by C. D. Reiss
The air was scorching and the smoke thick enough to burn my eyes and throat. I crouched and got out of the room and into the service hall.
There, I saw the origin of the fire, where the hundred-year-old roof beams burned and the smoke was thicker than sour cream. It was closer to the carriage house, as if Antonio had actually walked back the way we’d come to set the bomb off, which would have made his way back to the house even longer.
Could he have made it to the house, between closing me up and the explosion? I tried to remember how long the interval had been. Ten seconds?
I couldn’t think about it, but as I scuttled to the house across Ludwig Street, digging into the recesses of my memory to recall the way, the seconds ticked, and I knew there was no way in hell he’d made it. No. He’d planted the bomb near the carriage house to block whomever was on the way down.
Pockets of fire raged in the corners, and smoke billowed in angry curls. My chest burned, my feet found every fracture and crack in the ground, and the heat felt like it was blasting at my back until I eventually found the end of the tunnel to the house across the street.
The door was ancient and heavy. My eyes burned so badly I couldn’t do more than feel for the hundred-year-old knob and deadbolt. They were hot to the touch, and I cursed. I picked up my skirt and shielded my right hand with the fabric then licked my left hand and quickly turned the deadbolt. I opened the door and closed it behind me. The air in the stairwell seemed seven hundred degrees cooler. I took it in as if I’d never breathed before, and my lungs punished me by feeling as though they were being stabbed with every gasp.
After a couple of blinks, I looked up. The stairs were the same as they’d always been, and at the top was a rough-hewn oval where Antonio had broken through the wall.
Antonio.
Fuck.
I ran up the stairs. Tripped. Fell. Got the hell up. I ran again and reached the dark basement, falling palms-first onto sharp plaster chips. I screamed. It hurt badly. I looked down, and even though I couldn’t see well past my singed eyes and the room’s darkness, it was obvious my hands were burned.
I swallowed. That hurt, too. It had been worse than I’d remembered down there. I’d been intent on getting out, getting to Antonio. I hadn’t even known I was in hell. And where was he? Was he still down there? What if he was burning to death on the far side of the tunnel, and I was up here with my feet on cold plaster, waiting?
I thought about going back down. I saw myself wandering through ten miles of tunnel, calling his name. I knew I shouldn’t have let him put me in that well. I shouldn’t have let him close the lid or walk away or any of it. I should have protected him the way he protected me.
And that was what he’d done. He’d protected me every step of the way. He’d put me under the umbrella of his love, and I’d done nothing but stand in his way. I’d made it my business to assert myself, and in doing so, I’d put him between me and death.
“Antonio.” I whispered, but no one answered. I didn’t even know who I was calling to in that dark basement. He wasn’t there. He couldn’t have made it and closed the door behind him. It was just me, with a murder on my conscience and my docket, on the run, alone.
Don’t stop until you’re in the car.
“Get it together,” I said to myself. I could cry about Antonio another day. Today, I had to make his death worthwhile. I breathed, even though it hurt, and looked over the basement. One stairwell went up to the house; I knew that. A blast of cold air came from another shorter, rough-hewn exit that led right outside. I heard the sirens through that opening and went to it.
The fresh air hit my face like a Freon blast. The yard went back a hundred feet and was surrounded by cinderblock and cast iron. A white car waited by the exit, which led to a back alley. I couldn’t tell the make, but it was nondescript, looking like a million other cars in the city. I walked to it, wondering how I was going to open the door without bloodying the handle or drive without touching the wheel. And then, ten steps in, I berated myself for worrying about my stupid problems after what had just happened, and I had to fight an emptiness and uncertainty I’d never felt before. The plan had been to go to Tijuana then drive south to Guatemala, and fly to Greece under different names. I couldn’t remember if I’d promised to stick to the plan. Was it the right thing to do? Did it even matter without him? I put my head on the cool roof of the car, listening to the sirens a block away. I prayed that no one was hurt, that I could gather the strength to drive away alone, and that Antonio was in heaven.
