The Girl She Used to Be

by David Cristofano

  “Really?” He swirls a yolk around his plate with a fork.

  “Hey,” I say, annoyed at his disinterest, “you’ve got a big green thing in your teeth.”

  He keeps swirling. “Okay.”

  I sigh and wait for him to realize I’m relatively pissed. I get nothing. “Wanna talk about it?”

  “About what?”

  “The doom that is clearly emanating from your entire presence here.”

  He puts his fork down, takes off his glasses, and pinches his eyes. Then he reaches into his pocket for his Nicorette. He shakes the box up and down but there is no rattle of relief. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” He rips the thing apart, verifying there are no pieces left, then narrows his eyes at it like he’s trying to destroy it by way of some occult power. Suddenly, he slams the box on the table and starts stabbing it with his spoon.

  I just watch and say, “I find this… disconcerting.”

  He drops the spoon and it bounces on the brick patio a few times and everyone is staring at us. Again.

  Jonathan buries his face in his hands and says, “I’m sorry.”

  I reach over, pull his hands away, and force him to look at me.

  “I just…” he says, “I just wish it could be easier. For you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your entire life has been ruined by my family. You’ve been deprived of a normal existence because my family refused to break from our world of crime and find a way to become upstanding citizens. And now… now, here I am, asking you to face the people who wrecked your life—who had your parents killed—so that they will, God willing, cut you some slack and let you live in peace. Here I am asking you to trust me and my cockamamie plan.”

  I take his hand in mine and tighten my grip. “First of all, I totally trust any man who can use the word cockamamie in a sentence with complete seriousness. Second, I agreed to your plan because, well… I really had no place left to go; it was either this or death.” I squeeze his hand as tightly as I can. “But most importantly, I’ve come to trust you, Jonathan. And I know that you’ll take care of me. I truly believe it—and no one could be more amazed at that than I am. The last few days, however many hours it’s been, have been the greatest of my life. I feel like the person I was born to be—meant to be—is waking for the first time and I have you to thank for it. And if God had this difficult life planned for me just so that I could find you and be with you here, now, then it was worth every minute of misery.”

  Jonathan shakes his head and looks away. “Don’t say that.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not a good man, Melody. Don’t settle for me.”

  “What do you mean? Everyone has flaws, Jonathan.”

  “Felony-level flaws? Mine are more extreme than most, you know? I mean, what will become of us?”

  I tug him a little to my side of the table. “We’ll figure that out as we go, okay?”

  Jonathan sighs, then stares at me. “I’m sorry, Melody. I only want the best for you.”

  “Don’t you see?” I slide my chair around to his side of the table and put my hand on his leg and say, “This is the best.”

  FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE I’VE MET JONATHAN, HE IS RESERVED and quiet and dark. We do not speak much for the remainder of our meal, nor during the walk back to the hotel. We remain close, holding hands and the like, though the purpose of his grip points toward pulling me away to safety at any moment, but the words have all but disappeared.

  We pack our things (all of my clothes go in his bag) and return to the lobby, where Jonathan disperses random bills and things happen with speed and attention.

  We make our way outside and the sun shines hard on the side entrance, where we wait for the Audi to be delivered from the underground garage. The valet pulls the car in front of us and has already put the top down, adjusted the interior car temperature, and turned on the radio; I guess this is part of the service. Jonathan slips him a twenty, opens the door for me, and helps me in, then gets in on his side and immediately undoes everything the valet set.

  We fly through the city streets; the lights remain green for us as though they understand the urgency of our mission. As we exit the downtown area, we are delivered into a dizzying mixing bowl of beam bridges and trestles that could only have been developed as a response to repeated population spikes. I try to imagine the math required to make this scene a success, and realize, for the first time, that while math can solve everything, it demands a creative mind to make it useful. The understanding of what makes these bridges exist and work—the compression, the tension, the torsion were all contrived by a creative engineer or architect—was then cycled through mathematics to make it real.

  All my life I’ve been lacking the vision. Jonathan, you see, is my engineer, my architect.

