I trail off, the image of her in the hospital bed floating back like it just happened yesterday.
“It won’t,” she says into my silence.
“I know it won’t. Because I’m not going to let it,” I answer, my words coming out as a vow wrapped in steel.
For minutes on end, we sit there, the past both imagined and real vibrating between our turned backs. Until I say into my fake phone, “So this is what you wanted? A do-over on telling me?”
“Yes,” she answers.
“No more Italian food, and you’re apologizing. For real? No Holt toast?”
“No Holt toast,” she assures me, and I can hear a smile in her voice. A real one.
That smile, makes me somber up though, because, “You know I’m not going to let you go, right?”
A resigned sigh. “I’d guessed.” She pauses again, and her voice is much quieter as she says, “I just want to stop hating you for a while. It’s been five years. Can we just…just be something else. Something new?”
Something New…
I wonder if she knows about the movie that came out after she lost her sight. About an interracial couple who overcomes obstacles way more minor than ours to be together.
“We could do that,” I say, my voice as quiet as hers now.
“Your ‘could’ sounds like a ‘but’ to me,” she says.
Yeah, I guess it does. I rub a hand over my face. “Listen, Amber, I’ve had a long day. If you’re not serious. If this is another trick…” I trail off, too weary to issue another threat.
These days threats are all I seem to hand out when I’m with Amber. The exact opposite of the what my book’s been telling me about being a good dad.
“How can I convince you I’m serious about this truce?” Amber asks behind me, her voice taking on a reflective note behind me.
Like it used to when we were married and working out the first series of knotty newlywed problems, like how to handle our taxes and splitting up housework. Wow, those problems feel banal now in comparison. And I have no idea how to answer that question.
Until suddenly I do.
Part II
Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate The Positive
7
Do I Worry
Amber
We could do that…
“Anything yet?” Peter asks me a month later, during what’s become our weekly call.
“No, not yet,” I answer, trying to keep my teeth from chattering. It’s freezing out on the roof this afternoon, even though it was in the fifties the last time Peter and I spoke. The temperature’s been bouncing around the last few winters in New York, and now it’s the kind of frigid that makes me wish I’d asked the Echo Dot about the weather before making this trip upstairs in nothing but a cardigan sweater that doesn’t even close at the front.
I can’t help but think of Fake Jake’s warning about business being good for his family’s disaster clean up business, as I tell Peter, “I’m working on it. Hopefully, I’ll have something for you soon.”
Our last couple of “not yet” conversations ended with him saying, “Okay, call me when you have something and either way, check back in next week.”
But today Peter says, “How soon?”
“I don’t know,” I answer, grinding my teeth to keep them from chattering. “These things take time.”
“Time’s exactly what I’m running out of.” The Boston accent Peter works so hard to keep hidden comes creeping back up as he tells me, “The D.A.’s on my ass. Says I’ve got to put up or shut up. If I don’t bring him something soon, I’m not going to be able to put in for a stapler, much less a squad to get you out of Ferraro’s pad.”
My lungs constrict, and not because of the cold.
I know I shouldn’t expect much from Peter. Our relationship has always been this way. Him irritated by my very existence, and me futilely wishing he would think of me the way I think of him, like a sibling.
But I know I’m a nuisance. Just one more thing on Peter’s overflowing desk, so I swallow the hurt and answer, “I’m working on it.”
“Yeah, I saw how hard you were working on it last weekend at that Love & Hip Hop New Jersey girl’s engagement party.”
“The show was called His Majesty, and she’s no longer on TV,” I answer, hugging myself tighter for warmth.
“Whatever, you didn’t look too trapped holding hands with that animal.”
My chest kicks in with the accusation, along with the memory of Prin’s and Sylvie’s voices right after Luca left to get us all a round of drinks.
I’d been so afraid they’d call me out as soon as he was out of earshot, but…
“Oh my God, I guess Z was right. You and Luca really are back together,” Prin had said. Then she had lowered her voice to whisper, “And can I just say I don’t blame you at all for taking him back. That dude is too freaking fine.”
