13. Loaded
LOADED
VALERIA
“You said you would give it back,” I tell him.
“I said in the morning. This is the morning.” Lorenzo is already dressed, sitting on the edge of the bed with his back half turned, which is not how he sits.
“Valeria. Before the coffee and before the boxes, I have to say a thing and I am going to say all of it without stopping, and I am not going to ask you for anything at the end.”
There is a voice men use for confession. I have heard it across tables from lawyers and once, last Saturday, from my father in a study with the television on. I have never heard it in my own bed at dawn.
I do the thing I am built to do. I sit up, I open the notebook on the nightstand, and I click the pencil once.
“Minute it,” I say. “Go.”
He looks at the notebook. He does not argue with it.
“The first night. The blue room, when I came up your stairs at 12:40 a.m. and Tazio was on your door.” He puts his hands on his knees. “You asked me a question. You said that between my brother falling and the window breaking, I did something that made me necessary, and you asked me what it was.”
“You said you did not know.”
“That was a lie.”
The birds keep going outside. There is a truck on the road down past the gate, and somewhere below us the kitchen door opens and shuts. I write it down, in the shorthand I use for depositions, initials and clauses, and my hand is steady on the page, and that is the last steady thing in the room.
“Fabrizio put the injector in my hand and I took the cap off with my teeth and I put it into my brother’s leg and held it there and counted to ten, and it worked, and he took a breath.
” His voice does not change anywhere in that sentence.
“I have known since the ambulance bay that whatever made me necessary that morning happened inside my own two hands, and I have never been able to get past it, and I told you I did not know.”
“Why?”
“Because you had four hundred people and two families deciding whether to shoot you that night, and I told myself I was not going to hand a stranger a rope.” He shakes his head once.
“That is the reason I gave myself at the time. The reason it stayed a lie for ten more days is different and it is smaller. I did not want you to look at my hands.”
He waits.
“Friday, in your father’s study,” he says, “he asked me to hold his silence for him and I told him he had had nine years to tell you himself and I had had six hours. I have been eating that sentence since I said it. I am done.”
The pencil stops.
Not because I decide to stop it. Because there is a point in every engagement where the auditor understands that she is not reading the books, she is in them, and my own initials are on a page from a week ago, in the dark, and I did not know I was writing an exhibit.
I do not scream. Screaming is for people with somewhere to put things.
“You understand what you have actually done?”
“Tell me which part you want.”
“I do not want a part. I want the whole thing said correctly, and you have said it as a lie about a morning, and it is not a lie about a morning.” My voice comes out flat and small and perfectly steady.
“Last Monday night in this bed, in the dark, I read you a list of names. Do you remember what I said when I struck you off it?”
He does not look away. “Yes.”
“Say it.”
“You said, because you were four hundred meters from a window with your own back turned to it, and because you put a needle in your brother’s leg with your own hands, and no man arranges to be the one holding the injector.”
“That is right.” I fold my hands so that they will hold still.
“I cleared you. Out loud. You heard me build your acquittal out of your own falsified testimony, with my head on your chest, and you took your hand off my hair so I would not feel what the rest of you was doing, and I felt it anyway, and I called it grief.”
He closes his eyes.
“You let me strike your name off a list you could not strike it off yourself.” I hear my voice go somewhere I have not been since I was twenty-four. “That is what you took from me. Not the truth about a needle. Ten days of an audit I ran on a number you wrote.”
“Yes.”
“Do not agree with me. It is obscene.”
“Then tell me what to do instead.”
“There is nothing to do instead. You do not get an instruction.” I push the covers back and get up, and I close the notebook over what he has just given me and take it with me, because it is now the only thing in this house he has not been able to arrange.
“I have spent nine years being the last person in every room to find out what she was standing in. My father knew for nine years. Gaetano Presti knew for thirty. Renata Alba knows something she took home in a shoebox. And the man I married eight days ago, who watched me put every single thing I own on a table in front of him on Friday night, kept one, and it was the one that was about me.”
