The Innocent

by Vincent Zandri

  A few minutes later I was still standing at the empty pier, with the river water moving flat and slow and the wind cool and picking up as the bright morning wore on. I knew I could have asked Cassandra whose baby she carried. Deep down, maybe it was a bit corny of me, but I knew I could have asked her and that she would have told me if the father was Vasquez or Pelton or Schillinger or the overcoat man, for that matter. But then, knowing for sure that it was one of these men would not have been a good thing. And besides, letting it go presented a second possibility. Just suppose the baby’s father was not one of the above? Just suppose the baby’s father was a nice, hard working young man whom Cassandra had not mentioned in the interest of protecting his identity? It wasn’t likely, but just the same it was the scenario I preferred to believe.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY

  MIKE NORMAN’S BODY WAS finally taken out of cold storage and buried at the Albany Rural Cemetery around noon on a warm bright day in early June. He received full pomp-and-circumstance, including three dress-uniformed cops who fired twenty-one rounds into the sky from black, police-issue M-16s.

  I stood away from the fanfare, far away from the crowd that had gathered by his grave, even farther from the podium where Mayor Jennings delivered a eulogy that included a plea for reform in the corrections department in light of recent calamities. He called for more prisons, more officers, more programs for violent offenders, better medical conditions, fewer field trips. Because, after all, Attica survivor Mike Norman would have wanted it that way.

  While the mayor spoke, I crossed the flat green landscape until I found a rectangular plot that, at five feet by ten feet, measured little less than a prison cell. It was a grave I did not visit often, but I knew it as a silent peaceful place, especially at midday with the sun yellow and red over the hills to the east. The cemetery had been laid out on a hillside a century and a half ago and on a clear day you could see through the tall maples and oaks to the Hudson River below; you could see the morning sun reflected off its glassy surface. Overhead, tall pine trees shaded the plots. When their pine needles shed, even the footsteps of the visitors were muffled, so that the place reverberated in silence.

  In the Albany Rural Cemetery, you always felt like you were being watched, even when you were certain you were alone. Sometimes you were sure that you could hear the voices of the souls speaking to you, but then you would realize that it was the sound of your own heart beating, your own voice inside your head.

  Silence was the reason Fran had chosen this place not two months before she’d died. One Sunday morning over coffee she’d said that if she went before me, she would like to be buried here, under the shady silence of the trees, with the river in the distance.

  I remember looking at Fran with a worried smile. I’d told her she was crazy, that she shouldn’t say such things, that such things could become self-fulfilling prophecies. That she was way too young. That she had a whole lot of life to live yet.

  “But I think you knew something I didn’t, Fran,” I said, “even if you weren’t entirely conscious of it.”

  Fran’s headstone was hewn from the whitest marble I could find. Small and smooth, it was buried flat in the earth, not like the usual arched headstone that began to lean with time until it fell to the ground, more dead-looking than the person it was meant to honor.

  I wanted Fran’s marker to be perfect forever.

  The engraving below the etching of an angel read

  FRANCES GORDINI MARCONI B. SEPTEMBER 14, 1952-D. MAY 13, 1996

  It said nothing else, her epitaph too personal for the world to know.

  I turned toward the entrance to the cemetery. I could see a woman coming toward me, walking slowly along the dirt path. With the sun behind her, surrounding her like an aura, it was impossible to see her face. But for a second I felt my heart fall away from my chest and the air leave my lungs. I stood up straight and waited for her, and when suddenly I saw her face and knew for certain that it could never again be Fran, I felt foolish and sad.

  But I wasn’t sad for long because the woman was Val, and she looked at me and smiled, her face lit up by the orange, cathedral-like sunlight shining in through the trees. I looked into her eyes, and I saw that she’d been crying. She carried a single red rose, and she knelt down, and laid the rose on Fran’s grave. Bowing her head, she made the sign of the cross, brought her hands together, and closed her eyes. After a minute passed, she made the sign of the cross once more and then reached out with her right hand to touch Fran’s headstone. She stood up, took my hand, and held it tightly.

  “You okay?” I said.

  “I was going to ask you the same thing,” she said. We understood one another and moved on back toward Mike’s service. I stopped before I got too close. From that distance I could see that the mayor had stopped talking and that a priest was sprinkling holy water on the mahogany coffin. He chanted some prayers I recognized, but I had forgotten most of the words. An Act of Contrition, a Hail Mary, and an Our Father. And then he sprinkled the coffin with more holy water.

  Val’s hand in mine, I turned and looked into her eyes, and I knew that a new life was about to begin, for her and me.

  “I want to leave now,” she whispered.

  “I’m ready,” I said.

  Val squeezed my hand as we headed for the cemetery gates.

  About the Author

  Vincent Zandri is an award-winning freelance journalist and adventurer. He is the author of the bestselling novels, The Remains, Moonlight Falls, and Godchild. He divides his time between New York and Europe.

  For more information, see his website at http://www.vincentzandri.com

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