by Terri Favro
Murdering Stan lives here?
A ponytailed blonde in running shoes and an emerald green track suit spots him and smiles brightly. “May I help you, sir?”
Marcello glances around, as if trying to decide whether to stay or go. “I’m looking for someone. Not sure he’s even living here. Guy named Stanley Mancuso.”
Ponytail giggles. “Of course he’s here. He’s everybody’s boyfriend.”
Marcello looks at the woman in amazement. “He doesn’t sound like the same Stan.”
“Come on, dear, I’ll show you to his room,” says Ponytail. “He’ll be thrilled. Doesn’t get many visitors.”
The hallway smells of urine, mashed potatoes, and disinfectant. Elderly men and women with walkers and wheelchairs watch them pass, occasionally calling out Lindy to the woman, who assures them she’ll be back soon with their meals and meds. She explains to Marcello that Mr. Mancuso is having a good day after a bad bout of pneumonia. He even managed to eat some solid food for lunch.
“The ladies fight over who gets to feed him,” she confides. “There aren’t many men his age in the home. He the cock of the walk.”
Marcello says nothing, struggling to decide whether to describe to this woman the kind of man she’s keeping alive, like making a pet of a rabid animal. When they arrive at the room she sings out, “Look what I’ve brought! A visitor!” he sees an emaciated man strapped into a wheelchair, his head resting against a brace that keeps it from flopping over. One side of his face sags, the paralyzed eye partially closed; the good eye rolls in Marcello’s direction.
The son of a bitch is still alive in there, thinks Marcello.
“If you’re here at five, I’ll bring a tray for you, too. Now I’ll leave you two boys to your fun,” Ponytail says and walks away, her crêpe-soled shoes sucking against the linoleum.
Stan’s cold blue eye studies him.
“You know who I am?” Marcello asks.
“No.” The word comes out like a breath. Nuh. But at least Marcello knows he understands.
“Marcello Umbriaco.”
“O’yeh. Zhun’er.”
Oh yeah. Junior.
“There’s stuff I want you to tell me. And I don’t want to be lied to.”
Stan is watching him, the mobile side of his face collapsing into folds as he struggles to speak. He’s angry, thinks Marcello.
“I want you to admit you killed Ida.”
The right side of Stan’s mouth twists into something like his old sneer. “Geh te heh!”
Go to hell.
Marcello stares at Stan, trying to gauge how to pull information out of the old bastard’s brain.
Stan shifts his head slightly, one side of his mouth working. He’s getting excited. “Plan yur wyfs akstent, tha bich. Dindoit. Ahranched it.”
I planned your wife’s accident, the bitch. Didn’t do it, arranged it.
Marcello’s ears are full of the sound of his own heartbeat. “You’re a murderer.”
“Suk kee me.”
So kill me.
Marcello closes the door and pushes an easy chair against it, jamming the back under the handle. He’s alone with the man who killed his wife and his unborn child. The villain is helpless, his skull as thin as an eggshell. Marcello will be the avenger, St. Michael the Archangel swinging his holy sword, wielding divine justice. Stan’s breath starts coming in ragged pants.
C’mehn, c’mehn, c’mehn!
On the unmade bed, a silver handrail shines among the rumpled sheets, the brightness catching Marcello’s eye. He can see his own reflection in its surface, a man with a patch of white hair and glasses, middle-aged, bereaved, enraged. He picks up the rail and weighs it in his hand. It’s a length of steel pipe, longer than a baseball bat, heavy enough to support a man’s weight.
If Marcello is the x axis and Stan is y, then the handrail is the lever that will shift the whole goddamn world.
“Guh uhn,” urges Stan, one blue eye fixed on Marcello.
Go on.
He wants me to do it, thinks Marcello, gripping the handrail.
“Do eh. Do eh. K’menh. Dun ‘oo haft a guss?”
Do it. Do it. Come on. Don’t you have the guts?
Marcello imagines himself beating Stan to death and beyond, rendering him down into gristle and blood and bits of brain, nothing left of a human being at all, just stains and offal. But before he can strike, the image in his mind changes.
