Chapter 32 #2
And then she was in the doorway in her salon smock with her coat over it and her hair up in a claw clip, and she looked at me on that bed, and her whole face broke and reassembled in about a second and a half.
She crossed the room and put both hands on my face.
"Okay," she said. "Okay. I'm here."
I did not cry in front of the tech. I did not cry in front of the doctor.
I did not cry in front of the man who took me.
I cried all over Nina Costanzo's salon smock for a solid two minutes while she held the back of my head and said the same four words in a rotation like a rosary — I'm here, I've got you — and did not ask me a single question until I was done.
Then she stood up, and turned around, and saw him.
He had come in behind her and gone to the corner, and he was standing there with his coat over his arm and his eyes down, and I watched Nina Costanzo look up at all of him and see nothing but a man who had made her best friend cry.
"You," she said.
"Nina—"
"No." She didn't raise her voice. That's how I knew how bad it was. "You've got a hospital and a heartbeat and a woman in a paper gown, and I've got four days of no phone calls. You're going to explain that in the car."
"Nina, he's—"
"In the car, Caterina."
The Camry smelled like her — that salon smell, the sweet chemical one that gets into everything — and she had a blanket on the back seat and a bottle of water in the cupholder and a paper bag of food from a gas station because the woman cannot arrive anywhere empty-handed even when she is furious.
He folded himself into the back with the blanket over his knees like a bus passenger. I got the front, reclined, feet up on the dash, because a doctor had told me to stay off them.
Nina drove eleven miles without saying one word.
Then, at the light where the highway starts: "Okay. Talk."
"Nina—"
"Not you. Him." She caught his eyes in the mirror. "You. Talk."
"I took her," he said.
I turned around so fast my seatbelt locked.
"I took her out of her house and I brought her to a place with no telephone, and she asked me to bring her back and I refused." Level. Flat. No decoration on any of it. "She walked in the cold trying to get home. That is why she is in this car with a hospital bracelet on."
Nina's hands stayed exactly where they were on the wheel. Ten and two. She didn't look at him again. She drove maybe a quarter mile.
"Are you sitting behind me telling me you kidnapped her."
"Yes."
"Cate."
"He did," I said.
"And you're—" she checked the mirror, checked me, checked the road, "—you're sitting in my car with him."
"Yes."
"Because?"
"Because it's not what it sounds like," I said. "And because I can't tell you what it is."
"Try."
"Nina—"
"Try, Cate. Four days. Try."
"There are people who might come for me." It was the smallest true thing I had. "Being near him is dangerous. That's why he did it. He was wrong — he was wrong in the worst way anybody has ever been wrong with me, and he knows it — but he wasn't wrong about that part."
Nina's chin came up.
"What people."
"I can't."
"Are they coming to my house?"
"No."
"Are my kids in this? Cate. Look at me. Is Gina in this?"
"No. God, no. Nina, no."
"Then what people." Her voice was climbing. "Who is coming for you?"
"I can't—"
"Not you." Her eyes went to the mirror and stayed there. "Him. You. Back seat. Who is coming for her?"
Silence from behind me.
"Oh, no. No, no. You had plenty to say twenty minutes ago." She checked the mirror again, and the road, and the mirror. "You sat behind me and told me you kidnapped my best friend like you were reading me a delivery order. So finish it. Who?"
"People who are not going to find her," he said.
"That's not an answer."
"It is the only one I have."
"Then here's mine." She had both hands on the wheel and she did not look back again. "From where I'm sitting, a man who takes a woman out of her house to a place with no phone is not the guy who protects her from the dangerous people. He is the dangerous people."
"Yes," he said.
That shut her up for about a quarter mile. It shut me up too.
"Say that again."
"You are right. In that house I was the danger to her.
I have understood that since I stood on a road in the rain and watched her walk away from me carrying my child.
" Level. Unhurried. Nothing defending itself.
"You will not have to protect her from me again.
But there are others, and they are real, and they are not mine, and that is all I am able to give you. "
Nina hit the wheel with the flat of her hand.
