Chapter 13
MARINA
I did not say no.
I have had two days to think about the fact that I did not say no, and I have thought about it in the shower and in the kitchen with Rosa's spoon and lying on my back in the third-floor room with four pieces of paper in the drawer of the bedside table, and I have come to no conclusion at all except that I did not say no, and he did not ask me again, and the house has gone back to being very big.
So I go home.
It is Tuesday. I tell Benny at breakfast and Benny looks at Rosa and Rosa looks at the ceiling and twenty minutes later there is a car at the door, and it is Benny driving it, and nobody has told me I cannot, because there is no paper any more that says I cannot, and everybody in the house knows that by now.
I do not know how. I did not tell them. But Rosa put two eggs on my plate this morning instead of one and did not say a word, and that is how I know she knows.
Sunset Park looks the same. It is a shock how much the same it looks.
"I'll be an hour," I tell Benny.
"I'll be here."
"You can go and get a coffee."
"I'll be here."
Nico is up, which is the first strange thing. Nico is not up before noon unless something is wrong, and it is ten, and he is dressed, and the apartment is clean.
Not clean the way I clean it. Clean the way somebody cleans a place when they are trying to make a point to themselves.
The dishes done and stacked wrong. The couch cushions turned over so the stains are on the bottom.
The window open, finally, and the peas gone from the freezer, and my brother standing in the middle of it in a shirt with a collar looking at me like I am a landlord.
"You look better," I say.
"I feel better."
"Your eye's open."
"It's been open a week." He touches it. The bruise has gone to yellow and green at the edges. "Do you want coffee? I got coffee. Real coffee, not the"
"Nico."
"What."
"What's going on."
"Nothing's going on. I'm making coffee. You came home. Sit down."
I sit down. He makes the coffee, and he makes it with his back to me, and I watch his back, and his hands are steady, and that is the second strange thing, because Nico's hands are never steady, they were not steady at the bar and they were not steady in the kitchen with the Camry, and now he is pouring water like a barista.
"Is the car still outside," I say.
"What car."
"The grey one. The Camry."
"Oh." He does not turn round. "No. Not for days. I think it was nothing. I think I was being paranoid. You know how I get."
I do know how he gets. He gets frightened, and when he is frightened he comes to me, and he came to me about that car with his hands shaking under his arms nine days ago, and now it is nothing.
"Okay," I say.
He brings the coffee. He sits across from me on the turned-over cushions, and we drink it, and it is real coffee, it is good, and we talk about nothing.
About Cassidy's, and Kev, and the six hundred dollars, which I still have not got, and whether the landlord is going to fix the radiator this year.
About the girl at the bodega who likes him.
It is the most normal twenty minutes I have spent with my brother in a year, and every minute of it is wrong, and I cannot say how.
Then his phone buzzes.
Not his phone. A phone. It is in the pocket of the collared shirt, on the left, over his heart, and it buzzes once, and he does not look at it, and I do not look at it, and it is not his phone, because his phone is on the table between us with the birthday-cake screen face up where he put it when he sat down.
"You've got two phones," I say.
"What?"
"There's a phone in your shirt."
"That's. It's a work thing. The restaurant gave me a"
"You don't work at a restaurant. You got fired from the restaurant in August."
"A different restaurant. I got a job. I was going to tell you. It's in Bay Ridge, it's a"
"Nico."
He stops. His hands have gone under his arms.
I could push. I know how. I have known how since he was eight. You wait, and you do not say anything, and you let the silence get heavy enough that he has to put it down, and it takes eleven minutes, and I have eleven minutes. Benny is downstairs. I have an hour.
I do not push.
I do not know why. I sit on the couch with a cup of real coffee going cold in my hand and I look at my brother lying to me with his hands under his arms and a second phone against his heart, and I am tired.
That is all it is. I am so tired. I have been carrying him for twelve years and I put him down for nineteen days in a stone house on a hill, and I did not know how heavy he was until I stopped, and I cannot pick him up again this morning. I cannot.
"Okay," I say.
"Okay?"
"You've got a job. That's good. Tell me about it another time."
He looks at me like I have hit him. Then he looks relieved, and then he looks ashamed of being relieved, and all three go across his face in a second, and I finish the coffee and I stand up and I kiss him on the top of his head, and I go.
Benny is exactly where I left him.
"That wasn't an hour," he says.
"No."
He drives. He takes the long way, down Fourth to the expressway instead of cutting across, and I let him, because the long way has the water in it and I want to look at the water. Halfway over the bridge he says, "He talked to me this morning."
