Chapter 14
NAOMI
The safehouse has a lemon garden behind it, six trees in ancient terracotta, still dripping from the storm. That’s where Alessia and I take what’s left of the morning, because after the study neither of us can be in a room with walls that listen.
I’m still hearing it. Nobody warns you that a sound one day short of eleven weeks old can follow you out of a room, down a corridor, into a garden.
Lev’s little machine, the gel cold on my skin, a long minute of static that took years off my life.
He moved the wand in small patient passes, one centimeter, another, his face giving away nothing, Alessia’s grip stopping my blood at the knuckles.
And then, there, unmistakable, impossibly fast, a hummingbird’s business plan, the whir of somebody very small in a very great hurry.
The heartbeat. My passenger has a heartbeat. I heard it in a mafia safehouse study with my best friend crushing my hand, it’s still going in my ears out here under the lemons, and I suspect it never fully stops again.
“So,” Alessia says. She’s sitting on the low wall, peeling an orange from her own crates with surgical violence. “You’re keeping it.”
She says it flat, already knowing. I answer it anyway, because it deserves saying out loud, in daylight, sober, on my feet.
“I’m keeping it.” The words come out and settle into the wet garden like they’ve bought property.
“Yes. Before fear talks me out of it, before logistics talk me out of it, before anyone with a better argument shows up. I decided in a fish plant, if I’m honest. Somewhere around the second interrogation, it stopped being a situation I was managing and started being someone I was hiding. ”
Alessia nods slowly, splits the orange, hands me half without asking. Vitamin C, says the gesture. Sit down, says the gesture. I love you, says the gesture, in the dialect she says it in.
“And the doctor’s terms?”
“You heard him.” Lev, packing his bag, choosing his words the careful way he did everything, that one sentence he left on the table between us like an instrument.
If it endangers you, my silence ends. “It’s fair.
It’s more than fair. He works for a man whose house we’re standing in, and he still drew the line at me. ”
“He put his oath above his boss in his boss’s own corridor.” She eats a segment, staring at the lemon trees. “I nearly liked him. It was upsetting.”
The laugh breaks out of me before I can stop it, and this time I let it run.
The garden’s empty. The trees report to nobody.
Alessia watches me laugh with her fierce face on, the one she wears when she’s decided not to cry, and when I’m done she says, quietly, “You heard the heartbeat and you looked at the door.”
“What?”
“In the study. The little machine found it, it was wonderful, I was crying like an idiot, and you, love, you looked at the door.” She lets that live in the air between us. “The door he was standing behind.”
The orange is suddenly very interesting. Six lemon trees. A wall with weather stains. Anywhere but her face.
“When do you tell him, Naomi?”
“When I know what he does with things he owns.” It comes out too fast, ready-made, a line I’ve been building in some back room of myself since July.
“You saw the gate this morning. You’ve seen the men, the cars, the perimeter.
Everything inside that perimeter belongs to him or works for him or gets protected by him whether it asked or not.
The moment he knows, I stop being a woman who’s here, I start being the mother of a Glazunov, and that’s a title, Alessia, a legal status in a world with no courts.
I need to know which one survives it. Me or the title. ”
“And last night?” Alessia keeps peeling, eyes on the orange. “Which one was in the reinforced room, you or the title?”
The trees drip. Somewhere on the far side of the house a car door closes, male voices, the ordinary machinery of an armed household changing shifts.
“That was me,” I say, finally. “That’s the problem. It keeps being me.”
“And your mother?” Alessia asks, gentler. “When Marina hears any of this, in any order, from anyone but you.”
“I know.” The lemons drip. “She gets it face to face, when it’s safe, when I can say it in a kitchen with the door open. She waited out enough emergencies by telephone for one lifetime. I won’t be another voice on a line telling her to stay calm.”
“She’d like him,” Alessia adds, because she is constitutionally incapable of leaving a wound undressed. “Marina. She’d pretend not to, for a month, on principle. Then she’d like him.”
