Chapter 7
MARINA
Dot wants "Moon River" and Dot is going to get "Moon River," because Dot is ninety-one and has outlived two husbands and a son and does not have time for my opinions about "Moon River."
"Slower," she says.
"This is slower."
"Slower than that. Andy Williams did it slower."
"Andy Williams had an orchestra, Dot."
"Andy Williams had manners."
The men on the sofa laugh. There are three of them, and they are always on the sofa, and they laugh at everything Dot says because she is the one who still has all her teeth and it is a kind of power in here.
I slow it down. The piano at Sunny Vale is an upright that somebody's family donated in about 1975 and has not been tuned since, and the F above middle C sticks, and you learn to go round it, and I go round it, and Dot closes her eyes.
Sundays. I have been doing this for six years.
Nobody pays me. I came in once looking for a job in the kitchen and there was no job and there was a piano, and I sat down at it while I waited for the manager, and a woman who is dead now came and stood beside me and put her hand on the lid and cried, and I have come every Sunday since.
It is the only thing I do that is not for money and not for Nico, and I have never told anybody about it, and I did not tell Benny where we were going until we were in the car.
Benny is by the door. He has his club soda, which he brought from the house in a bottle, and he is standing against the wall between a fire extinguisher and a poster about hand hygiene with his arms folded, and two of the aides have already asked him if he is somebody's grandson, and he has said no ma'am both times.
I finish "Moon River." Dot opens her eyes.
"Better."
"Thank you."
"Now do the one you did last week. The one you like."
"You don't know which one I like."
"I've been watching people for ninety-one years, Marina. I know what you like."
I do not play the one I like. Not yet. I play "Fly Me to the Moon" for the men on the sofa, and I play a Sinatra medley that I have played so many times my hands do it without me, and while my hands are doing it I look out at the room.
Twenty-two people in cardigans and wheelchairs and one in a hat.
The light coming in flat through the big windows off the parking lot.
The smell of the place, which is floor cleaner and boiled vegetables and something sweeter under it that I have stopped noticing.
The aide called Precious is doing somebody's hair at the back. Somebody is asleep.
Benny is not by the door.
I do not stop playing. I look at the door, and Benny is not against the wall between the extinguisher and the poster, and I go round the sticking F and I look again, and the reason Benny is not there is that somebody else is.
He is standing just inside the room in a dark coat with his hands at his sides, and he is looking at me, and he is not doing anything else.
Not checking the exits. Not checking the room.
He has already checked the room. He did that before he came through the door, I know he did, because I have watched him do it to every room he walks into for twelve days, and now that is done and there is just this.
He does not come in. He stands there.
I finish the medley. The men on the sofa clap. Dot does not clap, Dot never claps, but she says "Fine," which is worth more, and then she turns in her chair with the whole business of a woman turning in a chair at ninety-one, and she looks at the door.
"Who's that."
"Nobody."
"That's a big nobody."
"He's my," I say, and stop, because there is no end to that sentence that is true. "He's from where I work."
"Well, tell him to come in or go out. He's letting the cold in."
He hears her. He must, she does not have a quiet voice, and I watch him hear her and I watch him decide, and it is the first time I have seen him decide anything, because usually by the time you are looking at him the deciding is done.
He comes in. He walks across the day room between the wheelchairs, and he takes a plastic chair from the stack by the wall, and he unstacks it, and he puts it down at the end of the front row next to a man called Walter who is asleep, and he sits in it.
A plastic chair. In a coat that cost more than the piano.
Dot looks at him for a long moment.
"You'll take your hat off in here," she says.
He does not have a hat. He puts his hand up to his head anyway, as if to check, and finds no hat, and puts his hand back down.
"Yes ma'am," he says.
The men on the sofa laugh, and Dot turns back round, satisfied, and I sit at the piano with my hands in my lap and I cannot remember what I was going to play.
I play the one I like.
I did not decide to. I put my hands on the keys and my hands decided, the way they did in the walk-in, the way they did on the lid of a piano in the moonlight with him sitting three feet away in a chair with a sheet on the floor beside it. It goes up. It stops. It comes down.
He knows it. I see him know it. He does not move, he is very good at not moving, but there is a stillness that is a man sitting and a different stillness that is a man listening, and he goes from one to the other, and Walter sleeps beside him, and the sun comes in off the parking lot.
My father wrote it. I have never said that to anyone.
It is not a piece, it is not anything, it has no name.
He wrote it for my mother the year I was born and he played it every night when he got home to let her know he was home, and I learned it by ear at four years old and he found me playing it and laughed so hard he had to sit down, and then he taught me the left hand.
The slow part. That's her, he said. That's the bit that's her.
You have to keep it going underneath no matter what the right hand's doing. That's the whole trick.
I keep it going underneath.
When it is over, nobody claps, because it is not the kind of thing you clap for and they know that, they are old, they know what they are hearing.
