CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
ADELINA
The problem with Halloween is the wall.
I do not think about it until four o'clock on the thirty-first, when Matteo comes out of the car with his bag and says, "What time do we go," and I am standing in a gravel turning circle three hundred yards from a gate, inside twelve acres, nine of which are trees.
There is nothing out there.
There is a road. There is a wall along the road for eleven minutes in a car. The nearest front door that is not ours is a mile and a half away and belongs to people who have a gate of their own and a sign about dogs.
"Matteo."
"What."
"There's nowhere to go."
My brother looks at the house. Then at the drive. Then back at me, and I watch him work the whole thing out in about four seconds, which he can do, which he has always been able to do, which is the worst thing about him.
"That's okay," he says.
"We can do something else. We can do the."
"No, it's fine." He puts his bag on his shoulder. "I'm nine. It's mostly for little kids anyway."
And he goes inside.
I stand on the gravel and I could put my head through a window.
Nico arrives at six.
I hear him before I see him, because Nico arrives the way weather does, and by the time I get into the hall he has a shopping bag in each hand and he is already talking.
"Giglio. Where's the boy."
"Upstairs."
"Get him down. Ten minutes." He puts the bags on the hall table and starts taking things out of them, and it is candy, it is about forty dollars of the worst candy on Long Island, and he is sorting it into piles. "Bruna! Where's Bruna. Bruna, I need the big bowls."
"Nico."
"Six doors," he says. "I counted on the way in. Front, kitchen, boot room, chapel, the one at the end of the west corridor that goes nowhere, and the garage. Six doors is six houses. It's a street."
I stand there with my hand over my mouth.
"Don't do that," Nico says, without looking up. "You'll set me off and I've got a reputation."
Here is what happens on the thirty-first of October.
Eleven grown men and one seventy-one year old woman stand behind six different doors of a house in Oyster Bay for an hour and a half, with bowls, and wait to be knocked on.
Vincent Nappi does the front door.
Vincent Nappi is fifty-eight and has worked for this family since 2007 and he has a voice like gravel in a bucket, and when my brother knocks on that door in a bedsheet with two holes cut in it, Vincent opens it and says, "Oh my God.
What is that. Marie, come and look at this," to nobody, because there is no Marie, and then he screams.
Matteo is delighted to the point of physical distress.
They do the kitchen door, where Bruna has made actual food instead of candy and is furious about being told this is wrong.
They do the boot room, where Frankie has put on a hat.
They do the chapel door, where Tommaso Greco, who has two daughters and a minivan, opens it, looks down at a child in a bedsheet, takes his glasses off, and says, in the flattest voice I have ever heard from a human being:
"I'm going to need to see some identification."
Matteo laughs so hard he has to sit down on the step and use the inhaler.
Nobody panics. That is the thing I notice, afterwards, lying awake. Five men and none of them made it a big deal. Vincent just came over and sat down on the step next to him and started talking about a dog he had in 1991 until my brother's shoulders came down, and then they did the last two doors.
At the garage door, the sixth house, Salvatore opens it.
I did not know he was home.
He is in a black suit with no tie and a bandage on his right hand and he is holding one of Bruna's mixing bowls with about six pieces of candy in the bottom of it, and he looks at a boy in a bedsheet, and the boy looks at him.
"Trick or treat," says Matteo.
Salvatore holds out the bowl.
"Take the whole bowl," he says.
"That's not how it works."
"It's my bowl."
"It's not your bowl, it's Bruna's bowl, and you have to just give me some," my brother says, "or it's not a real one."
And my husband stands in a garage doorway at half past seven at night and considers this with complete seriousness, and then he takes three pieces out of the bowl and puts them in a pillowcase.
"Three," Matteo says.
"Is three wrong?"
"Three's good. Three's what the good houses do."
Nico is on the terrace at eleven.
I find him because I am putting the bowls back and the terrace door is open and it is forty degrees out there, and he is out there on the balustrade at the far end with his coat on and a bottle beside him and his legs stuck out in front of him in the dark.
"Don't say anything about the coat," he says.
"I wasn't going to."
"Bruna said something about the coat."
I sit down on the stone about four feet away.
The garden goes away downhill from the terrace and you cannot see any of it at this hour, you can only see the shape where the pear tree is and, right at the bottom, a dull orange line along the bottom of the glasshouse where the heater is on.
"Thank you," I say. "For the six doors."
"It was nothing."
"It was not nothing, Nico."
"It was forty dollars of candy and a phone call."
"You made seven men from my neighbourhood stand behind doors for an hour and a half," I say, "and not one of them looked at their phone, and Tommaso Greco asked a nine year old for identification."
Nico drinks.
"Tommaso enjoyed that more than any of us," he says. "He's been waiting eight months for something to happen that he could be funny about."
We sit for a while.
And then I ask him, because he is drunk, and because it is dark, and because I have had it in my mouth for two weeks and I nearly gave it to the wrong person in a kitchen at two in the morning.
