Chapter 16 #3
Near midnight, the candles guttering and the dancing gone to the slow drunk end of itself, I leaned into Tonio in the dark of the garden and said it, the baker’s reflex that no amount of being served all day could kill.
Ten minutes. Just to see it whole. I’d been gone from my shop one full day, the longest in a year, and the not-knowing had a hook in me, and I wanted to lay eyes on the green glass and the green letters and know it was standing.
He looked at me a long moment, the soldier flickering behind his eyes, and then the indulgence won the way it wins with him, the man who lets me reach for the plate before he tells me to sit, and he said ten minutes and got the car.
The block was dark and quiet.
The drive over had been nothing, the city slid past empty and cold, and Tonio’s hand stayed on my knee the whole way and his eyes stayed on the mirrors.
I’d had visions of the shop in tatters, in flames, destroyed.
There had been a Caruso soldier watching the place all day, but even so, my mind went to a dark place.
We turned onto my street and the headlights swept the dead asphalt and the closed shutters of the block Gianni’s people had bullied one tired owner at a time, and then they found Filoxenia.
Whole. Intact. The new green glass unbroken, FILOXENIA across it in the deep paint Tonio had lettered with his own hands one slow afternoon, the curve of the F still a little wrong, all of it standing in the dark exactly as I’d left it.
My chest loosened.
I felt it go, the day’s last held thing, the hook coming out. “See,” I said to myself. “See. Nothing happened. You worried for nothing. It’s standing. It’s fine.”
“Wait.” Tonio’s hand came out across me, low, a bar. His voice was careful. “Let me look first. Stay—”
But I was already out of the car.
I was lit up from the inside, that’s the truth of it, drunk on prosecco and joy and the old don’s hands and a future I’d let myself have for one held breath, and I had my key out and I was crossing the cold sidewalk to my own door because it was mine and it was standing and I’d been afraid for nothing all day, and I heard Tonio’s door open hard behind me and his voice—Katerina, wait—and I didn’t wait.
Olimpo got there first.
He’d come out of the car ahead of all of us, the great grizzled shape of him moving with that surprising fast he keeps under the heaviness, and he reached the threshold of my shop a stride before I did, the doorway he’d claimed for weeks, the doorway he slept across and grumbled in and inconvenienced everyone from—
And he locked up.
All four legs went stiff. The hackles came up the whole ridge of his back, orange roan bristling, and a sound came out of him I had never once heard in all the weeks he’d lain in my kitchen judging me—not the grumble, not the verdict, a low rolling thing from somewhere deep in his chest, ancient and certain and afraid, and he would not go through the door.
He who had claimed that doorway as his own.
He planted himself at the edge of it and refused, his amber eyes fixed on the dark of my shop, and the low sound climbed.
“Olimpo?” My key stopped an inch from the lock. “What—”
Then the smell hit me.
Wrong. So wrong. Heavy and sweet-sharp and chemical, nothing like the orange-blossom and butter and woodsmoke that hit you at my door like a wall—this was the opposite of that, the anti-smell, pouring out under the door and through the seams of the frame, the whole shop swimming in it, my whole warm bright shop drowned in something that caught at the back of my throat and made the world tilt.
Gas. The shop was full of gas.
“Tonio—” I got his name out and that was all.
His voice changed.
I’d heard the soft-steel. I’d heard the wall come up. I had never heard this—a roar that was pure command and pure terror at once, a soldier’s voice, his brother’s voice, his father’s, fifteen years of the life in it.
“OUT—out, get OUT—”
His arm slammed across my chest, the whole length of his forearm, and he had me off my feet and turning, dragging me back from the door, the key flying out of my hand, Olimpo’s low sound breaking into a single sharp bark—
And the door swung.
I don’t know if it was the wind of him pulling me, or the latch I’d half-worked, or nothing at all.
But it swung, and somewhere in the dark of my drowned shop there was a click—small, ordinary, the click of a thing closing a circuit, the click of a fridge motor kicking on or a timer or a spark where no spark on God’s earth should ever be in a room swimming in gas—
And the world turned to white.
White and a sound that wasn’t a sound, that was bigger than sound, that came up through the soles of my feet and the bones of my chest and the teeth in my head all at once, and a wall—a wall of heat, the heat of every oven I’d ever lit multiplied past sense, a hand the size of the building—and it lifted me off my feet.
I left the ground.
That’s the last thing I had in order. Tonio’s arm across my chest and the green letters and the white and the heat and the ground gone out from under me, the whole street tipping, the cold air full of fire and the deep green paint and a hundred years of my father’s dream coming apart in the air around me—
And then nothing.
Nothing but ringing.
A high, flat, endless ringing where the world’s noise used to be, the whole of hearing pressed down into one thin scream of tone, and under it, far down, muffled, like sound coming through deep water—something. A voice, maybe. My name, maybe.
The ground was against my cheek.
Cold and gritty and wrong, the sidewalk, my own sidewalk, the dead asphalt I’d swept a thousand times, and my eyes wouldn’t quite focus, the dark all gone orange and shuddering at the edges, heat on my back, and the ringing, and the smoke pouring across the ground low and thick into my open mouth.
Tonio.
Somewhere. The voice under the ringing was him, I knew the shape of it even broken, even drowned, even through the scream in my ears—Tonio, somewhere in the orange dark, shouting my name, Katerina, Katerina, the sound of a man crawling toward something he can’t reach—
And then hands.
Hands closed around my arms.
Not his. I knew it the way I know a wrong note in the dough, the way I know a man casing my room, the cold animal that had gone quiet all day coming up screaming too late—these hands were wrong, gloved, hard, gripping under my arms and hauling me up off my own sidewalk and back, away from the fire, away from the broken green letters, away from the voice still shouting my name in the smoke—
Hands that weren’t his, closing around me, dragging me into the dark.