Chapter 16
MARINA
Lutheran Medical at two in the morning smells like every hospital I have ever sat in, and I have sat in a lot of them, and the chairs are the same chairs.
"Family?"
"Sister."
"He's in four. They're stitching. You can go back."
I go back. Salvatore does not. He stops at the double doors with Luca beside him and Benny behind, three men in dark coats in a hallway painted the colour of old teeth, and a nurse looks at them and looks at me and decides not to ask, and I go through on my own.
Bay four. A curtain.
I have my hand up to pull it and I stop, because I can hear him breathing behind it, and I know that breathing, that is the breathing of a boy who is trying not to cry in front of somebody, and I stand there in the corridor in the black jeans and the T-shirt I put back on inside out in the dark of the study forty minutes ago, with a man's blood dried on my hip under the denim, and I take one breath, and I open the curtain.
"Hey."
"Mari."
His face is gone again. The left side, the same side, the eye that had just opened, and the doctor is a young man with tired hands putting a stitch into his eyebrow, and he does not look up.
"Orbital's fractured," the doctor says. "Same one. It was healing and now it isn't. We'll need a scan. He's got a concussion and he's got the ear again, and." He stops. He ties off. "And there's the arm."
Nico's left arm is on a tray beside the bed, on a blue paper sheet, palm up.
Somebody has cut a letter into the inside of his forearm. From the wrist to the elbow. Two long strokes that meet at the bottom, straight, deliberate, not deep enough to matter and deep enough to scar, and the blood has been cleaned off it so it is very clear.
A V.
I look at it. I look at it for a long time. Then I look at my brother, and he is looking at the ceiling, and his mouth is going.
"What did they say."
"Mari."
"What did they say, Nico. When they did that. They said something."
"They said." He swallows. "They said tell Vitale we know about the girl."
"It'll scar," the doctor says. He is looking at the arm, not at either of us. "I can close it clean but it's two long cuts and it's on the inside where the skin's thin. It'll fade. It won't go." He glances at me. "I have to ask if he wants it reported."
"No," Nico says.
"I'm asking your sister."
"She says no too."
I look at the V. I look at the doctor, who is twenty-eight and tired and has asked the question because he has to, and knows the answer because he works in Sunset Park.
"No," I say.
The doctor goes. He says something about the scan and something about an hour and he goes, and I pull the plastic chair up to the bed and sit in it and put my hand on Nico's right hand, the one that is not on a tray, and he holds on.
"Two of them," he says. "Not the same ones.
Not Paulie. These were. I don't know. They had a van.
I was coming back from the bodega and they had a van and they just. They didn't even hit me at first. They put me in the back and they drove around, they drove for like an hour, and one of them sat on my legs and the other one had the.
" He stops. "He had a box cutter. He did it slow. He did it like he was writing."
"Okay."
"He said it three times. Tell Vitale we know about the girl.
Tell Vitale we know about the girl. Like he was making sure I'd." His hand tightens.
"And then they pushed me out. On Second Avenue.
Out the side of the van while it was going, and I hit the.
And then a guy. A guy in a car stopped and put me in his car and drove me here and I don't know who he was, Mari, he didn't say, he just drove. "
"Was he one of Salvatore's?"
"I don't know. I don't know what they look like."
"Did he say anything at all."
"He said you're all right, kid. That's all. He said it about six times."
I look at the V on the tray.
"Nico. The phone."
"What."
"The second phone. The one in your shirt. Did they take it."
He does not answer.
"Did they take it, or do you still have it."
"They took my wallet."
"That's not what I asked."
His hand goes slack in mine. He looks at the ceiling. His good eye is wet and it is running down into his hair and he does not wipe it, and he says, to the ceiling, "I lost it. In the van. I don't have it. I don't know where it is."
I do not push. I have not got it in me. I sit and hold my brother's hand while the fluorescent light buzzes and a woman two bays down cries about somebody called Michael, and I look at the V that somebody carved into him slowly like they were writing, and I do the arithmetic.
Nine days ago he had a car outside his window.
Six days ago it was gone. Tonight he had a van.
And the thing that changed in between, the only thing, the thing that is going to be in every mouth in the family by the end of the week, is that the rat's daughter locked the door of the Don's study at one in the morning and decided.
The V is for Vitale.
But it is on my brother's arm.
