Saving Francesca (24 page)

I’m hysterical. I don’t know what I’m talking about. But I can’t stop.

“You keep her all to yourself. You think you can fix everything by forgetting about it, but you just make things worse. It’s all your fault. You’ve kept her sick, because you don’t know how to handle it. Because you’re a weakling. Everyone says you are, and I believe it and Mummy could have done better than you and I don’t know why you just don’t
fuck
off now before you make it any worse.”

The look on his face is so devastating, but I don’t care. I want to hurt him.

I turn to walk out but my mum is at the door, looking horrified.

“Don’t you
ever
speak to your father like that
again
.”

I run out of there, to the people across the road, and I bang at their door over and over again, but no one answers and I keep on banging until there’s blood on my knuckles and then I run up the road as fast as I can because I need to find them.

But I don’t.

They’re gone.

I hear my father calling out my name, but I keep on running.

Everyone’s gone.

And I need to find them.

chapter 32

I DON’T CARE
where I end up. I walk to Central Station and get on a train and then I sit there, watching the stops pass me by, all their names meshing into one, until the stops become infrequent and I know I’m out of the metropolitan area and I have no idea where I’m going or when I’ll get there. It’s like one of those mystery flights, except I’m in no mood for surprises.

I have two dollars on me and, in all probability, a fare evasion fine awaiting me on the other side of wherever. After what seems like hours, the train stops, but I don’t move. There’s not one other person in my car and I feel like the last person on earth. Finally, I step out of the car and look at the sign. Woy Woy. We’ve driven past the sign before on the way up to the coast with my mum and dad and Luca. The Woy Woy sign in the past was a good memory and I want to remember it, but I can’t and I say the words over and over in my head, hundreds of times, sitting there for hours and hours, trying to remember why the Woy Woy sign in the past was a good memory. But I’m not remembering anything at all. I’m just saying words in my head that mean nothing.

People appear again. It happens all of a sudden. One minute there’s nobody and next minute a train pulls up and hundreds of people get off and I realize that it’s rush hour and, like most of my days, I wonder where time has gone. I look at some of their faces closely, but they don’t look at me. They just walk or rush or talk or laugh, their heels tapping toward me, then in front of me, and then they pass me by. And that happens at least every half hour. The same thing. Not one person looks at me. They want to get home. It’s written all over their faces. And I keep on telling myself that after the next train comes I need to move. Need to do something, because it’s dark and my skin feels cold. But my brain has stopped ticking and I can’t even think of how to do that. In reality, it’s all about turning around and getting on the train on the platform behind me, but the first casualty of all this is the ability to operate logically.

And then a train comes and nobody gets off. Not one single soul, because everyone’s home. I don’t know whether they’re happy there, or angry with the people they live with, or waiting for something good to happen, but they’re someplace better than here. I want to go home. I go back to saying
Woy Woy
over and over in my head until I realize that it’s Mia’s name that I’m saying, and my dad’s and Luca’s and Will’s and Justine’s and Siobhan’s and Tara’s and Jimmy’s and Thomas’s and Ms. Quinn’s and Brother Louis’s and Mr. Ortley’s, and then I start all over again. Their names ringing through my head.

And in that dark silence where it seems that everyone is someplace but me, it all comes back. Mia and me on the beach when I’m twelve. She’s telling me a story of when I was five and I almost drowned. She calls me Frankie the Brave.

“I don’t remember,” I tell her as we watch my dad and Luca out in the surf on the boogie board.

“You had this gorgeous pink bikini with flowers attached at the side and shoulders, and you were throwing yourself across the surf like the insane kid that you were and then running back to us and saying, ‘Did you see that, did you see that?’

“All of a sudden, we heard a scream and we realized that someone was out there drowning. Robert raced down the beach and I knew he’d be okay and that he’d get whoever was out there. But then you bolted down after him. You pulled those flowers off your suit and threw them to the side, and you ran straight into the water because you had to save your father. You went under and I couldn’t see you and I was screaming and screaming, but you didn’t come up again and I thought, my baby’s dead. . . .”

