22. Twenty-Three #2
Then she will clean it and close it properly herself at the kitchen table, with the good light on, in silence, using the same small exact movements she uses on other people’s evidence, and I will watch her do it and understand that she is not going to fall apart, because everybody who could do it is either dead or standing in a hallway with a shotgun.
Rosalia will be told at two o’clock. Not by me. By Ciro’s sister, and I will make the arrangements and I will not go, because there is no version of me walking into that woman’s kitchen that is not obscene.
I will send the box back with his sister. Unopened. With a letter that will take me four hours and is one paragraph long.
And at eleven o’clock that night, my wife comes and stands in the doorway of the study where I have been sitting since dark, and she says, “Come to bed.”
“Valeria.”
“I am not asking you to talk.”
“I am no good tonight.”
“I know exactly how good you are tonight,” she says. “Come to bed anyway.”
She takes my clothes off like a woman disarming something.
That is the only way I can describe it, and I have gone back to it since.
There is nothing hurried in it and there is nothing performed in it.
She undresses me in the middle of our room with the lamp on, and every time she finds a mark, she puts her mouth on it, the vest bruise across my ribs that has gone the color of a storm, the field wrap on my left arm, a set of scratches on my forearm I do not remember getting.
“Valeria.”
“Do not.”
“You do not have to do this.”
“I know I do not have to do this.” She puts both hands flat on my chest and pushes until the backs of my knees find the bed. “Sit down.”
I sit down.
“Now stop being the man who runs this,” she says, “for one hour, in this room, with me.”
And then she gets into my lap and takes my face in both hands and kisses me, and it is not filthy and it is not desperate, it is careful in a way that opens something in the middle of my chest that I have kept nailed shut since I was fourteen.
“Tell me what you want,” she says.
“I do not want anything.”
“That is a lie, and you are bad at lying to me now.”
“I want,” I say, and my voice does something I do not authorize, “I want to not be able to hear anything for a while.”
“All right.”
So she puts her hands over my ears.
She does that. She actually does that, she puts one palm over each side of my head and holds it, and she puts her forehead against mine, and everything in the world goes down to a low sound like being underwater, and we stay like that for I do not know how long, and I feel my own breathing come back down to something a man could live at.
Then she takes me inside her, slowly, still holding my head, and there is nothing in the language for what that is.
It is the quietest one of my life.
She moves over me with my hands on her hips and her palms still over my ears so that all I can hear is the sea in my own skull and her voice coming through it low and far away, and every so often she takes one hand off to make me look at her.
“Here,” she says.
“Yes.”
“Not the corridor. Not the doorway. Here.”
“Yes.”
“Out loud.”
“Here.”
I do not last the way I would want to and she does not care, and when she cums it is with her face in my neck and both arms around my head and she does not make a sound, and I feel every second of it go through her like weather, and I follow her about four strokes later with my mouth against her collarbone, saying something that is not a word.
Afterward she does not get off me.
She stays exactly where she is with her legs still around me and my head against her chest and her hands still on the sides of my face, and my ears are ringing, and her heart is going against my cheek, and she says it into the top of my head, quietly, like a woman putting something down that she has been carrying up a hill.
“I love you.”
I do not move.
“You do not have to say it,” she says. “I am not doing that. I am not going to sit here and wait for it like a girl. I have been carrying it since the boathouse and I have been putting it down and picking it up for nine days and tonight there was a boy holding a door and I have decided I am not doing that anymore.”
“Valeria.”
“I love you,” she says again, and she says it easily the second time. “That is all. You can do whatever you want with it.”
And here is what I do with it.
I hold on to my wife in the middle of the worst week of both of our lives with my face against her sternum, and I feel the whole of my chest come apart, and I think, with perfect clarity, in the voice I use for numbers:
Tell her now.
Tell her tonight, in this bed, with her arms around your head, while she is still the woman who said that.
Tell her that six days before Giulio was killed, you sat in a room with your father’s old men and you were told there was a way to draw the thing out and that the way had a woman’s name on it.
Tell her you did not say no. Tell her that you married her for a hundred reasons and that one of them was on a list and that you can still see the handwriting.
Tell her, because in about four hours she is going to say something to you across a breakfast table about eleven signatures that are not hurried, and you are going to be so proud of her that it will not fit inside your body, and none of that will survive what you are about to be.
Tell her while it is still a confession.
Because if you wait, it becomes a discovery, and there is no coming back from a discovery.
“Valeria,” I say.
“Mm.”
Her hands are on the sides of my face. Her heart is going against my cheek. She is warm and she is here and she is mine for exactly as long as I keep my mouth shut.
“Nothing,” I say. “Go to sleep.”