Small Mercies (11 page)

But it’s not. It has dimensions, it has depth. It changes and transforms. It hits you differently each day. You owe it respect in some ways. You have to mourn everything: the flaws as well as the virtues, the bad moments as well as the good. You have to turn over every rock and embrace the individual sadnesses you find underneath. The Bobby stories did that.

Together, Tina and Gail gave grief its due.

* * *

She parks the car on the street in front of Tina’s house, a modest, high-ranch home, surrounded on both sides by ridiculous Roman-columned monstrosities. Bobby bought a house half a mile from his parents. All he ever wanted was the life they had.

She will tell Tina a Bobby story, the first Bobby story, the prelude to all the others. She will tell him about Maria, who kissed her stomach, and Enzo, who grieved in an attic, and Sean, who spun his quarters, and Constance, who told her not to have children and wouldn’t cross a bridge to see them when she did. She will tell her about Diana Landini’s blouses and birthday parties at red picnic tables and how she miscarried and she caught Maria crying by herself, even how sex crazed she was during her pregnancy with Peter. She will tell her how Tiny Terrio, who she knows, whose daughter is a friend of hers, asked a question and ushered Bobby’s name into the world. She will tell Tina all of this and Tina will understand. Tina will hug Gail and everything will be normal again between them.

And when it is, Gail will ask her about the man she met. It’s only fair. She will ask her and listen to Tina’s answers and she will be happy for her.

She walks up the front stairs and rings the doorbell. One of Tina’s neighbors, a man, picks up his paper and waves it at her in hello. The front door opens and a woman answers, wearing a long white T-shirt that extends below her waist. Gail flinches, uncertain.

“Mrs. Amendola?”

Gail hears small feet scampering toward the door. Bobby Jr. leans into view.

“Grandma!”

“Bob-a-loo.”

She leans down and hugs him. Milk and Cheerios. They should sell it as cologne.

“Tina’s not here.”

Gail’s eyes move up to the woman she now recognizes: Stephanie DeVosso. Friend of Tina’s. Stephanie’s legs are a deep, settled brown. In March. She stretches her arms in a long yawn and her T-shirt lifts, revealing skimpy black panties. Gail can see the mound of Stephanie’s pubis in relief against the silk fabric of her panties. She bites down an urge to take Bobby to the car and drive away.

“That’s okay. I was just passing by. I thought I’d take a shot.”

“I’ll tell her you stopped by.”

“Not necessary, Stephanie. I’ll call her later.”

She kisses Bobby, who races back inside.

“Later, Grandma-ma-ma.”

Stephanie looks after him. When he’s out of sight, she puts a hand to the side of her mouth and whispers.

“She spent the night with Wade.”

Now he has a name.

“Of course. I forgot. Sorry to bother you, Stephanie.”

Gail turns and walks down the stairs. She remembers a rumor she heard somewhere, something Michael brought home from the Leaf. She turns, calls back to Stephanie.

“Meant to ask you, Stephanie. How’s your friend Jenny doing? Jenny Valenti?”

Stephanie’s teeth shift behind closed lips.

“She’s fine.”

“Good. I saw her mother a few weeks ago at Enzo’s. Said she’s really struggling with the whole mastectomy. Must be tough, for a woman that age. You know, with a young husband.”

Gail’s eyes narrow. She holds them on the younger woman until the woman looks away.

“Must be,” Stephanie says, eyes down.

“Yes, well, we all have our crosses to bear. Have a good day.”

Gail doesn’t look back as she walks to the car. She drives to a nearby strip mall and parks the car. She looks at herself in the rearview mirror. Her eyes are drained and red.

“Silliness,” she says to her miserable-looking reflection. “Pure silliness.”

Her cell phone rings. Tina’s number. Stephanie must have called her. She hesitates, unsure whether to answer. She clears her throat, tests her voice. No point putting this off.

“Hello?”

“Gail? It’s me.”

“Hey, Tina. How are you?”

“Is everything okay? Stephanie said you came by, needed to talk.”

That colossal bitch.

“No, it was nothing. I was driving around and thought I’d stop by. I should have called first.”

