Chapter 38
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
ONE MONTH LATER
Luca
The knocking pulls me out of nothing. Not sleep. Sleep has a shape, and whatever I do on this couch every night doesn't have one.
I sit up and the room tilts. The bottle on the floor is empty.
The glass beside it is empty too, which means at some point I stopped bothering with the glass.
My mouth tastes of ash and cheap whiskey, because a week ago I stopped buying the good kind.
The good kind was for a man who had somewhere to be in the morning.
The knock comes again. Harder.
"Fuck's sake," I say to the door, and stand.
I check the peephole. Then I open the door.
Valentino stands in the hallway in a dark coat, and behind him, Fabio.
Fabio looks at me for a long moment. He takes in the state of me. Then he turns to Valentino.
"I told you," he says.
Valentino doesn't answer him. He steps past me into the apartment and looks at it. Bottles on the counter. Takeout containers I don't remember ordering.
I retreat to the couch and sit.
"What the hell happened," I say. "Who's dead."
"Nobody's dead." Valentino stays standing. He doesn't take off his coat. "Fabio and I fly back to Sicily tonight."
"Fine. Have a good fucking flight."
"You're coming with us."
The word is out of me before he finishes. "No."
Fabio moves to the kitchen without being asked. He picks up the bottles one at a time and sets them in the sink.
"Luca." Valentino's voice stays level, which is how I know he's already decided. "You can't stay here like this."
"I'm not leaving." My hands are on my knees and I make them stay there. "Wisconsin is four hours away from this couch, Valentino. Sicily is an ocean. There's no goddamn way I put an ocean between me and her."
Valentino looks at the ceiling. Then he curses, long and low, in the Sicilian his mother gave him, and I agree with all of it.
"Then hear the rest," he says. "You're not going with Ryan. That's finished. I called him this morning and pulled you off the list."
Heat climbs my neck. "That wasn't your call to make."
"It was mine to make and I made it." He steps closer.
"Three choices. You come to Sicily. Or you stay in Chicago and work what I give you — city work, clean work, nothing across a border.
Or you tell me you're staying here to chase Juárez anyway, and I put you down right here in this shithole apartment and carry you onto the plane myself.
" He doesn't raise his voice for any of it.
"I watched you get shot twice for Amanda.
I'm not watching a cartel bury you because a woman broke your heart.
I won't let you get killed, Luca. Not on my watch. Pick."
Fabio has stopped moving in the kitchen. Both of them are watching me. Somewhere under the hangover I know Valentino is right about Juárez. I wasn't going there to work. I was going there the way a man walks into deep water with his pockets full of stones.
"Chicago," I say. "No Ryan."
Valentino studies me. He's checking whether the words have weight or whether I'm just moving his hand off my throat. Whatever he sees, he accepts it. He nods once.
Fabio dries his hands on a dish towel I didn't know I owned. Then he says, "Go take a bath."
I look at him.
"You smell like the floor of a bar," he says. "And we're playing football tonight. Seven o'clock. There's a pitch on the West Side, lights until ten. Dante's bringing a ball."
"Football." I say it flat, waiting for the correction.
"Football." Fabio folds the towel and lays it over the faucet, square, even. "You, me, Dante, Liam, two of Nico's boys. Three a side."
I search his face for the joke and it isn't there. We haven't kicked a ball since — I count backward and stop, because the answer is Sicily, years ago, another life, a summer when Elena was alive and I still laughed at things.
Every muscle in me wants to say no. No is what I've said to everything for a month. To Megan's calls, to Liam's texts, to the light through the windows.
"I'll be shit," I say. "The leg."
"You were always shit," Fabio says. "The leg's an excuse now. That's the only difference."
Valentino's mouth moves. He heads for the door and stops with his hand on the frame.
"Seven o'clock," he says. "And Luca. City work starts Monday. I'll send the details."
The door closes behind them. I sit on the couch in the quiet, in the smell of a month I'm ashamed of, and my eyes go where they always go. To the refrigerator, to the crayon house with the garden and the fish.
Then I stand, and this time the room holds still, and I walk toward the bathroom.
