by Jeanne Ray
I don’t know who I was trying to convince, me or him, but the inspirational lecture seemed to make both of us feel better. Romeo lifted his fingers and I slid mine underneath them, and he lightly pressed down. It was a moment, pure and unsustainable.
Then I heard the back door open, and Tony and Sarah started shouting out for Grandma.
Chapter Three
I WAS NAKED, BUT STILL HAD THE PRESENCE OF mind not to move too quickly so I didn’t bounce poor Romeo. I stood up carefully and made a quick dash to the closet for my bathrobe, a shameful abomination of ten-year-old chenille that looked like the primary function of its long, hard life had been to wax floors.
“One second,” I called. I covered up my beloved, who was mostly under the covers anyway. “I’m going to go put out the fire,” I said to him. “Don’t go anywhere.”
“Hah,” he said weakly.
I was three steps down the staircase of our recent undoing when Little Tony and Sarah and Sandy rounded the corner into the entry hall from the kitchen. All of our eyes landed on the same pile of clothing locked together in a loving embrace on the floor.
“You didn’t hang your coats in the closet,” Sarah said in a self-satisfied voice. I was always reminding her to do just that. Fortunately, she didn’t see it was more than coats on the floor.
The way I saw it, I had two options: I could ignore the clothes, or I could pick them up very fast. I decided to pretend I didn’t see them.
“Are you sick?” Tony said.
“No, honey, I’m not sick, but—”
“You’re in your bathrobe.”
“I am, that’s right.”
“And you’ve been crying,” Sarah said.
I touched my hand to my face, and my eyes were still wet. I had been crying over the very thought that something could happen to Romeo, and when I remembered that, my eyes welled up again.
Sandy was looking at the clothes and looking at me and doing the math in her head. She stared at my bare feet and ankles, and chances are she was making a correct assumption that the bareness went all the way up. “Why don’t you kids go do your homework,” she said in a flat voice.
“I want to show Grandma my new shoes,” Sarah said.
“I’ll look at them in just one minute, sweetheart. Sandy, can I talk to you for a second?”
She looked at me sternly, the way I had looked at her when I caught her sneaking in the back door in the middle of the night from a date with Tony Cacciamani, when she was a junior in high school. She took several exaggerated steps through the piles of clothing (she could have walked around them) and I was heading down the stairs as the doorbell rang.
“I’ll get the door!” Tony said.
“I want to get the door!” his sister said.
“I said I was going to get it first!”
Was it possible that Al could get here so fast?
“You always get to get the door. Mom, he always gets to get the door!”
Sandy, who was only two feet from the door, just leaned over and opened it.
In all of my confusion I had never thought to ask Al who Dominic was, but when they stepped inside the entry hall, it was plain to see that Dominic was Al’s younger brother. They both had the same heavy salt-and-pepper hair, the same broad shoulders and beefy arms that made them look like they should be unloading crates onto docks. Al had on his regular uniform, black pants and a black shirt and a black cotton zip-up jacket, while Dominic wore khakis and a brown leather aviator’s jacket.
“Hi Al,” Sandy said, and the children ran over and threw their arms around him, calling, “Father Al! Father Al.” They loved Al, and more than that, it cracked them up to say his name. They never got over the delicious strangeness of addressing someone who wasn’t their father as Father. They could not say it enough. I thought briefly of my mother stirring in her grave to see her progeny embracing a Catholic priest, but the truth is, I would have hugged Al myself were I not feeling so naked beneath my robe.
“I thought Romeo was the one who was sick,” he said. There was no reference to funny business in his tone; Al was remarkably without guile.
“I thought she was sick, too,” Tony said, excited by the coincidence of jumping to the same conclusion.
“Romeo’s sick?” Sandy asked.
“He’s hurt his back,” I said.
Sandy lowered her eyebrows slightly. “Where is he?”
“Upstairs.” I tried very hard to banish any note of sheepishness from my voice, but I wasn’t very successful. We were all more or less standing in a pool of our clothing. I had made a poor choice earlier when I decided to let them lie.