Not this way, Marcello tells himself.
He tosses the handrail back onto the scrabble of bed sheets where it hits a bedpan, giving a hollow metal ring. Marcello places himself directly in front of Stan and wraps his hands around the man’s neck, a thin stick of cartilage and sagging flesh. One blue eye, wide open and staring at him, starts to tear up.
Stan gurgles. From the hallway comes the shuffle of feet, the squeal of rubber wheels, the call-and-response of patient and caregiver.
Lin–deeee?
Com–ing!
Stan’s face is darkening to the colour of ink. He hears Ida’s voice. You’re doing him a favour! Stan welcomes death—so let him live! Besides, they’ll lock you up and then what happens to Sophia?
Marcello closes his eyes. Just let me finish it.
Ponytail’s voice, high and frightened, is shouting, “What’s blocking the door? Sir? Sir?”
Marcello releases his hands from around Stan’s neck. He steps back and yanks open the door, face to face with Ponytail, her trolley beside her. She has brought two dinner trays. Marcello picks up one of them and hurls it at the wall over Stan’s head. The old man sits slumped in his wheelchair, head flopped forward like a dead man, but flinches when the metal tray clatters to the floor. He’s alive.
Marcello pushes his way through the crowd of onlookers peering in at the door. Caregivers, residents, even a janitor with a pail watch Marcello pass. No one bothers to stop him. Stan becomes just another mess to clean up while Marcello returns to the world.
17. A SHOUT FROM GOD
TORONTO, DECEMBER 21, 2013
LILY GAVE UP on religion long ago, but when her mother’s illness overwhelms her, she goes to Holy Martyrs. They have the best music of all the churches in Toronto’s west end. None of that modern stuff; it’s traditional all the way, with a pipe organ and a four-part choir.
Her only other escape is physical. As her mother’s body breaks down, Lily builds hers up: weights, crunches, running. Yesterday, one of the trainers at the gym took her aside: “Lily, you’re overdoing it. Maybe you should see your doctor?”
Lily goes to Saturday evening Mass instead. A torrent of notes cascades out of the organ loft like a shout from God. Lily pauses at the back of the church, trying to let the music drown out her grief. On this particular winter’s night, even Bach’s Fugue in G Minor isn’t working.
Earlier that day, at the nursing home, Lily had spread out some pictures: family snapshots, portraits of friends from the old days, even a photograph from the Oka standoff that won Lily a photojournalism prize.
Mamére’s fingers tremble over a Kodachrome of Lily squinting in sunlight as she rides piggyback on a man’s shoulders. His big hands grip her ankles hanging over his chest. Her running shoes are different colours.
“Remember, Mamére? You took this one at the Seahorse. I would’ve been what—eight years old? Nine?”
Her mother’s fingers brush the snapshot. For one breathtaking moment, Lily thinks Mamére actually recognizes someone in the photograph. She has to remind herself that the movement is likely a trick of her mother’s torn and tangled nerve endings. Her frozen eyes might as well have been staring at a bedpan. Lily slips the photograph back into the leather portfolio.
Mamére is only sixty-seven; Lily, eighteen years younger. Almost as close in time as sisters.
Soon I might be you, Lily thinks. If she’s inhe
rited the Huntington’s gene from her mother, she’ll get the disease. Paralysis, dementia, all of it.
Her doctor urges a genetic test. Lily refuses. Knowing her destiny would be like waiting for years to be in a car wreck, watching as her body tears itself apart in slow motion. No amount of healthy living will make a damn bit of difference.
Lily picks an almost-empty pew near the back of the church, where she can listen to the music without feeling like she has to take part in the Mass. She especially wants to avoid giving the sign of peace to strangers.
A man sits at the other end of the pew, bulky in his winter coat; he doesn’t look at her when she slides in. She suspects he’s not the sign of peace type, either.
At the altar, Father Silva lifts his hands and says, “Peace be with you.”
