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Boston, Massachusetts, 1940

Ella meets me at the bus station. She might be my half-sister, but she looks wholly happy to see me. She folds me in her arms straightaway and says, “Welcome.”

My feet and my behind still vibrate from the engine’s constant rhythm. It’s a relief to be on solid ground again.

“I’m glad you made it. How was the bus ride?”

“Good, I guess.” Not that I have anything to compare it to. “I’m glad it’s done.” I tell her about the old guy I talked to. I don’t tell her what we saw.

Ella keeps her arm around me, walking us along the sidewalk toward her car. She’s strong and tall and warm. I’m tired from the long road, and it almost seems like I can lean on her and rest. But the cacophony of the city around me is too exciting. I’m folded into more than Ella’s embrace; I’m a part of Boston now.

The city is alive. More than alive — it’s hopping, thriving, breathing. Never have I seen so many people at one time. It’s a Sunday afternoon, and folks are dressed up in their churchgoing fineness. Women in neat knee-length dresses with delicate hats or large sculpted curls in their hair. Men in dapper suits of all colors and neatly brimmed hats. Children scampering everywhere, enjoying the summer sunshine. We drive past a park, nestled right among the tall buildings, and I can hear laughter as the youngsters run and jump and play.

Up until now, I thought Lansing was a big city. But here, there are stores for every kind of thing you can imagine. Dress shops and tailors. Haberdashers and cleaners. Groceries and fruit stands and butcher shops and bakeries. Shoe stores with windows chock-full of the latest fashions, with people clustered on the sidewalks peering in to see what’s new. We pass tobacco shops and jewelry dealers and movie theaters with grand marquees ten feet high. Nightclubs and bars and restaurants, too, with glittering metal signs, or ones made out of lightbulbs so that they’ll glow in the dark. Department stores with a whole city block of windows, full of appliances and clothing and knickknacks and things whose purpose I can’t even guess.

I try to read every sign, every message scrawled in paint across a picture window, but there’s too much to see. Impossible in one sweep to take it all in. Through the open car windows waft the scents of food cooking. Each delightful whiff lingers for a second, and then it’s gone. Spicy tomatoey something. Fresh bread. Smoke from passersby’s cigarettes. Steam from the laundry vents. The fur of a wet dog I can’t even see. Something sweet and strong that makes my mouth water, like a swirl of cinnamon and sugar.

Everywhere there are signs for city buses and subway trains, going every which way. There are streetcar tracks here, too. It’s weird, but I didn’t expect there to be. I won’t ride those. I wish they weren’t even here, in my new life. I look away from them quickly, toward the things that are new and exciting.

Ella’s neighborhood is called Sugar Hill. It seems like a nice area. The people walking on the sidewalks are dressed well, and the sounds of the traffic and the commotion make everything seem alive and important.

Ella’s home is an impressive three-story house with a porch out front and a driveway for her car. The second floor has one of those three-sided windows sticking out. She leads me inside. The house smells good, like home cooking, with hints of Ella’s perfume. There’s a basement, too, so it’s four floors altogether. A big place.

Ella shows me my bedroom, a small rectangular room upstairs. “Why don’t you settle in while I get some dinner ready?”

“Thanks.”

She leans forward and kisses my cheek. It’s little things like that, all warm and familiar, that make me know I’m doing the right thing. This is where I’m supposed to be now. I’ve only met Ella one time before, but she really does feel like family.

Ella leaves me alone to unpack. In a room of my own, I can put my things anywhere I want.

Lansing, 1939

At first, when I learned Ella would visit us in Lansing, I didn’t know quite what to make of the news. Hilda told me that she’d written to Ella about Mom being taken away from us and committed to the center in Kalamazoo. I guess, being slightly older and having some measure of means, Ella wanted to help us.

Our half-siblings from Papa’s first marriage had always been something of a mystery to me, so I was curious to learn more about Ella, and Hilda brought her out to Mason to meet me. Ella took a special interest in me right away — Hilda must have mentioned some of my troubles in particular, since she was always concerned about me being separated from the family. Stealing chickens and swiping melons — the kinds of things we did to get by — had made me seem like a problem to the child-welfare people. My bigger pranks had been all in fun: moving outhouses to trick farmers and things like that. But I may have gone a little far when I put a thumbtack on my teacher’s seat during class. I had been expelled and was living at the Swerlins’ group home, where the welfare people sent the most troublesome boys. It was one step away from a real juvenile detention center. My sisters — Hilda and now Ella — felt like they needed to do something to get me back in line.