“Romeo! Romeo! Romeo!” Sarah called and bounded past me up the stairs. She took them two at a time, and in a flash she was on the second floor, a gazelle clearing a hillock in a single, graceful leap.
“Sarah!” Sandy barked just as the girl was reaching for the bedroom door. Everyone froze. It was a dazzling trick that Sandy could pull off when absolutely necessary. Wisely, she did not overuse it. The Bark was reserved for only the most dire of occasions.
“I was just…” Sarah began.
“Downstairs!” Sandy said.
Sarah considered putting up an argument, but then thought better of it. She began to slink down, one wrist trailing limply over the banister.
Al cleared his throat nervously. Sandy had always looked so unassuming, and now he would have to rethink her completely. “This is my brother, Dominic.”
Poor Dominic. He must have thought we were a flock of loons. “Welcome to the fun house,” I said, and shook his hand.
“Pleasure,” he said.
“Dominic’s a doctor,” Al said. “You probably know that already.”
“Our mother used to say that having a priest and a doctor in the family meant everybody was covered one way or the other.” Dominic held up a plastic shopping bag from CVS. “I brought a few things by.” It wasn’t exactly a black alligator bag but I’d take it.
“I really appreciate you making a house call,” I said, holding the neck of my bathrobe closed with one hand. “Especially on such short notice. I didn’t think you’d get here so quickly.”
“We just finished Mass,” Al said. “Saturday night is a good time to call. You got me on the cell.”
“Priests have cell phones now?” I asked. I don’t know why this surprised me. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a rabbi with a cell phone, at least a reform rabbi, but priests still seemed to have one foot in the middle ages, what with the incense and all.
“Did you say Romeo is sick?” Sandy said. Sandy was like one of those very clever black-and-white dogs that can teach a sheep to ride a bicycle. She was trying to cut the flock in half, herd the adults upstairs and the children into the kitchen. I had a suspicion she wanted to pick up the clothing.
“He’s this way,” I said, and started walking up.
“I’ve never seen the upstairs of your house,” Father Al said brightly.
“Romeo?” I said quietly as I opened the door and brought our company into my bedroom.
The clothes on the floor of the entry hall looked bad—a shirt, a sweater, two pairs of pants, all those shoes touching laces—but maybe that could be written off to very poor housekeeping. In the bedroom, however, the underwear told a different story. The underwear was intermingling on the floor. In one deft move, I kicked it under the bed.
Romeo looked like he had frozen into the last moment I had seen him. Every muscle in his face, the way he held his arms, everything about him was exactly the same.
“Oh, Romeo,” Father Al said, and shook his head at the sight of so much pain.
Dominic, on the other hand, didn’t seem to be bothered at all. “Didn’t see you at Mass last week, buddy,” he said. “Your mother must be lightening up on you.”
Romeo’s eyes opened into slits. He made a sound that was clearly intended to be “hah” but it didn’t quite come out as “hah.” It sounded more like a sharp exhale.
“Horsing around with a back like yours.” Dominic shook his head and starting rummaging through his bag of tricks. “We’re not kids anymore, Romeo.”
“You shouldn’t give him a lecture when he can’t even talk back to you,” Al said.
Romeo gave a small smile.
“You think he can’t talk back to me now, just you wait.” Dominic tore open a little foil packet and pulled back the sheets enough to rub an alcohol swab over a small spot on Romeo’s hip. Then he fixed up a shot. “You know the expression, ‘You made your bed, and now you’re going to have to lie in it?’ Well, that’s the story. You stay exactly where you are. The only other place you’re going to be going is to the hospital for surgery.”
“He’s going to need surgery?” I asked.
“Maybe not, if he can stay still and let himself get better.” He slid the needle into Romeo’s hip, and I winced, though Romeo never seemed to notice.
“What is that?”
“Demerol and Phenergan. It will knock him out and keep him from throwing up. It’s a terrible thing to throw up when you’ve broken your back.”
