Chapter 36
MARINA
Rosa puts the box on the piano and does not open it and does not tell me to, and that is how I know what is in it before I lift the lid.
"They were her mother's."
"Rosa."
"Then hers. Then in a drawer in my room with the dress, because Carmine couldn't look at them and Salvatore didn't know they existed." She folds her arms. "Now they're on a piano. Do what you like."
Pearls. Two of them, small, on old gold wires, the kind you have to put through and hook. Not expensive. Not anything. Sunday afternoon, the music room, the piano open, and my hands over a box with a dead woman's earrings in it.
I cannot pick them up.
"I can't."
"You can. You've got ears." She takes them out herself.
She puts them in my hand, closes my fingers, the way I closed Salvatore's on a key, and she looks at me with her mouth in its line.
"She wore them every Sunday. To this room.
For the music. You're going to play in a minute for the whole of that family, and you're going to do it in her dress, because I've had it cleaned, and you're going to do it in her ears, because I say so, and then they'll know. "
"Know what."
"Whose house it is."
She goes. I stand there with two pearls in my fist.
Then I put them in.
They come at four.
Not forty this time. The family. Matteo first, with a bottle, of course, who stops in the door and looks at me in the green dress at the piano and says, "Oh, that's not fair," and sits down on a sheeted chair without taking the sheet off.
Luca, who nods, and stands by the wall, and does not sit, and never will.
Carla, who has never once been in this room and looks at the ceiling.
Rosa in the doorway with a towel. Nico, in a clean shirt.
Arm out of the sling for the first time.
A look on him like he has walked into a church by accident.
Aldo, who kisses my cheeks and says nothing about Thursday again, and it has been two Thursdays now, and I have stopped counting.
His eyes go to my collar. To the steel chain there, Rosa's, thin, going down inside the green silk to where the key is, and he looks at it for exactly as long as it takes to look at a thing, and says nothing about it either, and it is the first time in a month that Aldo Bracci has had nothing to say about anything, and I put that where I put things.
Not Dominic. Dominic is in his own house with a man on his door and I do not know the whole of why and I have not asked, because Salvatore came home on Thursday night with a face I did not have a name for and sat on the edge of the hard bed with his hands hanging between his knees and said, Paulie's dead, and then, not by me, and then nothing, and I put my hand on the back of his neck and left it there until he lay down.
And Salvatore. Last. He comes in and stands where he stood the first time, at the end of the keyboard, one hand on the black wood, and looks at me in his mother's ears. He does not say anything. He does not need to.
I play.
Not the piece. Not yet. The things you play for a room.
The Sunny Vale things, the Sinatra, the one Dot likes.
Matteo sings a line of something. Rosa hits him.
Carla laughs. It is a room. Just a room with people in it and a piano going, and I have not had that since I was seven, and I let it be that for as long as it holds.
"Do the one about the moon," Matteo says.
"Which moon."
"There's more than one?"
"There's four."
"Then do the one Dot likes."
"How do you know about Dot?"
"Benny." He grins over the bottle. "Benny says she made Sal take his hat off. I've been waiting three weeks to say that in this room. Sal. Did you take your hat off?"
Salvatore does not look at him. "Yes."
"He doesn't have a hat," Luca says, from the wall.
"That's what makes it good," says Matteo.
I play the one about the moon. Slow. Dot would say slower.
Then I play his.
Enzo's. My father's, out loud, in the room he wrote it for, with the left hand under and the right going up and stopping and coming down, and nobody talks, and Aldo puts his hand over his mouth, and Nico, who has never heard it played on anything but a table, sits very still with his good hand on his bad arm and his face doing something I have not seen it do since he was four, and Salvatore stands at the end of the keyboard and does not move, and I keep it going underneath. I keep it going the whole way.
When it is done, nobody claps. They know what they heard.
Matteo says, "Well," in a voice that is not his usual one, and clears his throat, and opens the bottle.
Nico moves into the pool house properly that night.
