That she was staying in the Pagano home raised more than a few eyebrows. But Auberon had worked with Pagano & Sons Construction. His name was soon linked, as well, to the Pagano Brothers, and the direction of the stories linking those names shifted to theories about Auberon’s possible criminal, or at least shady, dealings.
Sabina was safe.
For two weeks after Carlo brought Sabina to stay at the house on Caravel Road, there were no further developments of any significance, except that James’s reputation continued to disintegrate. The longer the mystery of his disappearance lingered, the more bold became his detractors. Even Sabina had been shocked by some of the stories. Her husband had been, quite simply, a crook. When she’d said as much to Carlo’s Uncle Ben, the old man had simply inclined his head, the corners of his mouth turned up in the small, indulgent smile with which she was becoming quite familiar.
Uncle Ben had checked in on her in person a few times during the two weeks she’d spent mainly lying low and recovering. Sabina knew that he was the head of the notorious Pagano Family, even more ruthless than James—and in fact she was sure that he had killed her husband—but to her he was a kindly old man who smiled at her and patted her hand.
After the first few days, some of the Pagano siblings had gone back to their lives. Carmen returned to the beach house, Luca to his apartment, John to his. Joey stayed, and Sabina got the impression that he had been instructed to. He prowled the house like a guard dog, especially when the media hounds were thick outside.
Carlo and Trey were still in the house, too. Sabina knew that Carlo had lost a great deal. While she had gained everything that was important—her freedom—he had lost, at least for some time, his home and his work both.
Now, he was trying to work from the house and commute into Providence when he had to. He hadn’t talked to her much at all about what had happened with his work or the stresses he was coping with. Even when she asked, he diverted her. His main interest was in helping her recover.
Trey was perfectly happy. He loved being at ‘Pop-Pop’s’ house, and though he was impatient that they weren’t going to the water more often, there was always someone around who would play with him. Even the siblings who had returned to their own homes came by every day, especially at dinner. Almost every evening, the big, dark walnut table in the dining room was full.
Sabina had never experienced family like this. Even when she’d been part of a happy family, it had been smaller and much more subdued than this cozy chaos. Everybody talked at once. All the time. Everybody used their hands when they did, so sometimes she almost felt the need to duck. She was herself a physically expressive speaker, or she had once been, but with nine people around the same table—ten, if Mrs. D. was with them—all of them talking or laughing or yelling, their hands going, Sabina half expected the room to achieve liftoff.
They had accepted her completely, and in these short weeks she’d realized that she had made real friends. Even Rosa, who had been distant in their first encounters, and Carlo Sr., who had been cold, had accepted her and treated her as one of them. They were all solicitous of her weakened condition, often hovering far more than she needed.
Sabina was used to hurting and used to getting over it. Though she’d been hurt more this last time than ever before, and though the memory of it was the most painful part, she was not someone who indulged in self-pity. She would have drowned herself in James’s infinity pool long ago if she had been someone who indulged in self-pity.
She’d gotten out of bed as soon as she could stand to put weight on her damaged feet and felt reasonably sure she wouldn’t make them worse by using them. And she’d sent Carlo to sleep in his own room as soon as she could believe that she really was safe—the night of the day Uncle Ben had come to tell her that James Auberon could never hurt her again.
He’d been surprised and hurt that she’d sent him upstairs. Though he’d tried to hide it, she’d seen it, and she regretted it. But they had to slow down. She knew that as an absolute truth. She had spent fifteen years shackled into an abattoir of a marriage. She had been young and naïve when that bondage had started, and she had never been with any other man than the one who’d tormented her. She barely knew anything about who she really was, who she should be. Her life and her very nature had been devoted to navigating the treacherous terrain of her marriage.
Carlo had been a perfect gentleman the two nights she’d slept in his arms. Of course he had; he was a gentleman, and even more so while she was hurt. He’d cared for her, held her, made sure she was comfortable, made her feel safe. And she had never felt safer. Even in the deep throes of her trauma, she had loved being nestled with him. She had felt love from him. She had felt love for him.
And so she had sent him upstairs.
By the time two weeks had passed spent in the bosom of this wonderful family, Sabina knew that she was falling for them all. She didn’t want that, not yet—no, she did want that, she wanted it desperately, but she knew that she was not ready for it. She had first to learn how to be strong in a way that wasn’t reactive. For all the years of her marriage—for her entire adult life, perhaps even for longer than that, her strength had been focused on enduring, surviving. She had never had a chance to make a life for herself. To make herself.
