Will North

by Water, Stone, Heart (v5)

  All that did was melt off her baby fat. By the time she was fourteen, Johnny was a gang leader running a neighborhood drug operation—grass, pills, cocaine, who knew what else. When rival gang members began hassling her on her way home from school—whistling, hooting, making rude gestures—she assumed it was Johnny's doing, a way to humiliate her further. But when she confronted him about it, he exploded in a kind of strange paternal fury and had his allies beat one of her tormenters so severely the kid had to be hospitalized.

  Then Johnny raped her. “See, Nicki, I'm your protector now. You want me to keep protecting you, right? Right?”

  She nodded, crying. He crouched above her, whipped on a condom, and forced himself inside her—all the while keeping one hand over her mouth. She couldn't fight him off, so she did the only thing she could: She fled. She left her body behind, under her brother, and occupied the far corner of her room, up at the ceiling, from which perch she could observe dispassionately what was happening below. It was sort of like watching a bad horror movie; what was happening was brutal, yes, but also more than a little bit ridiculous looking. She knew about sex, of course, from school and from her girlfriends, but she had somehow thought it would be more graceful, more like a slow dance with the lights low at the Catholic Community Center. Not this.

  Afterward, after the grunting and thrusting, he simply climbed off of her and said: “Here's the name of the game, slut: You take care of Papa Johnny, Papa Johnny takes care of you.” Then he leaned down, as if to kiss her, but instead said, “And if you don't, I'm not gonna hurt you. Oh no, Papa Johnny would never harm his Nicki, even if she is a slut. Papa Johnny will have someone he knows hurt good little Jamie instead. I'll put the hurt on Jamie so bad you'll never forget it—never forget what you did to your own little brother.”

  There was a picture of the three of them on her bureau, a wet, happy trio holding hands as they ran out of the water at Revere Beach. She was maybe six, Jamie four, Johnny nine. It must have been taken before their father left, because they seemed so happy. Maybe this was all her father's fault, this thing her brother had become.

  Angela noticed that her daughter was losing weight and made bigger meals on weekends when she was home at dinnertime. Nicola forced them down, then excused herself and threw it all up again. Angela noticed that her daughter's grades were slipping and berated her, pointing out what a good student Johnny was—Johnny, whose only purpose in school was to protect his customer base and who now hired friends to do his schoolwork. Angela never noticed anything else going on in the walk-up apartment, including the drug traffic at night. How can she? Nicola reasoned. She's not here; she's working all night to feed us. It's not her fault. But she felt desperately alone, isolated, as if she existed in a stockade to which only Johnny had the key. She never knew when he would steal into her room; that was part of the fun for him, to keep her guessing, to be in control. Only once did she try to gain the upper hand; she figured maybe if he thought she liked it, he'd leave her alone. He was slouched in front of the television, watching Kojak, his favorite show.

  She leaned over the back of the chair and whispered: “How about it tonight, huh, stud?”

  His head jerked around. “Get away from me, pig!”

  “Whatsamatta, Papa Johnny can't get it up?” she sneered.

  Fast as a lightning bolt, and with almost as much power, he slugged her, knocking her to the floor, her head spinning. Then he returned to the TV show, as if none of it had happened. That night, he did come to her room, and was especially vicious. She never taunted him again.

  Sometimes she thought Jamie knew what his older brother was doing to her. If Johnny wasn't at home distributing, Jamie would come to her room, where she was trying to do homework, and sit beside her, just holding her hand. He never said anything, but his love was like a lifeline, like salvation itself.

  Johnny stopped raping her about a year later, partly because he had no shortage of older, more experienced girls now, and partly because he was just too busy dealing to bother. Nicola had no idea where the money he made was going. It certainly wasn't going to their mother, and he wasn't spending it on drugs for himself; he was scrupulous about staying in control and seldom indulged in his own products.

