31. Nothing Happened
NOTHING HAPPENED
VALERIA
Nella Moro will not come to the house.
She says it on Broadway at four minutes past eleven without turning round.
“Not the house.”
“Nella.”
“I know what house that is. Everybody on the Hill knows what house that is.” She watches the road go past. “You have taken two kids out of one place where a man decides things and you would like to drive us to a bigger one, and I would like you to hear how that sounds from the back seat.”
Lorenzo’s hands do not move on the wheel.
“Where, then?” I say.
“I don’t know. That’s not my job. You’re the one with the six things.”
And she is right, and it is the first entirely correct thing anybody has said to me in five weeks.
So I do it myself, in a moving car, with a nine-year-old eating pastry behind me.
A hotel on the water in East Greenwich, two rooms on one floor, booked in the name of a woman who has been dead since ninety-six, paid from an account of mine that has never been through the D’Amato house.
My solicitor, who is not Keane and never has been, at two, with emergency guardianship papers and a school for September.
A number for a woman I was at law school with who does nothing but this.
It takes eleven minutes.
And somewhere around minute six, holding a telephone in a moving car with my dead husband’s ring still in my bag, I notice that I have stopped feeling anything bad.
I notice that my hands are steady for the first time since the cathedral. That the thing in my chest which has been sitting on the diaphragm for thirty-seven days has lifted off it.
That I am enjoying myself.
I put the telephone face down on my knee and look out of the window at Providence going past and understand that I am going to have to say that out loud to somebody today, and that there is no arrangement of words that will make it survive being heard.
At the hotel Tobia stands in the middle of the room and does not put his bag down.
He looks at the door to the corridor, then the bathroom, then the balcony, then back at the corridor. Two seconds. Lorenzo makes a small sound behind me, like somebody has put a hand on a bruise.
“Do you want to know how the room works?” Lorenzo says.
The boy looks at him.
“Door to the hall has a chain and a bolt, your sister has the card, there is no other way in. Window opens nine inches, they build them like that. Fire door at the end of the corridor on the left goes down to the car park and does not lock from the inside. The one on the right is alarmed, so use the left.” He says it exactly the way you would tell somebody where the towels are.
Tobia puts his bag down.
“Thank you,” he says.
And my husband, who has run a criminal family for eleven years, has to go and stand at the window with his back to the room.
I give Nella both keys and no third one.
“Nobody comes to that door who has not telephoned you first,” I say. “There will be a woman here at two who is not from my husband’s family and does not work for him. If you do not like her, say so and I will get another.”
Nella turns the cards over in her fingers.
“So you are the one with the money now,” she says.
I do not answer that.
“I’m not being clever,” she says. “I’m asking.
Yesterday there was a man with the money and this morning there is you, and I have got two rooms and a school and no key that anybody else holds, and I would like to know which of those things is because of a rule and which is because you happen to be all right.
” She looks up. “Because if it’s the second one, then it lasts as long as you do. ”
“That is the correct question,” I say.
“I know it is. Answer it.”
“I do not know yet,” I say. “I have had it for four hours.”
“All right,” Nella Moro says, and puts the keys in her pocket. “That is at least the first true answer.”
Ruggero telephones at twenty past twelve.
Lorenzo takes it in the corridor, and I stand where I can see his face, because I have learned that much this week.
“Say it again.” Then: “How long?” Then, after a while: “All right.”
He puts the telephone away.
“He came out at eleven forty and drove north.”
“And Loffredo?”
“Went to work at twenty past eleven the way he has every day of his life. They passed each other in the hall, Ruggero thinks. There was no noise.” Lorenzo is looking at the carpet. “He is at the plant on Allens Avenue now. He is fine.”
I put my hand on the wall.
“Then nothing happened.”
“Nothing happened,” Lorenzo says.
And we stand in a hotel corridor in East Greenwich at half past twelve on a Friday and neither of us believes it for one second, because the man we are discussing has waited four months before, and fifteen years before that, and thirty-one before that.