“I broke his back?”
Both Al and Dominic turned to look at me, and Romeo used his last word to whisper, kindly, “No.”
“We won’t know for sure without an X-ray, but chances are he has a compression fracture. Just think of it as two of his vertebrae moving a little closer together. At least that’s what he had ten years ago, and when you have one, it stands to reason you’re going to have two. But it’s nobody’s fault.” Dominic stopped and reconsidered this. “Well, it’s his fault. Whatever he was doing, it’s pretty safe to say he shouldn’t have been doing it.”
I was so distraught, I wondered if there was anything left in that vial for me. Then we could be laid out side by side, Romeo and Julie, the star-crossed aging lovers who fell prey to their own passions.
“How long does he have to stay in bed?”
“It could be a week, it could be considerably more. It depends on how he heals up. Even when he’s up, he’s going to mostly be down. You have to keep him in bed.”
“I’ll try my best.” Standing there naked in my tatty bathrobe, the comment felt tawdry.
Dominic patted me on the shoulder. He could have made any number of jokes and had a nice laugh at my expense or Romeo’s, but he took the high road and gave me a pleasant smile. “I’ll swing by in the morning to check on him. You take good care of him. If you need something, you call me. We go all the way back. We always felt sorry for Romeo being an only child—we used to let him tag along.”
“There were thirteen of us,” Al said.
Dominic capped the spent syringe and dropped it back into the bag, then he scrawled out a series of prescriptions. “These are for pain, and he’s going to need them. Whatever he needs, I’ll be here.”
“And I’ll be here, too,” Al said.
“If he decides to opt for faith healing over Demerol,” his brother said. “But I think he should stick with the drugs. This man you are in love with has a very bad back.” I thought I detected a certain amount of pity in his voice, like I had been the unwitting recipient of damaged goods that I was now stuck with.
Al and Dominic offered to show themselves out, and I stood by the bed, watching the man I loved melt into a deep puddle of drug-induced sleep. Kink by kink, he let go of his waking life and spread across the sheets. I could tell just by looking at him that he wasn’t going to be coming around anytime soon.
I sat down very carefully on the bed beside him and held his hand. For that minute I could see him as a boy of six or seven, worn out and hard asleep after a day of summer baseball. I could see him as a father at thirty, up all night with croupy babies and completely exhausted, or a businessman of fifty, falling asleep on his flower-arranging table after a giant wedding.
My dear Romeo. So he had a bad back he hadn’t mentioned before. Believe me, there were things going wrong with my own machinery that I hadn’t been so quick to share. Well, I wouldn’t let him carry the boxes of flowers in from the truck anymore. Everything would be fine.
There was a light tap on the door, and Sandy stuck her head inside, her curls conveying a sense of franticness. “Is he okay? Al said his back was a mess.”
“He’ll be fine,” I said, resting assured in my own sudden sense of peace.
Sandy slipped inside the door, our clothes neatly folded in her arms, the shoes balanced on top. “I brought you these.” She put them on top of the dresser.
“Thank you. I’m sorry I didn’t get things picked up.”
“I was going to give you a hard time, you know, before I realized that Romeo was hurt.” She sat down on the little straight-backed chair beside my desk and looked at the two of us. “The truth is, I wish Tony and I could be alone in the house every now and then. Privacy is hard to come by around here.”
“Maybe we should have a sign-up sheet.” Sandy and I really were in the same boat. She was married to the son and I was in love with the father and with all of us in the house together with two kids, it was just about impossible to find five minutes alone.
From downstairs I heard Little Tony wail, then I heard the Candyman start to sing again. Sandy sighed and shook her head. “There she goes.”
“She’s going to do us all in,” I said. “You know that.”
“Mom!” Tony cried from outside the door.
Sandy sighed again and pushed up out of her chair heavily, like a foreman going to deliver a guilty verdict. She opened the door halfway and touched her son’s head gently. “I know.”
