by April Lust
I disappeared into the kitchen just as the door to Daddy’s office swung open. The click of footsteps retreated down the hall towards the front. A jingle of bells indicated that the man had left.
On my way back upstairs with a plate of food, I saw the light in Daddy’s office was still on. As I passed by, I snuck in a glance. His head was buried in his hands. He looked like the saddest man on earth.
# # #
I was on high alert for the next few weeks, but nothing out of the ordinary happened. No more bodies in the dumpster and no more late-night appearances from the Espositos. The only change was that Daddy didn’t let me go outside anymore. It was like the body had never existed. I wanted to ask him about it, but if Daddy knew I was snooping on his private conversations, he’d throw a fit. It was better just to keep silent and mind my own business.
It was late Friday night. The dinner rush had long since subsided, and I’d finally gotten permission to flip the sign on the front door to Closed. Normally, Daddy would have calmed down a notch, but he’d been on edge ever since the dumpster incident. I didn’t know it was possible for him to be any angrier, but he managed to find a way. Every tiny slip-up drew a reprimand from him. A dropped dish meant a full fifteen minutes spent with his furnace on full blast, screaming in my face, telling me what a waste I was and that I was killing him all by myself. I was more careful than ever.
I wiped down the tables, flipped the chairs on top, and started mopping the floor to soak up all the spilled food from the evening. I was lost in my own world, humming quietly, when I pirouetted and swung the mop around to move to the next section of floor.
On my spin, I let the mop head drift just a few inches too high. I saw what was coming, but I couldn’t react quick enough to stop it. The mop struck an upturned chair where it hung from one of the tables. The force of my spin sent it clattering into the one next to it. Together, their combined weight tipped over the table, which struck the next one over, and on and on again, until a dozen tables knocked into each other and went tumbling to the ground like dominos.
The sound of wood breaking erupted throughout the quiet restaurant. I stood frozen in fear, mop in hand and splintered furniture around me on all sides, when Daddy stormed in. One look at the scene and his face went taut with fury.
“Daddy, it was an accident—” The slap of his hand across my face cut me off mid-sentence. Blistering pain shot through my jaw. I dropped the mop and ran to the kitchen.
He’d never hit me before. In all these years, he’d thrown every curse word in the book at me; he’d ranted and raved and belittled me; but he’d never hit me. It felt like a huge, thick line had been crossed, like we’d gathered up a crucial bit of momentum that would send us tumbling down into an even worse life faster than we’d ever gone before. Rock bottom had never looked closer.
My skin was on fire where he had struck me and a deep ache was starting to settle into my jaw. The lights were blurry and dizzy through my teary eyes, but I didn’t stop moving until I had run all the way through the kitchen and onto the back stoop. Only then did I fall to a seat and let the tears flow freely.
He hit me. Daddy had hit me. That was all I could think about, all I could feel as I sobbed on the back steps.
After a while, though, the tears just stopped. There was nothing left in me to feel sad. I’d cried out the last bit of me that felt anything, or at least that was what it seemed like. All that was left was a numbness that looked like it stretched forever. Maybe even the rest of my life.
“Why are you crying?” came a sudden voice.
I jerked my head up from where it lay in my arms. A boy stood in front of me. He looked about my age, maybe a little older. His eyes were a bright blue beneath dark hair that swept over his forehead, long and shaggy. His head was tilted at a curious angle. Something about his gaze made me think he knew everything about me right away.
“No reason,” I said, sniffling and wiping a hand across my eyes. I didn’t want to be seen crying. All I wanted was to be alone. Couldn’t this boy see that?
“That’s dumb,” he said bluntly.
I ogled at him. Did he really just say that? “What do you want?” I asked him defiantly.
“I wanna know why you’re crying.” His head was still cocked to the side as he looked at me.
I considered him for a moment and decided to tell him the truth. “My daddy hit me,” I said.
The boy’s blue eyes flashed for a moment with an emotion I couldn’t quite read. “He shouldn’t do that.”
I shrugged. “He’s my daddy. He can do whatever he wants.”
“No,” the boy said as he shook his head, “he shouldn’t do that to you.”
“Why not?”
“Nobody should hit a woman.”
I saw his fists curling. Part of me wanted to laugh. It was a ridiculous scene, after all. What was this teenage boy going to do to my grown man of a father? But another part of me saw how serious he was. “It’s not like I can do anything about it,” I said.
“You should stand up for yourself.”
“How?”
“It doesn’t matter. Just find a way. You can always stand up for yourself.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. To be honest, the thought had never occurred to me before. This was just how my life was destined to go. An angry dad, a failing restaurant, and chores that never ended. That’s what was in store for me. The idea of pushing back against those things was alien, too unheard of for me to even process.
