Chapter 16
CATE
Ispent two nights on Nina's couch, under the afghan her mother crocheted during the Carter administration, being fed like a hostage in a very loving kidnapping.
She asked. Of course she asked. Nina Costanzo has extracted every secret I've ever owned with warm water and scalp pressure, and she started before my coat was off.
Who is he. What did he do. Did he hit you — no?
Okay. Is he married. Is he married, Cat, because I will drive to wherever he is right now.
Is it money. Is it another woman. Is it — and here she lowered her voice to the register the neighborhood saves for the word it won't say — is he sick, Cat? Is that it? Is he sick?
I gave her nothing. Not because I wanted to — because everything true started with a word I could not say in her kitchen with her kids' school photos on the refrigerator.
She'd look at my face after every swing, read the padlock on it, and come back twenty minutes later with a new angle, because that's the other thing about Nina: she has never once respected a locked door in her life, she just believes in picking it slow.
The first night, nothing. The second night she was still going at eleven — a new angle involving Joey, the house, and whether this was about money after all — when he showed up on her corner.
I was on the couch pretending to sleep when I heard her at the front window, and then I heard her get her husband up, and then I heard the word police, and I was across that living room in my socks before my brain had finished the sentence.
"Don't call anybody."
"Cate." She had the phone in her hand and the blinds cracked and her voice was doing the thing it does when she's keeping it down for the kids, which is barely. "There is a man on my corner. Enormous. He has been standing there since it got dark. He is looking at this house."
I looked through the blinds.
Streetlight, corner, and him — hands at his sides, absolutely still, making no attempt at a doorway or a shadow or any of the tradecraft I knew for a fact he owned. Standing in the open under the light like a man who had decided to be looked at.
"Don't call anybody," I said again, and something in how I said it made her put the phone down and look at me instead. Look at me, then the window, then me — every question she'd asked me re-sorting itself behind her eyes at speed.
She jerked the blinds another inch and pointed with her whole arm, in her robe, keeping her voice down for the children.
"Does he look something like that, Cat? The man you won't talk about.
Is that the him? Because that is the biggest human being I have ever seen in my life, and my cousin Angela married a Buonfiglio. "
"That's him."
"Madonna." She looked through the blinds a long moment.
Her husband hovered behind us in his undershirt, awaiting orders.
"And he's not hiding. You see that? Man's under the streetlight.
He wants to be seen." She let the slat go and turned around.
"Okay. Nobody's calling anybody. Anthony, go back to bed.
" And then, to me, quietly, terribly: "He knows you're here.
And you knew he'd come. That's why you keep looking at the window. "
I hadn't known that. She had.
I was outside before I'd finished deciding to be.
Nina's spare coat over my pajamas, my sneakers with no socks, down her steps and across the dead street with the cold coming up through the soles, and he watched me come the whole way — didn't move, didn't speak, just stood under that light and let me arrive at whatever speed my fury picked.
"What are you doing here?"
"You were behind that door. I can't be behind it with you. This is as close as the distance goes."
"You don't get to—" I stopped, because I didn't know how the sentence ended, and standing there in the cold with my breath showing, I made myself find out what I'd actually come down to say.
"The church thing. The sky. That's mine.
" I said it first because it was the one piece I was sure of.
"That's between me and a locked building, and it's old, and it's not yours, and I'm not going to stand here and make you pay Heaven's bill.
You're the only one in this whole thing who showed up.
I know that." My breath came out white. "But here's what is yours.
I drank coffee with you every morning for weeks.
I told you about Nonna. I took you to bed.
" The word came out steady and it cost me.
"And you're — I don't know what you are.
I watched you cross a room in a way rooms don't allow.
I've got a photocopy where your name is three thousand years old.
And now it's midnight and my whole body still turns toward you like you're a stove in January, and underneath that, all the way down, I am afraid of you — and I hate it.
I hate being afraid of you. I don't even know if I'm supposed to be.
