Death 7 Choking （Change of Life） #5
STELLA WAS SOBER BY THE TIME Joey’s Oldsmobile pulled into the driveway and Mickey emerged from the driver’s side, one brown platform shoe at a time—how did she walk in those things, and why would she at her age?
The car also emitted the three older girls, listless Betty, Janet, still so runty for eleven years old, and bony, mean Mary, who was fourteen, all sternum and scowls.
The Fortuna females congregated around the trunk for a long minute, then paraded up the driveway with whatever parcel they had bought during whatever shopping trip they had just taken using whatever money they did not spend on the rent they should have been paying to live in their own house.
Stella watched from the armchair by the window, only realizing how cronishly she was craning forward and squinting when her neck started to ache.
Her heart was already pounding with anticipation of her confrontation with Mickey.
How could she have left her babies alone?
Didn’t she have any common sense? Stella wanted to take the woman and shake until her little brain rattled in her skull.
For the last two hours, Barbie and Pam had stayed in the Maglieris’ living room, watching whatever came on the television next.
Richie, Mingo, and Artie had trickled in during the early afternoon, exhausted by their morning war games in the woods, and now the five cousins were all sitting on the red couch or the blue carpet, watching The Guiding Light.
Stella had always let her children run around as they chose with little supervision, as long as they didn’t burn anything down, but now, thinking about what had happened to these girls made her feel guilty for leaving them.
Nevertheless, she did. Mickey was their mother and it was the mother’s job to control this situation.
As she crossed the street for the fifth time that day, Stella fought her way through the same ring of thoughts that had tormented her since she had broken down her father’s door: Was it only Mickey’s children, the ratty, uncivilized little scamps?
Or had he preyed on others? Had he ever, ever been left alone with Bernie?
The thought—again—made Stella want to vomit.
Not her Bernie, it was impossible. Her heart rejected the idea before she could test it further.
What about the boys? Were they safe? And, or—were they dangerous?
Did these monstrous tendencies bleed down into yet another generation?
Stella remembered hints her mother had dropped about the Fortunas in Tracci, how Assunta had described their one-bed house as a pigsty of disease and animal behavior.
Finally Stella understood what she must have meant by animal behavior. Was the whole family poisoned?
Mickey was putting away groceries when Stella let herself in through the back door.
Janet was sitting at the kitchen table and eating directly from a bag of Ruffles.
Stella studied the skinny little girl, who didn’t acknowledge her aunt’s scrutiny.
It was impossible to tell by looking, Stella thought.
“Is Papa here?” Stella asked.
“I haven’t seen him, honey,” Mickey said. Even when she spoke Calabrese to Stella, she still said “honey” in English. “Maybe he took Pam and Barbie for a walk.”
“Pam and Barbie are over at my house,” Stella said. She was not going to make a scene in front of another unhappy little girl today. In English, she said, “Janet, I gotta talk with your mother. Go sit in the living room, okay?”
Janet made no verbal acknowledgment she’d heard Stella, but after a moment she slid out of her seat and disappeared down the hallway, leaving the open bag of potato chips.
For all Stella knew she hadn’t been being obedient, had just whimsically lost interest. An enigma, that one, like her older sister Betty.
“What is it, Stella?” Mickey said. “Is something wrong?”
“Yes,” Stella said. “Yes, Michelina.” Now that the time had come, after all her preparation, it was too hard to say. “You have to move away from here,” she said finally.
“Oh, Stella, you know we can’t do that.” Mickey had taken an English muffin out of a new bag and was breaking it open with a fork. “We haven’t got the money right now. You know how business is for Joey. We can barely feed the girls.”
Stella wanted to argue with that, to remind the nincompoop of the department store bags she had seen her lift out of the trunk of her car just moments earlier.
She fought down her impulses and brought the conversation back to the most important point.
“Michelina, you have to move out of this house. I don’t care what you have to do, you have to figure out a way.
” She cringed against the words, lowered her voice in case the girls in the living room were listening.
“Your daughters aren’t safe here. Do you understand me? ”
Mickey looked up from the butter dish and the crumbs on the counter. Her dark eyes were sharp on Stella’s. “What do you mean?”