He has been in it for three weeks. He has been in it with a bag and a sling and the television, like a boy in a waiting room, and tonight Rosa gives him a set of sheets that are his and a drawer and a key, an actual key, to the pool house door, and he stands in the kitchen holding it like it might go off.
"I don't"
"You do," Rosa says. "It's a key. You put it in the lock. Your sister's been picking them since she was fourteen, I'd have thought it ran in the family."
He looks at me. I shrug.
"She said you'd fix the pool pump," Rosa says. "You said you could. Was that true?"
"I can fix a pump."
"Then you're not a guest. Guests don't fix things. Go and put your sheets on."
He goes. At the door he stops, and turns round, and he looks at me across the kitchen with the key in his hand, both halves of his face, and he says, "Mari," and stops, and I say, "I know," and he goes out to the pool house, and I hear the door, and I hear it lock, from the inside, and I put my hand flat on Rosa's table and leave it there.
"Give it back to me," I say.
He is in the chair by the dresser in his room with his shoes off and the ring of his mother on my hand and her pearls in my ears, and he looks up.
"The key. My father's. I put it in your hand a week ago upstairs and you've had it in your pocket ever since. I've watched you touch it. I want it back." I hold my hand out. "Not because I'm leaving. Because it's mine, and I'd like to know what it opens."
He puts his hand in his pocket and takes it out.
It is small in his hand. Gold gone dull, the bow of it worn smooth from sixteen years against my skin, and he looks at it and then holds it out, and I take it, and the chain is gone, the chain is in a basement in Rosebank, so I close it in my fist.
"Every lock in this house," I say.
"That's a lot of locks."
"Then we'd better start."
We start.
Matteo finds us on the second floor at ten with a wardrobe open and both of us on our knees in front of it.
"Is this a game?"
"It's a key."
"I can see it's a key. What does it open?"
"That's the game."
He gets down on the floor with us. He does not ask again. He goes through the drawers of a wardrobe nobody has opened since his mother, and he does it carefully, and he finds a glove, one, grey, and holds it for a second and puts it back, and says nothing about it, and neither do we.
It is not a small house. The third-floor room: the door, the wardrobe, the chest with nothing in it.
The music room: the cabinet under the window where the sheet music was kept and is not.
The study: every drawer of the desk. Then the cabinet under the tank, where he shows me the false back and the Mosler behind it.
A safe from 1961. My father's key in my hand.
It is not that kind of key. It was never going to be.
It is small and flat with a hollow bow, the key to a jewellery box or a diary or a locker, and it does not fit the Mosler.
It does not fit anything on the ground floor.
It does not fit the garage or the pool house or the gate box.
At midnight we are in the kitchen with Rosa, who has come down because we have been opening and shutting things for two hours and she can hear it through the floor.
"It doesn't fit anything," I say.
"No."
"It's not for the house."
"It was never for the house." Rosa has the kettle on. She says it with her back to us, drying a glass that is already dry, and I look at Salvatore, and he is looking at her back, very still. "He didn't leave that for you, cara. Whatever you think. It didn't come to you from him."
"It was round my neck. He put it round my neck the week before."
"He gave it to Carmine."
The kettle ticks.
"That Sunday. Before he went down. He sat at this table with his hat on his knee waiting, and I gave him coffee, and he took the chain off from round his own neck and put it on the table by the cup, and I said, Enzo, what's that, and he said, It's for Carmine.
Give it to him after. And tell him," she puts the glass down, "tell him, give it to my daughter when she's old enough to ask what it opens.
Those words. And then Aldo came in the door and I put it in my apron, and I gave it to Carmine on the Tuesday, and he looked at it a long time, and he gave it to your mother, Marina.
He drove to Rosebank himself and put it in her hand on the stoop and said Enzo wanted her to have this and drove away, and your mother put it round your neck and told you it was his, and that was all she told you, because that was all she knew. "
I cannot move.
"So it's not a keepsake," Rosa says. She turns round.
"It's not a thing to remember him by. He didn't give it to Carmine to remember him by.
He gave it to Carmine so that one day you'd stand in a kitchen and ask what it opens, and now you have.
" She looks at the key in my fist. "Your father meant you to look. "