25. Bait
BAIT
VALERIA
I am awake at ten past two and I know exactly why.
He came to bed at twenty past ten and said nothing and lay down in his two feet like a man getting into a grave, and at some point after midnight his breathing changed, went quick and shallow and then caught, and I lay in the dark with my eyes open and my whole body listening, and after a while it evened out again and he did not wake and I did not ask.
I have not touched him since the night Ciro died.
I want to be exact about the next part, because I have been exact about everybody else in this business.
I could have him in four seconds. That is the arithmetic, and I have run it twice.
Four seconds to cross two feet of sheet, and he would not say one word, and he would put his hands on me the way he does, which is completely, and I would get the thing I have wanted since a landing in this house with no light on, and in the morning I would have handed him the only piece of ground I have left.
There is nothing that happens to me in this house that I did not decide.
That is all I have got. I am not spending it at two in the morning because I am lonely.
So I do not cross the two feet.
I put my hand under the covers instead, and I decide it, out loud, in my own head, in a full sentence, the way I decide everything.
It is going to be quick and it is going to be nobody in particular and then I am going to sleep.
It is not quick, and it is not nobody.
I am so wet the moment I touch myself that I have to stop and breathe, because I have been carrying this under a coat and a schedule and four hundred pages of a dead woman’s paper, and my body has been keeping its own file the entire time.
I get two fingers into myself and the heel of my hand hard on my clit, and I try, I honestly try, to make it be a shape and a weight and nothing else.
And it will not be. It is his hands. It is his hands and the size of them and the ink along the edge of the right one and Ottavia’s gold on my finger and his brother’s ring on his, and it is a man saying say it into the side of my throat in a voice with no hurry anywhere in it, and it is the way he goes still and lets me do whatever I am going to do and does not once try to steer it, and I bite down on the inside of my own wrist so that the man two feet away from me does not hear his wife working herself.
My hips have started to move and I cannot stop them and I do not try very hard.
I think about the boathouse. I think about him underneath me in his shirt with his jaw set and his hands off me because I told him to keep them off me, and the way he broke and put them on my hips anyway and said sorry into my collarbone and did not take them off.
I think about his mouth. I think about him going down on his knees on a landing in this house with my dress in his fists and my back against the plaster and no light on and no words, and how he made a noise when he got his mouth on me, one, low, like a man who has been let into somewhere he was not expecting.
I think about him saying tell me and meaning it.
That is the one that does it. Not the rest of it. That.
I cum on my own hand in the dark three days after I stopped being able to look at him, with my wrist between my teeth and my back arched off the sheet, and it goes on and on and it is not kind, and I make no sound at all, because I have had nine years of practice at making no sound.
Afterward I lie there with my heart going and my hand still between my legs and my eyes open on the ceiling.
He is two feet away. He is asleep. He has not moved.
And here is the thing I would like on the record, since I am the one who keeps it.
I did not do that instead of forgiving him.
I did that so that I would not have to. I have just taken the one thing I still want from that man and I have taken it alone, in the dark, without telling him, because it was cheaper than asking, and I have spent five weeks being furious with people who do exactly that.
I get up at ten to three, because I can hear water running in the bathroom and I do not want to be lying down when he comes back.
I call the meeting for eight in the morning, and I do not ask my husband whether I may.
That is the first thing. There are nine people around the long table in the study by five past, Keane, Tazio, Nadia Ferrante down from the port, Nunzio Farro with his hand in a cage of steel, Peppe Mazza with the crutches, two of Tazio’s people, Fabrizio, and Lorenzo, and I stand at the head of it because that is where I put myself.
Lorenzo takes the chair at my right without a word.
He has done that every time since Wednesday. Whatever I say, he says yes, and when somebody looks to him for a second opinion he looks at me, and I am letting him have it, because a man doing penance is at least a man doing something.
“Thirty-five days,” I say. “Here is where we are, and then here is what I am going to do, and then anybody who wants to argue can argue.”
I lay it out flat. Four dead men, three of them mine.
