Interim Summer 2009

Frankie hadn't had family of her own, at least not any she ever talked about. She always lit a candle on the same day every June. Wilhelmina knew it was for Frankie's father, but whenever Wilhelmina asked questions about him, Esther and Aunt Margaret would…not shush her exactly, because they weren't the types of aunts who shushed children. But they would form a sort of soft but protective barrier between Frankie and all questions. Wilhelmina could feel it thickening the air as the aunts murmured and ho-hummed. They would tell Wilhelmina, "Frankie may not want to talk about it. Let's wait for her to volunteer." Which Frankie never did.

Frankie seemed to have no pictures either. Wilhelmina imagined a picture of a shortish, sturdy-ish man in old-fashioned clothing, with tanned skin and thick silver hair like Frankie's, maybe with Frankie's generous nose and warm smile. When Frankie lit the candle, she always set a little battered metal crucifix beside it that hung from a short chain of black beads, like it was part of a broken rosary. She'd grown up in a town not far from the aunts' Pennsylvania house, on a small farm that was no longer a farm but a housing development, plus a shopping complex at which she never shopped. Aunt Margaret and Esther shopped there sometimes. Frankie didn't mind. "It's a long way to the next Target," she would say, watching from the vegetable garden while Margaret or Esther emerged from the car with the telltale shopping bag. Then, with her usual familiar creaks and groans, she would stand, wipe the dirt from her knees, and extend her hand, which was always warm and rough when Wilhelmina took it. "Shall we go see if they've brought us any treasures, Wilhelmina?"

Aunt Margaret had also grown up nearby, in the same town as Frankie. Aunt Margaret and Frankie had gone to school together, then met Esther in college. Aunt Margaret's childhood house was still standing; Aunt Margaret always said it did and didn't look the same. She could recognize its shape, but the color had changed, and the shed was gone, and the lawn was perfectly landscaped now, the neighborhood around it gentrified. It made her feel a bit unsettled to drive by it, she said. Wilhelmina's family was her only remaining kin. Her brother, Wilhelmina's paternal grandfather, had died a long time ago.

Esther, in contrast, had a very large family seeming to hail from everywhere, with hubs in Miami and New York. Most everyone was Cuban or Jewish or both; Esther had had a white Jewish mother and an Afro-Cuban dad, and had grown up in Washington Heights. The refrigerator door was crammed with pictures of this grandniece's bat mitzvah, that cousin-three-times-removed's quincea?era, and dozens of babies. Her phone conversations were sprinkled with Spanish or Yiddish or both, depending on who was on the other end of the line. Her sister and many of her cousins still lived in New York. At least once every summer, one of them would pass through on their way to somewhere else and stay for a couple days. Once, two of her ancient tías came, not because they were passing through, but just to visit; Tía Maria and Tía Rosa, two tiny wrinkled women who spoke little English but kept up a constant joyful conversation with each other and Esther in Spanish, and Frankie a little too, because Frankie knew some Spanish. They liked to sit in the sun, stretching their feet out and drinking Frankie's iced tea. One of them, Tía Rosa, drew sometimes, in a sketchbook. Wilhelmina peeked once and saw a butterfly, a toad, a ladybug, a dandelion in a patch of grass, the sycamore tree that stood outside her own bedroom window.

One summer, when Wilhelmina was seven—it was 2009—Esther's cousin Ruben visited. He stayed a few days because he was handy and the aunts had a list of tasks he declared he was happy to perform. He set up a TV he'd brought with him, a hand-me-down from one of Esther's cousins. He fixed the gutters. He replaced some missing shingles on the side of the house, then painted them. He even built Frankie a low kneeling bench, which wasn't on the list. He constructed it to be sturdy but light, so that Frankie could move it around easily in her garden. After he'd nailed the last nail and sanded the last edge, he came to the border of the vegetable patch, where a tangle of big leaves hid the baby pumpkins. Then he held it out with his chin to his chest, almost bashful, as if he thought his help might be rejected. When Frankie saw him standing there, she cried out, "Ruben, you dear!" and smiled a smile so radiant that Ruben's face burst into happiness.

