by K. J. Dahlen
After returning with the phone, I opened up the camera and handed it to Dante.
He pushed the red button and started talking into the phone. “Hey Rita, it’s me. I know this has to be strange, but I didn’t know how else to contact you. I’m here with Annalisa. She and I have spent a lot of time together and, well, we’ve fallen for each other. I know it sounds crazy, but I love her.” He looked away from the phone for a second and smiled at me. “And she’s going to help me escape tomorrow night. That’s Friday. I need your help though. There’s the blue duffle bag in my closet. Can you grab it and meet me about a quarter mile south of the Morelli household at…Uh…eleven.? Thank you so much Rita. I’ll explain more when I see you. Please don’t tell anyone. See you tomorrow.” He pressed the button again and handed me the phone.
I held it tightly. Even though I was terrified for him, and a bit scared for myself too, I couldn’t stop smiling. He’d already told me he loved me but hearing him tell someone else made it all the more real.
We kissed for a while before I left him for the third time that night. I could barely sleep. When I woke in the morning I felt awful, which wasn’t a surprise. I’d been living on three hours sleep for a week. The afternoon naps had helped but it just wasn’t the same. My stomach was upset, a ball of nerves. So many things could go wrong. I felt like I was going to throw up.
There was a lot riding on me getting the message to Rita. Even though I felt like sleeping or at the very least, laying on the bathroom floor with my head against the toilet, I knew I had to get up and out of the house. It wasn’t until I went to leave I realized that I had no way of getting out of the house without Donnie tagging along. I needed Lina’s help. Besides, I had to tell her I was leaving.
“Are you okay?” she asked sitting next to me on my bed.
“Yeah, no...well yeah. My stomach is upset, but that’s because I’m all nerves,” I said, drinking the coffee that I’d grabbed from the kitchen as well as the breakfast biscuits.
“Nerves about what? Big night with Dante?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “Marco said that if everything goes as planned and he thinks it will, that I can go home tomorrow, which means that Dante will be leaving. Have you and he talked about seeing each other after he’s released?”
My stomach was settling with the food and with talking about it to Lina. “Yeah, we have.” I took her hand. “Lina, something really shady is going on. Last night I heard Vito talking. He was talking on the phone to someone, I don’t know who, about killing Dante, and then killing my dad and Dante’s dad. He even said something about killing two loyal guys. I have to think that one of them is Marco.”
“Marco?” Lina asked with her mouth open wide.
“I don’t know for sure. Vito didn’t say his name, but either way, he’s going to make sure that Dante doesn’t get out of here alive. He wants to start a war, and when it’s over he and whoever he’s in with are going to take over.”
“Are you going to tell your dad?”
I shook my head. “I can’t. He won’t believe me, and then he’ll wonder what I was doing up, and it might wreck the deal for Dante. I can’t take that chance.”
“Then what are you going to do? I have to warn Marco.”
“Dante and I are going to run away together. I’m going to help him escape tonight, and meet him at the docs at midnight. You can wait till morning, till they discover that Dante is gone and tell Marco everything. He will probably listen to you.”
“So you’ve really got to go?” she asked, tears in her eyes.
“Yeah, at least for a little bit. But I get to be with him.”
Lina gave me a huge hug. “Then it’s worth it because I know you’ll be happy.”
“There’s one problem though,” I said, holding up my phone. “I have a message on this that I need to get to Dante’s sister this evening. I can’t figure a way out of this house without Donnie coming with me.”
“Donnie? That’s easy,” Lina said. “I’ve got the perfect plan.”
Donnie played into it just like she said he would. He’d come up to me in the kitchen in the late afternoon. “Are you all right Annalisa?” he asked when he found me with my head on the table.
“No, not really. Female troubles. Lina is going to run to the store for me in a bit.” I’d learned a long time ago, if you mentioned “female” stuff, most men never asked anything more.
His brow furrowed. “But didn’t that just end?”