A room in Mount Vernon with five jigs and one empty space.
Three forgeries, all of them better than the people who own the hands.
A fund that has been running my mother-in-law’s rules out of a Providence account for ten years, in her words, taking care of widows it made.
And a letter dated the ninth of July that describes me, correctly, in a way nobody in this room could improve on, and that says I have already been paid for.
Peppe Mazza says, “Signora, forgive me, but what is he waiting for?”
“He is not waiting,” I say. “He is finishing. Everything that has happened in this house in thirty-five days has been the end of something he started ten years ago, not the beginning of something new. We have never once been in front of him.”
Nobody likes that.
“So we stop chasing,” I say. “I have read everything there is and it is all beautiful and none of it has his name on it. So we are going to do the other thing.”
“Which is what?” Tazio says.
“We are going to make him come and stand in a room.”
I go to my father first, because I am not doing any of it behind his back ever again.
He is in the kitchen of the house I grew up in with a binder in front of him. An actual binder. Tabs. A table of contents in his handwriting on the first page, the way he did in November, when he was courting me in the only language he has.
“What is this?”
“Everything I can remember,” Ettore Rinaldi says.
“Every name, every year, every envelope. Some of it twice, because I did it once and then I did it again to see if I would say it the same way, and where the two do not match I have written both.” He turns the binder around.
“The second tab is the men who are still alive.”
“Papà.”
“The third tab is me.”
I stop.
“Keane came Tuesday,” he says. “There is a statement in there with my signature on it, witnessed, notarized before poor Gilda. Everything I took. Every date. The four hundred, and the three after, and the one that came before a man died, which is the one I have not been able to say out loud to you and which is written down in there in plain words.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because you are going to need a document that cannot be attacked,” he says, “and there is only one kind, which is a man saying a true thing that ruins him.” He closes the binder and pushes it across the table.
“Use it whenever it helps you. In a courtroom. Against me. I have told Keane he is not to protect me, and he is very unhappy about it, and I found that quite enjoyable.”
I put my hand flat on the cover.
“There is a fourth tab,” he says.
“What is in it?”
“The cardiologist.” My father looks at the table. “Since April. It is not good, and it is not tomorrow, and I did not tell you because in this family a man who is unwell has a price on his head, and I decided that I would rather you were angry with me than frightened for me.”
“That was not your decision to make.”
“No,” he says. “I know that now. Everybody in your life has been making that decision for you since you were twenty-four and I started it.”
And my father, who has never in his life apologized for anything without putting a condition on the end of it, does not put a condition on the end of it.
I sit in that kitchen for a while.
“You are coming to Sunday,” I tell him, when I can. “Every Sunday. With the binder or without it.”
“Valeria…”
“Every Sunday, papà. I am not negotiating in my own house.”
Here is the plan, and here is what it costs.
The fund answers letters. For eleven years an old woman on Doyle Avenue has written to a post office box in Providence whenever something was wrong with Concetta Vanni, and every single time, something arrived.
So we are going to write and say something is wrong.
I take it to Renata Alba myself and I sit in her front room with the finches going and I tell an eighty-one-year-old woman that I want her to lie to the only correspondent she has had for eleven years.
She listens to the whole thing without interrupting.
Then she says, “You want me to tell him Concetta is dying.”
“No.” My mouth is dry. “Not dying. Worse than that, for our purposes. I want you to tell him she has been moved into a facility and that they will not let her stay unless a person with authority over her affairs comes and signs for her.”
“And if he sends money?”
“That is the point. He cannot send money. Money is not a signature.” I put my hands flat on my knees. “Nobody can sign that but a person standing in a room.”
Renata Alba looks at me for a long moment.
“You understand what you are asking,” she says. “That man has kept that woman alive for ten years. He is going to open that letter and think a person he is responsible for is frightened and alone in a place she does not know.”
“Yes.”
“And that is what you want?”
“Yes.”
“Say why. Out loud, in my house, since you are asking me to write it in my hand.”
And I sit in that room and I make myself say it properly.