  He didn't want her for sex anymore, but he still found ways of using her. His “customers” came and went, up and down the stairs. An ugly, desperate parade. The traffic was especially heavy in the early evening after Angela went to work. He'd brag to his low-life pals about what a great body his sister had, and encourage them to check her out. Sometimes he'd drag her out of her room and put her on display: “Hey, slut, come meet some of my gentlemen friends!” Lots of laughter—some of it oozing lust, some of it nervous and wary. They leered at her and made disgusting noises. But no one ever touched her. They were too afraid of Johnny. It was hard for her to tell which made her feel dirtier, the rapes or the slurs.

  There was a noise downstairs and Nicola shot upright. She realized she wasn't fully awake; she'd been drifting, and now she struggled to become conscious. The sound came again and she relaxed, dropping back down on her pillows. It was just Randi pushing his aluminum water bowl on the slate kitchen floor as he drank. Next came the click of his nails on the stairs, the cold, wet nose nudging her palm, and the familiar thump as he leaped up to the foot of her bed, walked in a circle a couple of times, then flopped down. Her guardian.

  Outside, there was only the music of the river.

  It's a hot Saturday afternoon in August when Ricky DiCarlo, one of Johnny's preadolescent henchmen, shows up at the apartment door, drenched with sweat.

  “Nicola, you gotta come. It's Johnny.” Ricky is a short, wiry kid with a nose so big it precedes him by five minutes. He's got a Red Sox hat on backward, the rear-facing brim like a counterbalance to the nose. Johnny calls him “Durante.” He is vibrating with fear.

  “What's he done now?”

  “Holy Mary, Mother of God, Nicola; they topped him!”

  Nicola stares at the little thug, frozen for a moment, and notices blood spots on his shirt, like rust stains. She glances over her shoulder; her mother is taking a nap. She steps into the hall and heads down the stairs, taking them two at a time and calling over her shoulder, “Where?”

  “Gennero's.”

  Nicola knows the place, a hole-in-the-wall pizza joint so narrow you felt as if you had to walk in sideways.

  “We was hangin' out and Johnny, he decides he wants to go get a slice, you know?” Ricky says as they burst out into the street. “We're just standing there and these three guys elbow in—big guys, grown-ups. One pulls out a sawed-off, sticks it in Johnny's face, and bam!”

  They're running down Hanover Street now, heading for the pizza joint. Nicola can hear sirens approaching. “What did you do?” she yells.

  “We—none of us—did nothin'! The whole thing was, like, two seconds. Then they back out the door, get into a car, and they're gone.”

  They round the corner and Nicola sees there's a small crowd outside Gennero's, like maybe it's lunchtime and they're in line to order a slice.

  “Who was it, Ricky?” she asks, panting.

  “I dunno.”

  Nicola stops, grabs the kid by the shirt, and spins him against a brick wall so hard his head comes away bleeding. “Don't gimme that shit! Who was it?!”

  “No, I swear, Nicola; I don't know them!”

  “Yeah, like you don't know your mother, eh? You chickenshit!”

  She slaps him full across the face and he doesn't even try to stop her. Then she wades through the crowd, and when old man Gennero in his stained apron yells, “Hey! No!” and tries to stop her, she bodychecks him aside and keeps going, right through the door and into the place, where the air is fragrant with pizza dough, tomato, garlic, herbs, and the lingering, acrid smell of fireworks on the Fourth of July.

  The restaurant is deserted.

  But Johnny is there. He's sitting on the floor in the corner beneath the niche where Gennero has a blue
and white statue of the Virgin. His head is hanging down as if he's napping or something. The wall and the Virgin behind him are splattered red, like somebody had flung an institutional-size can of tomato sauce. The sirens are very close now.

  She expects to be horrified, and in some corner of her brain she is, but she is oddly separate from that part of herself. It's as if she's Kojak; she's trying to make sense of the scene before her, trying to take it all in. She is about to lift Johnny's head—it's a reflex; she knows he's dead, but she wants to see his eyes—when the cops arrive and one of them grabs her.

  “Come away from there, girlie; that's not for you,” the cop says quietly. He's from Southie; she can tell by the Irish accent. He's trying to be gentle, assumes she's in shock, and he's correct.

  “Take your fuckin' hands offa me!” she screams. “That's my brother!” And now she's crying and flailing punches.

