Chapter 3
CATE
Ididn't tell Nina about the bus. Nina told me about the bus.
That's not exactly how it happened, but that's how it felt, because I walked into her aunt's salon at nine forty in the morning with a dozen sfogliatelle as an offering and a speech prepared, and Nina took one look at me in the mirror over her first client's half-foiled head and said, "Who died."
"Nobody died."
"Okay. Who almost died."
I have known Nina Costanzo since the second grade, when she bit Anthony Russo for me, and there is no version of my face she hasn't seen before I've felt it myself.
Lying to her is something I do for fun sometimes, the way you play chess against a computer on the hardest setting.
You will lose. You do it for the experience.
"Sit," she said, pointing her comb at the empty chair at the wash station. "Connie, you're processing, don't move. Cat. Sit."
I sat. She ran the water warm, tipped me back, and got her fingers into my scalp, which is the Costanzo method of interrogation and has a hundred percent conviction rate, and I stared at the ceiling tiles and gave it up in pieces: the bridge, the late, the light, the bus.
Her hands stopped.
"The B one? On Fifth?" Brooklyn measures all disasters by their route number. "Caterina."
"I'm fine."
"You crossed against the light in Midtown with four hundred years of somebody else's angel zipped in your coat—"
"In my defense, the angel made it."
"—and you're telling me this at the sink?
A day later? I have to hear you almost died with my hands in your hair like I'm finding out from a scanner?
" She yanked the sprayer like it had personally been driving the bus.
Nina's anger has always been the most reliable love I know.
Her husband gets flowers when he's in trouble; I get water pressure.
"There was a guy," I said, because the only way through Nina is cargo first, feelings later.
The water shut off. In the mirror across the room I watched her face go through its entire repertoire and land on the one she uses for novenas and gossip, which are the same face.
"What guy."
"The guy who pulled me back."
"Describe him."
"Tall. Dark hair. He had—" I lay there with my hair soaked, hunting for anything that wouldn't sound like what it sounded like. "He caught me like I was a grocery bag. He told me to watch where I was going. Then he told me I was fine, like he was reading it off a form, and then he left."
"He left."
"He left."
"You almost die, some enormous stranger catches you out of the air, and he leaves.
" She wrapped my head in a towel with the tenderness she reserves for concussion victims and idiots.
"What did he look like. And don't do the thing where you describe him like a police report, I want the real inventory. "
I did the thing where I describe him like a police report.
Height, build, coat. It's self-defense; the real inventory was not available for publication.
The real inventory had kept me up until four in the morning and was, at that very moment, sitting behind my sternum like a swallowed coin — the jaw I could've drawn blind, the eyes that went blue when the light hit them, the hand at his side closing and opening, once, like a decision being made about me at a level of the world I didn't have clearance for.
Nina listened to the police report with her arms crossed. Then she delivered her verdict to the salon at large, over the hum of Connie's timer:
"A guy built like a bad decision catches you off Fifth Avenue, tells you you're fine, and walks away." She snapped a towel off the shelf. "Marry him."
"Nina."
"I'm serious. The ones who stay and want a thank-you? Garbage. The ones who leave?" She pointed the towel at me like Scripture. "That's a man with secrets. God, I miss secrets. You know what I have? A husband who tells me everything. Every thought, Cat. It's like being married to a podcast."
"He was rude."
"Rude how."
"'Watch where you're going' rude."
"After he saved your life?" She considered this.
"Okay, that's — no, see, that's not rude, that's material.
Rude is Donnie asking if you 'need company' through the door.
This is banter with a delayed fuse." She spun the chair so I had to face myself in the mirror — wet-headed, hollow-eyed, alive.
Her voice dropped out of theater and into the register that was just for us, the one from the year Nonna was dying, when she came by every single Tuesday with lasagna and never once asked how I was doing in a way I'd have to answer. "You're okay?"
"I'm okay."
"You swear on the saints."
"I don't believe in the saints."
"They believe in you, heretic. Swear anyway."
I swore anyway. She blew out my hair like she was mad at it, which meant it looked incredible, and she took two sfogliatelle for the road, and when I left she stood in the doorway of the shop with her arms crossed watching me walk down 86th like the bus might come back for seconds.
The whole way home I did not think about him.
I was extremely thorough about it. I did not think about him past the fruit stand, and I did not think about him under the el, and by the time I hit my corner I had not thought about him so completely that I'd walked past my stoop and had to double back, and Donnie was on it.
"Caterina." Cat-a-REE-na. He was picking at the vestibule paint like it owed him something. "You got a boyfriend now or what?"
"Eleven hundred a month, Donnie."
"I'm asking because some guy was out here half the night.
" He said it lightly, but his eyes flickered — a little sideways flick toward the street — and I didn't like it.
"Across from the alley. Big guy. Just — standing there.
I seen him when I got up to use the john at like three, and I look out, and he's there, and I look again at four, and he's there. "
The hair on my arm stirred.
"Probably waiting on a ride," I said.
"For a hour?"
"You watched him for an hour, Donnie?"
That moved the conversation along. Donnie developed an urgent relationship with his mail and I let myself in, and I stood in Nonna's hallway with my back against the door for a second, between the eleven saints, thinking: a big guy, standing across from the alley, half the night.
It should have scared me. I want to be honest about what order things happened in, because I've had time to think about it and the order matters: fear did arrive. It just arrived second.
