Chapter 29
MARINA
Kev gave my shifts to a girl called Brianna who cannot pour a Guinness and does not know it.
"She's fine, Mar."
"She's pouring it in one go."
"Nobody's complained."
"Frankie's complained. Frankie's sitting there looking at it like it did something to him."
"Frankie complains about the weather." Kev wipes the bar in front of me, which he never does, which means he does not want to look at me.
"I held them three weeks. Three weeks, and you said you'd call, and you didn't call, and I heard things, Mar.
Everybody heard things. And then you come in on a Tuesday morning with a bag and a ring on and ask for Thursday nights back like nothing's. "
"It's not a ring."
"It's on your finger."
"It's." I stop. I look at it. I have not taken it off in three days and I do not know why, and I have made myself not think about why, and I put my hand under the bar where he cannot see it. "Never mind. Give me Sunday. Sunday afternoon. Nobody wants Sunday afternoon."
"Brianna wants Sunday afternoon."
"Brianna can't pour a Guinness, Kev."
He wipes. Behind me Frankie says, to nobody, "She took the dog," and I understand that I am in a bar in Bay Ridge on a Tuesday morning arguing for a shift I do not want in a life I have already left, and that the girl who cannot pour a Guinness is standing where I stood for ten years and it does not look wrong. It looks like a bar.
"I'll call you," Kev says.
That is what men say across a bar when they mean no. I have said it myself a thousand times.
Brianna comes down the bar while he is in the back. She is twenty-two and she has the kind of face that has never been told anything it did not want to hear, and she leans on the rail and looks at my hand and says, "Is it real?"
"It's old."
"Old's real." She looks at it a while longer. "Kev said you were living with. You know. Up there."
"Kev talks."
"Is it true what they say about them? The snakes?"
"There's a tank," I say. "It's empty."
She thinks about that. Then Frankie says her name from the end and she goes, and I watch her pour him a Guinness in one go, and he looks at it, and he does not say anything, and neither do I.
Sunset Park is the same.
That is the thing I keep hitting. I walk up Fourth from the train and it is the same, the bodega and the church and the laundromat that is not the one on New Dorp Lane, and the building is the same, three flights and the smell on the second landing, and I let myself in and the chain is off because there is nobody here to put it on, and the apartment is the same.
Clean, the way Nico left it. The couch with the cushions turned over.
The window he opened, still open, letting November in.
I shut it.
I stand in the middle of the room in my coat.
Three days. I have been here three days and I have not unpacked the bag, it is on the floor by the couch with Teresa's dress in it, and I have slept on the couch, not the bed, because the bed is in the room that Ray used to lock, and I have not been able to.
Three days, and I keep waiting for it to feel like mine, and it is like standing in a photograph of somewhere I used to live.
Nico is in a pool house on a hill with a woman who unlaces his shoes. I have not called him. I do not know what I would say. I left you there is true and you're safer there is true and both of them are the same thing Salvatore said to me in a doorway, and I heard what that was.
I go to the bodega because there is nothing in the fridge, and the girl behind the counter who likes Nico looks at me and looks at my hand and says nothing, and the man behind her says something in Spanish I understand about half of, and the half I understand is Vitale.
I buy milk. I buy bread. I pay with a twenty from the strip in my shoe because there is nothing in checking, and I walk back, and a car goes past slowly, and it is a blue Honda with a child seat in it, and I stand on the sidewalk and watch it to the corner anyway.
Wednesday I go to Rosebank.
I do not know why. I tell myself it is the bank, there is a branch on Bay Street and I need to move what is left of the checking into something I can get at without a card, and that is true, and it is not why.
I get off the bus a stop early and walk.
Tompkins. Chestnut. The stoop in between where two nine-year-olds sat for thirty years, and it is still there, it is a stoop, and there is a woman on it with a stroller who looks at me and does not know me.
The old building. The one with the fire escape.
I stand across from it. Second floor, front.
The window I climbed out of at two in the morning to sit on the iron in a coat with my knees up, because iron in January was better than the room, and somebody on the second floor of the building I am standing in front of watched me do it and never once asked why.
I look up at the fire escape. It is the same fire escape. Somebody has put a plant on it.
"Silvestri."
A woman. Sixty, seventy, in a housecoat with a bag of groceries, coming out of the deli on the corner, and she has stopped on the sidewalk and she is looking at me the way Mrs Amato looked at me across the street when I was nine, and I know before she does it what she is going to do.
She spits.
Not at me. On the sidewalk, between us, a neat small spit like she has been practising, and she says, "Sixteen years and you come back here wearing that," and she looks at my hand, at the ring, and she says the word.
The one I have not heard out loud since Dominic.
