Miracle (The Pagano Family Book 6) (28 page)

The look she was giving him now indicated that she understood what he was doing.

She lifted a little paw. “M—m—mmm,” she hummed.

Joey froze. That was as close to a word sound as he’d heard her make.

She hummed again, but it didn’t turn into more than that. After a few seconds, she took Mimi from his hands and scooped Poppy from the box. She held their tiny, squirmy bodies to her face.

When Joey saw her shoulders shaking, he folded his little family up in his arms.

Sometimes, words simply weren’t required.

~oOo~

That night, Joey lay alone and sleepless in his bed.

He was lonely—maybe lonelier now than he’d been before Tina. Loving her, knowing she loved him, knowing how unhappy she was, how lost—it made a hole in his gut that festered when he was away from her.

But he was lonely when he was with her, too. Not until she had gone quiet had he realized how very much she’d filled in his silences. Her lovely, cheerful voice had become the soundtrack of his life, and he missed it.

It wasn’t only her voice. Even when they’d been quiet together, before, she had filled in his spaces. Everything about her had been alive and present. Now, she was more than silent. She was absent. Each day a little more.

He knew what was happening. He remembered. It killed him to think that she was going through that violent psychic shift, that vicious unraveling that he had gone through, knowing that he would never again be the person he’d been, knowing that even the people closest to him—his very closest family, his father and siblings, the people who loved him—knowing that they no longer knew him as the person he’d been.

Knowing that
he no longer knew himself.
Whole layers of his personality had been peeled away, and he hadn’t known who the person under all that had been. He hadn’t figured that out until this year. Truly, he was
still
figuring that out.

He’d been lost and broken, and no one had known. They’d seen the tank, they’d heard the stutters and gaps in his words, but they hadn’t known that it wasn’t his loss of speech or breath that had hurt him most of all. It was the loss of expression. The loss of being known.

And he’d
never
been truly known by his family. For Tina, this would be so much worse not only because she had lost more communication but because her family connections had been less conflicted than his own. She’d had people in her family in whom she could confide, and she’d lost that.

Since his mother’s death, Tina was the only person he’d ever been comfortable confiding in.

She was losing much more than he’d lost, and his losses had nearly destroyed him.

He wished he could tell her that he understood, but he didn’t have the words.

Well, that wasn’t true. He couldn’t speak well enough to explain. But he could write. And she could read.

Joey got up and unhooked the cannula from his face. He grabbed his laptop and sat down in the faded upholstered chair that had been part of an old set of Adele’s living room furniture.

As he opened the laptop and went to his email, he stopped. Email didn’t seem right. Text? No—that wasn’t right, either.

He set the laptop aside and went downstairs to his father’s study.

Pop had hated the way the digital world had changed business, and he’d resisted the change, doing things the old way as much as he could. He’d sworn that doing everything online, rather than in person, or even by phone, had removed relationships from business and even from life. ‘Nobody talks to anybody until it’s too damn late,’ he’d groused in a refrain. ‘Nobody takes the time to write a damn letter. Your mother kept my cards and letters tied up in red ribbons. You can’t do that with damn emails.’

Joey had never worked, and had barely lived, in any world but a digital world, so he hadn’t related to his father’s old-school perspective. He could name plenty of relationships he had that existed predominantly or exclusively online. Since the shooting and until Tina, any social life he’d had had been digital.

Sitting behind his father’s desk, even six months after his death, Joey felt a bit guilty. This space was sacrosanct. His father’s most private place.

The study itself was not an impressive room. In the house next door, the study was bigger and more elaborate, with built-in bookcases, and room for a small seating arrangement, and French doors that opened onto the back yard. Carlo used it as his home office, just as their father had. But Pop had retired by the time he’d married Adele and moved here, and the room he used as his study was just a small, square room, with a single window facing the side street. His desk took up most of the space.

Adele had done nothing yet to remove her second husband’s presence from the house, and she showed no inclination to start. His clothes hung in the closet; his medicines filled a kitchen cupboard. The last album he’d listened to,
La Traviata
, still rested on his old turntable, its jacket and sleeve leaning against the unit. Even the last issues of his magazines were stacked next to his chair, the glasses Joey had taken from his face still resting on top of the stack. When Adele tidied the house, she dusted everything and returned it all to its place. In some ways, the house was becoming a shrine.

It was probably his responsibility to make that stop. Maybe that was what Adele needed from him, why she’d needed him to stay: to help her move forward.

And yet sitting here, at his desk, for the first time he ever had, Joey felt his father’s presence keenly, and he understood for the first time what Adele meant when she said the house was full of ghosts. Pop had lived far longer next door, in the house he’d built himself. Joey would’ve thought he’d haunt over there instead. The family home.

But he’d passed that house on to his children long ago. This was where he lingered.