Bee was there with Wilhelmina that summer. Bee was invited to stay with Wilhelmina and the aunts every summer, but this was the one summer his parents actually let him come. He was almost, but not quite, seven, and he was called Tobey then. While he and Wilhelmina played in the yard or worked with Frankie in the garden, Ruben carried the ladder from one part of the house to another, climbing it with a hammer in his belt and nails in his mouth, passing from shade into sun. Sometimes he climbed so high, right up to the roof tiles, that Wilhelmina, watching, felt the emptiness beneath his feet and had to look away, whirling with a dizziness that Ruben himself did not seem troubled by. She would push her hands into the dirt beside Frankie and the earth would stop spinning.

Every morning, the aunts and Ruben had breakfast before Esther and Aunt Margaret left for work. One day, very early, while Wilhelmina was pattering down the stairs with sleep still sweet and heavy in her limbs, she heard them talking in the kitchen.

"You know what I've always wondered?" said Ruben. "Do you three ladies sleep together in one big bed?"

"Ruben, dear," said Aunt Margaret, with flint in her voice. None of the aunts had a habit of sharpness, but the kitchen suddenly felt full of sharp aunts. "Is that your business?"

"Uh," said Ruben. "No."

"Is it a respectful question, furthermore?" Esther put in.

Ruben's apologies were immediate, profuse, and heartfelt. "Honestly, Ruben," Esther said a few times to her cousin, but every time she said it, she sounded a little less exasperated, because it was clear that Ruben understood the rebuke. All three of the aunts returned to sounding like themselves, their voices a melodious counterpoint as they talked with Ruben of other things.

After Esther and Aunt Margaret drove off, Ruben began his chores. Wilhelmina and Bee went out to play near Frankie, who was picking beans in the garden.

Curious, Wilhelmina sat in the yard, watching Ruben carry his ladder around. Ruben didn't look like Esther. Esther was tall and slender with pale brown skin and dark hair streaked with silver that she wore in braids, and a soft smile that appeared often, sometimes teasing, sometimes ironic, other times a bit secretive. Also, she was stylish. "A sharp dresser," Frankie always said approvingly, "whereas I am a sparkly dresser," which was true. Frankie always had a sparkling pendant, or something shining in her ears.

Ruben, in contrast, had a rare but bright smile and a big voice, he wore a Mets cap over curly pale hair, and he had short, powerful limbs and pale skin, more like Aunt Margaret than like Esther. He wore baggy shorts and T-shirts. His face was different from Esther's; she looked Black, and he looked white. Their laughs were different. He sang while he worked, in a rough, scratchy timbre; Esther didn't sing much, but when she did, her voice was smooth and clear. When Ruben talked, though, a New York accent like Esther's came pouring out of his mouth.

Wilhelmina watched him carry the ladder past the rosebushes that grew wild against the old, sagging carriage house, then around the corner of the big house and out of sight. A moment later he came back, collected a can of paint from the shed, and disappeared again. Her thoughts followed him. Wilhelmina was thinking about Ruben's question.

Nearby, Bee—called Tobey—lay on his back in a patch of tall grass, watching lilies bob and sway above his head. A bee was bumbling from lily to lily. It brought to mind the low drone of a tiny announcer's voice, starting and stopping, starting and stopping, like the man who introduced the players coming to bat at a baseball game.

"Do you remember that boy at the baseball game?" said Bee.

Frankie, who loved baseball, had taken them to a minor-league game weeks ago. It was funny that they were both thinking about it now. "What boy?" said Wilhelmina. "Tobey?" she added, when he didn't answer. "What boy?"

"The boy sitting right behind us. His grandfather kept calling him Raimondo."

That sounded familiar. "Sort of."

"And he kept saying, ‘Stop calling me Raimondo.'?"

Wilhelmina hadn't been paying much attention, but she could hear that boy's voice in her memory. "Yeah, I think so."

"The grandfather finally said, ‘All right, what should I call you then? Can I call you Ray? Will you be my Ray of light?'?"

"I missed that part," said Wilhelmina, who liked the idea of being someone's ray of light. "You were really listening in, weren't you?"

Bee didn't speak for a while. Wilhelmina watched Frankie push up onto her feet and carry her new bench and her basket to the cucumbers. Frankie wore her long, silver hair in a twisted braid that wound around her head like a crown. Wilhelmina thought it made her look like a queen, even if her jeans were muddy and her fingernails caked with dirt.

"My dad's name is Tobey," said Bee.