“No, Gail, I’m sorry. I should have . . . I wasn’t sure how to . . . Christ, I’m sorry.”

“Tina, it’s okay. It’s my fault. I’m sorry.”

“I would have asked you to watch the kids, but I didn’t think, I mean, I wasn’t sure . . .”

Tina’s voice trails off. Gail wonders where she is right now. Manhattan? Connecticut? New Jersey? She knows nothing about this man, Wade. She didn’t even know his name until a few minutes ago. For all she knows, Tina could be lying in bed with him as they’re talking.

“I’m really sorry, Gail.”

“Nothing to be sorry about, Tina. Stephanie shouldn’t have bothered you.”

“Well, the bitch just couldn’t resist ruining both of our mornings.”

They both laugh.

“I needed that, Tina. Thank you. Let me let you get back to your—” Man? Other man? New man? Lover?— “day.”

“Wait, I was going to ask you something later, but I may as well do it now.”

“Sure, anything.”

She hears Tina exhale, can visualize her trying to formulate the question.

“Would you mind if Wade came to the party on Sunday? For Bobby Jr.’s party?”

Gail almost asks who Wade is and then she remembers.

“That’s next weekend,” she says, without meaning to sound irritated.

“I know. I know. I just thought that it might be a nice way for Wade to meet everyone.”

“Sure, Tina. Of course. He’s more than welcome.”

Tina asks if she is sure.

“I am,” Gail says, though she is not. Her voice lacks punch, it’s like water in a puddle. She feels disconnected from the world, from this conversation. If this man is coming to her house in a week’s time, she has things to do. People to tell. She has to tell Bobby, of course, but the other boys as well. Michael, Peter, Franky. These will not be easy conversations. Tina is asking too much. A week to tell four men news it will take them a decade to accept? Too much, too soon.

“Are you still there, Gail?”

“Yes, Tina, sorry, I got distracted.”

She’ll start with Peter, start with the most sensible one. Maybe he can tell her how to tell the others. Maybe he can help her figure out a way to tell Franky.

“Are you sure you’re okay with this?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure there wasn’t something you wanted to tell me?”

“It was nothing,” Gail says, thinking
nulla.

“Okay, I’m sure we’ll chat during the week. Have a good one.”

“You too, Tina.”

She closes the phone. A week from now, a stranger will step into her house. Before that can happen, she has to tell the boys, all of them. No small task.

Gail opens the car door and steps out. The cool air is bracing, revives her a bit. She looks around the shabby little mall. It was brand new ten years ago and now it’s dilapidated: a dingy deli surviving on Lotto tickets, a walk-in slice joint with Mexicans behind the counter, one abandoned storefront, and a narrow little diner that looks to be a week away from going under.

She peers in the window of the diner. Two old Italian women—glasses perched above bony noses, scarves wrapped around shrunken heads—chat at the front table over coffee and Danishes. One of them turns to Gail, gives a friendly nod. Gail waves back, thinking of Maria. She should have told Tina about everything, just rambled on about all the things she never told her. It wouldn’t have been perfect over the phone, but that doesn’t matter. She should have told her.

A voice rises in her head. The voice has a smoker’s rasp and speaks perfect English. And between each sentence is a pause long enough to spoon a mouthful of soup.

What were you going to tell her anyway, Gail?

That he was conceived in response to death and born in its shadow? That you named him after a man—a boy—who died young? That you gave him a cursed name, a condemned name? One that was doomed to be etched in remembrance. Bobby Amendola. A firefighter’s name, if ever there was one.

You could have named him George or Fred or Paul or Kevin. You could have given him a butcher’s name, Enzo, or a drunk’s name, Sean.

You could have given him any of these names and he would still be alive.

One final pause.

Or you could have listened to me, those many years ago, when I told you that, one way or another, your children will rip the heart from your chest.

