CHAPTER EIGHT
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MARY
The door was still opening when Danny came up out of the folding chair with both hands out.
“Mary. Oh, God. Mary.”
Before that door there was a corridor, and before the corridor, the floor.
Bogdan drove us in from the Perch through squalls that came every twenty minutes, the palms along Biscayne Boulevard bent over like they were being told something. Ninety-one degrees on the display. Then the service way, and a building with no weather in it, which is the point of the Coliseum.
I looked at it the way I look at somebody else’s kitchen.
Gold laurel wreaths in the carpet, worn colorless along the path to the cage.
Cashier windows down the south wall, printers running, men in half sleeves writing down what I could not read.
A slot paid out behind me, a small bright emergency nobody ran toward.
Everything in that building gets written down twice. I filed the room without knowing what for.
Behind the cage was a coded door, and behind it a corridor the color of a filing cabinet, and Nicolas Varela standing in it with the cage manager.
“—and the marker file stays in the credit office till you say different,” Hector Ruiz was saying. “It’s two rooms from where he’s sitting. Nobody’s been near it.”
Nicolas put his right hand up and Ruiz stopped mid-word. Two women went by with cash trays and found somewhere else to look.
I had asked Luca yesterday and he had not promised me anything. Bogdan came to the elevator at half past two, I got in the car, and the answer turned out to be a hallway with flour in my sneakers.
“Let me take him with me today,” I said. “He goes where I go. I’ll be responsible for him.”
“No.”
My ears went hot before I had finished hearing it, and my palm was flat on the wall.
“That’s it? Just no?”
“You asked me a question. I answered it. You’d rather I dressed it up, and I’m not going to.”
“Dress it up for me, then. I’ll wait right here,” I said.
Nicolas Varela did not move, which in that hallway was its own sentence.
“He’s still in our custody. You’re not taking responsibility for him again today.”
I said, “That’s not a reason. That’s a receipt.”
Behind him a framed license hung on the wall, state seal, a name printed under it that is also the name on the contract I signed.
That is my answer to anybody who asks about the police.
The debt is real, my living in my grandmother’s shut bakery is not legal, and the board that renews that license has him on it.
“He’s twenty-six years old and he weighs nothing and he is sitting in a room in this building with a coded door on it,” I said. “Give me one day. I’ll have him back here at eight in the morning and you can count his fingers.”
“You’d have him six hours.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do. So do you. That’s why you said today and not tomorrow.”
He was right, and he said it in a cook’s voice reading a thermometer.
I was relieved, and I want the word left as it is. A man had said no to Danny for me, and I have never once managed to say it myself.
“You want a thank you,” I said. “You’re not getting one—not for the corridor, not for the coded door, and not for arranging this without telling me.”
“I know,” he said.
“I want that clear before I’m in there.”
“We’re clear. Ruiz will walk you out when you’re done.” He was already turning away down the corridor. “Don’t give your brother anything to carry.”
“He’s my brother.”
“That’s why Ruiz heard it,” Nicolas said, and he was gone.
Rian was holding up the wall by the second door, arms folded, taking up most of the hallway. My hands had started up again, so I put them under my arms.
“Shaking’s fine. You can shake. Just don’t do it where they can price it.”
“I’m not shaking,” I said.
Rian nodded once. “Okay.”
I looked at the coded door, then at his boots, because I was not looking at his face.
“Are you coming in with me?”
Rian did not unfold his arms. “I’ll be in the door.”
“That’s the same as coming in. You could stand somewhere that isn’t a doorway. There’s a whole hallway out here and you’re welcome to any part of it.”
“There is,” Rian said. “I’ve looked at it.”
He reached past me and put the code in without reading the keypad.
“You didn’t look at that keypad.”
“No.”
“You’ve stood at this door enough times to have it in your thumb, and you’d have let me not notice.”
Rian looked at the keypad like it had told on him.
“Go on.”
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Danny had me by both arms before the door finished, saying my name into my hair, and the office was cold and his hands hot through my sleeves.
It smelled like casino carpet and cold cigarette in the fabric and, under it, like a man four days into sweating something out.
A tube ticked in the ceiling. The chair he came out of had a leg wrapped in silver tape.
“Let me look at you,” he said. “You look good. You look—okay, don’t hit me—you look like Mom.”
“I look like I’ve been awake a week,” I said.
“You look like her when she was mad. She’d have the whole—the eyebrow, and the thing with the—”
“Don’t do the hands thing,” I said.
He put both palms up in front of his face like a man stopping a bus.
“Grandma’s hands could stop a bus.”
And I laughed, one ugly bark in a room with no windows, and I hated the sound, and I hated that he can still do it to me in under two minutes, and I hated most that I had wanted him to.
Then I sat on the edge of the desk and looked at his shoes.
