“She didn’t know.”
“She slept in our bedroom in StuyTown. Cooked on our stove.”
“They don’t tell us anything,” Sarah says.
“I didn’t care. You’re all in on it. I let her go back, knowing what they’d do to her. What do you think happens to women after they’re hollowed? They don’t get to see their children.”
She steps away from the glass. I can still taste her breath on my lips.
“Don’t tell me.”
“It’s too late for that, prima. And you know it.”
She’s leaning toward the other end of the hall. The exit. She’s too curious to run now. She’s opened up a can of possibilities and she’s ready to know what they are.
“The truth,” she demands.
I can tell her the truth without betraying much more.
“There are men who like a stripped cunt. They’ll pay good money for them.”
“So she was—”
“Shush.” I shut her down before I have to say too much. “What I do know… because I saw it happen… is someone was brought out in a bag soon after your mother was hollowed. It’s a woman, and she’s still there.”
“Where?” Her question is little more than a breath.
“There’s a place in Queens called the Hole. If Massimo doesn’t know it, Caesar does. Ten paces west of Angel’s Tower. Bring shovels.”
Her eyes go wide, and her lovely lower lip goes slack as shock replaces anger. She puts her back to the wall and blinks. Tears fall. I drown in those tiny droplets.
“You said she was alive.”
“She might be. Go find out.”
As if floating on yards and yards of black fabric, my wife runs out.
I press my cheek to the glass to catch a last glimpse of her pausing, rethinking, maybe disbelieving what she just heard, but the door at the end of the hall slaps closed and I’m alone again. She’s gone.
That’s the last I’ll ever see of her. She’ll never be back.
I’ve protected every good thing I’ve done in my life and lost her in the process. The trade is broken. It’s bad. Everything is bad, and empty, and it’s shattered me and thrown the pieces in the cold void with my brother’s body.
She’s gone, and I did it. I hurt her too much this time.
I can’t see my way through the panic. My lungs are in the chokehold of my angry, grieving heart. They can’t breathe and my heart can’t beat.
What have I done?
On my knees, I lay my forehead on the drain, wishing my way through the slits. If I could fit myself in them, come out the other side in slices, each one divorced from the next, into the blackness. They’d flow down, down, falling through an abyss before mixing with raw sewage. Finally home, where I belong.
What have I done to her? Why can’t I wish myself dead? The bed is wood, or I’d smash myself against it. The mattress is too thin, or I’d suffocate myself with it. If I jumped off the bed, headfirst onto the concrete, maybe I could end this.
I want to do it again.
I want to take it all back.
Hope is poison, but regret is a fucking shredder.
If I could do it again, I wouldn’t do it the same.
CHAPTER 15
SARAH
“You can’t come,” Massimo says in the parking lot under Precious Blood.
“I can drive,” I remind him. “And if I can’t steal a set of car keys, I know how to get a cab. Don’t think I won’t, or I can’t, and don’t think your men can stop me.”
There was money in the safe. It’s in the desk drawer now. All I have to do is take it.
But then what? I don’t even know where we’re going.
Most of the men have loaded shovels and buckets in the backs of SUVs, like overgrown children going to the beach for a middle of the night sandcastle contest. Doors slap closed and engines hum as they exit in a line.
“I know.” Massimo throws two spades into his Suburban and shuts the rear door. It refuses to slam, hissing to a gentle close. “And I don’t think anyone can stop you.” He leans closer to me and speaks softly. “Except him.”
He means Dario. But Dario didn’t stop me. He told me a place to go so that I’d go there.
“I’m trained to be an obedient wife. He told me where Mom is. He wants me to go. So I go.”
All of those things are true, but unrelated. I am trained for obedience. Dario did tell me, and I’m sure he wants me to be the one to dig up whatever’s in the hole. But that’s not why I want to go. I’m sick of waiting around. I need to see this with my own eyes, and if it’s some kind of trap, so be it. I’ll be caught inside it.
“Get in.” Massimo taps his phone.
The car lights blink as the car beeps. Locks clack open and the engine turns over. It’s nothing like the Skylark’s step-by-step process, and again, I’m reminded of all I don’t know.
Massimo drives through the city, over a bridge, and with a single turn, we’re in a place that doesn’t look like anyplace I’ve ever seen. The buildings are low brick squares with windows broken like open eyes. The walls are painted in an alphabet I cannot read, and the cars lining the streets are coated in months’ and years’ worth of dust and grime. The litter is so old it’s caked in the corners of the curb.
With another turn, he takes me to yet another world where the litter remains, but the walls are fewer. The trees are painted in the strange runes, and a rotten egg smell comes through the car vents. Another turn onto a rutted road lined with puddles and abandoned concrete buildings. Between two orange posts holding an open gate puts us on a road cutting through a dense forest of gutted cars. In the headlights, I spot a cut chain dangling from the end of one of the gates. The thick trees border an unlit road that hasn’t been maintained. Reflectors sporadically indicate the shape of the road as the car bounces on rocks and water-filled divots.
We’re alone in the car with the shovels rattling in the back as the SUV heaves to and fro.
“You stay by me.”
“Are you nervous?” I ask.
“Yeah, I’m fucking nervous I’m going to have to kill Lucari before we find out where he’s hiding our girls.” He stops by a tower of used tires where the rest of the men unload their tools, faces ghost white in the headlamps.
What am I supposed to think? If they dig up the remains of my mother in this swamp of garbage, how am I supposed to feel about Dario’s lies?
I’m angry at him. I am so mad I could spit in his face. I’d punch him if I could reach him, but would I really hurt him? Am I willing to get him killed?
No. I’m not. The best piece of me would die with him. I’d escape the Colonia because of what he taught me, but I’d never find happiness. I’d walk through life an incomplete shell of a human.
“You won’t do that.”
“If I don’t like what I find here…” He slaps the car into park. “You better fucking believe I will.”
He gets out.
For the first time in a long time, I pray. I ask the Holy Mother for strength, for insight, and mostly I pray that I was lied to.