Julie and Romeo (20 page)

“Did you kill him?” Those were her first words to me. Her breath was sweet with peppermint.

“Mort’s going to be fine.” I had absolutely no data with which to support this. They were the first of the masses to arrive. I guessed that Sandy had called her sister and was still home waiting for Gloria to come help with the children.

“Where is he? What have you done with him?”

What have I done with him? Like maybe I had put him in a storage closet? “He’s being seen by the doctors now.”

“The doctors!” she said. “He’s with doctors!”

“This is a hospital.”

“Mother, what happened?” Nora said. She was as well-dressed as ever, but looking a little less confident, as if perhaps even she understood her own culpability in the day’s events.

“Your father showed up at the flower shop and then Romeo showed up at the flower shop. I wasn’t expecting either one of them. They got into a fistfight.”

“So your boyfriend did this. You admit it!” Lila said.

“I admit it,” I said.

“Nora, you’re my witness.” She turned to me. “I will sue you, so help me God.”

But Nora was falling down in her witnessing duties. She was punching numbers on her cell phone and pacing off across the lobby for privacy. I had a sudden chilling vision of Nora testifying against me in court. She would point me out to the jury, say,
That’s her. “I don’t know what you’re going to sue me for exactly. I don’t have any money. I wasn’t involved in the fight.”

Lila was only stumped for a second. “It happened in your store. That means you’re liable.”

“Well, seeing as how Mort threw the first pot of flowers, I would say you were liable, if I was the kind of person who sued other people, which I’m not.”

“You contemptible bitch,” Lila said. “I told Mort this was lunacy, flying across the country to try and straighten out your love life. But he had to help you. He had to be the good guy. This is how you thank him.”

“This is how I thank him,” I repeated, and then reminded myself of Romeo. “Aren’t you a little curious about how he’s doing? Don’t you want to go and talk to his doctors?”

Lila flashed her blinding incisors at me in something between a growl and a snap. For a second I thought she really did mean to bite me. Then she stomped off. Never did one woman get so much sound out of such a small heel.

“I can’t believe you let this happen,” Nora sighed when she came back. She watched Lila’s retreat to the nurses’ station but did not follow. “Alex is on his way over. If she talks about suing again, maybe he can shut her up.”

I hit Nora once when she was fifteen. She came home drunk at four in the morning after I had spent the night on the phone with the police and local area morgues. She came in the front door and proceeded up to her bedroom without stopping to say hello. When I called out her name in a mixture of relief, joy, and fury, she told me to drop dead. I slapped her open handed across
the face, exactly the way every child psychologist will tell you you must never do. I replayed that scene over in my mind for years, trying to think how I could have handled it differently, properly, but I never came to any other conclusion. It was my failing as a parent, but to this day smacking her seemed like the only logical response to her actions. There in the hospital waiting room I put my hand on her shoulder. “If you want to see your father and his wife, you invite them out to see you. Buy them plane tickets, I don’t care. But don’t you ever, ever conspire against me with anyone again and expect me to forgive you because I am your mother. I am sick and tired of forgiving you, Nora.”

The story of the slap was especially fitting because Nora now wore the same look of utter incredulity that she had worn at fifteen, the red imprint of my hand still fresh on her cheek. “I was trying to
help
you,” she said. “I called Daddy so he could talk some sense into you. Clearly Mr. Cacciamani is a dangerous man—don’t you understand that now? Do you still think he’s so wonderful after what he did to my father?”

“Nora,” I said, trying very hard to keep my voice steady, “I think you should go and comfort your stepmother because if I have to talk to you about this for one more minute, I’m going to say something we’ll both feel bad about later.”

Again with the open mouth, the disbelieving hurt. I was sure I was doing the wrong thing. I could not help it. Not every relationship works out. It hadn’t worked out with Mort, it wasn’t going to work out with Romeo. Was it possible that it might not work out with Nora? Could I ever come to such a point with a
daughter to say “Enough’s enough” and “See you around”? The very thought of it made me want to run to her and beg forgiveness, and I might have, had there been time.

