by Marco Rafalà
Sam brought his cupped hand up out of the water, and the water rushed through his fingers and mixed back into the sea. Crests sparkled in the sun. Far out, at the curve of the Earth, the sea touched the sky. Out here life became infinite, measured in starlight. My chest tightened as if my lungs were fuller than they’d ever been before.
22
We sailed through the Thimble Islands, passing a motorboat full of tourists. They waved at us. Snatches of their guide’s narration carried over the loudspeaker: “Adriaen Block discovered the archipelago in 1614 . . . They were named after a fruit, the thimbleberry . . . Locals nicknamed Wheeler Island, Ghost Island.” And then we were out of earshot. When I turned back to look over my shoulder, I saw a forlorn house on its own lonely isle—little more than a rocky perch—and I understood why the locals had given Wheeler that nickname.
“Captain Kidd had a hidden harbor here,” Sam said. He sat down next to me.
Sam’s father pointed off into the distance. “His cove will be over there once we clear Governor Island,” he said. And he guided me through labyrinthine waterways, and said the name of each island we passed. He spoke as if the water held their names and stories in its swells, written there by the wind. Stories of Captain Kidd’s treasure buried on Money Island during his mad dash to outrun the British navy in the 1600s, and Little Miss Emily, the P. T. Barnum circus performer, whose love affair with General Tom Thumb in the 1800s was somewhere still inscribed on the granite of Cut-in-Two Island.
Seagulls hovered over the water, sinking and rising on currents of air. Waves rolled against the hull, sails rippled in the breeze. The music of the ocean. The siren song of the edge of the world. I imagined myself way out at sea with Em and her smoky Eye of Horus makeup. We’d sail the void, set our course by the silver cords that tied the constellations and stories together. Like stars, we’d rise and sink with the speckled gulls and dapple the water with our light.
Back at the B&B, Sam and I washed the dinner dishes. Then we sat at the table on the flatbed truck his father used as a porch for the converted garage. Sam had just finished tuning his guitar when the phone rang. He leapt up from his seat, handed me the guitar, and ran inside yelling, “I got it!” I hunched over the instrument, craned my neck toward my fingers on the fret board. I formed a D chord, the way Sam had shown me, and the steel strings dug deep into the pads of my fingertips.
“That was Jamie,” Sam said. The screen door slammed shut behind him. “Em got drafted into babysitting her little brother tonight. Jamie’s over there now keeping her company. But they totally want to hang out next time you visit.” Sam took the guitar and sat back down. “Check this out.” He strummed the opening chords to a song.
“What is that?”
“‘Boys Don’t Cry.’”
“It is? Let me hear it again.”
He started over, playing the chord progression twice. It sounded nothing like the song until Sam began singing the first verse, off key, and even then, it didn’t sound much like “Boys Don’t Cry” at all. I didn’t have the heart to tell Sam. He was in a fantasy all his own—eyes closed, foot tapping and head swaying out of time—and it made this world, his divided home, unreal to him.
I knew what it was like to have that fantasy crushed. Tomorrow, when Sam went home, his mother would greet him at the door and pepper him with questions about his weekend. Tomorrow, when I went home, I’d want to talk to a mother I knew wasn’t there, whose voice I couldn’t even remember—my mother and her stars on the ceiling of my bedroom. I wanted to tell her about my weekend. I wanted to tell her about Em. Tomorrow, I would go back home, but for now I needed to pretend that I was never leaving.
“That’s really good,” I said. “Did you figure that out by yourself?”
Sam grinned. “I’ve been practicing all week.”
The sun smoldered at the rim of the world, slipping further below the horizon. A dusky brown-and-orange sky hung over everything.
The rain began around three in the morning. Droplets pattered against the house and the leaves of the trees. Soon, a downpour drummed the roof and driveway. By five o’clock, the trees outside Sam’s window swayed and bent in gusts. Branches creaked against the side of the house.
