Chapter 18
MARINA
Benny's hip is in three pieces and he wants to know if it looked cool.
"It didn't look like anything. I was underneath you."
"But from outside. Carla saw. Did she say it looked"
"Carla said you screamed."
"I didn't scream."
"You screamed, Benny. It was a good scream. It was the kind of scream a man does when his hip is in three pieces and he's just saved somebody's life, and nobody's going to hold it against you."
He thinks about that. He is grey under the hospital lights and there is a pump in his hand for the morphine that he keeps looking at and not pressing, because he is twenty-four and a man on a door, even from a bed, and I reach over and press it for him.
"Hey."
"You're allowed."
"He said no drugs on the job."
"You're not on the job. You're in Staten Island University Hospital with a pin in you. Press the button."
He presses the button. His face goes loose at the edges. Out in the hall a cart goes by with a wheel that needs oil, and it is nine o'clock at night, and I have been in this chair for four hours, and I am not leaving it.
"Danielle," he says. Slurring a little.
"What about her."
"Verizon."
"I know where she works, Benny."
"If I'd. In the lot. If it'd gone the other way. I'd never have." He shuts his eyes. "That's stupid. Phone store."
"It's not stupid."
"It's a phone store, Marina."
"I know a woman who's ninety-one and still tells people to take their hats off.
You want to know what she'd say? She'd say you go into that phone store on Monday on crutches and you say, I'd like a phone, and I'd like to take you to dinner, in that order.
And Danielle says yes because you've got crutches and a story, and you tell her the story.
All of it. The car and the kerb and the scream. "
"I didn't"
"You tell her about the scream, Benny. Women like a man who'll admit to a scream."
He is asleep before I finish. I sit and watch him breathe with the pump loose in his hand, this boy who put himself on top of me in a parking lot because a man told him to and then did it anyway, and I try to feel what I am supposed to feel about it, which is that I owe him nothing, that he was doing a job, that the job was the deal.
I owe him. I owe him everything. I have been telling myself for twenty-five years that I do not take, and I have taken a man's hip.
Rosa comes at seven with a bag.
She does not knock and she does not say hello. She puts the bag on the end of Benny's bed and starts taking things out of it and putting them on the tray table like she is setting up a stall. A thermos. A tin with a lid. A sweater of mine that I did not pack, folded. My other shoe.
"Carla found it under a car."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me. Put it on. You've been sitting in a hospital in one shoe for two hours, they'll think you're a patient." She opens the tin. Biscuits. She puts one in my hand without asking and looks at Benny. "He's asleep."
"They gave him something."
"Good. He fights it when he's awake, he's like all of them.
" She sits. She does not sit the way Aldo will sit later, on the edge, ready to go.
She sits like a woman who has been in this kind of chair before and knows it does not matter how you sit in it.
"Teresa sat here. Not this room. Down the hall, the old wing, before they built.
Carmine had a man shot in 'ninety-eight, one of his own, he'd got it wrong, and he brought him here himself, and Teresa sat with him for nine days because Carmine wouldn't come in the room.
" She looks at the door. "He's in the hall. "
"I know."
"He's been in the hall since five. He won't come in. He hasn't come into a hospital room since they carried him into one at twelve with his hands like that." She takes a biscuit herself. "So I come in. Somebody in that family has to be able to sit in a chair."
We eat the biscuits. Benny breathes. It is the first time anyone in this city has brought me a shoe, and I put it on, and it fits, and I do not say anything about that and neither does she.
"He looked at you," Rosa says. "In the lot.
When he came out of the office with you.
Carla told me. She said he had his hands on your face and he wasn't looking at the car or the kerb or the boy on the ground.
He was looking at you like he was checking you were still there.
" She brushes crumbs off her lap. "Carla's known him since he was ten. She said she'd never seen it."
"Rosa."
"I'm just telling you what Carla said."
"What are you telling me."
She stands up. She puts the lid on the tin and leaves the tin, and she picks up the empty bag and folds it under her arm, and she looks down at me in my two shoes.
"I'm telling you he doesn't come into hospital rooms," she says.
"Benny's mother's coming at eight. From Bayonne.
She's a talker, she'll talk the whole time, let her.
She'll bring food and it'll be worse than mine and you'll eat it and say it's good.
That's how you get through a night in one of these chairs.
You let the mothers talk. And he's been standing outside this one for two hours. Work it out."
She goes. In the hall she says something to him, short, and he says nothing back, and I hear her shoes going away down the corridor, and his do not move.