“I can’t stand it!”
“Listen, go in your room and put your Walkman on. It’s all you can do. I need to spend some time with Grandma right now.”
Tony peered around his mother to where I sat on the bed with my sleeping Romeo. “Is he okay?”
Tony was a sweet boy, maybe too sensitive for his own good, but genuinely loving and concerned for others.
“Sure he’s okay,” I said. “He just needs to get some sleep. Go tell Sarah to turn the volume down. Tell her that Romeo is trying to rest.”
Tony smiled hugely. So rarely did we give him the opportunity to exercise any real authority over his little sister. As he ran down the stairs, he screamed out her name.
“Sarah! Grandma said—”
Sandy shut the door. “She’s become so fixated on this whole lottery thing.”
“It’s 234 million dollars,” I said. “Most residents of Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire are fixated on it.”
“I’m worried about what’s going to happen to her when she doesn’t win. What if she grows up to be a compulsive gambler?”
“From what I understand, compulsive gamblers are people who win at first, then spend the rest of their lives trying to recreate the experience. Sarah’s never won a dime.”
“I still think we should cut her off. The lottery isn’t meant for eight-year-olds.”
“So we’ll stop buying her tickets.”
Sandy wrapped a curl around her finger and pulled it down until it was straight. “Can you imagine it though, if she did win? We could move out of here and buy a house. Big Tony could go to medical school. Both Tonys could go to medical school if they wanted to. We could buy a medical school.”
“Sandy,” I said in a low voice.
She dropped her face to her hands. “I’m sorry. I’m falling prey to Wonka-thought. It’s hard not to, sometimes. It’s like living in an Orwell novel; you hear the same propaganda day after day and after awhile it’s hard not to believe it.”
“Satisfying and delicious,” I said wearily. I picked up sleeping Romeo’s hand and petted it. “He doesn’t even hear us.”
When I was a little girl I was always losing my parents, or they were losing me. They would take me to market before the sun came up to buy flowers, and I would get interested in a stray cat or a straight line of ladybugs walking over the face of a Gerber daisy, and when I looked up they would be gone. “Just s
tay where you are,” my father would always say. “If you stay put, then we’ll know where to find you.”
That seemed to be the advice that stuck with me for the rest of my life. I stayed put in Somerville, stayed put in the house Mort and I bought together with my parents’ help when I was pregnant with Nora, stayed put in the family business long after my parents had died and Mort had left. Now I was staying put in my own bed next to Romeo, and one by one everyone was finding me.
Big Tony sailed up the stairs and through the door without so much as a tap. The Cacciamanis were not inclined toward knocking.
“Dad!”
Big Tony wore a close-trimmed beard and a pair of green carpenter’s pants with various loops hanging off the side in case he felt like carrying hammers. He was boyishly handsome and boyish in his heartfelt intensity. He loved Sandy, he loved her kids, he loved public health. I even believed he had come to love me, and oh, did he love his father. He picked up Romeo’s hand and immediately dropped his fingers down to feel his pulse.
“Why isn’t he waking up? Why isn’t he in the hospital?”
Sandy came over to her husband and wrapped her arms around his waist. “It’s his back. Dominic said he was going to be fine.”
“He gave him a shot to help him relax,” I said, scooting off the bed to give him some room. I had to get dressed. I could not put this off another minute.
“He has an awful back,” Tony said. An awful back, one step beyond a bad back. “What was he doing?”
“Tony,” Sandy said, in a kind voice.
Not only did I have to get dressed, I had to figure out a way to get some clothes on Romeo before the neighbors started dropping by to pay their respects.
“Dominic said he thought Romeo would do better if he just stayed where he was for now.”
“The last time they tried to move him it was a disaster.” Tony put his father’s hand down gently on top of the covers. “Poor Dad.”
Sandy looked at me, then at her husband. “He’s going to be fine. I know he’s hurt, but it’s just his back.”
Tony shrugged. “Maybe it’ll be different this time.”
“So how was it last time?”
