“No,” she said, anticipating the question. She sat hunched in the bathwater, shrouded in dripping towels. “I nailed him before it got that far. Besides which, he was cranked out of his skull. What he wanted, was me dead.”
She looked at him with an expression that said, And that is that.
“And now you’re here,” he offered.
“A little the worse for wear.”
The water cooled, Shel settled herself back, eyes closed. So this is where the future starts, she thought. With a beating. A scalding dunk in the healing tub. She watched as Abatangelo wiped flecks of blood from the porcelain. Regarding her body, she detected swelling here and there, but he’d rid her scratches of infection; they were neat white seams. Her skin flushed. My Little Miracle Worker, she thought. Unaware that she was watching, he searched inside her purse until he came across a perfume bottle. He added several drops to the tub water.
“I’m assuming you’ll tell me,” she said finally, flicking tepid water at him, “where it was you picked up your medicine.”
He sat down on the floor and peeled off his shirt and trousers. In only his shorts, T-shirt and scapular he answered her finally with, “You grow up Italian, you learn how to take a beating.”
She shook her head and laughed. “That’s an answer?”
Abatangelo shrugged and poured himself three fingers of vodka.
Shel said, “And after your daily lesson- your mother, she did this for you?”
“No,” he said.
Her eyes softened. “Who?”
“Aunt Nina. My father’s sister. She was the designated guilt bearer of the family.”
She watched him turn away, busy himself. Until you took over, she thought, thinking better of saying it out loud. There simply was no limit to the burden he’d shoulder, as long it was for someone he loved. And if there was one thing to be said for Daniel Sebastian Abatangelo, she thought, it was this: The man loved.
“You look good,” she told him.
He shrugged and drank.
“No, don’t be like that. You look good.”
Her words slurred from the swelling. She eased back, closing her eyes again. The ridiculous songs he’d sung for her echoed in her head, making her smile. And yet a suspicion came over her quickly- tomorrow would never redeem today, not even with Danny there. The future did not start here after all, just more of the same. I am, she thought, depressed. Her heart sank in an utterly familiar way and she looked at Abatangelo as though to ask him to stop it, stop this feeling.
“Hey,” she whispered. He did not hear her.
She pictured Frank reeling room to room, clutching his head, rehearsing his sotted apologies, waiting for her to reappear so he could shower them on her. God help me, she thought. Is there a word in the language, she wondered, in any language, for someone as hell-bent as I’ve been to do the right thing, someone committed to real charity, not lip service, the Good Samaritan and all that, someone who put her own life aside to care for someone else, some lowly forgotten other, the least of my brethren- is there a word for someone who does all that, does it for years, only to see it crushed in three weeks’ time, carried away by a bitter wind of insanity, cruelty, and death? Yeah, she thought, there’s a word. And it’s nothing grand or tragic. The word is “depressed.”
A thread of bile slithered up into her throat. Abatangelo eyed her curiously as she spat toward the toilet.
“Freshen that up?” he asked, nodding to her glass.
She worked her tongue to rid her mouth of the taste of her sputum. “Keep it cold, keep it coming,” she said, holding out her glass.
Abatangelo obliged, the liquor poured happily. “Thank you,” she said.
She studied his face, his shoulders, his long heavy arms. She wanted to tell him, We have to find a safe place now. We can’t self-destruct anymore. Fate doesn’t have to be all gloom and sorrow. Fate can be happy, too. You and me, Danny, happy again, my God, what a concept. Maybe fate is love, and love requires nothing more than the courage to be seen for who you are. Maybe they could teach each other that. Maybe they could handle that, show each other, it isn’t so terrible or hard, letting someone see you.
Without thinking, she stood up in the tub. As though to be seen. Looking down self-consciously at the soaked wrinkling of her flesh, her bruises, she said, using a Betty Boop voice, “Such a dainty little rose.”
Abatangelo toweled her dry, produced a sweatshirt and boxer shorts for her to wear and wrapped a dry towel around her head, fussing it into a turban. Missing her, wanting her from afar had become so ingrained a habit that her reflection in the mirror seemed strangely more real than she did. To dispel this illusion, he gave her his arm, led her back to his bedroom and set her gently onto the narrow bed.
She looked up at his face with a plastered smile, sniffing the cologne in his chest hair. Fingering his scapular, she said, “I had hoped, sir, you wouldn’t go churchy on me.”
He removed the cloth medallion, hanging from his neck by a satin thong, and let her hold it. She took it as though it were a shrunken head.
“Oh Danny, you worry me with this stuff.”
“Chaplain at Safford handed them out like suckers.”
“That explains how you got it. Not why you wear it.”
On one side, assuming the foreground, was the picture of an arch-backed man, bound to a cross. Christ Crucified predominated the background, wreathed in purplish storm clouds and attended by disciples. On the reverse side, the inscription read: “Jesus, remember me when you enter upon your reign. Luke 23:42.”
“St. Dismas,” Abatangelo explained.
“There’s a saint named Dismal?”
“Dismas,” he corrected. “The Good Thief.”
Shel fingered it a moment longer then handed it back. “The guilty are so sentimental.”
Morning had come. The curtains flared with light. Abatangelo retrieved another bottle of vodka from the kitchen, this one warm, so he brought ice back with him, too. He filled both their glasses. Shel set her cheek on her knee, watching him.
“In all the time you were gone, all those years,” she said, “a day didn’t go by that something didn’t come up. Some little thing, you know? A smell. A voice somewhere. Reminding me of you. I began to think I’d never forget you. And I needed to. Sometimes. You understand?”
A hint of relief, even joy, flickered beyond the heartbreak, like a promise. It showed in her eyes, her smile. Abatangelo waved a fly from his glass. “I came as fast as I could,” he said.
She laughed softly. “Not fast enough. Sorry.”
They stared themselves into self-consciousness. Then, gently, she leaned forward and kissed him on the mouth.
“I am so looking forward to it,” she said.
“What?”
She gave him a little shove. “Sex, you asshole.” She ran her hand across his hair, his face, his throat. “Soon as I’m in better shape.”
The same fly scudded angrily across the ceiling join. The sound of morning traffic escalated outside. Shel eased back onto the bed and closed her eyes.
Abatangelo stroked her hair and watched as she drifted off. Her palm closed and opened, as though in a dream she was reaching for something. He studied her eyebrows, the chewed nails, the wrinkled flesh middle age had engraved around each eye, around her mouth. With his fingertips he traced the line of her shoulder, her arm.
A sense of well-being settled in. Images segued through his mind, scatterings of film in which she laid her head on his stomach, knees drawn up, as though she intended to nap there. He imagined her rising, straddling his hips and placing him inside her, eyes closed, quivering slightly as he rose to her. She would lift her chin, no sound, rocking with him gently. Something long-lost and forbidden. Strangers on a bridge, someone saving someone else. In his fantasy she came without cries or moans the way she often had, simply lowering her head and shivering as he slowed his rhythm. Bringing her down to him. Kissing her hair.
Every hour through the morning, he shook her awake, told her this was a precaution against concussion and checked her eyes, her pulse, her breathing. At first, Shel accepted this attention compliantly. He was a man who knew his beatings. After the fourth roust she grew irritable. By noon she was fending him off.