  In one swift, sure, graceful move, the cop scoops her off her feet, carries her out the door, and gently sets her in the backseat of a squad car, where, empty of fury now, she sits stonelike, staring, like someone waiting for a long traffic light to change. Another cop, a lady, kneels on the pavement by the open rear door and talks quietly to her, trying to get her name. Nicola suddenly folds at the waist, clutching her stomach. The lady cop sees it coming and pulls her out of the car so she can throw up in the street. The woman strokes her long hair and says soothing things to her as Nicola retches; she has no idea what the woman is saying, but it helps.

  Randi was snoring. She didn't know why, but she found this endearing, only one of many sweet things about the witch's dog. She leaned over and stroked his velvet head. The snoring stopped; the dog heaved a damp sigh, shifted position, and was once again asleep.

  Nicola wished she could sleep, too, but she was thinking about Andrew now—happy to be rid of Johnny, at least for a while, but no less troubled for thinking about Andrew. What the hell was wrong with the guy? “Don't you understand how I feel about you?” he'd yelled. Yeah, I do, but you're out of here in a few days, for Christ's sake. Probably the guy was just plain out of it; still shell-shocked by his wife's walking out on him. Either way, it was meaningless. What kind of man falls in love with you after only a few days? A lunatic, that's who.

  And yet, she was almost certain there was nothing else crazy about him. Softhearted, perhaps, but not softheaded. That was it, then: He was a scheming Lothario. Maybe his wife really left him because she was tired of all his affairs. No, if that were the case, he wouldn't have seemed so surprised when she'd invited him home, and then upstairs. Surprised, and also shy. So, what then? A romantic? Lord, that might be even worse. She'd been one of those once herself, and look what it got her. All right, then, she said to herself, let's look at the facts. He's a professor in Philadelphia. I'm an artist in Cornwall. And this is where I belong. Is he going to toss aside a career at a major university to build stone hedges? Not likely. Then again, she'd overheard Jamie talking to someone at the Welly the other night about “this American” who was a “stone artist.” She remembered that she'd felt secretly proud of Andrew then.

  Then it struck her that the reason she was lying here in the dark trying to figure out Andrew Stratton was that she cared for him. A lot. This astonished her. What if he did love her? Did she love him? No, that was ridiculous. She'd fallen for Jeremy because he was handsome and charming and, as it later turned out, rather wealthy. She'd agreed to marry him before she knew anything about him, really, anything deeper than the superficial charm. And that veneer had turned out to be very thin indeed. She wasn't falling for this Andrew chap either: far too little information upon which to base a decision.

  Assuming love was something you decided upon …

  Lee was halfway up her favorite tree, but the climbing was slow, what with having to hook the umbrella over a branch each time she climbed higher. After having been drenched more than once by summer showers while reading in her tree, she'd had the brilliant idea of keeping her old red umbrella with the white polka dots there permanently, hooked over a limb to be used as and when necessary. The thing about summer showers was that they were short, sharp, and unpredictable. It could be sunny one minute and absolutely pelting down the next. You could stay in the tree and get soaked, or you could climb down, run home, and also get soaked, by which time the shower would have passed. With a brolly you could wait it out and keep your book dry. She thought this arrangement exceptionally clever. And besides, she considered the dotted umbrella too childish to be seen in public with anyway. A proper seat—a couple of planks nailed to two limbs, maybe—would be nice, too, but Elizabeth at the Visitor Centre had told her the valley was owned by the National Trust and she knew they'd never go for that. The trust was very strict; her Dad leased land from the trust, and they even told him what kind of cattle he could graze there. Maybe a pillow would be okay, though. She was reading the latest Harry Potter, and the branch she favored tended to get hard after a couple of chapters.

  Today, however, she wasn't reading. She'd come up to have a think. The tree was a good place to think, what with the water bubbling along below and the birds and the privacy and all. It was like Harry Potter's Platform 9¾ at King's Cross station; it was her portal to a special, if not actually magical world.

