The Murderer's Daughters (13 page)

Merry sobbed, holding our father’s arm; he could do nothing but rest his head on Merry’s red hat. I grabbed the shovel from my stinking old cousin and placed the thin handle between my father’s shackled hands. Side by side, we walked to the edge of Grandma’s grave, Merry following. My father and I bent together, lifting up a clod of dirt and, clumsily with our four hands, guided the earth over the grave. Grandma’s casket sat dark and lonely at the bottom of the hole.

As one, we overturned the shovel and watched the dirt fall on the center of the coffin.

I handed the shovel to Merry. She dug in too far and came up with an oversize shovelful. I helped her lift it, and together we covered another piece of Grandma’s casket.

I’m sorry, Grandma.

“Time to go, Joey,” said my father’s keeper. The man had a surprisingly kind face, or maybe it was his thick-rimmed glasses. I confused glasses with kindness.

“Can’t I visit with the girls a little more, Mac?” My father looked like
he’d start crying any minute, making me want to pound my fist right into his chest. Merry clutched his jacket.

“Please,” Merry begged. “Stay longer.”

My father looked over at the guard, his eyes pleading like Merry’s.

“Sorry, Joey,” he said. “Time to go, buddy. Say good-bye to your dad, girls.”

My father tried to lift his arms to hug us, but his handcuffs held his hands prisoner.

“I love you a million, Daddy.” Merry wrapped her arms around his waist. He rested his locked hands on her head.

“I love you a trillion, sweetheart.” My father caught my eye. “I love you, Lulu.”

I shrugged.

“Look,” he said. “Just so you know and don’t feel bad later, I know you love me, too.”

I stared right into his stabbing, killing eyes. “You don’t know that.”

“Yes, he does,” Merry said, her head still buried in my father’s chest.

“Lulu, I’m your father,” he said. “You’ll never get another one.”

“I don’t have a father.”

“Yes, you do,” Merry said. “Daddy is our father.” She wouldn’t let go of him, locking her arms around him.

“Come on, Joey.” The guard tried to pull Merry away from our father, which made her hold on tighter.

“Don’t go, Daddy,” she said.

Daddy pushed Merry gently away, the fabric of his jacket stretching as she hung on. I had to end this. I put a hand on each of her arms.

“Let go,” I said. “Let go, or he’ll be in even worse trouble.”

Merry released her grip and fell back on me.

“Sorry, baby,” Daddy said to Merry. “I’m sorry.”

I grabbed Merry and forced her to turn around and start walking.

“You’ll be okay, baby,” Daddy yelled. The guard touched my father’s head as he helped him into the car.

Mama had died almost four years ago, and I didn’t even remember where she was buried.

A shandeh un a charpeh.

Uncle Irving and Cousin Budgie were heading back to our limousine. We trailed behind them, ready for the drive back to Brooklyn. I turned around, stretching to see where Grandma was.

I’m sorry, Grandma.

I still thought about Grandma every day, even though she’d died nine months ago.

December was almost over; in a few days it would be 1976.

Lulu and I were leaving Duffy, and I was scared.

I’d never packed before. I folded my shirt exactly as Grandma had taught me when I helped her do the laundry, crossing each sleeve across the chest and making a tidy shirt package. Then I placed it in Grandma’s beat-up brown suitcase. Why Grandma had a suitcase, I had no idea. She never went anywhere until she died.

I smoothed down my bright blue poncho. The poncho had become my most treasured item of clothing the minute Mrs. Cohen gave it to me for Chanukah.

Nobody had bothered me since they found out about Mrs. Cohen and us. It was as if we were magic all of a sudden. Even Reetha left me alone. Sometimes she even gave me this scary, sugary smile that showed all her yellow teeth, like she thought maybe I’d take her with me.

As if.

I wished I could take Janine and Crystal. We promised each other that we’d always be friends, but Lulu said don’t bet on it.
They’re not going to take you back here after you leave,
she told me.
Especially since Mrs. Cohen won’t be working at Duffy anymore.

I wondered how soon they would be here, Mrs. Cohen and her husband. Lulu and I didn’t know what to call them, so we usually ended up referring to them as “they.” Now that we’d be living with them, we needed to figure out better names.

Thinking about moving into their house made me feel like I had to pee. Questions looped through my head.
How could I be good every minute? What would we do in their house? How long would the Cohens like me?

Lulu stuck her head into my room. “You ready? They’ll be here soon.” She marched over to my side of the dorm, dropped the paper bag she carried, and immediately began checking the stripped bed for anything I might have forgotten and inspecting each of the rickety dresser drawers.

“I’m scared,” I said.

“You sure you have everything?” Lulu knelt, looked under the bed, then got up and dusted off her jeans, which were so long the fashionably shredded bottoms swept the floor. Visible iron springs squeaked as Lulu sat on the thin, bare mattress, bringing her knees to her chin and circling them with her long arms. Lulu got taller, cooler, and smarter each month, while I stayed shrimpy. I needed to grow up. I wanted to rise to the occasion of this most important moment of my life. Mrs. Cohen had to be happy that she took me. The Cohens needed to like me, to love me.

“How long do you think they’ll let us stay?” I asked.

Lulu scowled. “I don’t know and I’m not asking. You just have to be good. If they let us stay for three years, then I’ll be over eighteen, and I can take care of you.” Lulu removed my hand from my chest, where I’d been tracing my scar. “
Really
good,” she emphasized. “We can’t make any trouble for them.”

“Aren’t they taking us so they can take care of us?”

“They’re old. Mrs. Cohen is even retiring.”