“And also with you,” the congregants respond. They trade kisses and handshakes.
Lily glances at the man at the end of the pew. He’s looking at her now, too. His eyes appear to be deeply bruised. A white patch on his tangle of grey hair makes him look as though he’s been daubed with paint.
“Peace be with you,” he says. He doesn’t offer his hand.
“You, too,” Lily responds.
When Mass is over, Lily remains in the pew, listening to the choir sing the processional. The man hasn’t moved. He’s sitting with his head bowed and hands clasped in prayer. Lucky him. Lily hasn’t been able to pray for years, ever since she realized that she was talking to the empty sky.
She glances at him again. Robust, her mother would have called him, with the broad body of a boxer and the High Renaissance profile of a stained glass martyr. St. Sebastian, after the Romans got finished with him. She imagines the man looking down at himself in surprise, his winter coat bristling with arrows.
Lily stifles a laugh but one note escapes up into the nave. She pretends she’s clearing her throat, but the man is on to her, trying to decipher the joke. He has to be at least sixty but looks younger when he smiles.
Lily smiles back. “Do you like the music?”
“Very much. My daughter joined this choir in high school.” Lily can hear the cadences of a long-lost accent in the man’s voice.
“Really? What part?”
“Soprano.”
She looks up at the choir loft where two dark-haired women, a soprano in her twenties and an alto about Lily’s age, gather sheet music. The older woman tucks in the younger one’s blouse, a tender gesture that reminds Lily of Mamère. The soprano and alto are obviously the bruised man’s wife and daughter. That’s why he’s waiting.
“Your daughter has a wonderful voice. I enjoy hearing her sing duets with her mother,” says Lily, searching for her gloves.
The man gives Lily a puzzled frown, then glances up at the choir loft. “No, no. Those two aren’t mine. My daughter Sophia is away.” The man hesitates, before adding, “Her mother is dead.”
Oh, great. All Lily wanted was a quiet moment alone, and now she’s stumbled into someone else’s grief. As if she needed more. “I’m sorry for your loss,” she says. It’s the correct phrase, all that’s required.
But before she can slide out of the pew, he says: “Thank you, but I lost her a long, long time ago. Not that you ever really get over it.”
Lily stands awkwardly with her coat half-on, trapped in this stranger’s tragedy. Surprised by his naked show of emotion, she’s tempted to confide in him.
My mother’s dying. Very, very slowly. I have to grieve while she’s still alive.
Instinctively, she knows this level of intimacy would open a discussion about the misery of witnessing a slow death versus the shock of a sudden one. No, thank you. Looking for a way out of the conversation without seeming rude, she offers: “Raising a little girl on your own must have been a challenge.”
He smiles as if she’s paid him a compliment. “Now that she’s grown up and gone off to work for her uncle in England, I don’t know what to do with myself. This’ll be my first Christmas without her.”
“England! How nice. Have a good night, then.”
“You too,” he says, still not moving from the pew.
Lily pulls on her gloves. The man’s solid presence is starting to attract her like a big planet pulling a smaller one into its orbit. She finds herself wanting to touch that white patch of hair. It reminds her of a blaze on a tree, marking a way through the woods.
Behind them, in the narthex, the organist hustles her way out the door with her arms full of sheet music, the choir members huddled close behind her, singing out their displeasure at the blast of wind.
Lily and the man are alone in the church. She sees now that his eyes are shadowed, not bruised. The mark of a fellow insomniac. Someone who lies awake nights, thinking about people who aren’t there any more.
Oh, what the hell, thinks Lily. I’m alone, he’s alone, we’re grown-ups. Pretending to rummage in her purse for car keys, she says, “Would you like to join me for coffee? There’s a place near here I’ve been meaning to try called Marcello’s.”
The man laughs, the sound of his voice echoing in the hollow space above them.
“Yeah, sure, I know it,” says the man. “I own it.”
