The elevator chimed, and the doors opened. Pete and Rosa came out, just as Carmen and Bina returned from the bathroom. Carmen pulled Rosa into an embrace, but Rosa pushed herself free and came straight to Carlo.
“Trey? Do we have him back?”
Carlo shook his head and offered his baby sister the hug she’d rejected from Carmen. This one she took, crying into his chest.
“I can’t believe Joey let this happen. That asshole!”
Carlo pushed her back and looked down at her. “Hey. Watch your mouth, Peanut. Joey did what he could.” Saying it, Carlo finally believed it. Joey hadn’t done as much as he should have, but he’d done as much as he’d known to do. He’d put his life on the line for them. Carlo should have known that Joey wouldn’t know yet how to be a good guard. But Carlo hadn’t thought there was any more danger than simply Jenny showing up somewhere and trying to see Trey. That, Joey could have handled. Joey and Bina.
Before Rosa could say more, Uncle Lorrie was back in the waiting room. “Junior. Come. We got something.”
With a quick look at Luca and a longer look at Bina, Carlo set his baby sister aside and went out into the hall to meet with his Uncles.
Uncle Ben was on his phone. “Hold where you are. I’ll be in touch in three minutes.” He handed the phone to Lorrie, who ended the call.
“We have them. Trey is safe. Upstate New York. Looks like she was on her way to Canada.”
All Carlo heard was that Trey was safe. They had him, and he was safe. His chest ached from the pressure of his suddenly swelling heart. “He’s okay?”
“Yes. He needs you, but he’s well. What’s your move, nephew?”
~oOo~
It was the deep dark near dawn by the time Carlo, Uncle Ben, Uncle Lorrie, Nick, and the driver/guard—whose name, it turned out, was Bobbo—made it to the rank little motel outside of Watertown, New York, where Ben had told his men to hold Jenny and Trey. They were alone; Pagano Brothers men were still looking for the guy who’d been with her.
They were keeping Trey and Jenny in separate rooms. When Carlo got out of the big Navigator, Uncle Lorrie gestured for him to follow and led him to a room on the far corner of the first floor of the two-story motel. Uncle Lorrie knocked. There was movement on the other side of the door, and then it opened. A man with a gun nodded at Lorrie and opened the door all the way. Carlo pushed through, into the room.
Trey was lying, curled into a tight ball, on one double bed. A woman was sitting up next to him, her back on the headboard. She was thin and blonde and looked a little like Jenny, if Jenny had had a much less privileged life. Carlo had no idea who she was; he assumed the Uncles’ men had brought her on to look after Trey.
He went to his knees at Trey’s side of the bed. His boy was pale and sweaty, but he seemed to be sleeping. He looked so small and lonely, curled up without any of his bedtime toys, both thumbs in his mouth.
His heart felt misshapen, it was so full of love and worry and regret, and he laid his hand on his little boy’s small shoulder. “Trey. Wake up, pal.
As he woke, Trey’s little face puckered in distress, and he whined and made himself even smaller. Carlo’s heart broke. “Trey, it’s Daddy. You’re okay, pal.”
Bright green eyes, red-tinged now with tears and fatigue, opened. His thumbs popped out. “Daddy?” Trey blinked and opened his eyes more, his body beginning to relax. “Daddy?”
“I’m here, pal. I got you.” He scooped his son into his arms and held him as tightly as he dared, then just sat on the floor between the beds. “I got you. You’re okay.”
“Daddy, I don’t wanna stay with Mommy. I wanna go to Pop-Pop’s. Mommy is mean now.” He began to wail. Carlo held him even closer, letting tears of his own fall.
“We’re going back to Pop-Pop’s. And you don’t ever have to see Mommy again. Okay?”
“I want Elsie.” Trey’s sobs continued, and he curled up into a ball in Carlo’s arms.
“Elsa’s at Pop-Pop’s, pal. She’s waiting for you.” He kissed his son’s head. He smelled of sweat and cigarette smoke. Jenny didn’t smoke. He looked around the room; it didn’t appear that the people who’d been taking care of him did, either. He wanted to know where the asshole who’d helped Jenny do all this was.
Trey began to calm, and he shifted in Carlo’s arms. There was a bruise on his little bicep, taking up most of the space between his elbow and his shoulder and shaped vaguely like a hand and fingers. Carlo leaned his son back and took a good look at him. One of his cheeks was the deep red of a new bruise, as well. Carlo filled with a murderous, vicious rage.
“Trey, what did you mean, Mommy’s mean?”
“She yells and hits. And Mr. Mark does too but he hit Mommy and went away.” His sobs picking up again, Trey fought to be closer, and Carlo pulled him to his chest, tucking him under his chin.
Carlo was going to be sick. He felt like the blood in his veins had turned to bile.
“It’s okay, pal. I won’t let that happen again.”
“Carlo.”
He looked up and saw Uncle Lorrie standing at the end of the space between the beds.
“It’s time.”
