Chapter 10 - The Garden Where Matteo Slept
The wheelchair was in the carriage house, behind the winter tires and the three-legged wooden duck that had lost its pull-string in March.
A family of field mice had built a nest in the upholstery beneath the seat cushion, using the wool from Alina’s discarded blanket and the stuffing from an old boat fender to line a nursery where six pink, hairless kits slept through the warm afternoons of June.
Marco Moretti did not sell the terminal leases in Newark.
He did not surrender the concrete piers or the three dry docks where the tugs came in from the bay with their hulls black with harbor grease.
He simply stopped going to the meetings at the diner on Route 46.
When Luca Santoro sent two men to ask why the checks for the haulage permits were being drawn on a commercial bank in Philadelphia instead of the private office in Fort Lee, Marco met them on the terrace.
He was wearing an old linen shirt with the collar open and no holster beneath his arm.
He had a pair of brass pruning shears in his right hand and a basket of yellow climbing roses on the table between two glasses of iced lemonade that Elena had made with mint from the kitchen garden.
“Tell Luca,” Marco said, snipping the dead head off a tea rose with a clean, metallic *snip*, “that if he wants the Hudson leases, he can buy them at the public auction in Trenton next Tuesday.”
The younger of the two men—a boy from Brooklyn who had two diamond studs in his left ear and a nine-millimeter Glock tucked into his waistband where anyone could see the outline through his silk shirt—looked at the basket of roses.
“He said you’re done, Moretti,” the boy said. “He said you spent fifty thousand dollars on a Mexican woman’s green card and you forgot how to collect the vig.”
Marco set the shears down.
He did not look at the boy’s Glock. He looked at the boy’s eyes—the small, wet, nervous eyes of a twenty-year-old who had never seen an entire warehouse burn with three men chained to the water main inside.
“I didn't forget anything,” Marco said, his voice so quiet that the bees in the hydrangeas were louder than his words. “I remembered everything. That’s why you’re going to walk down that driveway, get into your rented Impala, and drive back to Brooklyn before I decide that this terrace needs two more stone urns.”
The boy didn't answer. He looked at Marco’s eyes—not gray now, but that terrible, deep, ancient black that looked like twenty feet of harbor water at midnight—turned on his heel, and walked down the Belgian blocks without waiting for his partner.
Marco picked up his lemonade.
The ice rattled against the glass.
Down on the lower lawn, where the hydrangeas met the cherry tree, Alina was setting up the croquet wickets.
She was eleven now.
Her hair had grown down to her shoulder blades, tied back with a piece of blue surveyor’s tape she had stolen from Dario’s truck because she liked the color. She had one white cane—a slender, carbon-fiber rod that weighed less than six ounces, with a carved wooden handle that Tonio had turned from a piece of Matteo’s broken baseball bat.
She didn't lean on it. She used it like a pointer, tapping the iron wickets into the turf with the heel of her purple sneaker.
“Not there,” Alina called out. “The red ball goes through the double arch.”
Sophia was carrying the wooden mallet.
The mallet was thirty inches long, the head made of heavy maple, twice as heavy as the toddler’s yellow frog boots. She was dragging it behind her through the clover, her small face red with the effort, leaving a long, bent trail through the dandelions like the track of a wounded beaver.
“The red one is Matteo,” Sophia shouted back.
“Matteo doesn't get to play croquet,” Alina said, walking toward her with that long, swinging, uneven stride that had become her own—not a limp, but a deliberate, rhythmic cadence that took her across the grass faster than Elena could walk with a laundry basket. “Matteo always cheated. He used to kick the ball into the hedge when Papa wasn't looking.”
“He said he didn't cheat,” Sophia said, dropping the mallet onto Alina’s foot. “He said the hedge moved.”
Alina picked up the mallet.
She didn't use the cane. She balanced on her left leg, her right foot planted behind her for stability, swung the maple head with both arms, and sent the red wooden ball clattering through the iron hoop fifty feet away.
The ball hit the white peg at the end of the run with a sharp, hollow *tock* that echoed off the fieldstone walls of the carriage house.
“Ha!” Alina yelled.
Sophia clapped.
She clapped with her whole body, jumping up and down until her bare feet were green with clover juice, her small white dress billowing around her thighs like a parachute.
“Again!” the child screamed. “Do the blue one!”
Marco watched them from the terrace.
Elena came out through the French doors, carrying a white porcelain platter with six slices of peach cake that were still warm enough to make the powdered sugar melt into the crust.
She set the platter on the teak table beside the roses.
She did not curtsy. She did not look at the floorboards. She sat down in the second teak chair, her hands smoothing the linen of her skirt, and looked out over the lawn where her daughter was currently attempting to ride the croquet mallet like a horse.
“The doctor sent the bill,” Marco said, looking into his lemonade.
“Keller?”
“The other one. In Zurich.”
Elena took a piece of the cake. The crust was flaky, smelling of butter and almond extract. “Did you pay it?”
“I sent him a photograph,” Marco said.
Elena turned her head. Her dark eyes, warm beneath the gray hair that had started to show at her temples, looked at the man who owned the hill. “Which photograph?”
Marco reached into his cardigan pocket.
He didn't pull out the money clip. He didn't pull out the Kimber’s spare magazine.
He pulled out a small, square Polaroid—the edges yellowed, the chemicals slightly mottled at the top where the roller had jammed.
In the photograph, taken three weeks ago behind the greenhouse, Alina was standing on the bottom rail of the paddock fence.
She had both hands in the air, her face turned up toward the sun, her mouth wide open in a laugh that showed the two crooked bicuspids that Matteo had always told her looked like a vampire’s.
Beside her, sitting on the top rail with her yellow rainboots dangling six inches above Alina’s head, was Sophia.
The toddler was holding a piece of bread with strawberry jam, her small face completely covered in red sugar, pointing a greasy finger directly at the lens.
On the back of the white paper, written in the cramped, heavy, left-handed slant that Marco had used since he was eight years old in the parish school on 4th Avenue, were five words:
*The nerve was not dead.*
Marco set the photograph on the table between the roses and the peach cake.
The wind from the river picked up, stirring the petals on Matteo’s stone, carrying the scent of the salt marsh and the hemlocks down through the ravine where the Canadian’s truck had been pulled away.
Down on the grass, Alina was running.
She was not running fast. She had that hitch in her right hip, that slight, inward swing of the knee that would stay with her until she was an old woman with three grandchildren of her own.
She was running toward the gate.
Sophia was three yards ahead of her, her yellow boots flashing in the summer light like two small, furious suns, her laugh rising into the warm Jersey air where nothing—not the trucks on Route 9W, not the fire in the cellar, and not the forty men with the nine-millimeter pistols—could ever reach them again.
“Catch me!” the child screamed into the wind.
May you like
Alina didn't answer.
She drove her right foot into the rye grass, locked her knee against the earth, and jumped.
