by John Domini
JJ: “She wasn’t much older than Dora and Sylvia.”
“They never could get her exact age,” Barbara said. “The way she’d been kept, you know, it affects your growth.” When she closed her eyes again, the image in the dark was Maria Elena. The girl could hardly have looked less like Barbara’s two, coarse-haired and mocha-skinned, with crooked teeth and an Aztec-hatchet nose.
“She was kept in a cage, right?” Dora asked. “Some bad man kept her locked up in a cage.”
“H-hey.” This was Paul. “Do we, do we have to talk, to t-talk ab-bout…”
“Some bad man,” Sylvia said.
“The markings indicated she’d been in a cage. The pattern on her buttocks, I’m saying. At the Center, they showed me photos. And Nettie and Sister Trudy warned me to think it over.” Barbara gave an airless laugh.
“Sister Trudy,” Chris said. “Mom, you want someone to blame, look no further.”
“Brought to you by Sis-ter Tru-dy,” JJ said.
“That’s who’s to blame. Her and the brain trust over there at the Sam Center.”
“I mean, as if this was ever their decision to make! Jesus, Mom. You volunteered over there, okay. But what gives those people the right to—”
“Boys.” Barb raised her eyes. “If I could work there again I would. In a minute I would. I’d work like Nettie, I’d get a real job there.”
The older brothers shared a look.
“But that’s not what God sent me. I didn’t have a job there, I was a mother, that’s all. And listen, Sister Trudy didn’t have to tell me anything. Anyone with half a brain could figure out that as soon as that girl found herself back in a family situation, there’d be—repercussions.”
“G-guys, guys. I don’t 1-like it when you, when we t-talk ab, ab-b-b…”
“Paul.” Barb couldn’t quite see him, some trick of the sun on the dust.
“Listen to me, Mr. Paul. It’s Mama’s fault. Mama’s fault, everybody, I’m owning that.” She didn’t know how to avoid the jargon. “Sister Trudy and Nettie, over at the Center, you think they would lie to me? You think I would lie to them? I knew what I was risking, bringing a girl like that into a family situation. But I wanted something so simple, so simple. Basic socialization, that’s all.”
“Mom,” Chris said, “nobody’s saying you’re lying.”
“Socialization? Mom, I mean. The girl was only with us, what? Ten days?”
“We never even ascertained specifics about the abuse. Sometimes she talked about an uncle, sometimes it was a stepmother.”
“Talked?” John Junior caught her eye. “That girl didn’t talk, she screamed. Mom, she screamed all the time. And when she didn’t have something she could hurt you with, hey. She’s got her pants down.”
Paul stood up, his chair clattering backwards.
“JJ, come on,” Chris said. “You know you got all that from Pop.”
“Well Pop is right. Mom, you know what he told me, out at the Refugee Center? He said, ‘Your mother’s not the easiest person in the world to live with.’ Hey. You know he’s talking about Maria Elena.”
Barb was aware of her middle child, his white sleeves aglow. But she couldn’t take her eyes off John Junior.
“Yeah, Pop tells me things. You can’t keep him under your thumb all the time. The day after that girl came to our house, he pulled me aside and he told me to make sure the twins were never alone with her. Good call.”
The mother had intended the Magic Kingdom, but the girl saw Gotham City. The first morning Maria Elena woke up in the Lulucita house, she’d crawled into the master bathroom while Jay was shaving and, after checking his befuddled grin, flipped his thick penis out of his boxers and kissed it. The father had lost control of the razor, slashing a half-circle across his cheek. His bellowing set Dora and Sylvia running for the stairs, forgetting even the cat; thank God John Junior had stopped them. Then after the father had banged back into the bedroom, bleeding, accusing, the little refugee had come after him with the scissors Barb used to trim the children’s hair.
Had the girl been feeling scorned? Maria Elena had worse secrets than Silky Kahlberg. She shrieked in languages no one knew.
“Mom told us to stay away too,” Chris was saying. “Like, Mom the same as Pop, JJ. She realized that we weren’t equipped to deal, just ordinary American kids.”
“Okay, but how long did it take? How many incidents?”
