Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter
Twenty-Two
“He’s, like, in love with you.”
“In love with you.”
Danny pushed open the doors at the back of the bus and leapt across the sidewalk, two squares at a time, ’til he reached the graffitied door on Port Richmond.
He’d worked it all out in his head. Once inside, he’d kiss Ma on the cheek, crank up the volume on her episode of Dateline NBC (for a bit of privacy), and grab the receiver off the wall and lock himself in his room.
He wasn’t sure what he’d say once he got Christian on the line—if he got Christian on the line—but he knew that if he didn’t hear his voice tonight, he’d go absolutely insane.
He dashed up the stairs, his feet barely touching the cracked linoleum, but when he hit the landing on the third floor, a familiar smell entered his nose, paralyzing his body.
It was the smell of yellow—old flower vase water and fiberglass insulation mixed with musty carpet and burning hair.
It was a smell that made him sweat and hide behind bedroom doors and tuck his knees up tight to his chin, blocking out the world.
It was the smell of his father’s Newports.
Danny crept up to the apartment door, pressing his ear to the cold painted steel, praying that he’d been wrong and would hear the voice of one of Ma’s work friends who had just popped in for a weekend smoke. But what he heard instead turned his spine into an icicle.
Danny Victorio had two choices. He could turn and run.
Go hide out in the basement, or the bus shelter, or the corner store, pretending to examine the nutritional facts on a box of Twinkies until the coast was clear.
He could run. Like he always had. Away from danger, or discomfort, or anything that forced him to face himself. Or he could open the door.
He could open the door.
“When I grow up…,” Danny whispered under his breath, closing his eyes and stepping out onto the dark stage—the audience silent, the conductor raising his baton, the warm glow of a spotlight hitting his face. “When I grow up, I want to be an avalanche.”
Danny reached for the doorknob and twisted it open.
“Well, look who the cat dragged in.”
His father sat at the kitchen table, looking over his shoulder, the top two buttons of his uniform undone, a dull white T-shirt peeking out from underneath.
His service cap was hanging off his knee, his holster at his side, his boots shined and polished, but with mud caked on the heels.
Across from his father was Ma, wearing a lemon cardigan that he’d never seen before, her cheeks rosy with blush.
On the table between them sat an ashtray with a handful of stubbed-out butts, half with lipstick kisses on the filters, and two glasses half full of beer, still frosty at the base, like they’d been chilled in the freezer beforehand, just how his father liked them.
“Danny,” his mother said, a new lipstick color framing a painfully wide smile. “How was the show?”
Danny didn’t reply. He stood frozen in the doorway.
“I invited your father over,” she said as casually as if she were mentioning that she’d picked up a couple of calzones. “It’s a long story, but we’ve been talking the past couple weeks.”
Danny’s father raised his boulder elbow and rested it on the back of the chair, pivoting his body to get a better look at his petrified son.
“And, well, we’ve been thinkin’,” his mom said, shrugging, and then straightening the ashtray in front of her so it lined up perfectly between the tablecloth flowers, “that it might be time for us to give it another shot. You know, both your father and I have had some space and some time. And I know how much you miss your room at the South Shore place.”
Danny tried to swallow, but found that his throat had frozen solid.
“Your father says he’s kept it just the same, just like how it was.”
He tried to unclench his jaws, tried to pry open his teeth.
“I know this seems sudden,” his mom continued, sounding embarrassed, like the whole thing had been her own misunderstanding. “But we both think it’s what’s best.
“Oh!” she added, clapping her hands beneath her chin. “And I almost forgot. Your father even got you one of those, uh, shoot. Whaddya call ’em, Tony?”
“Nintendo 64s,” his father said in a low, unhurried voice, wearing a smile that looked more like a grimace.
“Right, 64s. Isn’t that nice?” Ma said, her eyes pleading with Danny to agree that a copy of Super Mario 64 was, in fact, nice. “Beats those old tapes you’ve been stuck with.”
“Your Ma says you dropped outta St. Pete’s,” his father said, stretching his battering-ram legs out across the kitchen tile.
“I didn’t…,” Danny said, breaking his silence before it swallowed him whole. “I didn’t drop out.”
“Oh, sorry,” his father said, holding up his hands like Danny had attacked him, his apology veiled with the sarcasm Danny had known his whole life. “My mistake—your Ma informs me that you transferred to some chichi school for twinkle toes.”
Danny’s eyes flashed to his mother, who, at the mention of St. Pete’s, had started busying herself once again with the ashtray, arranging the cigarette butts into straight little lines.
“A few months with me outta the house and my son turns into a fruitcake,” his father said, shaking his head. “But don’t worry—I talked to the monsignor, and he said as long as you don’t bring any tutus, St. Pete’s’ll be happy to have you back in January.”
His father clamped his hand down on Ma’s, sandwiching it on top of the ashtray, halting her nervous fidgeting.
“So that’s that.”
Danny felt the tension in his chest, like something was about to slip, like snow packed too tightly on the edge of a steep slope.
“I’m not going back to that school,” Danny said quietly.
“I ain’t finished,” his father said, leaning back in his chair, his voice a terrifying calm. “It’s paid for. I know that money was an issue before, when it was just your mother, but things have changed.”
“And I’m not going back with you,” Danny said, his frozen throat splintering. “So why don’t you just leave?”
