Lena
FIFTEEN
The park on Saturday afternoon is the specific gold of a late afternoon, the kind that makes everything look slightly more like itself than usual.
The grass is greener, the sky is a more definitive blue, the laughter of the kids on the climbing structure rings cleaner and brighter than it has any right to be.
Opal is at the top of the climbing structure with Bea, the two of them sitting up there like they own the city below them, which at this moment they probably feel they do. Princesses in the castle tower, or ogres fighting the wizards below, I’ve heard them play both.
I’m on the bench with my coffee and a paperback I’ve been carrying around for two weeks and only opened twice, watching them and not really reading or paying too much attention to anything.
I’m doing that particular park-bench thing where you let your mind go soft at the edges and just exist in the warmth for a little while.
I’ve been doing more of this lately. More existing, less calculating. I’m not sure if that’s growth or complacency, and I’ve decided not to decide right now. These days, I get to enjoy moments here and there, and I’m relishing it.
I accepted the job offer from the logistics firm.
I did it at the kitchen counter with Dario’s coffee maker producing something excellent in the background, and Opal eating cereal, and the whole morning feeling almost aggressively normal.
I said yes and hit send and sat there for a moment with my phone on the counter and felt something I can only describe as solid.
A floor that bears weight. I’ve been surviving on surfaces that don’t entirely hold for long enough that the solidity is itself a sensation worth noting.
Dario said congratulations without looking up from whatever he was reading. Just congratulations, flat and certain, the way he says things he means. Opal made him say it louder so she could cheer. He said it louder. She cheered.
Like we were any clustered family who received good news, while enjoying the morning. Like I’m not happily living with the man who blackmailed me into living with him.
I have the urge to call it Stockholm syndrome, but that’s just an old sexist term for what happened to that woman.
It was made up by a psychologist to explain why she was trying to keep the police from interfering with a hostage situation—the shrink said she must have fallen in love with her captor, because why else wouldn’t she want their help?
Turns out, when the police were making moves to come into the building, the assailant got squirrely. It was the only time he was actively violent. Before their involvement, the hostages were about to be released. But when cops came, he was agitated, so she told them to back off.
And now we have a whole sexist term for something that only women get labeled.
Funny the way my thoughts float these days. I guess being relaxed will do that to a girl.
I’m thinking about this—about the morning, the job, about the fact that in just a few weeks our arrangement ends, and I have no clear idea what that looks like from where I’m currently standing—when I smell his cologne.
Not Dario’s. Ed’s.
It’s not a bad cologne, which is somehow worse.
Ed Esposito settles onto the bench beside me with the easy, unhurried movement of someone who has planned this and is not in a rush.
He’s wearing a spring jacket and a relaxed expression, and he looks, from any distance, like a friendly acquaintance stopping to chat.
“Lena, you look good. The new place agreeing with you?”
My stomach turns over. He knows about the new place. Knew we’d be here. Knew my routine enough to meet me here. Snuck up while I was lost in thought.
“Ed. Hi.” My voice comes out steady. I don’t know how.
He’s watching Opal on the climbing structure, smiling the mild, benevolent smile of a man at a park on a Saturday. “She looks good too,” he says. “Healthy. You finally got her sorted out, huh?”
“What do you want, Ed.”
“Same thing I always want,” he says, still in the warm register, still watching Opal. “The money you owe me, Lena. Nothing complicated about it. But I want it from you. Not from your new friend.”
I keep my hands still in my lap. I keep my eyes on Opal. “I don’t know what you—”
“I know Spinelli.” The warmth doesn’t leave his voice.
That’s the worst part, actually—that he can deliver what he’s delivering while sounding like someone’s cheerful uncle.
“I knew who he was before you did. And I want to be very clear with you, because I respect you, Lena, I always have—if that money comes to me through him, or through anything connected to him, I’m going to have a very serious problem.
