Undercover (12 page)

T
HE NEXT DAY was the thirteenth, a Friday. The sun had come down hard the afternoon before and melted things, but at dusk the temperature had dropped, so now, outside, it was a stalactite world, heavy icicles daggering down from the gutter lines and window ledges. On the walk to school Jilly said that she couldn’t wait for summer, when all the dirty snow would be gone and all the flowers burst open with blooms. She said she had been building up a garden in her mind like some garden she had seen on one of her shows—dahlias, gladiolas, lilies, but not the orange lilies that were, she said, far too common. She
would plant the garden along the back edge of the yard and bring Mom one fresh blooming stalk each day. “That’s all I can think of, Elisa,” she said. “If Dad doesn’t make it home, I mean.”

In her blue beret, tan leather gloves, and long woolen coat, Jilly looked, just then, like a snow queen. We walked along not saying much, and there was a sort of peace to that.

At the doors to the school, past Romance Hill, we went our separate ways. That morning, as usual, there was a crowd—flying hollers and high fives I had to dodge my way around until I’d made it down toward the end of my hall, within seeing distance of my locker. I thought I saw Theo standing there, and then I realized I had—that he’d been there, seen me, taken off. He had a special way of vanishing, Theo. He’d thin-aired himself once again.

“Theo,” I almost called after him. “Theo!” But what would be the use? There’d be no turning him around. I grabbed my locker lock and dialed in: Thirty-six. Nineteen. Two. I pulled the lock; it
clicked. I swung open the door, hung my coat on the hook, bent down, and I had to dig around a bit at first, but then, absolutely, I saw it—the sheet of paper, folded to a square.

THE BORDER ROAD SKATING
& HUMANE SOCIETY
IS PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE

The John Mischa Petkovich First Annual
Interpretive Free Skate Competition
February 28, 4
PM
Open to the Public
Registration Required

Here are some words for your Book of Words, if you ever decide you need one:

T
HAT NIGHT Mom joined us downstairs for dinner. We had canned soup and the kind of cheese that’s separated by plastic squares, a couple of old crackers. Jilly lit two candles and put them on plates in the table’s center, then turned the lights down low. All through dinner, she caught Mom up on all the soaps, and when she got things wrong, I said so. “You’re such a pain in the butt, Elisa,” Jilly said, and I said the least she could do was keep the soaps straight, because it felt good, for once, to be jerks with each other, it felt right and normal.

After dinner Mom said she could use a good dessert, and so I stood and opened up the freezer—
dug in through the bags of frozen peas and sausages, the boxes of French toast, the slab of steak that had bruised to blue, the cans of concentrate. All I could find were three cups of overfrosted cherry ice, and that’s what we ate, with those little wooden spoons, scraping out the sweet like it was the most important job in the entire world. Jilly’s lips turned the color of the ice, which upped her glamour quotient. Mom pointed to a place on the left side of her forehead that had gotten what she called a sudden cold.

The wicks burned deep into the wax and gave us shadow faces, and I thought about the pond under the moon at night and all I’d learned to see in the dark, all I’d learned to look for. I thought of all that would change once I told my secret, but the time, in fact, had come. “Mom?” I said, for we were all still sitting there. “I’m going to need your help. I need a dress, but a dress that I can skate in. I need you to make me pretty for one day.”

Mom looked at me, then looked at Jilly, then looked at me again, and what I want noted right
here, for the permanent record, is that Jilly will grow up to be my mom. She will look the same way lit up by old candlelight, the same way taken by surprise, the same way not believing and then perhaps believing, the same big eyes and the same O!-question-mark lips.

“You want what?” Jilly said.

“Did you say a dress?” my mother asked.

“A dress,” I said, “for skating.” And then, as the candles burned low in their wax, I told my sister and my mother of my own private history—which is a story, the way I told it, of expeditions and stolen skates, of paths through woods, of snow. Of a forgotten trail to a forgotten pond, of a sunken marble girl. I told them that I’d found music up inside my bones, that speed is powered by your knees, that it doesn’t matter who you are—your arms can make you lovely.

