Mafia Girl

by Deborah Blumenthal

  “He’s a senior, Daddy, a pit bull. A ten-year-old pit bull named Herbie.”

  He nods his head, understanding.

  “Old,” he says, shaking his head, “without a home.”

  “He had a sad life in a shelter and now he lives with us.” I hold up a picture of Herbie, the only thing they let me keep.

  My dad’s face softens. He smiles.

  “And he likes mom’s cooking. She’s always feeding him.”

  “He looks like a good boy,” he says. “You did right—they give back so much.”

  “I wish you could meet him,” I say, my voice cracking.

  “I wish I could too, Gia,” he whispers, his eyes clouding over.

  Seconds of silence and we just sit there and stare at each other with all the memories of our lives together flowing between us because this has to last. Finally we go on, talking normal, everyday things. Words, words, and more words back and forth like a volley over an invisible net to keep the lifeline alive. The neighborhood, the church, the priest, my friends, my schoolwork, movies he’ll never see, music he’ll never hear. Whatever we can grab to keep our mouths moving—and it all feels like lies and hypocrisy and empty talk without meaning or joy or laughter because we’re afraid to divulge too much because it will show him that we’re living. While he isn’t.

  I don’t want him to think about what he’s missing or how everything’s empty now without him at home. But he knows. My dad knows everything. Still I don’t want to make his life here even worse, if that’s possible.

  Minutes go by and then hours. I’m so, so bone tired. He is too. But no one wants to turn away because this visit has to last him.

  Five visits a month, that’s all he gets. Only we’re more than halfway across the country so we aren’t flying back to Florence, Colorado, next week or the week after. We can’t afford to. So we talk and keep talking like guns are pointed at our heads. And none of it matters except that we connect.

  I pick up my hand and press it against the glass wall. He puts his in the very same spot, as close as we’re going to get for the rest of our lives.

  “Who loves you more than anyone else in the whole world?” he whispers.

  “You do, Daddy,” I say, pinching my leg so hard that I break the skin.

  Neither of us says anything and I shake my head as the tears flow.

  “Please,” he says, “please don’t cry.” He glances up at the clock.

  “Gia,” he says finally. “Remember our secret?”

  I nod.

  “Remember Beppo?”

  I squint. What?

  He lifts a finger as if to silence me then turns it into a fist that he presses against his mouth, pretending to cough. He glances up. The room, they’re listening, the gesture says. “Take good care of him,” he says, looking at me pointedly.

  A message. But what?

  “Time is up,” the guard says.

  My dad gets to his feet. He makes a kiss with his lips, then slowly turns away.

  “I love you Daddy!” I shout. “I love you!” Only he doesn’t turn back, so I shout it again, louder. “I love you Daddy! I love you!” because I forgot to say it, I forgot to say it! All that time together and I’m so stupid, so stupid, I forgot to tell him.

  “Gia!” Anthony says.

  “I forgot to tell him, Anthony!” I scream. “I forgot to tell him!”

  “He knows it, Gia,” he says softly, stoically, his own eyes filling with tears as he takes my arm and pulls me away. “He knows it.”

  But I pull away and run back to the glass and pound on it. “Daddy, come back!” I shout. “Daddy, Daddy, please!”

  “Lord help us,” my mother cries. “Lord help us.”

  “He’s gone, Gia,” Anthony says. “He can’t hear you anymore.”

  Then he drops his face in his hands and starts sobbing too.

  The wind is blowing hard and it’s starting to snow as we walk to the parking lot. The ground is icy and uneven and it’s hard to walk without slipping. My face feels as numb as my insides. Anthony takes my mom’s arm so that she doesn’t slip on the ice. I nearly fall once and then again.

  “Can’t they salt the parking lot? Is that so fucking hard?”

  Anthony turns around and stops, reaching out an arm to me. I take his arm and we walk slowly, stepping carefully, crossing the frozen tundra.

  My mom sits in the front seat next to Anthony and I stretch out across the backseat.