At the first thunderclap, the windowpane rattled. I pulled on jeans and sneakers and went outside. Flashes of sheet lightning made lavender flashes of twilight. Rain sprayed onto the front porch like mist over sailboat railings. The wind howled. Lightning flashed inside a charcoal billow of clouds, and then the sky went dark again. Thunder broke.
“What are you doing?” Sam said behind me.
“Watching the storm.”
He looked up at the porch ceiling as thunder rumbled overhead. “You can work out how far away it is,” he said, “by counting the seconds between the thunder and lightning.”
I leaned against the wooden railing, tipped my head into the rain, and lifted my feet from the floorboards. Teetering there like a seesaw, I waited for the charge of electricity, and then counted for the thunderclap. “This one’s getting close,” I said. My arms trembled. They were getting tired from balancing my weight on the slippery rail. “I wish we didn’t have to leave.” My feet set down with a thud. I jumped the three steps to the sidewalk and said, “You coming?” Then I ran off across the lawn with Sam’s footsteps splashing behind. I stopped against a tree, leaned into its bark, and waited for him. The Long Island Sound showed in a flash of light. Thunder rolled overhead.
Sam called out.
“Catch up,” I said. Then I scrabbled over granite boulders and loose rocks, down to the beach and into the water up to my ankles.
In the distance, anchored boats swayed on their spines—port, then starboard. A jagged line of lightning streaked and split into branches near the horizon. White foam waves crashed in around me. The lights of the islands flickered across the choppy water. Residents stayed shuttered inside their homes, waiting it out. Maybe they watched the storm through window slats, the way Sicilian families did in the war. Maybe in the hours after the Allied invasion began, the wartime skies looked like this. My father had run halfway around the world to try to escape that war and this sky, and even he could not break free. He saw an explosion so bright, the remnant of that light in our skies might never extinguish. He tried outrunning it, but there is weight in light as well as heat, and he burned, caught up in it.
“You shouldn’t be in the water,” Sam said. “Not with the lightning.”
Breaking waves surged up the beach. Knee-high walls of crashing foam and water knocked me back a step and then seized my legs in retreat. Stones and barnacles tumbled into the sea, ammunition for the fight, for when the sea came back at me again. Shells and pebbles pelted my feet. My blue jeans stuck to me. They were heavy from being wet. Lightning flashed and a ground-shaking thunderpeal broke overhead. A larger wave struck me in a thunderous, spraying crash and knocked me down into the sand. The water washed over me. It receded into white foam crests out to the horizon and left me with the taste of sea salt in my mouth and the feel of the sea—thick and briny—in my lungs.
23
Low, heavy clouds covered the morning sky out to the horizon. After lunch, we packed our bags and loaded them into Sam’s father’s pickup. Tires turned over wet asphalt. Windshield wipers squished and chattered in time with the rain pattering against the truck. I felt small and heavy. Smaller and heavier with each mile marker we passed. We pulled off Route 9, into downtown Middletown, and turned down my street. Father Salafia stood on my front porch. He opened his black umbrella, hurried down the steps. His shoes splashed in the puddles pooling on the sidewalk. I felt like one of those pebbles on the beach worn smooth by tidewaters. Pick me up, I thought, give me a good sidearm toss, and skip me across the waves.
My father sat on the tattered flower-print couch in the living room, his face drawn and tired. The checkerboard on the tray table set up for a game. He had brought out a wooden bowl of walnuts and an empty dish for the shells that he cracked
in his fist. When I walked through the door, he pulled the ladder-back chair out for me. “You all right?”
I kicked off my soaking-wet sneakers and dropped my backpack in the front hall. “Fine,” I said. “I’m black?”
“Eh, sure,” my father said. He pointed at the red pieces in front of him.
We played checkers.
“Tomorrow night at your confirmation rehearsal,” my father said, “you say sorry to Morello’s boy.” His voice didn’t have any kick in it, like he didn’t mean what he was saying.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Why?”
My father jumped his red piece over one of my black ones, removing it from the board. Then he placed my captured man crown side down on the tray table and said, “Doesn’t matter why. I’m your papà. You do what I say. There is no why.”
