Gravesend (17 page)

The percolator on the stove reminded him of his grandmother’s house, how he and Duncan would stand at her hips and watch the coffee brew up into the glass bulb, and how he loved the smell of it filling her house until she smelled like coffee and he smelled like coffee and the world was just coffee. They’d sit down at the table after that and his grandmother would pour coffee for everyone, Pop, their mom when she was just a mom, him and Duncan, and boxes of
sfogliatelle
and rainbow cookies would be open and there’d be fennel, grapes, paring knives. Their grandfather would say, “Eat some fennel.” But he’d want a rainbow cookie and the good-smelling coffee even though he was too young to drink coffee. “Have a grape,” their grandfather would say, and then he’d put a grape on Conway’s plate and a piece of
sfogliatelle
.
Sfogliatelle
were Duncan’s favorite. He could eat a whole one, maybe two. He loved the powdered sugar on top. He loved to dunk it in their mother’s coffee on the sneak. Conway didn’t love
sfogliatelle
. He preferred rainbows. Both he and Duncan yearned to know coffee.

Now Conway looked through the cabinets and found a dented can of Folgers and opened it and scooped some into the percolator and ran the tap through the spout and put it on the gas on high and waited for the smell.

He guessed he would do what Ray Boy had suggested, stay the night and go out in the morning to make sure he’d done everything correctly. If someone had heard the shot and thought it somehow out of the ordinary, maybe the cops would be banging on the door any minute. But it had already been two plus hours and he didn’t think that would happen. It was late and first light wasn’t that far off, and he might get lost on these small roads if he tried to drive out anyhow.

He sat at the kitchen table and explored the gold-flecked Formica with his fingertips. Almost the same as Alessandra’s.

The coffee sputtered on the stove. He could smell that it was done and he searched around for a mug and found one with a picture of a hawk on it. He poured the coffee and sat at the table with it steaming in his face.

He finished one cup and poured another and went into sit by the wood stove. The glass on the stove door was sooty. Conway opened it and saw scoops of ashes and little curls of Sunday circulars. He wondered if he should burn this house down, too.

A high stack of newspapers was piled on the floor protector that the wood stove sat on. Behind the stack was a pyramid of logs. A black Fila shoebox was sitting on top of the logs. Conway rested his coffee on top of the stove next to the pipe and reached for the shoebox. He opened it and saw what he guessed to be Ray Boy’s stuff. A marble notebook, a few pictures, a fake Rolex, a Don Mattingly rookie card, a pair of drugstore reading glasses, and a passport-sized album full of airplane stamps. Looked like Ray Boy had meant to burn it all but instead he always just wound up sitting there looking through everything.

Conway was afraid to open the marble notebook, guessing it would be some sort of confession or letter to Duncan. But he opened it anyway and it wasn’t a letter or a confession. It was just pages and rows of numbers. He couldn’t figure out what the numbers signified but then something signaled that it was likely a tally of push-ups and sit-ups. The notebook was just filled with neat little rows of numbers, written in pencil mostly and Conway could see where Ray Boy had erased and adjusted a number here or there.

The pictures were harder for Conway to take.

One was of Ray Boy with Mary Parente outside Bishop Kearney on a fall day. Conway could tell it was fall because Mary Parente was wearing her crimson Kearney cardigan with the sleeves halfway down her palms and there was a tree in the picture, the one from outside Kearney, and it was a fall tree with half-bare branches and a gray quality. Ray Boy was hugging Mary from behind, kissing her neck, looking at the camera. Conway wondered who was taking the picture. Probably Teemo or Andy Tighe. More in the picture revealed itself. Girls stacked on the front steps of Kearney behind them. One of those girls—it was fuzzy but Conway could make it out—was Alessandra Biagini. Crazy. She was talking to another girl, hands up, gesturing.

