Free House Arrest by Ellen Meeropol Page B

Momma drives me up the coast to Rockland. We’re going to take the ferry to the island where she grew up. Her sister still lives there. Momma tells me I’m going to stay with Aunt Ruth for a few weeks. I start to cry. I don’t know Aunt Ruth very well and barely remember my cousins, even though we’re about the same age. We don’t visit them often. Daddy says we don’t see eye to eye.
    “Just for a couple of weeks,” Momma promises. “So I can take care of your Daddy.”
    What about me, I think. Take care of me.
    We leave the car in the parking lot and walk onto the boat with one suitcase for the two of us. We stand in front, holding onto the metal chain. When the ferry passes the jetty lighthouse and picks up speed, the wind gets fierce. Momma puts her arm around me and steers me inside. We sit at an orange table. I pick pieces of rust off my fingers.
    “Do you remember our photo album, from when Daddy and I lived in the commune?” Momma begins that way.
    I nod. With those raggedy clothes, it was hard to tell who was a boy and who was a girl. We had laughed together, my parents and me, over those pictures.
    “And remember the war in Vietnam? Your Daddy and I were against that war, and so were our friends in the commune.”
    I know all about their war. My third grade class studied Vietnam. We made care packages of pencils and crayons and notebooks, mailed them across the world to children whose schoolyards had trees that still wouldn’t grow leaves.
    “It was wrong to draft young men into that evil war, to kill and be killed. We wanted to stop the bombing.” Momma puts her finger on my chin and lifts it up, so I have to look at her. “We set a fire in the draft board where all the records were kept. So they couldn’t process any more soldiers, at least for a while.”
    Momma set a fire?
    “Afterwards, your father and I decided not to do that kind of protest any more.”
    “You mean fires?”
    She nods “Fires and other things that could hurt people. We moved to Portland, and the next year you were born. Last month one of our old friends from the commune was arrested. He was in a lot of trouble.” Momma’s lips get so skinny they almost disappear. “He told them Daddy set the fire. That’s why those men came this morning.”
    The ferry slows down and turns into the island harbor. We go outside again to stand in the wind. Aunt Ruth is waiting on the pier and drives us to a white house across from the harbor. Momma and Aunt Ruth huddle together for a few minutes in the kitchen while I stand close to the doorway and pretend to look out the window at the boats. I cannot quite hear their whispers, except one thing.
    “Mitchell is very nervous,” Aunt Ruth says. “Our business depends on our customers’ trust.”
    “Good grief,” Momma whispers back. “She’s ten years old. Joe McCarthy is dead.”
    Aunt Ruth makes coffee. Mine is mostly hot milk, with two spoons of coffee and two spoons of sugar. That’s the way I like it, but I’m only allowed to drink it on special occasions because coffee stunts your growth.
    Momma is in a hurry. She says she has to catch the last ferry back, to be with Daddy in court the next morning.
    I whine and plead. “Don’t go.”
    She must be worried about me, because she decides to stay overnight and take the first ferry back in the morning. We share the narrow bed in Aunt Ruth’s tiny back bedroom. I sleep with my nose in the peach smell of Momma’s hair.
    It’s way more than a couple of weeks. I miss the tryouts for E.T. and then I miss the play. My Portland teacher sends thick envelopes with schoolwork and my cousin Marilyn plays teacher with me in the evenings. In June, Aunt Ruth asks me to help her with spring planting. I’ve never had a garden. At home, we get our tomatoes and lettuce and cukes at the food coop. I watch her and copy what she does, pushing my finger into the dirt, up to the second knuckle. Into every hole I plant a seed with a wish for Daddy