Small Mercies (10 page)

While Gail sweats, Maria coughs. She starts coughing around Memorial Day and is still coughing on Labor Day. It’s a thick, phlegmy cough, sounds like her lungs have been filled with the wrong fuel. Every day, Gail asks her if she’s okay.

“A cold,” she says. “
Nulla
.” Nothing.

She rubs Gail’s stomach to change the subject. Maria thinks it’s a girl. Gail thinks Maria may be right, especially if it’s true that girls steal their mother’s beauty. Her face is gaunt one day, puffy the next. Her legs ache with varicose veins. Even her translucent eyes seem dim and drab. She perspires like an obese sultan and the older boys, conscious of impending change, hang all over her.

In the fall, Maria’s cough turns sharp and painful. The phlegm disappears; her mouth seems to pull sound from an empty chamber. One morning, Gail sees a red spot on the handkerchief that she coughs into and insists that she see a doctor. Not tomorrow or next week. Today.

“It’s nothing,
nulla
.”

Gail doesn’t accept this answer. She drives Maria to the appointment herself, her swollen stomach grazing the steering wheel. The doctor tells her it’s viral bronchitis, nothing too serious. He suggests using a humidifier, drinking tea with honey and lemon, and taking Tylenol for the pain. Gail drives Maria home, stopping at a pharmacy to buy a humidifier. She sets up the humidifier in the still, dust-flecked bedroom of Maria’s house. She tells Maria that she should stay home for a few weeks and rest. Maria says that Gail needs help, that she can’t manage the two boys alone in her condition. Gail tells her that she’ll need more help when the baby arrives, that she’ll need a fully rested Maria without any cough. Maria lies on top of the bed, acquiescent, and this frightens Gail a bit.

“Are you okay? Do you want me to stay?”

“No, no, no.
Nulla
.”

“Stop saying that. It’s not nothing.”

Maria reaches for Gail’s stomach.

“Bambina. Bella bambina
.
”

“If it’s a girl, I’ll name her Nulla, after her stubborn grandmother.”

Maria laughs, provoking a coughing fit, which brings her torso off the mattress. Gail eases her back down. She kisses Maria’s forehead.

“Rest.”

After Gail starts the car, she has a moment of uncertainty. She turns the engine off and reenters the house, as quietly as she can. She takes the stairs slowly, her bulk bringing a few groans from the wood. She doesn’t want to scare Maria, wants to make sure she’s okay. She pushes the door to the bedroom in a few inches. The soft light of late afternoon sun is muffled by the curtains; the humidifier spews moist air over the bed. She hears Maria’s labored breathing, a few staccato coughs. She sees the dark bulk of her body turn in search of comfort.

Gail exhales. She is a mother, prone to checking on her charges, even when there’s no reason. Maria is resting. All may continue. She leaves the house as quietly as she came. She pulls the car delicately out of the gravel driveway, hoping not to disturb Maria. By the time she picks the boys up at the Landini house, her mind has moved on to a host of trivial concerns: what to make for dinner, whether Michael has to work this weekend, what to get the new neighbors as a housewarming gift.

She doesn’t think of Maria again until Enzo calls that night and tells them through rolling sobs that he came home from the store and found Maria cold and lifeless in their bed.

* * *

Bobby arrives in the shadow of Maria’s death, two months after she is put into the ground. His tiny body is pressed to cheeks streaming with tears, equal parts joy and grief. All look at him and think of Maria and how she would have loved to hold him. He spends his first day in this world without a name; they have been too busy, too guilt ridden and grief stricken, to worry about names. If it was a girl, the name was easy. But a boy?

Gail lies in the hospital bed, worn out in every way. Michael sits in a chair, holding his new son, trying to be happy. In the hallway, Enzo moans and shakes, his grief disturbing the happy idylls of the surrounding families and their brand-new bundles of joy. Tiny arrives with flowers. He is a new dad himself. His daughter, Maria, is a month old. Fatherhood suits him. He’s gotten a touch thicker above the belt and below the chin. Enzo sees him and hugs him with vigor, crushing the flowers between them. He shepherds Tiny into the room. Tiny kisses Gail, lays the pressed bouquet on her lap. He takes the petite, placid wonder into his arms. He asks for a name.