How long had it gone on? Had it really taken Barbara ten days to concede that for Maria Elena, home and family would always seethe, cutthroat, bloody? When Jehovah’s Witnesses came to the door, Barb had been down in the laundry room, and by the time she’d rushed upstairs there were copies of The Watchtower scattered across her stoop and her camellias. Two women in white gloves hustled away, screeching promises of hellfire while, cackling spread-legged in the open doorway, Maria Elena masturbated with the remote for the front room’s stereo. Just getting the girl inside left Barbara with a serious black eye. The bruise took longer to disappear than the scar she’d gotten from the bathroom scissors.
She and her husband managed to protect the twins from excesses like that—she and her husband and JJ and Chris, the full security team. But twice during the brief adoption Dora and Sylvia watched this older child squat on one of the better rugs in the house and drop a quick twist of shit, a demon challenge to her step-sisters. During dinner another day Maria Elena had fondled both the older boys at once, dipping in her chair to extend her reach, so that the only thing the others could see above the tabletop were her feral eyes. She’d muttered the English words she knew best, the filthiest in the language, and JJ had startled away, whipping up a full plate and breaking it across her head. In response Maria Elena, her pockmarked face like a sea-creature’s draped with weeds and clams, had bared her gap-full shark-like teeth in prolonged malevolent laughter, interspersed with more of her badlands jabber. Finally she’d come up with a bit of un-obscene English: You don wan it? You liars. Liars. What you got all those fine big soft beds for upstairs if you don wan it?
“How many times,” JJ went on, “does she have to pull down her pants or hold a knife to somebody’s neck?”
“I can’t, I can’t,” Paul said. “In-n-need to get out, get out of here…”
“Mom, really. Pop called it. He told me, ‘This family is going to be dealing with the damage she did for a long time.’”
Paul was trying to find a way out of the circle of chairs, but Barb kept her eyes on John Junior until she caught a whiff of the younger boy’s sweat. She’d come to know it so well, her middle child’s sweat; she could pick it out even in this dusty sauna. In a moment she too was on her feet, her arm around Paul. He had her mother’s body, Barb recalled: the light bones of a family that sculpted shells.
“Mr. Paul,” she said. “Big guy. You need a break?”
The boy slumped into her embrace, and she was stung to think how much she’d talked about the girl as he’d sat listening. How could she have let it go on so long?
“Sure you can have a break,” she said. “Paulie, sure. Let’s get you some air.”
She glanced at the others, keeping them in their seats, and the sight brought back the notion that she’d wound up raising an abused child after all. After Connecticut Children’s Services had taken the Mexican girl away—well, what would you call this boy’s daily getup, the black and white, if not obsessive compulsive?
The mother felt relieved about getting out of the museum’s upstairs closet. Relieved for herself, as well as for Paul: to step back into the gallery felt like going to the beach. Paul noticed the air too, his curly hair shifting against her breast, and Barbara left the door open for the others. The last thing she needed was one of them getting dizzy. She still had a dirty job to do.
Checking round the gallery, the first person she noticed was the NATO trooper. The Lieutenant Major must’ve figured he needed extra security, though just now the liaison was dawdling over the tomb jewelry, without so much as a g
lance at the mother and boy. The guy with the semi-automatic, left to his own devices, was trying out his English on Romy. To see the gypsy chatting across the bright room in an outfit that was, after all, only what all the girls were wearing—you could tell at once she was no Maria Elena.
When Umberto approached her, the mother’s determination resurged, blackly. Silky didn’t even bother to look, he sent his flunky, and once again she was sick of living this way. Had it up to here with this double dealer and the husband who played along.
Meantime her middle child pulled away. Paul regained his composure, smoothing his shirtfront. “I guess I j-just need to use the bathroom,” he said.
“Seruizio?” asked the Neapolitan. “Bagno?”
“Really?” Barbara asked. “That’s all, Mr. Paul?”
“It’s oh, oh, okay. And you can, you can g-go ahead a talk about, about wh-wh-whatever you need to, in there.”
