Touch (The Pagano Family Book 2)

by Susan Fanetti

  Finally, she’d forced her feet to move, and she’d gone into her kitchen, poured herself a glass of orange juice, and opened the door to the cabinet next to the sink. But there, again, she’d gotten stuck. She needed something; she could feel her gears slipping, and she had meds that were meant to fill in the occasional gaps left by the stuff she took regularly. But what? Was she anxious? Was she depressed? Was she on her way around the bend?

  She’d compromised with half a dose of Xanax and then she’d gone and sat in the orange papasan, grabbing the big, stuffed kitty that had been sitting in it and holding it close to her chest. Manny didn’t do pets. She wasn’t great with living animals. It wasn’t that she didn’t like them or was mean to them, but she lacked that thing that made people think of pets as other people and assume they had human emotions, so she just didn’t bond with them much. But her stuffed kitty with the long, soft white fur and the blue satin ribbon felt good in her arms.

  She spent the night curled in the papasan, thinking.

  oOo

  Feeling not much more sorted out in the morning, she decided to go into Providence early and spend the day with her folks. It was Saturday, and that night was a Battle of the Bands gig, so she’d have to be in town for that, anyway. The day was free otherwise, and she’d had no plans beyond meeting up with the band a few hours early. Maybe she could help her mom in the yard or something.

  She packed up her clothes and stuff for that night, and her makeup kit, and dressed in jeans, a t-shirt, and Chucks for the day. It was still early, not even eight o’clock, so she decided she’d stop at the Cove Café and get coffee and a muffin or something before she got on the highway.

  Edith, the owner, was behind the counter. Manny wondered if she ever took a day off, because in the five weeks or so that she’d lived in Quiet Cove, she’d been in this little café maybe six or seven times, at different times of the day or week, and it was always happy Edith, with her cute, frizzy, old lady hair and her adorably tacky souvenir t-shirts.

  Today’s t-shirt was neon green and had a screenprint of a happy, chubby dude in a t-shirt, board shorts, and flip-flops. He was flashing a peace sign. His eyes were squinty and red. It said Get BURNT on the Cove.

  Manny wondered if Edith knew what that meant. But she knew enough to know she shouldn’t ask.

  Edith beamed at her across the high counter. “Morning, lovie. Getcha a regular coffee this morning?”

  “Yes, please. And a cruller, too. They look good.”

  “Just fresh out the oven. You want it to go?”

  Manny had thought that she’d sit here in the café and eat, but it was a warm, sunny morning, and the beach was only a couple of blocks away. She had a sudden urge to go sit at the fire pit, like last night. “Yeah. Think I’ll sit at the beach.”

  “That’s a great idea. Get there before the crowd sets in. I love the beach first thing. Always start my day with a walk. The sunrise over the water puts every day into perspective, y’know?”

  “That’s a nice thought.” She paid for her breakfast, and Edith handed it to her with a wink.

  “You have a good day, lovie.”

  “Thanks. You, too.” Manny went out feeling a little calmer. She liked it when people were just nice.

  She walked down toward the beach. The Cove Café was on the street that ended at the beginning of the boardwalk, where she and Luca had gotten their hot wieners last night. She headed toward the fire pit.

  The beach wasn’t empty, but it wasn’t crowded. There were some people with their dogs, and one family setting up a tent in the sand. A few surfers on the beach, and a few more in the water.

  Luca surfed. And sailed, and did a whole big list of other macho stuff. He was big and tan and burly, and he laughed easily. He really was nothing at all like her. They didn’t have probably anything in common.

  Oh—he didn’t like to fuck in bed, either. That seemed a pretty slim thread to try to build something on.

  Is that what she wanted? To build something? On what evidence could that possibly be any kind of good idea?