God forgive me for what I know to be a small-minded slur against Romeo’s family, but when they came in the door I couldn’t help but think of
West Side Story
, the Jets walking down the streets of Hell’s Kitchen snapping their fingers together in a way that was supposed to establish them as dangerous characters. There were so many of them and they all looked so much alike. The wives all looked like sisters, and though I had met four of his sons before (counting Tony, who was still in Ecuador), I could not tell one from the other. It wasn’t like they were twins, mind you, I just couldn’t remember which was which. My only lucky break was that the old woman didn’t appear to be in attendance. They came toward me in a block, a mass, and while I was ready to defend myself against Lila and Nora, I knew I could not offer the slightest resistance to them. Just as I thought they were going to run me down, stomp me to death, the whole pack veered to the left and went to the nurses’ station. There was a flurry of inquiries, some raised voices, and then every last one of them disappeared through the swinging double doors marked
NO ADMITTANCE: HOSPITAL PERSONNEL ONLY
. That was it.

Two minutes later Father Al came in looking flustered and concerned. “Al,” I said, and waved him down.

I could see the confusion on his face. He was trying to place me as a parishioner and then he remembered. “Julie, oh. Julie. Are you all right? Were you hurt?” He patted my hand. It was such a relief to have someone pat my hand.

“No, I’m fine.”

“What about Romeo? Raymond called me. He said there was an accident and he said something about you.”

I could imagine what the something was, but Al was a priest and wouldn’t say. “He’s going to be fine, I think. Oh, God, I hope he’s going to be fine. There will be some stitches, maybe a broken bone at worst. He got into a fight with my ex-husband.”

“Mort? Mort’s in town?”

“You know Mort?”

“I don’t know him myself, no, but I’ve heard plenty about him over the years. I certainly feel like I know Mort.”

“Well, they ran into each other.” I thought of how that sounded, but then decided to let it stand.

“And Romeo’s children …” He looked around nervously. “Have they come in yet?”

I nodded. “They’re already in the back with him. I don’t even know if they saw me.”

“This is going to be bad,” he said. “Romeo will be fine. He’s had his share of stitches before. He was such a scrapper when we were in school. I thought he had outgrown it.”

“He probably had. He was provoked.”

“We’ll keep that between us.” Al looked toward the doors. “I really should go in there.”

“Do me a favor, will you? Let me know how he is. Tell him I’m out here. I know they’ll never let me in to see him, but I don’t want him to think I just walked away.”

“He knows that.”

I suddenly felt a great sob come up from my chest, and it got halfway out before there was time to properly suppress it. “I’m
absolutely prepared to give him up. I don’t mean to sound so melodramatic, but I can’t keep causing him all this trouble with his family. I love Romeo. I only want what’s best for him—you know that, don’t you?”

Al took me in his arms and let me cry on his black shirt for a minute. Gloria would have done the same thing if she hadn’t been home with the kids. I pulled myself upright and ran my hands beneath my eyes. “Go on,” I said. “I’m fine.”

Al nodded and smiled at me, then he went through the doors without even stopping to ask the nurse’s permission.

What if Romeo thought I was gone? What if he didn’t even know I was out in the lobby? All I wanted was to hold his hand, to tell him everything was going to be fine. I wanted the chance to tell him all sorts of comforting lies about how everything would turn out fine. But once Mort threw that pot of flowers I lost all of my rights, or I realized I’d never had any to begin with.

Sandy came in next. It was starting to feel like a terrible episode of
This Is Your Life
. I felt that if I stood there long enough, my third-grade teacher would come in through the electric doors. “I always thought that Julie Roseman was trouble,” she’d say.

“Dad?” Sandy asked me. She looked particularly disheveled and I wondered if she had been working in the garden. There was dirt on the knees of her jeans.

“I don’t know. Nora and Lila are back there with him now. I’m afraid I’m persona non grata on both sides. No one has come out to tell me anything.”

“Have you asked?”

There hadn’t been time, exactly. “I’ve just been standing here. I don’t even know what I’m doing.”

Sandy, never a take-charge sort of girl, went up to the nurse and asked for the status of Mort Roth and Romeo Cacciamani.

“Are you a relative?” the nurse asked. She had seen a lot of relatives.