In the next picture, Ray Boy was sitting on the hood of a car with Andy Tighe, Teemo, Bruno Amonte, and Ernie DiPaola. McKenna had once asked him—right after Ray Boy got out and Conway was making plans to find him—why he hadn’t just gone after Teemo or Andy right there in the neighborhood instead. What he’d told McKenna then was that it was all about Ray Boy, it’d always been only about Ray Boy, he was the strong one, the leader. Teemo, Andy Tighe, they might’ve busted Duncan’s balls a little bit, but Ray Boy was the evil one, not just some neighborhood chump. And that was true. But what Ray Boy had said in the car was also true: Conway knew or thought he knew that Teemo and Andy Tighe weren’t capable of the things Ray Boy was capable of. One of the things he thought Ray Boy was capable of was squashing his mission, killing him, making him a ghost like Duncan. The picture told it all: Bruno and Ernie at the far ends, Teemo and Andy Tighe with their arms around Ray Boy, Ray Boy in the center, legs wrapped around the hood ornament, the leader, everyone wanting to be part of his crew. And he had been strong enough to control Conway in the end. Just not in the way Conway would’ve figured.

A couple of pictures showed Ray Boy’s family posed in front of a blue sky backdrop. Him and his sisters, his mother and father. Conway couldn’t believe it. They’d all gone to a place, one of those places that made photos like this, and had a fucking family picture taken. Maybe a big version of one of these hung on the wall in Mr. and Mrs. Calabrese’s house. Ray Boy, in the picture, wasn’t smiling, wasn’t anything. He looked like a snake against the blue sky, greasy, fake, like he didn’t belong.

Then there was a faded Polaroid. A nudie shot of Mary Parente. It wasn’t posed for. She was sitting on the edge of a motel bed. Conway knew it was a motel bed because of the drab quilt and anywhere-everywhere landscape painting on the wall over the headboard. Looked like she’d just dried her hair. She was sitting straight up, shoulders out, was in the middle of saying something.

Conway arranged three of the logs in the wood stove and stuffed newspaper pages under them. He found matches in the kitchen and came back and lit the crumpled pages and watched them flame up and lick the logs. It took a little while but the logs caught and the fire started to burn. Conway fanned out Ray Boy’s pictures on the floor in front of him. He threw the blue sky family shots into the fire and watched them sizzle. Next was the one of Ray Boy and his crew and Conway took his time watching the fire eat it, the way fire-clawed holes took over and the picture just stopped existing. Next he tore Ray Boy and Mary Parente Kissing in Fall into little pieces and sprinkled them into the fire like a seasoning. He thought about keeping the nudie shot of Mary. He still saw her around the neighborhood sometimes. She worked in a bank, had four kids, kept a tight body, dyed her hair black, wore enough make-up but not too much. He’d always thought she was hot. She got on the same bus as him his freshman year and he used to sit there and just take in a deep breath as she passed in the aisle. She smelled of apricot lip gloss and vanilla perfume. Two buttons on her white blouse were always undone. She wore a wispy gold crucifix. She stopped taking the bus at the end of that year and started getting rides with Ray Boy. He took in her nakedness, all her angles and softnesses, and then put the Polaroid in the fire. The flames slid over her body, lit it up, and then she disappeared.

Conway put everything else in the fire—the notebook of numbers, Mattingly’s rookie, the Rolex, the drugstore glasses, the album of stamps—and then he ripped up the shoebox and dropped it in piece by piece.

He sat near the stove and drank his coffee.

He wanted to look through the rooms in the rest of the house. He figured that Ray Boy had other stashes hidden around. But he decided against it. Nothing he found could ever matter. He pulled his knees up to his chest and rested his head against them. He listened to the fire pop and waited for first light.