“Honestly Donnie, the way you keep track of that is kinda creepy.” I was playing the part Lina had suggested, but it really was creepy how he knew these things.
“Hey,” Donnie said, putting up his hands. “It’s not like I try to, it’s just that you and your mom... well your dad is my boss, and once a month he gets all cranky when he can’t get any.”
“Ewwww! Donnie!”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Sorry, but anyway, that’s how I know, cause last week he was a bear, but then yesterday...”
“Donnie!”
“Sorry.”
“Anyway, I’m going to bed. I’m not coming down for dinner.”
“Fine,” he said walking from the room.
It had been as easy as Lina had said it would. Wearing her sunglasses and scarf, no one looked twice at me as I drove through the gates in her car. Earlier in the day, I’d googled Dante’s sister Rita, so I would know what she looked like. I thought finding her in the park would be impossible, but I picked a bench along the main path and waited. It seemed like the most likely place to wait. I really wasn’t sure what I’d do if I didn’t find her. I sat there, my leg bouncing nervously, holding my phone in my hand.
Finally, I saw her go running past me, wearing headphones. She’d stopped at the water fountain and was refilling her water bottle when I’d approached her.
“Rita?” I asked walking up behind her.
She spun around in surprise, then her eyes narrowed. Apparently, she recognized me. “What the fuck do you want? Where the hell is my brother?”
“I have a message from him,” I blurted thrusting my phone at her.
She seemed surprised but took my phone. She pushed play on it. Her face was hard, cold. Maybe she was expecting to see him being tortured or something. Instead, she saw him sitting on a bed in a dark room.
I watched her face as the message played. I’d listened to the message a few times while waiting for her. Her jaw dropped at his admission that he was in love with me.
She brought her head up, this time appraising me, as she looked me over head to toe.
I felt small under her gaze.
There was no welcome hug, no change in her demeanor at all. She simply said, “Tell him I’ll be there.”
“Thanks,” I said rushing away, relieved she believed him and not wanting to say more in case I’d somehow fuck it up. I got halfway to Lina’s car before I realized that I’d left my phone with her. Feeling like an idiot, I turned back to get it. She’d walked about fifty yards from the water fountain and was talking on her phone with her back to me.
“You won’t believe this,” I heard her say into her phone as I approached. She was still holding mine, replaying the message one more time. “Dante fucked his way out of another one Jimmy. He’s convinced Franco’s daughter that he’s in love with her. In her defense, he sounded so convincing I almost believed it, almost. Can you imagine Dante with only one woman? I bet he fucks half a dozen women after she helps him escape tonight.” She started laughing.
The tears fell involuntarily from my eyes.
I stood there frozen. Thoughts rushed through my head. Had he been using me? It had seemed so real, and it had been my idea, hadn’t it? I turned away from her, needing to get out of there. My head spun as I headed back to the car without my phone. There was no way I was going near her again, even if she did have my phone.
I wanted to go and ask Dante about it, but there wasn’t time. And what would he say anyway? He’d tell me he loved me and she was wrong. He�
�d say that if it were the truth and he’d say that if it were a lie. I started to doubt everything.
I moved in a daze through traffic nearly forgetting about going to the pharmacy where I was picking up the fake supplies I’d told Donnie Lina was getting. It seemed stupid, but Lina said I needed to come back with a bag. I wondered if I should just skip it, but thinking about anything was difficult, and I couldn’t seem to focus on anything for more than a few seconds.
Deciding on following as much of the plan and not wanting to think about anything, I pulled into the pharmacy parking lot. I wandered the store for a few minutes.
As I stood in the feminine hygiene section trying to forget Rita’s words, tears streamed down my face. I was so emotional, maybe I really was about to get my period. I did some mental math. I remembered I’d had it for Lina’s birthday last month because she wanted to go dancing and I felt kinda crampy, but we went anyway. So that was the fifteenth, and so.... wait... Donnie was right, I was supposed to get it last week. I’d never been late ever. I paced the aisle redoing the math. It was hard to focus on anything, let alone think straight.
