Abroad (34 page)

It wasn’t that Colin wasn’t trying. Claire’s lover—it was impossible for me not to think of him that way—was savoring me. He spent ten minutes on my neck alone, and then moved lower, then lower. He murmured my name through his teeth.
Ti voglio. Sei bellissima
.
Ti adoro.
At first there was satisfaction, knowing I had taken the thing Claire so wanted. But the more he went on, the more repulsed I became. Not by Colin, but by myself.

What a stupid circle we’re caught in
, I thought. Claire for Colin, Colin for me, me for Marcello, Marcello for Claire. I let out a bitter laugh.

Colin took it as encouragement. He arched his back, pressing his pelvis harder into mine.

“Just finish,” I begged. “Please. I want you to finish.”

He let out a strangled cry and started pumping until he shuddered with a dull moan. Finally, he collapsed onto me. I struggled out from under him and rolled out of bed.

“Tabitha,” he said. “Come on. Stay.”

I shook my head, searching for my clothes. He put his arm over his head, staring at me.

“You’re a good girl, you know,” he said.

And yet, the blackness in my heart. I couldn’t even look at the man on the bed, so thick was my revulsion with the thing I had done to my friend. I pulled on my jeans, shirt, and trainers, not even bothering to shower.

“You’re panicking,” he said. “But in a little while you’ll see this will all be all right. Now you and Claire can forgive each other, move on with things.”

“I don’t think so,” I said, zipping my jacket. “I’m sorry, but this is ruined, all of it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” I said, with a certainty that surprised me. “
Yes
.” I did not want to see Colin again. I had thought of him for so long, but everything about him repulsed me now. Was it the narrowness of his cheekbones? The sharpness of his nose? Or simply the notion that I had done something so horrible?

Hysteria.

“I’m sorry. I’m just a bit mad.”

“Listen, why don’t we go talk to her,” Colin said. “Together. It’s not like she hasn’t fucked up herself. She’ll understand, I promise you.”

“I don’t want her to,” I said. “You don’t understand. This isn’t me at all.” The room was dank, airless. I was in a deepening panic to leave. “Goodbye, then.”

It was eight when I scurried down Colin’s steps. There, just on the other side of the street, I could see Claire walking to our lover’s flat, texting madly.
I’ll make this up to you
, I whispered. I put up my hood and hurried past her, head down, breaking into a run toward the safety of home.

26

Ervin Bogdani. Just a small player in my story. And yet, he was the one who stole everything.

I’d met him only a few times. The police and reporters bent over backward trying to link us together, but I had danced with him just once, and after that barely remembered him in passing. Each time I ran into him, including the last, fatal incident, he was little more than a stranger to me.

I should have paid more attention, I suppose, to the boy with the white-tipped hair. Objectively, Ervin Bogdani, who was born to a poor but loving home in Albania, was a pleasant-looking person, born with good intentions. He had a sister and a mother, though his father was dead. Ervin was brought up in one of the poorer neighborhoods of Gjirokastra. When he was eleven, during the 1997 rebellion over Ponzi schemes, his mother and sister were accidentally killed at a demonstration when a truck was turned over by protesters. Ervin’s uncle managed to get his nephew a manufactured visa, and the boy was sent to Italy to live with a distant cousin.

A poor Albanian in Italy. What does it mean? The Italians see their country as the big brother of Albania, but the truth is, unless they are paying tourists, foreigners are far from beloved. To be an immigrant means you are one of hundreds of thousands, many who have come to escape violence, hunger, disease, famine. It means, in many parts of Italy, the locals won’t speak with you. It means employment is unlikely. If you are lucky, you’ll make your way to one of the more cosmopolitan cities, where work is more plentiful and minds are more open. Rome, or Florence, or a university town, like Grifonia.

Ervin’s cousin was an unmarried bartender, uninterested in fatherly duties. He lived in a flat on the edge of the city. It was a grim place, and the boy took to slipping into the other apartments in the building and making himself at home. The neighbors didn’t seem to mind. He was quiet. Polite. By the time Ervin was fifteen the cousin had disappeared. And so when Ervin wasn’t sleeping on the sofa or guest room of a friend, he was hiding at the train station, his things stored in a locker.