The smell of burning wood that saturated my clothes reminded me of him, and I decided I’d never wash that fucking dress. We’d tried everything together. We’d done crazy things, wild, irresponsible shit. My God, I’d shot someone. I was a murderer for the rest of my life. I’d killed two men: Paulie, on purpose, and Antonio through sheer recklessness.
My breath hitched, and though I tried to hold back the tears, they came nonetheless. A minute to cry. I had to just take a minute to breathe, mourn, and cry.
Like angelic comfort from the firmament, a hand came on my shoulder.
It was a cop, maybe, or some other authority figure come to arrest me, or Daniel gently comforting me before handing me over for a hundred infractions. Then I felt a hand on the other shoulder, and through the smell of burning wood that saturated my clothes, hiding all other scents, came a voice.
“Passenger side, Contessa.”
I spun so quickly I got dizzy and fell into Antonio’s arms. I was saved, pulled from the jaws of despair. I didn’t care why or how, just that it was true that he was with me.
“What? Theresa? What’s wrong?” He pushed me away, and when he saw I cringed, he looked down. My hands were up, in front of me. He took them from underneath.
“Gesù, what happened?”
“I thought you were dead,” I said.
His ripped shirtsleeve dangled off his elbow like bunting. “Not yet. I run faster than you think.” He held his finger to my face, first pointing then stroking the length of my nose. “But next time we go to a wedding, the worst that will happen is you get too drunk to dance.”
“I don’t drink at weddings.”
He put the hand without the ripped shirtsleeve on my cheek and kissed me in the dark yard, with the crickets squeaking their mating call and the thup-thup-thup of the helicopters getting closer.
“You ready to go?” his mouth whispered into mine before he kissed me. God, I couldn’t believe I thought I’d lost that hungry mouth, those lips, soft with intention, framing a brutal tongue. I couldn’t touch him because my hands were still raw and burned, but he pulled me closer in that kiss. I wanted him to tear me apart against the side of that nondescript white car.
But I pushed the kiss off before I could ask and he could be tempted to comply. “You driving, Capo?” I barely had enough breath to finish the sentence.
“Si, amore mio.”
He walked me to the passenger side and held the door open for me. His arm was bloody under the torn shirt, but he didn’t say a word about it. He knocked on the hood of the car as he came around, as if sending me a message that everything was all right and that he had it under control, and when he got in and the gate opened, I knew he did.
The car pulled into the street, and we drove south, to our life.
epilogue.
theresa
ijuana was filthy. A year ago, I would have been happy to leave because of that alone. The heat, even in December, the layer of crud on everything, the narrow alleys that smelled of piss, and the stink of old tequila and beer in the air would have been enough to get me on a plane early.
We had no phones, no way to be contacted. We were gone. Poof. Disappeared. I never felt so free in my life.
“Terrified,” I said to Antonio. He looked as if a layer of worry had been scraped from him. He looked younger, even.
“Fear is a good thing,” he replied, leaning over the bar, tilting his glass bottle on the bar surface, leaving an arc
of condensation behind. We’d stopped in a small hotel that looked as if it was going to give up any minute and collapse into a pile of wood and dust. “Keeps you honest.”
I hadn’t been afraid when we’d crossed over the border into Mexico. He’d packed clothes and cash and hid his wounded arm under a sleeve. It hadn’t been so bad, nothing a little unguent and a kiss couldn’t fix. My hands had second-degree burns, and though they looked awful, I only had to fold them to hide them. I had nothing. He thought I wasn’t coming, so I had only the clothes on my back, the crap in my bag, and some valuables I wouldn’t part with.
We’d crossed the border when the traffic was so dense we would have only gotten stopped if blood were dripping from the trunk. Then we made it a point to laugh and joke as we went through Border Patrol, as if we were no more than a loving couple looking for a fun weekend. I think we were so high on adrenaline that nothing was easier than manic laughter.