Sitting in the passenger seat of Lily’s Honda, Marcello says he prefers walking to Mass, even on blustery nights like this one. He says he used to love driving but, these days, enjoys it less and less. Lily resists the temptation to ask why. As she pulls to the curb across from the café, a Future Bread delivery truck rumbles past, its sign reading: The Future Is Coming!
A chill runs through Lily as Marcello unlocks the front door of the café. She glances around at the neighbouring groceterias, dollar stores, and wedding and Communion dress shops, all asleep and dreaming.
“Not enough business in this weather to stay open late,” Marcello says, holding the door for her. “How about I make a couple of cappuccinos and we take them upstairs?”
Unbuttoning her coat to let in the warmth, Lily watches Marcello steam milk and pour espresso into thick cups, a gold band on his hand catching the light as he places biscotti on a plate. For a big man, he handles the food with surprising delicacy.
Balancing a tray, he leads her up a stairway behind the bar to a flat. An upright piano shines against one wall; a wood-burning fireplace dominates another. A few greeting cards are propped on a table. Otherwise, he hasn’t decorated for Christmas. Not that it’s any more festive at Lily’s place.
Over the mantel, a solemn-looking, dark-haired girl stares out of a painting—the daughter, obviously. Next to her are several black-and-whites of a woman with large, serious eyes, chin resting on her clenched fist. She looks directly at the camera, not smiling, but with noticeable emotion. She dearly loved whoever was taking her picture, thinks Lily.
“Your wife?”
Putting a record on the turntable, Marcello nods. “Ida. I took those the year before she died.”
As the Flower Duet from the opera Lakmé fills the room, Lily examines the photographs. Ida looks no more than thirty. Wide, dark eyes, a pointed chin, full mouth, blonde hair. Her expression is watchful, alert. And something else: slightly alarmed. Despite the passion in her eyes, there’s a certain tension in the set of her mouth. Perhaps she didn’t want her picture taken. Or she was guarding a secret she was afraid the camera would expose. Lily has seen that expression in some of her subjects. The look of someone with something to hide.
“You have a good eye,” Lily says.
Marcello acknowledges the compliment with a nod and waves Lily to the couch. When he offers biscotti, she shakes her head. He raises his eyebrows at Lily’s refusal to eat.
She crosses her legs. “What was weighing on your mind tonight, Marcello? I could feel you thinking from the end of the pew.”
He shrugs, soaking a chunk of biscotti in the coffee. “Sometimes I just like to sit quietly and talk to God. To Ida,
really.”
“What was tonight’s conversation about?”
“I’ve been thinking about becoming a priest,” he mumbles through a full mouth.
Jesus!, Lily thinks, tugging down the hem of her skirt.
“A rather late-in-life decision, isn’t it?” she asks, carefully.
Marcello grins. “Now you sound like Ida. She thinks I’m crazy to even consider it. You’d be surprised how many guys join the priesthood after their wives die.”
The offhand way that Marcello mentions his late wife makes her seem alive. Lily feels almost guilty about being alone with her husband. Oblivious to the effect of his words, Marcello starts eating Lily’s untouched food.
“What about you? Why were you there?” he asks, dunking her biscotti in his cup.
Lily considers whether to tell him about her mother’s illness and her own fears of getting sick. She decides: No.
“The usual for a lapsed Catholic. I like the music.”
They sip their cappuccinos, Lily watching Marcello over her cup. Drink up and go, she tells herself. Early tomorrow, she has to return to the nursing home with its antiseptic washes never quite covering the odour of dirty diapers, the crrrkk of privacy curtains, the ring of a catheter hitting stainless steel while a voice sings, “Good girl, Ms. Daigle!” Lily never witnesses the siphoning of her mother’s bladder. She stands outside the curtain and waits. Waits for the neurologist, the nurse, the physiotherapist. Waits for the first signs of Mamére’s disease in herself. She’s so tired of waiting.
“Marcello, if you haven’t yet taken a vow of celibacy, I’d really like to sleep with you,” she announces.
He stops gathering their cups, his eyes wide. “You don’t even know me.”
“I don’t want to, except in a Biblical sense.”