She wanted Carlo. She wanted to be part of his family. She wanted all of it. But she did not want to be taken on as some broken thing, like a bird in a shoebox. She wanted to be worthy, to be as strong and powerful as every other person sitting around the big table in this beautiful, lively house.
Almost three weeks after Carlo brought Sabina to stay at the house on Caravel Road, the mangled remains of a body washed up downshore. Though it was only a torso and an arm, and badly decomposed by time and its wet journey, the speculation was immediate that it was James. The detectives on the case called her, to prepare her before the news broke. They told her she did not have to come and try to identify the body, because it was too damaged for visual ID. They put a rush on the lab work. A week later, the identity was confirmed. James Auberon had washed ashore.
Around the same time, a white Cadillac Escalade was reported as abandoned in a parking garage at Logan International Airport. The owner, one Edward Gardner, a licensed private investigator with an unsavory reputation, was nowhere to be found.
With the case unsolved and not conclusively foul play, and with no suspicion on her, Sabina let James’s legal team deal with the arrangements for his memorial service—which James had clearly and elaborately described in his will. She attended as the bereaved widow. Carmen went with her and held her hand. After the service, media attention finally died down.
James’s will left Sabina comparatively little, as she’d known, another reason she had never been a chief suspect despite her association with the Paganos. He’d instructed most of his assets to be liquidated and donated to his various pet charities. Wanting nothing that had been his or that had been hers because she had been his, she instructed his attorneys also to include all of her personal possessions in the liquidation. To Sabina, of his billions, he’d left $200,000 and her BMW.
She gave the money to Gloria. With one practical thought, she kept the car, and she kept the garish canary diamond. She’d need a car to get around, and she’d hock the ring, that physical symbol of her entrapment, and use that money to give herself a way to eat until she could figure out how to live her life.
~oOo~
A month after Carlo brought Sabina to stay at the house on Caravel Road, Sabina was in the back yard with Trey and Rosa, playing ‘golf’ with little plastic clubs and balls while Elsa snoozed in the shade on the flagstone patio, when Carlo came through the gate. He had been in Providence all day, and Sabina could tell that the day had not gone well.
Trey dropped his club and ran full-speed to his father, squealing as he was swept up and swung around. Sabina had gotten to know this wonderful little boy fairly well during her time with the Paganos; though he was well-behaved and could be cal
m, he was happiest in motion.
Carlo gave his son a good hug and then set him down and came straight to Sabina. He hooked his arm around her waist and kissed her cheek. “Hi.”
“Hello.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Good today, thank you. Your day was good?”
“It is now.”
She smiled and laid her head on his chest for a moment. They’d been like children in high school these past weeks. Even this contact—these touches, kisses when they were alone in a room, or before they retired for the night—was too much, too close. But she couldn’t stay away from him. She wanted him, and it was clear that he felt the same. She was not ready for more, could not even fathom the idea of being intimate with a man, any man, even Carlo, right now, but she wanted his closeness, his touch like this, and she knew she was falling into another trap. Not one of his setting, but of hers.
She was better, healthy, for the most part. Her husband was gone, his story over, his power over her destroyed. It was time she started her life. She and Carlo had to talk.
~oOo~
Sabina helped clean up after dinner, while Carlo bathed Trey and settled him in bed. She was standing at the counter, alone now in the kitchen, putting clean glasses into the cupboard, when he stood behind her and put his hands on her hips. She was wearing a sleeveless top. Her bruises had mostly faded away, and, though some of the cuts on her skin might remain scars, she was healing well. In this house, at least, she felt no need to hide the signs of what had been done to her.
When he put his hands on her, she stopped what she was doing and looked over her shoulder. He kissed that shoulder, his eyes on hers. “What would you like to do tonight?”
They spent their nights quietly. The siblings scattered, and Carlo Sr. took a scotch into the living room to watch television. Sometimes, they’d watch with him. Sometimes, they’d play a game. Sometimes they’d talk, learning about each other. He was a good man. Deep down and on the surface, in every way, Carlo Pagano was a good man. The stories he told about his life, his family, his work, his love for his son—they were all rich and wonderful.
She had few such stories of her own. In her lack of them, she recognized the void of her very self. She was a cipher, little more.
Often, those talks had ended with physical contact Sabina both craved and feared. In his arms she felt whole, and she knew she needed to feel whole outside of his touch.
“We can walk on the beach?”
She had not been back to the beach since she’d fallen into Carmen’s arms. His face registered something stronger than mere surprise at her suggestion. “Yeah? Are you ready for that?”
“My feet are healed now.”
“That’s not what I mean, Bina.”
