2. The Wrong Dream
THE WRONG DREAM
LORENZO
Ten hours since my brother went down at the altar, and the first motion before my table is whether to murder the bride.
Nobody says the word. Silvio Corva has spent forty years not saying words. He stands at the far end of my father’s dining room pressing a nicotine patch through his sleeve the way another man would cross himself, and he offers the table “the question of the woman.”
“Say what you’re asking for,” I tell him. “In this room, tonight, we’re going to be men who say it.”
He says it. “Tonight. In the boathouse, quiet, and by Sunday she’s a woman who went home to her father and never arrived.”
“Ettore Rinaldi has ninety men and a terminal we share a fence line with.”
“Ettore Rinaldi has a daughter who’s buried three husbands.”
“Ettore Rinaldi has a daughter who put her hands on my brother’s chest while your nephew pointed a gun over her head.”
That closes his mouth. It doesn’t change his mind.
So I take the table through the arithmetic, out loud, so every man at it owns a piece of the answer when we’re done.
War with the Rinaldi costs us the port before Monday and somewhere between forty and two hundred of the men whose mothers I know by name.
What Corva wants buys none of it back. It buys one night of feeling avenged, and it takes that night out of the only person in the cathedral who tried to reverse what the rest of us stood and watched.
“She’s a guest of this house,” I say. “East wing. Tazio on the door.”
“Protection or custody?” Corva asks, because he’s old, and he knows where the soft place is.
I don’t answer him. Not answering is an answer, and every man files out of that room knowing his Don has left a door open without saying which side of it the lock is on.
Then I walk the house, because the house is a bad position and somebody should know it. I have thirty-one men. I need sixty.
My hand keeps going to my right coat pocket, and the pocket is empty, because I put my brother’s ring in a Rinaldi woman’s palm this afternoon in front of nineteen witnesses.
There’s a count I’ve done every morning of my life without knowing I do it, the way a man pats his pocket on the way out a door.
Two. It was two when he hid my shoes in the bread bin and swore on our mother’s life that the house had eaten them, two when they gave me this chair, two at 10:40 yesterday morning.
Somewhere in the fourth phone call tonight I did the count, and it came back wrong.
I sat down in the hall chair like a man whose leg had stopped working, and Fabrizio took the phone out of my hand and finished the call for me, and didn’t say one word about it.
And under all of it, the syllable.
Tell…
My brother came back for one breath this morning and spent it on half a word. I’ve set it down forty times tonight and it doesn’t stay down.
Fabrizio finds me at half past twelve with a plate.
“You’ve eaten nothing since yesterday. Bread and the veal. Don’t make me stand here.”
He’s been awake as long as I have, that purple glitter elastic still around his wrist because he hasn’t been home to take it off. He’s made ninety phone calls tonight. He’s told two mothers.
“Nonna refused the sedative,” he adds. “She has the Beretta on the nightstand and Aldo’s glasses in the drawer, and she informed me that if anybody comes up her stairs she won’t be aiming for the leg.”
“The tower?”
“Bolt was pre-set. The mortar dust around it is old. Somebody was up in that scaffold days ago with a drill. I had that window flagged in February, and I keep thinking there was a Tuesday somewhere when I could have caught this, and I was somewhere on that Tuesday, doing something.”
“You can’t audit a Tuesday, Fabri.”
“Watch me.” He takes the plate back after two bites, which was the whole point of the plate.
I go to the east wing instead of to bed.
Tazio is on a kitchen chair he’s dragged up three flights rather than sit on my mother’s bench, and he stands so fast he nearly puts it through the wainscoting.
Nineteen years old, a suit hanging off him like it’s drying on him, and he has this job because his mother asked my grandmother in a church parking lot in March.
“She asked for a toothbrush and paper.” He waits until I look at him. “Not a phone.”
Then he does the thing nobody else in this house has had the nerve to do tonight.
“Am I keeping people out of that room, or am I keeping her in it?”
I have an answer for that. I decline to give it to him, and I open the door, and I understand as I do it that I’ve just made a nineteen-year-old carry something that belongs to me.