Sylvie had laughed. “Yes, Luca is very good looking, and obviously treating you well,” she’d added, her Jamaican accent lilting light and bright. “You are glowing, and I’ve never seen you looking so happy and so relaxed! I mean ever, in the whole time of me knowing you.”
“Yassss, girl, get your life,” Prin agreed with a huge cackle. “Love is a good look on you.”
I’d just taken their compliments, completely stunned. Here I’d thought I’d have to do the acting job of the century to get through the party. But the reportedly suspicious Prin and Sylvie had instantly bought into Luca’s story as soon as I’d walked through the door with him sans my usual grumpy overworked and underslept attitude—which I guess they had easily mistaken for happiness.
And apparently, my brother had seen the same thing they had in the pictures of us that made it on to the internet.
“That…that wasn’t real,” I say now like I couldn’t say to my two easily duped girlfriends. “He asked me to go with him to the engagement party, to prove he could trust me. It was a test, one I had to pass if I want him to really start talking to me.”
“You sure you passed it? I’m thinking you didn’t if you still don’t have anything I can use. And besides, if you’re so desperate to get away from him, why didn’t you tell Majesty girl what was going on? That sheikh she’s marrying still has diplomatic immunity. He could probably help you out easier than me.”
“Yeah, maybe,” I answer because I’d thought of that, too, when Luca asked me to be his date to the party. “But Zahir and Luca are lifelong best friends. For all I know, the sheikh would have taken Luca’s side and then all the work I’ve been putting in to get him to trust me would have gone down the drain. But believe me, I’m trying to get you what you need to put him away. Nobody wants that more than me right now.”
“Really? Nobody wants that more than you? Is that what you think? Because I’m thirty-eight and still pretty goddamned scared that bastard will put two bullets in my head as soon as I try to settle down and have children with somebody. Meanwhile, you’re holding hands with that animal, looking so cute they’re talking about Ferraro all over social media. Suddenly, news sites are calling him the CEO of Ferraro Disaster Management, instead of the leader of the Ferraro Family. And my co-workers are wondering if him knocking up a blind lawyer means he’s actually gone legit.”
“He hasn’t,” I assure Peter. “And I understand you’re stressed, but trust me, I am, too. I told you my story. You know I’m not here of my own free will. And him being behind bars is the only thing that will prevent him from coming after me again once I’m back in WITSEC.”
“Yeah, that’s what you told me a month ago. But a lot of girls stop thinking straight when guys like Luca Ferraro get them into bed.”
“First of all, I’m not a girl. I’m in my thirties, and I’ll officially become a mother two months from now,” I remind him. “And second of all, we’re not sleeping together.”
“Not sleeping together?” Peter repeats, his voice incredulous. “What happened to that sob story about him kidnapping you and making you sleep with him?”
“He did kidnap me, and I am sleeping in the same bed as him,” I answer with more patience than I’m actually feeling. “But we haven’t…” I clear my throat, hating that I’m having this conversation with my older brother of all people. “…done that.”
“So, let me get this straight. He’s acting like you two are together for real, taking you out to parties—”
“Party. Just one party,” I correct.
“And you’re expecting him to start talking to you, even though you’re refusing to put out?”
“I’m not…” Oh God. This is so beyond embarrassing to talk about. “I’m not refusing him. He’s never asked.”
“He’s never asked,” Peter repeats, his voice incredulous.
“No.”
“You two have been shacked up, sharing a bed for two months and he’s never once tried to put the moves on you?”
“No,” I answer, and I leave it there. Luca’s complete lack of interest in doing anything with me beyond holding hands the one time we were in public together, so that Prin and Sylvie could see that I’m all right, isn’t something I can explain to my half-brother. Or to myself for that matter.
“It hasn’t come up.”