Behind the boy, a staring contest got underway. The loaded looks were limited this time to Umberto and the Lieutenant Major, a call and response. Barb couldn’t miss it, but she kept her own eyes on her boy. She gave his collar a straightening.
“It’s okay, Mama. It’s, it’s ancient hist, history.”
“I don’t know how I let it go on so long.”
“Talking, like, talking, that’s p-part of the, the, the p-process.” He’d worked one hand into a pocket, the knuckles visible under the cloth. “Everyb-body’s got to find their o, own way to m-m-m… we’ve all got to find a way to m-move on.”
He’d picked up a few catch-phrases himself, during his therapy after the girl had been taken away. Not that Barbara could see any reason not to believe what the boy had to say. And meanwhile Umberto’s smile hadn’t improved any, and the liaison officer’s nod was more of the same, a Power Nod. Mother of God, was she sick of these shadow soldiers and their antique charade.
So she let Paul go, once more accompanied by a bureaucrat in a blazer.
Back in Bridgeport, of course, he would’ve been heading for therapy. The man at Paul’s elbow would’ve been one of the people with Children’s Services.
As she returned to the storage space, Barbara kept her eyes down, avoiding everyone’s look. Back at the Samaritan Center, Paul had seen—how many counselors was it? Four, five? Enough to keep Barbara from seeking more here in Naples, anyway. Here DiPio had been doctor enough for her, and Paul clearly preferred the reading therapy, the tales of witches and beauties and magic boots or hats. But back in Connecticut, he’d had to start on treatment the very day that Barbara had discovered him and Maria Elena tangled together across the Monopoly board.
The naked girl had howled, she’d jabbered in her witless tongue and leapt to her feet. She’d bent over and shown the mother her ass, her branded child’s ass, with today’s fresh markings, the indents of the game’s plastic houses and hotels. Then English, shouting around one scarred buttock: You liar, what you got all this for? Liar! When Barb had looked to Paul, he’d tried, moaning, to roll out of sight. His Reading Rainbow t-shirt had been up around his neck and his blue jeans down around his ankles; his belly, compared to Maria Elena’s, looked pale as the moon—pale as sperm. He couldn’t hide that, the fluid that dribbled across the colors of an imitation Atlantic City. He couldn’t roll over, he was still so erect.
Barb and Jay and their oldest had protected Dora and Sylvia, and JJ and Chris had protected themselves. But that morning Barbara had allowed the middle child to stay home from school, at breakfast he’d been stuttering worse than usual, and over the next couple of hours, between grunting over the garden’s compost heap and scowling over Ann Landers, the mother had fallen again into that bottomless delusion, her own goodness. What you got all this for, if you not good? She’d fallen dizzily, convinced for an hour or so that her own happy family (“good as bread” was how her runaway mother would’ve put it) might from their own safe and comfortable corner exemplify a fix-it for whole riven and lambasted world.
By noon that same day, while Paul was still in the bath, a squad car had swung by the house. Two officers and a woman in plainclothes together managed to round up Maria Elena, after no more than a minute or two of spine-flaying screams. The screams of a baby, really. One last time the little girl tore around the downstairs, quick for her age but no match for the grownups, yanking off her soaked clothing and offering her disfigured crotch.
Nettie and Trudy, over the weeks that followed, had called in every favor they’d been owed. The Sisters felt responsible, to be sure; they had their own consciences to clear. More than that, it became apparent that they genuinely cared about their lay colleague. They didn’t want to lose what Barbara Lulucita contributed to the Center. A sweet discovery, that was: proof that the Sisters hadn’t just lobbed the mother a few softball duties in order to keep those monthly checks rolling in. A silver lining, that was, maybe. Nonetheless Barbara wouldn’t say she ever got over the final glimpses, the final ear-splitting pleas, of her temporary additional child. Nor could she forget how troubled Paul had looked, that first afternoon in Samaritan Center. The first of Trudy’s and Nettie’s good turns had been getting Children’s Services to shuttle their people over to Holy Name. The Sisters arranged for the boy to work in a familiar setting.