With a little shiver, Joey cast away those strangely superstitious thoughts. The late-night gloom and quiet, and his own melancholy thoughts, had gotten to him. He tried the middle drawer of the desk, expecting it to be locked, but it slid open readily to reveal a neat array of pens. In the top right drawer was a stack of heavy paper. Over the years, Joey had seen Pop withdraw pen and paper often enough to have expected what he’d found, but he still paused and stared at the contents of the open drawers for a moment.

God. Pop was dead.

Even now, months later, sometimes the truth of it came out of nowhere and knocked him off his feet.

He cleared his throat and selected a pen and a sheet of paper, setting both on the blotter before him.

Now what? The idea to write Tina a letter had seemed romantic and important while he’d been lying in bed feeling sorry for himself, but now his thoughts had filled with even more gloom and melancholy, and he doubted. Had he
ever
written a letter this way?

As a kid, yeah. His mother had made all her kids write thank-you cards for gifts, and every Christmas, they had to write letters to family in Italy. But not since then. He didn’t think he’d done more than sign his name to the occasional greeting card since then.

And a love letter? God, no. There’d been no one in his life worthy of this effort before.

He’d never been worthy to receive one, either. He had never even
seen
a love letter.

No. This was a stupid idea. He reached over to open the drawer and put the sheet of paper back where it belonged, but, not paying attention, he’d dropped his hand too low and grabbed the pull for the bottom drawer instead. He recognized his mistake immediately—the bottom drawer was twice as deep as the top—and started to push it back in, but a flash of something caught his eye.

Red ribbon?

He pulled the drawer out all the way and found bundles of yellowing envelopes wrapped in fading red ribbons.

The envelopes were addressed to Teresa Pagano, from Carlo Pagano. All had been mailed, but many had the same address for sender and recipient—181 Caravel Road. Pop had mailed letters and cards to his wife even while they were in the same house.

He’d known his father and his mother had loved each other, and he’d been old enough to remember the wreck Pop had been after her death—so destroyed that Carlo and Carmen had had to move home and play parents for Joey and Rosa. For years. But he’d never, ever, thought of his gruff, demanding bear of a father as
romantic
.

Toward the back, the bundled envelopes, yellower than the rest and brittle, were addressed to Teresa Giacomo. Before they’d been married.

Joey’s parents had been married nearly thirty years. His mother had been dead more than twenty. She’d kept Pop’s letters all her life, and he’d kept her bundles the rest of his.

Pop had been right. Emails and texts didn’t last like this. They didn’t
mean
this.

With an abashed glance around him, more than half expecting to see Pop standing there with his beefy arms crossed over his chest, judging him, Joey carefully untied a faded red ribbon and eased one of the most yellowed pages from its envelope. A letter to the young Teresa Giacomo.

Oh, my beautiful girl,
it opened.

Joey smiled. That was what Theo called Carmen: ‘beautiful girl.’ He’d always thought it was cheesy. Not so much now.

~oOo~

By the time he closed the drawer on the carefully retied bundles, the night sky beyond the window had brightened to grey light.

He knew his father better now than he ever had. He knew his mother as a woman he’d never known. And he missed them both so badly it made his chest hurt.

Every single letter he’d read, every card, had opened the same way. For thirty years:
Oh, my beautiful girl.
And every one had ended the same way:
I am devoted. C—

He picked up the pen he’d laid aside hours before and, after a moment’s pause, wrote on the blank sheet of heavy paper,

Hey Baby.

Not a very romantic start, he supposed, but it seemed right nonetheless.

Without worrying if what he wrote was dumb or sappy, pausing only when his brain refused to offer up the word he wanted, Joey wrote his first love letter.

Hey Baby,

I was trying to remember the last time I wrote a letter, and I think it was the Christmas I was thirteen, a few months before my mom died. She used to make us write letters to family back in Italy to send with the box of presents. I wrote about six sentences, if that. It was a just a chore I had to do so I didn’t get slapped up the back of the head.

I’ve never, ever, written a letter like this one. I hope I do okay.

I want to tell you that I think I know what you’re feeling. I know how I felt. I’ve been sitting here for fifteen minutes trying to make the right words happen to describe it, but maybe it’s too big for words. Lonely seems like one of them. Actually, lonely might do it. Even when people are all around, it’s lonely. Even when it’s the people who you know love you, it’s lonely. It was like there was a wall between me and everybody else.

I was lonely in my head, too. Like I couldn’t even keep myself company because I’d changed too much. I didn’t even know myself, and who I was supposed to be was on the other side of the wall with everybody else.

That sounds weird, but I hope you get it.

For ten years after I got shot, I was alone on the other side, and I got lonelier and lonelier. By the time I saw you in Boston, I was just waiting to die.

It was you that showed me I was the one keeping that wall up. Carole and the rest of my ‘team’ showed me how to knock it down, but you were the reason I wanted to. You
are
the reason. As big as my family is, you’re the only person in the world who really knows me. You’re my reason.