Chapter 1
Sarah’s day ended as it began. The same question, always.
“How is he?”
Every day and every night. She would fret and worry while away, but working paid the bills, paid for the roof over their heads, the food on their meager table, for the doctors and medicines that kept her only living son breathing. Maitiú had died in infancy. Her husband Iosaf the war. And Stíofán—?
No neighbors greeted her upon entering the block. The building. No wide eyed sympathy. Tears. Hasty looking away. It wasn’t like—before. Nothing like before. If her Steven had sickened—had, had died—well. She would know. The walls were paper thin, the apartments crowded, the streets filthy. There were no secrets in DUMBO.
“How is he?”
“Much the same,” Signora Luciana croaked. “Still breathing.”
Then—
“That boy is back.” James Buchanan Barnes. James. Jimmy. Jay. Jamie. Seamus. Yankel. The all-American boy, that cheeky Irish bastard, or that half-bred thieving little kike depending on who you asked, but “Bucky,” he’d insisted. “Call me Bucky.”
That boy. Sarah could hear the crone’s disapproval. Condemnation.
They all knew about “that boy’s” father. George Madison Barnes was black Irish, ugly as sin, a blind drunk and a mean one at that. And there were rumors…well. Winnie had known, must’ve known, marrying him. Known what she and her mongrel brood were in for. Not many men would marry a pregnant woman, raise another man’s bastard up alongside his own children, and if Winnie sold her soul and happiness to the devil for the chance to raise her unborn babe with a roof over his head and food in his belly, well. Sarah could not judge. She’d lost their first babe on the boat ride, no grave but the watery depths, then her husband, her Iosaf in the Great War, all so there might be a better life, better world for their next.
Because that boy—that Barnes boy—Bucky, for whatever hell he’d been raised in, was not his mother’s husband’s son. She’d seen the bruises on Winnie’s face at mass, seen the flock of children hanging from her, seen the patience that was more weariness and brokenness than love…and she’d seen the child, hated by a man who ought to love him as a father, standing straight and firm, bruises, hurt and anger all masked by a smile. A boy as stubborn, as willful, as strong her own.
“How long has he been here, Signora?”
“Too long.”
…All day. James Barnes had been known to run truant, on sunny days, roaming Brooklyn like strutting tomkit, getting into scraps and raising hell. And if her Steven didn’t show up for school, he’d hold that gaggle of curly-haired Barnes girls by the hand, deliver them safe and sound, then run right back and sit by his side. And even if Winnie cajoled him, cried at him, if George Barnes dragged him kicking and screaming by the hair, threw him down the stairs…well. James “Bucky” Barnes wouldn’t leave her son’s side.
“Hey, Stevie. Sit up straight for me.”
“‘M fine, Buck.”
“No. Ya gotta sit up straight, Stevie. It helps ya breathe.”
“Hurts.”
“Where’s it hurt at, Stevie? Just you show me, show me an’ I’ll make it all better.”
“‘M okay,”
“Right here? Yeah, pal. I can feel it. All knotted up like riggin’. I got ya, Stevie.”
“You don’t gotta.”
“I know I don’t gotta. I wanna.” And those hands, those strong, boyish hands would dig into the thin flesh of that twisted back, kneading those taut muscles smooth.
It wasn’t fair, Sarah thought, wasn’t right. That one boy should be so healthy, so hale, so whole, the other a cripple doomed to a short, sickly life. The scoliosis twisted him, spine bent and angled, robbed him of the height, the handsomeness that Iosaf had, crushed his misshapen lungs, his malformed heart. Made him prone to pneumonia. Worsened his asthma. And one day, one day soon, it would kill him. Her poor, bent, beautiful boy, frail as old Signora Luciana, delicate as a bird. It pained her to see him so, watching him like a cut flower in a vase, knowing it was short-lived, dying already, that she must look, look, always look lest he wilt away while she was gone.