Chapter Seven #2
Three years, she'd lived like this. Three years of flinching at a particular knock, of keeping the chain on even during the day, of doing the math on rent a week before it was due because being a day late meant a visit, and a visit meant standing very still in her own doorway being told how patient he was being, how understanding, how not every landlord would put up with a single mother, while his eyes stayed on her a beat too long, the way a man looks at something he believes he's owed and is simply waiting to collect.
She had never told anyone how small that made her, not even Stephanie.
She'd folded it up and carried it the way she carried everything, so it wouldn't become one more thing Louis had to be brave about.
Not once had she let herself think the actual word for what it was. She let herself think it now, standing in the doorway with Valerio's fury a live thing beside her.
Fear. That was what three years under this roof had actually been.
"It's warmer than it looks," Louis said quickly. "And the water stain is Australia. We named the spider in the bathroom. Mama makes the best rice in the world on that stove."
"The rice is legendary," Aislinn confirmed, aiming for bright and reaching at least dim. "And the commute is wonderful, the bus stop is right—"
Someone started banging on the door.
Not knocking. Banging, fist-first, the whole cheap door jumping in its frame.
"Open up, it's me! Open up, I know you're in there!"
Louis paled. "The landlord."
His name was on the list. Aislinn knew it was on the list; she'd seen it in the pencil columns, third from the top, with dates.
Valerio set down the one-eared rabbit he had, for the past minute, been holding with unexplained care, and his voice, when it came, had gone somewhere cold enough to keep meat.
"Let me handle this."
GUMWOOD HAD BEEN GOOD to her. That was the thing nobody appreciated. Hadn't he been good to her?
Three years that woman had lived under his roof, three years of him being patient about the rent when he didn't have to be, well, patient enough, a few days here and there, and did she think other landlords would do that?
For a single mother? With a kid who stared at you like a little judge?
Other landlords would've had her out on the street.
Gumwood had let her stay. Gumwood had come by, personally, to check on things.
Fixed her sink once. Well, looked at it.
He'd looked at a lot of things over three years, the way she came up the stairs tired with her hair falling down, the way she smiled at everyone, even him, especially him, a smile like that wasn't free, a smile like that was a down payment on something, and Gumwood had waited, patient, generous, three years of layaway on a woman who owed him.
And then today.
Today he'd watched from his window as a limousine, an actual limousine, poured her out onto his sidewalk along with the kid and a man.
The kind of man who got out of limousines.
The kind with a suit worth more than Gumwood's truck and a face like the last thing you see, and she'd walked up those stairs with him, into the building Gumwood owned, laughing at something, laughing, and something in Gumwood's chest had been drinking since four o'clock and now it stood up.
She was his. That was just a fact of the building, like the plumbing. Everyone knew it. He'd waited three years.
He took the stairs loud on purpose and hit the door with the heel of his fist.
"Open up, it's me! Open up, I know you're in there!"
The door opened.
It wasn't her. It was the suit, filling the doorway top to bottom, jacket still perfect, not even a tie loosened, looking down at Gumwood with all the concern of a man reading a menu with nothing on it he wanted.
"Where's my girl?" Gumwood demanded.
"Are you talking about my wife?"
"She's not married—"
"Then are you talking about my wife?"
Same words. Same voice. Gumwood's brain slid off the sentence twice, and the sliding made him angrier than anything had all day, and he did what he'd been wanting to do since the limousine, he swung.
The suit wasn't there anymore. He'd moved the way expensive things move, no hurry in it anywhere, and Gumwood's fist hit doorframe, and the pain came up his arm like electricity while the man watched him with those pale eyes and spoke as though continuing a conversation from earlier.
"You should apologize, promise not to hurt anyone again, and I'll let you go. But only if you swear you mean it."
"I'll teach you how to apologize to me."
Another swing. Another glide, smaller this time, insulting in its smallness, like stepping around a puddle.
"One last chance."
And Gumwood, three years patient, four hours drunk, and one limousine humiliated, reached behind him and pulled the knife he kept for exactly no occasions like this one.
"I'm going to kill you."
Something changed in the doorway then. Nothing moved, that was the horror of it, nothing moved at all, and yet the temperature of the man went somewhere Gumwood's body understood before his brain did, the way animals understand weather.
"Don't say I didn't warn you."
Gumwood charged.
Behind the apartment door, Louis heard the crash of a body hitting the landing wall and did what seven-year-olds do when they've been told to stay put. He went to look.
His hand was already on the doorknob when the fight ended.
It ended in one motion, fast and almost beautiful, a single clean arc that took Gumwood's legs out from under him mid-swing and left him folded against the banister before the sound of the impact had finished traveling down the stairwell.
By the time the door actually opened, there was nothing left on the landing to see but a man asleep on the floor in a posture no sober person achieves by accident, and Valerio straightening his cuffs like he'd just finished signing a document.
"Papa? What happened?"
"Your landlord," Valerio said, smooth as silk, not a hair out of place, "is extremely intoxicated."
Louis studied the body with the clinical interest he brought to all evidence. "He's not snoring. Don't drunk people snore?"
"Only the amateurs." Valerio's voice stayed easy, unbothered, already herding the moment back toward normal. "Don't imitate this man, Louis. Excessive, uncontrollable drinking doesn't make a good man, or a conscious one. Remember that."
"...Okay." Louis considered this with real seriousness, the way he considered all adult wisdom, and tucked it away for later use. "Should we call an ambulance?"
"Someone will attend to him. Go on back inside now, and shut the door for your mother."
Louis went, satisfied, and the door clicked shut behind him.
MINUTES LATER, VALERIO Le Sabre walked back toward the stairs, rolling his shoulders once inside a suit that had declined to wrinkle.
His knuckles were split and painted red, and none of the blood was his, and on his way to the steps he stepped over the unconscious body on the landing with the mild attention of a man avoiding a hose left on a lawn.
Upstairs, the door flew open before he reached it, and the two of them were on him at once, both crying, both trying to check him for damage in overlapping layers, small hands and smaller hands, and he stood in the doorway of the worst apartment he'd ever seen and let the two best things in the world pat him down like airport security.
"I'm alright," he said. "No one will ever hurt you again."
"But you won't go to prison?" Louis asked, tears still on his face and logistics already back online.
Valerio almost smiled. This was really his son. "No, I won't go to prison."
"But what about the landlord?"
"Don't worry about him."
And while Aislinn pressed her face against his ruined knuckles and Louis relocated the one-eared rabbit to the safety of his backpack, Valerio stood very still and replayed, behind his eyes, the last few minutes on the landing.
The part they hadn't seen. The part where the man had stopped being able to stand, and Valerio had crouched down to his level, taken a fistful of his collar, and asked the only question that mattered.
"Did anyone ask you to do this?"
"No."
He'd watched the answer come out of what was left of the man, too broken for invention, and he'd seen that it was true, and he'd hit him once more anyway, and the landlord had gone out like a cheap bulb.
No conspiracy, then. No one behind it. That was the thing about bullies that no one wanted to believe. They didn't need instructions. They simply knew who to target, always, with a nose for it, and they chose one of two kinds. The ones who reminded them of their old selves.
Or their complete opposites. The kind they could never be.
Aislinn Tyndale had spent eight years surrounded by people who would never, in any life, be anything like her.
Inside his jacket, folded once against his heart, Louis's list had four names left on it.