She’d understood what he’d meant. “I know. I would like to go. I enjoy the ocean at night best of all. I miss it. Can we?”
He brushed an errant lock of hair from her forehead. “Of course we can. We’ll drive down to the beach, though.”
She nodded, and he took her hand. She was nervous and sad, but she knew what she was about to do was the right thing.
~oOo~
To walk onto the sand near Carmen’s cottage was more difficult than Sabina had expected it to be. This was a place where she had made some good memories, but her last memory overrode them all. She hesitated as they came around the corner of the cottage, feeling a rush of the fear and adrenaline that had kept her ravaged body moving for two miles, while Eddie had lumbered after her.
Carlo turned to her. “We can go back, Bina.”
“No, we can’t. Back is the wrong way to go.” She took a breath and stepped forward.
Carmen came to the door to see who was lurking around her house; when she saw them, she nodded and then closed her door, as if she could tell just by looking at them that they wanted to be alone. Maybe she could; these siblings seemed to be connected in all sorts of ways.
Fighting back the newest memory by pulling forward thoughts of sitting around the fire with the Paganos, of watching Carlo play in the surf with Trey, of kissing him in Carmen’s kitchen, feeling him, Sabina made it to the tideline.
The night was glorious, clear and bright, the moon nearly full, the sea calm and rhythmic. There was an extra bit of chill in the air, and the beach was empty on this midweek night. They walked in quiet for a while until she felt calm again. When they came to a cluster of large rocks, she pulled on his hand, and he stopped and looked down at her, concerned.
“I’d like to sit.”
With a nod, he lead her to the rocks, and they sat. Then he took her chin in his hand and turned her face to his. “What’s going on, Bina? Something’s on your mind.”
“Yes.” With a deep breath and a squeeze of his hand, before she could be dissuaded by his beautiful, warm eyes on hers, she said what she had rehearsed. “It’s time that I go, Carlo. Go away. I need to make a life for myself, and it’s very easy to stay hiding in yours.”
His hand dropped from her chin, and he turned and looked out over the water. “Where will you go?”
“I’m not sure. There are things still I need to make sense of. I know little about myself.”
“Stay here. In Quiet Cove. I’ll take Trey back to Providence.”
“No, Carlo. This is your home. I need to make one of my own.”
“Bina, you’ve already started to make a home here. You have friends here, now. People who care about you. People who aren’t me. I’ll stay away. If it’s me you need to get away from, I’ll let you be.”
“I think you don’t understand me well. It’s us I need to make distance from. I’m not enough of myself now to have with you what I want.”
He turned from the water finally and looked at her. “What do you mean?”
“I’m not strong, Carlo. I…I don’t feel even like a full person. I don’t know how to describe…I had always to—to adapt to him”—she hated even to say the name of her dead husband these days—“and so I lost myself. Like I lost my language. I tried to think in Spanish the other day. I could not. I don’t have enough words left of my own language to make even one thought. I gave up everything that I was to survive him. All of me, all of my strength, to endure. And now I am not strong. I have to become strong. I want to be with you strong.”
With a sad laugh, Carlo picked up her hand and set it on his leg. “That is the definition of strength, you know. To endure. I think you’re one of the strongest people I know. To endure what you have, to have freed yourself, to be sitting here, on this beach, with me, to know what you need and to say it—Bina, I’m in awe of your strength.”
“I thought I was strong. But now I don’t feel it. I must feel it in myself.”
“I understand. But Bina—don’t kick away from the new moorings you’ve found. Stay here. Not in the house, but in town. The money from the ring will get you started. I’ll stay away, but keep your friends close. You deserve people in your life who care about you, and you have that now.”
She smiled and bumped his arm lightly with her shoulder. “You would just like your brothers to keep an eye on me.”
“Maybe a little.” He shifted on his rocky perch and faced her. “Bina, I know the time we’ve known each other has been chaotic. And I understand what you’re saying now. I won’t try to force you or even ask you to do something you’re not sure about. But I want to be clear. I would like very much to be with you. You say you want to be strong, to have what you want with me. I’ll give you the time and space you want. But I want you to know that I’m here. When you’re ready.”
“I don’t know how long that will be. You shouldn’t bind yourself like that. I don’t want you to do that.”
“Well, how about this. If you change your mind, or if I feel like I need to move on, we’ll talk about that. We’ll be honest with each other.”
She nodded, fighting back sad tears. What she really wanted, wanted quite badly, was to curl into his arms. Instead, she forced on a bright smile. “You are
a wonderful, wonderful man, Carlo Pagano Jr. You are my hero.”
Footsteps Page 17