Michael and Gail exchange a nervous glance. The boy needs a name. He does not know their sorrow. He has done nothing to deserve this. From the hidden recesses of her brain, Gail remembers Maria sliding a photo across the kitchen table to her. Something she wanted to share. A fragile, faded, black-and-white thing, with dozens of fold lines crisscrossing the two people depicted: a young girl dressed in a blazer and skirt. Large glasses on a long thin nose. No classic beauty, but a touch of eccentric comeliness. Maria. A boy, a few years older, stood behind her, blithely handsome, on the verge of masculinity. His hands folded across his chest in mock defiance. Gail pointed to him.

“Enzo?”

Maria shook her head, carefully turned the flimsy, yellowed paper over so Gail could see the writing on the back: Roberto e Maria. Lecca. 17 aprile 1931.

She turned the photo over again, pointed to the boy.

“My brother.”

“Roberto?”

“Si.
Morto
. He died in the war.”

“He was so handsome, Maria.”

Roberto. Robert. Bobby.

“Gail?”

Gail looks to Michael for guidance. His eyes are tired, blank; no name is resting on his tongue. Tiny looks nervous for a second. She speaks without thinking.

“Robert. His name is Robert Enzolini Amendola. Named after Maria’s brother, Roberto.”

Tiny smiles, relieved. Even Enzo looks happy.

“Wonderful. Hello, little Bobby. Little Bobby Amendola.”

It sounds right. A good name. Anyone named Bobby Amendola is gonna turn out fine.

“Gail?”

She goes to see Enzo weeks later, finds him in the attic with dried sausages on strings hanging from the rafters. He’s drinking his homemade wine and cutting pieces of sausage with Maria’s knife, the one with the chipped black handle. Bobby is there, these things—the smell of that attic, the slicing of that sausage, the slosh of Enzo’s wine—they slip into him. He is tiny, but he absorbs them.

“Gail! Gail!”

* * *

She feels hands on her arms. She looks up and Michael is leaning down, his face in front of her. Not the addled, sleep-deprived father of three with no name on his tongue. Not the bold man of action who raced next door. Not the handsome, tireless dervish who fixed this house, worked two jobs, and satisfied the carnal needs of his libidinous, pregnant wife. No.

A tender old man with fear on his face, worried about his wife. How long has he been here? Crease lines converge on his eyes. When did he get so old?

He’s dressed for church, slacks and a collared shirt. He goes because she asks him to. Sometimes he doesn’t and she understands that; some Sundays she doesn’t want to go herself, but she does anyway.

“Are you okay? You’re not dressed. Is everything okay?”

A bit of fatigue in his voice. This isn’t the first time he’s had to pull her out of a daydream. She tells him it’s harmless, an idyll, but she can see big words scrolling across his forehead:
Alzheimer’s,
dementia
.

“I’m fine. I need to talk to Tina.”

“Tina?”

“Yeah, I need to explain. I need to tell her about Maria. I never told her about Maria. Not really.”

Michael looks confused.

“Maria. My mother?”

“Yes.”

“Gail, you’re not making any sense.”

“I know. It doesn’t matter. I can’t explain it.”

She starts going through the kitchen drawers. She finds the paring knife, still chipped, the blade long gone dull. Michael sighs, a long, pointed gesture of exasperation.

“Look, are we going to church or not?”

“No.”

He tries to suppress a smile. He’s still a child in this way. Let him play hooky from church. Give him ice cream, beer, pizza, two seconds of naked tits in a movie.

“I’m going to change then.”

“Fine.”

She puts the knife in her bag, slips on a jacket and sneakers, and dashes out to the car. The air is cold, still dewy; another gray day, makes her long for the blazing crispness of early autumn. She could call, but she wants to do this in person. Sit at Tina’s table and explain. What exactly? She’s not sure, but Tina will get it, Tina will understand.

Their lives didn’t overlap. Maria never saw Bobby’s face, never held his hand. She’s always known this, of course, as a mathematical matter—one life ended before the other began—but she’s never really understood what it meant. He grew up eating the dishes that Maria taught Gail to make. The mother he always knew was different because of Maria, had already absorbed the gentle lessons of motherhood she bestowed. He sat in an attic strewn with sausages with his grandfather when he was three weeks old. These are all things Tina should know.

She drives faster than normal. She’s holding something slippery and precious and she needs to get to Tina’s house before it slides away.

A year after Bobby was killed, Tina was in a low, angry place. Her parents were retiring, moving to Florida. They’d put it off for a year to help Tina after Bobby’s death, but now they were moving forward. Selling the house and moving away. Tina was furious. She railed at them, night after night, at Gail’s table, the tears streaming down her face.