Fifteen

Another bartender came on duty around ten to help out, giving Amy time for a quick smoke break. Alessandra followed her outside. They shared a cig and made out a little. But then some other girl showed up. Looked like a gutter punk with face tats and a pierced lip and clothes that had melted into her skin. She had black dreadlocks and scabies scars on her hands and wore laced-tight combat boots that went almost to her knees and were spray-painted silver. She was dragging around a pit bull with a chewed up ear, using a length of nylon rope for a leash. “You’re who?” she said to Alessandra.

Alessandra said her name. “I’m Amy’s friend.” She put out her hand.

The gutter punk swatted it away. “Amy’s friend?” She turned to Amy. “Fuck’s this about, Amy?”

Amy said, “Alessandra, this is Merrill.”

Merrill got up in Alessandra’s face. “Merrill Luckless. I’m Amy’s girlfriend.”

“Your girlfriend?” Alessandra said.

“Used to be my girlfriend,” Amy said.

Merrill exploded. She turned away. She pulled on one of her dreadlocks. She tied her dog to the hydrant on the curb and started pacing back and forth.

“Might be best if you go,” Amy said.

“Okay,” Alessandra said.

“She gets like this, it can last. I know how to deal with her, but it’s probably better if you’re not around. I’m really sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

“Another time.”

Merrill approached Alessandra again and spit at her. The spit landed on her shoulder. It looked like melted aspirin. Merrill was yelling. Alessandra saw her teeth. Sawed-down yellow stumps. Amy got in the middle of them and pushed Merrill back. Alessandra went inside and gathered her things. Amy followed her in. Hipsters stared at them. Alessandra looked out through the front window and saw that Merrill was pacing around again. Amy took her to the back of the bar, and they walked down a little narrow passage to a door that opened into a piss-fumy alley. Amy said, “I’m sorry again.”

Alessandra was shaking. She said nothing and took off down the alley.

On the train back to Brooklyn, Alessandra’s nerves were still shot. Men in heavy coats sat slumped all around her. A Chinese woman with a folded shopping cart sat on the edge of her seat across the aisle. Two kids danced around a pole, their pants low, iPod earbuds hanging at their shoulders. A half-full Coke bottle rolled around under the seats, cap off, Coke skittering across the floor. A man hauling grocery bags set them down in front of the doors and started to hand out cards that said he was deaf and needed help. Alessandra refused the card. She’d forgotten the feeling of being on the subway. Everything was a scam. Everyone was out to get you. She felt horrible already and now she felt worse.

The train passed over the Manhattan Bridge. When they went back underground, the lights flashed off and her heart thumped. She saw Merrill’s face in the darkness.
Merrill Luckless. Christ.

By Thirty-Sixth Street, the crowds had mostly filed off. It was just her and some Russian couple snuggled close together in a two-seat wedge with their backs to her. She started to settle down, craved more gin, a cigarette, something to wash Merrill and Amy from her mind. Maybe it’d been a mistake to get with Amy in the first place. It never ended well with the girls she hooked up with. Maybe it was something about her taste. They all had dark histories. Gutter punks with pierced lips and pit bulls. Leslie, that script consultant, had a barista who was into bondage and handguns. Meredith, who used to be a run-of-the-mill housewife with frosted hair and glossy nails, had a loose cannon cokehead ex-hubby who tossed a mocha frap at Alessandra’s windshield one Sunday morning. She’d had better luck with guys insofar as there was less drama involved. It never ended well, but no one got spit on.

When the train was back aboveground, Alessandra took out her phone and checked her messages. The first one was from her father. Checking in. Next one was Stephanie. Blubbering. Alessandra skipped it. Another one from her father. Checking in. Stephanie. Blubbering. Then one from Lou Turcotte. More bullshit. Funding. Beau. She wasn’t even sure what he was talking about. She deleted the message. Skipped ahead. The next voice she didn’t recognize. Heavy breathing. A swampy mouth. Grinding teeth. All business. She said, “Alessandra Biagini, this is Stephanie Dirello’s mother.” Like they were fourteen. “My Stephanie is,” gasping now, “in the hospital. Ever since you showed up, she’s changed. I never had problems like this with her.” She wailed into the phone and then hung up.

