CHAPTER NINETEEN
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MARY
I was barefoot on the limestone at nine in the morning in a shirt that was not mine. It smelled like Rian. The house had been empty since before seven and somebody’s coffee had gone cold in the pot.
Yelena stood in the kitchen doorway with my phone held out at arm’s length, like something she had found in a coat pocket. “Miss Warren. The telephone.” I have asked her twice to say Mary, and both times she looked at me and did not say Mary.
I came off the stool wrong on my way to her and all of Tuesday night came back at once and in order. My cunt ached. My nipples were tender. I put both hands flat on the black stone and waited for it to go through me and out the other side.
I did not apologize to anybody for any of it, and that includes me.
In the mirror at seven there had been marks on both thighs and one hip in a pattern I could have drawn from memory. I looked at them a while. Then I put the shirt on over them and came downstairs.
Yelena had cleaned around me again, so the counter was wiped and the pot was full of yesterday’s coffee, because I had told her on Sunday that the pot was mine.
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“Mary. Tell me you’re horizontal,” Luca said into my ear in that kitchen.
“I’m vertical. It was a choice and I regret it.”
“Good. I had a whole plan for the version of this call where you couldn’t get up and had to listen to me.”
I poured the cold coffee into a cup because my hands wanted a job.
“You’ve never once been interrupted in your life.”
“I’m going to be thinking about your mouth in a deposition this afternoon, and it’s going to cost some client of mine real money.”
“Bill it to the family.”
That is a very expensive man being pleased with himself. I wanted him in the room for it, and it went through me anyway in the hard light.
“I intend to.” Something changed in the line then, and it was not the connection. “Marchetti sent his paper back this morning. All of it. Ten years of it, with our seal cut off the corner with a pair of scissors, which I thought was a nice touch.”
I put my hip against the island because the stone was there.
“Sent it back where?”
“To my office at seven, by a boy who wouldn’t give a name. There’ll be a case at your service door in about a minute, because he split the delivery, which is a message and not an—”
The service door has a bell nobody uses. It went while Luca was still talking, and Yelena was already moving.
“Don’t sign for it,” Luca said. “Let Yelena sign. If anybody’s counting hands on that thing today I want hers on it and not yours.”
The courier was a kid in a plain shirt with no company name on it, and the service elevator stood open behind him. He held out a flat wooden case about the size of a cutting board. Yelena took his clipboard and signed for it herself, which I have never once seen her do.
She set the case on the hall table, lifted its hinged lid and stood over it longer than it takes to look at a box. Then she picked up the laundry and went down the service hall without a word to me.
“It’s here,” I said.
“What’s it look like?”
“A wooden case. Flat. Somebody’s cut the corner off every page.”
I turned one of the pages up with a fingernail. Somebody had gone through a decade of paper with a pair of scissors, taking the same corner off every sheet, and it had cost them an evening, and not one cut was rushed.
“Who did the cutting? Him, or a boy with scissors?”
“Him. He didn’t sign a thing and he cut every one of them himself, which is the only sentimental act Tomas Marchetti has ever committed.”
“Is Yelena supposed to know about this?” I asked.
“Yelena knew before I did. She always does, and she’s never once told me how.”
The service elevator shut and descended. I put my hand against the cool hall wall as I went by.
“That’s ten years of standing arrangement on the port. He rents us the schedule and we don’t ask what else moves on it, and he’s rented it to us since before our father died.”
“Is that bad?”
“It’s four families, and as of nine o’clock this morning we’re certain of exactly one of them, and the one is us.”
“That’s arithmetic,” I said. “I asked you a question.”
“You asked me whether it’s bad. Arithmetic’s the honest answer to that, and I’m giving you the honest one, which is more than anybody in my family gave me this morning.”
“Say the part you’re not saying.”
Luca let a breath go. I have heard him do that twice and both times he was about to be careful with me instead of truthful.
“I’d love to. That’s a different phone call and I’m not making it from a parking garage.”
“Then get out of the garage.”
“Tonight. I’ll bring food, and both my brothers, and Nicolas will sit there and not eat any of it, and Rian will—”
The phone went dead against my ear in the middle of the word. I looked at the black screen, and then down the hall at the laundry cart.
“Charger,” I said.
The cart kept going. Yelena has never once fetched me a thing I could get myself, so I went and got it.
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Nicolas’s study is the only room up here with no glass in it. At nine in the morning it is the color of a shop with the shutters down, so I turned the lamp on with my knuckle.
Nicolas’s handwriting was all over that desk. On the backs of things, in pencil, small and upright and much slower than his voice.