I asked, “Do you fight back against your daddy?”
The boy’s fists relaxed. “I don’t have a dad.”
My jaw dropped. “What do you do, then? How do you get food and stuff?”
“I steal cars and sell them,” he boasted. “I can do whatever I want.”
If it were anyone else, I wouldn’t have believed them. Plenty of street kids lied about being bigger and badder than they were. It wasn’t the first time I’d talked to one of them while I was out back. But usually I could tell right away they were phony. With this one, something was different. I believed him without questioning it.
“What’s your name?” the boy asked.
“I’m Natalia.”
“Nice to meet you, Natalia. I’m Nicholas.” He crossed the distance between us and stuck out a hand. I looked at it curiously. “Shake my hand,” he demanded.
I reached out and placed my palm against his. His grasp was firm but gentle. I liked the warmth of his skin. He looked straight at me as he squeezed softly. His eyes were bright in the darkness.
Just then, my father’s voice interrupted. “What the hell do you think you’re doing out here, Natalia? And who the fuck is this?”
I dropped Nicholas’s hand immediately. “It’s, um, just someone who, uh…”
Daddy’s eyes narrowed. His gaze darted from me to Nicholas and back again, dark and accusing. “You street rat, get the hell away from my daughter,” he spluttered. Saliva flew from his lips. “And get the hell away from my restaurant! Go on, get!”
Nicholas backed up slowly, his eyes never leaving mine. He didn’t say a word, but I knew what he’s thinking. Stand up for yourself. He turned and walked away. I lost sight of him when he turned the corner at the end of the alleyway.
Daddy gripped my arm and yanked me to my feet. “You think you can sit around and cry out here? Get the hell back in there and clean up the mess you made!” He hurled me in through the door he held open. My shoulders drooped as I walked back towards the disaster of a dining room.
For a moment, when Nicholas touched my hand, his words made sense. Standing up for myself seemed feasible. But now, on the other side of the door, I surveyed the wreckage, and it felt impossible again. Wood splinters everywhere. The ruined tables crumbled chaotically around the room. This would take hours to clean. I’d be up all night trying to piece everything back together.
Nicholas was wrong. There was no escaping this life of mine.
Chapter 5
; Nicholas
I continued home. I could still feel the ghost of Natalia’s fingers on my own, a faint tingling where she’d touched me. The contact had a weird electric tint to it, almost like static electricity. Maybe I was just imagining things, but it really felt like there was something still there, like her fingertips had left a mark. I studied my hand under the glare of a streetlight overhead, but I couldn’t see anything.
I shook my head and let thoughts of her drift away for the time being. Jogging through a small break in traffic, I crossed the street and made my way down the alley to the foot of a fire escape. I jumped up to tug down the ladder. It descended with a metallic shriek, then I clambered up and took the stairs two at a time on my way to the top floor of the building.
Reaching the open window on the top level, I slipped inside. I landed with quiet feet on the tile floor of the bathroom of the empty apartment that Smalls and I had been squatting in for the last couple months. The electricity didn’t work, so we had candles scattered throughout the place, but by some miracle the water still ran, so it was as good a place as we could afford for the moment.
I reached to pull open the door and let Smalls know I was home, but just before my fingertips settled on the doorknob, I heard voices. I frowned. I didn’t recognize them. Sucking in a breath, I leaned my ear to the crack in the door and listened in.
“Smalls, you rat-faced piece of shit, you shoulda known better,” said one of the unfamiliar voices. It was a man’s voice, deep, like it belonged to someone big. There was a faint Italian accent on the edges.
“You made the wrong choice, my friend,” said another softly.
My heart was pounding in my chest. I didn’t like the menace on the edge of these men’s words. I needed to get a closer look.
Tugging open the door as slowly as I could to avoid the squeak of the hinges, I slipped through and crouched low to the floor. The bathroom opened onto a short hallway. The corner of the wall jutted out into the living room. I moved towards it and peeked my head around just far enough to get a line of sight into the living room.
Smalls was seated facing in my direction on the one rickety chair we owned. His hands were bound behind him. Standing with their backs to me were the two men I’d heard. One was grossly fat, his belly hanging heavy over the edge of his pants. The other was taller, skinnier, and he was holding a gun in one gloved hand. The fat man was gripping a length of iron pipe.
Smalls looked badly roughed up. I saw a cracked tooth tangling by a thread from his mouth. The front of his shirt was slicked with blood, and his head hung forward, too exhausted to hold it up straight. “Please…” he muttered through lips fat and busted.
“Why didn’t you just think, Smalls?” the skinny man said mournfully. “We knew you were working with The Punishers. You could’ve stopped, and all this mess would’ve been avoided.” The fat man shook his head in disgust.
