“You remember this?” Ava says to Don. “Sitting out here, waiting for school to start?”
“I was late a lot,” Don says. “Sister Maura, she’d come out and knock me in the ass with a yardstick when I buzzed after the door was locked.”
Ava’s struck by how different people can have such different memories of a place. To her, these steps speak of carefreeness, of youth, of her body growing and changing over the years she stood and waited here, of good times with her friends, games of hopscotch and skully, sweet gossip whispered in ears, notes passed back and forth, dreaming of after-school egg creams.
“We’d meet out here for fights on Wednesday afternoons,” Don says. “That was fun.”
“Fights?”
“We’d pit whoever against whoever, you know. Make it like a boxing match. One of us would be ref. One would hold up round cards and act sexy. Someone would usually get their ass kicked pretty fast. I was one of the better ones. I knocked Onofrio Scotto out with one punch. Everyone scattered.”
“The sisters never came out to break it up?”
“Once or twice. They were probably up in the convent by then, hitting the whiskey. I saw Sister Eleanor watching once, eating popcorn. You remember her? I got a kick out of the mean ones.”
“She picked up my friend Marisa by the ear. Off the ground a foot, maybe more. Marisa’s ear hurt for a week. I thought Sister Eleanor was gonna rip it off.”
“That Sister Eleanor had some real chops.”
“Let’s pass by the church.”
“That’s what this is? A ploy to get me into church? Come on. Now who’s messing with who?”
“I just want you to see it.”
“I’ve seen the fucking church my whole life. It’s ugly. You think Jesus is just gonna appear to me and say, ‘Come back to me. Tell me how you really feel about your dead son.’?” Don makes a mocking gesture, like he’s blessing something that’s not there.
“I do think that, yeah.”
“Just my luck. I find the woman of my dreams and she’s a religious nut.” He allows himself, though, to be led by the arm around the corner and up Eighty-Fifth Street to the church.
They stand on the steps. Don leans against the railing.
The church is bell-shaped, its glass doors like mirrors on a summer day like this. Stained-glass windows wrap around the sides. Ava loves those windows. So much of her life has been spent pondering them, kneeling before them to light candles, stuffing singles into poor boxes on the concrete walls between them. She remembers Sister Lena taking her aside one day, as she gazed up at the windows after a round of confession, to ask if she knew who Frau Ava was, if she was named after her. Ava said no, not that she knew of. She wasn’t named for anybody. Her mother liked the name Ava because of Ava Gardner, but she wasn’t named for Ava Gardner, who broke Sinatra’s heart. Sister Lena told her that Frau Ava was a poet and an anchorite a long time ago. That’s all Ava remembers. She never looked into who Frau Ava was or even what an anchorite did. She remembers the word anchorite so vividly, feeling important because Sister Lena assumed she knew what it meant.
Now she looks up at the gold cross on top of the steeple. The sunlight hitting it. She loves it, too. The way you can see it over the El and through telephone wires. She’s unsure how someone can look at that cross and not see or feel Jesus. She’s been unwavering in her faith, even with Anthony dying. Even with Nick’s agnostic ways. While she was in the hospital with Anthony, holding his hand, dabbing at his head with a wet washcloth, while he squirmed and complained of pain, she’d talk to Jesus, and she swears she even saw Him sitting there across from her once, looking the way she’d always expected Him to look. Radiant. Like His eyes were telling her there’d be peace on the other side of the suffering.
Don doesn’t seem particularly impressed by the cross or the windows. He doesn’t seem called back to some good memory of the church. Ashes thumbed on his forehead. Feeling restored after confession.
“Nothing?” Ava says.
Don gives a frozen look, stares straight at the front doors of the church. “I see him! He’s right there on the front steps. He’s looking at me.” He busts up laughing.
“That’s not nice,” Ava says. “It’s really not.”
