Lily's Crossing (7 page)

Chapter 14

I
t was late on Monday night. Still in shorts and a shirt, Lily lay under her red quilt looking up at the sky. She could see Orion’s Belt, and the
W
of Cassiopeia. They were sharp and clear among the other stars in the dark sky. It was a beautiful night, and finally she and Albert were going to watch for convoys.

She thought about it a little uneasily. They hadn’t talked about Lily’s going to Europe since that day at the beach. Maybe he had forgotten, she told herself, or maybe he had thought it over by now and knew she had been lying.

She turned in the bed, trying to put it out of her mind. Everything was ready for tonight, on the floor. A sweater, two towels, her sneakers tucked in one side of her beach bag, and two bottles of soda jammed into the other side.

If only Gram would go to sleep. Vaguely she heard Gram’s radio, the end of
Lux Radio Theatre
, and then music. “Would you like to swing on a star?” She couldn’t keep her eyes open.

Then suddenly she was awake, wide awake. It seemed very late, midnight, maybe one o’clock. Gram’s radio was off, and all the lights. Lily reached for the screen and pushed it up and out.

She dropped into the rowboat and pushed herself along under the porches. In the light that spilled out from the les of Mrs. Colgan’s blackout shades, she could see a mess of sand crabs hanging on to the pilings.

And at the Orbans’, just silence. She sat there as wide awake as if it were the middle of the morning, so angry at herself for sleeping, so disappointed Albert was asleep, she could have cried.

“Too much crying,” she said aloud.

“Too much talking to yourself,” a voice said, so close she jumped.

Albert dropped into the boat. He was clumsy and splashed water in over the side. “Because of the cat,” he said.

She leaned over until she could see the cat’s face, its eyes peering out from the front of his open jacket. “Cats hate the water.”

“This one does not. I thought you would not come.”

She opened her mouth, ready to lie, but raised one shoulder instead. “I fell asleep.”

Albert nodded. “It is hard to stay awake sometimes.”

Lily pushed the boat out from under the porches. “Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll cut across the bay. That way we can stay away from the surf.”

“But it is closer the other way.”

“Yes, but it’s harder to fight the surf than the bay. If you’re going far you want to save your arms.”

He nodded, watching her pull on the oars.

“Will you teach me to swim?” he asked after a while.

She blinked. She had been thinking again about Poppy . . . Poppy on a troop ship watching her swim toward him. It was a wonderful dream. “Swim?” she repeated. “Yes. But why can’t you swim?”

“I did not have an ocean,” he said. Like Margaret in Detroit, she thought.

“I had a river, the Danube.” He leaned forward. “It runs between Buda and Pest, but the river is not blue like the waltz. It is gray, and sometimes silver.”

Lily didn’t say anything. She had never heard of Budapest split up that way in two halves. She’d heard of “The Blue Danube,” though. It was one of the songs in her music book for the piano.

It was hard to row now. The marshes were closing in around them, and there was the dry rustle of the reeds hitting the sides of the boat and scraping the bottom.

She could see Playland now in back of them on Ninety-ninth Street, the roller coaster, a dark skeleton, and the Ferris wheel rising up behind it. In front, the boardwalk was misty, the tall lights painted black toward the sea, so German subs couldn’t spot ships in the water nearby.

“How long?” Albert asked.

“Long?”

“To learn to swim.” He leaned forward. “I want to go with you to Europe.”

She opened her mouth. Tell him right now, she told herself. Tell him it’s just too far, the water’s too rough.

“Lily?”

She sighed. “You could never learn to swim the Atlantic in a summer. It would take months, years to be good enough, fast enough.”

“If you can do it . . .”

“I’ve been swimming since I was four,” she said. “And remember that afternoon when I went into the surf after you, I was nearly swept under.”

He didn’t answer.

She took a breath, trying to think of something to convince him. “You even said you thought I was a better swimmer.”

In the dark she could just see him shaking his head. “I know you are a good swimmer,” he said slowly. “I know you were coming for me.” He stopped for a moment. “I was . . . I don’t know the word . . .”

How could she tell him the truth now? He was the first friend she had ever made. You couldn’t count Margaret . . . Margaret, who had been in Rockaway every summer from the time they could walk, from the time they could talk. Albert, a friend, a good friend, Lily’s best friend.

“ ‘Teasing’ is the word,” he said.

She looked at him. His face was so serious. One hand was in his jacket, petting the sleeping cat. “You do not want to take me,” he said. “You think I will not be able to keep up.”

