Chapter 24
SALVATORE
Tommy tells her about Sunday because Tommy's twenty-six and has never once in his life been in a room with a secret and got out of it with the secret still in.
I find that out from Rosa. Rosa finds it out from the way Marina puts a plate down at lunch, and Rosa comes to the study and stands in the door with her arms folded and says, "She knows about Sunday," and I say, "How," and Rosa says, "Tommy said ring in the kitchen and then said nothing for a full minute with his mouth open," and goes.
It's Wednesday. I've had three days of the house being very quiet around her, and now it's going to be quiet around me.
She's not in her room. She's not in the music room, the lid's down and the cloth's on.
She's not in the kitchen and she's not in the pool house with the brother, who says she came in and stood there and went out again without a word, which is how I know something's coming, because she talks to him even when she's got nothing to say.
I find her in the garage.
The strip lights are off and the door's shut and she's in the Mercedes. My father's car. In the driver's seat, in the dark, with the keys not in it and both hands on the wheel, not going anywhere. Sitting in a locked thing she picked.
I open the passenger door and get in and shut it.
She doesn't look at me.
"Tommy told you."
"Tommy told the kitchen. I was in it."
"It wasn't meant to come from Tommy."
"No. It was meant to come from nobody. It was meant to come from you standing up on Sunday in front of forty people and a ring in your hand and my face doing whatever it did, and that was going to be the first I heard of it.
" Her hands are still on the wheel. Ten and two.
"That's the plan. That's the whole plan.
You were going to put a ring on me the way you put a lock on me, from the outside, and tell me after. "
I don't say anything.
"Say something."
"Yes."
"Yes what."
"Yes. That was the plan."
She turns her head, finally. In the dark I can see the shape of her face and not much else, and the shape's enough.
"Why."
"Because the men need to see it."
"The men."
"Dominic put it in the hall on Tuesday. Marry her or get rid of her.
He's right. Not about you. About them. They see a woman up there that I don't claim and don't put out, and it's a crack, and they'll put a knife in it, and it won't be a knife in me, Marina, it'll be a car over a kerb.
It'll be a van. They go for the crack, not the wall.
" I look at the windscreen, at the dark garage door. "So I make you the wall."
"By marrying me."
"By standing up and saying it."
"Without asking."
"I'm asking now."
"You're not. You're in a car in the dark telling me why.
That's not asking. I've heard men ask, I've watched them do it across a bar with their hands shaking, and this isn't it.
This is a man explaining a lock." She takes her hands off the wheel.
"And I've been sitting in this car for an hour trying to work out whether I'm angry because you didn't ask, or because if you had I'd have said yes, and I don't know which is worse. "
The garage ticks. Something cooling that hasn't run.
"You'd have said yes."
"Don't."
"Marina."
"Don't do that. Don't take that and put it in your pocket with everything else you've taken off me.
I never asked to live here. I never asked for any of it.
I walked up a hill for my brother and you put me on the third floor and you put your mouth on me and you put your blood on my hip and now you want to put a ring on me in front of your uncle, and every single one of those you decided, and I get to decide one thing, and it's whether I'm allowed to die. "
"You're not."
"That's not yours."
"It is now."
She hits the wheel. Flat-handed, once, and the horn goes, short, loud in the shut garage, and she doesn't care, and neither do I.
I take her wrist. The left one. I take it out of the air where it's come off the wheel and I hold it, and the hair tie's there, and under it the mark, and I put my thumb on it the way Donato did, and she goes still.
"You're not allowed to die," I say. "That's it.
That's the only thing I want. Everything else, the ring, the men, Dominic, the door, it's all that.
It's all the same thing. I don't know how to say it so it sounds like anything but a lock, because I only know locks, and you're sitting in my father's car telling me you'd have said yes, and I'm going to take that, I'm going to put it in my pocket, because it's mine, and I'm not sorry. "
She looks at me.
Then she's across the seat.
There's no room. It's a car from 1994 and the gearstick's between us and it doesn't matter, she comes over it with her mouth on mine and her hands in my shirt, and it's not the kitchen and it's not the study and it's not the room with the sun in it.
It's angry. It's two people who've been shouting in the dark, and she bites my lip and I let her, and I get the seat back, the passenger seat, it goes with a sound like something breaking, and I pull her over onto me.
"This doesn't fix it," she says. Into my mouth.
"I know."
"I'm still. I'm still furious with"
"I know."
"Then why"
"Because you're here."
