14. Pietro
— ? —
Pietro
Nobody in the kitchen moves.
Giulietta fills the doorway with the morning glare at her back, and Ysabelle is between us with one hand already going to her stomach, and I’m three steps too far away, close enough to see how wrong her eyes have gone and too far to put my body where it needs to be.
“Giulietta.” I keep my voice low and level, the voice I use in a negotiation that’s already going wrong. “How did you get past the men outside?”
“Your security.” She laughs, and the sound has cracks running all the way through it.
“They think they’re so careful. I’ve watched this street for weeks.
I know when their shift changes, and I know when the old woman wheels her cart out to run her errands.
All I had to do was wait.” Her gaze slides off me and fastens on Ysabelle, on the swell she can’t hide anymore. “So it’s true.”
It isn’t a question, and I watch the last reasonable thing go out behind her eyes.
“Come inside and sit down,” I say, easing one slow step closer. “Whatever you came here to say, you say it to me. Only me. Leave her out of it.”
“Leave her out of it.” Giulietta’s voice climbs.
“That’s the only thing you’ve ever done, Pietro.
Where is it you think I belong? In the empty apartment, waiting for you to remember I exist?
At my mother’s grave, asking her why the one thing she begged you for was to look after me, and you couldn’t even do that? ”
“He did look after you.” Ysabelle’s voice is steadier than mine has any right to be. She holds her ground and doesn’t look away from the woman coming apart in her aunt’s doorway. “For ten years. It was me he forgot.”
“Ysabelle.” I say it low, a warning she has every right to ignore, and she ignores it.
“You want him to look at you,” she says, and takes a step that puts her squarely between Giulietta and the rest of the room. “I know exactly how that wanting feels. I have lived inside it for a decade. But it doesn’t give you the right to stand in this kitchen and-”
This is the door she wouldn’t walk out of. I begged her to leave this house and she chose it, and now she’s standing in it between a woman who wants her gone and the man that woman wants, and I understand with total clarity that she isn’t going to move.
“That baby was supposed to be MINE.”
It happens faster than the last word of it. Both of Giulietta’s hands come up and drive into Ysabelle’s shoulders, all of her weight behind them, and Ysabelle’s heels skate out from under her on the tile Remedios mopped an hour ago.
I’m already moving, already reaching, and I’m not fast enough.
She goes back with her arms flung wide for anything to hold, and there’s nothing to hold, and the side of her head finds the edge of the kitchen table with a flat, final crack, and then the softer and far worse sound of the rest of her folding down onto the floor.
“Ysabelle!”
I hit my knees beside her hard enough to feel it in my own bones. Her eyes are shut. The blood comes fast and dark from behind her ear, spreading into her hair and out across Remedios’s clean floor, and she’s limp in a way I’ve never seen her, mouth slack, gone somewhere I can’t follow.
For one bottomless second I can’t find her breath. Then her chest rises, shallow, and rises again, and the relief of it nearly takes me down with her.
“Call an ambulance!” The voice tearing out of me isn’t one I know. “Somebody call an ambulance, now-”
There’s no one else in the house to call to, so I get my phone out with a hand that won’t obey me and call the ambulance myself, giving the address twice because the first time it comes out wrong.
Then I fold my jacket against the back of her head where the blood is coming and press down hard, the pressure I once read about in a book I bought in secret the week I first knew she was pregnant, and I count her breaths so I don’t have to think about anything but the next one.
Above us Giulietta is still talking, in pieces. “I didn’t, I only wanted, I never meant for-” The sentences keep collapsing before she can finish them. “I didn’t mean to hurt her. I only wanted you to look at me for once instead of at her.”
I don’t look at her. I know that if I look at her I’ll take my hands off my wife to put them around her throat, and my wife needs my hands exactly where they are.
When I finally speak to her, my voice comes out flat and low and emptied of everything except the thing I mean.
“If she loses this baby,” I say, “if I lose her, I won’t send lawyers. I’ll come myself. I’ll take your life apart with my own two hands, one piece at a time, and I’ll still be at it when you’re an old woman. Do you understand me? I’ll be the last thing left in the world that frightens you.”
Her legs give out under her. She folds down onto the tile a careful distance from the blood and puts both hands over her face and says the only sentence she has left, again and again, to no one.
“It was supposed to be me.”
I’ve already turned back. I set my forehead against Ysabelle’s, careful of the towel, and I beg her under my breath, the same words looping because they’re the only ones I have. Stay with me. Stay with me.
The sirens climb up out of the street noise, distant and then deafening, and then the kitchen is full of strangers in uniform who move me back with firm hands and voices so calm I want to scream at them for it.
They fit a collar around her neck. They lift her onto a board as though she weighs nothing at all.
One of them is asking me questions, how far along is she, how long was she unconscious, is she taking anything, and I answer every one and couldn’t tell you afterward a single thing I said.
“I’m riding with her,” I say, and it isn’t a question, and nobody is foolish enough to try me on it.
In the back of the ambulance I fold into the corner they point me to and hold the only piece of her they’ll give me, two fingers of one hand, while a young medic works over her without pause and keeps up a bright, level stream of talk, you’re doing beautifully, Ysabelle, stay with us, we’ve got you.
Out the small window the wet city smears past, the red light washing over the glass and going dark, washing over and going dark.
I’ve sat across a table from men who ran countries.
I’ve never once been as powerless as I’m in that corner, and I pray to a God I quit speaking to a long time ago.
Then double doors bang open and a corridor swallows her and a second set of doors swings shut in my face, a flat hand on my chest, a voice promising someone will come for me soon. And there’s nothing left to do but the one thing I’m worst at in the world.
The chair they finally allow me is hard plastic bolted down to outlast men like me. I don’t leave it.
Once, Anton appears at the far end of the corridor, and he can’t lift his eyes to meet mine.
She waited out his shift change and the one hour Remedios was gone, and he knows it.
But I’m the one who read his warning days ago, the text that said she was watching the house and wasn’t going to stay away, and I put my phone in my pocket and said nothing, because I decided on my own that Ysabelle didn’t need to carry it.
I decided for her. The exact thing I swore I’d stop doing, and it’s why she’s behind those doors with a crack in her skull.
Anton failed at his job. I failed at the only thing I’d promised her.
There’s no version of tonight where I get to blame him and mean it.
I have nothing left in me to give him, so I give him the one thing I can, and I don’t send him home, because the man I most want to throw out of this hospital is myself.
When a doctor comes at last, she stops in front of my chair and waits for me to get to my feet, and she chooses her words with care.
“Mr. Marino. Your wife has a concussion and a laceration behind her ear that we’ve closed with stitches.
She lost consciousness, so we ran a full scan of her head.
” She pauses exactly where a frightened man needs her to pause.
“The scan is clean. No bleed, no fracture. She’s stable, for now, and we’ll be monitoring her overnight. ”
“The baby.” It’s all I can get out.
“The heartbeat is strong.”
It’s the finest word in any language I’ve ever spoken, and I hold on to that one word with both hands, because it’s all that stands between me and the floor.
They let me in after that. She’s small in the white bed, wired to machines that measure everything about her except the one thing I need to know, a fresh bandage stark against her dark hair, her hand come to rest over our child even now, even from wherever she has gone.
I drag the chair as close as it’ll go and fold her hand into both of mine. It’s warm. Warm is the entire world tonight.
“I’m here,” I tell her. “I’m not going anywhere. Not this time.”
The monitors beep, steady and stubborn.
And then, under my hand, so faint I almost convince myself I imagined it, her fingers move.