Chapter 9
MARINA
Benny has been sitting outside my door for three days and I have learned that he has a sister in Bayonne, that he cannot whistle, and that he is in love with a girl who works at the Verizon store on Forest Avenue and has never spoken to her.
"You should speak to her."
"And say what."
"Say you'd like a phone."
"I've got a phone."
"She doesn't know that."
He thinks about it. He is sitting on a wooden chair that Rosa brought up from the kitchen, tipped back against the wall with his feet on the rung, and I am sitting on the floor of my room with the door open because it is either that or the window, and we have got as far as this in three days.
His sister. Whistling. The girl at Verizon.
"What's her name," I say.
"Danielle."
"Does she chew gum?"
"Why?"
"Because if she does, you've got something to talk about."
He nearly smiles. He does not, quite, because he is a man on a door and men on doors do not, but it is close, and I take it.
I have been taking small things for three days.
Rosa letting me dry the plates. The cat that is not supposed to be in the house coming in through the kitchen window and sitting on my feet.
Seven o'clock, and the phone, and Nico's voice saying I'm fine, Mari, the car came, they brought me a pizza, I'm fine.
A car came for Nico on Tuesday. It brought him up the hill and he sat in the kitchen with Rosa watching him eat, and he would not look at me for the first ten minutes, and then he did, and he said, "Is it okay here," and I said yes, and it was the first thing I have told my brother in twelve years that I did not have to think about.
That is the problem. That is the whole of the problem.
It is a house with a drain in the basement, and a boy on a chair outside my door, and a man who said a warning to me across a desk with his hand in my hair, and I dried Rosa's plates last night and I was happy doing it, and I cannot afford to be happy in this building.
I know what it costs. I have seen the invoice.
"Benny."
"Yeah."
"The lock on this door. The outside one."
He looks at it. It is a brass thing, old, set into the frame above the handle where a hand from the hall could reach it, and it has been painted round so many times the edges have gone soft.
"It's never been turned," he says. "Not by me.
Not by anybody. He said if I turn it he'll break my arm, and he said it like he was telling me the weather.
" He tips the chair forward onto four legs.
"You want to know something? I checked. First night.
I thought, if she's going to be locked in I want to know it works, and I went to turn it, and I couldn't. It's painted shut.
Whoever painted this hall last painted right over it. You'd need a chisel."
I look at the lock.
"Okay," I say.
"Okay what."
"Just okay."
At one o'clock Rosa calls up the stairs that his lunch is on the table and he can eat it sitting down or she can bring it up and watch him eat it standing, and he goes, because there is no third option with Rosa, and I count to sixty and I go the other way.
The lock on the garage side door is a Schlage from about 1988 and I have it open in forty seconds with a bobby pin and the pencil from my hair.
I learned that at fourteen. Ray used to lock me in.
Not always. Only when he and my mother had somewhere to be and he did not want me wandering, which was his word, and the lock on my bedroom door was a cheap one that turned from the hall side, and the third time it happened I sat on the floor with a hairpin and a flathead from the kitchen drawer and taught myself, because nobody else was going to.
It took four hours. The fourth time he locked me in I was out and back before they came home and he never knew.
I have never once been grateful for that until now.
The garage is dark and it smells of oil and cold concrete and there are six cars in it under the strip lights that come on when I find the switch, and I do not know cars, but I know which one nobody will miss.
It is at the end. It is a Mercedes, an old one, square, dark green, with a film of dust on the roof that the others do not have, and the keys are on a board by the door with a paper tag on them that says C in handwriting that is not his.
Carmine's car.
I stand there a second with the keys in my hand.
Then I think about Kev in Rockaway saying I've got your envelope, Mar, six hundred, come and get it, and Nico's rent on Friday, and I think about three days in a room on the third floor with a boy in a chair outside the door and a phone that comes back at seven, and I unlock the car.
It starts. That is the first surprise. It starts like it has been waiting.
The garage door goes up on a button clipped to the visor, and I take it slow, no lights, round the side of the house and down onto the drive, and I have thought about this.
I have had three days to think about nothing else.
Benny goes down to the kitchen at one because Rosa makes him, and Rosa makes him eat sitting down, and that is twenty minutes, and the booth at the gate at one o'clock is a kid called Vito who reads on his phone with his feet up, and the gate opens on its own for anything coming from the house because the house is the house and why would it not.
It opens. Vito does not look up.
I am on Todt Hill Road. I am on Todt Hill Road in a dead man's Mercedes with six hundred dollars waiting for me in Bay Ridge and my hands on a wheel that has not been held in two years, and it is raining, the proper kind now, October rain, and the wipers are slow and one of them squeals, and for about ninety seconds I am the happiest I have been in sixteen days.
Then the lights come on behind me.