He had chosen to listen to Luca and Bina. He would not do it himself. While they’d traveled to Watertown, he’d been tormented by second thoughts, still feeling sure that he was shirking responsibility for a problem he had created. Knowing that Jenny had hit Trey, and had allowed someone else to hit him, did not ease Carlo’s need to handle her himself.
But now, with Trey crying into his neck, his tiny arms nearly choking him, the rightness of the decision he’d made became clear. He was Trey’s father before anything else, and he would not set his son aside to deal with Jenny. In the simply practical and utterly philosophical realities both, he could not put his son down. His arms were too full to kill.
Carlo nodded. “I don’t want anything to scare Trey.”
“Understood. George here will drive you to the all-night diner down the road. Maybe Trey would like an egg cream? We’ll meet up with you when it’s done.”
“That sound good, Trey?” He shifted Trey in his arms so he could see his face, that bruise pushing bile through his veins again. Trey wasn’t sleeping, but he didn’t respond. He lay there, blinking, and slid both thumbs into his mouth to suck.
As Carlo stood with his now quiet, limp son in his arms, Uncle Lorrie asked, “There anything you want to say to her?”
Was there anything he wanted to say to the woman he’d once loved, who’d borne the beautiful son in his arms? To that woman, he might have something to say. But that woman was a mirage. Maybe she’d never been real.
The woman who’d abandoned them? Who’d taken his son from his family at gunpoint? Who’d hit him and scared him? For her, words were both inadequate and unnecessary. There was no vocabulary sufficient to express his rage, his hatred, or the debilitating fear and loss he’d experienced on this day.
And there was nothing he needed to say to a woman so soon to leave this life. As far as Carlo was concerned, she was dead already.
And Trey was in his arms again.
“No. I’m not letting him go for anything. Just end it and let’s go home. Please.”
~ 24 ~
Though he was still unconscious, Joey had stabilized while Carlo and the Uncles were on their errand to collect Trey, and the family had scheduled shifts at the hospital so that people could get sleep or food, or could work. Peter had rented a car and gone back to Providence, taking Rosa back with him. She did not want to miss her first week of classes.
That had caused a ruckus with her siblings and father, but in the end, no one stopped her from going back to Brown. Of all the Paganos, Rosa was the one Sabina enjoyed least. She was a pleasant young woman, for the most part, but she was badly spoiled and self-centered. More than once, Sabina had heard one of the siblings refer to Rosa as a ‘princess,’ and it was an apt description. Like the princess with the pea, she was.
Rosa and Joey didn’
t get along, but it still seemed wrong for her to leave. She loved Trey deeply, Sabina knew that. At least she could have stayed to see him home safely. But instead, she fretted about missing the first week of the new college term.
Well, Sabina didn’t know about college. Maybe the first week was especially important. But she thought about what Carmen had told her: If you care about Trey and Joey, and about Carlo, you stay with the other people who do. Even if it hurts. That’s family. Rosa needed the same wisdom.
But she was gone. Carmen and John had taken the first shift at the hospital, and everyone else dispersed, but only to their homes nearby. Luca had taken Carlo Sr. and Sabina back to the house. Carlo Sr. had put his arm around her and said, “Come on, honey. Let’s go home.”
Home. Was this house her home already? Was that the right thing?
No matter. Is was a real thing, she thought. A true thing. Not quite three months since she’d gotten free of her stark, lonely, debasing life with Auberon, she had found herself in the bosom of a large, loving, chaotic, complicated family.
Carlo Sr. was weak with fatigue and stress, and he allowed himself to be persuaded to go to bed when they got ‘home’—after a deep glass of scotch. It was nearing dawn, so Luca left to get the shifts going for the work day. Sabina, unable to sleep, and knowing Trey and Carlo would be home in a few hours, made a pot of strong coffee and then busied herself tidying up, while Elsa followed her around the house. The housekeeper had been there while she and Joey and Trey were out, but still Sabina cleaned the clean kitchen and fluffed the fluffed throw pillows in the living room. She went up to Trey’s room and set up his bed with his shark sleeping bag and all his shark things. She took the dog outside and swept the swept patio. And then she simply wandered the house.
It was a beautiful, old arts and crafts house. Carlo had told her that his father had restored it all, nearly single-handedly, and every room showed his tender care. The heavy walnut woodwork and gleaming wide plank floors, the leaded glass windows, some with stained glass, others with period-true wavy glass, the flagstone fireplace—even after more than three decades and six wild children, the house showed little wear. There were some places in the house—the smaller bedrooms, the mudroom, the rathskeller in the cellar, where there was a wet bar and a game and TV room—that had been lived hard in, but the family seemed to treat the rest of the house with respect. The rooms were used every day, but they were never ill-used. The resulting effect was a perfect balance between beauty and comfort.