O
n Monday morning, Peter Amendola is woken by the sounding of the Staten Island ferry’s horn as it eases away from the southern tip of Manhattan and slips into New York Harbor. The sound—a brief, low rumble—has woken him most of the mornings he’s stayed at Alberto’s apartment, even before he knew what it was. He groans and shifts to a sitting position on the couch, rubbing his eyes. He lifts his BlackBerry from the glass coffee table in front of the couch and checks the time: a little past six. He walks to the window to watch the ferry’s progress. He knows its path well, knows the feints and turns of its twenty-five-minute voyage. He spends half his time in this apartment watching as one ferry leaves and another arrives, passing each other. A crowd of them at rush hour.

Back and forth, on and on, again and again.

He used to love the ferry. It was the quickest way to get to Manhattan, to get off Staten Island. The summer before he went away to college, while his high school buddies were getting shitfaced in the Midland Beach parking lots, he took the ferry into the city most weekend nights with his girlfriend Tracy DeSantis. He’d have an inexpensive night planned: a walk around the Village, then a cheap dinner at a place in Chinatown or Little Italy, walk back down Broadway to the ferry. He didn’t know where to go, didn’t have any money anyway. He didn’t care. He just wanted to be there. They took the train up to Times Square, the Upper East Side, Central Park. He wanted to see it all, see every inch of it. He peered in through the windows of expensive restaurants—the bustling downtown hot spots, the posh uptown restaurants catering to tight asses, the steak and martini joints of midtown full of red-faced bankers and nattily attired lawyers—not with envy, but with impatience.

One day
, he thought,
one day soon
.

Tracy didn’t like the ferry, didn’t really like Manhattan. But she liked Peter, probably even loved him in that simple, teenage way, so she went along with his requests. On the way in, he wouldn’t linger on the rear deck with her, wouldn’t enjoy the illicit pleasure of making out with her, touching her in the dark recesses of the ferry’s nooks and crannies. Instead, he’d pull her up to the front of the boat ten minutes before it docked, so they could needlessly line up with the tourists and the boisterous black kids from the North Shore projects, while the ferry crawled to its dock. Sometimes he even dragged her down to the seedy lower level with its surreptitious pot smokers and deranged, piss-soaked vagrants because the ramps down there lowered first, affording that level’s denizens a head start into the city, into the night. Peter didn’t want to miss anything, wanted everything the city had to offer, wanted the city itself.

On the way home, Peter, glum and a little surly, wanted to linger on the rear deck and stare up at the impossible angles of the Twin Towers, their peaks not visible until the ferry pulled a good distance away. That view, changing incrementally as the ferry drifted away from Manhattan, was simply awe-inspiring. No other description fit. After seeing it, Peter was awed; by the reach of man, by his godlike ambition.

Only when they were halfway across the harbor would Peter’s attention turn back to the expectant lips and tongue of the young Ms. DeSantis. By the time the ferry docked on Staten Island, he was back in her good graces, a short car ride away from getting laid in her basement while her parents slept two stories above. When they lay together afterward, Tracy talked about the benefits and potential pitfalls of staying together when they both left for college, and Peter nodded sleepy assents, all the while trying to re-create the sensation of standing at the back of the ferry and staring up into man-made infinity.

One night he told Tracy that whenever he left Manhattan, he felt like Columbus leaving the New World. He thought he was being poetic, but Tracy said that didn’t make any sense. That, if anything, he should feel that way when he left Staten Island because that was the less developed, New World place and Manhattan was the older, developed civilization, like Europe in the time of Columbus. As soon as she said this, Peter decided that they wouldn’t be staying together when they went to college. He conveyed guarded optimism for the proposition through the summer, though, to ensure the continuation of the good times in her basement. He broke up with her the night before he left for Cornell. He even managed to make it seem like it was the best thing for both of them.

He watches the ferry until it disappears behind Governors Island. He wants to feel like he used to when he was on that rear deck, ignoring Tracy and staring up at the towers. He wants to be awed again by something. Anything.

But the towers are gone.

And Tracy DeSantis is Tracy Gordon now. He Googled her a few weeks ago, found a Facebook page. Married to a dentist and living in Hazlet. Couple of kids. Still looks good, in the toned and complacent manner of the suburbs. Like Lindsay actually. Seems happy enough. He knows it’s a facade, but that’s not the point. A path not taken. Maybe he should have listened to her. They could have stayed together, coasted through college, a few casual dalliances here and there—on both sides, no questions asked, no hurt feelings—but stayed together.

