“We sound like a mutual admiration society,” she said.
“Hey, that’s not a bad thing, is it?”
Isabella laughed. “I guess not. So what do you think . . .”
I didn’t hear the rest of what my daughter said because she and John vanished through the rear door of the church. Liza and I just looked at each other, and she burst out, “Wow, my God. He’s a keeper, Sam.”
Yeah, I thought so, too, and nodded. “But a part of me keeps wondering if he’s too good to be true.”
“I’m so with you on that.” She lowered her voice as we walked through the alley toward the rear of the church. “I stayed with Brian last night. He . . . he thinks I’m amazing. Can you believe it? In all the years I was married, my husband never once told me he thought I was fucking amazing. Never.”
I gave her arm a quick squeeze. “But you are. Brian sees the same things in you that I see. How great is that?”
“It’s wonderful. But, Sam, I don’t want to be one of those women who needs a man’s approval to feel whole. It’s not what I’m about. I mean, Brian’s exciting and an incredible lover and he’s oozing with class . . . but maybe it’s too soon. Maybe I need to be by myself a while longer, to . . .”
“Enjoy the moment, Liza. That’s all we’ve got; it’s the only thing that’s certain. This second, this instant.” Thank you, Tolle.
She started laughing. “I could be saying this to you, Sam. Do you realize that? Even though you were dealt a shit like Vito for a father, you’ve got great people in your life now. That’s what’s important.”
She was right.
We emerged from the alley and the air filled, suddenly, with the songs of birds, the coos of pigeons, the ring of distant laughter, and a flurry of butterflies we startled from the bushes. Behind the church, we sat down at one of the picnic tables, in a pool of warm light.
“I just want you to know something, Sam. If I’d been in your shoes inside that church, I probably would’ve slugged Vito. You handled it incredibly well.”
“I wasn’t consciously handling anything. That’s what’s weird. At first, I was paralyzed, then I felt infuriated that he would burst into a church like that, yelling obscenities. And then I felt . . . humiliated.”
“Naw, the core of who you are can’t be damaged by Vito, Sam. The best thing that ever happened to you and your mother was that he left when he did. His function in the bigger scheme of things was to supply DNA. That’s it. And I think he knows it, and it just galls him to realize that the child he abandoned grew up to make something of herself in spite of him.”
“But I realized I needed to forgive him.”
“Sometimes in order to do that, the past has to be exorcised. And right now”—she tapped her temple—“that part of me that’s a tad psychic is telling me that’s what this whole thing in there was about. Some pattern has been broken, some internal thing.”
She was right. I felt it. In a sense, the filming of Brooklyn Story was a kind of purging. I was laying my past to rest, and slowly but surely I was finding my way into a future untarnished by everything that had infected my earlier life. John was evidence of that.
I hugged Liza. “Thank you for always being there for me.”
“Honey, I feel the same.” She gave me a high five. “Soul sisters forever!”
SIXTEEN
As the bus pulled up in front of Sally’s coffee shop, I spotted Alec’s mother and sister on the sidewalk. Punctual. It meant they were really excited to see Isabella.
“You want to eat at Sally’s or with your grandmother?” I asked Isabella.
She glanced through the window, watching them, then looked at me. “I haven’t seen them in, like, nearly two years, Mom. I should eat with them.”
I kissed the top of her head, grabbed her pack off the floor at her feet, and handed it to her. “Got your phone?”
“Check.”
“Your iPad?”
She rolled her eyes. “Check.”
“Your—”
“Check, check, check.” Then she whispered, “I’m sixteen, okay? Not five. But I love you anyway!”
Filomena, Alec’s mother, was a large-boned woman, yet slim and trim, and had aged since I’d last seen her. Her chin-length blond hair was threaded with gray, and new lines had appeared at the corners of her eyes. But she greeted us as she always had, with bear hugs and the quiet elegance that defined her. And Gianna, Alec’s sister, was overjoyed to see us, especially Isabella, with whom she had always been close. We chatted for a few minutes there on the sidewalk outside Sally’s, then Isabella hugged me good-bye, slung the strap of her pack over her shoulder, and said she’d check in later in the day.
The three of them walked off with their arms linked, their laughter echoing in the air, and I stood there alone, watching them, a void opening in my heart. She was just going to be gone overnight, I reminded myself.
But I immediately projected forward to the day she would leave for college, and I knew I would break down in tears then, just as I had the day I’d dropped her off for her first day at kindergarten. Once you were a parent, you were always a parent. It didn’t end when your child turned eighteen or twenty-one or thirty or forty. Always, your child was your child.
It didn’t mean I had to project.
Liza came up behind me and touched my shoulder. “Hey, lunch is ready.”
“There goes my baby,” I murmured.
“Sam. It’s for one night.”
“Yeah, I know. But suppose the world ends between now and tomorrow morning?”
“Oh, my God.” Liza rolled her eyes. “Seriously?”
“No. Just thinking out loud.”
Liza stood beside me, gazing after them. “When my oldest son went off to college, I used to lie on his bed at night, inhaling the smell of him on his pillow, and sob myself to sleep.”
I laughed. “I hope I’m not going to be that bad!”