  “Turn up the heat,” she says, putting up the collar of her coat.

  “It’s as high as it can go, Ma,” Anthony says.

  “That’s all it can go?”

  “Ma, it takes time. It’ll get warmer. It takes time.”

  “This is how it is here for your father all the time,” she says. “It doesn’t get warmer for him.” She looks at Anthony but he stares ahead and doesn’t answer. She shakes her head and closes her hand around the cross on her neck.

  “Not even a plate of food from home,” she says, shaking her head and staring out the window.

  I close my eyes, lulled by the motion of the car, just like when I was a baby. Only now my dad isn’t driving.

  No one talks on the way back to Denver. We’re out of words and energy.

  So much of the day is a blur, but what I do remember is the cold, the bitter, unrelenting cold, and the sun that never came out and how it felt to leave the prison, like I was leaving a cemetery, and looking up at the wide-open steel gray sky and thinking about how I am outside and free while my dad is locked inside like a wild animal for the rest of his life.

  I also remember strapping myself into my seat near the window on the plane and wondering after we took off whether my dad could hear the plane overhead or for just a fleeting moment even see it pass his sliver of sky and know it’s us and understand how we feel about leaving him alone in the middle of nowhere.

  When I finally open my eyes we’re back in New York City and I wonder whether it was all some kind of wicked nightmare. I imagine that when I get home and walk into the kitchen or the living room, my head will clear and my dad will be sitting there waiting for us like before in his tan cashmere bathrobe. He’d look up at me and smile and open his arms to me.

  “Gia, don’t worry,” he’ll say and tell me that I’m safe and that everything will be fine because that’s how it’s always been for as long as I can remember.

  Only he isn’t there when we get home.

  All we have of him now are the pictures on the glass shelves in the living room: My parents’ wedding photo in the big, gold frame. A picture of both of us on Christmas day, near our tree. A picture of the whole family at the beach, all of us happy together, dripping ice cream cones in front of our faces. And one of just my dad when he was about twenty-five. He’s wearing a suit and tie and he’s looking very proud of himself. It’s the day he joined the life.

  We all walk into the house and stand there for a minute before taking off our coats. I hug my mom and even Anthony, and my mom looks up and whispers a prayer.

  From now on, it’s only the three of us.

  And Herbie.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  I’m sitting on Clive’s bed and he’s on his computer writing a paper when he brings up Michael.

  “Don’t mention him, please.” I hold up my hands and he shrugs and I change the subject. “I’m thinking of taking boxing classes to keep going with this fighting thing.”

  “Cool.”

  “Well, it’s cheaper than shopping.” Or staying home and feeling sorry for myself because my dad’s locked away and Michael is so over.

  Clive is wearing a black T–shirt and jeans—with no scarf.

  “If you could face a supermax prison,” he said, “I can face the people at Morgan or any place else.”

  But the strangest thing is when he took off the scarf, no one noticed. Or if they did, they didn’t say anything, which says not only that most of the people in the world are wrapped up in themselves and oblivious, but also that
what’s inside your head is not always reality.

  I wake in the middle of the night. Only this time it’s not the phone. It’s the conversation. The one with my dad.

  “Beppo, Beppo,” he’s saying. I sit up in bed and pull my furry bear toward me. He’s about four feet tall and fat and furry. I touch his face, running my fingers over the silky white fur. Then I examine his jewel-covered collar. Make-believe emeralds, diamonds, and rubies. When I was little, I was convinced they were real and having the collar made me rich.

  “See what I have?” I used to say to my dad. “Real diamonds and rubies.”

  That made him laugh. “Yes, I know, Gia,” he’d say. “You’re a rich little girl.”

  I run my fingers over the stones, feeling their hard, faceted surfaces. They’re attached to a thick ribbon, so I slide my finger beneath it and check the length of the band. Is there a message? A secret zipper?

  Nothing.

