Iona's idea to build the fort began in the peaked paunch of afternoon on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend. There was a strange hush up and down Huron Avenue. Half of the neighborhood, the "new arrivals," had driven away to recline by lakes in Maine and Vermont. Me and Iona were squatting by circles of tar that had melted in the road beside our house, pushing them around with the broken ends of sticks, and bursting the bubbles that had risen up from the sun's heat.
"We need a headquarters!" she said, dropping her stick and jumping back on the sidewalk embankment. "We have to make a fort."
Now, I didn't like to get involved in fort building. I was twelve already, and besides, it reminded me of the other time I made a fort with Iona, at her old house where her uncle lived. It gave me the heebies to think about that place. But Iona had let my Mom brush out her hair that morning, and last night she didn't flail like a Wildebeest when Mom pulled my old threadbare Garfield nightgown over her head.
I sighed. "It would be helpful to have an office."
*
Iona was my younger foster sister, but she wasn't like other foster kids we'd had before—Iona had a mother. Her name was Siobhan, and she was related to my mother, the cousin of someone's cousin in Ireland. The foster kids we'd had before, for months at a time and once for a year and a half, were always doing crazy shit. Real buck-wild, these transient siblings, especially the teenage ones. When Iona got there the only other one we had was Thomas, who had been around for months. Thomas, of the droopy eyes and lips, Thomas of the wise cracks and low-slung Dickies. He was the closest thing to a celebrity I had ever known.
The first day that my mom pulled Iona onto our wraparound porch, Iona was kicking and hollering "YOU'RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME!," while yanking at the strands of lace-lights that were strung up on the eaves of the entryway. She wanted me to think she was a big-ass steer, but I saw the whole thing and really, she was just a thrashing, brown-haired little colt.
By Labor Day weekend, though, I'd managed to find a good use for her: Sleuth's Assistant. I'd been running a little Private-I Detective Biz around Huron Ave. Sullivan Sleuths. As it turned out, the scrub was pretty good at sneaking in and out of things. So I let her pick up the binoculars on some long and scorched afternoons. I had her biking down Tobin Field to stake out the action at Tony's Pizza truck, then sent her creeping through the yard across the street, to spy on Brendan and the other Tilly boys through their first floor windows. Me and Iona had a thing going—Master, Margarita, that kind of thing. And I was showing her how to be tough. I'd had a lot of older brothers and sisters to teach me that stuff, and the poor little colt, she'd had squat.
*
We made a list of the different kind of forts one can make: Tree fort, Bush fort, Blanket fort, Swingset fort, Slide fort, Foxhole fort, Snow fort, Table fort, Trashcan fort.
We settled on the bush variety. There were low and long evergreen bushes flanking the right side of the porch, extending all the way to the back door. Before dinnertime we'd made a good start. Iona pushed up the cracked stone bird feeder that had been lying on its side for a couple years. We found a three-legged plastic chair and set it up beside the bird feeder, around a manger-hole in the bush, and Ta-daa—we had ourselves a door. Once inside, we let our sneakers fall on the small branches, snapping them in two, and we lined the walls with thick sticks gathered from the rest of the yard. We were hollowing out a space.
"I want to stay in here forever," Iona said, flinging her back down on the dirt. She spread her arms out to each side. "We can live here. I'll be the father detective, and you be the mother detective."
I let out a crack of laugh. If anyone was being the father detective—
"I don't have a mother," Iona said plainly. She was looking up at the bright sky through the overlaying green needles above us. "Siobhan is just a woman who found me on the street one day. I'm not really hers, and that's why she's so sad all the time."
Most times I'd seen Iona's mother she didn't seem particularly sad. Her face was just puffed up and blank, matching her bleached out haircut; she looked like a cooked scallop. Often she did have a cast on one leg or another, though, and sometimes she wore an eye patch. My mother told me that was because she was sick. "Sick" was my mother's code word for people like that— drunks, addicts. I nodded in response to Iona.
Thomas walked out of the backdoor of the house, and crossed through the yard trailing Sharon, his Puerto Rican girlfriend. "Hey retards," he mumbled. "Stop fucking up that bush. You're gonna get in trouble."