"About what."
"You. He said drive her where she says. Anywhere.
He said don't ask her why and don't call me first." Benny changes lanes.
He does it the way he does everything, like he is being marked on it.
"He's never said that about anybody. He doesn't let anybody go anywhere.
He didn't let Matteo drive himself till he was twenty-five. "
I look at the water.
"And the car," Benny says.
"What about it."
"He said if I see it I put you on the floor of the back seat and I drive to the house and I don't stop for lights.
" He glances at the mirror. "But I haven't seen it.
Nobody's seen it. It was outside your place Friday morning, Tommy clocked it on his way past, and Friday night it was gone, and it hasn't been back.
Not there. Not Teresa's. Not the house." He looks at the road.
"Friday night was the night he went to Rosebank. "
I turn that over. The car that sat outside my brother's window at four in the morning, gone the night Salvatore broke a man's hand over the Anchor. Nico saying I think it was nothing. Nico with his hands under his arms and a phone against his heart.
"Benny."
"Yeah."
"Does he tell you everything?"
"No."
"Does he tell Luca everything?"
He thinks about it, the way he thought about Danielle at the Verizon store.
"He tells Luca what he's going to do," Benny says. "I don't think he tells anybody why."
I go to the music room because it is the one room in this house that is mine.
That is not true. Nothing in the house is mine.
But it is the only room nobody goes in, and I go in, and I shut the tall doors behind me, and I take the cloth off the piano.
All of it this time. I fold it and I put it on a chair, and the whole of it is there in the afternoon light with the curtains open, black, enormous, a thing built for a room with forty people in it, and I sit down on the stool and I open the lid.
The keys are yellow at the edges. Nobody has touched them in sixteen years.
I put my hands on them and I play a chord, just a chord, and the sound comes out into the room and it is flat.
Of course it is flat. Sixteen years. But it is not as flat as it should be, and the action is good, and somewhere under the flatness it is still the instrument it was, and I sit there with my hands on the yellow keys and the sound going away into the corners of the room, and I understand that I have been waiting to do this since I was seven years old.
I play the piece.
With sound. For the first time in this house, out loud, the thing he wrote, the thing I played on the lid in the dark with a man three feet away, and the left hand goes under, slow, that's her, keep it going underneath, and the right hand goes up and stops and comes down and goes round, and the flat notes are flat and I do not care, and I am not humming it under my breath in a walk-in with my arms round myself.
I am playing it. On his piano. In their house.
When I finish, I am not alone.
"He'd sit there," Aldo says.
He is in the doorway. He has the reading glasses up on his head and his coat over his arm the way he had them on the night in the study, and he has been there a while, I can tell by how still he is, and I take my hands off the keys and put them in my lap.
"I'm sorry. I didn't"
"No, no. No." He comes in. He comes across the parquet and he pulls one of the sheeted chairs over, next to the piano, and sits in it, and looks at the keyboard, and looks at me.
"Play. Please. Nobody's played that instrument in sixteen years and I've walked past this door every Sunday and not once opened it.
I couldn't. And then I heard that, from the hall, and I thought.
" He stops. He takes the glasses off his head and folds them and puts them in his pocket.
"I thought, that's Enzo. For a second. I thought he was in here. "
"It's out of tune."
"He'd have said so. He'd have had a man up here by Tuesday."
I look at the keys.
"I've got something for you," Aldo says.
He reaches into the coat over his arm and takes out an envelope. A plain one, brown, the kind with a metal clasp, and he opens the clasp and takes out a photograph and holds it out to me, and I take it.
It is this room. It is this piano, with the lid up and the curtains open, and a man sitting at it in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled, half turned to the camera, laughing.
He has dark hair going grey at the sides and a face I have not seen in sixteen years except in my own, and behind him, out of focus, there is a table with glasses on it and a woman's arm.
"Two thousand nine," Aldo says. "The summer before. Carmine's birthday. He played for four hours and I sang, badly, and your mother danced with Teresa's sister, and he was happy. I want you to have that. Whatever else. I want you to have one where he was happy."
I cannot speak.
I look at the photograph. I look at my father's face and his hands on the keys, his big hands, my hands, and the white shirt with the collar open, and at the collar, at his throat, on a chain, there is something small and gold.
A key.
I know the shape. I have known the shape of it for sixteen years because it has been against my own skin for every one of them, and I put my hand up to my throat without meaning to and find it there under my shirt, and Aldo watches me do it.
"You still have that?" he says. Light. Closing the door of the envelope with his thumb. "The little key?"