That's the part I can't put anywhere, Raq.
Not the sky. You. What you are, and what it means that I—" I stopped that sentence with my teeth.
He took it all standing still. He didn't defend himself, and he didn't come closer, and both of those were answers.
"You should be afraid," he said at last, quietly. "Not of what I'd do. Of what I am. Those are different things, and you're the first one in a very long time to be afraid of the right one."
"That's not comforting."
"No. It's true. You asked for true."
I wrapped Nina's coat tighter and looked at him — the size of him, the stillness, the streetlight landing on him like it was landing on a building — and everything I'd been holding stood up in my chest at once, the questions, the fear, the wanting, and I understood that if I opened any of it out here I was going to open all of it, on a corner, in borrowed clothes, at midnight.
"I can't do this tonight," I said. "Not yet."
"Cate. We need to talk."
"Tomorrow." I was already backing up, because backing up was the only way I was going to make it back inside.
"We'll talk in the morning. But I'm warning you—" and my voice came out level, dead level, the intake voice, the one I use when the estimate is going to hurt: "You will tell me everything.
All of it. What you are, what you can do, what happened to you, what's actually going on in my basement — everything.
If you're not prepared to tell me everything, then don't show in the morning. Raq. I swear to the saints."
He looked at me for a long moment, under the light, with the whole empty street holding still around him.
"Go inside," he said. "It's cold."
"And you—" I was already backing across the street, and then the rest of it arrived, the thing that had been circling the couch with me for two nights among all the bigger things: "I walked out of my house and left you standing in my kitchen.
Two days I've been lying on that couch not knowing if my door is locked, if you're still in there, if my keys — you were alone in my house, Raq. "
"I left when you left. The house is locked."
"You don't have keys."
"The house is locked," he said, in exactly the same voice, and the hair went up on my arms, and I decided that particular receipt could wait for daylight with all the others.
"Fine. Then don't stand out here all night like a crazy stalker. Nina almost called the cops once already, and half this block has the precinct on speed dial. Go back to the house. You've got a painting to watch, don't you?"
He didn't move, and he didn't answer that either, and I knew with total certainty that he was going to stand under that light until the sun came up, visible to God and the whole block alike, because being seen was the entire message — and that whatever he was actually guarding, it apparently wasn't in my basement.
I let Nina's door close behind me with my heart going hard. The answer would be the morning.
Nina was standing inside her door with the afghan already off the couch.
She didn't say one word. She wrapped me in it, and steered me back to the cushions, and turned off the lamp, and from the dark of the hallway I heard her say, to nobody, to the ceiling, to the saints: "Madonna santissima, the real thing. "
I did not sleep one wink.
I lay on the couch with my heart still going and Nonna's rosary voice in my head saying say what's true, Caterina, so fine. Here was true: I'd stood three feet from a creature older than writing. I'd told him I was afraid of him. He'd told me I was right to be.
And the whole walk back across that street, what my body wanted was to turn around.
That was the part keeping me up. Not the fear — the fear made sense; the fear was the sanest thing I owned. It was the fear and the wanting in the same skin. Taking turns. All night.
Somewhere around four in the morning I stopped pretending I was deciding anything. I'd decided on the corner. Maybe on the stoop, before any of it. The only thing left was the terms.
He was still there at sunrise.
Nina was at the blinds when I gave up on the couch, coffee in hand, slat cracked, doing surveillance in her robe like it was a paying job.
"Still there," she reported, without turning around.
"Same spot. I checked at three. I checked at five.
The garbage truck went by and he didn't move, and Vinny's dog walked the block and wouldn't go near his corner.
" She let the slat go and looked at me. "You went out there at midnight in my coat and said six sentences to him, and whatever they were, that man stood at attention the rest of the night like you'd left him on post. So.
" She pointed me at the kitchen table. "Sit.
Eggs. He can hold his corner five more minutes. "
She put the plate in front of me, and the coffee, and then she sat down across from me and did what Nina does with a hopeless head of hair: stopped fighting all of it and picked the one place to cut.