“When my second son left for college, I didn’t cry as much. When my youngest departed, I didn’t cry at all. It gets easier. They’re always your kids, the best part of who you are; that never changes. But it gets easier to let them go.”
I realized I was not accomplished at letting go. But I knew the words, understood the sentiment: let go and let God . . . I knew about surrender, about stepping back and allowing a higher power to direct the flow of events. It seemed that I knew a lot of words and phrases like that, but all too often the words didn’t penetrate, didn’t sink in deep enough.
We went inside the Greek coffee shop, and I was immediately struck by how Sally’s existed in a permanent time warp. Nothing had changed since Isabella and I had been in here two years ago—the stainless steel counter stools with red cushions, the black-and-white ceramic floor tiles, even the booths beyond the counter. In fact, not much had changed since I’d first stepped in here more than thirty years ago.
Sally and her staff had prepared an amazing spread of food—feta cheese salads, humus with pita, fried chicken sandwiches, and even my favorite, moussaka. I went through the line with everyone else, helping myself to a little of everything. We all squeezed into booths and tables that still faced glass display cases that showcased doughnuts, pies, Greek pastries. “Play at Your Own Risk” by Planet Patrol started playing on the jukebox. It was like this faded sound in the background had brought me right back to the old days. It was picture-perfect. For the next thirty or forty minutes, the place rocked with tunes from the seventies and eighties, laughter rang out, and I truly believed these people were my extended family. I felt safe and secure enough with them to be who I was.
When the filming started, it was a scene with Jenean and a young brunette named Anna DiAntonio, who played Janice, my closest friend at the time. As John and I watched from the sidelines, I once again remembered that day vividly, how Janice had grabbed a couple of menus propped up b
y the condiments and passed me one.
“Order whatever you want, Sam. My treat.”
“I have some money, Jan.”
“No ya don’t.”
“I will as soon as I turn sixteen and get that job in the bookstore.”
“Then you’ll be saving for college. You can pick up the tab at those fancy places in Manhattan you’ll be taking me to when you’re a big shot.”
I still recalled how Janice never once made me feel poor, how there was never any doubt in her words when she referred to my dream of being a writer, a dream I’d shared with her. There had been people like that in my life from time to time, people who believed in my talent, in me, and I understood how fortunate I was that I had those kinds of people in my life now.
At the time this conversation took place between Janice and me, I’d had only three bucks in my pocket.
“I’ll have a Coke and some fries,” I said.
“No way,” Janice replied, and opened my menu. “I’m starved, and I’m not goin’ to eat alone. Besides, we have a lot to talk about.”
“That guy you mentioned?”
“I had to check it out first with Richie. He’s okay with it, and Tony’s available.”
“I already told you I wasn’t interested.”
“Your mouth says no, but your eyes and budding breasts say something else.”
At that point, John elbowed me gently in the side and mouthed, Did she really say that?
I covered my mouth with my hand, snickering silently, my head bobbing.
These days, Janice was happily married, had four kids, and lived in Florida with her husband, who was in the import/export business: women’s clothing. The journey she’d taken from the past to where she was now in her life was living proof that anyone can escape his or her past.
John slipped out his phone and tapped away. A moment later, my phone vibrated. He’d sent me a text message.
When we wrap here, how about dinner?
Sounds great!
We looked up simultaneously and in his eyes, I saw the promise of a magnificent night ahead.
• • •
The scenes shot in Sally’s required several retakes and some rapid script doctoring. When we finally wrapped, it was nearly six p.m. Everyone looked exhausted but happy.
“Okay, people, great job,” King said to the crowd. “We reconvene tomorrow morning in front of the hotel at nine, except for the art and maintenance crew, who will be setting up the stalls for the annual Festival of Santa Rosalia. Sam, could you be on site at eight, just to take a walk through with Renée to make sure it looks the way it should?”
“I’ll be there,” I said.
John touched the small of my back and guided me out the front door and onto the sidewalk in front of Sally’s. It was still light out, the air was cool but not cold. I zipped up my lightweight jacket.
“Car?” John asked. “Or should we walk?”
“Where’re we going?”
“My Brooklyn hideout.”
“Really? You actually have a hideout?”
“Bought it a few years ago. I love Malibu; I love California. But my roots are here.”
“But if you have a hideout here, why’re you staying at the Greenwich?”
“Because you are,” he said, as though it were the most obvious thing in the universe.
We walked several blocks to this adorable, out-of-the-way mom-and-pop pizzeria that was attached to what looked like a small two-family house. Very old-school Italian, and mostly what I grew up with in this neighborhood. I loved it immediately as I watched our elongated shadows moving along the sidewalk with us. “Do you ever wonder about them?” I suddenly asked, and pointed at our shadows.
John laughed and slung an arm around my shoulders. “The shadow people. When I was really young, I used to see them a lot. I remember one time my mother and I went to some neighborhood park, nothing special, just a slide, swings, a merry-go-round. I was maybe five or six. And I kept seeing something in my peripheral vision, something . . . quick, fleeting, a dark form. It intrigued me. And when I mentioned it to my mother, she told me this really complicated story about the shadow people. How they live in a dimension parallel to our own, a two-dimensional existence.”
