Chapter 35
MARINA
Benny comes up the drive on crutches at eleven on Friday morning and the first thing he says is that she said yes.
"Who said yes."
"Danielle. Verizon." He is grey and thin and his hip is in a brace under his jeans and he is grinning like a boy who has stolen something.
"Wednesday. I went in on these, like you said.
I said I'd like a phone, and I'd like to take you to dinner, in that order, and she looked at the crutches and she said what happened to you, and I told her. "
"All of it?"
"The scream."
"Benny."
"You said women like a man who'll admit to a scream. I admitted it. She laughed. She said Saturday." He shifts on the crutches and his face goes white for a second and comes back. "I've got a phone, too. I didn't need one. I've got two phones now."
Rosa comes out onto the step behind me with her arms folded and looks at him, at the crutches, at the brace, at the grin, and she says, "Kitchen," and he goes, and it takes him a long time, and nobody helps him, because you do not help Benny, and he sits down at the table where he ate his lunch every day for three weeks with his feet on the rung, and Rosa puts a plate in front of him that has been ready since ten.
"You're not on the door," she tells him.
"I know."
"You're not on anything. You're on that chair till the doctor says."
"He said six months."
"Then you're on that chair six months." She looks at me. "He'll want to go back on her door. He's been saying it to the nurses. Don't let him."
"I won't."
"You will. You let everybody." She goes back to the stove.
Benny eats. He eats the way they all eat in this house, like it is the first time, and between mouthfuls he looks at me across the table, at the pearls, which I have worn every day since Sunday because Rosa looks at my ears when I come down and I cannot bear the line her mouth makes if they are empty, and at the ring, and he says, quietly, so Rosa will not hear:
"It looked cool. From outside. Carla said."
"Eat your lunch, Benny."
Nico is under the pool pump with his good arm in it to the shoulder and his bad one lying on the tiles beside him like something he has put down.
"Pass me the."
"The what."
"The thing. The flat thing."
I pass him the flat thing. I sit down on the edge of the pool with my feet over the water, which is warm, which is the first thing I noticed about this house that I could not explain, a pool heated in November for nobody, and I watch my brother's back while he does a thing with his hands that I did not know he could do.
"Where did you learn this."
"Nowhere. It's a pump. You look at it."
"You never looked at the boiler in Sunset Park."
"The boiler in Sunset Park wasn't mine." He grunts. Something under the housing gives. "This one's mine. Rosa said. She said if it's yours you look at it."
The water goes round my feet. Somewhere at the bottom of it, under the blue, there is a phone.
"Nico."
"Yeah."
"The thing you didn't tell me."
His arm stops moving under the pump. It stays there, in the housing, and he does not turn round, and I watch the back of his neck go a colour.
"Not yet," he says.
"When."
"When I've. When I know how to say it so it doesn't sound like.
" He pulls his arm out. It is black to the elbow with something.
"He asked me one thing, Mari. The first time.
Before anything. And I didn't understand it, and I said no, and I've been thinking about it every night in here for three weeks with the pump going, and I think I understand it now, and if I say it to you I'll have to say it to him.
" He tips his head at the house. "And once I say it to him it's not mine any more. So not yet. Soon. Let me fix the pump."
I look at the water.
"Okay," I say.
"Okay?"
"You'll tell me when you tell me. Fix the pump."
He fixes the pump. It takes an hour, and it starts on the second try, and it makes a sound it was not making before, a low even one, and he sits back on his heels on the tiles and looks at it like a man who has done one thing right, and I let him have that, because he has not had one in a long time.
Luca comes at two with my duffel.
He does not come in. He never comes in. He stands in the kitchen door with the bag in one hand and something in the other, and he holds the bag out, and I take it, and it is heavier than I left it because Teresa's dress is back in it, folded, cleaned again, and my father's photograph, and the black jeans I ran out of Sunset Park without.
"The apartment's shut," he says. "The chain's fixed. Your brother's things are in the pool house. The landlord's been paid till March and he doesn't know by who."
"Luca."
"He said to."
"I didn't ask him to."
"No." He holds out the other hand.
It is the strip. My strip. The bills folded the way I fold them, in the order I fold them, with the elastic I have used since I was seventeen, and it is thicker than it was, and I look at it, and I look at him.
"It was on the floor by the couch," Luca says. "Where the shoe was. Tommy picked it up on Tuesday when he went for the bag. He didn't count it. Neither did I."
"It's thicker."
"Then somebody did." He does not move his hand. "He said it's yours. He said, tell her it's hers and I didn't touch it, and I'm telling you, and I'm not going to stand here till you take it, but I'm not going to leave with it either."
I take it.
I know the weight of that strip in my hand better than I know my own, and it is not that weight, it is more, and I do not count it, because I know what he has done, he has put the six hundred from Cassidy's in it, the six hundred I never went and got, and I stand in Rosa's kitchen with my exit in my fist and it has been paid into by the man I was going to exit from.
"Thank you," I say.
He nods. He goes.
I do not put it in my shoe.
I stand there for a while and then I go up the stairs, two flights, to the third-floor room where I have not slept in a week, and I open the drawer of the bedside table where four pieces of paper used to be, and I put the strip in it, flat, and I shut the drawer, and I stand and look at the shut drawer for a long time.
It is still for leaving. I have not decided it is not. But it is in a drawer now, and not in a shoe, and I know the difference, and so does the man who paid into it.
Aldo finds me on the landing.
The turn of the stairs with the window in it, where I once held a man's face and told him to come in. He is coming up as I am coming down, and he stops one step below me the way Salvatore did, and he smiles up, and it is the smile, the kind one, and he says, "Bella. I've been looking for you."
"Here I am."
"Here you are." He looks at my hand. Not the ring. The other hand, the right, which is closed, because I have been carrying my father's key in my fist for six days now like a coin I cannot put down. "You've still got it. Rosa said you'd been trying locks."
"Rosa says a lot."
"Rosa's said more in the last month than in the thirty years before it.
It's you. You've got the house talking." He does not come up the step.
"You'll want a chain for that. You can't carry a thing in your fist for the rest of your life.
Let me. I've a man on Victory Boulevard who does gold, he did my wife's, I'll have it back to you by Monday on something that won't break. "
I look at him.
He is kind. He is standing on a stair being kind to me with his glasses on his head and his ring going round, and he is asking, the way he asked in the office, lightly, for a small thing, and it is the fourth time.
The photograph. The office. The hug. Keep it close.
And now a chain, from a man on Victory Boulevard, for a key that does not fit anything in this house, that my father took off his own neck and put beside a coffee cup on the night he died.
He asked Nico about it too. Before Sonny. Before anything. Nico said. He asked if Dad ever gave you anything.
I did not know I knew that until I am standing on a stair knowing it.
"No," I say.
The smile stays. Something behind it does not.
"It's no trouble, bella."
"I know it isn't. No." I close my hand tighter. "I'll find a chain. Thank you."
He looks at me for a moment longer, and then he nods, and he comes up the step, and he kisses my cheek, and he goes past me up to the second floor, and I stay where I am, the window at my back, and listen to him go along the hall and knock at the study door and go in.
It is the first time I have said no to him.
I go down to the kitchen and I ask Rosa if she has a chain.
She looks at my fist, and she looks at the stairs, and she goes to her room and comes back with one, thin, steel, off something of her own, and she puts the key on it herself and fastens it at the back of my neck and drops it inside my collar without a word, and it is cold against my skin where the old one was, and then it is not.