16. Chapter Sixteen Grace #2
"He doesn't know anything. He doesn't know about the pills or the Marinos or any of it. He's just a bartender. He's just my friend. He walks me home and makes jokes about The Rhino and he doesn't know anything and they took him because he's the closest person to me and he has no fucking idea why."
My voice breaks on the last word. Not a clean break. A fracture that runs through my whole body, from my throat to my chest to my stomach, and the sound that comes out of me is a fucking wail.
Carmelo holds me on the sidewalk. His arms around me, his face in my hair, his body blocking the wind and the cold and the street.
People walk past. I don't care. I'm on my knees on a Philadelphia sidewalk being held by a man with blood on his hands and a knife on his belt and the only friend I've ever had is gone because of a life I didn't know I lived.
My phone rings.
No… it’s Carmelo's phone, not mine. He answers with one arm still around me.
"Claudio." One word. He listens. I can hear a voice on the other end but not the words. Carmelo's arm tightens around me. His jaw flexes against the top of my head.
He hangs up.
"Grazi... I need you to be strong right now."
I know from his voice. I know the way I know the tapping and the triggers and the room with no windows. I know because my body has been learning loss my entire life, and this is what loss sounds like coming out of the mouth of a man who doesn't use words he doesn't need.
"No," I say.
"They found his body. Under the overpass on Columbus Boulevard. Claudio's team found the vehicle and tracked it."
"No."
"I'm sorry."
"No. No. No."
Three times. The word comes out three times and each time it means less because the word can't change what happened.
Javi is dead. Javi who walked me home. Javi who called Carmelo The Rhino.
Javi who counted the times I checked the door.
Javi who asked about the Italian thing and suggested a therapist and offered me his family's Easter and never pushed past the wall and never asked for more than I could give and was the one real, unchosen, unmanufactured, unpaid person in my manufactured life.
Javi is dead because of me. Because someone took me when I was eight, drugged me when I was thirteen and then someone fell in love with me and killed the people who were drugging me and now the machine is awake, and it reached for me but found him instead.
I stop tapping. My finger goes still against the concrete. The coping mechanism, the oldest thing I own, the rhythm that started on a cold floor and carried me through five years of captivity and eleven years of suppression, stops.
For the first time in my life, the tapping can't hold what I'm carrying.
Carmelo picks me up off the sidewalk. He carries me across the street and up the stairs to an apartment building. Not my apartment. His. The one across from the restaurant. He opens his door with one hand and shuts it, locking it with force before carrying me to his room.
He puts me on the bed. He sits on the floor beside it with his back against the wall and his hand on the mattress next to mine. He doesn't hold me. He doesn't speak. He's just there, on the floor, his hand close enough to touch if I reach for it and far enough to give me space if I don't.
I don't reach for it. I lie on his bed in his apartment and stare at the ceiling and my hands are still.
Both of them. No tapping. No movement. My body has gone quiet in the wrong way, not the quiet of Carmelo's hand on my jaw or his body inside mine.
The quiet of a system that has been overloaded and shut down.
I think about Javi. His grin. His jokes.
The napkin I threw at him. The way he walked on my left side every night.
The way his eyes lit up when he told some stupid, corny joke.
Like the first time he called Carmelo The Rhino and I told him to stop, and he didn't because he never stopped anything once he committed to the bit.
He was the best person I knew. He had nothing to do with any of this. He was a bartender. He was twenty-six years old. He had a mother who wanted him home for Easter and a sister with a boyfriend and an uncle who asked five-year plans.
He walked me home because he wanted to. Nobody paid him. Nobody assigned him. He just did it.
I lie on Carmelo's bed and my hands are still and I don't cry. The crying will come later, or it won't, and right now there's nothing inside me that can produce tears because everything inside me is being used to keep breathing.
"His mother," I say to the ceiling. "Someone needs to tell his mother."
"It will be handled. Claudio will make sure the right people are contacted."
"Not by your brother. By me. I'll tell her. I owe her that."
Carmelo doesn't argue. His hand on the mattress moves half an inch closer to mine.
"When this is over," I say. "When you've done whatever you're going to do to the people who killed him. I want to know they're dead. I want to hear you say it."
"You'll hear me say it."
"And then I want to meet my father."
"He's waiting for my call."
"Call him. Now.” It doesn’t make sense and the timing is wrong, but hell, if my best friend just died, I may as well face all my demons in succession.
Get out all the pain, all the suffering because if I’m going to die, I’d rather die from it all quickly.
I don’t want to spend a lifetime remembering, a lifetime in fear, a lifetime slowly ripping off the band-aid. It needs to happen, all at once, now.
Carmelo pulls out his phone. He dials. I hear two rings and a man's voice on the other end, deep, speaking fast, and Carmelo says four words.
"She's ready. Come now."
He hangs up. He puts the phone on the floor. His hand returns to the mattress next to mine.
I reach for it. My fingers find his, and my hand is small inside his, and his grip closes around mine and holds.
I hold his hand in the dark apartment and I don't sleep and I don't cry and I wait for my father to arrive and I think about Javi, who deserved so much better than this, who deserved to live and grow old and walk someone else home when I didn't need him anymore, and who died because the world I was born into reached out and took the only thing I had that it hadn't already touched.
My finger rubs a circle on Carmelo’s hand. Tapping doesn’t feel right anymore, like an itch in my soul, a sliver I can’t reach. No… a circle is infinity. A lifetime of history and a lifetime of pain.
Maybe, if I’m lucky, I can process what losing my best friend has done to me, but today is not that day. Today, I bottle my grief and channel the rage, I burn, I burn because crying never took the form of revenge and received justice.
No. Now I’m angry.
I'm going to meet Javi's mother, and I'm going to tell her that her son died because of me, and I'm going to carry that for the rest of my life.
But first, I'm going to meet my father and send my boyfriend to kill the men who took him from me.
And as the fury builds like a hurricane, I realize that I didn’t need to change my routine to become Graziella…
I just needed to unleash the hell that resides in my soul.