  About twenty steps from the fire pit, and half her coffee gone, she saw him. He was hard to miss, even at a distance. A surfer came out of the water and caught her attention, because those broad shoulders and dark head looked familiar. He bent down and undid the tether thingy from around his ankle. Then he walked up into the deeper sand and put his board down, propping it up in the sand somehow. When he freed himself from the top half of his suit, she knew for sure. She really, really liked his chest.

  She smiled, and began to veer toward the water, thinking she’d say hi, when a blonde, also in a half-on wetsuit, with a little green bikini top barely covering her big jugs, came tearing across the sand and jumped onto his back.

  He laughed and swung her forward, putting her on her feet in front of him. She threw her arms around his neck, and they kissed.

  Oh. Okay. Um. Okay.

  Flipping through her mental flashcards, Manny turned around and headed back toward the boardwalk and the street, not sure what she was supposed to feel. But she didn’t feel good. She didn’t know why. She didn’t even know why she’d turned around. Why not just go down and say hi? Everything had been straight up last night. No lies were told, no promises made. Luca wasn’t hers. She wouldn’t even know what it would be like if he were.

  Why was her heart racing?

  oOo

  She did find her mother in the back, but she wasn’t working in the yard, exactly. About three years ago, Dottie Timko had taken a community center class on mosaics, and it had lit some kind of creative fire under her skinny butt. She’d always loved gardening, but now the back yard of the house on Spruce Avenue was a mystical fairyland of art and color. The paths were made up of stepping stones, each of which was a different piece of mosaic art. The birdbaths and feeders were mosaic. A cement garden bench was made into a replica of Tiffany glass irises. The risers on the wood steps leading to the mudroom and kitchen each spelled out a family name: ADAM, DOROTHY, EMMANUELLE, DMITRI, THE TIMKOS. Even the door jamb and window sill on the garage were mosaicked.

  Though Dmitri’s birth parents had named him, Manny had not been given a name until her adoption at age six. Dottie and Adam had named her, and she’d been called Emmanuelle until she was thirteen and a classmate had called her Porn Ho. She’d yanked his chair out from under him, mounted him, and stabbed him repeatedly with her geometry compass. She’d been expelled from school—and also had her first inpatient stay in the loony bin.

  Everybody called her Manny now, except her massage clients. But still, Dottie had put “Emmanuelle” on the stairs.

  Surrounding all the glass and ceramic finery were gorgeous plants full of fire and color, some taller than Manny, in pots or planted directly into the ground. At the back, there was a carefully-planned kitchen garden, full of herbs and vegetables. Dottie’s gardening endeavors filled the whole yard so that there was only a small, circular space of lawn amidst the riot. In the center of that space was a small, stone fountain with a Buddha sitting in its center, holding a lotus flower. Dottie meditated there every morning, even in the winter.

  When they’d first brought Manny and Dmitri home from Ukraine, Dottie had been a grade school teacher, teaching mostly grades fourth through sixth. She’d taken a semester of leave to help their new family get established. By the time that semester was over, Dottie had known that Manny would be her full-time job.

  So she’d resigned, and she and Adam, an electrician, had sold their colonial rowhouse on College Hill and bought a bigger, much cheaper fixer in Lower South Providence. The neighborhood was rougher, but they were on a decent block, with good neighbors, and the house had room for the kids, including one who went completely batshit crazy from time to time.

  They’d lived in this house for more than twenty years, and still they’d never stopped with the DIY projects. Adam was always rewiring or rebuilding or remodeling something, and Dottie was always painting and planting and sewing. A
nd mosaicking.

  Sometimes those DIY projects were repairs that Manny had necessitated.

  But never, not once, had they ever suggested that they regretted bringing such a damaged child home from across the sea. And she had pushed and pushed and pushed, trying to get them to expose their ‘true’ feelings, throwing their love in their faces again and again, making them pay for their gentle treatment of her. She had not been able to understand them, and she had not been able to trust them.

