This picture was taken less than twenty-four hours ago.
Eddie moves up next to my father and says, “Your girlfriend spent the day cooking up a serious deal with the feds. They took her to some operations center and apparently offered her the deal of her life. Any town, any job, any money. Isn’t that right, dear?”
I turn to Melody and she stares up at me, head shaking, mouth ajar, eyes filling. “Please, no, Jonathan.”
I’m looking at her but remembering Peter’s words to me on our last phone call, the relief I felt when Tommy left the Baltimore area: Whatever Tommy Fingers was trying to get or locate was achieved—not exactly sure what it is but Eddie Gravina’s anxious for Pop to have it—and he’s now on his way back to New York.
Peter chimes in: “Geez, Johnny, please tell me you did not discuss what this family does. Did she ask you about our family? Did she ask you to cough up information about our personal business?”
My memory serves up every instance where she probed me for information about my family; the recollections drift and stop in front of me like I’m being dealt a hand of cards. Though most obvious, her simple command—“Tell me the worst thing you can tell me”—was a demand I met with such ease, an offering surrendered with a harmony of heart and mind. I gave her everything she wanted. Worst of all: As I stare at her now, I have no choice but admit I was powerless all along, that no matter how I might rewrite this story, it would always end the same.
“No, Jonathan,” Melody pleads, “this isn’t right. They’re not right.”
But the pictures cannot be denied, their proof as convincing as a bloody shoeprint. Melody reaches up to try and claim my hand, tries to gain my attention, but my eyes are locked on the image again. I drop the picture to the floor, look at the next one: Melody in Sean’s arms, looking up at his face. Drop. Melody and Sean getting out of the black vehicle. Drop. “Souvenir,” I whisper. Melody being escorted into a larger black vehicle. Drop. “That was how you knew what a souvenir was.” The vehicle disappearing down an empty, dusty road. Drop.
I feel the collective weight of my family’s shame bearing down on me; I can barely breathe, yet the only regret I have is that Melody had not been genuine with me. I wanted her love so badly I would have lied to myself, to everyone, to get it. Turns out I lied in spite of it.
“Oh, God, Jonathan, no,” Melody says. “No. I didn’t make any deal! I—”
“How did you pull this off?” I ask. “I thought you were at the spa.” She becomes a blur as my eyes fill with tears. “I thought you were waiting for me.”
Her voice shakes. “I was. I was. They came and found me and took me to some place called Safesite. I was only gone for a couple hours. They wanted me to play you, they did, but I told them I wouldn’t do it!”
“Then why didn’t you tell me?”
Her head shakes like she’s nervous, like she’s saying no. It takes her too long to answer, and when she does: “I don’t know.”
Pop laughs so loud it startles me, turns to my family, and says, “She doesn’t know! She’s quick, this one.” Nervous smiles fill the room. He turns to Melody and says, “What you mean to say is you tricked my son into thinking you were at a spa all day, managed to sneak out with some federal agents for a bit, then slipped back in before he ever knew you were gone. And this didn’t seem shifty to you?”
Melody looks across the range of faces in the kitchen, gets a glimpse of her tenuous future from each and every one, different scenarios that all arrive at the same denouement. Her eyes land on my face last; they’re wet and red and dim with exhaustion. She shrugs and says softly, “I just… I—I don’t know why I didn’t say anything, Jonathan. We were living minute to minute and I didn’t…”
I toss the remaining pictures—all unviewed—on the floor; Peter bends down and picks them up, starts flipping through them and comparing each image to Melody, passes them along to the rest of the crowd.
I can’t convince myself that Melody had been disingenuous, that my interpretations of her words, of her touch, were anything but real. I don’t believe the way she kissed me and held me and looked at me were false; the intimacy between us that felt so practiced was anything but manifest. Yet my father is right: Her hatred for my family has to have been so severe that she could’ve acted her way through this, a performer taught to lie and deceive her entire life by the government, professionals whose careers are dedicated to the livelihood of people just like Melody.
I step back, lean against the wall. I got nothing. I am nowhere. I pray God helps me understand, to make sense of it all, to know.
Put it together. C’mon, map this out. What’s going on here?
Peter shakes his head, impales the silence with profuse profanity.
My father wipes his face over and over. Each guy in our crew groans as he fumbles with the pictures.
My father says, “All the days of planning, all the sleepless nights rife with worry, everything we did this week, every action perfectly executed, right to this moment we should be celebrating—and my own son takes everything and flushes it right down the frigging toilet.”
The fact that my father made that statement in front of Melody means there’s absolutely no chance of her seeing another sunset. She’s as good as buried.
C’mon. Map it out. What’s happening?
