Chapter 33
MARINA
The water goes pink and then it goes clear and I stand under it until it goes cold, and then I stand under that.
It is his shower. Not the third-floor bathroom with the soap still in its paper, which is mine, which I could have gone up to.
His. On the second floor, off a room I have never been in, a room with a bed made so tight you could bounce a coin on it and nothing on the walls and one photograph face down on the dresser, and he brought me to it without asking, and I did not argue, and now I am in his shower with Ray Donato coming off my hands and going down his drain.
My feet are cut. I did not know that until the water found them.
Small cuts, glass and grit from Tompkins Avenue, and they sting, and I let them.
My hair has blood in it from where his hand was.
I wash it three times. There is a bruise coming on my scalp that I can feel with my fingers and not see, and the skin under my left eye where the flame was is tight and hot, and I look at it in the steam on the glass, and it is nothing.
It is a pink place. He did not get to do it.
He did not get to do anything. I put a bottle in him and I ran and a man I said yes to put his hand on the bottle and watched him die.
I turn the water off.
He is in the doorway when I come out.
Not the bathroom door. The bedroom. He is standing in the door of his own room with his back against the frame and his sleeves pushed up and his forearms washed to the elbow and the cuffs of the shirt still dark, he has not changed the shirt, and he has the watch back on.
I see that first. The watch. It is on his wrist where it goes and there is blood dried in the links of it, and he has not cleaned that, and I do not think he knows.
He looks at me in his towel with my hair wet and my feet leaving marks on his floor, and he does not say anything, and I understand that he is waiting.
He has been waiting since the basement. He stood on Bay Street with his hand on my face and he drove me over the bridge with the heater on and he brought me to this room and nothing has come out of him about what he did, and he is not going to, because he is waiting for me to.
So I do.
"His name was Enzo," I say.
Salvatore does not move.
"My father. I've never said it. Not out loud.
Not to Nico, not to the priest at my mother's funeral, not to a teacher in ninth grade who tried for a whole semester.
I say my father or I say him or I don't say anything, and I've done that for sixteen years, because if you don't say the name then it's a thing that happened and not a person.
" I sit down on the edge of his bed. It is a very hard bed.
"Enzo Silvestri. Enzo. He played piano and he did the taxes for half of Rosebank and he took his shirts to the laundromat on New Dorp Lane on Tuesdays and stood and waited for them because he wouldn't leave them. That's who was in your basement."
"I know."
"You don't. You know a man on a chair. I'm telling you the rest of him."
He comes into the room. Not far. He sits in the chair by the dresser, the one with nothing on it, and puts his hands on his knees, both of them washed and neither of them clean, and he looks at me.
"Tell me the rest," he says.
I tell him about Ray.
Not the burn. He knows the burn. I tell him the part before, the part I have never told anyone, that Ray came a year after and he was kind at first, he was kind for eleven months, he brought groceries and he fixed the sink and my mother laughed for the first time since, and I was ten and I thought he was the thing that was going to make it stop.
And then he moved in. And the kindness went the way it goes, slowly, and then all at once, and the locks started, and the lighter started, and my mother started with the pills because it was easier than looking, and by the time I was fourteen I was the only person in that apartment who was awake.
"He never," I say. "The other thing. The thing you're thinking.
He never did that. I want you to know that, because I can see you thinking it, and it's the one thing he didn't do.
" I look at my wrist. The hair tie is gone.
It went in the basement somewhere, or in the road, and the scar is just there, in the light, round and shiny and small.
"He did this. He did it to see if I'd cry.
He said that. He said, let's see if she cries, and he held my arm on the kitchen table and he did it, and my mother was in the doorway, and she cried, and I didn't. I looked at him.
And he never forgave me for it. Eleven years.
Tonight, in that basement, with a bottle in his leg, that's what he said to me.
You didn't even cry. That's what he carried.
Not what he did. That I looked at him while he did it. "
Salvatore has not moved. His hands are on his knees and his face has gone to the one from the hospital hallway, the new one, the one that is not the gate, and I keep going, because if I stop I will not start again.
"I sat on the fire escape after that. Every night I could.
Two, three in the morning, in January, in a coat, because the iron was better than the room.
And a woman across the street watched me do it out of her bathroom window for two years, and she never came down.
Nobody came down. That's what I want you to understand about Rosebank.
It's not that they hated me. It's that they watched. "
"I know."
"And tonight you took me back to that basement.
That building. Not you. Him. But that's where I was.
In the chair. Under the bulb. Eleven steps.
I counted them when I was fourteen and I counted them tonight.
" I put my hands together in my lap. "And I got out.
On my own. Before you came. I want that clear too.
I want it in whatever ledger you keep. I got out of that basement with a bottle and my feet, and I was running towards you before I knew you were there. "
His hands close on his knees.
"So that's the rest," I say. "That's the rest of him and the rest of me. Now you."
"I killed him," he says.
"I saw."
"In front of you."