He is at the double doors when I come out. Exactly where I left him. He has not sat down, none of them have, and the nurse has given up and is pretending they are furniture.
"How is he."
"They're scanning him."
"The arm."
"You know about the arm."
"Luca knows about the arm."
Of course Luca knows. Luca knew before I did.
Luca knew in the study with the phone against Salvatore's ear while I was still sitting on him with his blood on my hip, and I look at Luca now, and Luca looks back, and there is nothing in his face at all, and it is the first time I have found that restful and hated it in the same second.
"The man who drove him here," I say. "Was that you."
"Tommy."
"Tommy was following him."
"Tommy's been on the building since the car. He saw the van and he lost the van and he found your brother on Second Avenue." Salvatore says it flat. "He didn't see who. He saw a van."
"And they said tell Vitale."
"Yes."
"We know about the girl."
"Yes."
"So they know."
He does not answer that. He does not have to.
It is in the hallway with us, it is standing there between the coats, and I look at him, at his face doing nothing and his hand in a wrapping that has gone brown at the edge, and none of this is news to me.
It was there on the desk. It was there when I turned to him and told him to lock the door.
There is always a price on the other side of a door like that, and I turned the key anyway, and I told myself the price would be mine.
It is never mine. It has never once been mine. It is always him.
"The van," Luca says. Not to me. To Salvatore, quietly, the way he says everything. "Tommy got the plate as it went. Jersey."
"So it's Jersey."
"It's somebody who wants us to think it's Jersey."
"Or it's Jersey."
"Or that." Luca looks at me. "The men in the van didn't know which box was copper, Marina. Somebody told them. Somebody told them where your brother buys his cigarettes too."
"Luca," Salvatore says.
"She's standing in a hospital at three in the morning with her brother's arm on a tray. She can hear a sentence."
I can hear a sentence. I hear it. I put it next to a car outside a window and a phone in a shirt pocket and a man in a plastic chair saying yes ma'am, and none of them fit together, and all of them are the same shape.
"Take me home," I say.
"Marina."
"Not yours. Mine. Sunset Park. Take me home."
"No."
"Then I'll get a cab."
"Benny."
Benny moves. He does not touch me. He steps between me and the exit, just that, an ordinary man standing in an ordinary place with his hands in his jacket, and looks at the floor, and I could scream.
I could put my fist through the wall the colour of old teeth.
Instead I turn round and I go back through the double doors to bay four and I sit in the plastic chair, and I stay there until the scan comes back clear and the doctor says he can go, and Salvatore's car takes all of us up the hill with Nico asleep against my shoulder and nobody saying anything.
They put him in the pool house.
Rosa is up. Rosa is up at four in the morning in her dressing gown with a bed made, and she takes Nico from me at the pool house door like she has done it before, and she has, she did it twenty-one years ago with a different boy, and she looks at me over his head and says, "Go up. I've got him."
"He needs the arm kept"
"I know what an arm needs." She has him sitting on the bed already, and she is unlacing his sneakers, and he is letting her, my brother who has not let anyone take his shoes off since he was five, and she says without looking up, "There's tea in your room.
Drink it. Then sleep, or don't, but go up. "
"Rosa."
"Go up, Marina."
I go up.
I do not go to bed.
I go to the third-floor room and I turn on the light.
There is tea on the bedside table, going cold.
I take the duffel out from under the bed where it has been since the first night, still packed, I never unpacked it, I have been living out of a bag in a stone house for twenty-four days like a woman in a hotel, and I put it on the bed.
The four pieces of paper come out of the bedside drawer and go in the front pocket.
The black dress goes in. The photograph of my father goes in, flat, against the side. I zip it.
Then the left shoe comes off, and the strip comes out from under the insole, and it is in my hand.
Four thousand one hundred and sixty. It does not need counting.
It is for leaving. It was always for leaving.
Three weeks ago in a walk-in I told myself it was for walking up a hill, and that was a lie, the kind I tell everybody, by leaving things out, and here it is in my hand, and here is the bag, and here is the door, and I did not say no in this room and now I am going to say it with my feet.
I put the shoe back on.
I put the bag on my shoulder.
He is in the doorway.
I did not hear him. I never hear him. He is standing in the door of the room he gave me with the hall light behind him and his coat still on from the hospital and his eyes on the bag, and then on the money in my fist, and then on me, and he says it very quietly.
"Where are you going."
"Away from you," I say. "So he stops bleeding."