  Within one minute we are booming out of the city on an exit ramp elevated two hundred feet above the water and we are heading north on I-95 and it is now only a matter of time.

  Before we are out of time.

  Once we’re through the Fort McHenry Tunnel and on a stretch of highway free of traffic, Jonathan grabs his CD case and selects a disc by Death Cab for Cutie titled Plans—as dimly entertaining as my choice of the Killers disc days earlier. He pushes it in the player and the mellow music drifts around the interior of the car and he reaches over and rests his hand on my thigh and says, “Three and a half hours and you’ll be in the presence of the Bovaro clan.”

  I gently place my hand on his and ask, “So what do I need to know?”

  He turns to me and sighs, throws the car into sixth gear, and punches the accelerator.

  White Marsh, Maryland, 91 m.p.h.

  “My brothers,” Jonathan says, “all live in New York, one of them still at home. I’m the third of four, and the most independent. I’m the only one who reads literature; my brothers think reading is noticing the ads for Dewar’s and Tecate in between the pictorials. Let me give you some background…”

  • • •

  Elkton, Maryland, 88 m.p.h.

  “Jimmy is the youngest and a bit of a stooge to his older brothers. He’ll do what they say and has made no real effort to understand what our family does or why we do it. I love my little brother, but he’s a total slob—and a caricature of a Mafia member. He’s got the thick black hair, magnified New York accent, is overweight, and always has some kind of food in his hand, like a cannoli or a Twinkie. He’s muscle and not much more…”

  Brookside, Delaware, 82 m.p.h.

  “Gino is two years older than me, and probably the closest to being as sane as I am. He’s smarter than the rest of us. But he weakens under pressure from my father and will do whatever he says—or whatever any of my father’s associates say—to stay in his favor…”

  Swedesboro, New Jersey, 76 m.p.h.

  “Now, Peter… he’s the oldest. And the cockiest. And the most vicious. And the most antisocial. And the best looking. Frigging Frank Sinatra with a boxer’s build and the mind of a crook. He’s a real bastard. He’s the quintessential mob leader, and he quite obviously wants to take over for my father when he’s gone. He sees everything my family does as his legacy but fails to realize that it actually takes a lot of smarts and a lot of self-control to succeed the way my family has—and he has neither. If he weren’t my brother he’d be my nemesis…”

  Cherry Hill, New Jersey, 69 m.p.h.

  “My brothers’ spouses? Peter is not married and does not seem to show any side that might be even remotely interested in carrying on a relationship beyond the two or three minutes it takes him to gain some sort of physical pleasure. As for Gino and Jimmy? Their spouses would be Connie and Roberta, respectively. Cosmetologists, gossips, gaining weight by the day. But they’d take you out if you ever disparaged their husbands, regardless of the horrible things their husbands do on a daily basis…”

  Trenton, New Jersey, 65 m.p.h.

  “As for my mother,” he says, then hesitates.

  This is a telling moment,
because there is something about men and their mothers—and I imagine it must only intensify within a Mafia family.

  Finally, he says, “She died last year.”

  I’m glad I didn’t make a joke.

  “Long story short, she had aggressive ovarian cancer, eventually making its way to her lymph nodes, and she was gone in a matter of weeks.”

  Jonathan stares forward, not necessarily watching the highway as much as blanking out, merely trailing the car in front of him.

  “What a life she had,” he says eventually. “The wife of a mob boss, raised four boys into men, threatened countless times, raped once, then died a painful and miserable death.” He sniffs a little but is not tearful. “You can look back and say, ‘Why me? Why have my family and I been forced to deal with such misery?’ But… the truth is we all know why.” He turns and looks at me and says, “No one deserves it more.”

  Rossmoor, New Jersey, 63 m.p.h.

  “And then, of course, there’s my father, a man who’s probably done everything wrong in his life, who’s entered virtually every aspect of crime considered by man since day one. And other than maintaining a faithful marriage to my mother, I’d say he broke the other nine commandments on a regular basis for the vast majority of his life. All this is true about him, yet I cannot help but love and respect him.

