Gingersnap (10 page)

“I can pay for the wood,” I said.

“No, you can’t. I’m trying to do everything right. I’m trying to be a good person. I’ve been doing that from the day Frank joined the army. I thought that it would count to get him home, to get them all home, back where they belong.”

“Not displaced anymore,” I said.

She nodded. “Exactly.”

She leaned over the counter. “He has our good-luck
charm with him, a little ring. It’s mine. He wears it on a chain around his neck.”

“Do you think that made a difference?”

I saw a flash of tears in her eyes. “Maybe not. But if he believed it would bring him luck, I hoped it would make him strong.”

I had a quick thought, and then it was gone.

Andrew was jumping up and down now, holding his thumb. “Splinters all over this wood. You’d think the owner would get rid of them.”

“You would.” Millie dragged a pile to the front of the store. “Put it on my bill,” she told her mother. “I’ll pay you when I’m forty.”

“I don’t believe it.” Her mother winked at me.

Andrew pulled a wagon from the storeroom. We loaded on the wood; then we zigzagged back up Eighth Avenue. “We’ll hammer these up all over the place,” Andrew said. “The fence will be a marvel. People will come to see it all the way from the North Pole.”

“Bringing their polar bears down here with them,” Millie said.

“Hope they’re on leashes,” I said, grinning at them.

We turned onto Carey Street, dragging the wagon, and dumped the wood into the alley. The noise was spectacular. Elise came outside, her hands up to her cheeks.

“Early tomorrow,” Andrew said. “We can only take one day off from school.”

“Ah, no,” Millie said. “It will have to be the day after. I’m in a play tomorrow.”

Elise frowned a little. “The next day is a school holiday?”

“You might say that,” Andrew told her.

They ran back down the alley, the wagon wheels grating. Elise went back into the bakery, and I kept thinking about Coney Island and my suitcase. I touched the stone in my pocket. “Bring me luck,” I whispered, not really believing it. “Or make me strong. I have to find that recipe book.”

I
spent part of the morning with Mr. Ohland, who read aloud from a small book he’d found in the library. It was about the Great War, Elise’s war.

Afterward, I went to the stationery store to call Celine. She was back to her old self, talking about how much she had to do, veering off to ask if I was behaving, helping my grandmother, and trying to be a lady.

I said yes to everything, staring out at Carey Street.

When we hung up, I went back to the kitchen, where Elise was preparing a jelly roll.

“I’m going to wander a little,” I said. “I’m going to see Brooklyn, if that’s all right.”

See Coney Island
.

Look for the recipe book
.

Elise took the tray to the stove. “Be careful. Don’t get lost.”

“Not displaced,” I said, smiling at her. “Not yet, at least.”

I took the subway, standing near the door, swaying with the movement of the train. What was it that Andrew’s mother, Mrs. Smith, had said, leaning over the counter? Was it something I should know about? Something I should remember about a ring?

Whatever it was, was almost there, but it just wouldn’t come to me.

My mind veered to the suitcase.

If only I could find it.

I got off at the Coney Island stop and walked the few blocks toward the boardwalk. On the beach, I picked up shells, running my fingers over them, then dropped them back gently onto the sand. A seagull swooped low over the water, wings outstretched, fishing.

I wandered around the curve of the sea. The waves were high and rough. Suppose Rob was on a raft? Something so small could easily turn over in an angry ocean. Oh, Rob.

I glanced over my shoulder at my footprints as they filled in with water. The waves left foam on the water’s edge; the tide was coming in, and the sand was pulled back into the sea.

I kept glancing up toward the boardwalk, trying to remember where I’d been, where I might see the suitcase again. All the benches looked the same.

I bent down, cupping my hands for a scoop of salty water and raising it to my face. An old man sat on a beach chair in front of me, reading the paper, war news printed huge and black on the front page:
Yanks fighting fiercely in Okinawa
.

I realized there was space under the boardwalk, enough room for a person to stand or sit. Enough room for a suitcase? I looked back across the beach at brown striped umbrellas, a half-finished sand castle, turned over beach pails.

Two women with kerchiefs covering their hair talked to each other as they walked along. I passed them and the sand castle. I went up toward the boardwalk, to that shady space underneath, and circled around an empty jar of Noxzema and a few broken bottles. There was an old orange beach blanket, faded and torn, but the suitcase wasn’t there. Of course it wasn’t. I kept walking along, looking underneath, the sand shifting under my feet. I found stray papers, magazines, and toys, but nothing of mine was there.

I went back up on the boardwalk and kept walking, searching. Where had I sat that first day?

How long ago it seemed.

And then, wedged under a bench, almost like a miracle, was the book, pages open and blowing a little in
the wind. I picked it up; it was thick with salt from the sea. Some of the ink had run. Whole pages were blurred; they’d disappeared in their own sea of blue ink.

The photograph was gone.

But at least I had the book. The suitcase didn’t matter. Everything I needed right now was here, the book and the stone girl in my pocket.

