Chisa
“MAMA. IF I LOSE IT at Papa’s house, does that still count as his turn or your turn?”
My daughter has been working on this tooth since Tuesday. She’s got it going back and forth with her tongue in the back seat.
And now she’s asking me about custody arrangements for the tooth fairy, as though that’s a normal thing for a seven-year-old to have to think about.
“It counts as everybody’s turn, baby.”
“Because Papa said a dollar and you said fifty cents.”
“Your father says a lot of things.”
“You could ask him yourself,” Rica says, not looking up from her book. “You could come in with us this time. Just once?”
And that’s the tooth, gone, all the way through my ribs.
“Eat your apple slices, Rica.”
“That’s what you always say when you don’t want to talk about him.”
“Then it’s working extremely well, isn’t it?”
It’s a cold, bright October morning, but we’re parked where we always park. The lot behind the conservatory, with that glass roof throwing sunlight at us in long slices.
Neutral ground.
That’s the phrase Mr. Brent used eight years ago, and it still hurts even now. Just thinking about it makes my chest squeeze. How did we end up like we’re two parts of Korea instead of two halves of a marriage? How did we—
Enough, Chisa!
I think it’s time I distract myself with mommy duties, like making sure Rica has everything she needs. “Baby? Did you put socks in?”
“Papa has socks at his house.”
“That’s not—” I stop, because I can hear how the rest of that sentence sounds, and I refuse to be that woman in front of my own child. “That’s true. He does.”
Then his car comes down the ramp, and my whole body forgets eight years of practice.
It’s the same as it ever was. The black car. The driver who never gets out.
Then the door opens, and Marcello Bastianelli unfolds from the back of it into the October sun.
My heart does what it always does, which is behave like something that has learned nothing at all in eight years.
He’s thirty-six now, but the years have done nothing to him except make him worse.
Six foot four in a black wool coat. Dark hair going silver at one temple, cut shorter than he used to wear it. That mouth. That face that used to make waiters drop things, harder now, every bit of the softness gone out of it.
It should look like damage. It should look like a warning. Instead it just looks like a man who got more beautiful while I wasn’t allowed to watch.
Two women coming out of the glasshouse slow right down when they see him. One of them says something to the other. They both look back.
And just like that, my chest is aching again. Eight years ago, seeing this could have made me feel jealous. Insecure. Now, well...
The sad part is that I still feel all those things. The only difference is that this time, I no longer have a right to such feelings. Not when the man I married can no longer bear the sight of—
Oh no, here we go again.
Rica’s excitement has gotten the better of her once more, and she’s out of the car before I’ve got my seatbelt off.
“PAPA!”
And this is what opens me up, every third Saturday, like a tin.
He crouches.
This man, who has never once in his life made himself smaller for anybody, goes down on one knee on wet asphalt in a coat worth more than my car.
He catches my daughter. One big hand comes up to cradle the back of her head, and for about four seconds his whole face turns into somebody I used to know.
Somebody who once fell asleep with his hand flat on my stomach, because the baby had hiccups and he wanted to feel them.
How am I supposed to watch that from forty feet away and stay standing?
Then he stands, and it closes, and he looks over her head at a spot in the middle distance about a foot to the left of me.
Why a foot? Why not just look? Would it cost him something?
“Forty minutes,” I call out. My voice comes out perfectly normal, which is the only real skill I’ve developed in my thirties.
He doesn’t answer. He never does. He takes Rica’s hand and turns for the glasshouse, and she’s already talking, because she gets that from me.
But he’s got to pass my side of the car to get there.
I know it’s coming. I get four or five seconds to prepare, which is four or five seconds more than I need in order to completely fail.
He comes down the length of my car with my daughter chattering at his hip. The closest he gets is maybe an arm’s length.
I can smell him.
That’s the part nobody warns you about. Not the money, not the lawyers, not the eight years.
The smell of a man’s coat in cold air. Your own body going oh, there you are, like an idiot. Like a dog at a door.