  Today's think was about Nicki—well, Nicki and Drew, really. Nicki had called while she and Mum were having breakfast and, after listening a bit and glancing at Lee, Mum had taken the phone out into the hall, where she talked in urgent whispers. Naturally, Lee went to the door to listen—Nicki was her best friend, after all. She couldn't hear what Nicki was saying, of course, and all she could catch were snatches of what her mum was saying in response: “Andrew said what?” and “Why'd you run away, you silly cow?” and “Sweetie, you need to let go of Johnny.”

  That was all Lee needed. Obviously, Nicki liked Drew but was seeing somebody named Johnny whom she needed to “let go of.” In her perch high above the river, now, Lee realized she felt kind of hurt that Nicki had a boyfriend she didn't know about. After all, she told Nicki absolutely everything that was going on in her life. Why had Nicki kept this a secret? She scrunched her eyes and made her mind sail above the village, on a reconnaissance mission, like Harry on his broomstick. But she couldn't think of anybody named Johnny in Boscastle—not in the upper town, not by the harbor, not in Forrabury Maybe he was from Camelford or Tintagel. Wherever he was from, it was clear Mum didn't think much of him.

  Lee decided she needed to talk to Drew about this situation. She felt she'd sort of pushed him and Nicki together, and now she worried he might be sad about whatever had happened between them yesterday. Plus, there was the whole problem of Drew returning to America next week. If Nicki liked him, that would make her sad, too, probably. Lee had looked at the reservations book her mum kept by the kitchen phone and knew other people had reserved the cottage starting the following week, so even if Drew wanted to stay, he couldn't—at least not at Shepherd's Cottage. She didn't want Drew to leave. She liked him, liked the way he treated her like a grown-up. A lot of grown-ups treated kids as if they weren't worth wasting time on, or as if they weren't even there at all. But not Drew. He always made time for her, as if she mattered. She left the umbrella hanging from a branch, tucked her book between the waistband of her shorts and the small of her back, returned to the ground, and headed down the valley toward the harbor.

  “Reckun yon chield wanna ax yew summat, Andrew,” Burt said, nodding toward the distant end of the wall. The hedge-laying crew was sitting by the river, finishing lunch.

  Andrew followed his gaze and saw Lee, who was standing, storklike, with one knee bent, foot resting against the opposite knee. He'd no idea how long she'd been there. The girl was capable of the kind of deep quiet that made you think she'd appeared out of thin air. When she saw he'd noticed her, she grinned and waved.

  “Don't go getting snared by these local lasses, now, Andrew,” Jamie teased. “We've work to do yet.”

  Andrew got to h
is feet and walked stiffly to where Lee waited, marveling that she could hold her balance on one leg. “Hiya, toots; whatcha doing down here?” Andrew said.

  “Came to see you,” she answered, dropping the other foot to the ground.

  Andrew smiled and bowed. “Then I am honored, madam.”

  “We need to talk,” Lee said, her pale eyebrows knit together to signal serious business.

  “We do?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Now?”

  “Uh-huh. Can you?”

  Andrew looked back at the crew, who were tidying up and going back to work. He knew Jamie wouldn't mind. “Sure, for a bit anyway.”

  Lee turned and started walking toward the entrance to the car park. Andrew followed. When they were out of earshot from the others, she said, “You like Nicki, right?”

  Andrew kept walking. “Well, yes, Nicola is a lovely woman, plus she's your best friend, too, and any friend of yours …”

  Lee leveled a look at him. “Don't treat me like a kid.”

  Andrew was about to protest, but he caught himself. “All right, yes; I like her. I think she's pretty terrific, although a lot of the time we seem to be at daggers drawn.”

  “What's that supposed to mean?”

  “Oh, you know, sort of teasing each other all the time.”

  Lee nodded, and said nothing for a few moments.

  “Lee, what's troubling you? Something is, or you wouldn't have come down here when you could be in your tree.”

  “Nicki called Mum this morning, all upset. About something that happened between you two, I guess.” She left the implicit question hanging.

  “Yes, well. We … um … had a bit of a disagreement.”

  Lee reached the bridge and stopped. She pretended to watch the water rushing underneath. “I think Nicki's got another boyfriend, Drew. His name is Johnny. Mum told her she should let him go. I don't think Mum likes him. Mum likes you, though,” she added.