“Where’s Father Borzumato? That’s his name, right? You want me to talk to him?” Don claps his hands together. “I’ll talk to him. I’ll tell him a few things. You think he’ll mind if I call him Borz? Maybe Father B is better? Like we’re old pals.”
“Stop.”
Don turns to Ava. “Listen, Ava. Forget this. I just had a thought. There’s what’s real, and there’s what’s not real. I want to get out of here for a while. I want to get out of my house. Out of the neighborhood. Italy. Like I said. Come with me. I’ve got this dough. We’ll travel like royalty. Go to JFK or LaGuardia and get on a plane and just take off. No looking back. Leave this all behind for however long we want.”
“I don’t know,” Ava says, her eyes darting back to the church. “Let me think about it for a while.”
“Now. Let’s go now.”
“You just bought me the car. I’ve hardly had the chance to use it.”
“Leave it at your house. It’ll be there when we get back. Pack a bag, if you want. Or don’t pack a bag—we can get all new clothes in Italy. Let’s have an adventure. People, they live their whole lives, they don’t have an adventure.”
“You’re crazy,” Ava says, but she’s thinking about how he’s reading her mind. This desire for adventure. This desire to have a new life and experience new things while she still can. Italy. She doesn’t say anything, but she wants so badly to nod.
DONNA ROTANTE
Pags understands the magnitude of the situation as soon as he gets there. He tells Donna to go take a shower, he’ll take care of everything. She’s not sure what he means, at first, but she listens.
In the shower, it hits her. Pags will make it like this never happened. And that’s what she wants. That’s why she called Donnie in the first place. Donnie wasn’t available to take care of it, so Pags is stepping in. He was always sweet on her. He seems happy to help.
Sometimes, you can make it seem like a bad thing that happened never actually happened. Donna knows that’s true. Not all the time. Not with Gabe, obviously.
The water gets cold quickly. She remembers she just took a shower before leaving for Mikey’s house, before setting these events in motion. Suzette will complain that she’s using too much hot water. But using all the hot water seems like a luxury now. She doesn’t want to be what she is. She can’t believe that striking Rosemarie with the wrench was enough to kill her.
Her hands are still shaking. She can’t totally settle into her new reality of believing that nothing actually happened.
She gets out of the shower and puts on different clothes, a red T-shirt and red gym shorts, bunching up the nice dress she’d worn for the first time and putting it in a plastic shopping bag.
Pags knocks on the bedroom door.
She opens it, her hair wet, feeling naked even though she’s wearing these other clothes.
“You okay, kid?” he says.
She shrugs. “I’m not sure.”
“I don’t need to know what happened. It was an accident. You can’t let it wreck your life.”
She looks past him into the living room and sees the rug rolled up. The body must be in the rug. The rug must have soaked up all the blood from the body. The body no longer exists.
Pags continues: “I’m gonna go out and pull Sottile’s car into the driveway. I’ll take the rug right out the back door, put it in the trunk, and that’s that. Don’t worry, okay? Shit happens. We’ve got a guy in Brownsville who makes things disappear. He’s got this vacant building, and he’s got a tub and lye. You don’t need to know the details. All you need to know is you’re in the clear.”
She nods. How can she live with herself after this? How can she face Mikey, or anyone?
Pags holds up the
wrench and the gun. “I got this and this. They’re going for a swim in the Gowanus Canal. You got anything else needs getting rid of?”
She hands him the dress in the plastic bag.
“Don’t thank me, okay? You’re always family, no matter what. This is what family does for each other. You take solace in the fact that nothing happened here today. You dreamed it all.”
She nods again.
He leaves the apartment with the gun and the wrench. She hears the car a couple of minutes later, rattling down the long driveway to the back of the house. Her Lynx is parked out on the street because Suzette prefers to keep the driveway clear. Suzette might look out her window and try to figure out what’s going on, but all she’ll see is a man putting a rug in a trunk.
Pags comes in, propping the back door open with a cinder block he finds in the yard. She can hear the car idling just outside the door, at the back end of the driveway. He’s wearing gloves now.
