CHAPTER 24 #3
I wash her hair. I undo the knot at her nape and her auburn comes down into the water in two long ribbons.
I lift the back of her neck on my left palm.
I pour water over her hair with my right.
I rinse with the rain-head above the tub.
The water runs through her hair. The copper drains slowly because the drain is original to 1907.
I don't speak Italian in the bath. The Italian was for the bed. The bath is for the hands.
She is at the surface of sleep by the time I lift her out.
I have known this would happen because I know her by the breath now.
I wrap her in a heavy white towel from the bath warmer and I dry her in the order I undressed her — her hair first, her shoulders, her arms, her torso, her hips, her thighs, her feet — and I leave the medallion on her chest because the medallion stays.
The chain is wet but the silver is fine.
The hairline crack on the angel's wing catches the brass-cone lamp.
I lift her against my chest again. I carry her back to the bed.
I lower her onto the bed and I take my lab coat from the hook beside the bedside table — the heavy white research-wing coat, longer and thicker than the surgical coats; the left pocket carries the silk and the Naples notebook still — and I wrap her in the coat.
The coat is the size of her and a half again.
The cuffs fall past her hands. The hem comes to her thighs. I roll the cuffs once each.
I draw the cashmere blanket up to her shoulders over the coat. I sit on the bed beside her. I lean against the headboard. I lift her head onto my thigh.
She is asleep before I have finished arranging her hair on my knee.
I sit. I don't move for a long time.
The notebook is on the floor by the lower brass rail where I dropped my coat earlier.
I lift it now and place it on my left thigh beside her head.
The leather is soft from forty years of a Sicilian's hand.
I open it to the page I have read four times in the last forty-eight hours.
The capo's handwriting is small and slanted and Sicilian-Italian and the ink is a dark brown that was black when he was alive.
I learned the script in the cell next to him.
The line I have been reading is this: Non diventare ciò che siamo. Do not become what we are. Diventa ciò che ti hanno chiesto di essere. Become what they have asked you to be. Sii il muro. Be the wall.
The capo's name is not in the notebook. The capo is the man on my wing; the capo is the architecture I learned from.
He will be dead by morning Naples time — I do not know it yet on the page; I will know it by Stefan's cable in the morning.
The morning is six hours away on the bedside table where the yellow pencil lies parallel to the brass lamp's base.
The page in my pocket will be his last instruction. I will be the wall.
I close the notebook. I put it on the bedside table on top of the yellow pencil. I rest my left palm flat on the headboard above her head — fingers slightly spread, the architect's tell — and I sit. I make no tally. I hold. I hold.
The Naples cell taught me that a body is not a prison. It is a wall, a door, a span. I asked her body to hold tonight. It held. I asked her to tell me what it needed. She told me. I gave it what it needed.
At zero-four hundred I am still sitting.
Her head is on my thigh. Her cheek is the color of bread.
Her left wrist — I lifted it from under the coat ten minutes ago and I checked it — has a faint pink line at the inside, fading; the silk was kind.
The medallion at her sternum has risen and fallen and risen with her breathing for six hours.
The cardigan is folded on the chair by the window.
The yellow pencil is on the bedside table. The Naples notebook is on top of the pencil. The silk strap is on top of the notebook, folded back into its precise rectangle. The order of objects is the order of objects in the room I have been building for her.
I think of him. The Sicilian. The man on my wing. The hand that wound a watch on a thumb. I don't know yet that he is dead. He is alive on the bedside table in the page he left me. He will be dead by zero-six hundred when Stefan's cable comes.
Her hand under the coat finds the hem and grips it once in her sleep. The grip is reflexive — the kind of thing the body does to confirm it is in the room it chose. The coat is mine; the body in it is hers; the wall is the wall.
I have decided what to do with the rest of my life.
I have decided to do it with her. I am not going to tell her tonight.
I am going to tell her last because I have been waiting four years to tell her and I want the architecture to be finished first. Tonight is one wall.
Tomorrow is another. The brownstone is the third. The greenhouse is the roof.
I lower my left hand from the headboard to the back of her neck. The skin there is the warmest of any place on her. I rest my palm against it. She makes a sound in her sleep that is not a word. I let my eyes shut.
Elena.
I don't say it aloud.
She sleeps.