She says it to the sidewalk and she goes past me with her groceries and does not look back.
Nothing happens.
The sidewalk. The bank statement in my pocket. My father's block all round me, and the thing that has come every time for sixteen years, the thing that goes down and stays down, the nine-year-old on the stoop.
It does not come.
So I look for it. The way you feel for a tooth that has gone. Nothing. What is there instead has no word, and it is not a feeling, it is more like a fact. The block is the same. The spit is the same. The word is the same.
And I am not.
Forty people stood up when I walked into a room.
A boy with a plate in his hip now took a car for me.
A woman who does not touch anyone put her hand on my face and said there.
A man looked at me across a room like there was nothing else in it, and locked a door for me, and opened it, and stood in a gateway under a snake and let me walk.
The block cannot reach that. The block does not know it is there.
The bank, then. The money moved.
And then not the bus home. The other bus, the one that goes over the bridge to Brooklyn, and a walk up a hill in Green-Wood that I have done twice in nine years, and a flat stone with my mother's name on it and nothing else, because nothing else was in the budget.
Gia Marie Silvestri. The dates. Forty-one years between them.
I stand there in the good shoes. There is a tree over her that was not there the last time, or was smaller, and the ground is wet, and I do not have flowers, I have never once brought her flowers, and I do not know what I am doing here except that I was on the Island and I could not be on the Island any longer.
"I'm angry at you," I say.
It is the first time. Out loud, to the stone, in a graveyard on a Wednesday, and it comes out plain.
"I'm angry that you cried and I didn't. I'm angry that you stood in the doorway.
I'm angry that you went to the pills because it was easier than looking at me, and I've never once said that, because you were sad, because he was dead, because everybody kept telling me you were sad.
" I look at the dates. "I was nine. I was sad too. "
The tree drips.
"I've got his ring on," I say. "Not Dad's.
Not yours. A dead woman's, from a house you danced in once.
And I walked out of that house on Sunday, and I'm standing here, and I don't know if I'm telling you because I want you to be proud or because I want you to be sorry.
" I put my hand on the top of the stone.
It is cold and it is wet. "I think I'm staying.
I think I'm going to go back. I wanted somebody to know that who wouldn't say anything. "
She does not say anything. She never did.
The bus home, and not once out the window.
Thursday night I play the kitchen table.
Three in the morning. The apartment dark and the window shut and Nico's turned-over cushions under me, and I have not slept, I have not slept properly in four nights, and I sit at the table my mother bought in 1998 with my hands on the wood and I play it.
Not the lid of a piano. A table. Formica.
And it is the piece, of course it is, my hands know nothing else at three in the morning.
No sound. The right hand goes up and stops and comes down.
The left hand goes under, slow. The middle comes, where it changes, where the left hand does the thing that is my mother and the right goes fast over it.
My hands stop.
Because it is not my father's piece I am playing.
It is the one I played him. In the music room with the lid closed and a man in a chair three feet away.
At Sunny Vale with him in a plastic chair next to Walter.
Out loud with the doors shut every night for a week, knowing he was in the corridor and would not come in.
Same notes. My father's notes. And somewhere in five weeks it has stopped being the thing a man played to tell his wife he was home and started being the thing I play to tell somebody else.
Hands off the table.
"I miss the house."
Out loud. In the dark. To the Formica. Rosa hitting Matteo with a towel.
The cat on the radiator. The beans. Benny's chair outside my door.
The whole building ticking at one in the morning like something settling.
The room with the window and the good bed and the lock that is painted shut.
The piano. A man asleep face down, one hand open on my pillow.
And I hate it. The missing. The same way I hated it when he broke Ray's hand and it felt like being kept safe, and now I know what that was.
That was the first time. Sixteen years, and the first time somebody stood between me and a thing so I did not have to be the one, and I hated it because I did not know how to be a person it happened to.
Still don't. But I know what it is now.
The left hand goes flat on the table, ring and all, and there it is in the dark. Her ring.
You're safer gone, he said. And I said that is not a reason, and I was right, and I walked, and I was right to walk.
Four days. Not safer. The same. Exactly as safe as before the hill, which is not at all, which is a girl on a fire escape, and the only thing that has changed is that now I know what the other thing feels like.
The buzzer goes.
Three in the morning. The buzzer, from the street door, long and hard, the way nobody buzzes unless they are drunk or bleeding, and I sit at the table with my hand flat on it and my heart going and I do not move.
It goes again.
I get up. I go to the intercom by the door, the one that has not worked properly since 2015, and I press the button, and I do not say anything, and for a second there is nothing, street noise, a car going by.
Then a voice.
"Little girl," Ray Donato says. "I've got a message from your fiancé."