“I am,” Natalia agreed.
“You’re probably beautiful,” the child had announced. “You’re like the good witch.”
“I am exactly.” Natalia had laughed.
Natalia paid for Mimi’s day care and ballet lessons. Elv still worked in the animal shelter. She’d been promoted to assistant manager, but she’d made clear what her hours would be. She would not work overtime. She was always out by three, waiting on the corner for Mimi. Elv didn’t like to go into the school and tried to avoid it. She felt she’d somehow manage to get herself into trouble. She still didn’t trust authority figures. She’d been so nervous about her first parent-teacher conference, even though it was just nursery school, that Pete Smith had gone with her.
“Hey, baby,” she would call cheerfully when the preschoolers all came rushing out. You’d never have guessed that she was brokenhearted when her girl came racing over, lunchbox in one hand, pink backpack over her shoulder. Elv had to laugh when she discovered it was her fate to have a daughter who loved pink. Mimi always did extra credit and scored the most stars on her weekly worksheet. “I’m the best,” she said quite simply and Elv grinned. She quite agreed. The funny thing was, she reminded Elv of Meg. The serious set to her face, the fact that she worked so hard at every task, how she set her shoes in a neat line: boots, ballet slippers, sneakers. But she reminded her of Claire as well, the way she would reach for Elv’s hand when they went to the cemetery in Astoria. Tell me a story, she always said, so Elv would sit with her on the bench where the hostas grew. There were starlings in the trees. She wanted to say that she would have done anything to change what had happened, to bring back the people she loved; instead she said that once upon a time, in the heart of New York City, there was a boy who found a secret world, a place where some people were good and some were bad, and loyalty was the most important trait of all.
“It was Daddy,” Mimi would say. She knew the story, word for word, and took great comfort in the fact that it never changed. It only went forward if she asked What happened next? Then Elv would tell her the next section, all about the man who was a giant, and a boy who had a gold ring that could transport him anywhere, and the sisters who could hear tomato plants growing, and the great-grandmother who could sew stars into dresses so that they would glow in the dark, and the little girls who wore them who could never get lost.
SOMETIMES THEY TOOK the train out to North Point Harbor and Pete picked them up at the station. He’d bought the two-family house in which he’d been renting an apartment when the place went up for sale. It was right in the town center; you could walk to everything. Mimi loved the tea shop that served homemade ice cream. She took her doll, Miss Featherstone, with her wherever she went.
“Miss Featherstone is a dancer,” Elv told Pete.
“A ballerina,” Mimi corrected her.
“I see,” Pete said.
They all ordered ice cream. Mimi always ordered vanilla.
“Just like Claire,” Pete said.
“Claire, my momma’s sister?” Mimi asked.
“That’s the one,” Pete said.
“Finish up,” Elv suggested to the child, who had begun to color on the back of her place mat with the crayons the tea shop provided.
Mimi drew a scoop of ice cream in a silver cup. There were stars all over the ice cream.
“Here,” she said, handing it to Pete. “This is for Claire.”
Pete looked at Elv, who nodded her okay.
“She lives far away, but I’ll mail it to her,” Pete said.
“She lives on the other side of the ocean,” Elv told Mimi, “where they all speak a different language and the light is a different color every day.”
Elv went to North Point Harbor on her own sometimes, when Mimi was at school. She still visited Lorry every Sunday, bringing their daughter along. But she didn’t want Mimi to think their world was made up only of the departed, that all there was in this life was something more to lose. She went to the other cemetery with Pete, who had arranged the stones from Paris quite beautifully and who still cut the grass and tended to the lilacs nearby. Elv noticed some spindly green things growing as well.
“Tomato plants!”
“I put them in every year,” Pete admitted. “I get different varieties, ones I think your mom would have appreciated. This year I planted Black Krim, from the Ukraine.”
Elv ducked her head so Pete wouldn’t see that she was crying. Pete handed her a handkerchief and she blew her nose. Before Elv took the train back to Queens, they went to the new diner that had just opened and ordered grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches in honor of Annie. They had strong cups of coffee.
“Remember the Cherokee chocolates?” Elv said. “Those were my favorites. One year I said I was allergic, just to be difficult, but I’d sneak out and eat some when no one was looking.”
“I never knew a tomato could be brown and still be edible.” Pete chuckled. “Remember the Golden Jubilees? They were huge. They didn’t even taste like the same species as what you get in the grocery store.”
Pete wanted to say something more, but instead he just started talking about the library project. Annie had left funds for him to oversee a reading room in the new elementary school on Highland Road.
“Is there something else?” Elv asked. “Are you sick of me and Mimi coming out and bothering you?”
“Oh, no,” Pete assured her. “I was just thinking of how things used to be.”