  She remembered the orphanage. Dmitri didn’t; he’d been barely more than a year old when Dottie and Adam had come for her and taken him, too. But she remembered. And she’d been a feral thing, lashing out, self-harming, trying to tear down the bright, soft world she’d been brought to, a world that had no context for her at all. She felt hugs as restraint. Any kind of touch was pain. Smiles were snarls, bared teeth. Soft words were lies, and portended horror. And she had felt cornered, swimming in terror and rage.

  Only Dmitri had been spared. She’d always felt connected to him, even before he could talk or walk. She’d never tried to hurt him, and she’d never resisted his love, when he was old enough to show it.

  Through all of it, only once had either Adam or Dottie ever hurt her back. When she’d stabbed Dottie with the sewing shears, Adam had hit her hard enough to knock her unconscious.

  She’d been sixteen. She’d woken tied to a hospital bed, with Dottie sitting in a chair at her bedside, the stitches in her arm, neck, and shoulder visible.

  Adam had been standing at the foot of the bed. He’d smiled when he saw her looking at him and said, “Morning, princess. It’s gonna be okay.”

  And that was when Manny started really working to understand the world. She wanted to learn to feel the love that she could see. To know it and trust it and take comfort in it.

  To give it back.

  This morning, Dottie was in the garage, hitting ceramic tiles with a hammer. She was always scouring for irregulars and seconds at home improvement stories, and she was a terror at rummage sales, ending up with bags and boxes full of mismatched china.

  She was a small, thin woman with short, salt-and-pepper hair and bright blue eyes. People had always assumed that Manny was her natural child, because they were quite similar in coloring and build. Dottie had a bit of a aging hippie vibe to her, preferring baggy cargo pants, slub tees and loose-weave, baggy sweaters, and Dansko shoes, and always wearing some kind of dangly earrings, even when she was destroying ceramic tiles in the garage.

  Manny knocked on the wood wall. “Hey, Dottie.” She’d never called her any derivation of ‘Mom.’ Probably Dottie had wanted her to at first; Manny didn’t know. But now they both thought it would be weird if she started.

  “Manny! Hi, babe. Did I know you were coming?” She set the hammer down and brushed her hands together. “Is everything all right?”

  “No, and yeah. Dimi has that show tonight, so I had to be in town anyway. Thought I’d see if we could dig in the dirt together.” Gardening was the first activity that Manny had enjoyed doing with Dottie. A person could get a lot of bad feelings out on a clod of dirt.

  Dottie walked over and looked closely. She didn’t try to hug or kiss her. “You sure you’re good? I worry about you so far away.”

  Manny rolled her eyes. “I’m forty minutes away. An hour, tops, in traffic.”

  “I know, but that’s far if you need help.”

  “I’m good, Dottie. Promise. I like my new place. And I’m on the schedule at two hotels, so I’m not driving all over the place as much.”

  “Okay. Good, good.” She smiled. “It just so happens I have a new flat of portulaca and about a three-by-six foot chunk of yard I want to clear some ivy out of and plant that instead. Will that do ya for some digging?”

  “Yeah. Hey—where’s Dad? Didn’t see his truck.”

  “Working overtime. He’ll be home ‘bout three. You still be here?”

  “Probably not—I have to get to Dimi’s.”

  “You could come back after—stay the night? We could do the Flea tomorrow! We’ll make your father carry our treasures.”

  Manny laughed. “Okay.” That sounded like a good day. A safe day, even. The Providence Flea got pretty crowded, but with Dottie and Dad, she’d be okay. Random bumps from strangers weren’t as much of a problem, because she didn’t need to read those. They were meaningless. She didn’t love being touched, period, but interaction was the really hard thing. So crowds weren’t great, but tolerable, as long as nobody tried to get friendly.

  It was how she managed to deal with the club scene with Fierce Ferret. She could even get in the middle of the dance floor and enjoy herself, as long as she was left in her own little bubble and could let everybody else fade away.

