Al Capone Does My Shirts

“Dad! Could you show me the cell house, and then maybe could we play ball?” I sound like I’m six and a half now, but I can’t help it. He’s been gone forever and I hardly got to see him at all yesterday. It’s lonely in my family when he’s not around.

His smile seems to lose its pink. He puts Natalie’s buttons down in two careful piles, gets up and brushes his uniform off.

I follow him into the kitchen. “You’re not working today, are you?”

“Some cockamamie psychiatrist decides the problem is Natalie doesn’t get enough attention, and Helen ships him off! Our Matthew! I’m happy as a pig in mud to have him here, but it’s a darn fool thing. What child doesn’t have a brother or sister? Half the world has seven or eight. Having a brother didn’t make Natalie the way she is. One look at the two of them together and that big-shot psychiatrist would have known that. He’s the one ought to have his head examined. It’s going to make Nat sicker just having Moose gone.”

“I can’t help if your mom can’t see the forest for the trees. She’s got one good boy, why not focus on him? But no, she goes on these wild-goose chases. It’s too bad the child is sick. But cut your losses. No use throwing good after bad.”

I nodded then. I didn’t mean to. Really I didn’t. My neck nodded without my telling it to. But once I’d nodded, I couldn’t un-nod. I was too stiff to move. When Mrs. McCraw drove off, I still had her knitting bag in my hand.

The thing is, we didn’t do that, right? We didn’t put her away. The Esther P. Marinoff will help her, right?

At UCLA they made us cut Natalie’s hair. Shaved it right off. They tested her like she was some kind of insect. [...] Nothing about her was private.

At home she’d spend hours in her room rocking like a boat in a terrible storm. But it was UCLA, my mother would remind us. When she said the name, it had a golden glow. They had promised a cure, if—a word my mother can’t ever seem to hear—Natalie’s problem fit the diagnosis they were studying.

“[...] An interesting case,” they said. “But not what we’re looking for. You should consider donating her brain to science when she dies.”

“Gram doesn’t live down the street anymore, honey.” My mom sighs. “We can’t do this without you. Being around kids is good for Natalie. Mrs. Kelly says so. And if she’s to get accepted to the Esther P. Marinoff...”

“Whatever you say, Mom,” I say, watching Nat fuss with her clothes like something’s too tight.

“What’s the matter?” I ask Natalie.

“She’s fine,” my mother answers for her. “We’ve been all over. We’ve had a lovely day.” My mom glances quickly at me and then away.

“She looks upset.”

“It’s just hot, that’s all.” My mom rubs her neck.

“She wants her buttons.”

“Well...yes...,” my mom admits. “But I’m sure once you take her out, she’ll forget all about it. Mrs. Kelly says it’s just a matter of redirecting her attention.” My mom’s voice isn’t quite so sure as her words are. She and Natalie have clearly had a hard time today.

“Don’t you think it’s kind of mean, taking her buttons away?”

“Numbers Nat, we need you!” Theresa interrupts.

Natalie looks up.

Piper hands Nat the money, rolled up in a handkerchief. “Three dollars and twenty cents split four—excuse me.” Piper looks at me. “Three ways.”

“One dollar six cents, two cents left over.” Natalie rocks with pleasure.

“Extra two cents goes to me,” Piper says as Natalie counts out each share.

We sit with her. Annie and Theresa, Jimmy and me. Keep her company wherever she’s gone.

That is the way my mom finds us when she gets off the boat, her music bag over her shoulder.

[...]

“Get them out of here.” My mom spits the words out.

“Mom, it’s—”

“I won’t have her made a spectacle.”

“It’s really not like that. They like her,” I say.

“NOW, Moose.”

But right where the chain link meets the cement wall, I see a gap.

[...]

I look down at Natalie. She hasn’t moved a muscle. I won’t be able to see her once I get up there. But I know better than to try to move her once she’s all set up.

I’ll just make it quick, that’s all. A couple of seconds to look. One minute, that will be enough. A ball could be sitting right there out in the open, just waiting for me. I know this is a lousy idea. But it doesn’t matter. A gap in the fence is a magnet. It just is.

My mom has taken off her green hat and her green coat and she has begun to make supper. Every minute or so she comes back to the table to read a part of the article again. It’s as if the newsprint is warm and my mother’s hands are very cold.

Natalie is on the living room floor, reading my math book like it’s the newspaper.

“Mom, I need to talk to you,” I say.

“Okay, honey.” She smiles. “I can’t wait to tell your dad about this! [...] Your sister is going to be okay! She’s going to be fine!”

