Rule

by CD Reiss

  “Theresa…”

  “Contessa…”

  I stepped in.

  “I was trying to save you from grief,” Daniel said as the door slid shut again.

  “Too late,” I said, standing next to Antonio. I watched the red numbers flip as we went upstairs into the belly of the LAPD.

  eight.

  theresa

  ho is this?” Margie asked.

  I was hunched in the corner of the precinct bathroom with Daniel’s phone. The first thing they’d done was take Antonio away and put him behind a door, and my sense of orientation went with him, as if I’d been airlifted and dropped into a foreign nation. My ex gave me his phone and told me to call my sister, whose first reaction to my voice had been silence. Her second had been disbelief.

  “It’s Theresa, I swear. I—”

  “We’re all going through five stages of a loss, here. Mom is still on denial and Sheila’s on anger, and you’re calling me like it’s hey-how-do-you-do time.”

  “You’re in the same stage as Sheila.”

  “What was Fiona put away for?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Prove you’re you. And tell me who she was in with.”

  “Oh, please, Margie, we don’t have time.”

  The lights buzzed above me, casting the bathroom in a light that seemed to suck away brightness rather than add it. I’d put my family through hell. Avoidance was futile.

  “She was put away twice,” I said, resigned to doing this. “Which time?”

  “The first time.”

  I couldn’t hear her tapping her foot, but I knew she was.

  “Fiona went to Westonwood for stabbing her boyfriend. Jonathan was there for suicide. Both were caused by a girl named Rachel, who was my friend. Who Daddy seduced. Enough?”

  She paused then spoke quietly. “Thank God. Thank thank thank God a million times you’re not dead. Where are you?”

  “I’m at the First Street Station, on the bathroom floor.”

  “You know what? I have no idea what’s happening with you, and I’ll care about it tomorrow. You need to be here.”

  “I know. I’ll be there, I promise.”

  “I’m not trying to be graphic. Just blunt,” she said. “Jon has irreparable damage to his heart. It’s not going to go well without a transplant. And maybe you don’t care. Maybe this new life you have is more important than the old one. That’s fine. But—and this is not for me, it’s for Jonathan—see him. Okay? Just see him. Then go back to whatever it was you were doing.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t make me come after you.”

  “I’ll be there. I swear.”

  “All right. Then you can tell me why you’re not dead.”

  My bitter laugh bounced off the green tiles as I hung up. I had to be a big girl and leave the building without Antonio.

  After washing my hands, I looked down and did what I always did since the night Antonio and I met. I checked my shoes. A little square of toilet paper was stuck to my right heel, still white and flat, hanging on for dear life, hoping for rescue from the trash.

  Come on, Theresa.

  I picked it off. I should have thrown it away. But it reminded me of meeting Antonio, of those months and years before, when I felt incomplete, and how that had changed with him. I knew a piece of paper couldn’t bring that back. Only I could. But I couldn’t toss it without tossing the feeling away, so I put it in my pocket.

  I took a deep breath and went into the hall. It was full of cops and lawyers, little metal carts with file boxes stacked high. Linoleum floors scuffed in the middle and shiny where they met the walls. I knew this place. I’d met Daniel here a hundred times, back when the doors didn’t mean a thing to me. Nothing behind them had been of interest.

  “Daniel!” I said when I saw him opening one of the nondescript doors.

  “Can you go to the waiting room?” he asked.

  “No. I need to see Antonio, then I have to go to Jonathan. Then after that, you and I are going to talk about what happened at the Gate Club.”

  “You don’t call the shots, Theresa.” He said it without reproach or vindictiveness. A man with toes everyone seemed to step on regularly, he said it so gently, I wondered if he was trying to ease me into a new reality.

  “Phrase everything I just said as a question.”

  “Mister Spinelli is occupied,” he said.