"You told me to stay on the stairs. I stayed on the stairs."
"You didn't look away."
"No."
"Why."
I think about that. It is a real question and he has asked it like one, and I give it what it is owed.
"Because you didn't," I say. "Sixteen years ago.
You stood in a doorway and you watched my father look at you, and you didn't look away, and you've carried that, and I've hated you for it since Sunday.
Not for being there. For standing there.
For letting him look at you and doing nothing with it.
" I meet his eyes. "And tonight I stood on a stair and watched you put your hand on a man and I didn't look away either.
So now I know what it costs. I know what it costs to stand there.
And I don't know if that's forgiveness, Salvatore.
I don't think it is. I think I'm going to be angry about the basement for a long time, maybe for the rest of it, and I think you're going to have to live with a woman who's angry about it. "
"Yes."
"And I'm staying."
He looks at me.
"I'm staying. Not for ninety days. Not till it's done, whatever it is.
I walked down that hill on Sunday and I sat in Sunset Park for four days and I went to Rosebank and a woman spat on the sidewalk and it didn't touch me, and I sat at my mother's table at three in the morning and I said out loud that I missed the house.
This house. With the drain in it." I hold up my left hand.
His mother's ring, wet from the shower, one small stone.
"I never took it off. Four days. I told Kev it wasn't a ring.
I don't know why I didn't take it off and I've stopped needing to know. "
He stands up.
He comes across the room and he gets down.
Not on one knee, the way men do it across bars with their hands shaking.
Both. He gets down on both knees on the floor of his room in front of the bed with his bloody shirt and his washed hands, and he puts his hands on my knees through the towel, and he looks up at me, and he does not say anything, because there is nothing he knows how to say, and I have stopped needing him to.
My hands go to his face. Both.
"Slow," I say. "And then not."
He is careful with my feet.
That is the first thing. He takes the towel off me and lays me back on his hard bed and he looks at the cuts on the soles of my feet before he looks at anything else, and he goes and gets something from the bathroom and cleans them, kneeling at the end of the bed, holding my ankle the way his mother held his at the lights, and it stings, and I let it, and I watch him do it.
Then he puts his mouth on the inside of my ankle. Then higher.
There is no hurry in him. There was hurry in the study and hurry in the car and there is none now, he has all of it, he takes his shirt off and there is dried blood on his forearm above where he washed and he sees me see it and does not hide it.
He comes up over me. He puts his mouth on the pink place under my eye where the flame was, and on the bruise on my scalp, and on the scar on my wrist, which I hold up to him, which I have never once held up to anyone, and he kisses it like it is a thing he is being given, and then he is inside me.
Slow. So slow. He holds himself over me and does not take his eyes off mine and it is the room with the sun in it, it is that, but it is not that, because in the room with the sun in it I did not know what his hands could do and now I do.
I have seen it. I hold the hand that did it.
I take his right hand off the bed and I hold it against my chest, over where my heart is, with the blood still in the lines of the knuckles, and he sees me do it and something goes across his face that I would pay to see again, and he says my name.
Then not slow. I asked for that too.
He gives it. He puts his weight on me and I take it, all of it, I wrap my legs round him and I put my nails in his back and I say his name and I say yes and I say don't stop and he doesn't, he says things into my neck that I will keep, and when I come it is with his hand still held against my chest and his eyes on mine and the light starting to come grey in the window, and I do not close my eyes, and neither does he, and I have never once in my life been looked at like that and I am going to be looked at like that for the rest of it.
He comes with my name in his teeth and his face in my hair, and after, he does not move off me, and I do not want him to.
The light is grey and then it is not grey.
His head is on my chest. My hand is in his hair.
There is blood on his sheet from my feet and from his hand and neither of us has looked at it, and the house is doing its morning thing under us, the pipes, a door somewhere, Rosa, and I lie there in the man's hard bed with the man on me and I think about a thing I have not told him.
Aldo. The office. Not before Sunday.
Sunday is done. Sunday was done on the gravel.
I could say it now, into his hair, your consigliere built the debt, and he would lift his head and his face would do the gate and he would be out of this bed and down the stairs before I had finished the sentence, and Aldo would be out of the gate by noon.
And Aldo was kind. Aldo sat in a hospital chair. Aldo put his arms round me in a room with a pencil ledger and smelled of wool, and he did what he did to keep me from Dominic, and it worked, it worked, I am under this roof, and he asked me for one thing.
Not yet. Aldo said he would tell him. Let Aldo tell him.
I do not know if that is right. I know I am tired and I know his head is on my chest and I know I have said more true things in the last hour than in the sixteen years before it, and I am going to let one stay unsaid for one more day, and I do not think that is a lie.
I turn my face into his hair.
"I'm not marrying you because you asked," I say.
He lifts his head.
"I want that clear. You asked wrong and then you asked right and then you didn't open the room, and none of that is why." I put my hand on his face. "I'm marrying you because I stood on a stair and watched you kill a man, and I didn't want to leave."