“They’re not . . . they’re not safe with my father.” Just say it, Stella. “Mickey, I came over here today and I found him . . . I found him touching them.”
Mickey returned her attention to the English muffin. “Oh, it’s nothing. He just likes to play with them.”
Stella had often wanted to do this woman violence but never more than in this moment.
“Mickey,” she said. She was struggling so hard to restrain herself that perhaps her urgency wasn’t coming through clearly.
“Mickey, he’s not playing with them. He’s .
. . he’s touching them. He’s . . . using them like puttane. ”
Mickey was quiet. She was spreading the butter, soft from being left on the summer-warm counter, thickly in the muffin’s spongy interior. Stella waited. Finally, Mickey said, “Well, it’s not like he’s raping them, is he?”
“YOU KNEW.” FOR A PASSAGE OF TIME, Stella was blinded by shock. She had been ready for denial, for stupidity, for whining or for hysterics. She had not been ready for this. “You knew,” she said again. “You knew and you let him do it anyway?”
Mickey shrugged sadly. “What can I do, though, Stella? It’s his house.”
“You knew what he was doing to your daughters and you let him?” Rage was a patina over her vision, obscuring the kitchen and this witch of a mother. “You left them here with him? What, to make it easier? So you wouldn’t have to watch?”
Mickey didn’t say anything now. Her wheels were turning, Stella knew, trying to find a way to make this conversation stop, to make Stella go away.
“You’re a terrible person,” Stella said, “but your children are innocent. You better do something about this or I’ll do something myself, and you won’t like it.”
“What do you want me to do, Stella?” Mickey said. She had opted for crying, her showy openmouth style. “I can’t make a fuss or he’ll kick us out. We don’t have any money to live somewhere else.”
Stella stepped toward her sister-in-law, forcing her up against the wall, and she grabbed Mickey’s face in her right hand. Mickey was too surprised to squeal.
“This isn’t about money, you stupid bitch.” Stella pinched harder—she would be only too satisfied to see purple circles like clown rouge on Mickey’s face tomorrow—and then released her. “You get your act together and find somewhere to live or I will call the cops and report you all.”
“For what?” Mickey said between her sobs.
“I’ll think of something.” Stella stepped away from her sister-in-law. “You go get your little girls at my house now. They need their mother, even if she is a stupid bitch.”
That was all the invitation Mickey needed to flee the kitchen. Stella heard her let herself out the front door. She turned to gaze out the window at the vivid green lawn of the backyard, where there was no sign of the monster, her father.
Now what?
Instinctively, Stella felt her work wasn’t quite done. She took a carving knife out of the drawer by the sink and let herself out onto the back porch to wait for her father.
MORE THAN TWO HOURS and no sign of Penny.
Bernadette was hoarse but stubborn. She couldn’t call out anymore, so she clapped as she walked up and down the wetland paths.
The heat had receded, leaving the damp air feeling falsely cool, and the diagonal light of the yellow-orange sun splattered among the knee-high reeds where the marsh water pooled.
Bernie cried silently as she walked and clapped.
It was too much time. If Penny had been here she would have come by now.
She’d walked every footpath between the highway and the ocean for a stretch of two miles.
She’d whistled and poked unwillingly with a stick among clumps of bushes, hoping she did not find a carcass.
Not knowing would be better than knowing at that point, she thought.
She could not know that Penny had been adopted by a loving beach family just as easily as she could not know that Penny had been dismantled by raccoons.
She wiped the salty snot from her chin with the inside of her striped Gardener’s uniform sleeve and blinked away her tears.
No mourning in front of her grandfather; only rage.
She watched him from this distance as he stood twenty feet from the car, clapping halfheartedly every so often.
Bernie had locked him out of the car so there was no way he could avoid the task she’d set him.
The old goat was going to stick it out till it was over.
Well. It was over. There was nothing more she could do here.
The bastard. Bernadette wished, earnestly, that he would die.
She was heading back to the car—more than halfway there, how close she came to missing—when she heard the rustling and stopped. Yes, rustling in the grasses, the length of a football field away, but she heard it.
“Penny,” she croaked, embarrassed at her own hopefulness. She cleared her throat. “Penny!”