“I didn’t…” Smalls was two words into his thought before the fat man swung the pipe viciously into the side of Smalls’ head. The crunch was sickening. I felt the blood rush from my face.
“Don’t tell us what you did and didn’t do,” the fat man barked. “We tell you what you did. And right now, my partner is telling you that you fucked up, capisce?”
Smalls nodded, unable to speak further.
“This is what happens when you try to hurt the Esposito family,” the man said. He leaned over, put two fingers under Smalls’ chin, and lifted it up to look straight in his face. “If you hurt the Espositos, you get hurt.”
The air reeked of blood and sweat. The skinny man let go of Smalls’ chin, which dropped back to his chest, and straightened up. “Now, we are here to make sure you don’t cooperate with the Punishers anymore. No more cars for them, you understand?”
Smalls nodded again.
“Do you swear you won’t help them again?”
Smalls nodded as frantically as he was able. A low moan trickled through his bloodied mouth.
I could almost hear the sickly smile on the skinny man’s face as he shook his head. “I wish we could believe you, Smalls. If only that were enough.”
Long pause.
He gestured to the fat man. “Do him.”
The fat man raised his pipe high above his head. The skinny man holstered his gun and started to tug his gloves off, turning around as he did so. I scrambled back behind the wall to avoid being seen just as I heard the crack of metal on Smalls’ skull.
More moaning echoed out as the crack sounded five more times, each crunch as wet and throbbing as the last. Then the sound of footsteps walking towards the front door. It creaked open, then clicked shut as the men left.
The second they were gone, I sprinted out towards Smalls. They’d cut his bonds loose, so he was slumped forward in the chair, hands by his sides. Blood dripped down his face, neck, and chest from the devastation in his head. His eyes were fluttering, half-lidded. I tried to tug him upright, but I lost my footing in the puddle of blood surrounding the chair and slip. He tipped sideways and fell to the ground on top of me.
I struggled upright. His head was in my lap. “Smalls, Smalls,” I said desperately. The candlelight flickering around us had never felt so ghastly, so wrong. “Wake up, Smalls,” I begged. “Please wake up.”
The only sound he could make was a nauseating groan. He tried to work his jaw to form words, but the scrape of pulverized bone overpowered the attempt and he gave up. He was floating somewhere between states of consciousness, drowning in pain. His fingers were wavering on his lap.
“C’mon, shorty,” I pleaded, using his nickname for me. “Don’t die. Please don’t die.” I felt the sting of tears in my eyes. This was the man who saved me. I had to save him. I had to. I owed him that much.
I pulled my shirt over my head and tried to soak up the blood. But there was too much. Smalls kept groaning, a horrible, grating noise that set my teeth on edge, as I dabbed at his broken skull with the wadded fabric. I could see slivers of white bone sticking out around the ragged edge of the wound.
I didn’t have any concept of time as I sat there, trying to stem the bleeding. It could have been hours or days or weeks that I didn’t move, Smalls’ head in my lap. It took me a long time to realize the moaning had stopped, along with the rise and fall of Smalls’ chest.
Numbness took over. I didn’t move, even as his body grew cold and still. I felt hollow.
Smalls was dead.
Chapter 6
Natalia
I was still standing in the middle of the trashed dining room, lost in thought and unsure of where even to begin, when the door flew open and three men I’d never seen before poured inside.
I whipped my head around to ask who they were, but I didn’t even have a chance to get the words out of my mouth before one of them had picked me up by my arms and slammed me into the wall.
“Where’s your daddy?” he hissed.
I hated the nasty smell of his breath and the unshaven hairs lingering around his mouth. His eyes were a dull brown, brimming with violence. Over his shoulder, I saw the other two men stepping over the broken tables and chairs on their way towards the office and kitchen. “I-I don’t know,” I stuttered, too frightened to make sense.
The man snarled, unsatisfied with my answer, and casually tossed me into the leather seat of the booth next to us. He raised his arm to point at me with the hammer he held clutched in his hand. “Stay there,” he ordered. “Don’t fucking move.”
I nodded. Fear had taken me over. I was nothing more than a pile of reactions. It was beyond my control to find words or form thoughts. All I could do was obey.
The man turned and followed his partners towards the back. I heard the sounds of struggling and their voices raised as they kicked open the door of Daddy’s office. He tried to yell, but the quick smack of a fist silenced him immediately.
Their suits and grease-slicked hair identified the men immediately as Espositos, though they weren’t the same ones as the two men who usually came to
collect money from us. One voice I recognized with a sudden lurch. It was the one who’d been talking to my father late at night on the same day I found the body in the dumpster. His words were short and clipped as he said coldly, “What’d you do, Antonio?”
“What are you talking about?” Daddy began. “I didn’t do any—”
“Hit him,” the man interrupted.