“She’s not that old.”

“God, Merry, she’s like sixty. Sixty! If she were our real mother, she would have given birth to you at like fifty.”

Lulu stuffed my collection of Nancy Drew books—her old ones—into Grandma’s suitcase. “Mrs. Cohen feels bad for us—but she won’t keep us if we cause them trouble. Doctor Cohen won’t let her.” She gave me the same slit-eyed look I swore I remembered getting from Mama. “They’re not adopting us; we’re just foster children.”

Lulu pushed the bag of framed photos she’d brought into my room on top of everything else in Grandma’s suitcase. I’d taken them from Grandma’s house when Uncle Irving took us there and said,
whatever you want is yours.
I didn’t know what else to take. The heavy chopper with the worn wooden handle that Grandma always used to make egg salad? The thick maroon blanket on her bed? Lulu saw me examining everything and said, “The Cohens will think you’re crazy if you walk in with a bag of Grandma’s old stuff,” so I just took some pictures, and Lulu kept them safe from Reetha for me.

I wished I’d taken something Grandma had held, though. Something I could touch and feel her.

The biggest photograph showed Daddy on their wedding day. Mama wasn’t in the picture. Daddy’s teeth were perfect Chiclets, his hair slicked back. He was the handsomest man I’d ever seen.

Daddy held me high on his shoulders as Coney Island wind whipped our hair. I looked like a miniature teenager in a tiny bikini. That was the summer before Mama died. Daddy used to sing the itsy-bitsy bikini song, substituting red polka dot for yellow, because my bathing suit had red dots. Grandma had laughed when I said that. “How could you remember that?” she’d said. “You were just a little
pishkelah.
”

I didn’t care if no one believed me. It was one of my favorite memories, and I hardly had any memories of Mama, even though I missed her every single day.

“Do me a favor, Merry,” Lulu said. “Don’t put the pictures all over your room at the Cohens’, okay? Put them away.”

Living with the Cohens never felt easy. After almost a year, I knew how to be good, almost perfect, but I kept worrying that, at some point, I’d forget.
Lulu kept reminding me how one minute of forgetting could mean disaster.

I walked home from school kicking the blowing October leaves around. Central Park leaves, Manhattan leaves, were prettier than Brooklyn’s.

I usually walked the five blocks home from school with my best friend, Katie, but she had a cold and had missed school. Walking alone was okay; just knowing I had a friend kept me company. Plus, I needed to figure stuff out, like how I was ever going to see Daddy again.

I ran my hand down the brand-new coat Mrs. Cohen had bought me at Bloomingdale’s, where it felt as though I were in a museum, with everything under glass, sparkling in bright white light. The day we bought the coat, Mrs. Cohen kept hugging me as we walked around the store, both of us touching silky shirts, admiring gold lockets and watches.

Anne.

Mom.

Mrs. Cohen.

I still didn’t have a clue what to call her.

The night Lulu and I moved in, Mrs. Cohen had said, “Call me Anne,” and a few weeks later, she’d said, “You can call me Mom if you like,” in a wishing kind of voice, but when I tried it out, it sounded stupid. The Cohens’ real children, who were grown-ups with little kids of their own, looked sour and angry when they heard me call her Mom. Most of all, I couldn’t do it because I thought Mama would be mad.

Even if I’d wanted to call Mrs. Cohen Mom, which sometimes I sort of did, then I’d have to call Doctor Cohen Dad, but he hadn’t asked, and anyway, I still had a real father. So now, I didn’t call either of them anything, which made conversations hard. Grandma would have said this should be the worst thing that ever happened. She’d’ve told me to stop thinking so much.

I tugged my coat closer, shielding out the wind.

Thinking about my father made everything feel swimmy. Even with Katie, I had to pretend Daddy was dead. Lulu had given me orders, before we started at our new school.

“I have something to tell you,” Lulu had begun, acting as though I might throw a fit, which I never did anymore. “When we start school, you’re not
allowed to say anything about our father or jail or our mother or anything.” This had all come out in one fast breath of a sentence.

“Who said? Them?” “Them,” of course, was the Cohens.

“I say.” Lulu had held her hand out when I squawked. “I’m not going to be Murder Girl anymore and neither are you. Understand?”

I’d started crying, quietly though, so Mrs. Cohen didn’t come in all upset and wanting to know what was happening.

Lulu had poked me in the shoulder. “Quit it.”

“Ouch.”

“Listen to me.” She’d put her hands on my shoulders. “This is our story: Our parents died in a car crash. That’s it. They crashed upstate. Driving to the Catskills. We lived with Mimi Rubee until she died. We went to Duffy because we had no other relatives. Now we’re here. That’s that.”

Lulu was all I had. I obeyed her no matter what.

Sooner than I’d wanted, I reached the Cohens’ large white apartment building on West Eighty-seventh Street. The doorman, Dominic, nodded and smiled just as he always did when opening the door. I usually thought about Dominic in the last few steps before turning down our block. How I had to smile and make sure he didn’t think I was spoiled or taking him for granted or anything. I hated having a doorman.

After grinning and thanking him, I ran to the waiting elevator and pressed the button for six, feeling the familiar whoosh as it went up. I put my key in the door, praying no one was home. By myself, I could snoop around and not worry if I was being good or bad.

“Merry?” Mrs. Cohen walked out from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a blue-checked dish towel. “Guess who’s here!”

I tried not to show my feelings. “Eleanor?” I asked. Mrs. Cohen’s daughter acted like something stunk whenever she saw me. At least Mrs. Cohen’s son just pretended I didn’t exist.