"Nico. What is he."
"What is who."
"Don't."
Nico puts the bottle down on the stone.
"I'm going to tell you a thing," he says, "and you have to understand that I'm going to tell you it in the stupidest possible way, because that's how I do everything, and if I do it the other way I'll stop halfway through."
"Okay."
"There's a thing in the Amazon," Nico says.
"There are these clearings. In the middle of the jungle, which is the most crowded place on the planet, there are these circles where nothing grows except one kind of tree.
Perfect circles. Fifty, sixty feet across, no vines, no scrub, no nothing, and then the wall of the forest starts again like somebody drew it.
"And for about four hundred years everybody who found one said the same thing, which is that a devil made it. That's the actual name. The locals call them devil's gardens and they have done since before anybody was writing it down, and you can look at the maps and they're on the maps like that."
He picks the bottle back up and does not drink out of it.
"It's ants," he says.
"Ants."
"It's ants. They live inside the one tree.
The tree is their whole house, it feeds them, it's got these hollow bits in the stems where they keep the young ones.
So the ants go out every night, every single night, for four hundred years, and they find every other living thing inside about thirty feet, and they go down to the base of it and they put formic acid into it, and it dies. "
The heater line glows at the bottom of the garden.
"Everything," Nico says. "Seedlings, saplings, anything with a root.
Doesn't matter what it is, doesn't matter if it's harmless.
And what you end up with is a clearing with one thing alive in the middle of it, in the healthiest soil for a mile, and the tree does great. The tree does incredibly well."
He turns round and looks at me.
"That's my brother," he says. "That's the whole man, giglio. That's not an insult and I'm not warning you. He kills everything around a thing to keep the thing alive, and in thirty-five years he has never managed to explain to one single person why he picked the thing he picked."
I do not say anything.
"They call this place the Devil's Garden," Nico says. "The families do. They've called it that since before I could talk, and they think they're being funny, and they think it's about the men under the."
He stops.
He stops dead, with the bottle in his hand, and he looks at the grass.
"About what," I say.
"Nothing."
"Nico."
"I'm a lot drunker than I look and I'm going to bed," he says, and stands up, and does not go anywhere. "Adelina."
"What."
"Congratulations," my brother-in-law says. "You're the tree."
I sit out there for a long time after he goes in.
At about half past eleven the terrace door opens behind me and I do not turn round, because I know the walk.
Bruna comes and stands next to the balustrade with something over her arm.
"You will get sick," she says.
"I'm coming in."
"You are not coming in. You have said that once already and you did not come in." She puts the thing over my shoulders. "Stand up."
It is a coat.
It is wool and it is heavy and it is the colour of a wet road, and it has a collar that comes up round the back of the neck, and when I stand up and she does the two buttons at the front it fits me almost exactly, which is a thing that has never happened to me in a shop in my life.
There is a mark on the left cuff where somebody once got something on it and got most of it out.
"Bruna."
"It is a coat."
"Whose."
Bruna does the second button and steps back and looks at me.
"Hers," she says.
I stand on a cold terrace in a dead woman's coat.
"I can't."
"You have been out in that garden every evening for nine days in a thing from a rack," Bruna says, "and the wind comes off the water here, and you will be in bed for a week and then who does the boy."
"That's not."
"There are nine coats in a cupboard on the second floor and nobody has opened it since 2003 and they are going to go to nothing." She picks up Nico's bottle off the stone. "A coat that hangs in a cupboard for twenty-four years is not respect. It is just a coat, in a cupboard, going to nothing."
"Does he know you've got them."
"He knows there is a cupboard."
"Bruna. Does he know you're giving me one."
And Bruna Sabbatini, who is four foot ten and who did not speak English at me for the first ninety minutes I was in her kitchen, looks at me in the dark with a bottle in her hand.
"He put the rug from her room in your bedroom the week before you came," she says. "He carried it up himself. He did not ask me, he did not tell me, and he has never mentioned it, and if you say one word about it to him he will have it out of there by Friday."
She goes in.
And I stand there in a coat that fits.
It is forty degrees and I have a cardigan and I do not feel it at all, because I am sitting in the dark of a garden working out that I have got this entirely the wrong way round for two weeks.
I have been thinking of myself as the thing in the cage.
And a man has just sat here and explained to me, in the stupidest possible way, that I am not in the cage, I am the reason there is one, and that everything outside these twelve acres is currently being cleared, by somebody, quietly, at night, in about a thirty foot radius.
I think about eleven men behind six doors.
I think about a linen order and a nebuliser and a lock on a shed.
And at about ten to midnight I get up off the cold stone and go down the path past the pear tree in the dark with my arms folded, because there is one thing on this property that nobody is allowed to touch and I want to look at it.
The heater is on.
The lights are on over the staging.
And the padlock is hanging open on the hasp.