CHAPTER EIGHT
ADELINA
The wall is nine feet high and it goes on for eleven minutes.
That is how long we drive along it. I time it, because I have to do something with my hands and Frankie has the radio on a station that plays commercials about back pain.
Eleven minutes of grey stone on the left with trees over the top of it, and then a gap, and then a gate, and then a hundred more yards of wall on the other side of the gate that I can see going away into the trees.
Matteo has his face at the window.
"How much of it is theirs," he says.
"All of it, I think."
"All of the wall?"
"All of the inside of the wall."
My brother sits back and thinks about this and says, "That's stupid," which is the correct response and which I would have given a lot to be able to say out loud myself.
Frankie looks in the mirror.
Frankie is about my age, maybe a year older, and he has a tie on and a neck that does not go with the tie, and he has said thirty words since Seventy-Fourth Street and nine of them were about the back seat belt.
"It's twelve acres," he says.
"Twelve," says Matteo.
"About nine of it's trees."
"What's the rest of it."
"The house," Frankie says. "And the garden."
In the daylight it is not a castle.
That is the first thing, and it is almost a disappointment, the way anything is when you have built it at three in the morning in the rain.
It is a long stone house, two storeys, with a roof that has been fixed in three different centuries, and it sits sideways to the drive as though it did not expect anyone to come up it.
There is a chapel behind it with a bell nobody rings.
There are four men at the gate and none at the door.
And on the left, running the whole length of the drive as you come up, there is a garden.
I make Frankie stop the car.
I do not ask nicely. I say stop, and he stops, and I get out in a gravel turning circle in October with my coat open, and I stand there and look at it for about thirty seconds.
It is not what rich people do to a garden.
Rich people do gravel and box hedges and a man who comes on a Tuesday.
This is a garden somebody made with their hands and then somebody else kept, for a long time, without changing anything, and it shows.
There is a pear tree, old and badly shaped and never cut back the way it should have been.
There is a bed of something gone over. And along the east wall, on the warm side, in the third week of October, there are roses.
Dozens of them. Red, mostly, and still going, and they should not be. Not this late.
I know exactly what a rose costs to keep alive.
Two summers at the wholesale market on Fifty-Ninth. I know what they need and how much water and what happens if nobody does it, and I stand on the gravel and look at forty feet of red on a wall in the last week before the frost, and I think, somebody is out here.
Somebody is out here every single day.
"Signora."
"I'm coming."
"He said you'd stop there," Frankie says.
They have put my brother at the very top of the east staircase.
It has a window over the back lawn, and a second door in the corner that opens straight onto the service stairs, so that he never has to walk past a single adult to get himself a glass of milk at two in the morning.
I was told about that door on Friday night and I did not really believe it.
The bed is made. There is a chair and a desk and a lamp that is a much better lamp than the one we left.
There is also a nebuliser.
It is on the nightstand, plugged in, with the mask in a clean bag beside it, and there is a second one in a hard case under the desk, and there is a box of the saline ampoules on the shelf with the dust cover still on it, and the mattress has an allergen casing zipped over it and there are no curtains, there is a blind, because curtains hold dust and you cannot wash them at sixty degrees.
I stand in the doorway with a box in my arms.
Matteo goes straight past me and puts his hand flat on the nebuliser.
"Is that ours," he says.
"I don't know."
"It's the good one." He crouches down and turns it round and looks at the back of it, and my brother has known the difference between a good nebuliser and the loaner from the clinic since he was five years old. "It's the one at the hospital."
I have to go out onto the landing.
Here is the thing that I cannot make sit down anywhere in my chest. There is nothing in this room that says welcome.
There is no toy. There is no poster, no fruit bowl, no card, no stupid thing with his name on it.
Somebody has gone through my brother's medical needs line by line, the way you would read a spec sheet, and satisfied every single one of them to the highest available standard, and then stopped, and closed the door, and walked away.
It is the least warm room I have ever been in.
And I stand on that landing with my hand over my mouth like an idiot, because in nine years nobody has ever once helped me with this.
Not my father, not my sister, not the clinic, not the school.
I have done every inch of it on my own with a calculator, and a man I have spoken to twice has looked at the problem for four days and simply solved it, with money, without comment, and without any apparent interest in whether I ever found out.