Ervin learned how to disappear. To flatten himself against the walls of alleyways, to dart into the shadows. Once he was dragged by a well-meaning postal policewoman to a homeless shelter, where he was beaten and raped. After that he became impossible to catch, a master at slipping away.

As Ervin got older, Grifonia became a sea of collegiate opportunity. He began sleeping with the girls who streamed down to the universities, staying at their houses, borrowing his friends’ sweatshirts and clothes. He played basketball at the public court. No one knew if he went to school, or who he was, or where he was from. He spoke pretty good English. He spoke Italian like a native. Though what everyone later recounted was that he rarely spoke at all.

To make ends meet, Ervin sold drugs. He had nothing to lose, and the opportunity came without hassle. He was at a party, and someone suggested, as he knew everyone and came and went so easily, that he get into the business. Only he didn’t like dealing on his own, so he started working for the Enteria connection. That year, his boss was a cold, intimidating blonde named Jenny Cole. Ervin didn’t like her much but was scared of her. She told him not to approach her in public, so he didn’t.

Ervin Bogdani was not a cruel person. Deep under his façade of indifference was a terrified boy pressed flat on the cement shower floor of a homeless shelter, arms pinned, a foot against his head. The memory motivated him to constantly carry a knife in his back pocket. He slept with it clenched in his hand.

I am not suggesting that Ervin Bogdani be pardoned. After all, he is alive and I am not. I wish it were the other way around. What I am trying to say is that he was a person. Killers are always people. It’s no excuse. Still, it’s important to remember, particularly if one is going to try at all to understand this strange nebula that was the end.

*   *   *

I walked down the alley, crossed the street, and came into the gate. It was unlocked, as usual. There was a light on, but then, I often left the kitchen light on, as I hated coming home to a dark house. Alessandra sometimes scolded me for the practice, as it offended her Italian sense of conservation. She grew up in a house where Ziploc bags were washed and reused, where every possible piece of food was used for compost. But she was gone that weekend, as was everyone else in the cottage, including the boys downstairs. It was the first time since I’d lived there that the building was completely empty, as all the Italians had gone home for the holiday. I opened the door, entered, and locked it from the inside with my key. Then I went to my room to get ready to shower.

The silence was heavy; it made me uneasy, and soon I began to imagine someone else was there. I was, by now, used to being chased by spirits. Their presence wasn’t something I could articulate, exactly, but since scratching the surface of the ancients and their tombs, I’d accepted that perhaps dimensions were deeper than I had believed before. So perhaps these apparitions I came across from time to time were not just my imagination, but something different I wasn’t meant to understand.

Only that night, there was a person in my house.

At seven o’clock, when I hadn’t arrived at the Club, Jenny called Ervin, who had worked for her since her arrival. She really did have expectant clients waiting—people who would be angry with her, who might call the Enteria administrators and inform them of some version of what she was doing. Hurriedly, she told Ervin that my house was always unlocked.

“And what if she’s home?” he’d asked her.

“She’ll give it to you,” Jenny told him. “She’s not unreasonable. She’s just always bloody
late
.”

But I hadn’t been home. No one had. He walked in as easily as if he’d been invited. For a man who lived nowhere, the coziness of our female nest must have been too much for temptation. Ervin poured himself a glass of juice and sat on the sofa. He poked about in our rooms, looking at our clothes, our books, our underthings. He hadn’t properly searched for the satchel yet, but he believed he had time, so he went into the bathroom and closed the door. A moment later, he heard the front door open and shut, and heard me walk into my bedroom.

Could there have been a day more filled with misunderstandings? There are so many
perhapses
. Perhaps if I had just gone straight to Jenny’s … Perhaps if I hadn’t slept with Colin … Perhaps if I had been a little less jumpy … Perhaps if Ervin hadn’t chosen to use the bathroom just then. For if I had opened the door and seen him there, I could have run, or waited for him, in his usual, unassuming, genial manner, to explain himself.

But those scenarios are not the story. This is the story.