Ella looked every bit like a well-to-do city woman. Her black hair was coiled in waves around her head, beneath a pert, proper cream-colored hat. She wore leather gloves and a fur coat that looked warm. She was a tall woman with a strong presence. She seemed enormous to me, like Papa, so full of blackness.

She held her arms out to me, and I let myself be folded into her all-encompassing warmth. I hadn’t been hugged warm in such a long time. I pulled away early, because it made me feel a little too good, and I didn’t want to get accustomed to that kind of thing.

Hilda headed back to work, but Ella wanted to spend some time with me. “Let’s go see about your mother,” she said.

Ella took me into the car, and we rode the seventy miles to Kalamazoo. I peppered her with questions about Boston, the city I had only seen pictures of in magazines and newspapers. I couldn’t imagine much of anything outside of the Lansing area. Kalamazoo was certainly the farthest I’d been that I could remember, anyway. Our family had moved from Nebraska to Wisconsin to Michigan when I was a baby, but it was beyond my memory. This was the only world I knew.

“What’s the best thing about the city?” I asked her.

“Oh,” Ella said, gazing patiently at me. “Well, I suppose we have access to a great many things.” She glanced out the window, at the stores and houses flashing by. “And we live among friends.”

All of it sounded wonderful to me. Hard to imagine, but wonderful.

“You could come visit,” she said. “Maybe over the summer?”

“Really?” I asked.

“It’s quite a long ride,” she said. “But we would be very happy to have you.”

I tried to picture it, me going all the way to Boston. Hours and hours on the train or bus just to get there. And what would I find?

Going into the state hospital was easier having an adult with me. Last time we had visited, just us kids together, they had given us a hard time about getting in to see Mom. Ella, in her big black way, took charge and walked me in without a bit of fanfare.

She put her arm around my shoulders and eased me forward. It helped. I didn’t like how much it helped, so I shrugged away from her and went toward Mom on my own.

It was strange to see her. Strange because I spent my days now putting away thoughts of her. It was easy enough to lose myself in all the school things. Football. Class-presidential things. All the distractions that came along with being popular and adored.

She was draped in a white-and-green gown made of thin fabric, its loose folds billowing around her. Her pearls were gone. There were flat green slippers on her feet, and she tapped one toe against the tile floor. She sat in a tall-backed chair with high arms. It made her look small.

I walked toward her because I had to, but I didn’t want to. Even though we’d come all this way, I just wanted to turn. To look away.

Ella came up beside me, then fell a little behind again as we got close.

Mom stood up. Put her hands on my face. “Honey.”

I felt relieved that she knew me, because I barely knew her. It had been a few months since I’d seen her, the longest time ever between visits. She was gaunt, with these haunted, saggy cheeks, but her shoulders were still broad. She put her arms around me, and I tried to find the warmth in her hug that had surprised me in Ella’s earlier. But this hug felt vacant of comfort. I held her tight anyway. “Hi, Mom.”

“Mrs. Little?” Ella stepped up behind me. “Ella Collins.”

Mom’s attention flicked to her. She stepped forward and embraced Ella, seemed to draw strength from her large dark presence, but then pulled away, smiled, and brought her attention back to me and me alone. She talked to me softly, pulled me to sit beside her. Ignoring Ella, who stood aside and watched.

In a sudden rush, I felt myself blurting out, “I have all As.” I knew it would make her proud. “I’m class president.”

Mom clapped her hands lightly. She praised my efforts. We chatted about everything — everything except all the trouble I was in — and for a while I found a way to close out the white hospital walls and the acidy smell and the squeak of wheels and the occasional troubled shriek that pierced our bubble. She was Mom again, and I was me, and the ugliness faded for a moment.

A brief moment.

It didn’t last long enough. Never long enough.

Ella came closer. “Mrs. Little, I’d like to talk for a minute, if you don’t mind.”