She isn’t in the ruined dress. It’s over the back of a chair by the window, beadwork gone brown down one whole side, left where anyone entering will walk into the sight of it. Exhaustion, or a message. With her I’m already learning the two aren’t exclusive.
There’s a legal pad on the floor beside her and four pages torn off it and laid out on the boards in a row, folded down the middle and sharpened with a thumbnail, and the pen lying across the top page where she put it down when the door opened.
She’s been building yesterday morning, five minutes to a line, and beside each line what everybody in that cathedral did with those five minutes.
There’s a space in the middle of the second page that has nothing written in it at all.
The fourth page is a column of names. Mine is on it, second from the top, and she doesn’t turn it over.
Her right hand is on her knee. It hasn’t stopped shaking. She sees me see it and doesn’t put it away.
“You scrubbed,” I note.
“Twice. It stays in the cuticles. Sit or stand. Don’t do the thing where you walk the room to make me watch you.”
“That’s a technique.”
“It’s a good one. My father uses it. Sit down.”
I take the window seat, which is lower than she is. She notices I’ve chosen the lower seat, and I have to decide whether I chose it.
“What did my brother say to you on the floor?”
“Nothing you can use.”
“Let me judge that.”
“You can’t. It isn’t information, it’s a private thing between two people who signed an arrangement, and one of them is at the medical examiner’s office and the other one is being guarded by a child.”
“Did you kill my brother?”
“No.”
“Would you tell me if you had?”
“No.” She lets that sit. “But I’d have done it somewhere I controlled the exits, on a day my father wasn’t in the building, and I wouldn’t have spent eleven minutes breaking his ribs in front of four hundred witnesses trying to reverse my own work.
If I’m lying, I’m too good for you to catch tonight, and the question is a waste of us both. Ask better.”
“Belief isn’t evidence.”
“No. It’s worse. It’s a position you have to defend. Ask better.”
“Then you ask,” I say, because nobody has told me to ask better since my father died.
She goes exactly where I would not have.
“Who knew about the injector?”
“Fabrizio. Me. Nonna. His cardiologist.”
“Who packed his suit?”
“His valet. He’s worked for us since before I could walk.”
“Who moved the injector from the left pocket to the right at Easter, and who was told?”
“He did it himself. He told Fabrizio.”
“And who wrote the seating chart?”
“My grandmother.”
“And who saw the seating chart before yesterday?”
I open my mouth and I find I don’t have the number. She watches me not have it, and neither of us says anything for a while.
“You’re better at this than my people,” I concede.
“Your people are asking who wanted him dead. That’s a list of two hundred, and it’s useless.” She pulls her knees up. “Whoever set that bolt had days. Days means he wasn’t hunting a moment, he was hunting a date, and only one thing about yesterday had a date on it.”
The clause. Everything that moves on Monday. She’s walked me to the conclusion I reached at four this afternoon and made it feel like she arrived first, and the worst part is that she may have.
“And one more.” Her eyes come up off her knees and onto me.
“The first shot was placed. Weeks of planning, a pre-set position, a clean exit. The second shot was improvised. A planner doesn’t add a target in the moment unless the moment made that target necessary.
Between your brother falling and the window breaking, you did something that made you necessary. What was it?”
I held the injector. I put the needle in his thigh with my own hand and counted to ten, and his chest filled.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Neither do I.” The pen taps twice on the pad, in time with her hand’s shaking. “That’s the question that should keep you up tonight. It’s keeping me up.”
Third time tonight she’s taken it off me, and I’m starting to enjoy it. Enjoying anything today is a thing I’ll answer for.
There’s a tray by the door with soup gone cold on it and a torn half sheet of paper on the saucer.
“Nonna sent that.”
“She did.” Her shaking hand fails at the corner of the paper twice before it takes, which she also lets me watch. “It says, Eat something. And if these men decide to shoot you, I will insist they do it downstairs on the tile. Aldo bought those rugs in Kashan, and they have survived two wars.”
Something starts to come loose in my chest, and I hold it.
“Corva doesn’t want the tile,” I say. “Corva wants the boathouse.”