She's in the jeans and I get them open and she gets my belt and it's fast and it's clumsy, her elbow in the door, my head on the pillar, and none of it matters, the jeans go down and she kicks them off one leg and she's over me with her knees on the seat and her hands on the roof, and there's no slow in it.
None. She takes me in one move with a sound that's more anger than anything, and I grab her hips hard enough to leave something, and she rides me like she's trying to prove a point, and I let her prove it.
The car rocks. My father's car. On its springs in the dark with the two of us in it and the horn still ringing in my ears, and she's saying things, she's saying you don't get to and this is mine and you don't, and every one of them she says harder, and every one I answer with my hips, and it's not making love.
It's an argument. It's the argument, the whole one, the lock and the door and the ring and the men, and we're having it like this because it's the only language we've both got.
She comes first. She comes with her head against the roof and her nails in my shoulders through the shirt and a sound that's nothing like the room with the sun in it, and I hold her through it and I'm right behind her, and I come with my face in her neck and her name in my teeth and my hand spread on the small of her back holding her down on me like she's going somewhere.
She isn't.
She stays. Breathing. Her forehead on the pillar by my head. My hand on her back.
"I'm still angry," she says.
"Good."
"Why good."
"Because you're still here."
Rosa's in the kitchen at two in the morning, which she isn't, she's never in the kitchen at two in the morning, and she's got the kettle on and two cups out, and she doesn't look round when I come in.
"Sit."
I sit.
She makes the tea. She does it the way she does everything, without any wasted motion, and she puts one cup in front of me and sits across from me with the other, and she looks at my shirt, which has a button gone, and doesn't say anything about that either.
"Sunday," she says.
"Yes."
"In front of Dominic."
"In front of everybody."
She drinks. "Your mother would have liked her."
"I know."
"No, you don't. You think it because it's a thing to think.
I'm telling you. Teresa'd have had her in this kitchen the first night and by the second she'd have been calling her cara and telling her which of the men to watch.
She'd have liked her because she doesn't sit down.
That's what Teresa liked. People who don't sit down.
" She puts the cup down. "Enzo didn't either. "
I look at her.
"You want to talk about Enzo."
"No. I want to tell you something about Enzo, and then I want to go to bed, and you can do what you like with it.
" She folds her hands on the table. "The night.
The October. You were here, you know what you know.
I was here too. I was in this kitchen. And I'll tell you what your uncle's never said, and your father never said, and Aldo Bracci's never said, because I was the only one who saw it. "
The kettle ticks.
"He came on his own," Rosa says. "Enzo. Nobody brought him.
There was no car, there were no men, he wasn't dragged up that drive.
He walked in the kitchen door, that one, at nine at night on a Sunday, on his own two feet, with his hat in his hand, and he asked me where Carmine was.
Like it was any Sunday. And Carmine wasn't here.
Carmine was at the club. So he sat at this table, right where you're sitting, and I gave him coffee, and he drank it, and he waited. "
"For my father."
"For your father. And your father didn't come.
Aldo came. Aldo came in that door an hour before Carmine did, and he saw Enzo at my table, and his face went a colour I've never seen on a man, and he said, Enzo, what are you doing here, and Enzo said, I've come to tell him.
Just that. I've come to tell him. And Aldo said, Not here.
Downstairs. Wait for him downstairs, where it's quiet.
And he took him. Down the back stairs. Aldo did.
With his hand on his arm." She looks at me.
"And an hour after that Carmine came home, and Aldo met him in the hall, and I heard them go down, and I didn't hear anything else, because I went up to my room and I put the radio on. "
I don't move.
"I've never told anybody that," Rosa says.
"Because it didn't matter. He was a rat, Carmine said so, and what did it matter whether he walked or was carried.
But you're going to put a ring on that girl on Sunday and she's going to be in this house for the rest of her life, and one day she's going to ask me, and I'm not going to lie to her. So I'm telling you first."
"There's one more thing. And then I'm going up."
I wait.
"His hat. Enzo's. He left it on this table when Aldo took him down, on the corner, by the cup, and nobody came back for it.
Carmine walked past it the next morning and didn't look at it.
Dominic didn't look at it. Aldo picked it up on the Tuesday and put it down again.
" She looks at the corner of the table. "I've got it.
In my room. In the bag with Teresa's dress.
Sixteen years. I don't know what I was keeping it for. I suppose I was keeping it for this."
She stands. She takes her cup to the sink and rinses it and puts it upside down on the rack, and she stops at the door with her hand on the frame.
"He wasn't dragged here," she says. "Whatever your uncle says. He walked in."