“But, Mom,” I say, “it says no kids are accepted after the age of twelve!”

My mother freezes. She’s so still, it looks like she’s stopped breathing. “Natalie is ten, Moose. You know that.”

“You can’t be ten for five years in a row,” I whisper.

“Stop it! Stop it!” I have my hands on Nat’s arms. I want to shake her, shake her hard. My arms tremble with the effort not to.

Natalie screams louder. I look into those trapped eyes. Wherever she is, she can’t get out, which only makes her scream louder. And suddenly I’m not angry anymore.

“I know what Mrs. Kelly says. I’m talking about Moose now and what he thinks. He’s good with Natalie. They’ve worked out a relationship. We have to respect that and trust him.”

“Well, yes, but—”

“You have to let him care about her his way.”

And then something I can’t hear.

“I got one child who has everything,” my mom says, “big, strapping, healthy, smart...makes people laugh. Got kids coming over looking for him night and day, just like at home. Little ones, big ones and the girls—they all like Moose. But Natalie, Natalie doesn’t have the whole world looking out for her. She needs me.”

“Moose needs you too.”

“Me? I’m not going to upset Natalie. She likes me,” Piper says.

“I’m sorry,” I say, my hand on the door.

Piper scoffs. “Can’t I at least say happy birthday?” She looks so earnest, so sincere, smiling her sweet smile. She’s even prettier without her hat.

“How did you know it was her birthday?”

“Theresa told me.”

Natalie is holding hands with a man convicted of some awful crime. It’s so strange, so awful, and so...normal. Natalie doesn’t look weird. She’s my older sister. A sixteen-year-old girl holding hands with a man not much older than she is.

This is terrible.

This is good.

“People know, Mom. They know.”

“They don’t know!” she cries, tears streaming down her face. “You don’t know! She won’t have a chance at sixteen. No one will take her. No one cares about an adult that isn’t right. It’s only kids who have a chance. It’s too late if she’s sixteen. Don’t you see?”

“Yeah, but Mom, you can’t pretend! It’s worse. People know—”

“No one knows. They don’t know and they don’t care. Put her in an institution. Do you know how many times I’ve heard that? Lock her up with all the nuts. She has to be TEN. It’s the only chance she has!”

“You didn’t care that it made me mad,” my mom says in a quiet tone of voice. “You didn’t care that it upset your father. You didn’t care that it was the night before Natalie’s interview. You didn’t care about anything. [...]

“But I see how much you care about Natalie. That’s the part that didn’t make sense. All night I tossed and turned. I kept asking why. Moose, of all people. Why did he say that? Why? And you know what? I could only come up with one answer.

“You did it because you believed in your heart it was the right thing to do. You were doing what you thought would help your sister.”

I try to go to sleep. But I keep thinking about Natalie at home in Santa Monica—living her life in the back room of our house and on the steps of Gram’s. I rode bikes with Pete, played ball, did my homework. She did not. I will graduate from high school, go to college, get married, have kids. She will not.

[...]

Nothing has helped. But suddenly I see this isn’t true. One thing has helped. Carrie Kelly. Natalie has been more a part of things here on this island than she ever has before. She’s had a life here, for the first time. Maybe just a little bit of a life. But a life just the same.

When I hang up the phone, I know I have to do something. Have to. I have no idea what. I wonder if this is how my mother feels. How she has always felt.

Now I understand. When you love someone, you have to try things even if they don’t make sense to anyone else.

I look directly into his blue eyes. “Remember you said we should think hard about going against the rules? Remember you said that. Well, I have thought hard.”

The warden meets my gaze. “I see that,” he says. “But in this case you’re asking me to bend the rules. And I’m not about to. You may think it’s the right thing to do, but I do not.”

“I figured Capone could write back in the book—you know, underlining very faintly in pencil the way the cons do.”

“No, I don’t know.”

“Let’s say you want to say, ‘I need your help.’ You go carefully through the book and look for an I and underline it. And then an n and underline it and an e and so on until you’ve spelled your whole message.”

“‘I like your mother very much’?” Piper says when she reads it.

“You got to say something about the guy’s mother.”

“Why?” she asks.

“Because then he remembers he has one. And he knows we know her too. Makes him act better. It’s The Mom Rule—all guys use it.”

“This is Al Capone we’re talking about. I don’t think he’ll fall for a cheap trick like that.”

And every day I wonder if we’ll be going back to Santa Monica. It seems so long ago that we lived there now, I’m not even sure I want to anymore. And I know moving back will be bad for Natalie.