“A fucking year, Gail? A fucking year? They gave me a year. Almost to the goddamn day. ‘We’ve done our bit, T. Now we have to get on with our lives. Welcome anytime.’ Oh jeez, thanks. Sure, we’ll drop in every weekend. Thanks a lot, fuckwads.”

Gail laughed at the familiar malapropism.

“That’s a Bobby word.”

Tina poured herself a large glug of Chianti.

“It sure is.”

“You can’t be mad at them, Tina.”

“Fucking A, I can’t. They’re moving to a golf course, Gail. They don’t even fucking golf.”

She cursed like a sailor in those years.

“What am I supposed to do? With a one-year-old and a kid about to enter kindergarten?”

Gail reached a hand over.

“Tina, anything you need. Anything at all. Michael and I aren’t going anywhere. Anything. You want to move in here? Done. You want to drop the kids off every day? Done.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“You’re welcome.”

Tina raised a hand to her face, pushed some tears into her skin. She exhaled.

“Well, I need two things right now. I need a cigarette.”

She fished a pack out of her purse. She cracked the window behind her.

“I didn’t even know you smoked,” Gail said, genuinely surprised but without judgment. She found an ashtray hiding in the back of the cupboard, behind a Cornell baseball coffee mug.

“I sneak, when the kids are asleep. I know I have to quit.”

“All in good time. I’m surviving on cheap red wine and ziti. What’s the other thing you need?”

“I need a Bobby story, one that I haven’t heard. Tell me a Bobby story, Gail.”

Gail wasn’t sure what she was asking.

“A story about Bobby, in other words?”

“Yeah, my therapist, she says I need to explore my grief, need to let it expand, not try to diminish it before its proper time. So I figure I have cried and wailed over everything I know about Bobby. I have relived everything we did together. Everything I can remember anyway. I have grieved for all of that. Now, I want to grieve over the things I didn’t know. Tell me a story about Bobby that I don’t know.”

“A Bobby story?”

“A Bobby story.”

It became their little tradition together. Whenever one of them got low, she would ask the other for a Bobby story. A story would be told, they would laugh or cry together, and then they would hug. Gail would sit up some nights, trying to remember little snippets from Bobby’s childhood so she’d have them ready for when Tina asked. She even wrote a few down in a black and white notebook so she’d be sure to remember them. The time Bobby snuck a communion wafer home from church. The time he was telling the whole family about his biology project and accidentally kept saying
orgasm
instead of
organism
. The time the boys fought the Garsini brothers at P.S. 8 because one of the Garsinis had pushed Bobby for no good reason. Franky jumped in to defend Bobby and then Peter jumped in to defend Franky. All three of them sitting in the kitchen that night, giggling and holding ice packs to their heads. One with a black eye, one with a bloody nose, one with a fat lip. Bobby happy as a clam because his big brothers had come to his defense.

She even told Tina about the time Franky and Peter left Bobby behind down at the beach at Gateway and she found him there crying, astonished that his brothers could be so mean. He was ten, maybe eleven, and it was the first time she saw him really angry, except for a few tantrums he had as a toddler. She told Tina the whole story too. She didn’t leave out her own failure that night. She let it serve as a lesson to Tina: how you punish your children is as important as whether you do. Never be cruel, even when they are.

And the things she learned from Tina. Little insights into what Bobby was like as a husband and a father. How he adored his daughter. How he loved his brothers, admired Peter and had eternal patience with Franky. She reaffirmed what Gail already knew: that her son was basically happy, an easygoing, kindhearted soul.

With flaws. Tina didn’t hide those. She told a few stories about his temper, about nights when he had a few too many. She told Gail that they fought the night before he was killed because he’d been at a bachelor party that weekend in Atlantic City and still went out to watch the Giants game with Franky. That when he came home, he was tipsy and tried to apologize, but she wouldn’t have it, and that when he left for work the next morning, she was still mad at him. That when he died, she was still mad at him.

Just when you think the sadness can grow no larger, your son’s widow tells you that—no, confesses that to you—and the grief pushes through a door you didn’t know was there to occupy a space you didn’t know existed. When you lose a child, you know the grief will be overwhelming and harrowing, but you half expect it to be monotonous. A single, horrible note that you can’t get out of your head.