Simple Faith (The Pagano Brothers Book 1)

by Susan Fanetti

  But then a hospital worker came in with a breakfast tray, hipping the door open with force and letting the shock of bright morning bustle into the room. The ceiling patterns broke apart like a jigsaw pushed off a table, and Lara dropped back into the real world with a crashing thump.

  “Morning! I’ve got your breakfast.” The round woman with a net over her grey hair smiled and set an aqua plastic tray on the over-bed table. Scrambling for focus, Lara stared at the top of her set of scrubs, showing ice-cream cones turned this way and that. Yellow cones. Brown, white, pink, and purple scoops, one on each cone, on a blue field. Brown for chocolate, white for vanilla, pink for strawberry, purple for? Blueberry.

  The woman left, and Lara’s eyes followed her, tracing the pattern.

  “Good morning, sweetheart. How do you feel?”

  Lara switched her focus to her father. He stood just outside the threshold, looking like he also had forgone sleep, and hadn’t had even the ambivalent comfort of a plastic-coated hospital bed while he’d done it. His light grey hair was ruffled. Blue plaid shirt rumpled, tired eyes wrinkled. Ruffled, rumpled, wrinkled.

  “I’m okay, Dad.” It was a lie, but it was also the truth. She was always okay, and never okay, and that was how she went through life. ‘Okay’ was like chaos, a concept created for and understood by convention. Lara knew what okay was supposed to be, and she knew how to present that image to the world. So yes, she was okay. When she couldn’t manage ‘okay,’ everything fell apart.

  He stepped into the room but didn’t approach her bed. “The doctor is on this floor. He said he’ll let you eat your breakfast and then come in. He thinks he’ll be able to release you this morning.”

  Lara stared at the tray before her. One slice of whole-wheat toast, cut on a diagonal but not quite at the corners. One pat of butter substitute. A small serving of scrambled eggs, approximately three inches long and two inches wide. Likely comprising two eggs. One cup of decaffeinated coffee in a plastic mug the same aqua color as the tray. One small plastic container, opaque white and capped with foil, of orange juice. A plastic-wrapped packet containing a white napkin and a black plastic set of utensils: knife, fork, spoon.

  Her father edged closer to the bed. “He wants to refer you to a therapist, Lara.”

  She looked up at him, met his eyes long enough for him to see that she had, and dropped her regard to his mouth, and the white beard around it, the hairs that poked softly at his lips. There was a long list of physicians and therapists in her past; all of her issues and anomalies, the organic ones as well as those that had been inflicted on her, had been well catalogued. ‘Raped, terrorized, and beaten’ was sure to fit into one of her extant diagnoses. “I have a therapist. I don’t want to see him.”

  “I know. I wanted to prepare you for what this doctor will say. It might be a good idea to call Dr. Rosen, though, sweetheart. To let him know this happened.”

  This happened. Lara’s hold slipped on the door to those fresh memories, and they flooded forward.

  She’d been sitting in The Ground Floor, at her favorite table in her favorite coffee shop, just down the block from her apartment in College Hill, reading a book, enjoying her afternoon treat. Her tea had been normal, the day had been normal. The patterns of her life had been in order.

  Then she’d stepped onto the sidewalk with her book still in her hands. A van had pulled up and blown her life into chaos.

  But there was always an order, a boundary, a cause for the effect, a reason. One had only to look deeply enough to see, or be patient enough to wait for it to evince itself. When that happened, she would understand.

  However, now, while her body still ached and her memories had sensate presence, was not the time to look deeply into the events of the day before. Lara turned her attention back to her breakfast tray and studied it, driving her mind to that order. The two halves of her piece of toast sat one atop the other on her plate. She picked them up and recreated the whole they’d once been.

  As her mind settled again, she remembered the exchange she’d been having with her father. “If you want me to, I’ll call him.”

  Dr. Rosen was her psychiatrist of record, and kept her prescriptions going, but he no longer required that she engage in talk therapy to keep them, and hadn’t for a few years. Not since three days after her thirtieth birthday, when he’d presented the option to end therapy like a birthday gift.

  And quite the gift it had been. She liked Dr. Rosen well enough, as well as she liked anyone, but she hated letting him into her mind. There had never been any comfort for her in the experience, with him or any other therapist, because there had never been trust. The only person in her life she would ever trust was the man in this room with her now.

  “Thank you,” her father said and finally came to the bed. He brushed his hand over her hair, and when his touch felt good, was welcome, Lara knew she truly was, or would be, okay, in the way she was ever able to be. What had happened would find its place in the chaotic pattern of her life, and it would be absorbed and silenced, nothing more than a single pixel of a vast image.

  ~oOo~

  Lara rested her head on the window in her father’s Jaguar XJL, Loire Blue with London Tan interior, and studied the buildings, signs, and people they passed. In the side mirror, she saw the black Chevy SUV behind them, taking every turn they took. It pulled her attention again and again and always was there.

  “There’s somebody following us.”

  “I know. Don Pagano has had a guard on you since last night. He wants you safe.”

  Don Pagano. Nicolo Pagano. Nick. The man she worked for.