I cannot work out if that is the kindest thing anybody has done for me.
Or if it is what you do to an asset.
The kitchen is where the trouble starts.
It is enormous and it is old and there are two stoves, one of which is from about 1962 and is the one that is on. There is a scrubbed table down the middle that forty people could sit at. There are copper pans on a rail that have been used so often the tinning has gone.
And there is Bruna.
"Hi," I say. "We met. Sort of. Adelina."
Bruna says something in Italian.
"I don't."
She says something else in Italian, longer, while moving a pot.
"I'm sorry, I really don't have any."
A third thing. This one has a question mark on the end of it and she waits, with her eyebrows up, and I stand in the middle of a kitchen in a house I am going to be married into in five days and I have no idea whether I have just been asked what I want for lunch or told to get out.
"Okay," I say.
That goes on for ninety minutes.
I try to help twice. The first time I pick up a colander and it is taken out of my hand with the sort of speed you would use on a child near a road.
The second time I go to lift the end of the table, because she is trying to get behind it with a mop and she is four foot eleven, and she says one word, sharply, and points at a chair.
I sit in the chair.
I sit in a chair in a kitchen for eleven minutes while a seventy-one year old woman moves a table on her own out of spite, and by the end of it I have stopped being upset and started being genuinely impressed.
Then she puts a plate in front of me.
She stands there.
"Oh," I say. "No, I'm."
Bruna folds her arms.
I eat the plate.
I go out at four because I cannot stay in that house another hour.
The garden goes right round the back, behind a hedge that has not been cut on the outside in years, and there is more of it than you can see from the drive. A path. Beds. The pear tree, up close, with about nine pears still on it that nobody has picked and the wasps have got.
And at the bottom, against the south wall, there is a glasshouse.
It is not a big one. Maybe twelve feet by twenty, brick to waist height, iron above that, with the original glass in most of it and newer glass in four panes where something has gone through. The vents at the top are shut. There is a heater in there, you can see the flue.
The door has a padlock on it.
It is not an old padlock. It is a new one, brass, oiled, on a hasp that has been screwed into wood that is a hundred years old.
I put my hands on the glass and look in.
I can see leaves. Long, strap shaped, dark. Pots on a staging bench, forty or fifty of them, and above the bench a run of grow lights that are on, right now, at four o'clock in the afternoon.
"Signora."
I have not heard her cross the grass.
Bruna is standing eight feet behind me with a coat over her housecoat and her arms down and her face doing something I have not seen it do yet, and I take my hands off the glass immediately, the way you do when you are caught, and I am furious with myself for it.
"I was just looking."
Bruna looks at the glasshouse.
"They were her orchids," she says.
In English.
In perfect, unaccented, Brooklyn-inflected English, and I stand in a garden with my mouth open, and my mouth is still open when she turns round and starts back up the path.
"Bruna."
She keeps walking.
"Bruna, whose."
"His mother's," she says, without stopping. "Nobody goes in."
I am still standing there twenty minutes later when somebody comes round the hedge and says:
"Oh, thank God, you're pretty. He wouldn't tell me."
He is tall and dark and about my age and he has a coat on that costs more than Frankie's car, and he is holding one white lily with the stem wrapped in wet paper towel, and he is grinning at me like we have known each other for years.
"I'm Nico," he says.
"I know who you are."
"You don't, actually, nobody does, that's my whole thing." He holds out the lily. "Here. Welcome to the house. It's from the garden, it's not from a shop, I want that on the record because my brother will say it's from a shop."
I take it.
And the stupid thing, the thing I am never going to live down, is that I have been in this house for six hours and nobody has said one single kind word to me in English, and a man I have never met in my life hands me a flower in a wet paper towel, and my eyes go.
Just like that. No warning. Standing in a garden.
Nico Marchetti looks at me with enormous interest.
"Oh, that's not good," he says. "Are you doing that because of the flower?"
"No."
"That's a lot, for a flower."
"It's not because of the flower."
"It's a little bit because of the flower," he says, and takes his coat off, and puts it round my shoulders without asking, and starts walking me up the path toward the house like this is a completely normal thing that has happened.
"What do I call you," he says. "Adelina's a lot of syllables."
"Adelina's fine."
"No," he says. "No, I've got it."
"You haven't got it."
"Giglio," says Nico.