It was the same thing every day: handing out stale bread and lukewarm coffee to a crowd of bitter, pinched facessome so dirty and expressionless that they barely looked human. It wasn't easy, this job forced upon me by Mother Superior, surely as some kind of cruel joke. Didn't she realize? Didn't that wrinkled old battle ax understand that every morning I do this, every chunk of bread I hand out and cup of coffee I offer, gnaws away at my sorry excuse for a soul, little by little?
In each and every dirt streaked face I can see my past staring back at me, with those hollow eyes that come with the territory; hollow eyes I still haven't been able to get rid of. It's hard to forget such a miserable life.
But that doesn't mean I don't try.
I spent much of my childhood wreaking havoc on the citizens of Brooklyn. My parents were a couple of drunks, barely remembering they even had a daughter unless they caught me doing something 'wrong'. Then they'd slap me around some until they got bored, or too sober. Aside from those sporadic spurts of brutal discipline, though, I was free. Fully responsible for my life at the age of six.
I was without parents, maybe, but I certainly wasn't without friends. Children just like me swarmed the streets, children whose parents didn't bother with them, or simply didn't exist at all. We were an army of hollow cheeked, bruise covered vagabonds, and our commander was a boy by the name of Jimmy Conlon. To us, Jimmy could walk on water. He was our savior, our white knight. When someone was sick, or hungry, or beaten up real bad, Jimmy Conlon always knew how to make things right again, and he never asked for nothing in return. When he walked down the street, a pile of newspapers on his shoulder, the street kids would stop and stare. The brave ones would say hello, and Jimmy would always toss them an easy grin.
His younger brother, Pete, had the same smile, except his had a wicked flavor to it. Despite that, Pete wasn't so bad (though God knows he wanted people to think otherwise). He was, after all, the one who saved me.
He was my best friend.
When both my parents were suddenly killed in a factory fire a week after my seventh birthday, nothing much changed. At first. But when a toothless old landlord came banging into the apartment I still called home demanding rent money, I found myself suddenly homeless. Parentless had been one thing. I could handle parentless. With no roof over my head, things were different. Bad different. 'Home' was a few empty milk crates stacked in a deserted alleyway.
That was how Pete Conlon found me: starving and feverish as I huddled in my palace of garbage.
A sucker for strays, Pete dragged me to the apartment he shared with his mother and brother. It was there, under the doting tutelage of a daughter-starved Theresa Conlon, that I slowly recovered. And from the moment I opened my eyes and saw Pete's round face peering down at me, light eyes filled with worry, I knew how lucky I was.
From that moment on, Pete and me were inseparable. Like two peas in a pod, Theresa used to call us. Double Trouble.
"Ouch!" I growled as a hefty handful of snow hit my shoulder. "Pete, I know that was you. Where are ya?" I was thirteen years old, a freckle-faced tomboy trying desperately to discover where the snowball hurling sniper was hidden as I trudged home from a long, cold day of trying to sell newspapers (trying being the key word there). Standing in the center of the narrow alley, I scanned the rooftops that rose on either side of me, seeking out the familiar figure. "Pete! Don't be a coward, ya bum. Come out here and face me like a man!"
Suddenly, I was tackled from behind. Tumbling into a nearby snow bank, I let out a screech of surprise. As I wiped snow away from my eyes, a blurry picture came into focus. Pete was standing over me, grinning. His aqua eyes sparkled in the pale winter light. "Oh jeez, is that you, Double? I t'ought it was someone else. Sorry." The sarcasm in his voice couldn't be missed.
I cringed slightly at the old nickname, a nickname that had suddenly taken on new meaning as I had recently sprouted a rather ample (and terribly unwelcome) chest. Pete reached over to hoist me out of the snowdrift and I thanked him with a fistful of snow down his collar.
"Hey," he yelped, shaking himself like a wet dog, "that's cold!"
"Stop whining', Trouble. A little snow never hurt no one."
