Her head was pounding now. What should she do? Clothes. She dug through her drawers for something little girls could wear, finally thought to take short pants and T-shirts from Richie and Artie’s drawer in the hallway. They were about the right sizes for Barbie; everything was too big for Pam but would have to do.
What now?
Oh, if Mamma were here—but she wasn’t.
Stella led the girls downstairs, sat them at the kitchen table. Mickey’s car still wasn’t back. Stella made the girls sandwiches, mayonnaise and slices of American cheese. She made one for herself, too, and they ate in silence. Stella’s mouth was so dry, she struggled to swallow. She wanted to pour herself a glass of wine but not before she figured out what to do about her father.
“I have to go back across the street now, just for a minute,” she told the two little girls. “You stay here at my house, okay?” They nodded. “You can watch television, or you can play in the backyard”—play—she shuddered—“or whatever you want, but youstayat my house. All right?”
They nodded again.
Not sure if she was doing the right thing—leaving the girls all alone, or letting her father escape his bad deed, they both seemed equally wrong—Stella stormed back across Alder Street to number 4. Waves of guilt washed through her, so distracting they folded the world around her into an unknowable haze. Stella could have left Pammy in the hallway, she didn’t have to bring the poor little thing with her into Tony’s bedroom when she went barreling in—could have spared her that much at least. She hadn’t had to turn on the light, seal Barbie and Pammy both in the burn of that image. How bad was Stella, running them across the street with bare bottoms for all the world to see. They were tiny, but they had feelings and shame. Her mind began to tick through the long list of shames she had never been able to shake off in her fifty years, and suddenly, for the first time in a long time, she had an urge to pray to God, pray that she hadn’t given them a shame they would never shake off.
Stella banged her way through the house, slamming doors open and closed again, barging into the bathroom. Her father was nowhere; there was no one there at all. The television buzzed in the living room, the sickly fake cheerful thing in this miserable house. There was no one in the basement, or the backyard or even the shed.Where had he gone, the ugly bastard? It wasn’t like he could drive away.
Stella went back to her house to sit nervously with the little Fortuna girls. They watched television and Stella stared out the window at the house across the street, waiting for either Mickey or Tony to come home.
JANICE WAS TEN MINUTES LATEfor her shift. As soon as she had punched in, Bernie ran for the parking lot. Gardener’s was only a few blocks away from Alder Street, but she had a car—Nino’s old Chevy, which he’d given to her to use until he was back from Vietnam—and when you’re sixteen and you have a car you drive it everywhere. She raced home, to the extent that one can race without disrespecting any traffic regulations, and pulled the car directly into her grandfather’s driveway.
She found him sitting on the weird cement back porch he’d poured that year he was going through his cement phase. His legs dangled off the side like a kid about to jump into a swimming pool.
“Where is my dog?” Bernie put her hands on her hips. “You tell me right now.”
“How shoo’ I know?” The set of the old man’s mouth was defensive through his pepper-gray three-day stubble.
“Where. Is. My dog.”
He made a heavy-handed flapping gesture. Her concern was misplaced, inconsequential.
“Where.”
“I take care of her,” Antonio said.
A stone formed in Bernie’s stomach. “What do you mean, you took care of her?”
“You don’t have to worry about her no more.”
“What did you do.”
The heavy wave again. His face was unhappy, though. “I take her far away, leave her where she can’t come back. Maybe someone else find her.”
Bernie was so angry she shouted. “Where?”
“Far away. Too far you find.”
She took a step toward him and, almost of its own accord, her hand shot out and pinched at a flap of flesh on the side of his neck, under his ear. She felt his thyroid contract under her thumb as he groaned in surprise. “You’re going to show me,” she said. As he reached out with his big hands to overpower her, she pinched harder and he gasped in pain. “Now. You get in my car right now.”
Bernie had no idea why he listened to her—she was strong for a seventeen-year-old girl, but her Grandpa Tony was an ox of a man, even into his seventies, and could have made her regret her attempt at coercion. But he stood and walked obediently to the driveway, pressed himself into the passenger seat.
The drive was more than an hour of highway and then winding streets toward the southeast Connecticut shore. They drove in silence punctuated only by Bernadette’s hatred and her grandfather’s blustery driving directions. The old man had never learned to drive a car, but he never forgot a street. They turned off the hedged lanes of hilly beachside neighborhoods, Bernie slowing to a crawl in the small-town traffic of summer tourists heading toward the beach or home for lunch. In the end, Tony pulled them off onto a dirt path running through the wetland reeds toward Long Island Sound.
“Here?” Bernie said.
“Around here.”
“Why theheckwould you leave her here?” For Bernie, “heck” was swearing.
He’d been out this way with his friend Sandro, who owned a construction company and sometimes had Antonio do day jobs. Sandro had picked Tony up on Tuesday morning—it must have been just after Bernadette left for work—and in a fit of inspiration Antonio had grabbed that damn dog and brought her on the ride to the construction site. Sandro had pulled over here, in this marsh, and Antonio had left the dog on the side of the road.