“That’s what terrifies me.”
“You’re falling.”
“I fell in July.” The orange half is gone. I don’t remember eating it. “This is the part where the ground arrives.”
She doesn’t laugh. She moves over on the wall until her shoulder is against mine. We sit there under someone else’s lemons, two women plus a heartbeat, and she says, “Then we plan for the landing,” which is Alessia’s whole theology in five words.
The practical afternoon arrives in pieces.
At two, the gray one appears in the garden doorway, holds out a phone with the particular neutrality of a man delivering something he expects to be shouted at about, and says the first words he’s ever said directly to me.
“Your number. Your contacts, your photographs, your messages. The crack is gone.”
The phone is new, my whole life cloned into it, and I decide, watching him retreat, to be disturbed about the mechanics of that later, on a day with fewer things in it.
The messages arrive in a landslide. Bianca first, eleven of them, escalating from How was the party to Your location is off, turn it on to a final one, sent at four in the morning, that just says Darling.
Call me or I call the police and my uncle, in that order.
Her uncle isn’t anybody. Her uncle owns a beach bar.
It’s the most frightening threat she has, and she led with the police.
I sit on the wall and blink at it hard for a while.
Alive. Safe. Long story, I type. The party ended weird. I’m resting somewhere quiet for a few days. Don’t call the uncle.
The reply arrives in nine seconds, from a fitting room in Milan, no doubt mid-pin. Define weird. Define quiet. Define somewhere.
Weird, food poisoning officially. Quiet, no wifi for gossip. Somewhere, with a friend.
WHICH FRIEND. Naomi. I know all your friends, I am your friends.
I look up at the house, at the terrace where a man in a dark shirt is standing with a phone to his ear, running a war I ended up inside of.
A new one, I type, and put the phone face down, coward’s tradecraft, learned at my own kitchen table.
Clara’s email is next, and it’s so exactly Clara that it steadies me like a handrail.
Sympathy in the first line, deadline in the second.
Devastated about the oysters, N. Rest completely.
The feature moves to the twenty-eighth, the sidebar can float, send nothing until you’re strong.
Also the tenor’s people called twice, he wants approval on ‘olive oil and spite,’ he’s decided he loves it.
Rest! Somewhere in Positano my career is idling with the engine on, waiting for me to climb back in.
It has no idea, none, that the driver is hiding a heartbeat behind a steel door.
I write four hundred words of the feature on Alessia’s laptop under the lemons, because I am still, whatever else this month has made me, a woman with a deadline, and the constellation deserves its paragraph.
The work steadies me the way it always has, the way it steadied me through the funeral summer, through every airport where a life fell through.
Give me a paragraph to fix and I can survive most things happening around the paragraph.
For an hour the safehouse is just a quiet venue with exceptional security, and I’m just a professional describing a party I attended.
Right up to the paragraph where my notes end mid-sentence in a corridor.
I close the laptop with both hands, a lid on something live.
Lev left me a page of instructions, folded once, in handwriting like a cardiogram.
Prenatal vitamins, the pharmacy dosage. Food, rest, water, the schedule for the follow-up he wants.
His direct number, underlined twice. A list of symptoms with Call me immediately beside them.
It’s the first document of motherhood I’ve ever owned, and it’s written on a bratva doctor’s notepad.
I fold it again, standing in the bedroom that still smells like candle smoke, looking for somewhere it can live.
Not the nightstand, the nightstand is nobody’s.
Not my bag, bags get carried by helpful armed men.
In the wardrobe there’s Alessia’s bag of my clothes from the Serafina, and in it the linen jacket I wore down the coast in another life.
I fold the page into the inside pocket, flat, invisible, then button the pocket over it.
Paper hides better than phones. Paper doesn’t sync to anything. I pat the pocket once, tell it to behave, and hang the jacket at the back of the wardrobe behind a coat.