Pete's response was a scathing glare in my direction, which I had become a pro at shrugging off. Other people did funny things when Pete glared at them, and I could never understand their sudden nervousness, their sweating, their stuttered words. I laughed outrightly at those stupid eyes of his, eyes that Pete once proudly confided to me he believed were his best feature. I laughed at that admission, too, and that was when Pete had stopped telling me such secret things.
He stood there muttering curses and I sauntered off toward home. A moment later he was by my side, apparently packing off his frustration for another day. "Sell much today?" Always the same question. Pete was practicing for when he assumed Jimmy's position of power, which, from the looks of the engagement ring on Jimmy's girlfriend's finger, was coming up fast.
"Nah," I responded, "no one was out. Too cold." He nodded in agreement as we climbed the stairs to the Conlon's fifth floor apartment.
"Hey," he said abruptly, his hand stopping mine as I reached for the doorknob, "we're going out tonight, to celebrate Mikey Di Salvo's birthday. You're comin', right?"
I rolled my eyes at the mention of yet another boys night out. As one of the few girls who sold newspapers in Brooklyn, I was an honorary member of the boy's club, a status that I intermittently loved and hated with equal vengeance. The only other woman in my life was Theresa, and she was pretty much my mother. My world was sorta a lonely one, with no other girls to giggle and whisper with, commiserating on the intimacies of teenage life.
"I guess."
Pete flashed a charming grin in my direction as he went to open the door. "Good."
I followed him inside, already regretting that I had said yes so easily. But this was Pete, and I had a hard time saying anything but yes to Pete. The simple "no" always stuck fast in my throat, and before I could recover he was smiling and nodding and going on his merry way. I never said no to Pete Conlon, and sometimes I hated myself for that.
We arrive at Harrigan's Pub just as it was beginning to snow for the third time that week. I groaned loudly at the sight of the first flake. Already the city was buried under a thick, slushy blanket of the stuff. Expertly ignoring my muttered curses to the weather, Pete pulled me inside. The party, after all, was waiting for him.
The room was wide and dark, with flickering gas lamps lining the rough wooden walls. Round tables appear haphazardly around the room, each one filled with the huddled figures of men and boys clutching mugs of cheap beer. A long, crowded bar took up the back wall. I glanced around, slowly realizing that my arrival had warranted a great number of leering stares pointed in my direction. My stomach lurched. I had forgotten what kind of place Harrigan's turned into after the sun set. I stepped closer to Pete without thinking, and he instinctively closed his hand around my owna gesture of brotherly protection. My heart slowed down some in my chest.
Slowly we made our way to a wild crowd in the back corner: three tables shoved together, packed with boys of various ages shouting and hooting and hollering at the top of their lungs. As we drew closer, a tall young man leapt to his feet, pushed his way free of the mess, and strode over to us. All eyes were on Jimmy Conlon as he did so, and as he bent to kiss me on the cheek, you could practically hear the gears of the Brooklyn gossip mill clanking.
"Rose! I didn't think you'd come!"
I couldn't help but grin up at him. "What, and miss the chance to see you? 'Sides, what's a party without Rosie Nolan?"
Jimmy laughed and pulled me over to sit near him as Pete rolled his eyes at my cocky words, words that he knew were nothing more than was a well-forged front. But Pete was not entirely inhuman. He kept his mouth shut and settled in a chair, letting me have my fun pretending that I was arrogant and brave, like him.
The boys that surrounded the table all shouted greetings at me, and I shouted back over the din of the pub, my face stretched into a smile. A few were familiar, but most foreign. The Brooklyn newsboys were growing at an unprecedented rate, no thanks to the Conlon boys and their equally growing reputation. A glass of liquor was pushed in my direction, and I consider it for a moment before picking it up and taking a gulp.
I was never much of a drinker. My parents taught me at least one lesson before they died. But then, it was a celebration, and those were few and far between in the lives of street-rats like us. So I fought down another swallow and raised my glass to Mikey DiSalvo, a dark-eyed, dark-
haired Italian fresh off the boat from Naples that Jimmy had (to no one's surprise) taken under his wing.
Feeling eyes on me, I turned to find Pete staring intently, a puzzled expression twisting his face. I giggled and threw a shrug at him, the alcohol and the fiddle music that had been struck up making me do such silly things as giggle. "What's that look for? Don't think I can handle it, Conlon?"