"Nobody in this car will tell me anything!"
"Nina—"
"Has he done this before? Has he ever put a hand on you? And don't do the face, Caterina, I've got a cousin who did the face for six years—"
"No. Never. Not once." I turned all the way around in the seat to say it, and my seatbelt locked again. "Nina, I have never once been afraid of him hurting me. Not for a second. Not in that house, not on that road, not ever."
She drove. Both hands. Ten and two. I watched her jaw work, and I watched her go through everything she knows, everything anybody from our block knows, and land somewhere.
"He's in something," she said.
I didn't answer.
"That's it, isn't it. He's in something, and it's the kind of thing where people come looking, and that's why there's no company, no cousins, no mother, nobody at that table but him.
" She glanced at the mirror and back at the road, and her voice dropped.
"Is it the kind of thing a person gets out of? "
"No," I said, because that one was true.
She was quiet for a while. Then she nodded, once, short, like a woman confirming a thing she'd already half decided.
And I let her have it.
She had put my whole life into a shape she grew up next to — half this neighborhood has an uncle nobody asks about — and it was the wrong shape, and it was the only one that was going to hold.
"I'm asking you to love me with a piece missing," I said. "And if that's not something you can do, I'll understand, and I'll still be at your table on Sunday, and I will never hold it against you."
Nina drove. The Sunrise Highway signs went by, and then the LIE, and then the first sign that said Brooklyn, and she didn't say anything for eleven exits.
Then: "Do you know what I thought? These four days.
I thought you were dead in a ditch, and then I thought you'd run off with him and were embarrassed, and then I went back to the ditch.
" She wiped her eye with the heel of her hand and put it right back on the wheel.
"You want me to love you with a piece missing.
Caterina. I have been loving you with pieces missing since you were nine years old and stopped talking for a month.
That's not a new job. That's the whole job. "
I couldn't say anything.
"I don't need to know what he is," she said.
"I know what you are." She looked in the mirror, at the back seat, and her voice went to a place I have heard exactly twice, both times about her children.
"But you. Whatever you are. You listen to me now.
If you ever take her anywhere again — if she is ever four days quiet again — I will not call the police.
I will come get her myself. Do you understand what I'm telling you? "
"Yes," he said.
"Say it back."
"You will come and get her yourself."
"That's right," said Nina, and put her blinker on, and took the exit for the Belt.
She double-parked outside the house a little after nine that night with the hazards going, and half the block was still out, because it was the first warm evening of the year.
"Caterina! Where you been, we don't see you—"
"Working, Mrs. Esposito!"
"She's been working," Nina said, over the roof of the car, in the voice that ends conversations on that block. "Leave her alone, she's tired."
"That's a hospital bracelet."
"It's a bracelet, Angela."
By dinner the entire neighborhood would know that Cate Fontana came home in Nina Costanzo's car with a hospital bracelet on. There is no version of that street where they don't.
I got out. The stoop light was on, faithful, guarding nothing. The window boxes needed everything. The bathtub Madonna two doors down had a new plastic rose in her hand since I'd been gone.
My legs went to water halfway up the walk.
He was there before I could reach for the rail — not touching me, close, both hands almost. And then he stopped himself and stood up straight and looked at me, and asked.
"May I carry you down your stairs?"
Four days. Four days and two miles of cold road and a hospital bracelet, and there it was, out loud, on my sidewalk, in front of Nina Costanzo and God and the Madonnas.
"Yes," I said, and the word cost me exactly what he'd earned — which is to say I heard my voice go soft on it, one degree, and Nina heard it too, and I did not take it back.
He bent to pick me up — and stopped, halfway, with his hands not quite on me, and looked down the steps at my door.
"What," I said.
"My brother is in your kitchen."
I looked at the door. Closed. Locked. Dark behind the glass, the way I left it four days ago.
"He's what?"
"He is sitting at your table. He has been there some time." Raq's jaw moved. "I would have told you from the corner. I have been trying to decide, the entire way up this walk, whether telling you would frighten you, and I have decided that it is not mine to decide."