“So you’re taking me?”
“Yeah.”
Peter ate the rest of his cereal while I drank a quick cup of coffee, then went back upstairs. I finished dressing, carefully knotted my tie, gathered up the office materials I’d brought home the night before, and returned to the kitchen.
Peter was standing at the door that led from the kitchen to the driveway, tall for his age, and slender, as I had been, but with his mother’s straight, determinedly erect posture. Behind him, I could see the rain as it drove down through the trees that bordered the driveway, and against its gray veil he appeared almost ghostly, his large round eyes blinking slowly, like an owl’s.
It was a floating, disembodied look that reminded me suddenly of Jamie, of the strange vacancy that had sometimes come into his face, lingered a moment, then dissolved into the pinched and irritated expression that was more usual with him. I remembered that during the last months of his life, those oddly resentful features had hardened into a mask of teenage hostility and sullenness, a face my father had finally aimed at directly, then reduced to a pulpy, glistening mass.
I glanced away from Peter, as if expecting to see his face explode as Jamie’s had, then motioned him out the door, following along behind at a cautious distance, my shoulders hunched against the rain.
In the car, Peter sat silently, staring straight ahead, his face no longer locked in that strange innocence and helpless doom I had suddenly associated with my murdered brother. I looked at him and smiled.
“Everything going okay at school?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Good,” I told him.
Glancing toward him from time to time as I drove toward his school, I could easily remember him as a little boy, warm and glowing, his hair even lighter, a silver sheen. In the mornings he’d had the habit of crawling into bed with Marie and me, inching his head under my arm, then glancing up with a bright, sometimes toothless, smile.
Strangely, that remembered smile brought Jamie back again, and I recalled the only bit of conversation I’d ever been able to recall between him and my father. We’d all been heading through an indistinct countryside, toward somewhere I don’t remember. My father was at the wheel, I in the middle, and Jamie pressed up against the passenger door. We’d been riding together silently, as we usually did, when suddenly my father had turned to Jamie. “You don’t smile much,” he said.
Jamie’s eyes shot over to him resentfully. “What did you say?”
My father appeared to regret having brought the subject up. “Nothing,” he muttered, returning his eyes to the road.
But Jamie wouldn’t let it go. “What did you say?” he repeated.
“Just that you don’t smile much,” my father answered.
Jamie gave him that familiar pinched, irritated look. “I smile,” he said curtly, as if my father had accused him of something he felt obliged to deny.
“Good,” my father answered quickly, then let the subject drop.
But not before he’d briefly leveled his two light blue eyes on my brother, aiming them steadily at his face.
I shuddered, and my hands curled tightly around the steering wheel, as if to bring my body back to the present. It was a tactic that worked so well, I sensed that I’d used it before, but unconsciously, to prevent the emergence of such brief memories, rather than to return from them.
Once at the school, Peter got out quickly, with a child’s enthusiasm, opening the door before I’d come to a full stop, then dashing through the rain to where a group of other boys huddled together beneath an aluminum awning. The bell was ringing as I pulled away.
I drove slowly toward my office. The rain grew somewhat lighter, but to the south I could see a line of clouds, low and heavy with rain. It struck me that the clouds lay between Old Salsbury and Bridgeport, and that Marie was probably driving under their low canopy at that very moment. It was then that I remembered that we’d not really said good-bye that morning. I’d heard the scrape of the bathroom door as it opened, then her voice telling me to get up, repeating it when I didn’t. After that, nothing.
Marie Olivia Farris. Age, thirty-nine.
I’d met her during my last year in college. I was living in New York then, a small flat in the East Village. At night I worked as a waiter in a restaurant in Little Italy. It was frequented by a well-heeled assortment of mobsters and mid-level show people, whom the owner, Mr. Pinaldi, liked to identify. “You know who you’re serving, don’t you?” he’d sometimes ask fiercely as I passed with a full tray.
Often I did know, but that particular night I didn’t have the slightest idea and told him so.
Mr. Pinaldi looked at me as if I’d just walked out of the Amazon, knew nothing of the civilized world. “The one with the bright red tie, that’s Joey Santucci,” he said in a vehement whisper. “He’s a button man for the Brendizzi gang. He whacks people, kid. He blows them away.”
My eyes had reflexively shot toward the customer.
Joey Santucci was sitting at a round table, with two women on either side, one middle-aged, like Joey, the other much younger, and a large man who was dressed in a dark suit. The older woman was overweight, with flabby arms, and had an enormous white flower in her hair. She had a smoker’s voice, hard and gravelly, and I took her for some old whorehouse madam Santucci had met years before. The second woman sat directly across from Santucci. She was no more than a girl, really, with dark brown hair and an olive complexion. She did not laugh when the others did, and at times, she cast disdainful glances toward the older woman, though always reserving the fiercer and more contemptuous ones for the man with the bright red tie. She was already halfway through her shrimp cocktail when I heard her call him “Dad.”
There was nothing to distinguish any of them, and I probably would have forgotten them immediately if it hadn’t happened.