I remember. Being Frankie the Brave and then years later being Francis the Fearful. But more than anything, I remember my dad’s hands. Out there in that surf. I knew they were his, even with all that water pounding in my ears and down my throat and even though every wave was like a giant punch against me, I knew his hands. And then I was holding on to his shoulders, my arms tight around his neck, my legs wrapped around his waist, and the fear just vanished.

I stand up, sure of one thing and one thing only. That my father will come and get me. He won’t give me a lecture, he won’t try to teach me a lesson. He won’t ask a thousand questions or ask me to apologize. He’ll just come and get me. I find a telephone and put in the two-dollar coin and the phone only rings once and I say, “Hello.”

“Just tell me where you are.”

I don’t know how it happens, but not even a minute later the police pick me up from the phone booth. They take me back to the station and make me a cup of Milo, and they are so kind.

“Your father will be here soon.”

When I grow up, I think I’m going to be a cop. They’re nicer when you see them up close, and I love the idea of driving around neighborhoods picking up teenagers who have sworn at their fathers and evaded train fares.

It’s well after midnight when my dad walks into the police station and I start to cry. Just seeing his face makes me cry. He hugs me and doesn’t say a word, and then I’m in the car and he’s driving me home.

On the way, we stop at one of those rest stops for gas and food, and we sit at a table opposite each other. I can’t speak. I’m scared to. I’m scared that anything I say will make him look the way he did yesterday, and I’m scared he’ll leave because of me.

“I didn’t want the baby.”

I don’t know what to say, so I say nothing. I let him speak because I have a feeling that it’s the first time he’s said it out loud.

“But Mia was ecstatic and she’d say, ‘This is a sign, Robert. My father’s died and we’ve been sent this baby.’ Then she had the miscarriage and I felt so guilty, as if I had willed it to death.”

I shake my head. Is this what he’s carried around all this time? This guilt and sorrow?

“When she wanted to talk about it, for me it was a reminder, so I’d brush it off.”

His voice sounds choked and I can’t bear it.

“‘Everything’s going to be fine,’ I’d tell her. ‘If you want, we’ll try again.’ Because I’m sure that’s what someone who’s been pregnant for twelve weeks wants to hear. That the baby she had lost could be easily replaced.”

I touch his hand and he grabs mine and squeezes it, not letting it go.

“I don’t know what to do,” he says. “I don’t know how to make this right.”

And it’s that very moment, looking at him up close, that I realize the truth.

“I’ve been scared all this time that we’d lose her,” I say to him. “That maybe we’d come home one day and she would have killed herself or something. But then I guessed she wouldn’t, but I just felt scared inside all the time. And then I realized that it wasn’t just losing Mummy that was scaring me. It was losing you, too. I thought, just say he gets sick of it all? Just say he leaves? I always thought Mummy kept things together, but you did, Papa. You always did and I just don’t know whether we’d cope without you.”

“I’m not going anywhere, Frankie. What’s happened to Mia”— his voice cracks and there are tears in his eyes and I can’t stop crying—“it kills me. But I would never give up on Mia or you or Luca. Just don’t give up on me.”

“Fathers in the movies always say they won’t leave and then next minute they’re packing their bags and moving in with uncomplicated women who spend a lot of time at the gym.”

“I’m not a father in a movie.”

“It’s because you’re our optimist,” I explain to him. “And most of the time that’s fantastic, but sometimes you don’t let us talk about how we’re feeling. If we feel scared, you say, ‘Nothing to worry about, guys,’ but that doesn’t make it go away. It makes it grow. And that’s what I was trying to say yesterday. That maybe she wanted to talk to you about the baby and about Nonno and about not coping and you kept saying, ‘It’s going to be okay, Mia.’ And maybe she didn’t want to be told it was going to be okay. Maybe she just wanted to talk to you about it.”

