Chapter 45
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Gemma
Mariela is on her third try at the same story and it's getting worse every time, which is the whole point of a Mariela story.
"So we're in Madrid, right, me and my cousin Rosa, and Rosa says the church is this way.
" Her hands go up, one pointing left, one pointing right, both wrong.
"Two hours, Gem. Two hours we walk. My feet, I could cry.
And then Rosa stops in the middle of the street and she says—" Mariela puts down her fork so she can do Rosa's face, chin up, offended, "—'Mariela, why you didn't tell me we passed it. '"
Luca doesn't laugh, but his mouth has moved a quarter inch and it stays there. For him that's a standing ovation.
"You passed the church," I say.
"Twice." She picks the fork back up and points it at me. "Twice we passed it. There was a man selling churros outside. I remember the man. I remember the churros. Rosa remembers nothing, and to this day she tells people I got us lost."
The mole she made is on my plate and I'm on my second helping, which I didn't ask for because with Mariela you don't ask, food just appears.
The radio plays low on the counter, a ballad, afternoon programming even though it's dark out.
Down the hall the kids are loud in the good way, Camila giving orders, Nina and Diego doing whatever the orders are.
I haven't been inside this building since the night I took Nina out the diner's front door instead of the back.
Three months. I stood on the sidewalk for a minute before we came up, and Luca stood next to me and didn't rush me.
Now I'm in the chair I always sat in, the one closest to the stove, and my body remembered it before I did.
My shoulders came down somewhere around the first bite.
It's normal. That's all it is. Dinner at a neighbor's table with the radio on and the kids down the hall. Eighteen months I lived two doors from this room and I never once thought of it as normal, because nothing was. Now I can feel it. It sits in my chest with a weight I didn't expect.
"Eat," Mariela says to Luca. "You think I cooked for the smell?"
"It's damn good," he says, and eats.
She nods once, satisfied, like a judge who has ruled.
She's been watching him all night without looking like she's watching.
She'll just decide. On the fridge behind her, taped next to Camila's school schedule, there's a photo from San Antonio.
Mariela's mother in a yellow dress, squinting at the sun.
The Guadalupe candle on top of the fridge is burned.
I put my fork down.
"Mariela." My voice comes out even, which surprises me. "I have to tell you something."
Her whole body turns. Not just her face—her shoulders, her hands, everything. "Okay."
"I'm pregnant."
For one second the kitchen is dead quiet.
Then Mariela screams.
Not a small sound. She's up out of her chair, and both her hands slap her own cheeks, and she says something in Spanish so fast I catch nothing except my own name.
Then she's around the table and I'm inside a hug that smells of onions and lavender.
She rocks me side to side. She's laughing and there's water in it.
"Un bebé," she says into my hair. "Gem. Gem. Un bebé."
"Yes," I say, muffled against her cardigan.
"When?"
"Summer. July, they think."
"July." She pulls back to look at me, holds my face in both hands. Her eyes are wet. This woman watched my daughter four nights a week for a year and a half and never asked me a single question I couldn't answer. "July is good. July is warm."
Then she turns on Luca.
He sees it coming. He gets halfway to standing, maybe to shake her hand, and Mariela ignores the hand completely and wraps her arms around all six-foot-one of him.
The sight is priceless. There's no other word.
He stands there with his arms out from his sides like she's wet paint.
This man with tattoos to his jaw and a gun somewhere on him even at dinner, being squeezed by a five-foot-four woman in a thirty-dollar cardigan who is telling him in two languages that he better feed me, that babies need their mothers fed, that she'll know if he doesn't.
His eyes find mine over her shoulder. I don't help him. I sit in my chair and I let the laugh come all the way up, loud, the way I never used to laugh in this building.
Then his arms come down, slow. One hand lands flat on Mariela's back. Careful, like it might be the wrong move, like he's checking the instructions. She pats his chest twice, hard, done with him, verdict rendered.
"Okay," she says, wiping her eyes with her wrist. "Okay. I make more food. You're eating for two, you eat like it's for two—"
"Mama, why are you screaming?"
Camila stands in the doorway with her hands on her hips, Diego behind her, and behind them both, Nina, holding Bear by one arm, looking straight at me.
"What baby?" Nina says.
Luca
Fuck.
Nina stands in the doorway with Camila's doll hanging from one hand, and she's already asked the question.
I watch Gemma decide in real time. Her shoulders drop half an inch and her chin comes up. She's not going to lie to the kid. Good.
"Nina, sweetheart," Gemma says. "Come here."
Nina crosses the kitchen. Camila loses interest and drags Diego back down the hall. The doll goes with them. Nina stops at Gemma's knee and waits.
I move my chair. I set it next to Gemma's and sit, close enough that Nina stands inside the space the two of us make.
Mariela leans against the counter with a dish towel over her shoulder and says nothing, which for Mariela is a decision.
"Okay." Gemma takes a breath. "What would you think if you had a baby brother or a baby sister?"
Nina looks at her mother. Then she looks at me. She takes her time with it, both of us, back and forth, the same look she gave me the first night in my apartment when she decided whether I was a bad guy. My chest goes tight and I hold still.