He echoed my movement, lifting his shoulders. "Never said ya couldn't." I expected him to smile and was surprised when no such expression graced his face. One of his boys slapped him heartily on the back, having played audience to our entire exchange.
"Let 'er go! Rose's a big girl. She'll be fine, Spot!" I wrinkled my nose at this diminutive and signaled for another drink.
Jimmy and I were the only ones who called him Pete anymore.
Things started to get blurry after that, like an impressionist painting where all the figures seem to melt into one another, no clear outlines. I remember Mikey pulling me into his lap and whispering sweet-sounding Italian words into my ear that made my cheeks go pink and tingles crawl into my belly. I remember how mad I got at Pete, who seemed to be having a hard time keeping his disapproving eyes off of us as he sat hunched at a nearby table, arms laced over his chest while one of his boys tried to entertain him with the latest gossip. Jimmy was twirling his girl, Marie, around the dance floor, and I remember thinking how happy they looked, how perfect, like the figures in a music box, spinning and spinning and spinning...
And then, all of a sudden, I was outside. Mikey was standing far to close for my liking, his hands tight on my waist and his hot breath on my face, reeking of alcohol. When he tried to kiss me, my knee jerked up automatically to connect with his groin, and he hobbled off, leaving a string of hackneyed English curses trailing in the air behind him.
I did a little jig of victory in the dark alley, but my feet slowed as the realization that I was all alone slid into my consciousness, slow and thick as honey. Where was Pete? Or Jimmy? I had not been without them since I was seven years old. Finding myself suddenly alone, I panicked.
The fact that I was fall-down drunk certainly didn't help the situation. Every time I took a few steps the ground lurched and wobbled under my feet, as if I was standing on an ill-made raft in the middle of the turbulent ocean. The snow had turned into freezing rain and the wind had picked up, spitting the precipitation into my eyes, stinging my face like tiny needles. The mouth of the alley was so close, beckoning me, teasing me. Six more steps, I begged my numb and trembling legs, six more and then the street and then surely someone will see me. The Conlon boys would find me, and Jimmy would scoop me up and take me home, because he was Jimmy Conlon and that was what he did, rescue people. And then Theresa would yell at her sons for being irresponsible idiots, for forgetting that I was not a boy yet again, and that I had to live by different rules. And I'd be tucked into my warm bed with my warm blankets all snug around me and Pete's warm body next to me, and I'd sleep forever. Six more steps . . .
On the third, my foot hit a patch of ice and I fell, my head meeting the brick wall that was next to me with a sickening crack.
I opened my eyes to behold two portly policemen standing over me, arguing with one another. It was still snowing, but the flakes were less angry now, tempered by a weak sun fighting through the gray clouds.
"She's dead, Paddy! Lookit 'er, for the love of Christ. Lips as blue as me dear mothers' eyes. Let's just get the body outta here, before it attracts attention."
The younger of the two, his face adorned with an auburn handlebar moustache, squinted down at me. "I ain't so sure, Bill. I ain't sure. Touch 'er, will ya?"
"Ooh no. I ain't doin' nothin'of the sort. You touch 'er."
The one called Paddythe younger onesighed heavily. "Fine," he muttered. Reaching down, he extended a pudgy finger, which he then used to unceremoniously jab me with, right in the ribs. I moved ever so slightly, much too cold to do anything else.
"See?" Paddy said triumphantly to his frowning partner, "told you she wasn't dead."
"Well by God, she sure is close to it. What are ya thinkin' we do with 'er?"
The younger officer straightened up and peered around for a moment before an enlightened look graced his face. He bent down again to hoist me up, tossing me over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. His partner looked at him quizzically. "Where are ya takin' 'er?"
"Right there," announced Paddy. With a free hand, he pointed to a hulking building across the street. I watched this scene from upside-down with half-open eyes and a half-
functioning mind.
The other cop grinned as his eyes followed the finger. "Why, Paddy, you're a bleedin' genius. I didn't even realize where we was."