"One question." She held up a finger. "Did he lie to you? Or did he tell you something true you didn't want?"
I looked into my cup. "The second one."
"Ugh." She sat back like I'd confirmed a diagnosis.
"Those are the worst. The liars you can leave, Cat.
The liars, you change the locks, you bless yourself, done.
A man who tells you the truth you didn't want—" she shook her head, slow.
"That's not a bad color job, honey. That's what's under the hair.
You don't walk out on what's under the hair.
You work with the head God gave you or you don't — but you decide it looking at it. Not from my couch."
She drank, and set the cup down like a cleaver coming down.
"Finish the eggs. I'm driving you home. And we're walking past that corner on the way to the car, because I want a look at this man up close in the daylight.
All night under a streetlight in March, on purpose, where your best friend can see him?
That's either the real thing or a Dateline episode. And I've seen every Dateline."
He was still on the corner when we came out into the morning — in the open, in daylight, a whole March night on his feet and looking exactly like he had two days ago, not a crease, not a shadow, like the cold hadn't dared to touch him — and when he saw me come down Nina's steps he went very still in a way I felt land under my sternum, in the spot where I'd been keeping the true thing since the morning of the letterhead.
He'd stayed. After the ultimatum, knowing the price of showing was everything — he'd stood on that corner all night with his answer, waiting for morning so he could give it.
Nobody warns you about walking back toward a man whose skin you know.
The body doesn't care what the rest of you is going through.
I was still furious at the sky, still carrying the couch and the grief and a word I couldn't say in Nina's kitchen — and my body wanted him anyway.
The hands. The mouth. The heat he throws without trying.
I stood on Nina's steps being angry about that too.
Two days since I'd touched him, and my skin had been counting.
Nina walked straight up to him.
She is five-four in her work clogs, and she stopped inside arm's reach of a man built like a garage and looked him up and looked him down and took her time about it, because fear has never once made the list of things Nina Costanzo does in front of witnesses.
"I watched you all night," she said.
"I know."
"You know." She nodded, slow, the nod she gives a client who has just admitted to box dye. "Okay. Then know this too. That woman has people. She's got me, she's got a block, she's got a church she's mad at, and if you hurt her — I have scissors, and I cut for a living."
"Understood," he said, with the same gravity he'd have given the archangel Michael, and possibly more.
Nina held his eyes another second. Whatever she was looking for, she found enough of it, because she looked at me next, and I answered the question before she could load it.
"I'm okay, Nina. I'll be alright. I'm walking home."
She looked between us — me in yesterday's clothes, him fresh off a whole night on her corner — and then she went up her steps and came back down with the bag and put it in my hands, veal and bread and whatever else she'd decided grief requires.
"Sunday," she said. To both of us. "My table. Both of you. I'm not asking." And she stood on her stoop with her arms crossed and watched us all the way off her block.
We walked. Six blocks, side by side, not touching, him shortening that enormous stride to mine like he'd been doing it his whole life, and the neighborhood waking up around us — the gates going up on 86th, the bakery exhaust, two guys arguing about the Mets like it was their job.
Nobody looked twice at us. A woman and a man walking home in the morning.
The most ordinary thing in the world, and my whole left side felt him the entire way home.
We were two blocks in when he spoke.
"Your friend threatened me with scissors."
"She means them."
"I believe her. I have been threatened by principalities." He didn't look down at me, but I heard it in his voice, the thing that lives next to the flatness. "That was the most credible one this century."
I laughed before I meant to, and the rest of the walk went easier.
At my gate I stopped, keys in hand, and looked up at him — the whole impossible height of him, patient on my sidewalk in the morning light like he had nowhere else in creation to be, which, it occurred to me, might be exactly true.
"Inside," I said, before the thing in my sternum could get any ideas about doing this on a sidewalk. "We're having a conversation. A long one."