  “He is still, even in his older years, someone who is feared, not only by the public and by his peers, but by his sons, which is why most of us cave in to his every request. That and the fact that he’s managed to be a successful criminal for almost five decades—and you can count on one hand how many people have been able to pull that off…”

  East Brunswick, New Jersey, 60 m.p.h.

  “You may get to visit some of my extended family, which really amounts to cousins and outside associates and, to be honest, it gets kind of hard to tell the difference. Everyone beyond my immediate family gets grouped into this olive-skinned mess of psychological problems.”

  I close my eyes and inquire casually, like I’m asking for a tissue, “Will your cousin who killed my parents be there?”

  He glances at me briefly, then answers, “Uh, no. He was killed a few years ago.” He points to his neck. “Bullet right through the throat, choked on his own blood for a long time before someone found him.”

  I am neither unhappy nor disgusted in the slightest.

  “You know who found him? Peter. And he let him die right there in an alley in Midtown Manhattan.”

  I grimace. “Why?”

  “Well, uh… it’s kind of complicated, but we let him get killed. It was payback for a mistake we made against another family. The whole thing is sort of ridiculous.”

  “Sort of.”

  “Look, I don’t make these asinine rules, and I certainly don’t like playing by them, but we’re talking about life or death here.”

  “Well, I can’t say I’m sorry he’s dead.”

  “You shouldn’t be. But the truth is, he just pulled the trigger. My cousin really had no more stake in the murder of your parents than the bullets that killed them. All he did was follow orders.”

  I scowl; I’m furious that the man responsible is still alive. If I wasn’t taken with romantic emotion and a vague sense of a hopeful end to all this, I’d be seething with rage, focused on violent retaliation. “Whose orders?”

  Jonathan shrugs and sighs at the same time. “My father’s.”

  Bayway, New Jersey, 58 m.p.h.

  While Jonathan has been in a slow deceleration for almost three hours, I’m confused as to why he’s not slowing down more abruptly, putting on his blinker and moving toward the exit.

  He passes right by the exit for the Staten Island Expressway.

  “I’m not the greatest with New York geography, but wouldn’t that have been the shortest way to get to Brooklyn?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  I look at him like he might be denser than his little brother. “Doesn’t your family live in Brooklyn?”

  He frowns a little and says, “When did I say that? I live in Brooklyn but my family lives in Tenafly.”

  I twist in my seat. “Tenafly?”

  “It’s in New Jersey, just north of the George Washington Bridge.”

  “I know where it is. Tenafly is barely twenty miles from where I lived before my parents and I went into Witness Protection. You kept saying we were going to New York.”

  “Melody, my family’s house is, like, a mile and a half from the Hudson.”

  I’m all befuddled. I was expecting an old brownstone full of thugs in dark clothes with five-o’clock shadows; now I’m envisioning an English Tudor and golf clubs and comfy slippers. “You never said Tenafly. I’m certain you said Brooklyn. I mean, geez, Jonathan, a New Jersey address would’ve stuck in my head.”

  “Well, my folks grew up in Brooklyn. Maybe that’s where you got it from. Or maybe because you called my father’s business line in Brooklyn. Or maybe we just got our signals crossed.” Jonathan looks at me and laughs and says, “I mean, we’ve only been together for a couple days.”

  His words echo through my head, on and on, and his laugh makes them all the more poignant. He’s right; we’ve only known each other a few days. So what in the name of all that is holy am I doing? Who is this guy? Why am I in this car, right now, right here?

  I throw up.

  “Whoa! Are you okay?” Jonathan carefully navigates the Audi to the shoulder and rests his hand on my back and tells me to relax, which is pretty admirable.

  This is not just saliva.

  Newark, New Jersey, 95 m.p.h.

  Regardless of what was causing Jonathan to slow the journey to his family’s house—fear, nerves, anxiety—there is a new motivator getting us moving: a stench. We roll down the windows but the scent coming back in as we progress closer to the Meadowlands is almost as offensive.