The explosion had made the news immediately. It had been contained in the tunnel. The report stated no deaths and one injury.
“They’re not saying we’re dead,” I’d said.
“It’s been an hour,” he’d replied, but he furrowed his brow.
“I saw that tunnel. Nothing would have survived it.”
“Things happened we didn’t expect. Our exit wasn’t clean.”
“I’ll go back and die again,” I said.
He laughed and drove the Toyota safely and sanely southward. I talked when I didn’t want to think about my family. I knew my memories of them would cloud and get distant until I could only remember little things. I played with the radio, and before we even hit San Diego, the news of Daniel Brower’s collapse as mayoral candidate hit the airwaves.
The TV was on in the bar, hanging above us, blaring Spanish, the light shining through the miasma of cheap Honduran cigarettes. Antonio could only decipher some of the news, but the pictures told the story. They showed an Italian wedding, joyful yet staid, and a room full of people, each with a story, each living a different version of the events until suddenly, arrows were superimposed on the screen, pointing at three men in suits.
As one, they whipped off earpieces as if in pain.
“What happened?” I asked.
He leaned his back on the bar, looking very pleased with himself. “When you pressed your home key…”
“No bomb. Thanks for that.”
“They got their wires from the bathroom attendant. Then you put this radio signal out. A very loud, high-pitched squeak. Very loud. His little team was exposed. He looks like the ass he is.”
I must have gotten sullen. My face, which hid everything from everyone else, was pure bright-yellow signage to him. It always had been. From the minute he beat some guy on the hood of a car, he’d known what I was feeling.
He put his fingertips on my chin. “It was for your own good.”
“You didn’t want to fight for us. You were just going to leave.”
“I didn’t want you to spend your life fighting. I want life to be easy for you. I want you to be happy. If I humiliated him, and he lost the election, he’d back off troubling you. I’d be gone. You’d be happy. That’s all I ever wanted. More than wanting you for myself, I want you to have a good life.”
“If it hadn’t worked out the way it had—”
“Don’t.”
“Are you upset that we’re here, together?” I asked.
“I’m upset that you scarred your soul for me. That’s the biggest sin I live with.”
“That’s not what I asked.” I looked at my orange juice then at the specks of pulp on the side of the glass, as if they could help me divine what he was thinking.
“Theresa,” he whispered then drifted off.
“Never mind,” I said, waving it off. “It is what it is. I think I’m just tired.” I shut down. I didn’t want to talk anymore. I wanted to pretend everything was perfect. If we’d been alone together I would have taken my clothes off and tried to drown my sorrow in pain and pleasure.
But being let off the hook wasn’t going to fly with him, not for one second. He put his beer down and took my head in his hands, thumbs on my cheeks and fingers at the back of my head. “Listen to me, and listen very, very carefully. We have a difficult list of things to do, and I need you to be the woman you are, the woman who can run the world. So, I’m going to say this once. Are you listening?”
He was so intense, so close. He couldn’t lie or obfuscate from that distance. “Yes, Capo.”
“I didn’t dream of this moment. I did try to leave you, but it was for your own good. I wanted to free you. I admit I was ready to walk away. And I admit that when you shot Paulie, I decided you had to come with me to protect yourself from being accused of his murder. I had to tell myself I was protecting you. But, my Contessa, I was so happy to be forced. I felt it was a gift. I had an excuse to take you and have everything I wanted. I can’t lie to myself. Yes, I want to protect you from being hurt, but I just want you. Plain and simple.”
“Antonio, You’ve been trying to get away from me since the minute we met. If you do it again, it will be the last time. My heart can’t take it.”
He nodded, looking at the bar surface. “I didn’t dream God could make it possible for me to have you. But He made it impossible for it to happen in any other way. Do you see what that means? It means I was destined to defile you. I live with that every day. My destiny is to destroy.”
“Maybe I was destined to be destroyed.”