He stoops over the body. “When I’m gone, I’m gone,” he says. “No mention of this. I won’t tell Donnie or nobody, not ever. You can trust me.”
“I don’t know what happened.”
“Hey, it’s no biggie. You’re not a bad person. You just keep it together.”
He hoists the rug over his shoulder. She’s afraid that blood will spill from either end, leaving a trail all the way through the kitchen and out the door to the car. But there’s nothing else she can see. Maybe he’s done something to prevent that.
He has trouble angling the body through the doorway and winds up smacking it a few times, first against the wall and then against the doorframe and then against the propped door itself.
Once outside, he pushes the rug into the trunk of Sottile’s Caddy. There’s plastic down in the trunk, she can see that. He has to sort of bend and smoosh the rug to make it fit, but he eventually crams it in there and closes the lid. She’s watching all of this from the doorway, as if keeping an eye on a moving man.
He turns to her and dusts off his hands. “Easy peasy,” he says.
She feels empty inside. He seems to understand what she’s going through, so he just gets in the car and drives away, going slow the length of the driveway and then speeding up once he turns onto the block.
And just like that, he’s gone. Rosemarie’s gone.
Donna pushes the cinder block aside and closes the back door. She opens the cabinets under the sink and finds cleaning stuff, paper towels and some homemade solution she cooked up. The bucket’s still under there collecting water from the dripping pipe, but she’s put it in at a bad angle and some of the paper towel rolls are wet.
She looks around on the floor in front of the turntable and finds a smeared drop of blood not far from Mikey’s backpack. She wipes it up. She doesn’t find any more blood.
What she does see—and she can’t believe she missed it before Pags left—is the new-looking gold purse that Rosemarie came in with, toppled right there on the floor next to the couch. The price tag says five dollars. The material is synthetic, almost rubbery. Donna can’t help but think that Rosemarie bought it just for the purpose of carrying the gun.
But there’s also the letter, or whatever it is, with Mikey’s name on it. Other than that, the purse is empty. She rips open the envelope, expecting a letter from Rosemarie to her son, begging him to wise up. She’s shocked to see it’s from Antonina Divino, whose family lived behind her and Donnie. Donna never knew her other than to say hi when she still lived over there. Antonina goes to Bishop Kearney. She must’ve just finished her junior year. She’s always got a different color hair, and the nuns give her hell for it. Donna can’t make sense of how the girl even knows Mikey. Antonina was a couple of years behind Gabe in school.
She reads the note and can’t make much sense of it. But being lost in trying to figure out the puzzle of what Antonina’s saying gives Donna some momentary purpose, takes her head away from Rosemarie and the damage that’s been done.
She rips up the note and stuffs it in the purse. She puts on flip-flops and walks outside with the purse clutched to her chest. The day is so bright. She’s struck by how early it still is. She walks to the corner of her block and takes a right.
McDonald’s is on Eighty-Sixth Street and Twenty-Fourth Avenue. Some kids are out front, skateboards at their feet, headphones on, eating burgers and letting the yellow wrappers fall to the sidewalk. She ducks into the back lot, where the dumpster is. She throws the purse into the dumpster, expecting it to make some noise, but it lands quietly on a knotted stack of plastic garbage bags.
Donna goes back to her apartment and puts Carly Simon’s No Secrets on the turntable. She finds the blazer she was wearing the day before. That’s where Gabe’s suicide note is. She sits on the couch and reads the note over and over and listens to the record, fearing that she’ll lose her breath and won’t be able to catch it, fearing that reality won’t allow her to lie to herself. She inhales and exhales deeply. She thinks about tearing up Gabe’s note too, but she can’t bring herself to do it. She stuffs it in the pocket of her shorts. Her mind plays a line on repeat: I won’t tell Mikey anything because there’s nothing to tell. I won’t tell Mikey anything because there’s nothing to tell. I won’t tell Mikey anything because there’s nothing to tell.