Sandy told her yes.

“Which one?”

“Both,” Sandy said authoritatively. “Roth is my father and Cacciamani is my uncle.”

“They’re related?”

“By marriage,” Sandy said. “Not blood. They hate each other.”

“Obviously,” the nurse said. She thumbed through some papers and then nodded her head. “Hang on a second.” She picked up the phone.

“You go in and see your dad,” I said. “I can wait here.”

“Is he going to die?”

“Eventually, yes, but not from anything that happened today.”

“Then I’ll wait with you for a minute. Dad’s got Lila and Nora. That’s a pretty full house.”

I wanted to kiss her. I kissed her. “How are the kids?”

“Their life is a party. They couldn’t believe that Gloria was coming over to take care of them. She was going to take them shopping.”

“Did you tell them about Mort?”

“I thought I should find out what’s going on first. They don’t need much information.”

“Okay,” the nurse said, putting down the phone and making some notes on a pad that said
Prozac
across the top. I wondered where I could get some of those. She looked at me. “You’re the ex-wife slash girlfriend, correct?”

“Correct.”

“What the hell. It’s nothing serious, anyway. Many bruises for both parties. Roth looks like a concussion and two broken ribs. They’ll keep him overnight for observation, but he should be out of here with a splitting headache by morning. Cacciamani had eighteen stitches, a broken left wrist, they didn’t say which bones, and, coincidentally, two broken ribs. They’ll let him go in about an hour.” She looked at us both hard. “Is either of these bozos laying a hand on you two?”

“Absolutely not,” Sandy said. “I swear.”

“Well, watch them.”

Sandy and I promised to do that and then we took our places in the chairs. “What a day,” I said. “What a horrible, horrible day.”

“Do you want to tell me what happened?”

“Not particularly.”

“I was just starting to like him a little, the idea of him at least.”

“Romeo?”

Sandy nodded.

“That’s really nice. I’m giving him up now. This is enough. Nobody needs all of this. My love is going to kill him and I couldn’t stand that.” I felt like I was going to start crying again. I pointed to the door. “Go back there and see if your father’s awake.” Mort had ruined my life once again, but I still couldn’t help feeling vaguely responsible for his pulverized state. If it wasn’t for me, he wouldn’t be bleeding now. Of course, if it wasn’t for Mort, I wouldn’t have been dating to begin with.

Sandy pushed out of her chair. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

“Take your time,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

I would have thought I’d be wired like a radio, but in fact I was so tired I thought about stretching out over the chairs and slipping off into a coma. I hoped they would notice me in a day or two and give me a room, hook me up to a nice glucose drip. I couldn’t imagine going back to work and I couldn’t imagine going home. The hospital seemed like a fine place to set up camp.

There was a pretty waiflike girl with long black hair and a dark purple scarf looped several times around her neck wandering through the waiting room. She would stop in front of people and ask them a question I couldn’t hear. They shook their heads and she moved on to the next group. She looked like the gypsy princess in every film that had a gypsy princess. She had those huge, sad eyes and exceptional posture. When she started to walk toward me, I just continued to stare at her like this was a movie.

“Mrs. Roseman?” she asked.

I looked up at her and blinked in agreement.

“I’m Patience Cacciamani.”

“Plummy?”

She nodded. She had tiny gold rings on all of her fingers and one of her ears was pierced three times. On her this looked like a good idea. It was easy to imagine her as a fresco painting in a cathedral or a marble statue in the Gardner Museum.

“My dad wanted me to tell you he’s okay. He made everybody else go out in the hall so he could talk to me alone. He wants to know if you’re okay.” She stared at me for a minute, but I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to say. “Are you okay?”

I couldn’t understand why she was talking to me. That fact
was so confusing that I could barely make out her words. “I’m okay.”

She sat down in Sandy’s chair. “You don’t look so great, if you don’t mind me saying.”

“I don’t mind at all.”

“It’s funny we should meet this way. I had wanted to meet you, but it never occurred to me it would be like this.”

“You wanted to meet me?”

“Sure,” she said. “Dad’s crazy about you.”

“But what about your brothers?”