Marcello
He had been saying it since Saturday. No to the house in Evanston, no to the car she wanted to drive herself, no to every reasonable thing a reasonable woman would ask for after two men came out of a van at her daughter.
He had expected a fight this morning. God help him, he’d been looking forward to one, because a fight was four minutes in a room with her that he could tell himself was necessary.
“I’ve sorted out the school,” his wife said.
Then she talked for a full minute without once stopping. A teacher called Mrs. Hunt, telephoned at half past seven. A family emergency. Work sent out every Monday. Half the class had chickenpox anyway, so the child would miss nothing.
There was a timetable, too. Maths and reading in the mornings. Cursive on Wednesdays, which his daughter would hate.
She set the envelope down on the corner of his desk. Her hands weren’t steady, so she gripped her own elbows to stop them.
“Are you homeschooling?”
“It’s the best way to keep her safe, but also keep her life as normal as possible.”
He waited for her to say something else. Again, she surprised him.
Their daughter had come round the side of a van at a dead run because the child’s father had a name. Chisa herself had been dragged out of her own life, locked behind gates she hadn’t chosen, and still she didn’t blame him at all.
“Thank you.”
The words came out rough, perhaps even eight years too late because he had never thanked her for being a good mother to Rica. And yet, Chisa being Chisa...
“Oh—don’t.” She was visibly flustered and close to squirming on her feet. “You don’t thank somebody for that. She’s my daughter, I’d do it if we were living in a tent.”
“She is ours,” Marcello said.
It was out of his mouth before he’d decided to say it. She went so still, and so pink, that he had to look back down at his desk.
She went out of his study without another word. Marcello sat looking at a padded envelope full of a seven-year-old’s spelling work for a very long time.
The day went the way the days went now. The gates stayed shut. The men on the lawn changed at two, then again at ten.
In the afternoon he passed the kitchen door and heard his daughter arguing about the letter R, and his wife laughing. He did not go in.
She asked me nothing.
That was what wouldn’t leave him alone.
Any other woman alive would have stood in that study and demanded to know what was happening, who those men were, why there were guns on the lawn of the house she’d been driven to. His wife had not asked one question. She had gone away and built a timetable instead.
It was the same woman who’d married him. That was the trouble. Eight years and a folder full of proof, but she was still the girl who cried in a stockroom over a bracelet that wasn’t hers.
By eleven the house was quiet, and Marcello was on the landing outside the yellow room.
He had not decided to be there. That was the first lie he told himself that night.
The child had asked for the arrangement—both of them, one on each side, the way it had been the night before. She’d asked at breakfast with her mouth full of toast and no idea that she was asking two people to lie three feet apart for nine hours in the dark.
He’d have refused anything else on earth. He could not refuse his daughter that.
So there was a reason to be standing on this board at eleven at night.
That was the second lie.
He knocked on nothing, opened the door, went in.
“Where is she?”
The lamp on the landing threw a long stripe of light into the room. His wife sat up in the middle of the bed with her hair loose and her glasses off.
It took him a moment to understand what he was looking at.
“She’s with your mother,” Chisa whispered.
The floor went out from under the night.
“They’re watching television!” She was already talking, because she always talked when she was frightened. “There’s toast involved. I wasn’t supposed to be told about the toast, so if you could look surprised in the morning, that would probably—”
“Chisa.”
“—save her from—”
“Chisa.”
She stopped.
Marcello stood in the dark of his wife’s room and made himself count it out one more time.
The child was two floors down, asleep in his mother’s bed. There was nobody in this room but the two of them. There had not been nobody in a room with the two of them in eight years, four months and thirteen days.
He had counted. That was a thing he had never once admitted to himself until this moment.
Go, then. Say goodnight, go down to the study, drink something, let the sun come up.
“Go to bed, Marcello,” she whispered.
And it didn’t sound like go away.
He heard it. He heard exactly what it sounded like, then watched her hear it too, and something in his chest came loose from its moorings.
He shut the door.
He couldn’t cross the room. That was the thing nobody would ever believe of him, least of all her.
Marcello Bastianelli stood with his back against a door, hands flat on the wood behind him, breathing like a man who’d come up a hill at a run. Eight years of discipline was all that stood between this house and the thing he wanted, and the discipline was going.
“Say it,” he told her roughly.
“Say what?”
“Tell me to go.”
She could end it with three words. He had built the last eight years so she’d never have to say them—so a lawyer said them for her, so a clause on page four said them in language nobody had to hear out loud.
“I can’t,” his wife whispered.
Marcello crossed that room.
Afterwards he would not be able to say how he got there. He had her face in both hands, her mouth under his. She made a sound against him that went through him like a current through water, and eight years came off him in the dark like a coat.
She was shaking. He could feel it everywhere they touched, so he made himself slow down. Then slower still.
“Cara.” He had her against the pillows now. “Cara, look at me.”
“I can’t see you.” Her hands came up to find his face, exactly the way they had on a night with a storm at the window, ten years and one wrecked marriage ago. “You’re a blur. A very large, very expensive blur.”
He laughed, but it came out broken.
Then he took his time with her.
He had been a man of appetite all his life, but by then he understood that this was the only night of it he was ever going to be given. A man does not rush the only night he is ever going to be given.
Slowly enough that she stopped being able to talk. Slowly enough that she said his name twice, then couldn’t manage even that.
Slowly enough that when she finally came apart in his hands, he had to press his face into her shoulder and hold on to her, hard.
His own eyes were stinging. Marcello Bastianelli had not wept since his father’s funeral, and he did not intend to start in front of his wife.
“You shouldn’t have married me,” he told her.
He said it into her hair afterwards, when her cheek was on his chest, his hand going up and down her spine without any instruction from him at all.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“I heard you say something ridiculous.” She turned her face up. Her chin dug into his sternum. “I’d say it was the best decision I ever made, except it isn’t, because the best one was Rica, and she came out of it, so actually it’s the second best decision I ever—”
“Chisa.”
“—made, and I stand by it.”
He lay there with the rain gone off the windows, and let himself have it for a moment. The weight of her. The ridiculous cheerful stubbornness of her. A woman thrown out of this house at dawn, still making jokes in the bed she’d been thrown out of.
“You’re a good woman.”
“You say that like it’s a problem.”
It is.
Because the woman lying on his chest making jokes about decisions was the same woman who had sat down at a corner table with Nunez, smiled at him, and let him pay for her dinner.
The same woman whose name was on a ledger of calls to Toronto.
The same woman who had been in this house the winter his men went into a quarry road.
The two of them could not both be true. For eight years he had chosen the version that let him keep breathing.
Then her hand went flat on his chest, over his heart, and his wife asked the question.
“Marcello? Do you still think I did it?”
Everything in him stopped.
Say no. The word was right there. It would cost him nothing tonight, but everything tomorrow.
A man who said no could not afterwards behave as though he’d said yes. And he had four men on his lawn, a name to find, and no earthly idea which of the people who’d eaten at his mother’s table had put that folder on his desk.
Say no, and he would have to go back to the beginning of everything he had believed since the night he signed her out of his life.
“Marcello?”
He put his forehead down against hers and closed his eyes. “Go to sleep, Chisa.”
It was not the answer she wanted, but it was all he could say for now, and his wife...
She still didn’t make any noise, but he knew anyway.
She cried herself to sleep, and he let her.
None of this changed anything.
Her betrayal. His desire. And this marriage that blessed and cursed him at the same time.