Anyone But You (18 page)

“Get out!” I yelled louder.

“It’s not his fault!” Mark shouted back, trying to make his point clear. “He just wants to you to know that—”

“
Get out!
” I screamed it this time, at the top of my lungs, with a forcefulness that stunned even me. The kitchen door flew open and Chef and Mario came running to my rescue. Mark turned, fleet-footed, and escaped through the front door. This couldn’t be happening, I told myself. This couldn’t be real. Through my tears, I assured my friends that no harm had come to me. At least, no harm in the physical sense. The emotional damage, however, was catastrophic.

“Just tell me about Ty,” I said, hoping for some good news. “What did Dad say?”

I used to be afraid to go to sleep. I was petrified that I’d stay in my dreams and never wake up. Whether it was a nightmare—or even some perfectly pleasant alternate reality—the idea of being stuck in a limbo land, powerless to return, struck me as the most horrible thing that could happen to a person. Other girls marveled dreamily over Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, but those fairy tales freaked me out to a level that some might consider paranoia. A shrink would probably have a field day with it, but I still slept with my bedroom door cracked open, if only to give me the comforting sense that I was never fully committing to “the other side.” When Chef explained that doctors had placed Ty in a chemically induced coma—on purpose—to protect his brain from the swelling caused by the injuries to his skull, I felt as though my veins had been injected with ice water. It was like that paralyzing sensation your nerves suffer when you jump into a too-cold swimming pool for the first time.

“The treatment is a good thing,” Mario said, trying to reassure me. “The doctors are doing everything in their power to make sure Ty comes through this okay.” But his words brought me no comfort. The anguish I felt over my cousin’s accident was like being lost at sea. Just when I’d think the pain was too much to endure, the thought that Roman was responsible came crashing over me like another giant, suffocating tidal wave. I was drowning in an immeasureable grief.

O
NE OF THE BEDTIME STORIES MY DAD LIKED TO
tell me before he died was about Rip Van Winkle, an ordinary guy who fell asleep in the woods one day and slept for twenty years. When he woke, everything in his universe was frighteningly strange and unrecognizable. Man alive, could I relate. I hadn’t been asleep, but had spent the last two years living a nightmare. It was autumn of 1945, but it certainly felt like two decades later on this, my first day back where I belonged. Only, I didn’t feel like I belonged—not at all, in fact. For starters, no one had been waiting at Union Station to pick me up. Not that I’d expected the city of Chicago to throw me a ticker tape parade, but it felt markedly anticlimactic to take the bus home. The military had sent Ma a telegram weeks ago letting her know I was returning to Chicago, but when I’d tried phoning her from Honolulu, and again in San Francisco before I’d taken the train back east, she failed to answer in both instances. It was probably for the best that my arrival was unanticipated. Had she known the specifics, my mother would have planned a colossal banquet for three hundred and fifty of our nearest and dearest. Considering everything I’d been through, I wasn’t quite ready for that kind of Italian celebratory onslaught.

Exiting the bus, my heart leapt at the sight of the old place on Taylor Street, which looked relatively unchanged. I entered the front foyer and climbed the creaky wooden steps, but my homecoming knocks went unanswered. After rapping on the door across the landing, I heard the sound of footsteps approaching from within. I smiled in anticipation of seeing Benny or his parents, but instead, the door opened to reveal a middle-aged woman I didn’t recognize. Glancing over her shoulder, I noticed an overstuffed davenport in the living room that looked equally unfamiliar, and drab brown curtains now hanging from the front bay window that would have made Mrs. Caputo frown in condemnation.

“Hello. Uh … are any of the Caputos in?”

“Wrong apartment,” the woman said, beginning to close the door in annoyance. Benny and his parents had moved? What rabbit hole had I fallen down?

“Wait,” I said, putting my hand in the doorframe to prevent her from shutting the door in my face. “I live across the hall here, or rather, my mother does.” I pointed across the landing. She stared at me blankly.

“Mr. Twardowski lives there,” she corrected me, shaking her head. “Are you sure you’ve got the right street, mister?”

I descended the steps and reemerged back out on the sidewalk, feeling stunned and confused. There were times during my long internment that I thought I was losing my mind, and here I was again, completely doubting my sanity. I felt like Odysseus—doomed to endure ordeal after ordeal when all I wanted to do was just get home. And, apparently, home was now located … somewhere else.