He knows he shouldn’t do this, torment himself with visions of where his life could have gone. He knows the Internet presents ridiculous, one-dimensional cutouts of people and that his own mind is putting the best possible gloss on what their lives would be like together because of his present misery. He knows the last thing he needs is
another
woman in his thoughts. He’d broken up with Tracy because even though she was smart and pretty and nice, she was too limited . . . too Staten Island. Perfectly happy to go away for four years and then come home. Live the same life her parents had, maybe some incremental improvement. Move to Jersey, sure, but what was that?

A preordained movement. A half step.

Back then, he’d wanted something more. How could you live in the shadow of the greatest city on the planet and be content with that? If Tracy couldn’t understand how he felt when they were slouching back to Staten Island, she’d never understand him. He didn’t want Staten Island. And he didn’t want someone who did.

And now? He wasn’t so sure. What was the difference between Hazlet and Harrison anyway? What did being a partner at a law firm and taking home almost a million a year get you in this city?

A better class of shadow. Nothing more.

A Manhattan-bound ferry slides into view. Peter grabs a glass from the cupboard and fills it with water from the tap. He returns to the window to watch the ferry dock, his mind mercifully preoccupied by the early morning happenings of the harbor. The sheer amount of activity is dizzying; dozens of ships dot the dark waters around lower Manhattan.

Another horn sounds. The inbound ferry has unloaded its passengers, reloaded, and is now departing for Staten Island. The sound perplexed Peter during his first few weeks at the apartment. He’d hear the horn intermittently during the day—in the apartment, walking around Brooklyn Heights—and later the incongruity would gnaw at him. What the hell was making that sound? This was New York City, not Newport.

He figured it out on a frigid weekend afternoon in late January. He was trudging along the Promenade, bare hands shoved into his coat pockets, head down. A light snow falling, the wind snapping as it rose from the harbor’s dark water. He paused at the railing, enjoying the punitive blast of wind. He stood there for a few minutes, distracted from the specific woes of his life by the most basic, universal needs: to be warm, to be inside, to eat. He was looking forward to heating up some soup, taking a scalding shower, feeling the warmth return to his fingers. It didn’t matter that these were trivialities. He was looking forward to something, something that had a reasonable opportunity of actually happening, and he hadn’t felt that way in weeks. He was reassured that he could still feel anticipation, if only for a cup of warm soup in the belly.

Below him, the cars on the BQE flew by, oblivious. A hardy, lunatic soul jogged past him, bundled so completely that he couldn’t tell whether it was a man or a woman. He watched the figure until it receded into white haze at the other end of the Promenade. His gaze turned back to Manhattan and its incomplete skyline. He watched an orange ferry slide away from the terminal, announcing its presence in the harbor with a familiar bellow. When he recognized the sound, the small measure of pleasance he’d achieved sank from his chest; he felt a familiar wretchedness rise to take its place. Exposing a finger to the biting air, he traced a clear, unfettered line from the ferry across the open harbor up to the windows of Alberto’s eighth-floor apartment. In addition to having unimpeded views of lower Manhattan, the apartment was perfectly situated to receive the sound of the ferry’s horn.

Peter laughed, a grim, caustic chuckle that the wind snatched.

Of course he should be reminded of Staten Island every morning. Of course he should. Let the punishment fit the crime or something like that.

* * *

Dominic burst into Peter’s cramped office five minutes before four, ranting that he had another fire drill that he needed Peter’s help on. One of his big clients had a whistle-blower and they needed to fly out to Wichita, of all fucking places, and start an internal investigation. Worst of all, the client contact was here,
now,
downstairs in one of the large conference rooms, having a complete meltdown; he needed a little hand-holding, a little stroking, a little everything-will-be-okay, and Dominic needed Peter to be his wingman for this meeting. And then, probably fly out to Wichita tomorrow, Monday the latest, and hit the ground running.