Dot puts her hand up to her mouth for a second and takes it down.
And he sits in his plastic chair with his hands on his knees and does not look away from me, and I do not look away from him, and it goes on longer than it should.
Dot turns in her chair again. All the way round this time, the whole business of it, until she is facing the plastic chair and the man in it.
"You. Big nobody."
"Ma'am."
"What's your name."
"Salvatore."
"Salvatore what."
He does not look at me. "Vitale."
Dot considers that. She has ninety-one years of considering things and she uses all of them. "I knew a Vitale," she says. "Carmine. He came to my husband's wake in nineteen eighty-nine and stood at the back and didn't take his coat off. He had a tank of snakes in his house. Everybody said so."
"That was my father."
"He was a son of a bitch."
"Yes ma'am."
"Are you?"
He thinks about it. He actually thinks, in front of twenty-two people in cardigans, and Dot waits, and I sit at the piano with my hands in my lap and do not breathe.
"I'm working on it," he says.
Dot looks at him a while longer. Then she turns back round, slowly, and says to me, "He'll do," and closes her eyes.
Then Walter wakes up and says "Is it lunch?" and it is over.
He does not come in the car. He drives behind us. I watch him in the mirror all the way down Hylan and over the bridge, and Benny drives with both hands on the wheel and says nothing for so long that when he does speak I jump.
"He doesn't do that."
"Do what."
"Sit. Like that. In a chair. He doesn't."
"He sat in a chair in the music room."
Benny looks at me in the mirror. Then he looks back at the road, and he does not say anything else, and I understand that I have just told him something I did not know I was telling.
The apartment smells of Nico. Which is to say it smells of the deodorant he uses too much of and the peas he has still got in the freezer and the fact that he has not opened a window since I left.
He is on the couch. He gets up when I come in and he sees Benny behind me on the landing, and behind Benny, on the stairs, a man in a dark coat who has never once been in this building, and his face does something complicated.
"It's Sunday," I say. "I said I'd come Sunday."
"You didn't say you'd bring"
"I didn't. They came."
He looks at me. He looks past me at the landing. He is scared of the coat and I cannot blame him for that, and then he does something I do not expect, which is to stop looking at the coat and look at me, hard, and say, "Can I talk to you."
"You're talking to me."
"In the kitchen."
The kitchen is six feet from the couch. I go into it. He comes after me and pulls the accordion door across, which has never once closed properly, and stands with his back to it and his hands in his hoodie.
"There's a car," he says.
I wait.
"Grey. Sedan. A Camry or one of those. It's been outside three nights.
Not every night. Wednesday, Friday, last night.
Across the street by the hydrant. Two guys, or one guy, I can't. It's got the windows.
And when I go to the deli it's there and when I come back it's there, and last night it was there at four in the morning, Mari, I got up, I looked, four in the morning. "
"Did you tell anybody."
"Who am I going to tell?"
"Nico."
"Nobody. I didn't tell anybody. I'm telling you.
" His hands come out of the pocket, finally, and they are shaking, and he puts them under his arms. "I thought it was them.
His guys. Keeping an eye. But then I thought, why would they sit out there, they know where I live, they know where you live, they could just." He stops.
"So then I thought it's Fusco's people. Or it's. I don't know who it is.
I don't know anything. I'm just telling you there's a car. "
I pull the accordion door back.
Benny is on the landing. He has not moved.
Behind him, on the top stair, with one hand on the rail, is the man who sat in a plastic chair in a nursing home three hours ago and said yes ma'am to a woman with no hat, and he has heard all of it, because the accordion door has never once closed properly, and I look at him and he looks at me.
"Is it there now," he says.
Nico goes to the window. He goes at the side of it, the way you go at a window when you have been going at it that way for three nights. He looks.
"Yeah."
Salvatore does not go to the window. He says, "Benny," and Benny is already moving, out of the apartment and down the stairs, not fast, an ordinary man going out for cigarettes on a Sunday, and we stand in my kitchen, the three of us, and wait.
It is a long minute. It is long enough that I count it.
Then Benny's feet on the stairs again, unhurried, and he comes in and hands Salvatore his phone.
It is a photograph. Grey Camry. Across the street by the hydrant. New York plate, and the plate is clear, and the windows are tinted, and there is nothing else to see.
Salvatore looks at it.
I am watching his face. I have watched a lot of faces across a bar.
I have watched men see a photograph of their wife with somebody, and men see a bill they cannot pay, and men see a name on a phone they have been waiting three days for, and I know the look of a man seeing a thing he already knew.
That look is nothing. It is a door closing.
This is not that look.
He looks at the plate on Benny's phone for two seconds, three, and nothing closes.
His face does not change at all, and that is how I know.
He is very good. He is the best I have ever seen.
But I have been looking at him for twelve days and I have never once seen him not know something, and I am seeing it now, and it is worse than the car.
He does not know whose it is.