Lydia tries to lift her head, fails. Instead, she succumbs to the nausea. A foamy river of pinkish bile leaks out of her mouth, onto her ex-husband’s pantleg and shoes.

Anthony del Blanco now becomes the full animal, and the beating begins in earnest.

Primal. Methodical. Complete.

At the moment when Anthony begins to wonder if he has finally gone too far, he remembers. He walks into the living room, finds The Secret Garden on the bookshelf, removes it. He laughs, wipes his bloody, damaged hand across his mouth. “Shoulda known,” he says, extricating the stack of bills from the book. “Nothin’ ever changes around here.”

He stuffs the four hundred dollars in his pocket, already tasting that first line of coke rocketing up his right nostril. A sensation he will surely reward with a second line, this one up the left. Toot, toot, he thinks, and tosses the book onto the kitchen floor.

“The Secret Garden,” Anthony del Blanco says to no one in particular, stepping out into a dazzlingly bright July day in Lakewood, Ohio, dropping his mirrored aviator sunglasses in place. “Yeah. Right. Big fuckin’ secret, Liddie.”

Lydia del Blanco is prone on her kitchen floor. Her jaw is broken, her right cheekbone is shattered. The first punch had demolished her nose; the cartilage now hangs from her face in a corrupt red mass. Three ribs on her right side are broken, two on the left. The ulna of her right arm is fractured and there is a laceration that runs from the middle of her forehead to the left side of her mouth-the result of being thrown through the glass door of the dining room china cabinet-a deep cut that will require nine hours of surgery in order to repair the muscles, and more than two hundred stitches to close.

She is unconscious and bleeding heavily.

Her son and daughter stand in the doorway, holding each other, trembling in the suffocating summer air that is suddenly brassy with blood, their all-but-destroyed mother lying before them, a trio of melting Eskimo Pies at their feet.

But no tears.

The girl lets go of her brother for a moment, steps forward, kneels on the floor. She makes the sign of the cross, then places her right index finger into the pool of warm blood near her mother’s left ear. She returns to the doorway, considers her brother’s face, the way he stands, now, with his hands clamped tightly over his ears, as if to blot out the silence of this horror.

Without a word, she places her finger gently to her brother’s mouth, leaving a small slash of bright scarlet blood on his lips. It is how she would think of him for years-his dark, frightened eyes; his sweat-matted shock of russet hair; red lips giving him the appearance of a sad little girl. She glances down at her mother one last time, then kisses her brother delicately on the lips, their mother’s blood all that they would ever say of this day.

Nine years later, when Lydia del Blanco dies, a jaundiced stick figure in the charity ward at St. Vincent’s, it will finally free her two children of this moment, free them from all the responsibility of the coming horrors in their lives, free them from the life of an addict mother who will live with a half-dozen men, sleep with ten dozen more, eventually running from heroin fix to cocaine fix to alcohol fix, her face a twisted, scarred mess, never again to resemble the slender young flower in the one photograph her son would keep forever.

A moment, the boy and girl would come to agree, that would free them from fear.

19

Mary says: “I have to meet someone.”

She thinks: What’s happening here? Two beauties in a row. First the jogger in front of my building. Now this guy. My knight in shining armor. I’m going to have to jump onto one of these boxcars soon. One of these days the train ain’t gonna run this way.

He is in his late twenties, early thirties maybe. When he had helped her to her feet she had supported herself against his right thigh and found it was rock hard.

The pain on the left side of her head, where the man had struck her, was minor compared to the wounding of her pride, the swelling of her embarrassment. To be lying facedown in the snow on a city street, humiliated and violated by a common thug, was far worse.

But the man standing in front of her didn’t seem to care.

“Well, at least let me take you to the hospital,” the man says. “I saw him hit you. You might have a concussion. We’ll stop at the police station. You can fill out a report.”

“No thanks,” she says. “I’m okay, really.”

He waits until her eyes meet his before he responds. His eyes are dark, expressive, the color of semisweet chocolate. “Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

The man lets go, and she finds that she is still a little wobbly.

“My name is Jean Luc Christiane,” he says.

“Tina Falcone,” she answers, before she can bottleneck the words in her throat.

“Nice to meet you, Tina.”

“You’re French?”

“No,” he says, smiling. “Born in the vieux carre in New Orleans. My family is in baking. I’m as American as beignets.”

“Well,” she says, rubbing the side of her face, thinking about how she had managed to go through most of her life without getting hit, only to be punched twice in one week. “All I can say is thanks. Who knows what that guy would have done.”

“It was both a duty and a pleasure,” he says. “Although I wouldn’t recommend this method of meeting to the rest of my unmarried friends.”

The word, unmarried, ripples between them for a moment. He is telling her he is unattached. If she is to play the mating game, this is where she lets him in on her marital status in some witty and urbane manner. Instead, she says: “No. I wouldn’t either.”

“So…” he begins, “… how do you want to pay me? The standard ‘I can call you in the middle of a snowstorm for a ride to the airport because I saved your life’ contract? Or do you have something else in mind? Because, clearly I cannot let you leave without settling this matter.”

He holds her gaze until she submits. She’s willing to bet that that stare has been awfully effective for him throughout his life.

“Well, what do you have in mind?” she asks.

“Seeing as I do this quite often-pulling pretty young women out of snowbanks-I do have a standard fee. If I’d had to run the perpetrator down, or produce some type of firearm, or even call the city crews to have you dug out of the snow, the remuneration would increase geometrically.”

“How fortunate I am.”

“Indeed,” he says, flicking the last snowflake from her shoulder.

“So… your standard fee is…”

“Dinner. Eight o’clock. Cognac at eleven. Home by twelve. Guaranteed.”

She considers his offer for a coquette’s moment. What the hell, she thinks. Maybe she’d get a hug or two out of it. She really needed a hug. Maybe even, God forbid, a long, dreamy kiss. It had been ages. “Yes. Okay. I’m game. Sure,” she says. “Why not?”

Jean Luc smiles. “Is that five dates, or just the one?” he asks. “I’ll have to check my calendar.”

Mary laughs.

It hurts her head.

But, for the first time in a long time, it’s a good hurt.

20

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