Christ.

Alessandra thought the worst. Stephanie had gotten drunker and washed down pills. She’d cut her wrists in the tub. Walked out in front of a bus. All the Conway shit had been too much.

Poor Stephanie.

The girl was a mess. A fifth grader still in a lot of ways. Dealing with stuff she should’ve gone through at sixteen, seventeen.

Alessandra dialed information and got the numbers for Maimonides and Lutheran. She wrote them on the back of her hand with eyeliner she found at the bottom of her bag. Where else could Steph be? Victory was closed, she remembered her mom telling her that.

She called Lutheran first. No luck.

Maimonides had her. The nurse she spoke to said Stephanie had been brought in a couple of hours ago. Couldn’t really say more.

Alessandra knew Maimonides was in Borough Park, right on the subway line. She was at Twentieth Avenue now and had passed the stop.

She felt like she had to go. Part of her didn’t want to. Mrs. Dirello would probably be there, playing the victim, wailing some more. Typical Italian mother shit times ten because Mrs. Dirello was a whackjob. She figured that Stephanie, if she was going to be okay, needed somebody to tell her not to feel bad about anything. Nothing was her fault. If she wasn’t going to be okay, that was another story.

At Bay Parkway, Alessandra got off the train and crossed the tracks to the other side of the platform and waited for the D back in the other direction.

Alessandra walked into the hospital room. She’d bought a small stuffed bear in the gift shop downstairs and held it under her arm. Stephanie was hooked up to an IV drip. Her eyes were closed and her skin looked chalky. Her mother was sitting next to her, wearing a black dress and black flats and a mesh net in her hair like a line cook. She was holding Stephanie’s hand, hunched over her stomach, praying in Italian. A red rosary was coiled on the sheets. Someone else was on the other side of the drawn curtain, watching
CSI: Miami
at top volume.

“Mrs. Dirello?” Alessandra said.

Mrs. Dirello didn’t look up. “They had to pump her stomach.”

“Is she going to be okay?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” She wailed and then started up again with the prayers in Italian.

“What happened?”

“Pills, who knows what else? You should know.”

“Me?”

Mrs. Dirello jerked her head up and fixed her beady eyes on Alessandra. She looked like a gypsy from a horror movie. “This all started with you, missy. My Stephanie, with the booze? Never. With the pills? With the wanting to move out? Never. End of story. She was a good daughter. Content to stay at home with us. Now look at her.”

“Tell me what happened.” Alessandra went over to the bed and held Stephanie’s other hand. It was limp. The hair on the back of it looked beautiful.

“What happened? You tell me. She washed down pills with a hundred year old bottle of Sambuca I keep under the sink. Whatever was in the cabinets. My blood pressure pills. The Ultram. Everything.” Mrs. Dirello stood up and smoothed Stephanie’s hair back.

“The doctors say what?” Alessandra let go of Stephanie’s hand.

“Who can get an answer?”

“She’s stable?”

“What’s stable? Who knows?”

Alessandra put the bear on the edge of the bed and went out into the hallway, wanting to talk to a nurse. Mrs. Dirello was out of her mind.

A lumpy nurse in blue scrubs sat behind a computer at the main desk on the floor. She had bobby pins in her hair and too much rouge on her cheeks. Her lips were chapped. “Help you?” the nurse said.

“I wanted to get some information about Stephanie Dirello,” Alessandra said.

“Such as?”

“I want to know what’s going on, that’s it. Her mother, her mother’s not in her right mind. She can’t seem to remember anything the doctors said.”

“You’re family?”

“A friend.”

“I can’t, I’m sorry. The mother wants to come out and talk to me, that’s one thing.”

