Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Luca
The phone vibrates on the arm of the couch. I let it go twice before I pick it up.
"Yeah."
"Ava's back." Valentino says.
I do not say anything for a second. The lamp is still on. The amaro is still in the glass on the floor by my foot. I look at the door of the bedroom because that is where I have been looking for ten minutes already, on and off.
"In Chicago?"
"In Chicago. Landed at O'Hare four hours ago."
I sit forward. My elbows go on my knees. The shoulder pulls and I let it pull.
"For how long?"
"She didn't say. Bruno didn't push. He's letting her be there."
"Alone."
"With a cat."
I run my thumb along the seam of the phone.
"Why now?" I say.
"I don't know. Bruno doesn't know. Maybe she does. She didn't tell him. She told the driver where to take her and that was that."
I move the glass with the side of my foot so it is not where I will step on it if I stand.
Riccardo was the don before Bruno. Three years ago, almost to the month. He had been don for eight years. He was married to Ava for six of them. She was twenty-five when she married him and thirty-one when he was killed and she will be thirty-four now.
Riccardo was shot at Bruno's first attempt to get married to Lucrezia Feretti. Bruno got shot too and he was in a coma. When he woke up he learnt that his brother was dead and that he couldn't walk.
Ava left after Riccardo's death. She went to Sicily because there was nothing in Chicago she wanted to look at anymore.
Riccardo had asked me once, at a thing at the house, to keep an eye on her if anything happened to him. He said it like a joke. He said it like the kind of thing a man says when he is two glasses in and feels generous about his own life. He laughed after and I laughed too.
Two weeks later he was dead.
Fabio got the same talk on a different night. We compared, after. We laughed about that, too, until we did not.
"Luca."
"Yeah."
"You hear me."
"I heard you."
"She's back. That is what I am telling you. I am not telling you to do anything."
"I know."
"Bruno's not bringing her in on anything. She's not — she's the widow. She's coming home. That's the read for now."
"All right."
"You and Fabio had her since Riccardo. Bruno knows that. He is not changing it. He is also not asking you to do it. You understand?"
"Yeah."
"Bruno is waiting."
"For what?"
"For the next mistake. That's what he is doing right now. He has not said it to me. He doesn't have to. He has Ava in the city and you in an apartment with a woman whose dead husband stole from Albanians. You know how he sits when he is waiting."
I know.
"Don't give it to him."
"I won't."
He breathes out.
"Sleep," he says.
He hangs up.
I sit with the phone in my hand.
Bruno is waiting for the next mistake.
I think about that. Bruno does not wait the way other men wait.
Other men wait and you can feel them waiting.
Bruno is just there. He drinks his coffee.
He asks about the shipment. He nods at the answer.
He sits in the chair and he listens. The waiting is underneath everything.
You only see it when the mistake is in your hand and he is already looking at it.
I think about humans.
Most of them I do not study. Most of them I take in once, the way you take in a room when you enter and then I stop looking. The information is there. I do not need to keep looking.
A few I have studied.
Elena was the first.
I do not let her name sit very long.
But.
When I met Elena I wanted not to disappoint her. That is the cleanest way to say it. I did not want her to be impressed. I did not want her to think I was good. I wanted her not to be disappointed. That was the whole shape of it.
I wanted to prevent every mistake before it happened. I wanted to see them coming from across a room and step around them. I would have walked the long way around a city block to keep her from finding out something small about me.
I would have lied to her about which side of the bed I slept on if it had mattered. It did not matter. She did not care which side of the bed I slept on. She cared about other things and I tried to see those coming too.
I do not know if she waited for the mistake. The way Bruno waits.
I have thought about it. More than once. I have sat in rooms by myself and tried to remember her face when she'd realised that I couldn't be there to prevent it.
Maybe she waited. Maybe she did not. Maybe she trusted me the whole way down and the trust was the thing that made the mistake louder when it landed. I do not know.
The mistake happened eventually. That is what I know.
That is the only part that is not theory.
Gemma
Nina spears a strawberry with her fork and holds it up like she's showing me a trophy. I smile at her.
"Big one," I say.