Peter dropped what he was doing, straightened his tie, ran a comb through his hair, and grabbed his suit jacket off the back of his chair. He didn’t complain. He didn’t groan. He was an eighth-year associate, on the precipice of making partner: complaining or groaning weren’t acceptable options. His weekend was already half fucked anyway. So now it would be fully fucked. Lindsay would be pissed, but Lindsay was usually pissed these days. If he had to go to Wichita, she’d be stuck home alone for the weekend, six months pregnant, trying to corral their daughter, Amanda, who was two years old and driving her mother insane.

He followed Dominic out of his office, shouting back at his secretary, Maureen, to call Mike Williston and tell him that something had come up and he’d have to give him his edits on the brief later that night. Dominic strode through the hall with alacrity and Peter had to hustle to catch him at the elevators.

“Which client, Dom? What’s this guy’s name?” Peter asked in the elevator down to the conference room floors.

“Oh, umm, Fred Baxter,” Dominic said, a thin smile on his tanned, avuncular face. He reached over and folded down the collar of Peter’s jacket. Sweat streamed down Peter’s face. He perspired constantly, a combination of stress, little sleep, and no exercise. Dominic put a hand inside his own charcoal gray suit jacket and withdrew an immaculate white handkerchief, the initials DD monogrammed in blue satin in the corner. He handed it to Peter.

“Take a minute, Pete; make yourself presentable. You’ll want to look good for this.”

Peter wiped the sweat off his forehead and the back of his neck. He looked over at his mentor, who was looking down at the floor. Dominic, usually prone to rambling harangues, had said next to nothing on the ride down.

There was no client waiting. This was it. This was
it
. Finally.

The elevator opened and they walked down the hall toward the large conference room, usually reserved for department-wide lunches. Dominic stopped before the door. He gave Pete the once-over. The realization of what was about to happen had flung open Peter’s sweat glands, even more so than usual; he was dripping. He tried in vain to staunch the flow with Dominic’s handkerchief

“Useless. Utterly useless,” Dominic said with a wink, and then opened the door.

The assembled litigation partners rose to cheer Peter and welcome him to the partnership. A flute of champagne was placed in his hand. Dominic hugged him, kissed his cheek, and whispered in his ear.

“Congrats, Petey. It took me twenty-five years, but I finally got another paesano in here. You got the world by the balls now, kid.”

Peter felt like he was in
GoodFellas,
like he was becoming a made man, being welcomed into a Mafia family. Dominic released him. The partners had formed a makeshift receiving line; ninety-odd men (and ten women) in five-thousand-dollar suits, their stern, workplace demeanors temporarily discarded, all waiting to shake his hand. Peter worked his way through the line, shaking hands and swigging champagne. After a half hour of backslapping and congratulatory handshakes, Peter looked around the room at his new partners. Bow ties and braces, cufflinks and horn-rimmed glasses. An entire room of consiglieres, if you thought about it. Not to Mafia dons. To captains of industry, to CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, to the people who called the shots in corporate America, who controlled the peaks and valleys of the stock market. The most powerful people in the country came to the partners at this law firm when they needed advice, when they had a crisis.

From a few seats down, Dominic caught his eye, raised his glass. He was a little drunk, the old hardscrabble litigator from the Bronx. On champagne and on his protégé’s success. Peter raised his glass in return, smiled.

No, this wasn’t GoodFellas. This was much, much better.

* * *

He staggered back to his office an hour later, euphoric and exhausted and more than a little tipsy. He shook hands with well-wishers as he went. Word had spread. Maureen was waiting for him and she hugged him, real tears in her eyes.

“Congrats, Peter. I’m so happy for you. You deserve this, you deserve this.”

Maureen had been his secretary for the past three years; she was competent, had a good sense of humor. She was also in her midfifties and reminded Peter of his mother. Dominic had once told him to never have a secretary who was better looking than his wife. Peter heeded the advice, as he did most of Dominic’s counsel. Maureen lived deep in Brooklyn—Marine Park or Mill Basin, he could never remember which—and had lost a nephew, also a firefighter, on 9/11. She felt a kinship with Peter, relished his successes in a way that his own mother couldn’t. By dint of working at this firm for so many years, Maureen understood what his making partner meant; his mother wouldn’t, couldn’t. Not entirely.