Epilogue
CATE
By June the block had its windows open again, and so did I.
I was at the bench with the gate light on and the evening coming in — a little Madonna and Child on the easel, private client, nothing haunted about her except the price — and I was working around the curve of myself the way I'd learned to, the reach adjusted, the stool pushed back, the tenant under my apron making her opinions known every time I leaned.
She. I'd stopped trying it out. It had stuck.
Down the hall Raq was setting the table for three, which meant Sar was coming to dinner.
That's a house rule now, written nowhere, enforced absolutely: Sar hoses down at the marina, changes his jacket, and stands downwind on the stoop until cleared for entry.
We don't talk about the first trimester.
The first trimester, my superpower nose and Sar's profession had gone to war, and the war had ended the same way every time — me, sprinting, him in the doorway saying again?
with genuine scientific interest — and a creature older than the ocean he fishes learned to be afraid of a pregnant woman's stomach.
Raq installed the marina rule personally.
Sar submitted like a man who'd seen the alternative.
He arrived at six with a bottle of wine for the brothers, a sparkling cider for me — cold, the good kind, because Sar does not forget a detail that matters — and lamb his guy swore on, smelling like drugstore soap, and held his arms out for inspection.
"Cleared," I said.
"The captain thanks you." He kissed the top of my head and went to argue with Raq about the grill, and my kitchen filled up with the sound of two ancient beings disagreeing about charcoal, and I stood at the sink with my hands in the water and let the whole ordinary miracle of it soak in like the light.
After dinner, after Sar headed back to the marina with the empty lamb dish and a container of leftovers he did not argue about, I stood in front of the saints.
All eleven of them, in their frames, in their rows — Nonna's wall, kept burning, dusted every Friday — and I stood there with my hand on the curve and got quiet in a way I could feel him notice from the other room. Two seconds later he was in the doorway.
"Caterina."
"I'm fine."
"You are standing at the wall." He said it the way other men say you're crying.
"I'm thinking." I kept my eyes on Saint Anne, who knew something about all this. "Maybe we should get married."
Silence. The specific silence of a very old machine changing gears.
"We are already married."
I turned around. He was entirely serious — level, certain, faintly puzzled.
"I'm sorry — we're what?"
"Married." He came into the room, counting it off like inventory.
"You took me into your home. I gave you my word, the binding kind.
We made vows across that table with witnesses on the wall.
I have known you as a husband knows a wife, and there is a child.
" A small frown, as if checking the math a final time.
"By every law that existed when the laws were written, Caterina, you have been my wife since the house rules went on the refrigerator. "
I stared at him. He stared at me, genuinely confused about my confusion.
"The refrigerator—" I put my hand over my eyes. Started laughing. Couldn't stop. "No. No, you enormous — I mean married married. In a church. With a priest and a dress and Nina crying and Joey in a suit he hates."
His face did something I have never seen it do. Not the wall. Not the stillness. A kind of slow dawning horror, arriving in geological time.
"A church."
"A church."
"Inside the church."
"That's traditionally where they keep the altar, yes."
He looked at the saints. The saints looked back, all eleven, with what I would describe as institutional satisfaction.
"Caterina. I have not been inside one of those in—" he stopped, recalculated, gave up. "The last time I stood in a consecrated building, it had just been built. By hand. I watched them raise the roof beam."
"Then you're overdue."
"The dress," he said, with the air of a man seeking any exit. "You have expressed opinions about dresses at present."
"Obviously after. After the baby, after I can fit in something with a waist, after I have collarbones again.
Next year. Spring." I came across the room and stood in front of him and took both his hands, and the laughing settled into the other thing, the thing under it.
"My Nonna got married at Regina Pacis in 1962.
My whole family, Raq. The block. The baby.
I want the paper, the priest, the bad photographer.
I want to marry you where everybody can see. "
And there it was — the thing that undoes him every time, being seen, being claimed in the open — moving through his face before he could bank it.
"Yes," he said. Immediately. Completely. Because he would agree to anything I asked with my hands in his hands, and we both know it, and I try to use it responsibly.
Then, after a moment, hopefully:
"Does it have to be inside the—"
"Yes."
He groaned. Older than the calendar, survivor of the fall, winner of a fistfight with an angel, and he groaned like Joey at a parking ticket.
"Fine," he said. "A church. A dress. The suit Joey hates." His hands tightened on mine, and the surrender turned into the vow it had been all along. "Anywhere you stand, I will stand. Even there."
"Even there," I agreed, and kissed him, and Saint Anne watched, and I swear to God she smirked.
He took me to bed slow that night, the June air through the screen and his hands relearning the new geography of me — careful of the curve, unhurried, murmuring into my skin in a language older than the saints — and after, I lay against the furnace of him with my ring finger bare and my whole life full, and fell asleep knowing that somewhere under his stillness, two heartbeats were being listened to.
I woke at six to light and birdsong and an empty bed, which meant coffee.
I found him in the studio.
He was standing at the back window — the old one, the painted-shut one, the one that hasn't opened since Eisenhower — and he was not moving, and the coffee was nowhere, and every hair on my arms stood up before I even saw what he was looking at.
On the inside sill, white against the old paint, lay a feather.
Long. Perfect. The gray of storm light at the root, going to white. Placed — not fallen, placed, square in the middle of the sill, on the inside of a window that does not open.
"Raq."
He didn't answer. He was reading it the way I read a signature under dirt.
"Raq. When— did you hear something? Last night, did you—"
"No." Flat. Careful. The voice from the worst nights.
"Nothing. All night, nothing." And that landed worse than anything, because I sleep next to a man who hears my heart change through a wall of brick, and something had stood in this room, close enough to touch the glass, and left him nothing to hear.
He picked it up — gently, two fingers, evidence — and turned it in the early light, and the light did something on it that light doesn't do.
"No one sheds these by accident, Caterina. Not ever. A feather left is a feather left."
"Left as what?"
He looked at the sealed window. At the yard beyond it, gold and ordinary in the morning. At the little room where I work, where the crib was going to go, where our whole life was.
"As a message," he said. "I have been standing watch on this house every night. And someone wanted me to know that it does not matter."
He put the feather in the drawer where I keep the true things, and closed it, and pulled me into his side with the arm that has held off heaven, and we stood there in the six o'clock light — my hand on the curve, his hand over mine, the saints burning down the hall.
The kettle went off in the kitchen, absurd, ordinary, screaming about breakfast. Neither of us moved.
"It was a message," I said. "So what's our answer?"
He looked at the sealed window. At the morning past it, gold and rising over the borough. And the blue came up in his eyes — banked, burning, the fire deciding not to be embers after all — and when he answered, it was not to me.
"Let them count again in the spring," he said, to the glass, to the sky, to whatever was listening. "There will be three of us."
An ocean away, in Lisbon, where the morning was already old, a man stood up from a stranger's bed and crossed to the window, because something had gone through him like a change of pressure.
He had kept to this city a long time now.
It suited him — the last edge of the old world, standing on its cliffs with its back to everything ancient, staring west at the new.
A city built entirely out of longing. The locals have a word for it, the ache for a thing that is gone and will not come back, and they put it in their songs and their tiles and their wine, and he had never once needed it translated.
His shoulders ached. Deep, at the roots. Ached — and then itched, fierce and sudden, the way a limb itches that is not there to scratch.
He rolled them, absently, an old habit older than the city.
Then he went still, and lifted his head, and looked west.
Out over the red roofs, over the river mouth, over the whole gray Atlantic.
Toward Brooklyn.
THE END