As for Jay, he’d contacted the UN earthquake-relief agencies after his and Barb’s initial session. Springtime grew busy. The family threw together the move across the Atlantic. Something like twenty-five days in a row, the mother went to confession, and with that and with Nettie making so much time for her, she could begin to sound like Chris, saying that Maria Elena was better off thanks to Barbara Lulucita. Or she could sound like some honor-haunted Sicilian, insisting without the least chill of hypocrisy that Jay’s mother should never know. Or she could echo Paul’s CS counselor, who proposed that the boy’s trauma might actually result in long-term psychosexual health. Given the right treatment, the counselor suggested, Paul might develop an exceptional comprehension of physical affection. He might grow up into one of those men who was good at intimacy; he might “achieve”—Barb repeated the expression though she never understood it—”all manner of sympathetic anomalies.”
After Maria Elena had been taken away, Barbara had found comfort in the words others gave her. The difference here in Naples, as she allowed Paul the sort of bathroom break he might need for the rest of his life, was that the mother had worked out something of her own to say. She’d forged her own absolution.
Back in the closet, Barbara shut the door. The chair’s plastic seat was as warm as the last time. “Your father and I,” she began, “you guys must’ve noticed.”
She looked at the shelves, the scraps of homes destroyed a thousand years ago.
“Pop’s told me all about it,” John Junior said.
Barb figured that if she lost control before Paul returned, if she told the others everything, maybe that would be for the best. Maybe Paul should hear it one on one.
“Mom,” her oldest went on, “he says you’ve been way hard to live with. After Maria Elena, what choice did he have except, I mean, something totally drastic?”
“Aw,” Chris said. “He talks to me too, JJ. I’ve heard all this stuff. And Pop also says, like, two-way street.”
‘Yeah, but he says Mom won’t say that. Whatever Mom wants, she gets, but she’ll never admit it.”
“He says he isn’t perfect either. He says that’s why he was at Castel dell’Ovo, because he’d sinned.”
“Guys,” Dora piped up, “what are you talking about?”
“We’re talking,” Barbara said, “about me and your father. About how things have been going between us.”
Say it, Owl Girl. See Naples and die.
“Till now,” she said, “I’ve been holding off because, because—”
The closet door slammed open. The shelves rattled, a terrible racket, and there stood Kahlberg with his gun out. “The girl,” he said. “She’s got Paul.”
The weapon was in one hand and from the
other dangled some kind of clothing, hard to see with the way he was blocking the gallery light. He gestured with the gun.
“The girl” Silky repeated. “The goddamn gypsy. She went after Paul and the guide and now Umberto’s down and we don’t know where she took the boy.”
Barb’s two oldest were off the trunk already, sneakers squeaking. The mother’s thinking split in wild directions, confession and memory and Mafia movies. She asked, “He’s—Umberto, he’s down?”
Silky frowned and hoisted the other hand, which turned out to hold a gray blazer. “Got him right upside the head.” He rotated the jacket to reveal, sketched along one lapel, a slant hieroglyph of blood.
With the coat, the gun, and the carrying case still slung across his chest, the officer blocked Chris and John Junior from getting past. “I tried to tell y’all,” he said. “Tried to warn you about that girl.”
JJ stepped closer, inside the man’s gun-hand. “Yeah well, she says you’re crooked. Says you’ve been making deals.”
Across the liaison’s expression flickered something close to the honest contempt that Barbara had glimpsed earlier.
“My girl says she’s going to catch you any day now. You’re going to be making some crooked deal and she’ll nail you.”
“Big shooter,” Kahlberg said, “right now all I know is, I’ve got your brother missing and a man down.”
Yet if Silky wasn’t about making deals, why did the next ten minutes or so—it couldn’t have gone on long, before the gunshots—feel to Barbara like nothing but arrangiarsi? She seemed to spend the entire time striking interior deals, each bargain more one-sided than the last. First she jumped to her feet beside her remaining boys. Do something, blared her nervous system, do something: a need so fierce it might’ve been what she’d wanted all along. She leapt up ready to knock over the Farnese Bull. Yet immediately she had to settle for less. The liaison officer kept his iron between them and the rest of the museum. He declared that there was no way in hell that he could allow a bunch of overexcited civilians to run around loose after an armed kidnapping.