  The reason, most likely, that she’d been snatched off the street.

  Did he want her safe, or the things she knew? Either both, or simply the latter. But she didn’t mind one of his men, or maybe two, watching over her, so long as they did it from their current distance.

  When her father passed the turn that would lead them to her apartment, she lifted her head and said, “I want to go home. My home.”

  He didn’t look away from the road when he answered. “I know, sweetheart, but you shouldn’t be alone. It’s not safe, and you’re not strong right now. We’ll go home, and we’ll talk. There are some things I need to tell you.”

  “I told you, I’m okay.”

  Now he did turn to her. “You’re counting, Lara. Out loud.”

  Instantly, Lara’s teeth clenched. She hadn’t realized. Had she been doing that all along, muttering her patterns like a crazy person? That wasn’t showing her okayness to the world.

  “I know you need your order. I’ll give you that at home.”

  She turned back to the view beyond the window, grinding her teeth together, and said no more.

  ~oOo~

  Though they both lived on College Hill, one of the nicest neighborhoods in Providence by most rubrics, Lara’s apartment was in an area mostly populated with Brown University students. Large homes had been carved up into apartments, and the blocks around hers all had the gently dilapidated aura of downtrodden nobility.

  Her father’s home, the one she’d grown up in, was in a more stable, more affluent part of the community, where the nobility hadn’t run down, and his Jag looked like it belonged on the driveway.

  When he parked the Jag where it belonged, Lara sat and stared out the windshield. Her father came around and helped her out of the car—she needed the help; the hospital-level drugs hadn’t moved fully through her system, and she was in no hurry to lose the mental padding that helped her hold off the chaos of the day before. And she was sore, too. Her father’s arms gave her comfort, showed her boundaries she needed, lifted weight from her bones.

  The black Chevy SUV—Chevrolet Tahoe, late model, maybe new—pulled past their house, swung around at the intersection, and parked across the street. Lara noted the driver and passenger, and was glad when they made no move to exit the vehicle. She held on to her father and let him usher her into his house.

  Inside, he helped
her out of her spring trench coat and hung it on the hall tree. His navy-blue rain slicker hung beside it. His green North Face parka still hung on the tree as well; a holdover from the recent winter.

  “Where would you like to sit?”

  Lara didn’t have to think; the answer had been in her mind since she’d silently agreed to come to his house. “The dining room.”

  He smiled. “You need a puzzle?”

  She did, and she nodded.

  After he guided her to sit at her place at the table, her father asked, “Do you have a preference?” She shook her head, and he went to the antique armoire in the far corner and opened it.

  Neatly, carefully arranged inside were several dozen boxes of jigsaw puzzles. One of Lara’s earliest therapists, when she’d still been in elementary school, had suggested that jigsaw puzzles might be a way to focus her mind and find order and calm. She’d been right, and Lara had done thousands of puzzles, most of them multiple times, in the twenty-five years since.

  Her father selected one and showed it to her: a five-hundred-piece puzzle, a close-up photograph of a vast collection of marbles.

  “Perfect.” She removed the lid and poured the pieces onto the gleaming mahogany surface of the antique table. Pushing her hands through the soft fall of cardboard shapes, she took a satisfying breath, her first in a long time.

  “I’m going to get some lunch started. Potato soup and saltines?”

  Lara had no appetite and didn’t care about food, but she nodded because that was the gesture that would please her father and make him go to the kitchen and leave her to find the edges and corners, the boundaries. Of the puzzle. And her existence.

  Before he left the room, her father stood behind her and smoothed his hand over her hair.

  ~oOo~

  No matter how impossible a puzzle seemed—she’d done a series of circular, thousand-piece puzzles in high school where each one was nothing but a single, solid color, and those remained the hardest she’d ever done—the key to solving it was patience in the sorting. Find the corners, if there were corners. Then the edges. Then sort by shape. People got impatient and tried to make the picture right away, but that only worked when the image had easily recognizable sections—like a body of water, or a house, or an animal. It was better to sort by shape and then, if the image gave you such clues, by color or composition.

  This one, with nothing but marbles, gave virtually no such clues at first, so Lara focused solely on shape. A legend on the box described eight different interior shapes, so she made eight piles, creating a boundary around a blank center in which she’d build the image.

  She was just about done sorting the piles and ready to move to the next stage—turning the boundary pieces picture-side up and spreading them out—when her father came back in with a tray full of their lunch: stoneware bowls of potato soup, a plate of saltines, and tumblers of milk.

  “You’ve gotten a good start. Can we take a break and eat? You need to eat. We’ll sit in the kitchen.”

  Lara was thirty-three years old and fully aware that her father treated her like a child, but she was equally aware how often she gave him cause to do so. And they both knew why. She’d never stray farther from this home than her apartment less than a mile away, because she’d never be able to face a world that didn’t have her father close at hand.

  Even in the world she lived in, monsters snatched women off the street and women poisoned their children. Imagine what horrors might exist beyond those edges.

  “Okay,” she replied and stood up from the table. A sharp twinge went through her back and between her legs, and the pain of it broke through the okay expression she’d been trying to keep in place.