A long beat. Then Peter dramatically groans. “Oh, fuck me, he has a girlfriend, just like dad. Why didn’t I think of that?”
A cold icicle that has nothing to do with the temperature outside suddenly spikes through my chest. Because, the Luca I knew couldn’t go two weeks without sex, much less two months. Of course, he had a girl on the side. Maybe more than one. Why hadn’t I guessed that?
Emotion, green and seething, rises up inside of me at the thought of Luca with another woman. So fast and primal, it locks any answer I might have given inside my suddenly dry throat.
“That’s who I should have tracked down, instead of trying to save you,” Peter is saying on the other side of the phone, his voice thick with derision.
And I can’t disagree with him. Even though, it’s my life hanging in the balance here. My life and my baby’s future.
A knock suddenly sounds on the other side of the terrace’s metal door, and my breath catches. It’s a warning from Naima. Rock must be on his way up in the elevator.
“I’ve got to go,” I say to Peter.
“Wait, any ideas about who this other girl might be?”
I end the call without answering that question, and not necessarily because I’m afraid of running out of time.
“Hey Rock, is that you?” Naima is asking as I open the roof access door and step back inside.
Put Naima on that Oscar shortlist, I think, because she doesn’t sound at all like someone who posted up next to the elevator as soon as the housekeeper left for the day. Then monitored it for any signs of life while I went to the roof with the contraband phone Peter somehow managed to get set up for me four weeks ago—though he still won’t tell me who his inside contact is.
“We were just coming down because it’s so cold out today,” she calls, as she quickly takes the phone from me. Naima’s been keeping it charged and hidden in her room since Luca doesn’t sleep in there. And the housekeeper doesn’t come on the weekends, which is the only time Naima ever sleeps over at Rock’s apartment.
“Yeah, it’s me.” Rock’s voice floats up to us from the bottom floor. “Who else do you think Joey’s going to let up here? You’re right about the weather, though.”
With that all acted out, I squeeze Naima’s shoulder and make my way down the winding stairs to start dinner.
“Hey Rock,” I say when I get to the bottom step. “How are you?”
“Good, thanks for asking. Where’s Naima? I thought she was coming down, too.”
“Oh, she’s probably made a bathroom detour on the second-floor landing,” I answer. Which is kind of right, because Naima’s been keeping the phone hidden in her tampon box.
“How about this weather?” I ask.
As a formerly busy person, I’ve never much understood the point of small talk, especially with the clients I’m billing by the hour. But it proves useful at this moment, as a handy subject-changing tool.
“Yeah, all this up and down is how people get sick,” Rock answers. “You should probably knock it off with the roof visits when it dips under twenty.”
Annnnd cue another subject change. I make a non-committal sound before asking, “So what do you think the chances are of the Knicks making it to the playoffs this year?”
That does the trick. Rock’s off and going about how the team’s become way too dependent on some star player, but that there’s only so much he can do.
I know Naima’s made it all the way down the stairs behind me, when he suddenly breaks off from his sports rant and says, “Hey, Nai. Howya doing, baby?” like a ray of unexpected winter sunshine has just arrived in the room.
“Good,” she answers, just as happily.
It’s a little after five p.m. now, but the way Naima and Rock greet each other, you’d think it was a brand new day.
They continue chatting, easy and breezy, as Naima and I unpack the groceries in the kitchen. And even though I’m aware Rock’s just using her to make his babysitting job more fun, a dark green cloud settles over my mood, remembering how it used to be during the year I was married to Luca.
Not that I want that with Luca anymore. I don’t need him to sound stupid happy to see me when he gets home from work. Or call me Ambs. Or come up and hug me from behind while I’m making dinner at the stove.
Like he used to. Like he maybe still does with whoever’s been attending to his needs these last few months.
But no. No, I don’t need any of that from him. All I really want is for him to give me the information Peter needs so he can storm this apartment with a SWAT team and a warrant for Luca’s arrest.