” He turns to look at me for the first time, and his eyes are empty in a way his voice isn’t.
“The kind of problem that ends with you identifying pieces of him to somebody in a very official context.”
The world goes very quiet. Not the park—the park is exactly as loud as it was, children shouting, a dog barking somewhere, the couple with the stroller passing on the path twenty feet away.
It’s something inside my head that goes quiet, because my brain needs a moment to process what the fuck he just said.
He’s not afraid of Dario.
That’s the thing I’m processing. He knows who Dario is.
Probably knows who his parents were. Their reputations.
What his mother was capable of and raised her son to be capable of.
And he’s still sitting here, in the warm afternoon, telling me that he has a plan for what happens if Dario becomes a problem, and the plan involves pieces of Dario being identified. By me.
My hands are in my lap. I’m looking at Opal. She’s still at the top of the climbing structure, legs dangling, saying something to Bea that makes Bea laugh.
I would not survive something happening to him. And I hadn’t known that until Ed Esposito said the word pieces.
If Ed is unafraid of Dario, how fucking dangerous is Ed?
Opal shouts something from the top of the climbing structure. She waves. I wave back. Nothing to see here. Nothing to worry about.
I don’t know how I wave back. I don’t know what she shouted.
Ed stands. “It’d be a shame if anyone thought you had something to do with Dario’s murder, Lena.”
“What? I would never—”
“Yeah, a real shame. I mean, I’ve done some good frame-ups in the past, so I know how easy it is to fake a lover’s quarrel.
” He bends at the waist to speak directly in my face.
“Shockingly easy to make the police believe what they want to believe, and then your poor little girl grows up without Dario and without her mama, since she’s behind bars for his murder. ”
He stands and sighs while I fight every urge to knock his teeth in. “That’s why the money has to come from you. Your hard work. Not his. Just so we’re clear. We are clear, aren’t we, Lena?”
“Yes,” I hiss through gritted teeth.
Before I get out another word, he walks over to the climbing structure, and waits at the bottom with his hands in his pockets. Everything inside of me goes rigid.
If I make a scene, I have no fucking idea what he’ll do. To Opal. To Bea. To Dario.
When Opal comes down the slide, he says something that makes her laugh—something easy and harmless, probably about the slide—and he pushes her on the swings for three minutes while I sit on the bench and hold very still and breathe.
He pushes her, and Bea, they laugh, and he smiles over his shoulder at me, and the smile is the most frightening thing I’ve seen in my life.
It slithers through me, leaving an oily wake in my gut.
Opal doesn’t know, and he knows she doesn’t know, and he wants me to understand that he can be in this park, near my daughter, anytime he chooses, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
He waves at me when he leaves. Cheerful. Unhurried. Whistling something I don’t recognize as he walks away down the path.
After we walk Bea to her place, I get us home. I don’t know exactly how.
Identifying pieces. He chose that specific formulation of words deliberately—not just hurt or gone, but pieces. Something irreversible.
He wanted me to sit with that image. He wanted it to work on me.
Well done to him, because it’s fucking working.
In the elevator, between the third and fourth floors, I cry. Silently. Opal is right there, still talking about clouds, cirrostratus now, whatever that is. I let the tears have the six seconds I have before the doors open, no sniffles, no sobs. I press the back of my wrist to my face.
The doors open. I walk out.
“Mama, are you cold?” Opal says in the apartment, looking at me with her sharp, careful eyes.
“A little. I’m fine.”
She gives me the considering look—the forty-year-old look that is far too old on her little face—and then she goes to her room, and I go to the kitchen and put both hands on the counter and breathe through my nose until the shaking stops.
I need Dario to come home. Not because I want to be rescued. What I need right now is the other thing. I need to say it out loud to someone who will understand its full shape, who won’t minimize it, who won’t panic, who will tell me the truth about what it means.
There is exactly one person in my life who fits that description right now.
I put water on for pasta and listen for the sound of his key in the door.