John Domini - Earthquake I.D.

“Oh, boys.” She grabbed the trunk-lid and slammed it. “Little, little boys.”

Before the sound of the slam died — the slam and the rattle — Umberto was rushing away.

“Disgrazia!” Barb shouted after him. She got a last glimpse of Kahlberg out in the gallery, grinning, before his sidekick yanked the door shut.

“Boys,” she repeated, growling at the door. “All my life, nothing but boys.”

“Mom, hey.” JJ didn’t like the suggestion that he was less than adult. “You’ve got to admit that was pretty cool—”

“Oh, don’t. Don’t! We’ve had enough, more than enough.”

But Barb noticed she was frightening the girls. Her two youngest had slid far back into their chairs, their legs flat on the seats. The mother closed her eyes and got a breath, never mind that the dark behind her lids had been imprinted by the box of penises, a netlike pattern of oblongs. Worse, their space was little more than a closet, already close with sweat. When Barbara reopened her eyes she saw, in the porthole’s sun-shaft, that their arrival had kicked up months of dust.

Talk, Mom. Another five minutes and they’ll either start whining or sneezing.

John Junior and Chris perched on the trunk top, frowning, puzzled. Paul found a chair and dropped his head into his hands, massaging his face. Barb had to blink at that, too, her fey miracolino looking so much like the burly Jaybird. Anyway the boy appeared in better shape than the girls, almost an illustration out of the literature back at Samaritan Center: typical postures of abused children. When the mother took a seat the plastic made a lot of noise. Every creak seemed another stab at where she might start. Years needs…Grandma unhappy… Silky Papa lying deal-making…

“Why did we come to Naples?” she blurted out. “What are we doing here?”

John Junior snorted, crossing his muscular legs. “Come on, Mom. You feeling guilty, hey?”

“Guilty? What? Are you saying…?”

“Come on. You know it was you.”

Barbara had thought she’d get further than this before things got difficult.

“Mom, I mean. You didn’t bring us in here to lie to us. Even the girls know what’s been going on.”

“What? They know?”

“Hey Dora, Syl.” JJ lowered his head into the shaft of sun. “Didn’t Pop take this job in order to make Mama happy?”

Dora’s lips hardly seemed to move, in the dimness. “Mama was unhappy,” she said, “because Papa wasn’t doing good like her.”

“You used to yell at him.” The other twin’s face seemed larger, her eyes on her mother. “You used to say, ‘Don’t you care about suh, about suffering—”‘

“Guys, guys.” Chris gestured open-handed. “I mean, everybody knows there’s another side here, right? Right? Everybody knows, Mom, this isn’t all on you.”

Barbara managed half a smile.

“Sure, you’ve got Pop jumping through hoops,” continued the second-oldest, smiling back. “Like, for months now. Maybe a little longer, come to think of it. Pop’s been jumping through hoops, and that means all the rest of us too.”

“Duh, gee, Chris-tuh-fuh. Gee, really?”

“Gee-ee. You know, Mom and Pop really should’ve checked the expiration date before they picked up your brains at Wal-Mart. We’re trying to talk serious, here, JJ.”

“Oh, serious? Tell me about it, bro. Seems to me it’s pretty serious when, every time my girl and I try to go on a date, they’re some guy with a semi-automatic.”

“Well like, your love life, I mean. That’s been referred to the Institute for the Paranormal anyway.”

John Junior appeared to have a comeback ready, but he caught his mother staring. He shifted against the trunk. “Mom. Hey.”

“You’re all saying, it’s because of me?”

“Well, I guess — not everything.”

“Like Paul,” Chris put in, “like Romy and all that. That’s not your fault.”

Either Dora or Syl began to repeat that their mother was a very good person, and Barbara’s gaze dropped to the floor, the circle of sun through the porthole. “It was because of me,” she said. “Because I took in Maria Elena.”

“Maria Elena was hard, Mom.” JJ spoke with surprising restraint. “I mean, you didn’t bring us in here to lie. A girl like that, she needed a miracle.”

“Aw, you got that from Pop.”

“Well maybe Pop’s right. Chris, hey. You saw yourself, even Pop couldn’t handle Maria Elena.”

“I found her through the church,” Barb said. “Through the Holy Name. I told myself, this is what I’m called to do. This is what a mother can do.”

“Mom.” Chris may have bent nearer. “She’s got to be better off now.”

“They kept telling me, she was the worst case the Center ever gave out for adoption. She’d just turned up one day in a cathedral in Mexico City, naked and rubbing a crucifix, umm… rubbing.”

Barbara swallowed thickly; no need to give the kids every gory detail. John Junior was right about why she’d brought them in here, and she had to admit that Maria Elena was, for this family, the first Beast of the Apocalypse. She had to confess to it all, the girl too. But there was no need for every gory detail.

JJ: “She wasn’t much older than Dora and Sylvia.”

“They never could get her exact age,” Barbara said. “The way she’d been kept, you know, it affects your growth.” When she closed her eyes again, the image in the dark was Maria Elena. The girl could hardly have looked less like Barbara’s two, coarse-haired and mocha-skinned, with crooked teeth and an Aztec-hatchet nose.

“She was kept in a cage, right?” Dora asked. “Some bad man kept her locked up in a cage.”

“H-hey.” This was Paul. “Do we, do we have to talk, to t-talk ab-bout…”

“Some bad man,” Sylvia said.

“The markings indicated she’d been in a cage. The pattern on her buttocks, I’m saying. At the Center, they showed me photos. And Nettie and Sister Trudy warned me to think it over.” Barbara gave an airless laugh.

“Sister Trudy,” Chris said. “Mom, you want someone to blame, look no further.”

“Brought to you by Sis-ter Tru-dy,” JJ said.

“That’s who’s to blame. Her and the brain trust over there at the Sam Center.”

“I mean, as if this was ever their decision to make! Jesus, Mom. You volunteered over there, okay. But what gives those people the right to—”

“Boys.” Barb raised her eyes. “If I could work there again I would. In a minute I would. I’d work like Nettie, I’d get a real job there.”

The older brothers shared a look.

“But that’s not what God sent me. I didn’t have a job there, I was a mother, that’s all. And listen, Sister Trudy didn’t have to tell me anything. Anyone with half a brain could figure out that as soon as that girl found herself back in a family situation, there’d be — repercussions.”

“G-guys, guys. I don’t 1-like it when you, when we t-talk ab, ab-b-b…”

“Paul.” Barb couldn’t quite see him, some trick of the sun on the dust.

“Listen to me, Mr. Paul. It’s Mama’s fault. Mama’s fault, everybody, I’m owning that.” She didn’t know how to avoid the jargon. “Sister Trudy and Nettie, over at the Center, you think they would lie to me? You think I would lie to them? I knew what I was risking, bringing a girl like that into a family situation. But I wanted something so simple, so simple. Basic socialization, that’s all.”

“Mom,” Chris said, “nobody’s saying you’re lying.”

“Socialization? Mom, I mean. The girl was only with us, what? Ten days?”

“We never even ascertained specifics about the abuse. Sometimes she talked about an uncle, sometimes it was a stepmother.”