Wilhelmina hugged herself. Bee's dad was a doctor, and Wilhelmina had noticed that everyone was always super nice to him. Actually, he wasn't just a doctor; he was an emergency room doctor, which meant he saved people's lives all the time. People turned away from other people when he entered a room and held their hands out for him to shake, looking into his face admiringly. They watched him when he moved off to talk to someone else. He was tall, dark-haired like Bee, and supposedly very handsome. People certainly acted like he was handsome. But to Wilhelmina, he'd always had the feeling of a false smile and hard eyes pasted to the outside wall of a cold, empty cave. When he'd just woken up or when he hadn't slept for days—two states in which Wilhelmina encountered him fairly often because of his strange work hours—the impression was heightened. When his eyes touched hers, Wilhelmina shivered. And she knew that Bee was afraid of him.

"I feel like my name is something else," said Bee.

"Something else?"

"I mean, not Tobey."

"Oh," said Wilhelmina, surprised. "What do you think your name is?"

Bee sat up. "I think it's Bee," he said, looking into Wilhelmina's face with his own face scrunched up in perplexity. "Like a bumblebee." Then, just as abruptly, he lay down again.

Wilhelmina looked from Bee to the bumblebee bumbling around the lilies, then she lay down too. It was a lot to take in. He didn't much resemble a bumblebee. His hair was thick and wavy, his eyes were greenish-brown, and his skin was flushed with summer freckles; he was skinny and long, not squat and round. He didn't bumble or buzz. He was quiet, and thoughtful, and serious. He didn't sting. "I think it's cool to choose your own name," she said.

"I don't think my dad will let me," he said.

Frankie's voice rose from the garden. "Your father has no power over your name, Bee," she said. "Should I call you Bee?"

"Yes," said Bee, who sounded pretty sure about it.

"Lovely," said Frankie. "It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Bee. Your father can refuse to call you by your name, and he can refuse to let you change it officially until you're an adult. But that has nothing whatsoever to do with what your name actually is. It's your name. You know what it is. Names are powerful. They're more powerful than one opinionated man."

Wilhelmina closed her eyes, thinking about names. Imagining them as powerful. The grass tickled her neck. She could tell that Frankie was in the tomato patch now, because the earthy, unmistakable smell of tomato vines was filling her throat. Wilhelmina, she thought. Bee. Wilhelmina. Frankie. Ruben. Wilhelmina. Bee. Tobey. She shivered again. Already, "Tobey" felt wrong. Tobey was her friend's father.

"I like Bee as a name," she said, which was true, even if she didn't understand it as a name for her friend.

"Thanks," said Bee.

"I'm worried I'll forget and call you the wrong name."

"It's okay," he said. "I'll remind you."

Wilhelmina remained on her back with her eyes closed, idly musing. Her mind returned to Ruben's question this morning. When Frankie moved away from the tomatoes to examine the garden's single promising eggplant, Wilhelmina knew she'd moved, even though she couldn't see Frankie. She searched her senses for signs of Ruben, and knew he was still on the far side of the house, climbing the ladder again.

"Bee?" she said.

"Yes?"

She could hear something new in his voice, because she'd called him Bee. It was a kind of confused happiness. "Bee," she said, wanting to cause him more happiness. "Can you always tell where people are?"

Bee thought for a moment. "What do you mean?"

"Like, when you wake up in the middle of the night," said Wilhelmina. "Can you tell where everyone is in the house? Or, say you closed your eyes now and Frankie went to the shed, and I went inside. Would you know where we were?"

"I mean, I could guess where you were," he said. "But how would I know where you were?"

"Just by," said Wilhelmina, "I don't know. By how it feels."

"I mean," he said again, "I think I could, maybe a little. But I think that's just because I would probably hear shed noises or something."

"Yeah," said Wilhelmina, understanding, and wondering if that was what she meant too. If when she came awake during that early part of the morning when it felt like an extra door had opened in the world, when the other humans in the house were asleep and the house was still and waiting, when the owls were coming home and the robins were just starting to stir, if the reason she knew where Bee and Ruben were, and whether the aunts were sleeping all together that night, or all apart, or in some other configuration, was because of the noises she almost didn't realize she was hearing.

Frankie's voice, warm and scratchy, broke into her thoughts again. "Some people have more of a sense of those things than others," she said.

Wilhelmina sat up, blinking. Looking for her aunt. Finding her in the eggplant patch, exactly where Wilhelmina had known her to be.

As Frankie wiped the sheen of sweat from her brow, her skin glowed with the sun. She gave Wilhelmina her megawatt smile. "Maybe it's part of your magic, Wilhelmina dear."