“How long do we have to be frightened for?”
“I do not know,” my husband says. “Possibly for the rest of his life.”
He tells me about the pavement in the car park with the engine off.
It turns out the asking was never the part that stopped me. It is not a lever. It is just a thing you do first.
He tells me what he chose and why. He does not say I had no choice, which would nearly have been true.
“It is a real reason,” he says. “It is also the one I picked out of the ones available, in about four seconds, and I have been checking it since eleven o’clock and it keeps coming out the same, and I do not trust it at all, because it was also the easy one.”
“Do you want me to tell you it was right?”
“No.”
“Good. I am not going to. And I am not going to tell you it was wrong.” I look at my hands.
“You chose the two in the back seat over the man upstairs. That is a thing a person is allowed to do. It is also a thing that ends with a man dead, and you are going to carry it, and I want you to carry it out loud. Not to me. I am not going to be your confessor, I would start to hate you. But do not become a man who has a smooth version of this by Christmas.”
He is quiet a moment.
“That is the first instruction anybody has given me since the funeral.”
“Then here is the second thing, and I am going to say it anyway because I have decided this morning that I am done being handled and I cannot be done being handled and go on handling myself.”
“Valeria.”
“I am happy.”
He turns his head.
“I have been sitting in a car making telephone calls for the last hour and a half,” I say, “and I am happy. My hands stopped shaking. I knew which call to make third. There is a shoebox on a table in your mother’s kitchen with thirty-four women in it and nine of them unfinished, and when I think about that my whole chest opens up.
” My voice is perfectly level, and I hate it.
“My husband has been in the ground a month. There are two children upstairs whose lives have come apart this morning and I got them a hotel and a lawyer and I was good at it, and I have not felt like this since I was twenty-nine years old.”
Lorenzo does not say anything.
“Do you understand what that makes me look like?”
“Yes.”
“Then say it, because if you make it kind I will not be able to stand it.”
“It makes you look like a woman whose husband’s death was the best thing that ever happened to her,” Lorenzo says. “And you have just told me that out loud, in a car park, to his brother, three days after finding out it was arranged.”
“Yes.”
“I would not have said it in your place.”
“No,” I say. “You would have waited until I had slept.”
And that is the thing that does it.
It is not the crisis and it is not the adrenaline and it is not three nights of a bed with a river down the middle of it.
It is that I asked a man for the unkind version of myself and he gave it to me straight, in a corridor, on his feet, without one soft word anywhere in it, and then stood there and let it go on being true.
Nobody has done that for me in nine years.
I have the second keycard in my coat pocket. Two rooms on one floor, and one of them has two children in it and the other has nobody at all, and I have been carrying that card since half past eleven without letting myself ask why I did not hand it over with the others.
“Come here,” I say.
He does not ask what for. He follows me eight feet down a hotel corridor in East Greenwich at twenty to one in the afternoon and I get the card into the slot on the second try because my hands have started shaking again, and this time it is not the case.
The door shuts, and I put him against the inside of it.
I get both hands in his shirt and my mouth on him and he makes a sound I have not heard out of him since the boathouse, low and surprised, and then his hand is in my hair and he is kissing me back like a man who has been standing three days from a fire.
There is a strip of white daylight down the middle of the curtains and the water going past outside and a bed neither of us looks at, and I do not want the bed.
I want him exactly where he is, upright, coat still on, hands where I put them.
“Do not be careful,” I say against his mouth. “I have had five weeks of careful and I will scream.”
“I am not going to be careful.”
“Good.” I get his belt open. “Then tell me what you have been doing at night, because I have heard you not sleeping through a wall and I want it in words.”
“Thinking about your mouth,” he says, into my throat, and his hand goes up under my skirt and takes the inside of my thigh in a grip that will mark. “And your hands. And what you would say if I ever got you somewhere nobody in that house could hear you.”
“Say the rest.”
“You do not want the rest.”
“I want all of it and I want it filthy and I want it now.”