"The biggest," Nina says. She puts the whole thing in her mouth at once and her cheeks bulge out.
"Small bites, baby."
She chews around a grin, red juice at the corner of her lip. I lean across the table with a napkin and she tilts her chin up for me the way she's done since she was two.
The door unlocks.
Luca steps in and the cold comes in with him. He shuts the door and turns both locks before he even looks at us.
"One hour," he says. "Then downstairs."
"Okay."
He goes to the counter and pours coffee from the moka pot into one of the white mugs.
I cross the room to him, close enough that I can smell the coffee and, under it, the soap he uses, plain and clean.
"I need to make a phone call," I say.
He sets the mug down. Doesn't ask. Just waits.
"My neighbour."
He watches me while I say it. His green eyes have that stillness that isn't calm, it's the opposite of calm, it's a very quiet gear working under everything.
"Name."
I open my mouth to answer and then stop, because his jaw has set. It's a small thing but makes me stop either way.
"You got a man?" he says.
"What?"
"A man. In your life."
The words come out and there's an edge under them like a hand on a knife you can't see. He's angry. I stand there with my mouth half-open and I can't work out what I did between the sink and the counter to make him look at me like that.
"I don't — no."
"You said neighbour. You didn't say he or she."
"Because — " My voice does that thing where it climbs a little without permission. I bring it back down. "Because I didn't think. Luca, it's a woman. Mariela. She lives across the hall from me. She's the one who watches Nina when I work nights."
"I asked because a man might go looking for you. Loudly." He picks up his mug again. "We don't want that right now."
The words make sense. The logic is there. But I can still feel the shift that happened between us, the way the air went tight before I said Mariela's name.
"Yes," I say. "But you got angry."
Luca stares at me but he doesn't talk.
I wait for him to explain. To tell me I'm wrong, or that I imagined it, or that it's none of my business. Dominik would have done any of those things. All of them, probably, in the same breath.
Luca reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a phone. Black, cheap-looking, the kind you buy at a gas station. He sets it on the counter between us.
"Make it quick," he says.
Then he walks past me toward the bedroom. I hear him say something low to Nina, hear her answer in that bright voice she uses when she's showing off, and then the door clicks shut.
I pick it up and dial Mariela's number from memory because it's one of three numbers I know by heart anymore. My mother's. Mariela's. The diner.
She picks up on the second ring.
"Hello?" Her voice is thick. Wrong.
"It's me," I say. "Gemma."
"Gem." A breath. "Where are you? I came by yesterday and you weren't — the super said he hasn't seen you."
I lean against the counter and press the phone harder against my ear. Behind me, Nina laughs at something. The bedroom door is still closed.
"I'm at a coworker's place," I say. "I'm going to have to stay here for a couple of days. Maybe longer. I'm sorry I didn't call sooner."
"Okay."
That's it. Just okay. No questions about which coworker, no asking why, no tone that says she doesn't believe me. Just okay, and then silence, and in that silence I hear it.
"Mariela." I grip the edge of the counter. "Are you crying?"
She laughs, but it's wet and broken. "No. Yes. I don't know, I haven't slept."
"Is it your mom? Did something happen?"
"Nothing happened. That's the thing." She takes a shaky breath. "She's the same. She's not getting better. The doctors say she could have weeks or she could have months, and I just — I know she won't live long enough, Gem. I know it."
My chest hurts. I want to tell her I understand, but I don't. My parents are healthy and whole.
"I'm so sorry," I say. It sounds useless
"How's Nina?"
"She's good. She's eating strawberries."
"Good." Mariela's voice steadies a little. "That's good. Camila keeps asking about her. I told her you had to go away for a little while for work."
"Thank you."
"You don't have to thank me." A pause. "Gem, are you okay? You sound — I don't know. You sound nervous."
I don't know how to answer that. I'm fine feels like a lie too big to fit in my mouth.
"I'm okay," I say. "I'll call you when I can."
"Okay." She sniffs. "Take care of yourself. And that baby."
"I will. Take care of yourself too."
I hang up before she can say anything else.
The phone feels heavy in my hand. I set it down on the counter next to Luca's coffee mug and stand there for a moment, staring at the wall.