I studied the board. My father had forced me into a move that would give him a king on his next turn from a triple-jump play. He waited for me to move. My weekend stretched out behind me. A smudge of light in the dark.
That night, I sat on the floor at the windowsill in my bedroom with the light turned off. The rain marbled the windowpane, framing the outlines of the shed, garden, and wire fence in thick brushstrokes running down the glass. The pink cloud of the mimosa tree in bloom, a halo of color against all shades of darkness.
My father slept in the adjacent room, his back curled to the place where my mother would be if she were with him. I used to sleep there, after she died, every time it stormed. That frightened and shivering boy molded against the curve of his father’s back. His forehead nuzzled in the dip where neck meets shoulders. The little hairs there tickled his nose. Big boy like you, my father used to say under his breath. I wasn’t the boy he’d hoped for, this son who slept with his father during thunderstorms. But still he indulged me. And I understood how my father could love the stranger I had made out of his son.
I took the festival bulletin from my desk and opened it to my mother’s picture. In the wan storm light, I could just make out her features. Her skin, pale like a ghost’s, pale like mine. I had my mother’s skin. My hair was coal black from my father. He had said life was like this—a raised fist. I had broken Tony’s nose with mine. I thought that’s what my father wanted.
Vincenzo once told me that my mother’s red hair would come later, when I became a man. In my beard I’d see her, highlights among my father’s sooty scruff. I wanted those highlights to come. I wanted to see the red brightening up all that coarse black hair.
24
Monday, by midafternoon, the rain had stopped but the sky did not clear. After school, Sam and I hung out at Record Express on Main Street. Spleen and Ideal by Dead Can Dance played on the store stereo. This was what empty church pews sounded like when no one was around to sit in them and make them creak. It was a cold sound, a sound for snowflakes. It demanded nothing, but you gave it reverence anyway.
Sam held The Cure’s single compilation, Standing on a Beach, up to his face so that the album art of an old fisherman’s large craggy face replaced his own. “You reckon we’re old enough to watch for Halley’s Comet yet?” he said, in imitation of an elderly man’s voice.
When I didn’t answer, Sam lowered the album and tucked it under his left arm. “What’s up with you? You’ve been down all day.” He pushed his blue-streaked bangs out of his eyes. From a freestanding display, he handed me a cassette in its long plastic security case. Black Celebration by Depeche Mode. “This is killer,” he said. “I’m getting this for you. This’ll cheer you up.”
“I still don’t have a tape deck.”
He put his hand on my shoulder. “Dude, that is sacrilege what you just said. I’ve got divorce-guilt cash from my dad to burn, so let’s fix this right now.” He walked up the aisle toward the front counter.
“You don’t have to do that,” I said.
He spun around, walking backward, all cool and grinning. “I know.”
Sam bought the two LPs for himself and the cassette for me, along with a silver-and-black portable tape player. “I still got five bucks left and some time to kill,” he said. “What do you want to do, paisanu?” He handed me the plastic bag with my gifts inside.
Cry, I thought—but the words that came out of my mouth were cold words. “Italian ice.”
At Vecchitto’s, we both got the same flavors we’d had at the festival—almond for me and lemon for Sam. He staked out a spot at the table by the window and started planning our next trip to Stony Creek. I’d come out for a week in July when he spent the month at his father’s place. Sam leaned forward on his elbows, legs bouncing up and down on the toes of his sneakers, and mapped out our summer. He narrated it like an adventure film serial, our sequel to Butterfield. The film promised more Wesleyan tunnel expeditions and Foss Hill nights before Sam left. It detailed our week together in Stony Creek, out on the water and on the beach with Em and Jamie. We’d form a band together, Cog and Pearl, with Sam on guitar and me as the enigmatic front man.
Beyond the train tracks and Route 9, the Harbor Park pavilion sat at the elbow of the Connecticut River. The river caught the pewter light of clouds and held it, a mirror for this overcast day. Silent and cold, the silver ribbon of water emptied into the Long Island Sound. It passed long-lost names and hearts etched in stones on its rocky beaches.
