just vowels and consonants arranged in senseless, random ways. The only reason it makes sense is because people decide it does. Otherwise it’s just noise!”

Clem sat up, interested now. “Like time,” she said.
“Like how we keep trying to measure it and calculate it, when it’s the most slippery, mysterious thing that exists.”

“You know what else makes no sense?” Nella was on a roll. “God having no beginning and no end. I get the no ending—that’s what heaven is. But it’s impossible to have no beginning.”

“That one’s easy.” Clem’s pencil traced a circle in the air. “Think of a toy train track that goes round and round so you can’t tell where it starts and where it ends.”

“God is not a toy train track!”

“Chill!” Clem grinned. “I’m not insulting God!”

Where did Nella’s questions come from? Did everyone have this voice inside, asking questions? But people were so different. It couldn’t be the same voice. Everyone’s must be programmed differently, like the GPS voice. But where did it
come from
? Whose voice was it, really, popping up when you didn’t expect, causing trouble and confusion? Coming from you but not being you?

More questions. Questions about questions. It was hopeless.

WITH A CAPITAL F

now

T
he autopsy report said that D’Lon Andrews died of a bullet wound to the abdomen. It also showed head injuries, probably from the car crash. The report said those injuries could account for his confusion and erratic behavior.

Clustering in the steamy midsummer air outside church, batting away mosquitoes at the bocce court, leaning across the tables at the social club, people talked. Business was down the tubes. The restaurants were half empty. Nobody wanted a Little Italy T-shirt, a Perry Como CD, a baby bib that said
Mangia!
, or a doormat
that said
Ciao!
It was as if the neighborhood had a bad smell. The Manzinis’ front lawn was covered with candles and stuffed animals and bunches of wilted flowers. Protesters stood outside the DeMarco house all day, holding signs, praying and singing and sometimes shouting. One morning the telephone poles were plastered with signs:
BOYCOTT RACISM
. The smoke shop guys tore them down and ripped them to bits.