  His insistence irked me, but I didn’t feel in a position to argue further. But I couldn’t just walk without talking to my Capo. If Antonio was occupied, it was probably Daniel who was occupying him, and there was a good chance he was behind the door Daniel was about to enter.

  I stepped back. “Fine.”

  “Don’t go far, Tinkerbell.”

  I turned and walked away slowly. As soon as I heard the door squeak open, I spun on my heel and pushed past Daniel, through the door, and into an empty room with two folding chairs.

  It was dark. The only light was from a window looking onto the adjacent interview room. Antonio sat alone at a metal table, in a beat-up wooden chair. If he knew the wall to his left was a two-way mirror, he didn’t show it by moving a muscle.

  Daniel closed the door behind him. “You should go.”

  “I’m going to bang on the window and shout.”

  “No, you’re not. The room is soundproofed and it doesn’t look like a mirror on the other side, first of all, and second of all, you’re leaving.”

  He reached for my wrist, but I pulled myself away before he could get a good grip. A door opened, and at first, I thought it was the door to the room I was in, but it wasn’t. It was the door to Antonio’s room.

  Daniel muttered, “I didn’t want it to go like this.”

  I glanced at him, his shoulders slouched, his eyes closed. I turned back to the interview room. Antonio was standing. In the doorway was a woman about my age and a boy of about ten. She had a cascade of black hair and olive skin. Her lips were full and sexual, and her limbs were lanky and long.

  The boy.

  Well.

  The boy was a young version of the man I loved.

  I lost the ability to swallow. Once I saw them, I couldn’t keep my eyes off Antonio. He could be stoic with the world, but he’d always shown his emotions to me. When he saw who entered the room, his face betrayed his heart. His joy was unmistakable as he said something in Italian.

  “She heard he was dead and came here.”

  Nella. It must be his sister. She was just stunning. A heartbreaking beauty with brown eyes that had seen too much and a quiet confidence that I tried to embody over the feeling of being incomplete.

  “She’s been in Sorrento,” Daniel said compassionately. “In hiding. She wanted to get her son away from the mob.”

  The woman ran into Antonio’s arms, and I stared as he embraced her, pressing his nose to her hair. They spoke in Italian, rushing through words I couldn’t understand. He touched her face and kissed her cheek.

  “I went looking for you and found two Spinellis on a manifest from Naples. I thought it was a ruse you’d set up. But it wasn’t. Obviously. It makes me kind of almost believe your story.”

  Antonio got on one knee to speak to the boy, his nephew. I’d never seen a man so happy. Even in that gritty box of a room, he shone with contentment, as if he was where he belonged and with the people he was meant for. His family. I knew then that I had to go back to Italy with him. If I was in jail twenty years, thirty for shooting Paulie, I’d meet him under the olive trees at sixty. He needed to be home with his family, and I’d be with him, no questions asked.

  “The only thing was the names were so close,” Daniel said, leaning on the mirror, watching me. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.” Why wouldn’t I be? I was witnessing Antonio speaking softly to his nephew as if the child was his own son. “Close to what? The names?”

  “To you. Antonin and Tina Spinelli. It seemed like a ridiculous subterfuge.”

  Wai
t.

  Something was wrong.

  “Tina?” I asked.

  “Short for Valentina.”

  I rummaged around the dark corners of my mind, looking under memories and details. I was snapped out of it when the little boy slapped Antonio’s face and screamed at him in Italian. Valentina pulled the boy back and held him, her eyes welling up with an apology.

  “Valentina shortens to Nella?”

  Daniel didn’t answer right away. He waited until I’d turned from the scene to look at him leaning against the mirror, eyes cast down. He fidgeted with his fingernail, gave it a quick bite. Stopped himself.

  “Daniel. What is it?”

  “Tink, I don’t know how to say this.”

  “Don’t call me that.” Before the sentence was even out of my mouth, I uncovered the name from a mental file box of things that were precious to Antonio in the past.

  Daniel let me know that what was written in that file was right. “Valentina is his wife.”