MIKEY BALDINI
Mikey is in the P.S. 101 schoolyard. He hasn’t been there since the night with Antonina. He’s looking through the chain link fence at Donnie’s house across the street. A car is parked in the driveway. Otherwise, the house doesn’t tell him anything. He needs to get closer.
He walks through the opening in the fence and crosses the street, ducking behind a telephone pole for cover, the machete at his side. He’s breathing heavily.
He expects to look up and see Donnie staring down at him from behind the curtain. Instead of backing off, he approaches the front gate of Donnie’s house. He opens the latch as gently as he can, lifting it with the tips of his fingers so it doesn’t make any noise. He then slides the gate open, hoping it doesn’t creak or whine, which it doesn’t, and he’s careful not to slam it against the aluminum garbage can near the fence. Once in, he pushes the gate closed but doesn’t snap the latch shut in case he needs to make a quick getaway.
He squeezes past the car, a Tempo, and goes down the alley on the side of the house, where he feels momentarily out of view. He passes the electric meter and a fire ladder hanging just overhead. A padlocked door that, he’s guessing, leads to the cellar where Gabe killed himself. A lot of these old houses have them. This one’s painted green, the paint peeling, the lock rusty.
Only two windows on this side of the house. The one on the second floor looks like a bathroom window. Frosted, small. Below that’s a bigger window, and he’s not sure what room’s behind it, but it seems dark. The house has green asbestos siding. Mikey brushes against it, and some flakes off on his jacket. He looks up at the gutters, clumped with debris.
He goes around to the back of the house and crouches under another window. The ground in the yard is cracked concrete. A crumbling brick barbecue squats next to a cast-iron tub full of dirty water. He can see through the curtain slightly. Looks like the kitchen. A little table off to the left. He doesn’t catch any movement, no shadows passing. He gets below it, sitting now, his back against the asbestos siding.
When he looks up, he sees the back side of the Divino house.
Antonina is out on the fire escape, smoking. She’s wearing overalls, and her hair’s pink. She doesn’t see him. She flicks her cigarette butt away and descends the ladder into her yard, which is full of cinder blocks, sawhorses, blue tarps, and empty planters, and then disappears along the side of the house.
Pigeons scatter from their perch on the top post of the battered chain link fence that closes off Donnie’s yard from the overgrown garden of the house behind him. Mikey can smell rotting figs from the fig trees in that yard, mushed grapes, tomato plants. He can see the golden bursts of squash blossoms through the diamond pattern of the fen
ce.
Mikey stands and looks through the window into Donnie’s kitchen. He doesn’t see anything. He puts both hands on the window and pushes up, hoping it’s unlocked. It is. He opens the window all the way and sets the machete inside. He’s being as quiet as he can be.
He hoists himself onto the sill, climbing in through the open window.
He’s standing in Donnie’s kitchen now. That table’s just to the side of the window. Formica top. An empty takeout container turned over on it. Dirty dishes are piled in the sink. One of the overhead cabinets is ajar, showing a rack of dusty spices that look older than him. He opens the refrigerator and gets hit with the smell of old ketchup.
The house is dead quiet. No voices, no anything.
Mikey picks up the machete and wanders down the hallway. In the living room, he sees empty Depends boxes on the floor. Leading away from the boxes toward the front door of the house is a small trail of blood that’s browned the wood.
The feeling of being in the house isn’t a good one. Walking here, he’d tried to inhabit a character—a man with a machete, out for revenge—but now he’s seeing that he’s just himself, and he’s nervous as hell.
He goes upstairs and finds the bathroom. The toilet seat is up. Black pubic hairs cling to the rim of the bowl. He places the machete on the blue tiled floor, which is strewn with pieces of toilet paper and toothpaste caps and rusty razors. He kneels in front of the scummy toilet, fearing that he’s going to puke. He looks down at the bowl and thinks, These are the pubic hairs of the man who killed my father.
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