13. Chapter Thirteen Carmelo
Chapter Thirteen: Carmelo
She doesn't text back.
I sit at the window for three hours watching her apartment.
The light stays on past two AM. Past three.
At three twenty-two, the light goes off so I put the phone down and clean my nails in the dark and think about what she's doing in there.
Sleeping, maybe. Or lying in bed with her eyes open and the empty pill bottle on the nightstand and questions building in her gut.
She didn't text back. Grace texts back. Grace responds. Grace is a woman who shows up and functions and communicates because that's what she's built her life around, the steady maintenance of being present and reliable and okay. If she didn't text back, something shifted.
I know what shifted. I'm just not ready to face it yet.
At six AM I call Danila. He picks up on the fourth ring, groggy, a different time zone.
"The pharmacy on the label," I say. "Pemberton Family Pharmacy."
"What about it?"
"Is it traceable?"
"It's a shell. Fake name, fake address. The network uses rotating pharmacy labels for the prescriptions. Different name every few years. Why?"
"If someone searched for it. Googled the name, looked up the address. Would they find anything?"
Danila is quiet for three seconds. "They'd find a parking garage."
Fuck.
"She searched it," Danila says. Not a question.
"I think so. I haven’t checked the clone, but I’d bet if I did, she did."
"Then she knows the pharmacy isn't real. And if she knows the pharmacy isn't real, she's going to start asking what the pills actually are." He pauses. "How much does she know?"
"She knows the pills weren't for anxiety. She had a flashback during sex last night. She spoke Italian. She doesn't remember doing it, but she heard herself."
"Oh… fuuuuuuck."
"I know."
"The withdrawal is ahead of schedule. If she's having full-scene fragments and involuntary language recall on day one without the pills, the floodgate is going to open faster than we thought. Days, not weeks."
"I know."
"You need to tell her."
"I know."
"Today."
"I'll tell her what she needs to hear."
"That's not the same thing as telling her the truth."
"It's what I have."
He hangs up. I put the phone down and go to the window. Grace's lights are still off. She hasn't left for the bodega. She usually leaves at ten fifteen on a morning shift. It's ten forty. She's late, or she's not going.
At ten fifty-two, her door opens. She comes out in her work clothes, hair pulled back, bag on her shoulder. No bodega stop. She walks straight to the restaurant, fast, her stride tight, her shoulders up. No easy pace. No loose posture. She's walking with purpose and the purpose isn't work.
I pull on my jacket and cross the street.
The restaurant isn't open yet and it’s not her shift.
The CLOSED sign is on the door. I can see Grace inside through the cracked window, standing at the bar, her bag on the counter.
She's not prepping. She's not tying her apron.
She's standing at the bar with her phone in one hand and something in the other hand and she's waiting.
She's waiting for me.
I push through the door. The bell rings. She turns and her face confirms everything I was afraid of.
Her eyes are red-rimmed and hard. Her jaw is set. She's holding the pill bottle in her left hand and her phone in her right and her finger is tapping the pill bottle, fast, the plastic clicking against her ring.
"Sit down," she says.
I sit on the bar stool closest to where she's standing because she told me to sit and I sat.
She puts the pill bottle on the bar between us. The label faces me. Pemberton Family Pharmacy. 1847 Spruce Street.
"That address," she says. "Is a parking garage."
I don't say anything.
"The pharmacy name doesn't exist. Anywhere. I searched it. No website, no phone number, no listing, no record. The pharmacy that's been filling my prescription for eleven years is not real."
She waits. Her tapping accelerates.
"Tell me you didn't know," she says. "Tell me this is news to you. Tell me you're surprised."
I look at her. Gray-blue eyes. Renzo's eyes. Red-rimmed and exhausted and furious and terrified… aimed at me.
"I can't tell you that," I say.
Her hand tightens on the pill bottle. The plastic cracks under her grip. "How long have you known?"
"Before I came to Philadelphia."
Her face twists. I watch the processing happen in real time: the confusion first, then the recalculation, then the slow, horrible understanding spreading across her face.
"Before you came here," she repeats. "Before you walked into this restaurant. Before you sat at table four and ordered the branzino and tipped thirty percent and learned my name. Before any of it."
"Yes."
"You came here because of me."
"Yes."
"You came here because of the pills."
"Because of what the pills were doing to you. Yes."