I popped my head out of our fort's door, ready to invite him in, but he just kept walking, bringing Sharon to the yard's gate. They kissed goodbye on the mouth, and he slipped both of his hands underneath her purple tank-top and around her waist. He kept them there while he kissed her, bobbling his head gently, until she broke away from him and walked towards Harvard Square without once looking over her shoulder.
*
My parents liked to do what Jesus did. My father was a priest in Northampton in the seventies, before I was born and he met my mother and married her. My Dad believed in Jesus Christ and walking with him more than my Mom did; she mostly just believed in Irish goodwill. Before Iona, we'd had seven foster kids. They would cry at the dinner table and run away in the night. I'd wake up in the morning to find an empty space at the breakfast table. Mom would shake her head and say, "An escapee!"
The next morning I was lying in my bed wondering what had happened to all of them, when Iona burst into my room. "Rise, and shine, and give God your glory, glory!" she sang, as she climbed under the covers with me. When I told her I didn't have time to finish the fort before I had to go to be an Altar Girl, she let out an ear-curdling whine that made me kick her ass back out the door she'd just skipped through.
Biking down Huron Ave. to St. Peter's the stillness of the Sunday morning was peculiar. It was too quiet, even for a holiday. I was sure that on the inside of the houses smiling teenagers crowded onto the otherwise untouched furniture. The pots and pans clanged together, and lonely cats stalked in circles, plotting. As I sped by roofs burgeoned with invisible ladders, beanstalks climbed out of windows, rope-swings swung to the ground. Things were happening, everywhere, things that I'd find out about.
I was the first and only Altar Girl at St. Peter's and probably the only Altar Girl in the state of Massachusetts. But she didn't give me a choice; my Mom said it was part of being a feminist. So I pedaled my bike down to the church on Saturday Afternoon and Sunday morning—sometimes twice on Sunday—and picked up a scratchy white robe out of the cardboard box in the closet of the sacristy. Then I started off mass, marching down the center aisle with the two-ton iron cross wobbling above my head. The upside of the whole thing was that I got to be friends with the neighborhood boys, like Brendan, and the boys gave me more cred than they used to. My family lived in a large wooden house, white clapboards, and three extra bedrooms for the extra kids that came in. It was the biggest in the neighborhood. Thomas told me not be ashamed of the big house we lived in. I was still tough, he said, and I shouldn't let anyone tell me otherwise.
I knew how to be tough: Carry a razor blade in the edge of your sock, or in between your sock and your Pumas. Walk straight through The Pit on your way home from school; you're not scared by those lip pierces and mohawks. Even when they hassle you. Some of them have been your foster sisters; some of them are still your foster brothers. This is how to be a feminist, this is what your mother tells you: never let a boy tell you what to do. You're the only female Altar Server. Never let a man come anywhere near you. And never look down from anyone's stare.
When I jumped off my bicycle behind St. Peters, Father Deveaney was sitting on the porch outside the rectory. He was almost always there— on mornings like this one, when I rode up on my bike, and on nights when I pressed my forehead against the backseat window on the way home from Brigham's, with mint chocolate chip dripping down my cheeks. I gave a wave, and studied the rectory building, wondering what happened in there. Such a big place for so few priests. I pictured Iona slithering through the side window. She would be able to fit. I knew my next docket for the Investigation List.
Brendan was the other Altar Server that day. He was my across-the-street neighbor for my whole life, but he'd started talking to me more, now. Listening when I spoke. In the sacristy after mass there was wine left in the gold-plated chalice that the entire congregation had put their saliva-y lips on.
"Drink it!" Brendan dared me. "You drink half and I'll drink half. Then we'll get motha'less, right here. Motha'less in church!"
I didn't respond to him, because I kept thinking how my father might actually be nuts. He told me once, straight-faced and somber, that what was in that cup was real, red hemoglobin-blood. Brendan lifted the cup up and drank the whole thing.
"Oh my god," he slammed the cup down on the counter next to the plastic bag of unblessed hosts. "I can feel it. It went right to my head, Annemarie. I'm drunk."
I rolled my eyes at him, and Father Deveaney stepped into the doorway. Brendan looked down.