  Her father reacted to it, flinching so that the milk in tall glasses sloshed, but the expression he gave her was a smile. He, too, put on a false face. His said he believed the façade of hers.

  “Come on, sweetheart. Let’s sit at the window and talk.”

  ~oOo~

  The warm, nostalgic aroma of the childhood lunch he’d made failed to waken her always elusive appetite, so Lara only sipped at her milk and her soup. She sat in the latticed sunbeam coming in through the mullioned French doors and traced the edges of her shadow over the table, the way the dark bars of the window intersected the lines of her body.

  His soup finished, her father got up and went around the island. He opened the white paper bag from the hospital pharmacy. She watched him sort her new meds and bring over two small plastic cups, one with clear liquid and another with three pills.

  “You need more on your stomach for these, sweetheart.”

  She studied the contents of the cups. An antibiotic. One she didn’t recognize. And the clear liquid. “Is that Thorazine?” Through all her pharmacological history, she didn’t think she’d ever had Thorazine at home. Thorazine: Chlorpromazine. Anti-psychotic. Alternative use for extreme anxiety. Extra thick padding against a dangerous world.

  “It is. The hospital doctor consulted with Dr. Rosen, and they decided you should be on it for a while, until you find how to sort this thing that happened.”

  They expected her to blow, then. Well, she had been counting out loud without realizing it. And she didn’t mind the numbness right now. She took a couple more spoons of her soup, ate a cracker, and washed the pills and liquid down.

  “What’s the white pill?”

  Her father’s head dropped. “A morning-after pill. The last one you need to take.”

  Right. Because she’d been snatched off the street down the block from her apartment.

  “Lara, there’s something important I need to tell you.”

  He wasn’t looking at her, so she looked at him, studying the small spot just back from the top of his head, where his thick hair was a bit thinner, and she could see the pink blush of his scalp through the rooted strands of grey.

  The latest dose of Thorazine was already moving through her, thickening the soft buffer between her body and the world, and between her mind and her self. It never took long; it was a powerful drug, and she was skinny. She’d always been unable to gain weight, as if the starvation of her early childhood had coded her cellular composition to reject any nutrition but the minimum necessary for function.

  “Okay,” she said, counting the hairs on his head.

  “Don Pagano is worried about you. He wants to put you somewhere safe while he takes care of the people who hurt you. One of his most trusted men is coming to keep you safe. He’ll take you somewhere safe.”

  There was nowhere safe beyond the edges of the world she knew. “I want to stay home.”

  “I know, sweetheart. But the don will keep you safe. Safer than I ever could. The people who hurt you could come again if you stay home.”

  Each word her father said was more incomprehensible than the one before it. Lara knew it was the drug severing her sense, and she tried to fight off the allure of encroaching ignorance. “I just started my puzzle.”

  “I won’t touch it. It will be exactly as it is now when you get back.”

  “But I need to finish it.”

  “Then I’ll pack it back up and have it ready to take with you.”

  “But I was sorting it.”

  “Then you can sort it again. You like that part.”

  She did like that part, and she couldn’t remember why she was fighting with her father.

  Lara pushed her lunch aside and laid her head on the table. There was something important going on, but she couldn’t remember what it might be, or why she cared.

  She didn’t care. It was nice not to care.

  ~ 3 ~

  They missed the family breakfast, but made it to the Mass. Afterward, before Nick, Trey, and Angie—Joey’s wife’s brother—headed to the cookout, Nick called them all back to the office, and they worked out the details of Trey’s assignment.

  It was a huge assignment. Trey would have some backup, but not much. In reality, he was going to be solely responsible for keeping safe the only person who
knew as much about the Pagano Brothers’ business as the don himself.

  First thing, he had to get that person, a woman who’d only the day before been brutalized, a woman who didn’t know him at all, a woman Nick had described as ‘peculiar,’ to trust him enough to go with him quietly.

  Or he had to take her by force.

  That was the assignment he’d been given.

  Before that, perhaps an even more difficult assignment, he had to spend time with his family and behave as if he wasn’t about to abscond Rhode Island with a woman he might in fact have to kidnap.

  Fuck, he hoped her father greased the skids for this.

  And peculiar how, exactly? When Trey had asked Nick that question, he’d gotten the unhelpful answer, You’ll see. Just be careful with her. Ask her father to explain.

  Okay then. There were a whole lot of ways he could fuck this up.

  Side by each with Angie, Trey followed Nick along the side of Joey and Tina’s house. Nick opened the gate, and they went through behind him, Angie pulling a step ahead through the gate and then falling back beside Trey, as if they meant to be in formation—and they did, in a way. Angie liked there to be a wider barrier at the don’s back than just one man. It was a habit he couldn’t shake, even when they were with their own family.

  Nick located Gessie right away and went for the guest of honor. As the don crouched before her to give her a gift, Trey scanned the yard. The kids were all playing, in clusters around the yard—all those little twerps were of his own generation, though he was old enough to be father to the youngest of them. The babies were with the women, the middle ones were playing in the playhouse and the sandbox, and the teenagers were hanging out, acting like they just didn’t care.