I was still standing there deciding what to do about the thing that arrived first when the truck pulled up.
Not a truck — a van, the kind of van that has never carried a mattress or a regret: matte gray, unlettered, riding low and slow like it was carrying a pope.
Two men got out in gloves. Actual white gloves.
On Bay 50th, where the last delivery that got carried to my door with two hands was a tray of baked ziti for Nonna's funeral.
"Fontana?" the older one said, reading off a tablet. "Caterina?"
"Depends," I said, which is Brooklyn for yes.
What came out of that van came out in a crate.
A good crate — I know crates the way Nina knows split ends — museum-grade, cornered in foam, climate strip on the side still green.
They walked it down my steps like it was a patient, and while the younger one angled it through Nonna's door frame the older one handed me a tablet and an envelope with my name on it in fountain pen — real fountain pen, wet-ink, the kind of handwriting nuns used to beat into people — and had me sign four times, and never once looked around at the basement the way people look around at the basement.
Then they were gone, and I was alone in my studio with a crate the size of a door, and I called Sal, because my hands had started shaking and I wanted to know why before they got worse.
He picked up on the first ring. He'd been waiting by the phone. Sal Ferraro, who taught me gilding with his hands over mine when I was nineteen, who does not wait by phones.
"It came," he said. Not a question.
"Sal, what came? There's a crate in my studio that costs more than my house."
"The client. From yesterday. He liked the Lombard — no.
Listen. He didn't like it. He examined it.
" Sal's voice had a note I'd heard maybe twice in fifteen years, and both times were about paintings.
"Forty minutes, Cat. With a loupe. Not one word.
Then he asks me who did the cradle repair on the back, because the grain matching was — his word — respectful.
" A breath. "I said my girl did it. He said: the one from the basement on Bay 50th? "
The shaking reached my elbows. "Sal. How does a man like that know where my basement is?"
"Because you're getting a reputation, that's how, that's the whole point, that's what a reputation is—" but there was a hitch in it, a half-second where the old man's voice checked its mirrors.
He'd heard it too. He talked over it, the way we both talk over things.
"It's a church piece, Cat. Private chapel, deconsecrated, whole collection's being liquidated, and this panel — he could send it to the Met's people.
He could send it to the guys on 57th with the climate rooms and the interns.
He's sending it to you. Full documentation in the envelope.
His people already handled the insurance. "
I looked at the envelope. My name, in that handwriting.
"How much is it insured for?"
He told me.
I sat down. On the floor. Of my studio. The Lombard angel had been worth more than me; this was worth more than the block.
"Condition report by Friday, no rush on the cleaning, he says.
Oh — and there's a rider on the policy, number that big.
Someone from the insurance company's gonna come assess the premises.
Locks, alarm situation, whatever they do.
Let them in, don't give them attitude." I barely heard it; I was doing the math.
"And Cat. Cat. Are you hearing me? This is the one.
You do this clean and quiet, and you never cold-call for work again in your life.
This is the one that gets you all the rest of them.
" And then, softer, because he is my second father and he can't help it: "Don't blow it. "
"I never blow the work, Sal."
"I know," he said. "It's the only thing you never do."
We hung up on that, because that's how Sal says I love you.
It took me two hours to open the crate, because I did it right — seals photographed, strapping logged, orientation arrows, the whole museum liturgy — and then the foam came away and I stopped being a professional for a second and was just a person alone in a basement with a very old thing.
An Annunciation. Chapel-sized, the angel arriving on the left, the dove, the lily, the gold ground gone deep amber under varnish the color of tea.
Beautiful, and filthy, and mine till Friday's condition report.
I swung the work lamp low and started walking the surface the way Sal taught me — slow, corner to corner, letting it tell me what it had been through.
It had been through something.
Under the grime, low on the angel's robe, there was a patch that didn't belong.
You wouldn't see it from a pew. You'd barely see it with a loupe.
But varnish ages like skin, and this patch was younger than the rest — not sixteenth-century younger.
Not even Victorian-improver younger. Decades.
Somebody had gone into this painting recently, quietly, matched the tone, and left no record — and there is no honest reason on God's green earth to do invisible work on a chapel panel and then hide that you did it.
Restoration you document. Concealment you don't.
The hair on my right arm stood up — that arm, the same stupid stretch of skin — and I was leaning in with the lamp in one hand and my loupe in the other when two things happened at once.
The first was that I felt watched. Not heard-a-noise watched. Watched like sun through glass, warm and directional, coming from the window at the top of my wall, the one that looks out at ankle-height on the whole indifferent street.
I looked up.
Across the street, in the doorway of the Espositos' bricked-up laundromat, a man was standing in the dark.
Big. Still. Donnie's guy — half the night, across from the alley — and I couldn't see his face and I didn't need to, because my arm already knew, the way it had known for two days, and my heart did something complicated that was not entirely, or even mostly, fear.
The second thing was the doorbell.
Nobody rings that bell. Joey has keys. Nina texts.
Donnie yells through the wall like we're in a tenement musical.
The bell hasn't rung since the funeral casseroles stopped coming — and it rang now, at ten o'clock at night, two long pushes, while the man across the street stood in a dead laundromat's doorway watching my window and a five-hundred-year-old painting with a fresh scar in it sat on my easel breathing tea-colored fumes at me.
I put down the loupe. I picked up Nonna's rolling pin, which is not a plan, but it's a tradition.
And I went to answer the door.