Danny’s mother’s eyes went wide, like she’d just spotted a tarantula on his shoulder and was warning him not to make any sharp or sudden movements.
“All right, tough guy, pack it in,” his father said, rolling his eyes like Danny was having a tantrum at the Gristedes checkout line.
“No,” Danny blurted, the foundation quaking. “I want you to leave. And Ma does, too.”
Danny’s mother rose from her chair, her eyes two big police sirens. “Danny, sweetie, please.”
“Ma, what are you doing?” Danny winced, the tiny fractures spreading. “What did he say? What could he possibly have to say to make you even think—”
“Stop it,” Ma whispered. “I mean it, Danny. Stop it.”
“Tell him to leave, Ma,” his voice breaking like the first crack of ice. “You deserve better. We deserve better.”
His father stood up from the table with a grunt.
“Shut your mouth, wise guy,” his father said wearily, like even dignifying Danny’s outburst was some exhausting chore. “Your Ma and I are the parents, and you’re movin’ outta this piss-den and back to St. Pete’s to get your shit straightened out.”
“Tell him to go!” Danny’s voice boomed, releasing a force that had been building for years.
“Enough,” his father said, raising an open hand, a warning that required no words. “I understand you haven’t had a man around in a while—that your mother let you run wild in the City like a hoodlum and prance around your fancy little school—”
“A man?” Danny cried, his voice picking up speed and volume. “You think that’s what you are? A man?”
His father’s hand clenched.
“A man takes care of his family,” Danny shouted, gaining force with every word. “A man doesn’t come home drunk every night. A man doesn’t walk out on his son.”
Hurtling downhill, devouring snow and ice and soil and rock.
“Danny, please,” his mom said, pinching her eyes shut.
“A man doesn’t beat his wife,” he cried, leveling shrubs and trees and decimating everything in its path.
“You’re not a man,” Danny snarled, stepping up until he and his father were chest to chest. “You’re a fucking coward.”
Danny’s head hit the floor before he even felt the blow, the sounds in the room replaced with a single high-pitched ring. When Danny opened his eyes, his father was standing over him, his fist raised yet again. His mother, hugging the wall, clasping her hand over her mouth.
“Stay down, boy.”
Danny felt the cold floor against his cheek, peering out at a world turned on its side.
Everything was askew—chairs crooked, shadows stretching in the wrong direction, the ceiling too far away.
He could taste blood in his mouth and a numbness creeping into his body and the bitter, inescapable realization that he was trapped.
But Danny had forgotten he wasn’t alone in this fight.
At first, it was just a flicker from the bulb above the kitchen table, his father barely noticing as he glared down at his son, crumpled on the floor.
Then it was the tremble of glass inside the sagging cabinets and the rattle of screws loosening themselves in the upholstered kitchen chairs.
Then the sudden hiss of the radiator and the flinging open of windows and the dishes flying from the drying rack and smashing against the yellowed walls.
Then the blaring of painful static from the TV and the thrashing of guitars blasting from the stereo, causing everyone to wince in pain and cover their ears.
And then finally, it was the words forming in Danny’s mouth, speaking not just for himself this time, but for a man who knew exactly what it was like to feel trapped.
“You…,” Danny and his Uncle Richie sputtered together weakly from their spot on the kitchen floor.
“Are…nothing,” they whispered.
Danny could feel the earthquake beginning to rumble in his father’s face.
“You are nothing,” the two men whimpered again in unison. “You’re worthless.”
This time, Danny felt it—leather and bone and rubber and 220 pounds of force slamming into his ribs. He howled in pain, clutching his side, but Danny and his uncle still had more to say.
“You’re poison,” they moaned together.
His father kicked.
“You’re a fucking tragedy.”
His father kicked again.
Crunch
“You’re a cancer.”
Crunch
“Tony, stop it!” his mother finally shrieked, grabbing at her husband’s shoulders, pulling him off and blocking yet another blow. “Stop it, baby, stop it!”
Danny coughed, ice crystals biting at his lungs. His mother knelt down and scooped up his body into her cold, rigid arms.
“Danny,” she whispered, wiping the hair from his forehead. “I told you to stop! Why couldn’t you listen? Why don’t you ever listen?”
Danny looked up at her face—at her new lipstick, which had smeared, and the tears now cutting scars down her swollen face.
She looked so lost. How could a person ever get so lost?
And Danny knew in that moment that she’d already made up her mind.
She was going back to his father and it didn’t matter what he said or did.
There were no more dead brothers with shithole apartments to run away to.
But Danny wasn’t lost. He was a City kid now.
He knew which bookstores had bathrooms and which parks used to be cemeteries.
He knew that jaywalking was a myth and that there was no north and south, just uptown and downtown.
And he had a subway map and a MetroCard.
But staring at his mother’s face, at her lost, empty eyes, he knew he only had swipes for one.
“I am stopping, Ma,” Danny moaned, pushing her arms away and picking himself up from the linoleum.
He looked back at his father, who was taller than he’d ever be, and stronger, too, but with fists that were good for only one thing.
And his mother, his poor, lost mother, trapped in the comfort of her own surrender.
“I’m finally stopping.”
Danny grabbed his bag and threw it over his shoulder.
This time, he was the one who slammed the door.