The priest faced me slowly, and asked us both why the cross was still at the back of the church. I'd left it there resting against the wall beside the murky holy water cup after I'd processed down the aisle with it.
"I'll get it," Brendan mumbled, and jogged out of the room, taking the most direct route, between two wooden pews.
I shuffled and re-stacked some missals. All I had left to do was go into the closet and change out of my robe, but with the priest standing right next to me, I decided I'd come back later to change.
Father Deveaney, in his full vestments with a white chasuble and a green-embroidered stole, moved toward me and put a hand on my shoulder. I felt that he always had an eye on me; I couldn't tell if I was lucky or cursed.
"How's everything at home, Annemarie?"
I sucked my breath to kill the noise.
*
At Midnight Mass last Christmas Eve I saw Father Deveaney threaten Thomas. I had already gotten communion and was kneeling in one of the front pews, with my head leaning on my mother's arm. She was praying like she always did—her face covered by both her hands. She could have been sobbing or screaming back there, and no one would be the wiser. When Thomas and his baggy pants'ed friends showed up at church they were snickering and slapping each others' backs in the incense-heavy entryway. I knew they'd been drinking in the Tilly's basement all night long. Then while my mother's face was covered, Thomas stumbled up to the altar, and stuck one hand straight out for communion. Father Deveaney grabbed him by his shirt collar, and put his par-boiled cheeks right up next to Thomas'. He whispered something, and Thomas shook his head ferociously, peeling the priest's grip off of him. After the midnight service Brendan whispered to me: "You know where they were tonight? They were getting Motha'less. Drunk-fucked as donkeys, I tell ya."
Now, in the sacristy, I looked down so as not to make eye-contact with Father Deveaney.
"Everything's fine."
He stared at me for a few beats, and I didn't know what he was waiting for. It was just the two of us there in the small room. He put his hand on the top of my head and rustled my hair. "Everything's fine, father," he corrected.
*
"We have to finish the Fort," announced Iona that afternoon. We were standing in the yard kicking a soccer ball listlessly. She was so skinny, the bones protruded out from her shoulders and elbows. I noticed how the bite in her voice had calmed though, even when she demanded things, and I was secretly proud that she hadn't wet the bed at all this week.
"We've got to sleep out there tonight. We've got to finish it so we can camp out."
I shrugged and made towards the garage. She followed behind me as I creaked open the side door. The roof was caving in at the back, and the air was cold and tangy with the smell of rust. I kneeled down on the uneven concrete floor, to open a box that was shoved into a corner. There was a blue tarp sticking out under the box.
"The perfect roof," I showed Iona.
The last time we'd made a fort was in the basement of Iona's grandmother's house where she lived with her dad who was never there, and her uncle who was always there. The light bulbs were burned out in the lamps downstairs. The upstairs smelled like grilled cheese and mothballs, but downstairs thick dust and cigarette smoke layered your tongue.
Her uncle Sean usually sat in the middle of the sagging teal couch in his plumber's tool belt. His t-shirts were all stained under the arms. Oftentimes the television was on but showing only black and white ants buzzing across the screen on top of each other. That day Uncle Sean was in his room with the door closed, though, so we took all the cushions off the couch and began propping them up against the bar.
Iona sat inside the fort and started stripping off her sweatshirt and elastic waist-jeans. "Take off your clothes!" she ordered. "We're lions. This is our jungle fort!" Soon she was completely naked, and her scrawny freckled body began crawling out of the fort. She sprang onto the top of the veneer-paneled bar, laughing and asking me to join her. Slowly, I took everything off too. I'd never been naked in a living room before. I sort of galloped along behind her, and we started roaring at each other, like little lions. The basement air was cool on every one of my limbs, and I felt textures I hadn't felt before: the corduroy of the couch arm on the backs of my thighs, the soft bottom of Iona's foot hitting into the top of my exposed shoulder.