When I’d come to the same conclusion, I stopped walking, staring right at the pregnancy tests. I totally missed the irony of how they were located right next to the tampons and right below the condoms, two things I wouldn’t be needing if I were pregnant. Without really thinking, I grabbed one and headed for the checkout.
Somehow, the idea that I might be pregnant had cleared my head some, giving me the opportunity to try to make sense of things. I began to process all of the new information and made some decisions.
First, I was going to let Dante go. If he loved me, he’d be waiting for me at the docks. If he didn’t, and it was all a trick, he wouldn’t be there, I could go home. I’d confess being tricked to my father and tell him about Vito. I’d feel stupid and heartbroken, but at least I’d know. There was no way to know for sure how he felt about me if I didn’t set him free. Even if he didn’t love me, I loved him and I couldn’t stand the thought of him being killed.
And second, if I was pregnant, I wasn’t going to tell him. I didn’t want him feeling obligated to be with me. I didn’t want that to be the reason he showed up at the docks at midnight. I’d always wonder if he did it for me, or for the baby. If he showed up, I’d tell him. If not, I’d raise the baby on my own. That was the third thing I’d decided. I wanted this baby.
It wasn’t that I wanted to be pregnant. I sure hadn’t set out to get pregnant. I wasn’t married. I wasn’t really even with Dante. I hadn’t finished school and I didn’t have my own place. I wasn’t sure how I’d do it financially, though I knew my parents would help out. Yet despite all of that, I knew that if I were pregnant, I wouldn’t end the pregnancy or give the baby up for adoption. Despite how Dante truly felt for me, I loved him, and I would love a baby if we had one.
Twenty minutes after leaving the pharmacy and making some potentially life changing decisions, I arrived back home. I put the scarf and glasses back on then entered the house with the bag from the pharmacy. It was all for nothing since no one even noticed me coming back in the house. I went up to my room and into my private bathroom. After I read the instructions on the box, which seemed simple enough, I was peeing on a stick. Leaving it on the bathroom counter, I went to lay on my bed to wait the ten minutes the box said it took.
As the clock ticked by, the reality of the situation started to hit me. I’d have to tell my parents, who thought I was a virgin. Dante would find out, and I’d be the butt of so many jokes. I’d have disgraced my family. Rita’s words and her face played over and over in my head. I felt the tears start to fall again. Ten minutes had passed, but I didn’t get up to go look. I was afraid to.
“How did it go?” Lina asked coming into my room,
I was wiping the tears from my eyes, having just decided that I needed to stop crying and go look.
“That bad?”
The moment I opened my mouth to speak, I started to cry again. “I found Rita...and showed her...and she said she’d come tonight to pick him up.”
“Well, that’s good right?” Lina asked, sitting next to me on the bed, clearly confused as to why I was crying.
“Yeah, but I was so nervous I left my phone there. When I went back to get it, she was on her phone talking to someone else. She was laughing at me...about me. She said she knew Dante could fuck his way out of another bad situation.”
Lina put her arm around me and hugged me tight.
“You should have seen how she looked at me, like I was nothing.”
“Wait, she knows you overheard her talking about you?”
“No. That was when she’d watched the video. She looked at me like she couldn’t believe he was in love with someone like me.”
“Well, she’s a stupid cunt,” Lina said pulling back.
I gasped at her word.
“Well it’s true. She has no fucking clue what has gone on between you two. I don’t really either, but I know how happy you’ve been.” She hugged me again for a long time. “And,” she said letting me go. “If he is fucking with you, then it’s his loss and you got some great sex out of it. You can forget all about him and move on.”
I started to cry again. No matter what, if he loved me or not, if I was pregnant, I couldn’t just forget about him. There would be a constant reminder every day.