Alessandra didn’t push it. She went downstairs and got a coffee in the cafeteria. There was nothing sadder than drinking watery grind-flecked coffee out of a Styrofoam cup in a hospital cafeteria. She looked around. People picked at withered fruit on trays and slurped bottled water or bad coffee. She tried to pick out the people who were upset, who were there to visit relatives who were dying. It wasn’t hard. They were slumped in their chairs, the food in front of them for show. One family, well-dressed, the father with a neat mustache, the mother in a pants suit, the kids cow-licked and cooperative, seemed almost joyous. Alessandra wondered what their story was. Maybe they just liked eating in the hospital cafeteria.

She thought about Stephanie. She pictured her washing down pills with a crusty old bottle of Sambuca. Where was she when she did it? In front of the medicine chest in the bathroom? It made Alessandra sick to think about. Poor girl probably looked at herself in the mirror, thought about what Conway did, and figured why not?

Alessandra blew on her coffee. She studied the sneakers of the nurses on the food line.

When she got back upstairs, the doctor was in the room. He was talking. He was a little Indian man with a stethoscope and a packet of Chiclets in his breast pocket. His silver-striped black tie was loosened around his neck. He looked like he’d been up for a thousand days straight. As he spoke, Mrs. Dirello wailed. “Please,” the doctor said. “Will you please allow me to finish?”

The person in the next bed still had their TV blaring, too.

The doctor pinched the bridge of his nose.

It was loud in there.

Mrs. Dirello was wailing for no good reason. The doctor wasn’t saying anything bad. He was saying that Stephanie was going to be okay. It was going to take a couple of days but studies showed this and test results were that. He got fed up with Mrs. Dirello. He pulled Alessandra out into the hallway and let out a breath. “That woman is a handful,” he said.

“I know,” Alessandra said.

“Did you hear what I said in there?”

“Most of it.”

“You’re her friend?”

Alessandra said, “Uh-huh.”

“We’re going to put her on this.” The doctor held out his clipboard and pointed to the medicine Stephanie was going to be prescribed.

“Okay.”

“After she comes to, she needs bed rest. We’ll keep her here a day or two, but that’s it.”

“She’ll wake up when?”

“Could be now, could be tomorrow. Depends. I’d bet soon.”

“Thank you, doctor.”

“Good luck with the mother.” The doctor walked away. His head was down. Alessandra felt sorry for him. Probably every room had a Mrs. Dirello in it.

Alessandra went back in and sat away from the bed under the TV. “Did you hear what he said?” she said to Mrs. Dirello.

Mrs. Dirello moaned. “What does he know? I want a doctor who speaks English.”

“He spoke perfect English.”

“Indians. You can’t get an Italian doctor anymore. Give me a Jew. Give me a Jew at least.”

Alessandra said, “Christ.”

“Nice way to talk.”

“Did you hear what he said, Mrs. Dirello? Or didn’t you? Stephanie’s going to be okay. There’s no need for the big production.”

Mrs. Dirello hissed, such an old Italian lady thing to do. She made claws in the air with her hands. “Who do you think you are? Miss Hollywood Glamour? Who needs you here?
Puttana
, that’s it. No good.
Disgraziata
.” She fake spit on the floor.

Alessandra shook her head. She decided she wouldn’t leave. She’d wait for Stephanie to come out of it. No way she could leave her alone with her nutjob mother.

Alessandra nodded off to sleep when the guy in the next bed finally shut off his TV, leaning her head back uncomfortably on the chair, and she snapped out of it a couple of hours later, maybe more, to see Stephanie’s eyes open now and Mrs. Dirello stroking her hair, saying, “My Stephanie. My Stephanie. Thank you, Lord.”

Alessandra went over and stood next to the bed. “You okay, Steph?” she said.

Stephanie nodded. Bags were smudged under her eyes. She flexed her hands.

“Why would you do this to me?” Mrs. Dirello said, arranging the red rosary on her daughter’s chest and gripping the beads.

Alessandra said, “Not now, lady.”

“
Puttana
.”