Sabina loved old homes like this, with distinct rooms and long hallways. She supposed they weren’t ideal for large entertaining, but they were cozy. Even this big house was cozy. Auberon’s house—his mansion—had also been old, but he’d had it gutted and remodeled, so that there were large, flowing spaces with easy movement from one room to another. And everything had been done in light neutral tones. To Sabina the whole house had seemed like the inside of a refrigerator.
She walked down the long hallway between the living and dining rooms and the kitchen. Carlo Sr.’s study, the guest room, and a bathroom fed off this hallway. It wasn’t a particularly wide space, and it seemed all the narrower because both sides were almost entirely filled, ceiling to floor, with family photos. Sabina adored this hallway of history. She had lingered a little several times, but there were too many photos to take in all at once. And she had yet to ask Carlo to give her the tour of them. She would like that, to have names for all these wonderful faces.
Sabina didn’t have this kind of history. She had no photos of her family in Buenos Aires; it had not occurred to her grieving, lost, eight-year-old self that she should want them. Tia Valeria had been impatient with photographs, insisting that people spent too much time peering through viewfinders and not enough time looking around at the wide world, so she had no photos of her time with her aunt. And she wanted no photos of her time with Auberon. Ironically, because he was a person of whom people took photographs, and she had often been at his side, there were probably hundreds of photos of her time with him.
But this, this beautiful, various archive—no, she had nothing like it.
The photos ranged from very old, toned in sepia, obviously heritage photos of ancestors—posed shots clearly taken in Italy, of dour-looking women and men standing in front of olive trees or cottages. Other old pictures were even more formal and dour, the kind of professional portraits of the time. Sabina thought it odd that people in very old photos never, ever seemed to smile.
There were black and white photos from the 40s, 50s, and 60s—she could tell by the fashions—and these people were all smiling, sitting around tables, dressed to the nines. On lounges at swimming pools, dressed in bathing suits and big hats. At the beach—this beach—dressed likewise. Sabina wasn’t sure who most of these people were—except that in photos starting in what Sabina thought were the 1960s, she recognized a young, handsome Carlo Sr. with an absolutely gorgeous, raven-haired woman, almost as tall as he. She must have been Teresa, Carlo’s mother. There were photos, too, of the Uncles as young, dashing men, and their wives, as glorious beauties. These photos were mostly in color. There was something extra alive about the colors and patterns of 60s and 70s fashion. So wild, so big, so vibrant. So sexy.
And then the photos of the children. These, Sabina could identify without trouble. So many photos of Carlo, Carmen, Luca, and John wearing wetsuits, surfing, skateboarding, having birthdays, graduating. Vacations at the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls. Trips to Europe. Baseball games. Football games. John playing his guitar. Carlo smiling next to a model of a building. Carmen surrounded by green plants. Luca in a boxing pose, bare-chested, wearing red shorts and what looked like boxing gloves with much less padding. That must have been a promotional shot from the ‘MMA’ he’d done. She knew that, because there was also a photo of him fighting, his bare foot connecting with another man’s face.
There were far fewer photos of Joey and Rosa. Baby pictures, toddler and young child pictures. But the few there were petered out quickly, while Rosa was still a flat-chested little girl in pigtails, and Joey was wearing braces. Then high school graduation photos, and nothing else. There were more photos of Trey on this wall than of Joey and Rosa combined.
Until this day, taking this extended time to appreciate every photo while she waited for Carlo to bring poor, sweet Trey home, Sabina had not noticed how comparatively few the photos of Joey and Rosa were. She thought she understood why—most likely, Teresa had been the family archivist, and she had probably been the one who had selected and framed photos for the hallway. Perhaps she’d even been the frequent photographer, too. When she fell ill and died, the family had lost its historian. And Joey and Rosa lost their place in the family a little.
Sabina knew the timeline, and knew that Carlo, Carmen, Luca, and John were all grown when Teresa died. She also knew that Carlo and Carmen had taken up the raising of Joey and Rosa, and that they had not been neglected. But standing here, steeped in a dense, loving history, Sabina recognized something that perhaps the Paganos themselves were too close to see. Joey and Rosa had been neglected. Not in an active way, not on purpose, but simply because they had been raised in a different family than the others. Their history was broken in two.
A lump grew in her throat as she understood that, and Sabina resolved to make a better effort to be patient with Rosa. Perhaps even to reach out to her, if she would allow it. And Joey. Sweet Joey. When he was well, Sabina would sit him down and talk with him. He was a good boy—no. He was a man. He was a good man. Only lost.
She was still standing in the hallway when Elsa, who’d been lying at the end of the hall, stood and went to the front of the house. The door opened. Sabina went around the corner and saw Carlo, Trey sleeping on his shoulder, standing with Nick, his cousin.
His voice low, Carlo said, “Thanks, man. I got it from here.”
Nick nodded. His air of intensity and menace still made Sabina nervous, even though she’d had a chance to speak with him once or t
wice, and he’d seemed pleasant enough. “Yeah. Take it easy, coz. I guess my dad’ll be in touch. Or Uncle Ben.”
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