  I turn on the lamp on my night table and then lift him up. Two legs, two arms, and a round, fat tummy. I run my finger over the fur.

  What were you trying to tell me? What is it about Beppo?

  We’d been talking about my secret plan for the future when my dad mentioned Beppo, so it has something to do with that, only what? My dad is used to talking in his own made-up shorthand. He’s been bugged by the feds for so long that he’s learned to say what he has to without them figuring it out. Only that’s not how he ever talked to me before.

  Then suddenly it hits me. I lift the bear and shake him. I examine the seams. The left side is smooth and neatly sewn, that’s not it. Then the right. It’s smooth and perfect too. I turn him on his stomach.

  Now I see.

  The back seam has been opened and re-sewn. Tiny, perfect stitches, but these were carefully done by hand. I run into the bathroom and grab the cuticle scissors, nearly tripping over the edge of the scale, then run back to my bed and carefully snip open the stitches, one by one until the opening is one inch wide. Two. Three. Then four. I peer inside.

  And there it is.

  Like a mule that has swallowed drugs to smuggle across the border, Beppo has been stuffed with cash.

  When was that done? How? Who did it?

  It had to be my mom. She was a designer and a seamstress. Her sewing is flawless. But was she in on this? She probably stuffed the money inside a long time ago. She helped my dad all the time and never asked questions.

  My dad is away in prison for the rest of his life, everything he put away for us gone except for what’s inside Beppo. Now I know. My dad had no doubts about how things would end up for him, and he wanted to make sure that no matter what, I’d have money for my secret plan for the future: to go to law school.

  I count the crisp hundred dollar bills. I make piles, five thousand dollars in each. I’m so wired that I make mistakes and lose count so I start over. It’s four a.m. when I finally finish.

  A quarter of a million dollars.

  My ticket to a different life. A life where I will stand up for people, or maybe helpless animals, who can’t stand up for themselves.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  “Start a boxing club,” Clive says.

  I look at him like, what? Are you kidding? “Do you think I want to hang out with the uppity bitches in our school?”

  “I thought it would be fun, but you have a point there.”

  So I’m a one-person boxing club, running every other day and boxing two times a week which my mom can’t understand and neither can Anthony who should be working out with me, but that’s another story.

  After Clive and I go out for teriyaki salmon and vegetable tempura and miso soup inside shiny black lacquer bento boxes so that the whole thing feels like a black tie dinner, I go back to his house where I practically live now and change into sweats.

  “Gia, be careful,” Clive says. “Remember what Anthony keeps saying.”

  “I’m careful, I’m careful.”

  “Do you want Thomas to ride along with you?”

  “I’m fine, Clive, don’t worry.”

  I don’t know if it’s the full moon or my music or something inside my head or someplace else, but I run to Riverside Park and keep running along the Hudson River as the sun sets and the sky gets darker and the lamplights cast a hazy yellow glow on the water. I start to get crazy thinking about things like when the American Indians were here before us and how they believed not in a separate God, but a godliness in the whole world, in the mountains and the rivers and the sky and in the plants and the animals, a kind of spiritual web that connected everyone and everything.

  All that makes me feel like I’m part of a bigger plan. Maybe it’s not exactly what the priest in our church says, but I can’t actually pinpoint the last time I was there anyway because, even though my mom prays on a daily basis, I don’t go anymore. I’m not sure why that is, but I think it has something to do with feeling that religion has let me down and hasn’t given me any right answers. Either that or I’m asking the wrong questions.

  I run and keep running and start to think about everything in my life, and then—flash—there’s Michael’s face and I remember exactly how he looks with his movie-star green eyes and thick dark lashes. And how he looked at me and how he kissed and tasted and how hot it felt to kiss him back and feel his lips on mine and be held in his arms, and I try to forget that because it’s over and hopeless and stupid, and I start running faster and then see a car slow down on the side of the drive and I watch it out of the corner of my eye even though it’s probably nothing, and I try to out run the memories and shake off the emotional whiplash, and pretend, pretend, pretend I’m getting over feeling what I’m feeling, but my brain is stronger than my heart. And it’s just not buying it.