I followed her on my hands and knees back into the fort and when we emerged again her uncle was standing there, leaning against the smoke-stained wall. He was slanted back, sipping out of his beer can and watching us. Iona continued to crawl around, and now she was on to some thing about hunting deer, and didn't seem to notice Uncle Sean at all. I kept on following her, over the coffee table and around the coat rack. He had both eyes on us, tracking, sipping. He kept watching and watching until I held my ground inside the couch-cushions and finally lured roaring Iona back inside.
*
That night we were allowed to sleep outside as long as I kept the key around my neck all night. They'd become strict about locking the doors, after all the runaways.
"You're the older sister now. You're in charge, Annemarie," she said. I nodded. This was the first time I'd been the boss.
It was muggy inside our fort. I tasted the chemical droplets of Off bugspray that clung to the air. Iona slept in an old flannel sleeping bag, her hair cow-licked every which way around her head, and a twitch of a smile in the corner of her mouth. A cricket orchestra was blaring outside, and it felt like I'd been out there for hours.
Thomas told me I was tough. The only Altar Girl. The only kid with seven—now eight—foster brothers and sisters.
A few years ago someone broke into our house while we were all asleep. We'd had a sixteen-year-old foster girl at the time, fat Tina, and I always thought it was her boyfriend. The only things protecting Iona and I now were some flimsy green braches, a moldy tarp, and me. My mom had found my dad's straight razor that I'd kept in the edge of my right tube sock for one whole school day, and she'd grounded me for a week, and made me say a Rosary while kneeling in the living room and then an Act of Contrition.
I listened to the cricket music some more, and the faint wail of an ambulance from blocks away. I'd had enough of this.
"Iona," I shoved her shoulder. She rolled over. "Iona, get up! We're going inside."
She moaned. I felt for the key around my neck and I pulled it over my head. Then I grabbed the two corners of Iona's sleeping bag and dragged her out of the door of our fort. She didn't even blink an eye. Dead to the world. The baby.
When we were in the yard I hoisted her up into both of my arms, and began the slow lugging process to get inside the house. I managed to unlock the side-door while still holding her.
Upstairs, I put Iona on my bed, still swaddled in her sleeping bag, and stared at her bony back. I closed my eyes all but a millimeter, and let the dimly lit blue flowers of the wallpaper become fuzzy around me. The sound of her breath, falling up and down, was like a metronome to the clanging pipes of the house. I kept looking towards the windows, wondering when the cracks of light would illuminate the edges of the blinds and it would be morning.
I pulled the blue sheet over my head, and it shifted Iona in her sleeping bag. She didn't make a sound. While I was underneath the covers, I heard the first screech. It was soft, the first two or three that I heard, just a quiet Screech… Screech. I didn't know what on earth would be making that noise, but it sounded like it was coming from outside. As I crawled out of the covers and slid down the bed, the noise got louder, and something added to it—a light banging noise. Screech… Screech, Bang. And again, Screech… Screech, Bang. I walked over to the window and pulled back the blind, and then I saw the most surprising thing.
A black jeep parked in front of the Tilly's house was jumping back and forth. The whole great machinery shrieked forth, and then back, and on the backswing the bumper hit the into a grey Honda park behind it. I pulled the blind totally behind me now, and pressed my body up to the window. There were people inside the car. Screech… Screech, Bang, it continued. I heard the faint squawk of a girl's voice. Then I knew what was going on. There were two people inside this car, and they were having sex. Screech… Screech, Bang— squawk. I knew what sex was, and I knew I was seeing it. Something moved in the backseat—a torso, or a leg. I waited for it to move again and thought, this is wrong. I should go back to bed.
I couldn't peel my eyes away. I couldn't un-stick myself from the window. Just as I began to wonder, Which of my neighbors owned a Jeep? I saw the curtain ruffle from the second floor window across the street, and a moon of a face glare out of it: Brendan Tilly's mother. From her window she could see my whole body squashed like a beetle against the glass, ogling the screwing car. I dropped to the floor, and then realization fell down upon me like a tarp, taking the air out of my lungs and bringing on panic: I had left the door unlocked. The people inside the car were Thomas and his Puerto Rican girlfriend. Thomas was banging and squeaking and losing his virginity, out there in the car.
