CHAPTER FOUR
She’s Family
The call came at ten past two on Sunday morning.
I woke to the phone buzzing on Dante’s nightstand and his voice already low and alert before he’d fully sat up. “Grant. Go.” He listened for perhaps ten seconds, and then he was out of bed and pulling on the jeans he’d left over the chair. “Where’s the girl? Good. Keep her there. I’m coming down.”
“What’s happening?”
“Someone left a voicemail on an old number of Alessandra’s. They said Mia’s name.” He was already at the door. “Stay here.”
I didn’t stay there. I put on my robe and went down the back stairs to the kitchen, and I found the house awake in the particular way it woke for real problems, lights on in rooms that should have been dark, two of Grant’s men at the terrace doors with their hands at their belts, a radio crackling somewhere in the front hall.
Alessandra was at the kitchen table in a sweatshirt, with her phone face down in front of her, shaking so hard her teeth were clicking.
Dante had pulled a chair close beside hers and had one hand flat on the table near hers, not touching her, just there, and he was talking to her in the low, even voice I’d heard him use on the phone with men twice his age who were about to lose a great deal of money.
“Listen to me. Look at me. They have a phone number that you haven’t used since March.
That’s all they have. They don’t know where you are.
Grant has three men on the east side and two on the road, and nobody gets within a hundred yards of this house without us knowing.
Mia is asleep upstairs with Rosa sitting beside her. Do you hear me? She’s asleep.”
“They said her name, Dante. They said her name.”
“I know. I heard it. And tomorrow Grant is going to find out whose voice that is, and then they won’t be saying anybody’s name.”
There was something in his face I had seen only a few times in seven years, a cold, total focus that made the room organize itself around him.
Grant was waiting at the doorway for instructions.
One of the men was holding a tablet with the voicemail file already pulled up.
Dante asked three questions, fast, and got three answers, and gave four instructions without raising his voice, and every person in the kitchen moved.
I loved him like that. I always had. It was the first thing about him I’d ever trusted, back when I trusted nothing else, the sense that in any disaster there was one person in the room who would not panic and would know what to do.
I stood in the doorway in my robe and watched him hold a terrified woman together with nothing but his voice, and I felt the old, uncomplicated pride of being married to him.
Then I heard a thin sound from the back stairs.
Mia was standing halfway down in her yellow pajamas with the gray rabbit clutched against her chest, barefoot, her face white. Rosa was hurrying down behind her. “She woke up and heard the radios,” Rosa said, out of breath. “I’m sorry, I couldn’t stop her.”
Nobody else had seen her. Dante’s back was to the stairs. Alessandra was bent over the table with her hands over her face.
I went to the stairs and sat down on the step below Mia so our faces were level.
“Hey,” I said. “Hi. It’s very loud down here, isn’t it.”
She nodded. Her eyes went past me to her mother at the table and filled.
“Your mom’s okay. She’s just talking to Dante about some grown-up things, and it’s boring, and it’s going to take a while.” I kept my voice low and ordinary. “I was going to make hot chocolate. Do you want to help me? I’m not very good at it. I always burn the milk.”
She thought about it. “You have to stir it.”
“See, I didn’t know that.”
“You have to stir it the whole time.”
“Will you show me?”
She came down the last three steps and let me take her hand, and we went into the pantry end of the kitchen, away from the radios, and I set a small pan on the back burner and gave her the wooden spoon and a step stool to stand on.
She stirred very seriously. The rabbit sat on the counter beside the stove and supervised.
Rosa brought a blanket and put it around Mia’s shoulders and gave me a look of pure gratitude over the child’s head.
“Does the rabbit have a name?” I asked.
“Not yet. I’m deciding.”
“That’s a big decision.”
“He looks like a Gregory,” she said. “But I’m not sure yet.”
By the time the milk was hot, Alessandra had lifted her head and seen us, and I watched her face change, the fear loosening just enough to let something else in. She came over and put her arms around her daughter from behind and put her chin on top of Mia’s head and looked at me over it.
“Thank you,” she mouthed.
I poured three mugs of hot chocolate, one for Mia, one for Alessandra, and one for Rosa, who’d earned it.
I made coffee for Grant’s men. I found the good blankets in the linen closet and brought two for the east wing sitting room, where Alessandra decided she’d sleep on the sofa beside Mia’s door for the rest of the night.
At four in the morning I sat on the floor of the little yellow room and read Mia a book about a family of badgers three times through, because every time I got to the end she said, “Again,” and I didn’t have the heart to stop.
She fell asleep during the third reading with the rabbit’s ear in her mouth.
Alessandra came to the doorway during the second reading and stood there listening.
When I finished and Mia said “Again” for the third time, Alessandra’s mouth twitched.
When Mia finally fell asleep, she came in and knelt by the bed and looked at her daughter’s face for a long moment, and then at me, sitting on the floor with the badger book in my lap.
“Gregory,” she said softly. “She told me in the kitchen. The rabbit’s name is Gregory.”
“After the badger?”