"He'll walk," Aldo says.
He is at the door. I did not hear him come, and then I did, and it is the reading glasses, he has them up on his head again, and he has a paper cup of coffee in each hand and he holds one out to me, and I take it.
"The surgeon told Salvatore. Two pins and a plate and six months and he'll walk. He'll walk badly, but he'll walk." Aldo sits in the other chair. The one that has been empty because nobody else in this family sits. "You've been here since five."
"Somebody should be."
"Salvatore's outside."
"So Rosa said."
"Yes. That's what he does. He stands outside." He looks at the biscuit tin on the tray and does not touch it. "You've eaten?"
"Rosa."
"Then you've eaten." The glasses come off his head and get looked at and go in his pocket, a man doing something with his hands because he cannot think what else to do with them, and it makes him smaller, and I like him better for it.
"I came from the House. Dominic's there.
He's in the kitchen telling Matteo that a car nearly killed a girl in the lot of Teresa's restaurant and that it's the girl's fault for being in it, and Matteo's telling him to get out of the kitchen, and Rosa's hitting them both with a towel.
So I came here." He drinks his coffee. He makes a face at it, which is fair.
"Your father would have sat in here. That's the difference.
Enzo would have sat in that chair and held that boy's hand and talked to him about baseball till the morphine took, and Carmine would have stood in the hall, and both of them would have thought they were doing the right thing. "
I look at Benny.
"You knew him well."
"I knew him best." He turns the ring on his finger.
"Rosebank. We were nine. He lived on Tompkins and I lived on Chestnut and there was a stoop in between and we sat on it for thirty years.
I was best man at his wedding. I stood up in the church when you were baptised.
I taught him to drive and he taught me to keep a ledger, and I never learned, and he never learned to drive properly either, so. " He shrugs. "That's what we were."
"You never came."
"After."
"After. Nine years old and the whole block crossed the street and nobody came. Not one person who'd sat on that stoop."
He does not look away. I will give him that. He sits in the hospital chair with his bad coffee and looks straight at me and takes it, and his eyes are wet the way they were in the study, and he says, "No. I didn't."
"Why."
"Because I was a coward, Marina. Because Carmine had decided, and when Carmine decided a thing, you didn't stand next to it.
You didn't send flowers to it. I had a wife and I had a place at that table and I looked at your mother on her stoop with a four-year-old and a nine-year-old and I looked at my place at the table, and I chose.
" He turns the ring. "I sent money. I know that's nothing.
Every month, an envelope, no name, because I couldn't put my name on it, and I know that's the cheapest thing a man can do, and I did it for sixteen years and I'm still doing it, and it doesn't touch what I owe. "
I have known about the envelopes since I was twelve. I never knew who. I used to think it was the church.
"I'm not asking you to forgive me," Aldo says. "I'm too old to ask for that and you're too young to give it. I'm telling you because you asked, and because I'm sitting next to you in a hospital where a boy took a car for you, and there isn't a better time. That's all."
We sit. Benny breathes. The cart goes by the other way.
And I ask him. I did not know I was going to. I have never asked anyone, not my mother, not the priest at her funeral, not the one teacher who tried, and I ask him now with a paper cup going cold in my hand.
"Who did it."
He does not pretend not to understand.
"Carmine," he says. "It was always Carmine.
He decided, and he did it himself, because that was Carmine.
He didn't hand things to other people that he'd decided.
" Aldo looks at his coffee. "In the basement of that house.
In October. I was upstairs. I've never once been down those stairs and I never will. "
"You were in the house."
"We were all in the house, bella. It was a Sunday."
I do not say anything. I put the coffee down on the floor by my chair very carefully, because if I hold it any longer it is going to go over.
"But you should ask Salvatore," Aldo says.
I look at him.
"What he remembers. You should ask him. He was seventeen, and he was in that house, and Carmine had ideas about what a seventeen-year-old should see.
" He stands up. He puts his hand on my shoulder the way he did in the study, and squeezes, and it is kind, it is the kindest hand that has touched me in this city in sixteen years, and I hate it.
"I've said too much. I say too much when I'm tired.
Ask him. He won't lie to you. That's the one thing about him, he won't lie, he'll just not say. So make him say."
He goes to the door.
He stops there. Not because he means to. Because there is somebody in it.
Salvatore is standing in the doorway of Benny's room with his coat on and his wrapped hand at his side, and he is not looking at Aldo. He is looking at me. And his face is doing nothing, and I have learned every one of his nothings in twenty-four days, and this is a new one.
He heard.