Gemma
The third test says the same thing as the first two.
I line them up on the edge of the sink anyway, like the order might change the answer. Two pink lines. Two pink lines. Two pink lines. My hands leave damp prints on the porcelain.
I sit down on the closed toilet lid because my legs stop agreeing to hold me.
Okay. I count backward. I've been counting backward for ten minutes and the math ends up in the same place every time.
This week I've spent throwing up before breakfast, which I told my mother was a stomach bug.
The period that never showed, which I told myself was stress, because when your whole life falls apart in one afternoon, your body's allowed to skip a month.
Except it didn't skip. It's busy.
My breath goes thin and fast. The edges of the room start doing that thing where they get bright and far away.
I put my head between my knees, which is what you're supposed to do.
I stare at the bath mat my mother has owned for twenty years and I think very clearly that he never finished inside me.
Not once. He was careful about it every single time, and I remember being grateful for that, which now seems like a stupid thing to have been grateful for, since apparently careful has a failure rate.
I make it to the door on the second try. My knees have that hollow feeling, and I hold the frame and put my head out into the hallway.
"Mom."
It doesn't come out loud enough. Downstairs, the TV mumbles and Nina's laugh rides over it. My father says a word I can't hear, and Nina laughs again.
"Mom." Louder this time, and wrong somehow, because I hear her put down whatever she's holding in the kitchen, fast, and then her feet on the stairs.
Susan Holt takes the stairs at a speed no sixty-one-year-old should, and she arrives with a dish towel still over her shoulder and her reading glasses pushed up into her hair.
"What's wrong. Are you sick again?"
I step back, let her into the bathroom and I point at the sink, because I can't make the sentence.
She looks. Her mouth opens and stays open. She picks up the middle test, holds it at arm's length, then pulls her glasses down off her head and holds it close, like the lines might be a printing error she can catch with better light.
"Gemma."
"I took three," I say. "Different brands. I made the pharmacy kid get one from the back in case the shelf ones were expired."
"Gemma."
"They weren't expired. I checked the dates in the car."
She sets the test down next to its sisters with the care you'd use on a lit firework, and then she looks at me, and I watch her do her own math.
"Oh, honey," she says.
"It doesn't make sense," I say, and my voice comes out flat and reasonable, the way it does when I'm the furthest thing from reasonable. "He never — we didn't use anything, okay, but he always pulled out. Every time. He was very consistent about it."
My mother closes her eyes for one second. "I did not need the mechanics, sweetheart."
"Sorry." Heat crawls up my neck. "I'm just saying the odds were supposed to be lower."
"The odds." She sits down on the edge of the tub, hard, and the towel slides off her shoulder onto the floor and neither of us picks it up. "Gemma, that method has been failing farm girls in this county since before I was born. Your cousin Patty exists because of that method."
I didn't know that about Patty. It's not useful information right now, but my brain files it anyway, because my brain has decided to be an idiot today.
The panic comes back up my chest in a slow wave, and I sit down on the toilet lid again and press my palms into my thighs.
My mother watches me do it. This past month she's learned to read me.
We've had a lot of practice, the two of us, at her kitchen table with cold tea between us.
I told her everything. Dominik, the debts, the running.
Luca. The contract. She and Dad sat across from me while I explained that my birth father runs Milwaukee, and Dad's face went through four different expressions before landing on the one he uses for tornado warnings.
It would've been funny if it wasn't my actual life.
"Will he know?" she asks.
"I took the test twenty minutes ago. Nobody knows. You know." I look at the three tests on the sink. "The pharmacist probably suspects."
"That's not what I asked, honey, and you know it."
I sigh and close my eyes.
"He lied to me," I say.
"I know he did." My mother reaches over and takes my hand off my thigh and holds it in both of hers. "And this baby doesn't care."
Downstairs, Nina shrieks with laughter at whatever my father just did. The sound comes up through the floor, bright and ordinary. I put my free hand flat against my stomach without deciding to.
"Mom," I say. "What do I do?"
She doesn't answer right away, and that scares me more than anything else in this bathroom, because my mother always has an answer.