“That sounds too simple.”

“No, it’s not. I think not being able to talk to you is probably the scariest thing in the world for her. If
I
couldn’t talk to you, I’d want to die.”

He’s crying and although I can’t bear it, I try hard not to cry.

“I think it’s about her grieving and you have to let her talk and you have to talk to her back.”

“When did you get so smart?”

“Oh yeah, I’m so smart. That’s why I’m God knows where and my friends who I thought were my friends aren’t, and the ones who are my friends, who I never considered my friends, aren’t talking to me, and the guy I’m in love with isn’t happy enough putting a girl between us but now has to put a body of water between us.”

He looks a bit stunned, but he smiles. “When you were born, I was hoping that the dramatic streak would skip a generation.”

“I’m not being dramatic. It’s the truth.”

“Your friends are at the house.”

I sit up straight. “Who?”

“I don’t know. Weird people. The Sullivan girl, whose father got the Gosford police to pick you up.”

“Siobhan?”

“And another one who’s making cups of tea for everyone and keeping the boy who’s telling Luca fart jokes away from the girl who says he’s ‘the last bastion of patriarchal poor taste.’ ”

“Justine, Thomas, and Tara.”

“And the drug fiend, Jimmy, is keeping Mia calm, and the Trombal boy’s called about ten times. I don’t like his manner on the phone.”

“You won’t like any guy’s manner on the phone.”

He slides out of the booth and takes my hand, pulling me against him as we walk out.

“Tomorrow, let’s try to get Mummy out of the house,” he suggests.

I nod. Saturday morning at Cafe Bones doesn’t sound too bad.

“Do you think I look like Sophia Loren?” I ask him as we get into the car.

“I used to tell your mother she looked like Sophia Loren.” He looks at me, frowning, and then it registers. “Oh God, some guy’s using that line on you, isn’t he?”

“Not just ‘some guy,’ ” I tell him. “The guy.”

We get home and Mia and Luca hold me so tight that I feel as if I can’t breathe, but in a way I’ve never felt so alive. My friends are still there and my dad lets them all stay the night, even Jimmy and Thomas. None of us get any sleep because everyone’s got a different account of the last fourteen hours, and they make it sound like a movie of the week.

“Brolin’s like, ‘Where’s Francesca Spinelli? I saw her in roll call this morning. She’s cutting, isn’t she?’ And he marches down to Quinn’s office and she throws a Quinn-fit and tells him to get a life—”

“That’s not true,” Siobhan interrupts. “She says, ‘Doug’—I’d change my name if it was Doug—she says, ‘Doug, Francesca’s going through some issues at home. Let’s just try to find her. . . .’ ”

“Trombal told Shaheen, who told Eva that Quinn told Bro that Brolin was a ‘detriment to the students.’ ”

The five of them have an argument regarding the truth.

“That’s not true,” Tara says. “Shaheen and Eva aren’t even speaking to each other at the moment.”

“What’s up?” Thomas asks.

I can’t get over how easily these guys get off track.

“Hello,”
I yell over their voices as they discuss the Shaheen/Eva dispute. “It’s not about Brolin or Quinn or my mum or my dad anymore.” They stare at me. “It’s about me and the fact that I’ve felt like crap for so long and not just this year. That’s the weird part. This year has been one of the best years I’ve ever had and I might win the uncoolest-person-of-the-year award by saying this, but if you weren’t my friends, I think I’d just go into some kind of coma.”

Justine has her arm around me and I’m crying my head off while I’m telling them, and then I see Thomas roll his eyes.

“God, you’re uncool,” he says, “for even thinking that. Now can we stop talking about such trivia and talk about the real issues?” He makes himself comfortable on my bed and looks around with this stupid demented smile on his face. “So who’s sleeping with me?”

I lie in my mum’s bed, facing her, and I remember what Angelina said. That she’s not going to get better just because she gets out of bed.