“No. After a boy in her class in Boston who used to share his pretzels.” She sat back on her heels. “She hasn’t mentioned Boston since February. Not once. She mentioned it tonight, to you, while you were burning milk.”
“I didn’t burn it. She wouldn’t let me.”
Alessandra laughed, very quietly, and wiped her eyes with her wrist. “I don’t know how to thank you.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know I don’t have to. I’m trying to anyway.” She looked at me in the dim light from the hall. “Did anyone ask if you were all right tonight? In all of that?”
I didn’t answer. She read the answer in my silence, and something moved across her face, and then Mia stirred, and she turned back to her daughter, and the moment passed.
When I finally came back down to the kitchen at five, it was empty except for Dante, who was standing at the island with a cold cup of coffee reading something on Grant’s tablet.
He looked up. “Where have you been?”
“Reading to Mia. Three times. About badgers.”
“Badgers.” He almost smiled. “Is she asleep?”
“Finally.”
He nodded and went back to the tablet. He didn’t ask if I was all right.
I had been awake since two, and I’d put a child back to sleep, and made hot chocolate and coffee for eight people, and he didn’t ask, because it didn’t occur to him that anything had been asked of me.
I’d simply been there, the way the kitchen was there.
* * *
We slept for three hours. When I came down again at nine, Dante was already in his study with the door closed and Grant inside with him.
We’d agreed on Saturday that he’d sit with me on Sunday morning to finish the seating chart for his uncle Sal’s seventieth, a party for a hundred and eighty people that I’d been planning for two months.
There were two tables I couldn’t solve without him.
His uncle’s business partner, Vito, couldn’t sit anywhere near his former brother-in-law, and I didn’t know enough about the history to know whether “anywhere near” meant the next table or the next room.
At noon Dante came out of the study, and I was waiting in the hallway with the chart.
“I’m sorry,” he said before I could speak. “I know. The seating. Can we do it tonight?”
“You said that about Friday.”
“I know I did.” He rubbed his eyes. “Grant thinks the voicemail came from a cousin of Marcus’s partner. He’s running it down. If it’s who we think, I need to make a call to Providence this afternoon, and that call has to be me.”
“Why does it have to be you?”
He looked at me, surprised. “Because I’m the one they’ll listen to.”
“Not the call. All of it. The meetings, the reports, the voicemail, being in the kitchen at two in the morning. Luca handles half of what the family does without you ever touching it. Grant handles security for three houses. Why does everything to do with Alessandra have to go through you personally?”
“Because she’s family, Vivienne.”
He said it as though it were a complete sentence. As though no other explanation could possibly be needed.
I looked at him. “What does that make me?”
The question confused him. He searched my face as though the answer should have been obvious. “You’re my wife.”
“Right.”
“You’re above family. You always have been.” He said it with real conviction, the way he said things he’d never had reason to question. “Vivienne, come on. You’re the most important person in my life. I don’t understand why that needs saying out loud.”
“Maybe because I haven’t heard it once in five days,” I said, “while I’ve heard her name about forty times, and Mia’s. You’ve sat up two nights in a row with her fears, and last night I sat on the stairs with her daughter and you didn’t know I’d left the room.”
He was quiet for a moment. Something moved across his face, and for a second I thought it had reached him.
He came to me and took my hands, the seating chart crumpling slightly between us. “I’m sorry if it’s felt like that. It’s a lot right now. I know I’m asking a lot of you. It won’t be like this forever. Once Grant finds these people, everything goes back to normal.”
He kissed my forehead. He went back into his study. The door closed.
I stood in the hallway with the seating chart, and after a moment I went upstairs to my office and sat down at my desk, and I understood that I had just been apologized to for how something felt rather than for what had happened, and that I had accepted it, and that I would probably accept it again, because it was easier than pushing into a conversation that neither of us knew how to have.
I solved the seating chart myself. I put Vito at table four and his former brother-in-law at table nineteen, on the opposite side of the dance floor, behind a pillar. It seemed the safest answer.
Dante found the chart on my desk at eleven that night, when he came up from the study. I was already in bed with a book. He stood in the doorway of my office across the hall with the chart in his hand, reading it by the hall light, and then he started to laugh.
“Behind a pillar,” he said.
“It seemed safest.”
“Vito’s going to think it’s a message.”
“It is a message.”
He came and sat on the edge of the bed with the chart still in his hand, shaking his head. “You know Vito tried to have that man’s car towed from Sal’s club in ‘09? For six months. Every week.”
“I know. It’s in column F.”
He looked at me, and for a moment his face was entirely soft, the face I saw on Sunday mornings over the crossword. “You’re scary,” he said. “You know that?”
“You married me.”
“I did.” He leaned over and kissed me, slow, and took the book out of my hands and put it on the nightstand. “I’m sorry about this morning. The chart. All of it.”
“I know.”
He fell asleep an hour later with his arm around me, and I lay there thinking that he was sorry, and that he meant it, and that tomorrow Grant would call and it would happen again, and that both of those things were true at once.
* * *