I know the car. I have been driven in it. It is the black Range Rover that Benny follows in and that Salvatore drives himself when he does not want to be driven, and it is a hundred yards back and closing, and it does not flash and it does not sound its horn. It just comes.
I do not stop. I do not know why I do not stop.
I have already lost, I knew I had lost the second I saw the lights, and I keep going anyway, down the hill and through the lights at the bottom and onto Richmond Road with the rain coming sideways, and the Range Rover comes with me, and nobody on the road looks twice, because on this island a black car following an old Mercedes is not a thing anybody wants to look twice at.
At the bend by the cemetery he comes alongside.
He does not look at me. He looks at the road. He is driving with one hand, and the other one is on the gearstick, and the window is up, and he is not angry. I can see that even through two windows and the rain. He is not anything. He is a man driving.
Then he moves the wheel about six inches and the Range Rover is in front of me and slowing, and I can go into the back of it or I can stop.
I stop.
He gets out of his car and walks back through the rain and opens the passenger door of the Mercedes and gets in and shuts it.
That is all. He gets in. He sits in the passenger seat of his father's car with rain on his shoulders and rain in his hair and looks straight ahead through the windscreen at the back of the Range Rover with its hazards going, and the wiper squeals, and he does not say anything.
I keep my hands on the wheel. Ten and two.
"I have money at Cassidy's," I say.
Nothing.
"Six hundred dollars. It's my money. I earned it before I ever walked up your hill, and Kev's been holding it, and Nico's rent is Friday.
I was going to be an hour. I was going to come back.
I took the car nobody uses and I was going to put it back exactly where it was and you were never going to know. "
"I was always going to know."
"How."
"Because you left the light on in the garage."
I close my eyes.
"And because Vito doesn't read on his phone.
He watches the drive on his phone. There's a camera in the gatepost. He watched you come down the hill with your lights off and he called Benny and Benny called me and I was in the car before you got to the gate.
" He turns his head, finally. "You did well.
Forty seconds on the lock. Nobody's ever done that lock in forty seconds. "
"You were watching that too?"
"There's a camera in the garage."
"Is there a camera in my room?"
"No."
"Is there"
"No." He says it flat. "No. There's a lock on the outside of your door that's been there since before you were born, and I haven't used it, and I won't. Ask Benny. He'll tell you it's never been turned."
I look at him. His face is wet and the water is running off his jaw onto the collar of his coat, and he is not wiping it, and the car is small, it is smaller than I thought, the seats are close, and I can smell the rain on him and something under it that is just him.
"I can't do this," I say.
"Do what."
"Sit in a room. Wait for seven o'clock. Wait for you to come back and tell me it's done. I can't. I've never done it. I've never once in my life sat somewhere and waited for a man to fix a thing, and I'm not starting now because you've got a nice house."
"It's not a nice house."
"It's a"
"It's a house with a drain in the basement. Don't call it nice."
That stops me.
He looks back at the windscreen. "You want to know what I'm frightened of," he says.
"Rosa told me you asked. Here it is. I'm frightened of that Camry, Marina.
I'm frightened of it because I don't know whose it is, and I know whose everything is.
And I'm frightened of you, because you've got a lock open in forty seconds and six hundred dollars in Bay Ridge and a brother, and you'll walk into anything for him.
You'd walk into that Camry. And I can't." He stops. "I can't have that."
"Why."
"Because."
"Because why, Salvatore."
I hear it after I have said it. His name. Not Vitale, not Mr, not the thing I have been saying for sixteen days to keep the whole of him at the length of a bar. His name, in the car, in the rain, and it is the first time, and I would take it back if I could, and I cannot, and he has heard it.
He turns.
I do not know which of us moves. I will think about that later and I will not be able to say.
The car is small and the seats are close and he turns and I turn and there is nothing between us, there is no bar, and his hand comes up and it does not touch me, it stops, it stops an inch from my face with the fingers open, and mine is on his coat, on the wet front of his coat, and I did not put it there, and his eyes are on my mouth and his mouth is right there, it is right there, I could count the drops of water on his top lip, and I am not breathing, and neither is he.
An inch.
Less.
The wiper squeals across the glass and back.
"Not like this," he says.
He says it very quietly, and he takes his hand down, and he does not move away. He is still right there, six inches, four, with the rain on him and his eyes on me, and he does not move away and he does not close it, and I have never in my life wanted to hit somebody as much as I want to hit him.
"You don't get to do that," I say.
"Do what."
"Nearly kiss me and then stop."
"I didn't nearly kiss you."
"Then what was that?"
He looks at me for a long second. Then he opens his door, and the rain comes in, and he gets out into it and stands there with one hand on the roof and bends to look back in at me.
"A warning," he says.