“So, Em,” Sam said. He kicked me under the table. “She really likes you.”
I shrugged as if to say, with a question, I guess. Then I ate my almond ice fast for the icy shock of brain freeze. Sam had unspooled a thread for me to follow—a way out of this labyrinth—and I held on to it even as I knew our Ray Harryhausen days couldn’t last. Nothing did. “How long do you think it takes for a broken arm to heal?”
“I don’t know, a month, maybe six weeks.” Sam looked up at the tin ceiling and checked his mental calendar. “I’ll be gone by then at my dad’s, the whole month. Dude, I didn’t even think about that.” He reached across the table and put his hand on my shoulder. “Why don’t you come with me?”
“A whole month? My father would never go for that.”
“What’re you going to do?”
“Hit the troll until he stays down. What choice do I have?”
“Tell someone. Tell your dad.”
I checked the time on the clock over the counter. “I have to go,” I said. “My father and the priest are making me apologize to Tony tonight. In their minds—” I mimed washing my hands. “Problem solved.”
A fleece of clouds spun out west. The skies clearing where the sun would set. The sun burning a clear path to its rest. My father and Vincenzo should’ve been at work, but they were arguing in the kitchen when I came home. Their voices carried through the screen door to the back porch.
“You can’t make him do this, Sal. No way. No godson of mine should have to ask forgiveness from that stronzo.”
“That old crow knows how to call a man on his debts.” My father’s voice dropped in volume. I put my ear to the screen. The porch creaked under my feet. “David,” he called out to me. “Stop listening and come in here.”
The back door wheezed as I pulled it open. Vincenzo leaned against the doorframe to the front hall, arms crossed. My father pressed his palms to the countertop like he was trying to crush it. He stared down into the yellow laminate. “You remember what I told you last night?”
“Come on, Sal,” Vincenzo said. “Don’t make him do this. Let me talk to the priest again.”
My father banged his fist on the counter. “Basta! Stay out of this, Enzo. He will apologize and then he will get confirmed and that will be the end of it.”
“For Christ’s sake, Sal. Not a day goes by that rotten Morello kid hasn’t sent our boy a note promising to hurt him. David’s too proud to even tell you.”
“Is this true?” my father asked me. He still stared at the laminate as if reading from a script in a kitchen-sink drama. The blue vein at his temple throbbed.
“What does it matter now?” I said. “I to
ok care of it. I took care of him.”
My father let out a long puff of air, like he’d been holding his breath for years and just couldn’t hold it any longer. He whirled on Vincenzo, his arms knocking the toaster over, freeing the plug from its socket. The toaster fell at his feet. “My son told you and you said nothing to me?”
“I didn’t want you to worry. I kept an eye on him. Haven’t I always kept an eye on this family?”
“This is what you do? Better you left us in Syracuse where you found us. My sister and me, we had a good life there. You should have left us.”
Vincenzo pressed his hands onto the back of a folding chair, leaning into it. “You don’t mean that, Sal.”
Watching them argue was like peering into a shoebox diorama that someone else had made. Two paper men, frozen in place, around them a black-and-white backdrop of bombed-out buildings, piles of rubble, dead soldiers, and a barefoot boy squatting in the filth—a snapshot of an argument older than me. The big bang, the detonation that gave birth to all our stars, set them ablaze and in fierce motion.
My father threw his hands up into the air as if in surrender. “You should’ve told me.”
“Boys fight all the time. I would’ve told you if it got out of hand.”
“What’s the matter with you?” my father said with uplifted pinched fingers. “You don’t know what could happen with a Morello.”
They fought as if I were not here, in this kitchen, where just a week ago we’d shared a bottle of wine, drunk from jars together. My piece of star burned in me, every cell in me igniting a chain reaction. I stormed upstairs into my father’s bedroom and took the shoebox from his closet. When I marched back into the kitchen, they were still going at it—all of us now caught in a slow gravitational collapse. I threw the box onto the card table.
