CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
ADELINA
The chapel is colder than outside.
I do not know how a building manages that and I have never worked it out since. There are eleven seats and a plain window at the east end with nothing in it, and there is a man sitting in the second row in his coat in the dark with something small in his hand.
I sit down next to him.
Not behind. Next to. I sit down on the seat that Bruna sat on at my wedding and I put my hands in the pockets of his mother's coat, and neither of us says anything for about two minutes.
"You should be asleep," he says.
"I woke up and you weren't there."
"I've been in here since half three."
"I know." I look at the window. "You always sleep on your back and you don't move, and at some point you stop being there, and I've got used to it, which is a stupid thing to have got used to in four weeks."
He turns the thing over in his hand.
It is the ring. I do not have to look at it.
"I came out here to say one thing," I say.
"Say it."
"It isn't the thing from last night. I'm not going to say that one again for a while, because you asked me not to and because you might have been right and I have not finished working it out."
"All right."
"It's this." I keep my hands in the pockets.
"Whatever happens at that table today, when you come home, I am going to be in the kitchen.
That is the entire thing I came out here to say.
You are going to come up that drive at some time between four and eight o'clock and there is going to be somebody in the kitchen, and that is not a promise about anything else, it's not about last night, it's not about the shed. It's a fact about a room."
Salvatore Marchetti sits in the second row of his own chapel at four in the morning.
"That's not a small thing," he says.
"I know it isn't."
"Adelina."
"Don't thank me," I say. "If you thank me I'll have to leave."
We sit there for a while longer.
And then he says, "Come outside," and stands up, and goes out through the chapel door into the dark, and I follow him, and I know before we are ten feet down the path where we are going.
He takes me to the east wall.
It is quarter to six and the light is coming.
Not properly. That grey that is not colour yet, where the shapes come back before anything else does, and there is frost on the grass and on the top of the low box along the path, and the roses along the east wall are done now.
Two left at the south end, brown at the edges.
The rest is hips and thorn and last year's wood.
He stops about halfway along.
"How many?" he says.
"Sorry?"
"Along this wall. How many plants."
I count them, because he has asked me to and because I have been up this wall with secateurs three times a week for a month and I would know it in the dark.
"Nineteen," I say.
"Nineteen. My mother put fourteen of them in in 1993 and the other five went in in the spring of 2010."
The light comes up another degree.
"Okay," I say.
"There are six men under this wall," Salvatore says.
The frost creaks somewhere when the light gets to it. That is a real thing. Nobody ever mentions it and it happens every morning in November.
"Six," I say.
"Six. They went in between the fourth of March 2010 and the ninth of May 2010, and there are five new roses because the ground was disturbed and it had to look like something, and Bruna bought them from a place on Glen Cove Road and paid cash."
I stand on a frozen path in a dead woman's coat.
"Who were they," I say.
And he tells me.
He does not look at me and he does not soften it and he does not put one single word in it that is there to make me feel better about him, which I have now understood is the only way he knows how to be kind, and it takes about four minutes.
Six men came into a house in Oyster Bay on the fourteenth of November 2002.
His mother was in the kitchen. He was eleven years old and he was under the sink in the cupboard with the pipe against his shoulder, because she had put him there about ninety seconds before, and he stayed in it.
They were not there for her.
That is the part he says twice. They were there for his father, who was not in the house, and who was in Atlantic City, and who came back on the Saturday and buried his wife on the Tuesday and lived another four years and never once said her name in front of either of his sons.
Nico was two years old and asleep upstairs and they did not go up.
"And in 2009," Salvatore says, "I was eighteen, and I had a name, and then I had two, and by the February of 2010 I had all six, and it took fourteen months, and I did it on my own and I did not tell one single person I was doing it, including the man I had already sworn to."
"Including Barone."
"Especially Barone."
"Say their names," I say.
He turns his head.
"What?"