I was undressing for my shower, my mind rife with guilt about the person I had clearly become. Mostly, I was thinking of Babs. I wouldn’t be able to tell her what I’d done. Craving unconditional love and forgiveness, I put my phone to my ear as I kicked off my pants, dialed my mother’s line, and, as I waited for her to pick up, pulled my shirt around my shoulders. That’s when I saw a man in the doorway.

The phone fell to the floor, cutting off. I screamed. I wasn’t a screamer, but it seemed important to make noise, so I did, at the top of my lungs. He wasn’t a large man, Ervin, but the years of basketball had made him strong. He had even played for the city team for a few months. His local sponsors—men fueled by newspaper stats and grappa—sometimes talked of his going for the national league. What I am trying to tell you is that he had inordinately large hands. At that moment, to stop my yowling, he brought his wide palm back and, with all his strength, knocked me down.

My head hit the corner of the bedside table. I felt an enormous burst of shooting pain and an alarming inability to move. The man, whom I now placed as the boy from the club, was kneeling over me, shaking me, trying to get me to be quiet. And that’s when I remembered his name.

“Ervin,” I said. Slowly. Clearly, so he would know I knew him. “
Ervin
.”

Mother, you were the last person I called. The other call to the bank, the one the police traced later, wasn’t me, of course. I knew you’d be sitting there on your sofa, the phone beside you, reading a book among your cozy litany of pillows. I was going to tell you, before I saw the boy in the doorway, that I was in trouble. That I had done something of which I wasn’t proud. I was going to let you mother me, perhaps fly me home for the weekend and feed me dolmas and ice cream. I would have let you love me and, by doing so, would have loved you back.

I don’t know if you picked up the call or not, but now you are reduced to such sorrow, the world can barely watch. You wander back and forth between Lucan and the haunted streets of Grifonia, a mortal Demeter, demanding justice, devastating mothers across the world with your bleak gazes. “I still see her,” you told the papers. They printed the words as a headline, blaring and bold. I wish I could talk to you, to tell you that the end was not, in fact, as terrifying as you believe. It was simple, really: I screamed a name, and the owner of that name had to quiet me. He had grabbed a knife from our kitchen. I didn’t even see it coming.

Two stabs to the neck. Blood shot forth in the form of a red geyser, scaring Ervin enough to send him backward. It was fascinating: the blood was inside of me, and then it was there, pulsing onto both of our bodies, pooling beside me in slick red sheets. Ervin did a panicked dance. He stepped in the blood, then jumped out of it again. He ran to the bathroom, grabbed a towel, and tried to mop it off his shoes. But it kept coming, and coming, and he gave up.

He knelt, staring at my face. When I blinked, he hit me. I suppose he thought it would help me die. I knew enough to lie still, and that seemed to satisfy him. He was not good at killing. It’s an art, you see.

He stood up, as if remembering his task, and grabbed my purse. He emptied my wallet—three hundred euros were inside, as I had gone to the bank just after Jenny’s admitting her lack of funds—then grabbed my phone off the floor. When he looked down at me, I could see that he was terrified yet resigned—he was the sort of person who leaves a mess, no matter how dire, out of laziness. I heard him run out of the flat, cursing. He was gone.

I lay there for a long time, feeling myself growing weaker, and—Mother, I’m sorry to tell you this—I was beginning to suffer. The wounds burned and ached, and I could feel my brain slowly ceasing to function. In truth, I was already dead, but I faced another hour or two of painful expiration. And then I heard someone at the door again.

“Look, we all love each other,” I heard Claire say. “I just think we all need to fucking talk this out.”

“You’re pretty drunk for this endeavor, love.”

“I needed to calm down,” she said. “I’m not too bad. Just some shots and pot.”

“Perhaps when you’re sober—”

“No. You ass. I love you and I love her. But I fucking hate you both, too. You
had
to even it out? This is too fucked up. I want everything worked out
now
.”

“Fine,” Colin said. “But she’s not—”

“Holy shit, there’s blood in here. Gross. She must have pierced her ear, or has her period or something—”

“No,” Colin said. “Oh, God. No. Oh, no. Claire, she’s right here.”

*   *   *

Tabitha Deacon, a girl from Ireland, studying abroad. She came home one night to an empty house, where a man was waiting. He stabbed her twice in the neck, then ran out the door, covered in her blood, taking her for dead.