My right hand has started shaking again while I am talking. It began somewhere around the word audit and it has not stopped, and last week I sat in this room and complained that it had gone, that it used to give me somewhere to put things, and I would like it noted that I did not mean it.
He comes toward me. I put my hand up flat.
“No.”
He stops.
“I am not leaving this house,” I say. “Understand what that is and do not make it into something warm. There is a fund in Providence that has been converting my husbands into cash flow since I was twenty-four, and there are two shoeboxes downstairs I have not opened, and you have thirty-one men, a name that opens doors, and access I cannot buy. The marriage is the best instrument I have ever held and I am not putting it down because you lied to me.”
He looks at the floor for the first time all morning.
“Say the rest of it,” he tells me.
“There is no clause for the rest of it,” I say. “There never is. That is why people write vows instead.”
He leans in from where he is standing, out of habit, going for the corner of my mouth first, and I turn my head, and he stops with about two inches to go, two inches from where the blood used to be, and straightens up. I watch him take that and put it somewhere.
“I am working in the library,” I say. “Have Nonna send the coffee down.”
Tazio is in the front hall at 8:15 a.m. with a face like a man carrying a live wire.
“Signora.” He falls in beside me. “She has agreed to a second one. Friday. Her mother suggested the aquarium.”
“The aquarium.”
“For a second date, signora, at my age, with an arm that does not fully…” He stops. “You are having a bad morning.”
“I am having a bad morning.”
“Then I will come back.”
“No.” I take the top folder out of his good hand. “The aquarium is fine. It is dark, there is something to look at, and nobody expects you to talk. Take her to the jellyfish. They are the only ones with any conversation.”
The joke comes out of me before I know I own one, and the laugh that follows it comes out the wrong shape, two hours after my marriage detonated in a gray bedroom. Tazio pretends not to hear the shape of it.
“Yes, signora.” At the door he stops. “For what it is worth, the house is better with you in it.”
“Go away, Tazio.”
He goes. Ottavia is at the end of the hall in her chair with Aldo’s glasses up in her hair and the arts section unopened on her knee, and she looks at me and looks at the staircase where my husband is not, and says absolutely nothing, and pours me a coffee I did not ask for from a tray that holds two cups at opposite ends with the sugar bowl in the middle like a border checkpoint, and puts mine in my hand.
The shoeboxes are open on the library table by 9, and my notebook is open at my end of it at this morning’s half page, and I have not been able to put one line under it since six o’clock.
Renata’s copies are ordered by year in her small looping hand, and she has annotated the margins for twenty-four years with the sort of notes a woman makes when she is the only person who will ever read them, and I have found four entries by 10:40 a.m. that Priya is going to build a week out of.
At 11:05 a.m. the phone goes and the house line reads a Pelham exchange.
“Signora D’Amato? This is Anne Kelleher.” A dishwasher is running behind her. “I apologize for the noise. My sister is convinced that if she cooks enough I will stop eating crackers out of my coat, and she is losing.”
“Doctor.”
“I am calling both of you before I file anything, the same as I did the first time, because you will be sent the amendment and amendments get read by people who are not physicians.” Paper moves. “Is your husband there?”
Lorenzo comes in from the corridor where he has been all morning without coming through the door. I put it on speaker and set the phone in the middle of the table and we stand at opposite ends of it.
“Go ahead,” he says.
“Some background first, because it matters to how much weight this carries.” Her voice takes on the flat careful shape it had at 4:40 a.m. ten days ago.
“When my retained specimens were taken on the Sunday, everything physical connected to this case left the building. What did not leave the building was my working file. My bench notes, my scene photographs, the intake photographs, the whole pre-filing set. It never left my custody, and it never left my custody because Don D’Amato declined to accept a copy of it when it was asked for.
I was told about the refusal afterward by Ms. Ferrante, who thought I would want to know.
If a copy had come to your house, a copy could have been taken from your house. As it stands, I have photographs.”
The clause I lost. The one refusal I did not get to price, standing in a farmhouse kitchen in Pelham with a dishwasher running, being the only reason there is a case at all.
“So the photographs survived?” I say.