Heaving my rucksack over my shoulder, I headed east toward South Racine Avenue, attempting to formulate a plan. I briefly entertained the notion of schlepping across town to Antonio’s, but it was Sunday—the place was sure to be closed. Thanks to lingering side effects of what the Army docs diagnosed as beriberi, my joints ached and my knees still buckled from time to time. I didn’t have much more walking in me today. Noting a pay phone across the street, I stepped off the curb to cross over when a familiar holler made me halt in my tracks. Swiveling on my feet, I spied old Mrs. Deluca leaning out from her first story window. She’d been a fixture in that open sash since I was a kid, and as such, was one of the neighborhood’s most trusted sources of gossip. Wearing the same blue housecoat and hairnet she always did (I guess some things
hadn’t
changed since I’d been away) she gaped at me and gesticulated wildly, like a melodramatic opera diva playing to the nosebleed section of a crowded theater.

“
Non ci posso credere!
It’s like looking at a ghost! Wait there!” She disappeared from her window ledge after indicating that she was coming outside to welcome me. I knew I looked gaunt and sickly—months of dysentery and starvation will do that to you. But likening me to a ghost seemed brutally blunt, even for an old Sicilian matron. At least she might be able to tell me where in tarnation everyone was.

“Dominick Monte!” she cried, grabbing the stone balustrade as she inched her fragile body down the front stairs. I bounded up to steady her, grabbing her by the elbow. “Oh! Oh! God save us all, is it really you?” (Did I mention she had a flair for dramatics?) Clearly she had heard about my epic saga, but I was in no mood to recount all the horrific details—especially not to the Taylor Street tattler.

“I’m fine, Mrs. Deluca, but where is everyone? It’s like they all up and vanished. My ma, Benny Caputo … I just really want to find them. And see my girl.” A curious look passed across Mrs. Deluca’s face, as if that whole ghost remark hadn’t merely been a figure of speech.

“You don’t know?”

“I’ve been in a P.O.W. camp for the last nineteen months, ma’am. I’m afraid I don’t know much these days.” She pursed her lips, tactfully, and that’s when I knew something was terribly wrong. The last year and a half—all those nights I’d spent wondering if I’d even survive another day—surely no news on the home front could rattle me like that had. I’d hung on for thirty-two hours treading shark-infested waters after our B-17, christened “Fair Rosaline,” got shot down over the Pacific. I’d endured torture and daily humiliation at the hands of my captors after one of their “rescue” ships finally scooped my near-lifeless body out of the cold, choppy waters. I even watched my fellow prisoners—American and British soldiers—die slow and agonizing deaths right before my eyes. Yet now, the ominous silence of Taylor Street’s most notorious busybody left me with the chilling sensation that my nightmare wasn’t quite over.

“Your mother has been staying with friends out in Cicero,” Mrs. Deluca explained. I knew exactly whom she was referring to, as my mother’s best friend from high school, Alma Rizzo, lived in that suburb just west of the city.

“And what about the Caputos?” I asked. I couldn’t wait to tell Benny about my new idea for the pizza place—the concept Stella had inspired, a singularly American pizza pie, in the most literal sense of the word. I just wanted to revel in normalcy again. After what I’d been through I didn’t want, or need, much more than that.

“Benito?” As she pondered this, Mrs. Deluca prodded her hair at the nape of her neck, tucking it further up into her hairnet, as if hedging. “He opened up a new place over on the corner of Taylor and Ashland,” she said. “They live in the apartment above it.” So that was it. Benny really had done it. As good as his word, he’d opened another location of the pizza joint while I was away, the old rascal. “But Dominick,” she continued, “maybe you shouldn’t—”

“Nice seeing ya again, ma’am!” I said to Mrs. Deluca (and she truly had no idea how much I meant that). She looked at me with real concern in her eyes as I turned on my heels to seek out my pal. Never mind that, I thought to myself. A few weeks of Italian home cooking and I’d pack on enough pounds to erase any worried looks aimed in my direction. I tamped down the feeling that some awful knowledge was awaiting me just around the corner. After all, given everything I’d been through, it was no wonder I was a tad circumspect about reacclimating to civilian life.