  I thought, in that moment, Daniel would be a vindictive dick. But he wasn’t. Not with my hand covering my mouth and my eyes filling up.

  Over.

  Everything was over.

  “Theresa. I’m sorry.”

  His apology was a backdrop to the scene in the interview room. Antonio spoke softly to her, Valentina… his wife… as she held her…. no… their son. He put his arm around her. What was her scent? Did he remember it? Even with his eyes closed, he looked as though everything was coming back to him.

  He was home, and I was on the other side of a wall.

  nine.

  antonio

  d had a life once. I was a family lawyer. I practiced keeping families together because I’d never had one. Valentina had married that man. She married an optimist with a future who had escaped a life in the shadows. She married endless potential¸ strength, contentment.

  The man she was married to the day before she died was a monster. She’d watched me become everything she loathed, everything my mother had tried to save me from. Valentina watched me fail and drew away away away. I didn’t even realize she was a stranger until her car exploded over the hills of Naples and I didn’t know where she was driving to.

  The despair. There was nothing like it. No experience in my imaginings. No anguish so great I could kill man after man to eradicate it. But I dampened it. I buried that optimistic man and all his possibilities and I steeped myself in what I was to become.

  An animal. A hell-bound murderer.

  And…

  And before Valentina was brought in, Daniel Brower had asked me questions that didn’t make sense, about Italy, about my whereabouts ten years ago. My relationship with Paulie took up no more than three minutes. I couldn’t turn the questions on him because there were two cops in the room, and my personal history with the district attorney was dangerous territory.

  I knew he was hiding something. I knew he was beating around a bush. I knew he was playing a game of his own making when he dismissed the cops and said the interview was over. They shut off the camera and started out.

  “And Theresa?” I’d asked as Brower was the last one out the door.

  “Don’t worry about her.”

  “Don’t dismiss me.”

  “I’m not dismissing you.” Brower held the door ajar. “Believe me. You fucked me royally. I’d never dismiss you again. But you’re about to hurt her, and I thought I could stand that. I was wrong.”

  Before I could tell him he was wrong about that too, he closed the door, and my denials died on my lips. I’d never hurt Theresa. I’d take death for her. Eat it with a spoon. Embrace my damnation to save her. She was my hope, the call to that earlier self I thought had died.

  In the minutes between the door closing and opening again, I unraveled the components of our predicament and tried to find a way through. She’d confess to shooting Paulie even if I swore I’d done it. The evidence might back her up. I had no idea what forensics would find. Hopefully the Carriage House had been such a mess nothing could be proven. Hopefully there had been so many criminals in such a small space that doubts would arise. But mostly, I hoped that the district attorney loved Theresa enough to protect her from what she’d done.

  What simple worries. What facile hopes.

  I forgot all of them. They imploded. A windshield—smooth, simple—cracked into an unpredictable web of joy, horror, confusion, completion.

  And disbelief.

  In the first second of seeing Valentina, I thought I was looking at a ghost. Or a different woman. Or a trick of the light. She was older but the same. She was… my God. My heart went up and down at the same time. It went to the heavens with joy and dropped out of me like a stone, because my grief was for naught, and my anger had been misdirected.

  And still, even with her hand on the shoulder of a boy who looked exactly like my father, I didn’t believe it until I held her and smelled the grass in her hair. It was her. I felt nothing but confirmation, a clicking into place of a memory with a fact.

  I had questions. Too many. Where? How? Why? And they were drowned out by the sound of a windshield cracking slowly into a million complex shapes that would never fit together again.

  She’d done to me what Theresa and I had attempted to do to everyone else. She’d faked her death. Her resurfacing was the perfect vengeance for the wrong we’d done.

  “Antonio,” she said, the Italian lilt a hymn from her lips.

  Her voice brought me back ten years, to the rustling olive trees, the trickle of the fountain in the piazza, the thick smell of soil. She ran into my arms, and I had to catch her or she would fall.