“No, it isn’t that. Really,” she said.

“You think I am a coward because of the plane that day.”

She kept shaking her head.

He leaned forward. “It was just that I was thinking it was Europe.” His lip trembled a little. “In Budapest, we had a yellow house with birds.” He moved his fingers. “They were small birds. Blue ones painted on the house, painted on the window shutters. I had an orange cat too, we called him Paprika, after the pepper. He looks like this cat.” He tried to smile. “And my grandmother, Nagymamma, was always telling me to do this and that, like your grandmother.”

Lily bit her lip, trying to think of what to say.

“I have only Ruth left. Ruth is my family.” He stopped then, and pointed. “Look.”

She turned and saw it too. The first ship looked like flat chunk of coal on the water, so far out she wasn’t even sure it was a ship. But then a second one appeared on the horizon, moving out of the mist. It was a huge ship, its top tangle of turrets and masts.

For a moment, they didn’t say anything. They sat there watching, the rowboat rocking gently, until the ship disappeared into the mist again.

“That was a troop ship,” she said at last.

Albert leaned back. “Yes,” he said, “I know. I will learn to swim, Lily, to keep up, and we will go out there, out to a ship. And then I will go back to Europe to find Ruth.”

She began to row again, turning the boat toward the canal, her mouth dry.

Chapter 15

T
here were two letters the next day, one from Poppy and one from Margaret. Lily managed to pick them up from the mailman before he even hit Cross Bay Boulevard. She’d been waiting on the corner for more than an hour, watching the street as far down as she could see, wondering if Margaret had gotten the letter she had sent. She had told her about Albert and the cat he was calling Paprika.

Lily yawned, tired from last night. Even after she had tiptoed through the dark kitchen at two or three in the morning and slipped under the red quilt again, she hadn’t been able to sleep. She had tossed from one side to the other, thinking about the troop ship, and Poppy, and what she could possibly do about the lie she had told Albert.

Now she took the letters and went straight to Margaret’s house, past the bedroom where Paprika slept now, a small orange circle on Eddie’s pillow. She climbed the attic stairs and shoved up the window as high as it could go, then took a quick look at the beach. It was still empty t this hour of the morning, litter baskets clean, the sand smooth and even. She had time, plenty of time. She wanted to stretch out this moment with two letters to read. It would be like sucking on a red LifeSaver until it melted into a thin little circle.

She looked at them both, Margaret’s as filthy as the first letter she had sent. But this time it was in ink that was blotted and watery as if drops had been spattered on it.

Her father’s letter was much neater, much cleaner, and is beautiful clear writing said “Miss Elizabeth Mary Mollahan.”

Lily slid her fingernail under the flap and slid out the tissue-paper letter.

“Lily,” it began. “My dearest daughter.”

She closed her eyes, and held the letter her father had held in his own hands just a few days ago.

She read the rest of it quickly, so fast the words ran together. He never mentioned that she hadn’t said goodbye. He never said that he minded, or didn’t mind, only about the war being over, and everything the same again.

I have a picture of you in my head as clear as a photograph to take with me overseas. You’re in the boat, and frowning, staring at a skate fish just before you set him free. By the time you read this, Lily Billy, I’ll be on my way across the ocean, the faster there, the faster home.

She thought her heart would stop. Her father out there, crossing the Atlantic, part of a convoy, maybe even on the troop ship she and Albert had seen last night.

She couldn’t even think about it. She looked at the end of the letter.

Hug the waves for me, and the beach on 101st Street.

And then at the very bottom,

Hug Gram too. She loves you, Lily, more than you know.

Lily wiped her eyes. It was a good thing she had Margaret’s letter to think about next, and not having to give Gram a hug.

She looked back at Poppy’s letter. At the very bottom he had written:

Don’t forget to finish those books
, Madeline,
and
A Tale of Two Cities,
and especially
The Three Musketeers.

Lily frowned. Strange that Poppy had written that. He had read
Madeline
to her a hundred years ago, when she was six. How could he have forgotten? And he didn’t know she was reading
The Three Musketeers
. She had just taken it from the library on Thursday.

She put her father’s letter down carefully near the chimney and opened Margaret’s. It started out in the strangest way. No opening, the way Sister Eileen had taught Lily in school. No “Dear Lily.” Just

Please go in my living room and get Eddie’s picture. Send it right away even if you have to ask your grandmother for the money. Tell her I’ll pay her back when the war is over. I can’t member what Eddie looks like and now he’s missing in action, isn’t it strange, on a beach. It was on D-Day. The telegram didn’t come until this morning. He never even got any of the candy.