“Mm.” She looks toward the window, the black water past it. “Tell him the last three men who married me all died indoors. Statistically, the boathouse is the safest place on this property for me.”
It takes me wrong. The laugh comes up my throat like a cough, like something that’s been sitting in my chest all day waiting for the guard to change, and hers comes after it, low and cracked and going straight into her hands.
For four seconds the two of us are laughing on the floor of a house where every clock has stopped, and there’s nobody awake to catch us at it but the boy in the hall.
It ends when her shaking hand knocks the pen off the pad. We watch it roll. Neither of us picks it up.
She stops laughing before I do. When I look over she’s already looking, and for two seconds neither of us can find anywhere reasonable to put it. Then she picks the pen up after all and holds it out, and I take it. We’re both very careful about our fingers.
I stand up.
“Don’t,” she offers.
“Don’t what?”
“Whatever you’re about to do to yourself on the stairs.” She isn’t looking at me now. “He’d have laughed harder than either of us. He took three sugars.”
I look back from the door, which I didn’t intend to do.
She’s down on one hand on the boards, reaching after the pen where it rolled.
I get out of the room before I forgive myself.
I sleep at three in the chair by my window, because the bed is a commitment to the night I’m not willing to make, and I dream about her.
The cathedral, full, then empty, the way rooms empty in dreams. I’m standing on the altar step where my brother stood.
She’s in the dress, and the beadwork is white everywhere it was brown, and the blood is already at the corner of her mouth, one dark comma, and in the dream it has always been there.
It belongs there. The priest’s voice comes from nowhere and everywhere, giving me the rite line by line.
I know the responses. I’ve never learned them, and I know them, the way I knew as a boy which hand was my brother’s in the dark.
In the front pew there’s a shape under a white cloth, and a hand hangs off the end of it. I know the hand. I don’t look at it. Looking at it stops this, and I don’t want this stopped.
The rite reaches its last line. The line he got four words into.
I say all of it.
The kiss lands, and it isn’t gentle. Her fists come into my collar the way they came into it on the marble, and she pulls me down.
The altar is warm under my back and she’s above me with the veil going everywhere and the dress gone the way clothing goes in dreams. Her voice is at my ear, patient as the priest, telling me where my hands go.
I put them there. She tells me not to move, and I don’t move, and the not moving is better than anything I’ve been given in ten years.
Slower.
Look at me while you do it.
In the dream I’m better at obedience than I’ve ever been at command, and the relief of that is enormous.
Her mouth opens over mine and I taste copper, pennies, the corner of her lip. She pulls back one inch and looks down at me and says, in my brother’s cadence exactly:
Tell…
I wake at a quarter past four in the chair, hard, sweating through a shirt that still smells of incense. My brother is seventeen hours cold in a county building, and I’ve just finished his last sentence with my own mouth and enjoyed it.
It’s the wrong dream. There was a dream owed tonight, the one where Giulio is thirty-eight and alive at the kitchen table, stirring the third sugar into his coffee slow enough to make Nonna watch.
I didn’t have that dream. I had this one.
A man isn’t responsible for his dreams, and I have never once believed that.
The phone goes at twenty to five.
“Don D’Amato. Dr. Anne Kelleher, medical examiner’s office.
Forgive the hour.” There’s cellophane somewhere behind her voice, the sound of a woman who hasn’t left a building in a long time.
“I’m calling you before I write anything down.
Once I write it, it belongs to the county.
Right now it still belongs to medicine, and medicine would like to be careful. ”
“Go ahead, Doctor.”
“The gunshot wound is through-and-through, ninth rib, left of the sternum, and the track is what I’d expect from the window.
That part is straightforward.” Paper moves.
“What isn’t straightforward is the hemorrhage.
There’s almost none. Bleeding of that kind requires pressure, and pressure requires a pump. ”
The cellophane stops.
“Doctor.”
“I’ve checked it three times, and I’ll swear to it once, so I’m saying it to you first, plainly, before the language gets dressed up for court.”
She takes one breath.
“The bullet entered a man whose heart had already stopped.”