Melody grabs my arm, sinks her nails into it. Her crying becomes audible, her body jerks as she begins to plead: “Jonathan, please—I love you. I do.” My eyes fill again and I look down so no one can tell; whether her words are true or not, I want to believe them. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to protect you. I just want us to be happy.” When I do not drop my arm for her, she slowly pulls her hand away and wipes her eyes. She steps toward my family and yells, “You freaking people. I hate your frigging guts, every single one of you, can’t believe for a second I wanted your approval. All I ask is that you forgive me for making a mistake, for even talking to those pricks at Justice. Forgive me, okay? Yes, they’d been watching me and could tell I was getting close to Jonathan, and they promised me the moon if I’d try to get information from him, to trick him. It didn’t matter because I told them to screw off. I never told Jonathan about meeting with them and I am sorry. I don’t want to hurt any of you. Please, just forgive me!”
C’mon, c’mon, c’mon. Figure it out. God, please.
Melody drops to her knees and sits on her feet, becomes hysterical. “I mean, I forgive you for having murdered my parents, for ruining my entire life, for making me this wreck you see before you. Can’t you please, please, give me one more chance? I just want one chance!”
I narrow my eyes, study every face in the room. My father’s angry scowl is aimed at Melody; Peter looks at me, shaking his head the entire time; Gino and Jimmy and the rest of the crew look at me then close their eyes and turn away; the wives look at me with saddened eyes, mouth the words, “Oh, Johnny.”
But when my gaze lands on Eddie, he catches my stare for only a second before he quickly drops his eyes and looks down. I feel a heat rise up through my chest. I keep my eyes locked on him, will stay like this all day if I have to. He looks up, his eyes taking the long way around the room before he catches me staring at him, then drops his face again, fast.
“Please,” Melody begs one more time, “I promise I’ll never hurt any of you.”
Peter hands over the last picture to Gino, takes a step forward and says, “That sounds like the plea of a woman facing certain death.”
My father waves his hand downward a few times, sends a signal for Pete to relax.
I can’t stop looking at Eddie. He makes one final attempt to lift his head, but now he’s unable to look me in the eye at all.
Then the projections come into focus: Gardner could’ve never supplied this information to anyone in my family. Being the whiner he is, I’d have been made fully aware if more than one Bovaro was requesting information of him. Though more importantly, I know Gardner didn’t have access to this particular ki
nd of data—“no file information, just addresses”—so the insider information was being supplied from another source. Gravina is somehow involved, and the fact that he can’t look at me implies the story is more complex than anyone here comprehends; I’ve known Eddie for years, and if he were simply reporting evidence, he’d have the same look on his face as the rest of my family. Some deeper betrayal exists that I do not yet understand.
The amount of adrenaline running through my veins makes it nearly impossible to keep from outing Gravina right now, forcing him into a corner to make him play his hand, to get to the real details behind how he’d know where Melody was and why no one thought to mention it to me prior to this moment. I’d volunteer to help my brothers dig the hole that would soon house him—but the outcome would not change Melody’s own future: dead and buried right next to Eddie.
I promised Melody I would keep her safe, that I would do whatever needs to be done to protect her. To keep that promise, there’s only one play I can make, only one that matters: Get Melody out of this house. Now.
Melody looks up, holds her breath, fights the tears.
My father glances at Peter, walks to the stockpot on the stove, gives his sauce a stir with a wooden spoon. Then, to no one in particular, “Take care of her.”
Peter steps up to bat, but Melody tips my way and grabs my leg and looks up at me, tells me she loves me like it’s the last thing she might ever say, uses her final words to assure me that no matter what this looks like, her feelings were genuine, that she wants me to know it was all true. I give Gravina one final glance, and with him still looking away, his line of vision ending at his shoelaces, I believe Melody.
I will never doubt her again.
Pop puts the lid back on the gravy. “Take care of it, Johnny, okay? Enough is enough. We’ve let you play this game for years.” He walks my way, says in a tone that none of us would mistake for anything but genuine sincerity, “No more.” As Melody clings to my leg, I hope somehow he sees the little girl, the child I brought home for them to meet. How could he look at this innocent woman and want her dead? How does someone’s sense of humanity devolve this far? I pray he sees it, understands, and agrees. He looks down at Melody, watches her breathe hard against my leg and suffer at our hand one final time, sees her get to live the nightmare from which she spent a lifetime running. And as he tilts his head and stares at her, for a few seconds I think he might see it, he might understand what I was trying to do, he might see the virtue, the beauty, the perfection in who she is. But then his expression turns to one of slight contentment, and my last thread of hope falls from the frayed end, drifts through the air, and vanishes. He turns to me and stares me down and says, “Put. A bullet. In the bitch.”
Though I hear the words, I cannot fathom them, cannot comprehend how he could ask this of me. He has created a finality, has officially calcified my softer life of tiptoeing around the darker crimes and keeping away from the blood spatter. His words are the mortar binding the bricks in the new wall between us. I am no longer one of them, no longer know who they are. I am a stranger in my own home.
I wipe the moisture from my eyes, know that if I display the slightest hesitation, that if I do not play the part of an infuriated, determined killer, she will be put to rest by a more seasoned member of our crew. So I must become the actor, must hurt Melody in a way that convinces not only my family, but her as well.