That’s all I want from Luca Ferraro, I grumble to myself as I turn my back on Naima’s and Rock’s conversation to start dinner. Instead of listening to their intense discussion about the early reviews of the new DC movie they plan to watch tonight. I concentrate on setting out everything I’ll need to season and prepare two halibut fillets which I intended to serve over a bed of sweet potato spirals—the closest I get these days to pasta, now that Luca and I have entered into our new peace agreement.
“Look at her. No makeup. No fashion. Ass like a pancake. That’s why your Daddy turned to me.”
The memory hits me like a truck I forgot to listen out for before crossing the street.
Daddy had been gone too long again, more than a month. And just like the last few gone too long times, Mama took that as her cue to drive us to Boston. That, also, had been a bitterly cold day. Gray, too. But we sat on a bench outside Peter’s and Danny Jr.’s fancy day school in Back Bay, like it was springtime and sunny. Watching until a woman with long, messy black hair in a velour jumpsuit, came to wait outside the school’s gate.
“Never let yourself go,” Mama had warned me, as we watched the woman pull her hair into an only slightly more presentable ponytail. “Especially with an Italian man. Remember that.”
She had said that to me, confident as a judge critiquing a hopeless candidate at a Mom Pageant. But then she gasped, quick and scared when the woman suddenly looked up from her haphazard ponytail installation and glared at us. Like we were homeless people, hanging out too close to the school.
Daddy had shown up at our house in the woods without a warning call a few hours later, just as Mama was making her third Hennessy and Coke. “Bel, go to your room,” he’d said before I could even think about greeting him with a happy hug.
Mama was in trouble for the Boston visit, and I had listened to Daddy yell at her about how she couldn’t do that shit while sitting on top of my pink and white bed.
“I’ll make it up to you,” Mama had answered, her voice as soft as his was loud.
“You think this is the way to get my attention? Get me out here more?”
“Let me make it up to you though,” Mama offers, her words happy and
slurred.
“Jokes on you, baby, cuz Judy’s gonna be watching me like a hawk now.”
“Come here, baby. C’mon. Just let me make it up to you.” Mama had kept saying over and over again to his every complaint. Until suddenly it grew quiet.
Then there had been a drunken giggle and a deep laugh, and one single door slam, followed by the urgent creaks of their bed as Mama made it up to Daddy for driving all the way to Boston and getting too close to his real family.
She never did say she was sorry.
“Don’t ever apologize when your man’s mad at you, that will only make him remember why he was mad at you in the first place,” Mama had instructed me the next morning, after Daddy left the house, whistling. “What you wanna do is sex him good. Make him forget why he was mad at you in the first place. That always works. ‘Specially with the Italians. Remember that.”
I was only eight. Strange what had gotten pushed into the farthest reaches of my mind after my mother’s tragic death. How many memories I’d suppressed about the woman who raised me mostly alone in that remote killing cabin.
Yet here I am, “remembering that,” just like she instructed, a month after formally apologizing to Luca and asking for a do-over. Making Luca dinner, like a dutiful wife, whose husband is getting his sexual needs met by somebody else.
I’d been so scared of getting turned into my mother by my overpowering attraction to a violent man. But now at the age of thirty-two, I have to wonder which of my father’s women had it worse. The mistress he risked everything to run away with? Or the mother of his two sons, who he was planning to leave behind?
“Everything all right, Amber? You’re kind of quiet tonight.”
I don’t realize I’ve just been sitting there, picking at my fish, until Luca’s voice breaks through my introspective daze at dinner that night.
“Oh, sorry, I was just…” Remembering the shower my father always took before he left our house and wondering why it still takes you so long to come up to bed after dinner, even though I’m cooking healthy now. Are you going somewhere afterward? Is that the real reason you always come to bed smelling of soap?
AMBER - His to Reclaim (Ruthlessly Obsessed Duet, Book 2): 50 Loving States, New York Pt. 2 (Ruthless Tycoons 4) Page 6