“Like the characters in that book Flatland.”
“Yeah, similar to that. But the way my mother told the story, it freaked me out. In retrospect, I think her version of the shadow people referred to the mafia.”
“I think they’re magical. Watch.”
We stopped there on the sidewalk, pedestrians flowing around us, and I cupped his face in my hands and brought my face very close to his and whispered, “Now look at them.”
We both glanced down at our shadows. Their bodies were pressed so tightly together that no light shone between them. And because our faces were so close, it looked as if we were kissing, but we weren’t. His eyes slipped back to mine. “Spooky shit, Sam.”
“But spooky good. They have their own lives.”
He kissed the tip of my nose and slipped his fingers back through my hair, and we hurried on through the lengthening shadows, our hands clasped. Once when Alec and I were out walking, I drew his attention to our shadows on the sidewalk and said, Do you think they have their own lives separate from us?
He’d looked at me like I had lost my mind. What the hell, Sam. They’re shadows, that’s all.
But didn’t infinite possibility lie in our perceptions? If we couldn’t think outside the box in which we’d been raised, where would any of us be? Still living in caves.
We stopped outside the house, and John opened the door. We climbed two flights of stairs. I felt strangely nervous—butterflies in my stomach, sweaty palms, tongue-tied. I might as well have been seventeen years old again.
Since I had never seen his place in Malibu, I had no idea what to expect of this hideaway in Brooklyn. Maybe he was into deep purples and shades of black, maybe I would find mold on the food in his fridge, his furniture in tatters, his bedsheets soiled, his laundry room piled high with refuse from other trysts. Maybe he was an S&M freak with whips and chains in the bedroom. Maybe this, maybe that. After all, what did I really know of this man other than the persona he showed to the world and a kiss under a mistletoe thirty years ago?
Then the door swung open, and I walked into a spacious, twilit apartment with high ceilings, skylights, hanging planters that billowed with ivy and ferns, wooden floors, impeccable furnishings, a place that whispered, Take off your shoes, have a bite to eat, chill, relax, kick back, you are home. John pressed a button on the wall, and some sexy, smooth Barry White music floated through the room. It sounded faded, like at Sally’s earlier, but was he trying to get me in the mood? I certainly was already.
He opened terrace doors to reveal a beautiful garden with lounge chairs. It appeared to be a hidden oasis in Brooklyn. John seemed to enjoy ducking away from people, from the world. He was a private kinda guy, and I loved that most about him. I noticed the wall-to-ceiling bookcase that must have held several hundred books, all of them neatly upright and probably organized according to author, subject, a John decimal system. I noticed a lot of war, Roman Empire, and old Bibles. The wraparound sofa, a rich, walnut brown, looked comfortable enough to sleep on. More books were stacked neatly on the stone coffee table. A colorful throw rug in the center of the room invited you to plop down and time-travel to . . . well, wherever your imagination could take you.
The largest wall held a high-def plasma TV that also served as a computer screen.
“Thirsty?” he asked.
“Parched.”
“Hungry?”
“Starved.”
“Delivery or should I cook?”
“Your choice.”
He thought a moment, then ducked into an open kitchen with granite counters, cedar cabinets, and a rack sh
aped like an infinity symbol that held bottles of wine. He cut up some Parmesan cheese and put out some olives from the refrigerator and laid some thinly sliced pieces of prosciutto on the plate. I enjoyed watching his hands move with ease. I enjoyed watching him and appreciated the simplicity with which he moved around the kitchen. Most men I’d known were clumsy in a kitchen and seemed to regard the room as a woman’s domain.
He poured the wine and tapped his glass against mine. “Salud, to Brooklyn. To the present.”
“To Brooklyn.”
As I sipped the delicious wine, I felt as if it might be a magical potion, the kind of thing a woman in a fairy tale would drink before she turned into a princess. Or a goddess. “This is fantastic, John.”
“Like you,” he said, holding up the glass, and our eyes locked.
I sipped again from my glass and thought it was probably the best thing I had ever tasted in my life, indescribable, silk sliding down my throat, through my bones, all the way to my toes. “What, is this like some sort of aphrodisiac?” I blurted.
“I think of everything, my Stunner, ahead of time. My mind is always going and never forgets, especially one as beautiful as you. I have never forgotten you. I always knew we would meet again, even if it did take this long.”
“I’m still in a kind of shock, Bobby Santos.” I poked him in the chest. “I think I actually like your new name better. John Steeling. It rolls off my tongue.”
He laughed. “Lemme see what else I can rustle up in terms of food. This stuff will knock us flat on our asses if we drink it too fast on empty stomachs.”
I sipped, paused, paused, sipped again. “What can I do to help?”
“Set the table and be beautiful as you are?”
“Perfect.” I started opening drawers, moving around the kitchen, carried a couple of plates and some utensils over to the kitchen table.
He eyed the contents of the fridge, shook his head, opened the freezer, and began removing packages of food. “Okay, our choices, Sam. I don’t have the ingredients I need to make any of my favorite Italian dinners. But we’ve got the workings of a fantastic Tuscan salad—and a pizza.”
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