  A figure gets out of the car and walks in a crouched-down way and crosses the highway, darting past cars going sixty that are honking at him like, what the fuck? He heads toward the running path, which is totally insane and suicidal, and I run faster and faster, and he crosses one lane and waits and then he’s almost near me when I hear an earsplitting crash and whine and wham of one car careening into another and then another and then—oh my god—the guy running toward me gets hit and his body goes shooting up into the air like a rocket. I scream and scream and can’t stop screaming and so does everyone else on the running track and I stand still, frozen, as the body drops to the ground and a car horn gets stuck and won’t stop beeping and it’s like a nuclear alarm to the world of something insane and out of control taking place, and inside my head somewhere I hear my dad’s voice screaming, “Run, Gia! Run away! Run for your life!”

  I turn and go the other way, my heart pounding like it’s been squeezed up into my mouth, and I don’t stop running, sweat covering me like a layer of oily rain. I keep going and going until I’m back at the other end of Manhattan, where I slow down and finally start to walk again.

  One foot. In front. Of. The other. My body trying to feel normal again, even though I doubt it ever will be because of the image of the crash and the body propelled toward the sky is now tattooed on my brain.

  FORTY-NINE

  The next day’s paper reports that a pedestrian was killed while attempting to cross the West Side Highway. There were conflicting reports from eyewitnesses as to whether he stepped out of a car or he came from the path along the river. There was no identification on the body, the paper said. No one could come up with any motives. There’s only a small picture, something that looks like it was taken by Weejee, the crime photographer from like the ’30s and ’40s who took lurid pictures of dead bodies at crime scenes.

  But the picture is enough for Anthony to recognize it.

  “Fucking Sal,” he says while he’s drinking coffee at breakfast. “Got what he deserved.”

  I don’t dare say anything because he’ll be furious at me for running alone along the river, but my heart registers panic.

  “Sal One-Eye? The one that Dad hated?”

  Anthony nods without looking up.

 
; They called him One-Eye because he lost an eye during a fight and wore an eye patch for the rest of his life. It always made me cringe to hear about him. Was Sal after me? Even with my father locked away in prison, were they still going after him by going after me?

  I vow that I’ll never go running alone after dark. Clive’s right. I should start a club, at least a running club, because there’s safety in numbers.

  All day at school I’m thinking about the day before and what could have happened and how stupid I was and if anyone knew, not that I’d tell, and somehow I get through the day, and even with my dad away and Michael out of my life forever and all the shit that enters your head at night, after running thirteen miles around the track at the health club because it’s brightly lit and safe but not much fun, I manage to sleep.

  Only after I hit the pillow all the craziness gets woven together in a patchwork of fantasies and the dream begins. I’ve decided to bring Michael home with me to meet my mom and Anthony. Ro thinks I’m insane.

  “He’s different,” I say.

  “He’s a cop,” Ro says.

  I invite him anyway.

  “You sure?” he says.

  I’m not sure of anything. “My mom will love you.”

  I invite him for Saturday dinner and the day before my mom is standing in the kitchen making manicotti when she turns to me. “Is the boy Italian?”

  The boy? “He’s not Italian.”

  She exhales and draws another breath. “Is he Catholic?” she asks, holding out her hands.

  “He’s Catholic, Ma.”

  She touches the crosses on her chest, like her prayers have been answered, at least some of them.

  We’re interrupted by a knock at the door. Michael’s standing there holding a bouquet of flowers. He holds them out to me, but I can tell this is weird for him. He doesn’t know how to act, but he smiles at my mom and his cop eyes scan the house.

  I panic that he’ll turn and run, insisting that it’s wrong and stupid and crazy, or worse, that he’ll go up to Anthony’s room and find grass or coke and change back from boyfriend to law enforcement officer again and bust my brother. But that’s not what happens.