My hands won’t behave. I shove them in my pockets.
He doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t slow down. But as he passes, his stride goes wrong—barely anything, half a beat where his weight hesitates.
Then it’s fixed. He walks on. And I’m left there wondering whether I imagined the whole thing because I wanted it.
They get about twenty yards out. I make myself look away from his back, which takes more effort than I’m prepared to admit to.
That’s when I catch it.
The car window. My own reflection, and past it, in the glass—him, half-turned, looking straight at me.
Eight years of a foot to the left, and the second my back is turned he looks.
My stomach drops out of me. I don’t turn around. I just stand there with my heart going like something trapped, thinking: so you do know where I am, then. You’ve always known exactly where I am.
Then a white van comes tearing down the ramp with its side door already sliding open.
At first I notice it the way you notice weather. Then two men throw themselves out of it while it’s still moving. They hit the asphalt at a dead sprint, coming straight up the middle of the lot.
They aren’t running at me.
“RICA!”
I don’t remember getting out from behind the car.
I think I’m screaming. I’m not sure. Everything’s gone slow, slow and so loud, and my flats are sliding on the wet and there’s a man’s arm swinging out towards my baby and I can’t—I can’t breathe, I can’t get there, no, please, not my baby—
Marcello whirls so fast his coat cracks in the air behind him. He rips Rica off her feet mid-stride and slams her in behind his legs, and he doesn’t look big now.
He looks like his father’s son. Like every photograph in that house I was never allowed back into.
But Rica—my clever, contrary, wrong-way-round little girl—does not stay behind him.
She bolts.
She goes left. Straight out into the open lot, exactly where nobody should ever go, and the first man changes course after her.
And I see the whole rest of my life happen in the space between two of my own heartbeats.
That’s when I find out we’re not alone in this car park.
Two men I’ve never seen before come out from between the parked cars on my right, moving like they’ve been standing there all morning waiting for a reason.
One of them hits the runner at full speed and drives him into the ground so hard the sound of it goes off across the whole lot like a dropped plank. There’s a scream. A man’s scream, ragged and awful and not stopping, and something in his arm is bent the wrong way.
The other one reaches my daughter half a second before the second man does. He throws his back to the van, folds himself around her like a wall, then takes the whole weight of what comes next across his shoulders without making any sound at all.
Who are they? Whose are they? How long have they been standing in the car park where I bring my child?
The van doesn’t wait for its people. It slams into reverse and screams backwards up the ramp with the door hanging open, one of them still crawling after it.
Then it’s gone. And the whole car park drops into a silence so total I can hear the conservatory glass ticking in the cold.
Then there’s my daughter’s voice, high and furious and absolutely fine. “You’re squashing me!”
My knees go. I don’t fall, but it’s a close thing, and I end up with my hand flat on somebody’s parked Honda.
Marcello is already moving. He crosses that lot like something coming off a chain, and the man holding my daughter gets out of his way without being told.
He takes her. He goes down on one knee on the wet asphalt and checks her over—both hands, both wrists, her knees, the back of her head, behind her ears.
His own hands aren’t steady. He does it anyway, while she complains bitterly about every bit of it.
When he’s done, he holds her against his shoulder with one hand spread across her back, and he closes his eyes.
One second. That’s all he allows himself.
Then he opens them and he looks straight at me for the first time in eight years.
Not past me. Not a foot to the left. At me, the whole way in.
It goes through me like a current through water. Eight years of a locked door coming open, with everything behind it still burning.
I can’t move. I actually cannot make my feet work.
He walks to me with our daughter on his shoulder. He stops close enough that I have to tip my head back to hold his eyes, close enough to feel the cold coming off his coat.
Then he puts his free hand around my arm.
He touches me.
After what seems like an eternity...
My husband touches me, and my whole body lights up like a switchboard.
I hate myself for it. Enough to cry about, if I’d anything left in me.
“Get in the car. Now.”