A Sharp Intake of Breath. Джон Миллер

hardly gone more than a foot when she paused and crouched down to look closely at one of the bricks.

      “What?”

      “This one’s loose.” She pushed with one finger and it sank slightly in. She turned and announced, slowly, like I was an idiot, “I’m going ... to try ... to pull it out.” She often talked to me like that. Pretty much everyone did, and not just because I was five.

      She picked at it with her fingernails, gingerly, but they weren’t long enough. She pulled two barrettes from her hair and inserted them into the crevices—it worked. She dropped the brick on the ground, then stuck her hand inside. “It’s perfect!” she said. “This can be our secret hiding place. Only you and me will know about it. Swear not to tell. Cross your heart, hope to die, stick a needle in your eye.”

      “I swear,” I said, full of wonder and excitement, not only at the hiding place, but also at a shared secret.

      She placed her found pennies and bottle caps in there, and then stuck her hand out. “Gimme the pen.”

      “No! I wanna take it home and show Bessie!”

      “You can’t show it to her—she’ll tell.”

      Just then, we heard our names called from the street.

      Lil put the brick back and grabbed my hand, pulling me up the lane to where Ma was waiting, arms crossed, expression stern.

      “What have you two been up to back there?”

      “Nothing, just looking around,” said Lil.

      “And what’ve you got behind your back, young man?”

      “My barrette,” said Lil, before I could think of an answer. “I’ve been trying to get him to give it back, but he won’t.” Lil grabbed the pen, smothering it with her hand so Ma didn’t see it, and she stuffed it in her dress pocket. “He got cooties all over it—I have to clean it off at home.”

      I frowned at Lil. She’d gotten her way, again, and managed to make me look bad too. I wished I were as smart as she was. How did she think of things so quickly? As we walked home, she whispered, “I just did you a favour. I told you Ma would’ve taken it away.”

      I wasn’t sure about Lil’s true motivation. I hardly ever was. Had she been helping me or just seizing an opportunity? She did give the pen back, but only a few days later, and only briefly once we’d returned to the alley behind Rothbart’s. Then Lil took it again and put it in our new secret hiding place, where she would have access to it whenever she wanted.

      From then on, the wall behind the pharmacy harboured all sorts of found objects Lil and I didn’t want our parents to know about—an extra stash of marbles, a shiny gold crucifix we discovered behind a church and would never have dared to bring home, a box of matches, and countless stray pennies we saved up to buy ribbon candy.

      The next year, when Mrs. Debardeleben was torturing me with the obturator, I went to Lil for help. One morning after my therapy session, we grabbed Ozzie and took off early to St. Patrick Street. We scanned the sidewalks as we always did, to see if anyone was watching, then ran to the end of the alley. Lil counted ten columns in from the back and five rows up. She picked at the brick, worked it out, and stuck her arm in the hole to pull out our accumulated loot. We sat with legs splayed in front of us, scattered the treasure, and started counting. When Lil declared that nothing was missing, she popped everything back and I crammed Ozzie in last. Lil placed the brick into its slot and off we shot, out of the alley and home again.

      IF A CHILD IS BORN WITH BOTH a cleft lip and a cleft palate, most parents are so distraught about the lip that they choose that operation first, even though it’s less pressing from a medical perspective. The goal for the lip is to stitch it seam-lessly, until it’s as pretty and perfect as Cupid’s bow. That’s the shape the textbooks tell surgeons to aim for: Cupid’s bow. They know the power a smile has to shoot love’s arrow straight and sure.

      Ma, however, was of the opinion that vanity was an indulgence, and since they weren’t able to save enough money to fix both the lip and the palate, they made a choice. Besides, since I had a partial cleft, the doctors advised my parents to consider that scarring from the operation might be more severe than the deformity itself. What a laugh. In choosing not to pursue the lip operation, my parents made the sensible decision, the one that ensured my survival, but they didn’t consider how disfigurement might make survival a capricious gift. They couldn’t know what it would feel like to have a warped bow, one that would cause the arrow to miss its target nearly every time. Ma frowned on vanity, but can a beautiful person, or even someone who is merely plain, truly understand what it means to be ugly?

      Not just ugly. Different enough to draw attention to it.

      Hare, serpent, ape.

      Nowadays, comparisons with the animal kingdom are rarer. Ma didn’t like them, even then. She declared, when I was born, that my notch was like a pinch of dough, raised up too high by the fingers, making a point where there should only have been a slight lilt. She said it made my mouth triangular, like hamentashen, the pocket pastries named after King Hamen’s hat and eaten at the holiday of Purim. The tip of my tongue, showing there in the gap, was like the poppy seed filling, only the wrong colour. I don’t think they filled them with cherry in those days.

      She started calling me her little Hermantashen, a humiliating term of endearment only someone who loved you would inflict. Eventually, everyone used this nickname—except Pop, who said it was ridiculous—and in no time at all, it evolved into ’Tashen, and then finally just Toshy. Doctors, teachers, prison guards, my late wife ... for seventy-seven years, people have called me Toshy, a childhood nickname that still follows me.

      

      I’ve always thought it’d be easier to be led to the gallows than to be brought handcuffed into a police station in front of your family. At least when they hanged you, they had the courtesy of putting a bag over your head.

      When they brought me in for questioning, the desk clerk sneered, as if to say he knew he’d see me eventually; all he had to do was sit back and wait for me to screw things up. Bessie sat on a bench in the corridor; on either side of her were my parents. But Lil was missing. Ma had one hand over her mouth; the other reached out. My chest tightened. The look on Bessie’s face I can only describe as wild confusion mixed with intense grief, as though trying to make sense of what was happening was causing a firestorm in her head. Though my mother was the one with the outstretched hand, I felt it was Bessie whose expression was calling out to me, more to ask for help than to give it. Pop just looked deeply sad, and shook his head almost imperceptibly as I was led past. He was sitting on his hands, his palms flat on the bench as though he had to stuff them there in order not to leap up towards me—in love or anger, I didn’t know which one it would be. Perhaps they’d told him to be still; it didn’t matter, the effect was a pupil waiting to be pulled into the principal’s office.

      I smiled weakly, hoping they’d believe that I’d be okay, even though I wasn’t sure of anything. I wondered how or why they’d managed to get my family to the station so quickly. It didn’t occur to me then that they might question them too.

      They brought me into an interrogation room and left me there for the better part of an hour. The room was claustrophobic, the air thick, and contained only a small table with a chair on either side. Finally, a plainclothes detective entered. He was tall and had a bushy moustache that hung down over his top lip, the kind I wished I could grow myself. His overcoat stank of cigar smoke. I’d never seen him before; he was the sort of man you wouldn’t spot as a police officer, either because he wasn’t in uniform or maybe because he came out of the station only to investigate crime scenes. I’d never stuck around once I’d created one.

      He paced a few times in front of me, his hands behind his back, and then he said, “All right. Now suppose you tell me how the hell you thought you were going to get away with stealing that diamond.”

      It