“Shh. Listen. I want you to have a normal, sweet life, but I can’t give you that. I will never be that man for you. Never. But here you are, with me. I am happy, and I carry the weight of my guilt for that happiness. So, don’t fool yourself; I don’t just want you, I hunger for you. My skin needs your skin against it. My mouth needs to taste your mouth. I. Am. Happy. But my soul has never been so stained.”
I swallowed a tablespoon of gunk. “I’m sorry,” I said through my tears. “I’ve made such a mess.”
“I forgive you. Can you forgive me?”
“I love you. You are my only, my one and only. And if I have to turn my life upside down, or go to hell to be with you, so be it.”
“That’s not to be undertaken lightly.”
“It never was. Never,” I said.
His eyes scanned mine as if deciphering the full meaning of the message: that I’d always understood what being with him meant and had grabbed it with both hands from the beginning. I never shared his doubts, and I think, for once, that comforted rather than troubled him.
“If I ask you this, I want you to answer it after you think about it. Don’t rush.”
“Ask what?”
He breathed lightly, almost a sigh, then brushed his fingers over my cheek. “Will you be my wife?”
“Yes.”
“I told you not to rush.”
“I’ll tell you again tomorrow. Same thing. Yes, yes, yes.”
We crashed together, mouths open, lips entangled, arms tightening around each other for the first moments of commitment, nothing between us but love.
The bartender wiped around our glasses, whistling. Antonio held my face fast to him then kissed my cheek and whispered in my ear, “I just heard your name on the news. They aren’t sure we’re dead.”
“We failed, then?”
“We were only buying time. We need to go.”
“No time for a good-bye-to-Tijuana screw?”
“Plenty of time for that later,” he said.
I smiled, imagining “later.” His body was mine, and I watched it move as he put a few bills on the bar and pulled me toward the door, every finger a lightning rod for my desire. I took a glance at the TV and jerked him to a stop. He followed my gaze up there.
Jonathan’s name was in the little tape below a reporter who stood outside Sequoia hospital.
“What is she saying?” I thought I was speaking in a normal voice, but I barely breathed it. I scoured my mind. Had Jonathan been at the wedding and I didn
’t know it? Had he been hurt by something I’d done?
“Something went wrong. The heart, like you said,” Antonio said, knotting his brow as he deciphered a language he only partly understood. He pressed his lips together the way he did when he was reluctant to say something. “It’s bad.” Antonio shook his head. “I don’t know all the medical words, but they say he will die.”
The TV flipped to a futbol game, and the bar patrons cheered. The room suddenly smelled sweatier, wetter, and more florid than it had.
“I like your brother,” Antonio said.
I didn’t answer. I didn’t have words. I had only a dead weight in my chest where a light heart should have been. I couldn’t swallow. I couldn’t feel my fingertips. Where had my elation gone, and my need for Antonio and only Antonio? Was it that easily swept away?
“We’ll keep the news on in the car,” I said. “Maybe they’ll say something else.”
I walked out into the heavy heat of the street. It was December, and I was sweating. The concrete flower boxes and indecipherable color-soaked graffiti that had charmed me on the way in seemed to mock me now, and the bent street with its dented cars no longer spoke of a charming over use but instead invoked an angry entropy, a sick god of destruction. The plaster cracks over every inch of the city twisted themselves into a net that wanted to catch me and drag me away from Antonio.
“I want to go somewhere with winters,” I said when he caught up to me. “Can we do that? Can we live somewhere with snow?”
“You need to go back.”
“No!” I shouted it to block out the knowledge that I needed to go, more than anything. I’d underestimated the pull of my family. I’d left them as if they’d always be the same, for the something different that Antonio embodied, and they changed as soon as I turned my back.
A man in a straw hat, one of many passing us, turned to watch as he walked.
“I can’t do anything about it,” I said, slashing with my arms. “I can’t donate my heart. I’m using it.”
He took me by the wrists stilling them. “Contessa, my love. He’s your brother.”