But I didn’t tell them about loving Theo. I didn’t say I’d written to Dad. That’s what undercover operatives do. They pick and choose their truths.

T
HERE WERE ONLY fifteen days between our soup and cheese dinner and the John Mischa Petkovich Interpretive Free Skate competition. Mom and Jilly went to work at once, that very night—studying their fashion magazines for color concepts, yanking dresses out of their closets to test out shoulder styles and decorative bits and all the things I will formally confess right here that I have never noticed. Every now and then they would make me stand up and turn, first slowly, then more quickly, so that they could configure, in their own minds’ eyes, an image of me as a skater. We did the work in that
part of the house that wasn’t a room or a hallway—their dresses and magazines in a messy stew. Jilly sat on the steps with a notebook on her knees while Mom contemplated hem lengths and leotards, sleeves that flared and didn’t, the kinds of beads you could see from a distance, even if the spotlights weren’t on.

Saturday, the next day, we set off for the rink—just Mom and me—so I could get, as my mother put it, a mental map. We had to drive straight past the school and Romance Hill, which still had the aftermath of Valentine’s hearts lying about, toward the two cross streets that make for the minuscule heartbeat of our town—one street with the shops, one street with the institutions: the library, the post office, the old opera house that had stood empty for years until someone turned it into a movie theater.

Border Road Rink was beyond all that, on the industrial road where civilization ends. You might have thought the rink had been built whole centuries ago, but Dad once said that though it wasn’t quite that old, you could trace its beginnings back to a few
heroic guys who pulled skaters out of thawing ponds. A glass case inside boasted the antique stuff—the rescue hooks, the double-runner skates, the old rabbit-fur mufflers that the skating ladies wore.

From the outside the rink looked like a concrete eyeball that had fallen to the asphalt from the sky. An old faded blue sign announced the public-skate hours, and the door was one of those heavy metal doors you imagine needing only for maximum-security prisons. Even when it was cold outside, it was always colder in the rink, where there was no direct sun, only the frosted-over glass of windows that ran high along three sides. The light that came from those windows was the color of smog. It told you nothing about the weather outside.

Running along the two long sides were two sets of wooden bleachers, and at the far short end there was the little cave where they stowed the old Zamboni, a monster that lived like the last of its kind. On the other short end, nearest the door and ticket booth, was the coffee shop where the artifacts
were housed and where you could buy hot chocolate, coffee, or candy bars—anything and all things for three dollars.

Above the coffee shop was a balcony that you reached by a set of wooden stairs, and on that day there were little girls up there in leotards draping themselves across a ballet barre. A tiny old woman with tight, wound-up hair was standing before them counting out first position, second position, fifth. She had a scarf the size of a quilt around her neck and a you-will-listen voice, and all the girls did that finger-pointing thing, with their arms just as high as they could reach them.

Still, it was the ice itself that had me in awe. I hadn’t understood how purely white and smooth rink ice could be, how perfectly even end to end, without twigs or wings or bug eyes.

My pond was smaller than that rink, and the rink was slippery smooth, and that day it had been divided into long halves by six orange cones, one half for beginners in a big group lesson, one half for
one girl in pink and her exceedingly French-looking coach. He stood on the ice in a pair of fuzzy boots, demonstrating the attitudes he wanted. Then he stood back and stroked his almost-white mustache while the pinked girl did her best to imitate him. There were times when even I could tell that the girl had it all wrong, and when that happened, her coach walked straight out to her, grabbed her limbs, and pushed them into proper place. He worked her like she was sculpture. Then she’d try the move again, and it would be right or it would be wrong, and he’d nod or shake, as moved to do. “She’s pretty, isn’t she?” my mother said, and of course she was, how couldn’t she be—so pinked like that, so small.