That was what Betty had said. Now I remembered. Her husband had carried the ring with him; he’d believed it would bring him luck.

I sat there looking out at those rough waves; no swimmers today, just rolling green water rising up and up, then folding back over itself.

Rob needed luck.

And I had our luck in my pocket.

“It’s our luck,” I called out over those waves. “I have it for you.”

He couldn’t hear me; I knew that. But would he be thinking of me? Would he be determined to stay alive so we’d be a family together? I kept touching the book.

But suppose …

Suppose he had that stone girl?

On the subway, I looked around for a lock of hair, for a pink sock, for soft hands. But she was nowhere. “Where are you when I need you?” I asked.

She didn’t answer.

I closed my mouth; a couple of kids were watching me, thinking I was talking to myself.

Maybe I was.

It was late in the afternoon now. The sun was just disappearing over the brownstone houses when I opened the back door to the bakery. My face was stiff from the salt air at the beach.

Elise sat in the kitchen, a pan of dough set to rise in the center of the table. She was looking at those papers of hers, bills, I supposed, working with a pencil and frowning.

I put the book in front of her on the table, the cover bent; the pages were sticky under my fingers. Her writing was there, though. She had to know it was hers.

She reached out and touched it gently, then my wrist.

“It’s good luck,” I said.

She opened her mouth to say something.

“Wait,” I told her. “I’ll make soup first.”

“Yes, and then we’ll talk.”

I went to the stove, smiling.

This was why I’d come to Brooklyn.

E
lise put her papers away in the small cabinet against the wall. Without speaking, we set the table together as we waited for the soup to thicken.

How could she not believe I was her granddaughter now?

But when I began to speak, she tilted her head the way she always did, holding up her hand. “Wait,” she said softly.

It wasn’t until the bread was cut into chunks and the soup was in bowls on the table that she began at last.

“It was a terrible war,” she said, “the Great War. We lived in a French village near Germany. Only a river
separated us from the German border and the fighting.”

She’d told me part of that before, but I listened to every word, my eyes on hers, hungry to hear, my spoon halfway to my mouth.

She closed her eyes for a moment. “In the early morning, when the sun was just coming up over the river, we heard the huge guns firing, coming closer. I remember my mother pulling off her apron.…”

My great-grandmother?

“She ran from the house to the stone barn, setting the cow free to wander, shooing the chickens away, while my father hitched our old horse to the cart. All the while they were shouting things to me: ‘Your warm coat, put it on.’ And to my brother …”

An uncle?

“ ‘Take the quilts from the beds. Bring them outside, spread them in the cart.’ ” She took a sip of the soup. “So good,” she said, almost whispering. “Potato soup.”

“Good-luck soup.” I took a sip from my bowl. The soup was hot and thick.

I pictured Elise at my age, shrugging into her coat, the braids that circled her head coming loose, and her brother …

“What was his name?”

She looked startled. It was almost as if she’d forgotten I was there.

“His name was Michael. He was a year younger than I was. He clattered from the bedroom in back, dragging the quilt I’d stitched with my mother. In the kitchen, I turned one way and then another, not knowing what to do. My mother called, ‘Take the eggs in a towel, the sausage in the larder.’ My hands were trembling, and as I pulled the bowl of eggs toward me, I dropped them. They spattered on the stone floor, all dozen of them, the brown shells in pieces, shards from the bowl everywhere.”

Just as I would have done, broken what was important. Elise nodded. To me? To herself? But I didn’t think she was remembering that I dropped things and broke them as well.

She began again. “I stepped through the pieces of the bowl, the slimy eggs, and reached for the sausage. I saw the cookbook I’d labored over from the time I was able to write.”

She reached out and touched the book that lay between us.

“The recipes I’d copied as my grandmother taught me how to work with yeast, how to roll dough,” she went on. “I couldn’t leave it. My dress had no pockets; neither did the coat I’d pulled over my shoulders. I wrapped the sausage in paper, tucked the paper parcel under my arm, and took the recipe book, too. All the time my mother was calling, ‘Come. Come now, children.’

“The army had reached our side of the river. The guns boomed, almost at our village. But I remembered my doll, called Lena, after my aunt who lived in Colmar. She was a sweet doll with a porcelain face and a cloth body. She wore the clothes I’d sewed for her, a long dress with a holiday apron, and a hat with feathers I’d plucked from our hen.”

I swallowed, putting my spoon down on the table, the soup cooling.

Elise was looking out the window that I’d washed, streaked again with flour. “How could I leave that doll?” she said. “I went back through the house, searching for her in the armoire, on the bed, and there she was on the windowsill, small and dainty, looking at me with her lovely glass eyes. I picked her up and ran, holding out the sausage package and the book to my brother in the cart.

“My father and mother were in front. ‘Hurry, hurry,’ they were calling, panic in their voices. I climbed up, ripping my coat, losing the doll’s hat with the feathers.