Two more valuable things.
I take the bag downstairs myself. It doesn’t weigh enough to ask for help.
“Can I help you with that, signora?” Benny asks at the foot of the stairs.
“Sure.” I let him take it. “Maybe put it in the trunk of the big car in the garage. The Buick.”
“Good. You should know you’re protected,” he says. “There are men all around the perimeter.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m at the front gate. I’ll head out there from the garage. Unless there’s something else you need?”
“I’m good.”
He nods and takes away my suitcase.
The thunderstorm doesn’t take a breath. The weather lady says it’ll keep up like this through the night. I sit on the couch with a sketch pad. The gray day turns smoke gray, then wedding gown satin, and all the while, my page stays blank white. The storm’s flashing, and the banging sounds like a war being waged in the sky. The lighthouse flicks a beam against the cloud cover every ten seconds.
It rains with the intensity of an outraged father, then continues as if the sky is trying to break the earth.
Is Dario really going to kill my father? Did I really help him do that?
This house is a way station between ignorance and panic. I have no map for guilt or regret because I feel none. If killing Peter Colonia—my father—makes the world safer for Dario and me to be together, then Peter Colonia must die.
I’m so deep in thought that when the phone rings, I jump.
I check the number. It’s not Dario. It’s not any of the handful of numbers I know off the top of my head.
I should let it ring, then call Dario. But he said not to unless it was an emergency.
Is getting a call from an unknown number an emergency?
Obviously, it doesn’t matter if I answer or not. Whatever harm’s been done has been done and Dario knows that. But maybe it’s him. Maybe he lost his phone and he needs me.
I answer. “Hello?”
“Sarah?” My name comes through wet sobs. It’s a woman.
“Who is—” I’m interrupted by a deep, snotty snort. “Denise?”
She may be in trouble. She may be on a Manhattan street corner, terrified and alone.
I can call Dario and he can go get her on the way back from killing my father.
I stop myself from laughing out loud. I’m so naïve.
“It’s me,” she says. “I can’t believe it’s you. This number was in his phone, and I hoped you’d pick up.” Snort. “Are you mad?”
“Of course not!” I speak for myself, because Dario won’t be happy. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, I’m… oh Sarah. It was so good to see you. I miss you so much. You looked beautiful. In that gross bathroom… you glowed.” A cracking boom comes from her side of the line. Thunder. “And I know you didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Henry.”
That’s not completely true. He still has some of his dick left because of me.
“Where are you?”
“On the rectory phone. I can’t talk long. It got weird here today.”
“Tell me you’re all right.”
“He found the video,” she says through chattering teeth. “Found the phone and then the video and…”
“Who?”
“Marco.” She sniffles. “And he wanted to know where it came from, and I tried not to tell him. I really did. But he did the thing where he hurts me, and Marco Jr. and Dahlia were in the next room.”
“It’s fine. Denise. It’s okay.”
Dario may not think it’s okay, but I’m not him.
“He’s the one who did a bad thing. In that greenhouse, it was him and he was being a disgusting animal. Why is he blaming me?”
“Can you run away?”
“And it’s not like I asked you to meet me in a park bathroom.”
This is my fault. All my fault. She’s in the rain, crying, telling me how her husband beat her, and he did it because of me.
“Run,” I say. “Right now. Just get on the bus.”
To where? I can’t tell her to come to me. But Denise doesn’t want directions.
“I can’t,” she says. “What about the kids?”
What can I promise her? What can I say that’s true?
“Give me time,” I say. “I’ll figure something out.”
“I don’t know if you can.”
“I will. Dario’s been rescuing Colonia women for years. He has this…” I’m about to tell her about the island. How much she’d love it. How Willa’s girls are so happy, and how I'll be there and we can be friends forever. I stop myself. She doesn’t need to know that. “… organization. He’s done it before. He’ll do it for you.”
“You don’t know?” Thunder cracks on her end again, while lightning flashes on mine.
“Know what?”
“It’s a rumor, I guess, but they’re saying that Lucari was meeting with Massimo in the subway…”
He was?
Why? Was that part of the plan? Have I been alone in the house enough hours for the world to change that much?
“When?” I ask.
“I guess, I’ve been trying to get alone with a phone for, like, an hour and a bit… and anyway the good news is Lucari jumped in front of a train and—”
“No. He didn’t.” The denial comes from a place in my body so deep, no knife could reach it.
“Maybe he slipped, I don’t know. But you’re free! He’s—”
“Shut up, Denise. I’m warning you.”
She shuts up while I turn into Black Widow, midair, flexed, nothing beneath me, nothing above, anchorless and suspended in the timelessness of a held breath.
Lightning splits shadow from sight, and thunder follows before the burst finishes freezing time. Denise snorts, and the spell is broken.
“He’s dead,” she says. “You can come home now.”
“I’m not coming home.”
“Please come home.”
“Good-bye, Denise.” I hang up.
The rain is harder. The lightning is sharper. The thunder cracks like a bone.
Now things are different. This, now, begins my life after he died. There was before he drove the car at my wedding. And there was after. Now the after is before, and I’m living a new after.
Maybe.
Denise probably heard some messy story fourth-hand, and Dario will show up in the driveway asking for dinner.
Hand shaking, I end the embargo and call him. I have to do it twice before my fingers get the shape right.
He does not answer. After twelve rings, it hangs up on me.
There’s nothing I can do to help a dead man, and if he’s alive, he said not to call.
Am I being obedient or sensible? I can’t tell. This couch in this dark room is becoming a new prison. This space before actual despair stretches like dough. It will break, and so will I.
But there’s Benny. I know how to get him.
I rush to the kitchen and find the blue button he showed me when I first arrived, but nothing happens. I press it again, harder this time.
Is he dead too?