Mom had said that I should have my own pair of skates for the coming competition, that her old, stolen, nicked-up skates would not do, and so we headed off toward the skate shop, down the alley between a pair of those bleachers. “My daughter’s skating in the Petkovich competition,” my mother told the little Geppetto man. She leaned across the counter and gave
him one of her most irresistible Hollywood smiles.

“Well then,” he said.

“Size eight, I think.”

“The options are many.” Giving my mom a wink, Geppetto pointed to the benches, where I went to sit while he went into a dark back room to sort through boxes. All the time we waited, my mother studied the photographs of skaters that were posted on the corkboard walls of the shop. “Oh,” she said, “I always wanted to be a skater. Look at how pretty they all are.” She got up close to one particular photograph and with deep appreciation squinted. When at last Geppetto reappeared, he plopped himself down on a rolling stool.

I tried skate after skate over sock after sock. In the end he sold us the most premium skates that came with the blades already on, because we didn’t have time, as my mother said, to wait for screws. “Leotards?” she asked him, and good thing he sold those, too. My mother gave him her credit card. He boxed things up. We were done.

It was on the way out of the rink that I saw the stack of flyers that announced the competition; they’d been put out on the ledge near the ticket booth. Immediately then I understood: Theo had taken Lila skating, but he’d also thought of me.

“Looks like the public-skate session is about to start,” my mother said, of the crowds that had begun to work their way through.

“We should go,” I said.

“It’s so exciting,” she said, and she smiled in a way she hadn’t smiled in weeks, in a way that made me wonder inside if things were getting fixed with Dad.

Mom would spend the rest of the day out, at the crafts and fabric store. She’d go through bolts and bolts and bolts, she’d later say, testing each fabric for its shimmer and glow, keeping my auburn hair in mind. She’d buy a new pair of shears, packs of needles in every sharp size. Then later that day she’d climb the thin steps up to the attic and carry her old Singer downstairs. She’d fit it on the kitchen table, like a fancy centerpiece.

O
NCE DAD AND I went treasuring when I was nine years old. It was summer, already hot at only daybreak, and you could feel the water in the air. “Grab your bucket, Sweetie,” Dad had said, and at dawn we had set out, him holding my hand because I wanted him to, because I put mine right in his.

That was back when our neighborhood was still mostly trees and such old houses that, one by one, they’d all come down. Where Mrs. Garland’s house would soon be there was a very giant hole and, inside that hole, some old foundations. Dad said that one day I’d learn about Pompeii and see the
resemblance, but for right then, he said, we should take a look around and see what we might see. “History,” Dad had said, “at our very fingertips.” And “Be careful where you step, Elisa. History takes courage.”

I found fragments of flowerpots and the slats of an old wood fence, the cloudy glass of a broken jar. I found a single die that I slipped into my bucket, and an old red metal fire truck, very miniature and rusted. I saved that, too. At the bottom of a pile of chipped bricks I found a dress that must have once belonged to a baby doll. I found an empty canister for film. I found a bit of Christmas foil. I found a wooden hanger.

The sun kept climbing up its ladder. My neck got trickled wet. “Elisa.” I remember the excitement in Dad’s voice. “Sweetheart, come here and see.” And of course I ran, because my dad was my dad and the very best in all the world at treasure hunts. I remember the sloshing-around-of-metal sound that came from my peach-colored bucket. I
remember standing in the shade of his long shadow. “Do you know what that is?” he asked, reaching a coin, silver and round, toward me.

“Money?” I’d said.

“Time,” he said. “A nineteen twenty-two silver dollar.”

“Oh” is all I knew to say.

I lifted the coin out of Dad’s hand and held it as appreciatively as I could. He turned it over, showed me the serious face of Liberty, the way something looking like sun rays shot right up through her hair. He turned it again and showed me the eagle, looking confident as any bird on any silver day.

“I bequeath it unto you, Princess of Dawn,” he said. “In honor of your courage.”

Princess, I remember he said. And I remember courage.