  Jonathan, ever creative, reaches behind his seat and finds a half-consumed bottle of Coke and hands it to me. “Shake this up and cover the mess with it. If it works on dissolving battery acid, it should work on stomach acid.” I glance his way. “Don’t ask.”

  I take the bottle, shake it, and spray it all over the floor mat. We wait a few moments as Jonathan continues his hearty pace. The Coke seems to work, but not enough.

  He points to the mat and says, “Pick it up and toss it out the window.”

  “What? You’re joking. I’m not going to litter!”

  “Look around you, Melody. We’re in the armpit of the Garden State.”

  He’s right; it would be hard to notice a floor mat amongst the mattresses and blown-out retreads.

  He slows down and pulls to the shoulder, and out it goes. No one notices or cares.

  “That’s one bad scent down,” I say. He looks at me and I point to my mouth.

  He reaches over and pops the glove compartment and two unopened boxes of Nicorette drop to the floor. I open a box and give each of us a piece.

  “I’ll take two,” he says. I deliver. “Actually, make that three.”

  I take three myself, because I’m not paying attention to dosage and Jonathan is too busy swerving around cars to notice what I’m doing. The gum is minty—FreshMint, to be specific—and the cool flavor coats my mouth and cleanses my palate. Then the nicotine kicks in and, considering I’ve never placed a cigarette to my lips, the sensation, the relaxed and calm feeling, makes me consider starting the addiction should I survive the afternoon.

  The Manhattan skyline approaches and fades over my shoulder.

  Englewood, New Jersey, 75 m.p.h.

  Everything has cooled: the air, the road, Jonathan, me. The images on the side of the road become soothing, a blend of suburbia and opulence; it’s hard to imagine real criminals living in a place like this.

  I’ve developed such a skill for lying that sometimes I even believe myself.

  Jonathan reduces his speed and the clicks of the concrete seams under the wheels are like a love song fading out, readying me for the next track.

&
nbsp; Jonathan keeps stealing glances of me and telling me (and himself) that everything is going to be fine.

  Tenafly, New Jersey, 15 m.p.h.

  As though I’d had some sort of vision, the neighborhood is just as I’d imagined. We drive past the strip malls, the Pathmark, the small businesses and mom-and-pop stores that somehow managed to survive despite the Wal-Mart a few miles away in Saddle Brook.

  We twist through a series of crumbling streets, where the trees get taller and the houses get older—and larger.

  And, as if on cue, Jonathan turns onto a curved driveway leading up to a brick-and-stone Tudor that sits inside an acre of ancient oaks and maples, a beautiful home that has clearly not seen a woman’s touch in some time. Though the lawn is well manicured, the trees and bushes have started to engulf the house. It is just the kind of place you’d envision might be full of creaky wood floors, high ceilings and cross beams, and smoke-stained fireplaces.

  The driveway is long, with a string of vehicles parked on it, all large, all American, each with seating for eight—if you include the trunk. Jonathan’s red Audi sticks out like a pimple on an otherwise blemish-free strip of asphalt.

  We sit in the car and face the house. Jonathan leaves the engine running.

  “Looks like everyone’s here,” he says.

  I take a deep breath and let it out slowly, quietly. “What did you use as an excuse to get everyone together?”

  “I didn’t really have to make an excuse,” he says. “It’s Sunday.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “My family usually gets together for a big meal here. My dad, he, uh… he likes to cook. It seems to have a calming effect, so we give him a lot of latitude.” He shrugs a little. “It was a long-standing tradition when my mom was still alive, and I think we all want to see it continue… you know, to honor her, I guess.”

  We both stare ahead, eyes locked on the house.

  “You know, you guys sound so normal sometimes,” I eventually say. “That is just the thing I would’ve loved as a kid, and especially now—a family to spend Sundays with. Even just a family would be nice.” I swallow and hesitate to ask my question because it’s going to sound silly. “You think, um… your family might accept me? I mean, into the family?”