Margaret

Lily sat there for another minute; then she went down the stairs feeling so dizzy it seemed her feet didn’t even touch the steps. She went into the Dillons’ living room and reached for Eddie’s picture. Her hands were shaking and she knocked it off the table, grabbing it before it hit the floor. Nice catch, Lily, Eddie would say.

Then she was out the door and down the street. She couldn’t wait to find Gram, to tell her this awful thing that had happened to Eddie Dillon, to ask for wrapping paper and stamps for the picture.

She went down the road and in the back door, but before she could begin, Gram had started. “Change your clothes, Lily, and get your hat,” she said. “Mrs. Colgan told me that Eddie Dillon is missing and—”

“How does she know?” Lily asked.

Gram put her hand up to her mouth. “A phone call all the way from Willow Run to Mrs. Tannenbaum’s candy store. We’re on our way to church . . . a special Mass, and we’re going to pray as hard . . .” She took a breath. “We’re all praying, I guess, the whole world, that this will be over soon.” She blinked back tears. “And right now, we’re going to pray for Eddie, and your father, and Albert’s family, and everyone who—” She broke off.

Lily put Eddie’s picture on the table next to the couch and went onto the porch to find her Sunday clothes, even though it wasn’t Sunday.

Just ten minutes later, she was walking into church, stopping for a quick dip of holy water, and sliding into a pew next to Gram.

As she knelt there and waited for Father Murphy to begin, the sun blasted in around the partly opened stained-glass windows. It felt as if it must be a hundred degrees. The fan in front didn’t do any good. It just moved the fringe a little on the banner that hung over their heads.

Father Murphy had hung the banner there himself. On its white background were rows of blue stars, one for each of the men from the parish who were in the service. There was one gold star in the middle. That was for a sailor who used to live near the Cross Bay Theatre. He had been killed at Pearl Harbor. And now, in a day or two, there’d be a silver star for Eddie Dillon, who was missing, lost somewhere on a beach in France, and no one knew if they’d ever find him.

Lily tried to imagine what it must feel like to be Eddie, to have been taken prisoner by the Germans, maybe, or just somewhere by himself, hurt.

It was a desert in that church. She lifted the brim of her straw hat away from her head and fanned the air with her hymnbook, watching Mrs. Orban come up the aisle with Albert, until Gram gave her a poke.

In a moment Father Murphy was out on the altar beginning the Mass, and Lily began to pray for Eddie, and then for Poppy. She prayed for Albert’s sister too, and his grandmother.

Next to her, Gram took her silver rosary beads out of their case, and on her other side, Mrs. Colgan opened her missal.

Lily leaned back against the pew, thinking how thirsty she was. She was dying for a glass of orange soda, or maybe a peach with juice dripping. If Mass didn’t end soon, and she didn’t get something to drink . . .

Gram was looking at her, frowning, so she started to pray again. She prayed for everyone she could think of, even Sister Eileen.

She looked at the stained-glass window. Outside, everything was red or orange or yellow. And inside were the sounds of the fan whirring and feet shuffling. Maybe they’d find Eddie. Maybe he had just gotten mixed up and had to find his way back, or maybe they had made a mistake and some other Eddie was lost.

She sat up straight. She had just thought of something. Eddie’s picture. She had left it on the table next to the couch in the living room. How was she going to explain to Gram where she had gotten it? What would Gram say if she knew Lily had been in and out of the Dillons’ empty house? Gram would say plenty. Lily’d be in trouble for the rest of the summer. And she’d never get back into Margaret’s house until the end of the war.

She tried to figure out what to do. She could feel her heart pounding at the thought of Gram reaching for that picture when they got home. She wondered if Gram had seen her put it down. Gram always saw everything she didn’t want her to.

But if she hadn’t, if Lily could get to the living room first, she could grab up the picture, and then . . .

And then what? She didn’t have a cent since the tan purse had sunk in the water. How was she going to send it?

And right now, kneelers were banging back and people were standing. Mrs. White was playing the organ, and everyone was singing “Holy God, We Praise Thy Name.”

Lily edged herself out of the pew almost before they finished singing. “See you,” she whispered to Gram. And before Gram could answer, Lily had ducked ahead of Mrs. Colgan and the other people going down the aisle. She took another quick dip of holy water and raced for home.