Lina mistook my crying. “Awww, hun. Don’t cry. I know you don’t believe me, but you would get over him. If I told you how many guys...well… and even Marco. I mean, how long has it been? We still don’t live together. I’m...well, I’m his...never mind this isn’t about me. Trust me, if he is fucking with you, you’ll get over him, but you don’t even know that he has been. Last night you were on cloud nine. He’s done nothing to change that right?”
I shook my head.
“So you’re basing this all on what his sister said?”
I nodded.
“She’s a stupid cunt, like I said. She doesn’t know what the fuck she’s talking about.”
“She knows him better than I do.”
Lina raised her eyebrows. “And why is that? Because she’s his sister?”
“Well, yeah.”
She shook her head and rolled her eyes a little bit. “And Donnie is like your brother and so is Marco right?”
I nodded. “Yeah. They know everything about me.”
She raised her eyebrows.
I laughed. “Well, I guess not this.”
“See? It’s all gonna be okay.”
At those words, I started sobbing again. “I might be pregnant,” I blurted out.
“Didn’t he use protection?”
“He didn’t have any. They took all of his stuff,” I answered. “I told him I was on the pill.”
“When did you go on the pill?” She tilted her head.
I felt myself blushing. “I um... I hope you don’t mind, but I used some of the ones you left here.”
She looked confused.
“You know. You left a few of those packs with just like one row in them when you stayed here last summer.”
Her eyes went wide. “The green ones? Bella! Oh, my God! Those are just sugar pills. And you can’t just take one and be protected, you have to…” She stopped talking when I’d started to cry again.
I thought I couldn’t feel dumber, but somehow I did.
“Oh, I guess it doesn’t matter now. Are you pregnant?”
“I don’t know,” I sobbed.” I’m too scared to look.” I looked over at my bathroom.
“You took a test?”
I nodded. “Yeah, but I haven’t looked.”
“I understand being scared, but no matter what, you’re going to be alright, baby or no baby, Dante or no Dante.”
“I know.”
“Good, cause you’ve got me and a great family.”
“I know I do.”
“But you love him right?”
“I do, so much.”
“And he loves y
ou too right?”
“I thought he did. I don’t know now. Maybe it was a trick.”
Annalisa walked to the bathroom and picked up the pregnancy test. She looked down at it and then back at me. “Annalisa Morelli. He does love you. You’ve got great instincts.”
I couldn’t help but smile at her compliment.
“And you know what else, you’re going to be a great mother.” She handed me the test.
I stared down at the word “pregnant.”
I was pregnant, and I was happy about it. I wondered how Dante would feel. I wanted to tell him, but I wasn’t sure that I should. I’d have a few minutes with him when I let him out, but I needed to know if he wanted me, not the baby.
As if she could read my mind, Lina asked, “Are you going to tell Dante?”
“I—I don’t think so.”
“Good. I don’t think you should. Not until you’re away,” she said.
“That’s what I was thinking. I don’t want him to meet me at the dock out of obligation.”
Her nose crinkled up. “You’re still on that? Damn, his sister really got to you. I was thinking that you shouldn’t tell him because if he’s like the guys I know, if he’s like Marco, he’d go all chivalrous, and think that it’s too dangerous or some shit.”
“I hadn’t even thought of that,” I admitted.
“Look, I know you’re all nerves and this isn’t something you expected, but neither was meeting Dante. Get some rest. You’re going to need it for tonight. You need to take care of yourself and the baby.”
“I can’t rest, I need to pack.”
“I’ll help you pack. You’re not bringing a lot are you?”
“No, just a small bag. Dante said we can get everything we need once we’re there.”
Lina helped me pack a few things and then I laid down to rest. She woke me at 9:30 and we said our goodbyes. She pressed a piece of paper into my hand. “This is my phone number for when you get to a phone, and this is an email address I made this afternoon. You can contact me there if you don’t think it’s safe to call.”
With one final hug, I left her and made my way downstairs. She promised to keep Marco occupied while I went to the basement.