She puts both hands on the bar and leans forward, and her voice drops low and steady. "What are the pills, Carmelo? Are you a spy? Sent here to make sure I take them, or what the fuck are you? WHO are you?"
"Memory suppressants. Pharmaceutical compounds designed to prevent traumatic memories from consolidating into conscious recall. They don't erase what happened to you. They keep your brain from accessing it. And no. I’m not a spy. I’m in the mafia."
Her mouth drops open. She can’t handle the information overload, so she asks the one question burning on her tongue. "What happened to me."
"Yes."
"And you know what happened to me."
"Yes."
She picks up the pill bottle and throws it. Hard. It hits the wall behind the bar and bounces off a shelf of liquor bottles and one of them rocks but doesn't fall. The bottle skitters across the floor and comes to rest under the ice well.
"Then tell me what the fuck happened to me."
I look at her. She's shaking. Not the withdrawal tremor. This is rage. Full-body, teeth-clenched, hands-fisted rage. Her tapping has stopped completely, the way it stops when something overwhelms the coping mechanism, and her eyes are on me and I am the target.
"You were taken," I say. "When you were eight years old, from a family that loved you. You were trafficked for five years. At thirteen, you were placed in Philadelphia with a manufactured identity and a family that was paid to watch you and a prescription that kept you from remembering any of it."
Her face doesn't move. Nothing on her face moves for five full seconds. She's frozen. Processing at a speed her brain wasn't designed for, taking in information that rewrites everything she knows about her own life.
"I was taken," she repeats.
"Yes."
"Trafficked."
"Yes."
"For five years."
"Yes."
"And the Marinos."
"Paid operatives. Placed to monitor you and maintain the medication."
"And Linda's not calling back because..."
I hold her gaze. I don't flinch. I don't look away. "Because I killed them. Five days ago. Both of them. So the pills would stop and you could start remembering. And because of what they did, knowing where you came from, what you’d endured."
The silence in the restaurant is deafening. No kitchen sounds. No music. No dishwasher. Just Grace on one side of the bar and me on the other and the biggest truth I've ever told sitting between us on the polished wood.
She walks around the bar. She comes to my side. She stands in front of me where I'm sitting on the stool and she's between my knees and her face is at my chin level and she looks at me, and her eyes are wet and her jaw is set and her hands are shaking.
"You killed them."
"Yes."
"You killed the people who raised me."
"They didn't raise you. They drugged you."
"You don't get to decide that for me." Her voice breaks on the last word.
"You don't get to decide what they were to me.
You don't get to kill people and call it a rescue.
You sat at my table and ate my food and kissed me and fucked me and you knew the whole time.
You knew who I was and what was done to me and you said nothing. For weeks. You said nothing."
"I know."
"Is that all you have? I know? That's your answer? I know. I know. I KNOW. I KNOW. That’s all you can fucking SAY TO ME?"
"Yes."
She hits me, open palm, right across the face. Hard enough that my head turns and the sound cracks through the empty restaurant. My cheek burns. I don't move. I don't react. I sit on the stool and let her hit me because I earned it.
She hits me again. Same hand, same cheek. Harder. My lip splits, and there’s blood in my mouth. I taste copper and swallow it.
"Hit me again," I say. "If you need to."
She doesn't hit me again. She grabs the front of my jacket with both hands and pulls.
Not to hit. To hold. Her fists are balled in the fabric and she's pulling me toward her, crying now, hard, and the crying is angry.
The anger is grief and the grief is everything she's been carrying that’s now burst open.
"Why?" she says into my chest. "Why did you come here? Why me? Why do you care about a woman you've never met? Why did you kill two people and sit at my table and fall in love with me and not tell me? That must be it because who does that?"
Fall in love with me. She said it. I didn't, but it’s true. I did fall in love with her.
"Because I heard your father say he lost you," I say. "And I couldn't stop."
Her fists tighten in my jacket. Her face is against my chest. She's crying and shaking and her body is pressed against mine. I put my arms around her because there's nothing else to do with my arms when she's this close and this broken open.
"My father," she says.
"His name is Renzo. He's been looking for you for sixteen years."
She makes a sound against my chest that isn't a word.
It's a sound from the same place her body keeps the tapping, deep and involuntary, the place where the truth lives.
She pulls back and looks up at me. Blood smeared on her forehead from my lip, tears on her face.
Her hands still fisted in my jacket. She's the most beautiful and unfortunate thing I've ever seen.
She kisses me.