When I got to Ashland Avenue, I was looking for the facsimile of our neon sign, the one we’d hung at the original Antonio’s location. Instead, I was greeted with a marquee almost three times its size emblazoned with a flourish of cursive letters: Cap’s Restaurant. Cap’s as in Caputo? Okay, Mr. Fancy-Pants. Way to commandeer the limelight. A copy of the menu was posted behind a glass placard on the wall near brick stairs that led down to the restaurant’s front entrance. I gave it a passing glance, only to notice that this didn’t seem to be a casual pizza joint so much as a fine dining establishment. There were entrées I recognized as being among Mrs. Caputo’s specialties. Well this was a change for us … but, surely, this was progress! Entrusting Benny with the business had clearly paid off. Peering inside the darkened basement restaurant and seeing how la-di-da the whole place looked, it occurred to me that he and I were one step closer to “big time.” He hadn’t simply held down the fort while I was away—he’d built a palace while he was at it!

Remembering that Mrs. Deluca had said the family lived on the second floor, I pushed open an entry door to the right of the restaurant and climbed a flight of stairs that led me onto an elegant landing. I rang the buzzer, observing the expensive-looking wallpaper and brass door knocker as I waited. Benny had done all right for himself and his folks! When the door opened, the face of an angel appeared—a startling but welcome surprise.

“Stella?! Sweetheart!” I exclaimed. “What … what are you doing here?”

I dropped my rucksack to the floor in anticipation of our embrace, but with a shrill scream, she collapsed onto the ground—echoing the thud of my bag. Before I could stoop to help her up, a voice called from another room.

“Darling! Are you okay?” He emerged at the end of the hall and his feet skidded on the hardwood floor when he saw me. His face, at first registering alarm, turned to absolute shock.

“Benny?” I looked at my friend, utterly confused. Stella, her arms thrown around my ankles in supplication, was sobbing and shrieking uncontrollably. Benny wilted onto an upholstered armchair next to a phone alcove in the wall, burying his head in his hands. Then I saw it. In the alcove, next to a ceramic pot filled with African violets, was a sterling silver picture frame. And in it, a wedding photo of a gorgeous, if tragically familiar, bride and groom.

My harrowing ordeal in the camp had been hell on earth, but when we were finally liberated, and I realized I was going to live, I felt invincible. My enemies had tried, but failed, to stomp out my soul. No worse fate could befall me, or so I had thought. Despite the pain and degradation I had suffered, I had held onto hope—to the image of her sweet, smiling face. Thoughts of Stella and our future together had been my lifeline. And now, as with the single stroke of an ax, that rope had been severed. Staring blankly into the fuzz-covered leaves of those rich purple violets, I felt an odd sensation deep in my chest, as if my inner pilot light had just been snuffed out. What little remained felt cold and desolate.

“I
CAN’T UNDERSTAND WHY THE POLICE AREN’T PRESSING CHARGES.
Roman Monte ought to be in jail for attempted homicide,” Ty groaned. I sat by his hospital bed four days after the accident, gripping his hand. Doctors had brought him out of his coma less than forty-eight hours earlier, but even in his weakened condition, he still had vengeance on the brain. A brain, which, mind you, had sustained one doozy of a beating. The way his head was now wrapped up in medical gauze, his younger brothers had taken to calling him “Q-Tip,” but only after his chief physician double and triple assured us all that there were no signs of permanent damage to his brain tissue. In addition to a hairline fracture of his skull, Ty had broken three ribs, punctured a lung, and shattered his elbow, which would require reconstructive surgery at some future date, but he would recover, thank God.

“Apparently, two people who were on the platform Sunday afternoon thought Roman looked like he was trying to keep you from going over the railing, not push you,” my mother explained to Ty. It was the first I’d heard of these developments, and my heart skipped a beat.

“But that’s incredible!” I inadvertently exclaimed. My relatives who were gathered around the bedside stared at me, expectantly, but I decided it would be wiser to remain silent.

“It’s an utter travesty. Why anyone would believe unreliable eyewitness testimony over the actual victim’s statement to the police is beyond me,” Aunt Val finally said.

I darted my eyes back and forth, as if I was counting marbles on the floor, then cleared my throat.