  “Valentina? Is it you?” Her cheek felt the same when my lips touched it; the smell and taste were the same. Though I felt all the tenderness in my heart for her and all the joy in the world that she was alive, another crack appeared where my love should have been. I pulled away, more confused than I thought possible.

  “It’s me, amore,” she said.

  “I know, it’s just… how?”

  “We have forever to talk.”

  Did we? Forever? Another crack. Another discomfort lodged in my gut where I thought I couldn’t be less comfortable. I held her face and called for the old feelings and found only happiness. An overwhelming yet generic pleasure that she still existed.

  She cast her eyes down. “This is your son, Antonin.”

  Her voice was cool and distrustful, and it hitched, as if she spoke through her own pane of broken glass.

  I had to look at him. Dolore. That was the only word for it. Pain. In him, and in me, and between us. I didn’t know children. All I saw was a little man and missed opportunities. Misused lives. Broken promises. And maybe the hope that they could be fixed. Maybe some wrongs could be undone. Maybe even a man like me could get a second chance to do something right.

  That must have been what my father felt when he saw me for the first time in eleven years. That was why he’d brought me into his world and tried to keep me from it at the same time. In that crack of realization, that I would do the same with my son as my father had done with me, Antonin let me know it wouldn’t be easy. He hit me. I deserved it.

  “Antonin!” Valentina cried, taking the boy and looking at me. “I’m so sorry. He’s confused.”

  The blow hurt my face but cracked that moment of hope that he needed me to fix him. Little Antonin was perfectly fine without me. I’d only undo the good work his mother had done.

  “We’re all confused,” I replied. Andati in pallone. I could only feel this confusion in Italian. As soon as I put eyes on her, I knew what she was feeling.

  “No,” she said defiantly, her Italian as cutting as it was musical. “No, we are not all confused.”

  ten.

  theresa

  had to do something. I had to walk. Think. Speak. I had to see my brother. I had to plan the next few days.

  I had to do a lot of things. But what I wouldn’t do was have the same complete mental breakdown I did when I f
ound out Daniel was cheating on me. So I dedicated myself to shutting out the image of Antonio looking at his wife as if he’d finally come home. Blot out the way he touched her cheek. Erase the sound of them speaking to each other in a common language. I had to focus.

  I sat in Daniel’s empty office with my hands in my lap and recited a litany of prime numbers, focusing my energy completely on three numbers ahead, imagining the shape of the digits, occupying the lowest parts of my mind on garbage so the higher parts of my mind could attend to the important things. I had returned alive. I was all right. He was all right. And maybe this crazy screwed-up situation was the best thing for him.

  Daniel entered with a glass of water. “How are you doing?”

  I took it and put it on the desk. “Thank you. I’m fine.”

  19. 23. 29. 31.

  He sat across from me in an old green chair. The leather squeaked from his weight when he shifted forward. “I’m kind of relieved. I thought he’d killed her. I thought your judgment had gone fully out the window.”

  “And now you think I was being reasonable?”

  “No. But at least I don’t think he’s in the habit of murdering his wives. Just his business partners.”

  “He didn’t. I did.” I tried to swallow the admission back. It wasn’t necessary to confess just yet, but in my weakened state, the truth was a powerful balm.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Sure. You did it.”

  He didn’t believe me. Or he didn’t want to. I tried to care, but I was broken, split apart, an incomplete measure of a person.

  I couldn’t come up with a reply, because all of my energy went into remembering Antonio’s reunion with his wife.

  Focus.

  Wife.

  An unbreakable bond under God. I’d been bedded, repeatedly, by a married man. I was the other woman. The whore. The one left behind. Big words, explosive ideas, hurtful phrases pushed into my consciousness like a TV left on to a bad show I couldn’t stop watching.

  37. 41. 43. 47.

  “Theresa?”

  “I’m fine. I think I should go to the hospital.”

  “I can take you.”