And now the most difficult moment of my life: As Melody looks up at me with her tear-soaked face and says, “Please, Jonathan, I love you,” I reach down and grab her arm and twist it, yank her up to her feet, then slam her against the wall. She squeaks as her back hits the edge of the doorframe. I feel like I’m going to vomit as she crumples to the floor and covers her face, overwhelmed by how many times she’s been failed in this life, how she interprets my betrayal now as one more failure. As I lift her back up only to slam her into the corner of the room, I have to tell myself I am saving her life.
“Come here,” I say, as I grunt and grab her by her other arm and haul her to the door. She lets her body fall limp, feels like I’m dragging her already dead body. My family watches the spectacle like a boring rerun. My objective is that they view my actions as determination, though the people I need to convince most are my father and Peter. As far as Gravina goes, I’ll one day release the pressure from my newfound self-discipline and self-control upon him, make it last for hours.
I open the front door of the Tudor so fast and hard it slams against an antique coat rack, sends it to the floor in slow motion. I yank Melody to the Audi; she stumbles and falls the entire way. I open the passenger door and shove her inside, run around and hop in, lock the doors.
As I start the engine, I say, “Geez, Melody, I hope I didn’t hurt you.”
I back out of the driveway, whip the car around in the middle of the road, and fly down the neighborhood streets at twice the speed as when we drove in. Melody rubs her shoulder, tries to collect her thoughts.
“I’m so sorry, Melody.” I ignore all the stop signs, pass idle cars. “Are you all right?”
She turns and looks at me, holds on to the door grip with all her strength, wipes the moisture from her face with her other hand. “I’m okay, I… think. Wait, you’re… you’re not mad?”
I wave my hand at her. “Look, here’s what we’re up against: If I didn’t convincingly act out the part of the livid mafioso back there, they’re going to send someone after us, make sure I close the deal.”
“Kill me?”
“Yes. I don’t have the greatest track record, if you recall. And being the guy who thought it was a clever idea to keep Morrison alive, they aren’t going to let this slide unless I really appeared like I was going to take you out.”
She swallows, hard. “But you’re not going to kill me?”
Despite our need for escape, I turn and look at her, pull my foot off the gas. “Melody, it’s hard to admit, but I love you. And I promised I would never hurt you—never. Do you remember? I promised you that when we first met.”
“Yeah,” she says, rubbing her shoulder again as if to imply, Well, this kinda hurt. She smiles and says, “But that was only, like, three days ago.”
I turn back to the road and accelerate. “Yeah, well, it’s a promise I’ve been keeping for twenty years.”
She stops rubbing her wounds, stares at me.
“Look,” I say, “I don’t know how or why you met with the feds or how you managed to get to their operations center, but I know in my heart you love me.” She doesn’t respond. “Right?”
She reaches over and touches my knee, and as she is about to say something, I catch a glimpse of a familiar shape in my rearview mirror. I shake my head and say, “Predictable.”
“What?”
“Guess I’m not taking home the Oscar. It’s Peter.”
If my father’s insistence that I take Melody’s life was mortar between the bricks, Peter’s tailing us is the wall’s capstone. Their reluctant tolerance of my defiance over the years, my loose rebellion and incapacity to conform to the full Bovaro stature, has come to a close. Only time will tell if they’ve lost their love for me, but for these it is now too late: They have lost their faith, and they have lost their trust.
Everyone has made their choice.
I know what was running through my father’s mind: We’ve come too far, worked too hard to get through this nightmare to have one loose end get pulled and start the unraveling process. Peter begins closing in, speeds up the road in his massive black Chevy.
“I’m never gonna outrun him with that monster engine he’s got.” Melody turns around, watches the black mass fast approaching. “Though we do have one advantage.” I check my rearview again, see him whip around a Honda, the body of his car tipping as he sweeps back into our lane. “We can outmaneuver him.”
I quickly turn down a side road, drop the car from sixth to fourth and begin passing cars, take turns at speeds I know Peter could never replicate, would have him flippi
ng the massive sedan off the street and into some suburban front yard.
Melody grips the door with both hands as we cross over a series of small hills, become airborne with each crest. Peter begins to fade as he slows on the turns behind us, pulls to the left each time he comes over a hill.
Peter and I both know these side roads well, have traveled them countless times, can anticipate every twist and turn, every unfilled pothole and blind corner—which means he knows where I’m heading: the Palisades Parkway.
As we hit a mile-long stretch of bends closely lined by century-old oaks, he’s all but vanished.
By the time I get to the Palisades, he can’t be seen. I drive so far above the speed limit that we’re passing cars like they’re static randomly broken-down objects in the lanes of the freeway. I care not about the other motorists, about cops, about careening across three lanes at a time; I care only about escape.
We get right back off the Palisades, hop on the New Jersey Turnpike driving south. Peter has disappeared; we’ve officially lost him.
We slow to the speed of traffic, about seventy, and try to merge into the masses, to blend. I stare ahead and begin trying to formulate a plan.
“Now what?” Melody asks.
I keep driving, keep staring: This is the exact reason emotion had no business influencing the course of her rescue plan.
“Now what?” she tries again.
The Exceptions Page 31