"Does that mean I would be the big sister?" Nina asks.
"Yes," Gemma says. "You would."
Nina thinks about this. She puts one hand flat on Gemma's knee, which is what she does when she's about to say a thing she's already decided.
"I don't like being the youngest," she says. "So if you change your mind, I don't want a baby."
Mariela breaks. She has to put down the towel to laugh — she grabs the counter with both hands and laughs from her whole body, loud enough that the radio disappears under it. Diego's head appears around the doorframe and vanishes again.
Gemma does not laugh. She takes Nina's hand off her knee and holds it in both of hers, and her face is as serious as she can make it so Nina can believe her.
"Nina. Listen to me. You would be the oldest. Certainly. Forever. Nobody can ever be older than you in this family. That's a rule."
I watch Nina weigh the offer. Terms and conditions.
The smile comes slow and then all at once, and she bounces once on her toes.
"Okay," Nina says. "Where's the baby?"
Mariela wheezes into the towel.
"It's in my belly," Gemma says. "It has to grow first. It comes out in the summer, when it's warm."
Nina bends at the waist and studies Gemma's stomach from a hand's length away, the way she checked the pancake batter for lumps. She doesn't touch. She straightens up, satisfied with whatever she found, and turns to me.
"Is it your baby too?"
The kitchen holds still. Mariela stops laughing. Gemma doesn't rescue me, and she's right not to.
"Yes," I say.
"Okay." Nina nods, filing me somewhere I can't see. "Then you have to stay until it comes out. Babies can't make their own pancakes."
"I know," I say. My voice comes out lower now. "I'm staying."
She pats my forearm twice, the way she patted my shoulder the day I said goodbye to her in the playroom, and then she runs down the hall shouting for Camila that she's going to be a big sister and it's a rule.
Mariela wipes her eyes with the heel of her hand and points at me.
"You heard her," she says. "The child has spoken. Es la ley."
"I heard every damn word," I say.
Gemma's hand finds mine under the table.
Così sia.
Nina hangs off Gemma's hand, heavy-eyed, dragging Bear by one arm. Mariela's voice carries through the closed door behind us, scolding Diego in Spanish about dishes. Gemma looks up at me and smiles. I'm reaching to take Nina's other hand when I see the screen.
Valentino. Ten forty on a Sunday night.
"I have to take this." I step toward the stairwell, and Gemma's smile drops off her face the way it does when she catches the change in mine. She pulls Nina closer to her hip and nods.
I answer. "What."
"Where are you?" Valentino's voice is flat and fast, which means he's moving while he talks.
"Pilsen. Dinner. What happened."
"Someone got into Ava's apartment. She came home and found a package on her kitchen table. Inside the package was a finger."
I stand still and let the words settle. "A finger."
"A human finger. Cut clean, wrapped in butcher paper, tied with string. No note. No name. Nothing else touched in the apartment."
"Whose finger?"
"We don't know yet. It's not fresh." He exhales, and I hear a car door slam on his end. "She called Bruno. First time she's spoken to any of us since she came back. She said four sentences and hung up."
A finger on a widow's kitchen table means somebody walked past her locks like they weren't there. It means somebody wanted her to know they could.
"Where is she now?" I say.
"Still inside the apartment. We sent Liam to pick her up an hour ago. She won't open the door."
"An hour ago." My hand finds the scar on my shoulder through my coat. "Why the fuck hasn't he broken the door already?"
Valentino sighs. It's a long sigh, and Valentino doesn't sigh. "I don't know."
"You don't know."
"Liam is standing in her hallway. He's talked to her through the door. She answers him, so we know she's alive and alone, but she won't come out and she won't let anyone in, and he won't force it." A pause. "He says forcing it makes us the second people to break into her home tonight."
I close my eyes. He's not wrong, and I hate that he's not wrong, because being right doesn't get her out of an apartment somebody already opened once. "Someone got past her locks, Valentino. They can get past them again while your man stands in the hallway being polite."
"He has two men on the street and one on the roof. Nobody gets near the building." His voice tightens. "That's not the problem I'm calling you about."
"Then say the problem."
"Bruno's been on the phone for an hour and he's got nothing. No cameras — they were looped. No prints. The lock wasn't broken, it was picked, and picked well. Nobody's claiming it. No family we're at war with, no debt, no message. Bruno is hunting a ghost, and Bruno doesn't do well with ghosts."
I know what Bruno does with ghosts. He starts turning over everything within reach until the ghost falls out of somewhere, and things break underneath. "Riccardo's been dead three years," I say. "She's been back in Chicago a month. She asked to be left alone. Who even knows she's here?"
"That's the question. The list of people who know is short, and every name on it is family." He lets that sit for a second, and it sits ugly. "Bruno wants everyone in tomorrow morning. Nine. That includes you."
Down the hall Gemma has crouched to Nina's level, zipping her coat, saying quiet things I can't hear. Nina yawns into Bear's head.
"I'll be there," I say. "If Ava's not out of that apartment by midnight, call me. I'll go open the door myself and she can hate me for it
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