They were new. Brown, soft, a sole you could bend with one hand, the shine that comes out of a box. His socks were not his either. I looked at them the rest of the visit.
“How much, Danny.”
“Don’t do that,” Danny said.
I said it again. “How much did you sign for. Say the number to me.”
He let go of one of my hands to pick up a paper cup that was not his and set it down somewhere else.
“I’m going to fix it. I’ve already started, actually—there’s a guy I know out of the room in Hialeah who says he can talk to somebody, and I’ve got a thing lined up for when I’m out, a real thing, with a paycheck—”
“That’s not a number. I want a number, not a plan and not a guy you know. One number, out of your mouth, and I’ll sit on this desk all afternoon until I’ve got it.”
“Mary—”
“I’m not asking you to be sorry. I’m asking you to—”
“I never bet that much.” He had both my hands again then, full eye contact, the works. “Mary, I couldn’t have. They wouldn’t let me.”
Past the wall a printer ran and stopped. The tube ticked twice.
“There’s a limit on a guy like me. They cut me off in July. Ask anybody at the cage, ask the—Mary, ask them, they’ve got it on paper.”
He said it fast and watched my face to see how it landed, the way he has since he was nine.
“You told me you were in Orlando,” I said.
“That was one time.”
“It’s never one time.”
I counted them off on the desk edge, the way our mother used to.
“March. You said Orlando and you were in Hialeah, and I only knew because you’d used my card there. November, you told me the mixer went out to get serviced. It went to a pawn shop on Eighth Street and I bought it back for four hundred dollars.”
“That was different, that was before—”
“You’re making the same face you made then,” I said.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist, and his eyes came up wet and steady and stayed there.
“I’m telling you the truth, I swear to God.”
“I know you think that.”
I did not weigh it. I decided it with my nose, one breath at the sink, a carton of milk gone off, no argument with the carton. My brother was lying to me, in a taped chair, in new shoes, with his hands around mine, and I put it where I would not have to look at it.
Here is what I keep behind my teeth. I am Danny with better habits. He picked a room and I picked a kitchen, and the rest of the difference is timing.
“Where’d the shoes come from, Danny?”
“They gave them to me. They took my clothes the first night, they gave me—it’s a room, Mary, they gave me clothes.”
“They gave you a shirt with somebody else’s collar in it,” I said, “and then somebody went out to a store and bought you shoes in your size.”
He looked at his feet like they belonged to somebody who had walked in behind him.
“Everything’s somebody’s size.”
Rian did not say one word. He filled the doorway and leaned back out of it, which is as close as he comes to leaving a room.
“You’re coming back,” Danny said. “Mary. Tell me you’re coming back. Say the words out loud, I don’t care if you mean them, just say them and I’ll sleep.”
I stood up and my knees came in wrong and I did not answer him, and I have not gotten that back.
Bogdan had both cars at the service door, engines running, the asphalt steaming where the rain had come and gone.
“Give it here.”
Bogdan put the keys into Rian’s hand, and Rian’s fingers closed over them, and it went through me low in the belly and lower than that, my whole cunt gone warm, twenty feet down a hallway from the door my brother was sitting behind. I have no defense for the timing of it.
“He’s the kind of thin that costs money.”
I did not answer that either. Bogdan went back inside to collect Nicolas for the second car.
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Rian took us out Biscayne, then the causeway ramp, where the expansion joints changed the note under the tires. The cruise terminals stood off to our right, the port cranes folded. Rain, then sun, then rain, the windshield strobing like somebody working a switch.
“Does he know what he’s signed?” I said.
“Nobody knows what they signed.” Rian did not look over. “That’s the product.”
“You could get that printed on the napkins.”
My hands would not hold still in my lap. I turned them over and looked at the callus ridge across the right palm and the nails cut to nothing.
Rian’s hand came across the console palm up and stopped on the leather, open, halfway. He left it there and drove and waited, and there was no asking anywhere in it.
I put my hand in his and he closed it.
Both sets of knuckles are flat where they were broken and reset. Two fingers sit off the line of the others. A hard ridge under my thumb, a split in the web of his left thumb, a callus at the base of every finger, and he explained none of it and I did not ask.
He drove one-handed for eleven minutes. Up the high span the expansion joint thumped twice under the tires, the third royal palm from the west end is dead, and the water went white, then gray, then white.
On the flat part at the top of the span, my cunt ached.
A straight piece of road, the middle of the afternoon, a man beside me who had answered one question and nothing else.
I looked out at the water and said nothing, because there is nothing to say about that, and because my brother’s face was in my chest next to it, and I was not handing either one over.
Coming down off the causeway with Fifth Street at the bottom of the grade, Rian let go of my hand and put both of his on the wheel.
“You didn’t believe him.”