  She and Dottie spent the rest of the morning digging out the ivy and planting the portulaca. After they were done, they went inside and made grinders and baked sweet potato fries, and they sat out in the garden at the mosaicked table and chairs and had a lovely lunch.

  Dottie peppered Manny with questions about Quiet Cove, her new apartment, her work, if she’d made any friends. Friends was always a burning concern for Dottie, who desperately wanted Manny to have a bestie. Manny wasn’t really ‘bestie’ material, but Dottie, cockeyed, stalwart optimist that she was, persevered.

  It turned out Manny had a little news. It was confusing news, but maybe this was the kind of stuff a girl was supposed to talk to her mother about. So after she talked about Heather, the girl at work who Manny thought was pretty nice—and who, she now remembered, knew Luca—she threw her mother a little bone.

  “I maybe met a guy. I don’t know.”

  Dottie stopped chewing mid-mouthful. Besties were a common topic of conversation. Boyfriends were not. Maybe Dottie’s optimism for her daughter didn’t extend to matters of the heart. Manny had never thought of that.

  Through her half-chewed hunk of grinder, Dottie asked, “You did? What do you mean? Where?”

  It was Manny’s way to answer the questions that were asked of her. “Yeah. I mean that I know him a little bit, and we had a date. It was nice. I’ve met him a couple of times. The band did a wedding in his family, and then I ended up giving him a massage, and then I saw him at a bar in the Cove, and then he asked me out.” She grinned. “He took me for hot wieners and we sat on the beach in the dark and talked.” She knew to stop there. Manny was baldly honest, but she also knew that parents weren’t thrilled to know their children’s sexual histories. Dottie probably didn’t want to know about the rest of the night.

  Or maybe she did. “Is that all?”

  Manny was starting to feel anxious and defensive. It confused her. So she fell back on her training. Clarify. “Dottie, I don’t know why you’re asking, and it feels weird. Do you want me to tell you everything about the date?”

  “Okay, babe. Easy. Okay. I’m asking because I love you, and because men sometimes take advantage of women. You’re very small, and you know you don’t act like other girls. I’m trying to understand whether this man wanted to hurt you.”

  “I don’t think so. He was very nice. The whole night, he was nice. He knows about me, and I think he doesn’t care.”

  “How does he know about you? Did you tell him?”

  “No. Dimi did. But then, last night, I filled in some details.”

  “Wait.” Dottie took a breath, and then she took a drink of her juice. “How is Dimi involved?”

  Conversations got away from Manny all the time. Should she have foreseen that telling her mother about Luca would have landed her here, having to tell her about her latest freakout? Well, she hadn’t. “There was a little thing. I had some beers at a bar, and a guy—not Luca—grabbed me. I raged out, but Luca was there, and he got us out of it. I guess Dimi told him about Ukraine so he wouldn’t think I’m a psycho.” She laughed. “I don’t know why he thinks that makes it better, but he does.”

  “Did anybody get hurt when you raged out?” Dottie was speaking slowly and car
efully, and Manny knew she was choosing her words, trying to stay calm and not trigger her.

  “I cut the guy who grabbed me, but that’s not going anywhere. It’s over.”

  Dottie took a breath and blew it out. “Okay. I think I need to talk to Dimi about this—do you mind?”

  Her brother would know which details to fill in and which to leave out. “No. I have a question about Luca, though. Something happened, and I don’t know what it means.”

  “Luca is the man who took you on a date?”

  “Yes. This morning, I saw him surfing with a girl, and they kissed. I think I was jealous. I am jealous. But I shouldn’t be, right? That’s a wrong thing to feel, since we only had one date.” Again, she laughed a little. “This is why I don’t date. I don’t understand any of it.” She felt stupid and childish that, at almost twenty-nine years old, she didn’t understand. But in her reality, she was much younger. In some ways, she hadn’t started to learn the world until she was sixteen—not even thirteen years ago. So she had the emotional maturity of a middle-schooler.