He must have escaped from the house, and was reigning terror on the whole neighborhood. Mrs. Tilly would undoubtedly squelch on him, and Thomas would have to be taken away. Tears welled up my eyes and I scooted across the floor, away from the window. How could I have been so brainless?
I stood up and decided I would have to fix it. I thought about the phantom silence outside, but I wasn't going to let fear get the better of me. I took a deep breath and heel-toed it out of my room so as not to make the floorboards creak. I took the stairs slowly, was thankful for the rough and loopy carpet, and made for the backdoor. I would scurry outside, knock on the car's door, and whisper that Thomas had to get back into the house before Mom and Dad woke up. Then we would go inside, lock the door behind us, and they would never know that I'd forgotten in the first place. I reached the bottom step and traversed the living room. Just as I had feared, through the den I saw the backdoor gaped open.
I stomped through the beige carpet stealthfully, making light footprints in just the same places that the robber had, years before. That's when I saw it. It was thin and pale, and crookedly splayed across the concrete top step outside. I stepped further and then I realized it was a body part. I was looking at the back of a woman's bare leg.
I screamed then, a true scream pumped out from the bottom of my stomach, a place I hadn't at that point known screams could come from. The leg was pale and too thin. It was broken at the base of the knee, and twisted the wrong way. I looked at that twisted ghostly leg, it's blaring whiteness, the calf's thin lifelessness, and my chest tightened with one fear: I knew who this was. Automatically I walked toward the open door and saw the rest of her body angled down the steps. I was right. It was Iona's mother, sprawled out. One arm crooked into an L shape above her head, and the other clutched to her chest. She was breathing, and her mouth twitched up to the right.
"Annmar..." she trailed off. I stood above her for a second, until I felt a stream of warm urine flowing down my right leg, catching on the inside of my pajama pants, spreading its warmth horizontally for a moment before growing cold and heavy.
"Help," Iona's mother muttered. There were tears in the corners of her eyes. Instead of screaming again I ran through the living room to the kitchen, where a telephone hung on the wall. I dialed 9-1-1. Someone at my house was very hurt, I told the operator.
*
Iona was woken up by the ambulance siren. My parents and Thomas, who'd been inside the whole time, were all sitting on the porch when Iona padded down in the blue and white Garfield nightgown. She was just in time to see her mother, keening lowly for her baby, be hoisted away on the EMT's police-tape yellow gurney. A cruiser and two navy-suited cops stood in the driveway in the dark. Iona saw her mother and made an animal noise, high pitched and nasal, and my mother and father flanked her on the steps, each with an arm over her chest.
*
We were all in the kitchen eating Cheerios with the morning news playing softly on the counter-top television when the social worker arrived. Her cheeks fell like a bulldog's over her jowls and her beige trench coat hung open at the sides. She entered the house without knocking—she'd been there before. My mother stood up and rubbed Iona's back.
"We need to talk to you in the living room, love," she told her.
Half an hour later Iona was dressed and being buckled into the backseat of the social worker's car. She stared at the headrest in front of her, and didn't even look at me. I knew then that she'd never come back to Huron Ave.
Father Deveaney had come over, and as I watched Iona go he wrapped his two sausage arms around me, the fabric from his cassock covering me like wings. From inside his cocoon I heard the engine of the car trip itself into action, and the car pull out and drive away.
"Sometimes you catch the dragon by the tail," Father Deveaney said, "and sometimes, it catches you." He released me from the shadows of his robes, and he and my father went inside the house. I sat down on the top step, right next to my mother. She squeezed her arm around my shoulder and I let my head fall so that I could heave into her lap, again and again.
She began to sing, "Taura-Laura-Laura-Laura, Taura-Laura-Lie. It's an Irish lullaby." I thought about what would happen to Iona for the rest of her life, where she would go now, and later. And I knew, in the rock-pit of my stomach just where that scream came from, that she didn't have a chance. My mother's arms rocked me back and forth to her song, "Taura-Laura-Laura-Laura, Taura-Laura-Lie. Hush now don't you cry." She was silent for a while and I turned my head just enough to see our still street enliven to Labor Day morning. Then my mother smoothed out the hair right above my temple and whispered softly, "I love you most of all."
© 2014 Maura Roosevelt