I stood there and wanted him so badly I had to put the dead phone down and start over. Nine in the morning, an empty house, and I wanted the man who has never once explained a kind thing he has done to me.
The second drawer sticks at three inches, going in and coming out. It stuck. The inside was lined with cedar paper, the same paper my grandmother lined her linen closet with.
The laundry cart came up the hall and stopped outside the door. “I’m up here for a charger,” I said, to a woman who had not asked me anything, and the cart went on.
A charger. A flat box of watches with the lid down, which I left down. A small stack of paper under a clip.
I lifted the clip, because I had already found the charger and was therefore looking for nothing.
The top sheet was a photograph. Printed, thick-edged, heavier than a photograph has any business being.
It was me. Outside Warren’s, on the sidewalk, in an apron with my hair up, laughing at somebody standing off the edge of the frame.
Green tile behind me. My grandmother’s sign over the door.
The corners had gone soft from handling and it smelled sour and old.
I could not tell who I was laughing at. I turned the print under the lamp and looked along the edge and there was nothing but sidewalk.
Then I turned it over.
There was a date on the back in pencil, in a careful hand I did not know. I read the year three times and it did not move. It was four years old, and I have known these people since September.
My knees went before I had decided anything. I sat down on the floor of a room I had not been invited into and counted a breath down to nothing, the way you count a pan going past amber, and when I got to the bottom of it I was still on the floor.
That photograph was older than Danny’s markers. Older than the number they hung on my brother. Older than the night anybody at the Coliseum learned my last name, older than every reason any of them has ever given me for any of it.
I did not finish the thought. There was nowhere to finish it.
“Nicolas,” I said, to a room with no glass in it and nobody in it.
Here is the part I did not see coming. I was not frightened of him. I sat on that cedar-smelling floor with my hands going and I wanted Nicolas as much as I had wanted him standing at the desk, and more, and that is the thing I could not get up from.
I know how to be afraid of a man. I know where to put it and how to carry it to work. I have never been afraid of the wanting, and the wanting is heavier and there is nowhere to set it down.
There was a worse thing under that one. Somebody had been carrying a picture of me since before any of this had a reason, and part of me liked it, and it was not the frightened part. I would like to say it came to me later. It came first.
I did not take the photograph. I did not photograph it either, and I thought about doing it, and my phone was dead, and I would rather not know how much of the reason that was.
I put it back face down under the clip with the papers in the order they had been in. I pushed the drawer until it caught in the same place. Then I took the charger, because a woman who leaves the charger was never in that room looking for a charger.
Rian called while the phone was still coming back to life on the counter.
“You sound like somebody sat on your chest.”
“Nothing happened. It’s a quiet morning.”
“You’re walking like a woman who got exactly what she asked for. Don’t tell me otherwise, I was there.”
I laughed before I could look at it first, and it hurt in three separate places, and I let it.
“You can’t hear a person walking.”
“I can hear you standing still. It’s worse.”
“That’s not a thing,” I said.
“It’s a thing. I’ve been listening to you not sit down since the first night in that house.”
He let a car go past before he said anything else, which with Rian is the same as changing the subject.
“Did you sleep?”
“Some. The glass was cold this morning. That’s new.”
“It won’t last.”
“Tell Nicolas the glass is cold up here,” I said.
“He was up before it got light. He knows.”
“Is Nicolas with you?”
“He’s been at the Coliseum since before seven,” Rian said. “Eat something that didn’t come off a tray. That’s the whole call.”
“I started bread at ten, then three men happened to me, and by four I was eating it. Go to work.”
“Yeah.”
Luca called back a few minutes after that. I had the sponge going by then.
“You went quiet on me.”
“The phone died.”
“I tried again and got nothing. I’ve stopped being fond of that phone.”
I set the charger on the counter where anybody walking through could see it, which is what you do with a thing you are not hiding.
“It’s plugged in now.”
“Then stay plugged in, and let me say a thing you’re not going to answer. Whatever anybody in this city has bought or sold in the last ten years, none of it was you. Say that back to me tonight when I’ve had a drink and can enjoy it.”
“Say it now and I’ll answer it now.”
“Tonight,” Luca said, “when I can watch your face while you don’t.”
“You’re in the garage again.”
“I live in the garage. Sit down, Mary.”
I told him I was sitting down, which made two lies that morning, counting nothing happened to Rian. Then I scrubbed a pan that did not need it until the light came off the water at a different angle.
It was dated four years ago, in pencil, in somebody’s careful hand, and I put it back face down in the exact place I had found it and went downstairs and said nothing at all.