There’s one call I’ve been circling all afternoon, and the light’s going gold, so I take the phone to the window before the nerve goes.
“Studio Ricci, good evening.”
“It’s Naomi Vale. I have an appointment for next week.” The same pleasant lowered voice on the line, the office that understands its clientele. “I need to cancel it. My plans have changed.”
A pause, kindness fitted into scheduling software, the whole gentle apparatus of the life I’d planned. “Of course, ma’am. Would you like to rebook? The doctor has openings the following week.”
Down in the courtyard, Lev’s gray sedan is long gone, but his number is folded into a jacket pocket behind a coat, underlined twice.
My prenatal care now comes with a confidentiality model rated for organized crime.
The doctor in Sorrento, with her calm that’s practically the specialty, will never meet me, and something about that loss is out of all proportion to its size, a small clean civilian door clicking shut somewhere down the coast.
“No,” I say. “Thank you. I’m being looked after.”
Dinner happens at the long table, all of us, because Alessia has decided that a household eats together or it isn’t one, and nobody in this house is brave enough to appeal.
Twelve armed men on their best behavior, passing her ragù with both hands like communion.
Khristofer at the head, sleeves rolled, watching his organization get domesticated one ladle at a time.
I’m put at Alessia’s right, within passing distance of him, which I choose to believe is seating logistics.
Halfway through, the young one from the gate radio gathers his courage across the table. “Ma’am. The piece on the cliff hotel at Amantea. The one with the funicular.” He’s gone red to the ears. “My mother’s town. She has it cut out, on the wall of the bar. That was you?”
“That was me.”
“The part about the old ticket man.” He looks at his plate, overcome by his own daring. “She reads it to customers.”
“Matvei,” I say, and watch him nearly leave his body at his own name in my mouth, “tell her the ticket man wrote to me. He wants it known he’s still there.”
The table erupts, twelve men suddenly experts on funiculars.
Alessia has stationed the parmigiano at her own elbow like a customs post, and when the gray one formally requests some, she inspects him first, then shaves it for him herself.
“This once,” she says, in the tone of a suspended sentence.
He accepts it the way men accept medals.
“You see how it works now,” Alessia tells the table at large.
“Good behavior, good cheese. This house runs on the same rules as every house.” Under all of it Khristofer passes me the good olive oil without being asked, the way he ordered a drink once in another life.
“The kitchen surrendered unconditionally,” he says, low, just for me.
“The kitchen was outgunned.”
For one hour, pasta, argument, somebody’s terrible joke about Ligurians, the safehouse is a farmhouse, the soldiers are cousins, and the man at the head of the table is just a man whose eyes keep finding mine down the length of it.
It’s the most dangerous hour I’ve spent since the fish plant, and there wasn’t a weapon in sight.
Alessia catches me watching him down the table, says nothing, and moves the parmigiano an inch closer to my plate.
I stand at the window a long time after the call ends.
The valley’s gone violet, the first lights coming up along the far ridge, somebody’s dogs having an argument two farms away.
The terrace below has him on it still, off the phone now, sleeves rolled, hands on the railing, looking down the valley at the sea like it owes him a report.
He stood there at four this morning too.
I heard the terrace door through the steel one, going out, not coming back for a long time.
The evening loosens him one degree at a time, the day coming off his shoulders, and nobody’s watching him but me.
I know from experience exactly how it feels not to know that.
Eleven weeks tomorrow. The word is up in my throat again, the whole sentence, four syllables, I’m pregnant, the simplest copy I’ve ever failed to file.
He promised the doctor waits until I ask. He promised nobody else decides. He has, so far, in his terrifying way, kept every promise he’s made me, which is exactly what I can’t afford to keep learning about him.
I close the shutters before the wanting wins. Behind me the jacket hangs in the dark with its buttoned pocket, keeping my secret the old-fashioned way, and one floor down a man keeps his promises about doors.
That’s the problem with him, I think, getting into a bed that smells like both of us. I’m starting to want mine opened.