CHAPTER SIXTEEN #2
“They told me to shred the whole box. I shredded the whole box.” She pulled the rubber band off. “Then I stood there with my hand in the bin and I took one thing back out of it, and I have not slept a whole night since.”
It was a photograph. Black and white, square, with a white border, the surface thicker and slicker than anything that comes out of a machine now, and cool when I put my thumb on the edge of it.
I took Nonna’s loupe out of my inside jacket pocket and set it on the emulsion.
A young woman on a sidewalk in a belted coat, laughing at somebody standing off to the left of the camera. Dark heavy hair pinned up off her neck. The Russo jaw that skipped my mother and came to me.
“That’s my grandmother.”
“I thought it might be. That’s why I took it.”
She was twenty-three years old in that picture.
There was a date printed along the bottom margin in the little serif type they used, and the year was nineteen sixty-one, and beside her, close enough that his sleeve touched hers, stood a silver-haired man in a charcoal overcoat with his hands behind his back.
I moved the loupe half an inch and stopped breathing in a way I did not decide to do.
“He hasn’t changed. Not the coat, not the face, nothing.”
“Who hasn’t?”
“The man who signed for the delivery,” I said. “Except he didn’t sign. You just told me that.”
“Honey, that picture’s older than I am.”
“I know how old it is.”
I did not answer anything else she asked me for a while. I was working the loupe down Rosalba’s arm, because her left hand hung open at her side, palm out, caught partway through a gesture she never finished.
Straight across it, from the pad under her thumb to the heel of her hand, there was a thin white line.
I turned my own left hand over on the table beside the photograph and opened it.
“Her paring knife,” I said. “Her kitchen. I was nine. She called the cut a promise and wouldn’t tell me who she’d made it to.”
Corinne looked at my palm and then at the picture and then back at my palm, and did not follow any of it, and did not pretend to.
“That’s the same mark,” she said slowly. “That’s the same mark in the same place.”
“It is.”
“Is that a family thing? Is that some kind of—”
“The woman who took the case off me in that tower has this exact hand.”
Corinne’s coffee had a skin on it by then. She put two fingers on the rim of the cup and did not lift it.
“There was a Frenchwoman,” she said. “On the confirmations. Never a phone number, just the name typed under the stamp. Mireille—”
“Don’t say her name in this house.”
My grandmother had kept a plan from me. So had my dispatcher. I no longer knew where one ended and the other began.
I sat in that cracked chair with a dead woman’s hand under glass and I understood that luck had never had anything to do with it.
There had been a plan in nineteen sixty-one and a plan in a dispatch office on Tuesday, and I had walked the whole route between them like a woman who thought she was choosing her own turns.
“There were twelve orchids in that office and every one of them was dead, and I stood there thinking it was a decorating problem.”
“I don’t know what that means, honey.”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t either.”
Her phone went off face up on the table between us. The screen lit with a number and no name over it, and it rang four times while neither of us said anything, and she reached out and turned it over and left her fingers on the back of it.
“That’s been happening,” she said.
“Since when.”
“Thursday. It’s four, five a day now, there’s nobody on it, and there’s never a message.” She didn’t turn it back over. “I don’t pick it up. I can’t. I won’t.”
I put the routing sheet in my inside pocket, folded once, and the photograph flat in a document sleeve beside Nonna’s loupe, and I stood up.
She stayed sitting. She did not ask me to forgive her and she did not ask what would happen to her, and I did not offer her either one, and that is the part I am going to have to carry.
At the door she pressed the butterscotch dish at me a second time and I took one and put it in my pocket.
The wind had shifted. It came straight down the row now and I went into it with my head down and my hand over the pocket with the photograph in it, and Marcus’s car was exactly where it had been two hours ago, with him behind the wheel and the door of that house still centered in his windshield.
He had not sent me a single message. There was a wolf somewhere across this city who would have called eleven times, and a pack of cigarettes on Marcus’s dash he had not opened.
The gray sedan was gone off the block. I stood on the curb long enough to be sure of it, counting the parked cars down to the alley mouth and back, and my legs were doing something under me that had nothing to do with the wind.
He had his elbow up on the sill and I stood in that cold looking at the shape of him like a woman with nothing else going on. My body had filed the sheet with my name in the box and moved on to the line of his shoulder. I would have words with it later.
He leaned across and pushed my door open.
He had to come most of the way over the console to do it, and his arm was through the space where I was about to sit, and neither of us moved for a beat longer than the door required. I got a lungful of him leaning through it, cold air and panther under it.
“Seatbelt.”
That was all. Not what she wanted, not what she said, not why my hands were shaking on the buckle. He put the car in gear and took us off Fell Street with the sun coming flat through the windshield.
He did not point us back at the Forge. He went east and then south through a dozen turns I would not have picked, and when I asked where we were going he said there was a car that had been behind us since Fell Street.
I wanted somebody to make her pay for it. Not the man in the office. Her. She had put her boy in front of my name and chosen the way any mother chooses, and I sat in that car and wanted it taken out of her anyway. I did not talk myself out of it. Marcus drove and said nothing about my face.
“The receiving code on Thursday’s notice,” I said. “It ends in nineteen. The crate weight on Corinne’s carbon is nineteen kilos too.”
Marcus glanced at me. “And?”
“That suffix belongs to a return cage. Not a warehouse. I’ve delivered there. The first digit on the notice has been changed, so it looks like an off-site reservation.”
“Which cage?”
“The public one behind Bex’s bar.”
He pulled over long enough to call his clerk. When he put the phone away, neither of us wanted to say how close that was.
After a while I opened the document sleeve in my lap and slid the photograph out to look at her one more time.
On the back, in my grandmother’s handwriting, was a second name. Mine.
The photograph had been taken in 1961. The ink on the back was blue-black, not brown, and beneath my name she had added another date.
1997.
A year before I was born.