"You know them. You've got them. You say them to yourself in the car, don't you, that's the thing you do, that's why Tommaso sits and waits.
" I have my hands out of my pockets now.
"So say them here. Out loud. Standing on top of them.
Because I have been walking up and down this wall with a bucket for a month and I would like to know whose garden I've been in. "
Salvatore looks down the wall.
And he says them.
"Vito Aiello. Gaspare Aiello, his brother.
Renato Console. Michele Falvo. Aldo Trapani.
" He stops. "And Peppino Vasta, who drove, who was nineteen, and who came into that kitchen and cried in front of four grown men and was told to wait in the car, and who is under the ninth one from the south end. "
The light comes up.
"Nineteen," I say.
"Nineteen."
"Same as."
"Yes," he says.
Here is what I do not do.
I do not run. I want to be very honest about that because I have thought about it a great deal since and there is a version of a woman standing on a frozen path at six in the morning being told that she has been deadheading a grave for a month, and that woman goes up that path and takes her brother and gets in a car.
I do not move at all.
And I would like to say it is because I am brave, and it is not that.
It is because I am standing next to a man who has just told me the worst thing about himself, unprompted, at dawn, five hours before he goes into a room where they are going to ask him a question, and who has not once tried to arrange any of it so that it lands softly.
Nobody has ever done that to me either.
My father spent twenty-three years arranging things so they landed softly and every single one of them was a lie.
"Does Nico know?" I say.
"No."
"Does Tommaso?"
"He knows there were six and he knows they are not walking around. He does not know where."
"So nobody."
"Bruna knows," Salvatore says.
I have to put my hand on the wall.
"Bruna."
"She was in the house in 2002. She was in the pantry and she stayed in the pantry because my mother made her, and she has never said one word about that night to me or anybody else in twenty-four years.
" He puts his hands in his pockets. "And in the spring of 2010 she came out here at four in the morning with a torch and stood at the end of this wall and did not ask me one question, and in May she drove to Glen Cove Road and bought five roses with her own money. "
The sun is actually up now. You can see the colour of the brick.
"She's been watering them," I say.
"Every summer since. Sixteen years."
"Salvatore, she's seventy-one."
"I know how old she is."
And I stand on a path at six in the morning and think about a small furious woman in a housecoat carrying a can up and down forty feet of wall in the heat every summer for sixteen years, on her own, with nobody to say it to, and about the way she took a towel off a chair and dried my hair with it in a study in the middle of the night without being asked.
"That's why the family call it that," I say. "The Devil's Garden. It's not a joke about him."
"They think it's a joke."
"They think it's a joke because if they knew it was true they'd have to do something about it," I say. "You let them say it."
"Yes."
"For sixteen years you have let two hundred men in this city call your mother's garden that, and every single one of them thinks they're being clever."
"Yes," says Salvatore.
We stand there until the light is properly up.
And I do the only thing I can think of, which is that I take my hand off the wall and put it into his coat pocket and find his hand in it, and he does not move for a second, and then his fingers come round mine and shut.
"I'm not going to say anything about it," I say.
"You don't have to say anything about it."
"No, I mean I'm not going to say anything about it. Not now, not in a week. I don't have anything. There isn't a sentence." My throat is doing something. "You were sixteen."
"Adelina."
"You were eleven and you stayed in the cupboard, and you have been paying for that for twenty-four years, and there are six men under a wall and a woman of seventy-one with a watering can and nobody has ever once said out loud that you were twenty."
He does not answer me.
He stands on a frozen path in his own garden at six in the morning holding his wife's hand in his coat pocket, in front of nineteen roses, and he does not answer me, and that is fine, and I do not need him to.
And then, from the house, through a window somebody has left open at the top of the east stairs, in the still air of a cold morning:
A cough.
I have been listening for that sound since I was fourteen years old.
It is not the wet one and it is not the one that means nothing. It is the short one, three of them together, tight at the top, and then the gap.
I am already running.