I ducked my head, because I’d known this talk was coming. I knew it was going to be about me. Someone had to break the news that I was in big trouble, and that I’d broken every expectation that had ever been held for me. The joy over my achievements at school would fade for Mom once she learned I was one strike away from juvenile detention.

“Ella Collins,” Mom echoed, addressing her directly for the first time. “Ella Collins.”

“Yes,” Ella said. “I’m —”

“I know who you are,” Mom snapped. She waved her fingers in the air, dismissing Ella. “You’re one of
them
.”

Mom clamped her fingers on my shoulders. I closed my eyes. Would have turned away, but there was nothing to turn to. She had a grip on me, so strong that it hurt. I could feel her pulse through the tips of her fingers — or maybe it was just my own heart pounding, fast and fierce, as though it wanted to bust out of my chest. I opened my eyes, and the pounding ache drummed deeper. Mom’s fierce grip on me felt strong enough to last forever, but I knew the system hated us and would keep on tearing us apart. Behind these walls, she seemed caught, and helpless in a way I’d never imagined she could be.

Still gazing at Ella, Mom whispered something, so softly I barely heard.

“What did you say?” I asked.

Mom’s attention flicked back to me, her eyes thickened by the clouds of pain and grief she usually kept above us, out of sight. I would have closed my eyes against it if I could have, but there was no escaping it. The air grew thick with sorrow.

“He left them,” Mom said. “I should have known he’d leave us, too.”

“She didn’t mean it,” Ella said as we walked away. “You know she didn’t mean to say that.”

But he did leave
, I thought.

“I don’t think badly of him,” she told me in a distant, floating voice. “He was always a father to me.” I watched her wipe a tear from her cheek. “Even when he wasn’t near. Can you understand that?”

I couldn’t. I couldn’t, because what I remembered of him was small, dark flashes. His smile. The proud look in his eye. A few of his words and the rumble of his car beneath me, the way he made me feel safe, but not much more than that. In all this long time that had passed, what I knew of him had only gotten smaller.

“Can you understand that?” she whispered.

There was so little that I understood. Least of all this.

Why I was here. Why Papa was not. Why I felt like I was leaving Mom, too. Why when Ella put her arm around me for a second time, I let her.

“We’re family. And we have to stick together,” she said. “That’s how we get through it.”

“Through what?” I asked her, but not because I wasn’t in it. Only because I didn’t know what was on the other side.

“Oh, Malcolm.” Ella hugged me, with both arms this time. “You miss him, like I do. Don’t you?”

I let her hold on to me, but I didn’t say anything. We didn’t talk about this. About the hole in us, or how it got there.

“It helps me to remember Papa’s work.” Ella talked on, maybe because I wouldn’t. “He believed in something. It’s never wrong to fight for what you believe in. What you want.”

All we have is want
, I thought.
All we do is fight. And he did leave.

It was dark already, in the car on the way back to the Swerlins’. It had been a long day, and my eyes were drooping. I caught my neck jerking forward a couple of times.

Ella patted her shoulder. “You can rest your head, if you like,” she said.

I could lean on Ella, it seemed. Everything around me had holes in it, and she was something solid. It wouldn’t hurt me to rest awhile. I moved closer to her. She wrapped a thick arm around me, and next thing I knew she was tapping me awake.

Out the window, the Swerlins’ place. Time to step out in the cold and back to my room.

“You stay out of trouble,” Ella insisted. “You hear?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She hugged me — so like Mom’s hugs used to be: safe, firm, and loving.

“You come visit me,” she told me. “You’ll like Boston. There’ll be a place for you there. I can promise you that.”

But Boston seemed big and far. Like a dream. A place to visit in my sleep, like the memory of Mom’s arms.

“I don’t know,” I said, edging away. “I don’t know.”

“Well, think about it,” she said, pushing open my door. The chill of the night caught me. I hurried the few paces to the Swerlins’ front door. I stood on the porch and watched as Ella’s car chugged off down the lane. As she disappeared, I felt a sinking return to everything normal. Everything cold.

I woke the next morning feeling no warmer. That very day I started setting aside money for the bus fare to Boston. Visiting Ella over summer vacation seemed like it would be the best idea ever.