Mafia Girl Page 13

  My dad motions to Clive to come talk to him. I casually walk toward them, pretending to be fixing the flowers on a side table. From the corner of my eye I see my dad put his hand on Clive’s shoulder.

  “You’re a good friend to Gia.”

  “She’s very special to me,” Clive says.

  My dad nods. “You are always welcome in my home, and I am here for you, whatever you need.”

  “Thank you,” Clive says and then falls silent. I don’t have to see his face to know how touched he is.

  We both head for the kitchen to help my mom baste all three turkeys and Clive gives her a pottery cup with a hand-printed label that says Herbes de Provence that has fennel and basil and lavender and stuff so we sprinkle it on the turkeys and it makes the house smell like a kitchen in the south of France, or that’s what Clive says, because how would I know. Everyone who walks in says, “Omigod, what is that?” and presses their hands to their hearts.

  That of course makes Clive feel very special and then we also help my mom mash the forty-five hundred potatoes, a job that Anthony hates to do, but Clive doesn’t mind. So Anthony goes upstairs to look at pornography on his computer or whatever, and then finally, everything is ready.

  All forty of us descend on the table like locusts and everyone looks at my dad who says grace and makes a speech about thanks, and of course my mom and I get teary-eyed even though we hate that.

  But I am thankful.

  For having my dad with us. For my crazy family. For Clive. For the recount. For what hasn’t happened yet, but will, like my secret plan for the future.

  When all the emotional stuff is finally over, we dab our eyes and take a breath, then pass around big platters of white meat turkey and then dark and of course we start with my dad. After the meat, we move on to gravy and then the mashed yams and mashed Yukon Gold potatoes and string beans and brussels sprouts and carrots and parsnips, cranberry sauce with walnuts and oranges, sausage corn bread stuffing with sage, and then the bread and then the pumpkin and chocolate pecan pies and the sugar cookies and espresso and tea and then after-dinner drinks, and then Frankie drops to the floor because he has a massive heart attack.

  The ambulance screeches up and the EMT guys give Frankie oxygen and it takes three of them to carry him out on a stretcher. By then everyone has switched over to speaking Italian because that way they feel closer to God and then they’re praying and throwing their hands up and everybody heads for their cars to follow the ambulance.

  But my dad holds up his hands. “Please, I will go with Anthony,” and “we’ll call you when we get there.”

  We all stay home and pray for Frankie and wait and wait and after that there’s a total pall over what’s left of the day. Clive and I help my mom clean up and then we go upstairs and watch a movie.

  “Do you want to stay over?” I ask Clive.

  “Would your parents mind?”

  “Definitely not.”

  But I put him in the guest room, not my room, anyway. At three in the morning the house phone rings and I know it’s my dad calling so I tiptoe into the hallway.

  “Thank God, thank God,” my mom says, which means Frankie pulled through and we have something else to be thankful for. I start wondering how the hell we’re going to get him to lose weight because when you’re ninety pounds overweight, you’re basically a walking time bomb.

  THIRTY-ONE

  I am coming out of school with Ro and Clive and now that Frankie is home recovering and Vinnie’s helping Frankie, my dad has actually agreed to let me cab it home or go with Thomas. And for once in my life I can breathe without a babysitter/spy waiting outside for me like I’m still in kindergarten.

  There’s an ice cream truck that always parks by the school and I decide to get a chocolate ice cream sandwich. I get in line and then look across the street while I’m waiting and I see something I’ve never seen before.

  At least not outside my school.

  He’s wearing sunglasses and a worn leather bomber jacket over jeans and he’s leaning up against a car with his arms crossed over his chest. He looks so breath-stopping hot that I feel faint. Am I hallucinating? It takes a minute for reality to set in and then I start to wonder how long he’s been there watching and whether his plan was to just keep observing from a distance or to actually cross the street and come closer.

  Instead of racing over, which my heart is telling me to do, I wait in line until it’s my turn. I buy two ice cream sandwiches and slowly cross the street.

  “Hope you’re not allergic to chocolate.”

  He half smiles as I hand him the sandwich, taking off his sunglasses and hanging them from the neck of his sweater. He looks at me hard, his eyes burning green like they’re lit from within, and he seems to forget the ice cream, but I start to rip the paper off mine with my teeth and point my chin at his to remind him. So he slowly and neatly peels away the paper and then holds my gaze.

  “How are you, Gia?”

  I manage to lick the ice cream first. “Hmm, better now.”

  The sandwiches are already melting from body heat. I watch his mouth move and the slow, hypnotic way he slides his tongue along the long side of the dark chocolate wafers, catching every drip while he watches me mimic his moves because this is definitely a game.

  Only my hyperactive brain is already firing questions: What’s next? What now? What exactly is his plan here, assuming he has one? But I’m not going to ask so I stand next to him and lean on the same black BMW and continue eating fast while he takes his time, which a shrink would definitely conclude means something major.

  Ro is watching from across the street and probably going, not that cop, but I smile at her anyway. And Clive is watching too because I know he’s curious about Michael after all I’ve told him. I look back at Michael working on the sandwich, and then, because I can’t think of anything else to say and the silence is killing me and screw my resolve to not say anything, I say, “now what?”

  “Work,” he says, checking his watch.

  “So you just came by to see me or what?”

  “Something like that.”

  That sketchy bullshit answer infuriates me because if this stupid cop doesn’t make a serious move soon…

  “So you saw me.” I turn to leave, but his arm reaches out and eases me back.

  “Gia…”

  “What, Michael?”

  “Watch your back,” he whispers, his face dead serious.

  I cock my head to the side. “What do you mean?”

  “There are rumblings…retaliation. That’s all I know.”

  I look at him curiously then cross the street. Did he come because he wanted to see me? Or just to pass on the vague warning because he felt it was his duty? Or both?

  Ro and Clive both look at me like, what was that all about?

  I shrug my shoulders because I have no idea.

  Later at night when I’m in bed, the ambiguity eats away at me and the scene keeps replaying in my head. The warning. The truth behind it, if there is. More than that my brain fixates on the video in my head of Michael eating the ice cream sandwich. His mouth moving. His eyes. The way the air seemed charged.

  I sleep fitfully, turning and twisting, obsessed with trying to get to know someone who seems intent on being unknowable.

  THIRTY-TWO

  BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM!

  Gunfire!

  Then another barrage of gunfire. BOOM, BOOM BOOM!

  I jerk awake, trying to figure out what’s happening. BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, my stomach seizing, recognizing the sounds but panicking because I have no sense of where they’re coming from.

  “Gia, Anthony, get down, get down on the floor under the bed!” my dad yells as my mom screams in panic.

  Like a terrified kid who wakes up with nightmares, I dive under the bed for cover, pressing my hands over my ears to muffle the deafening sounds and trying to stop my body from shaking like I’m having a seizure.

  BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, the shots conti
nue, hitting the windows and sending chunks of glass raining down, crashing everywhere, splintering and cracking, our home being shot up and destroyed, like we’re in the middle of a war zone—only we’re letting it happen, powerless, unable to fight back and we’re all cowering on the floor like scared sheep. I want to run down the hall into my parents’ room but it would be stupid to stand so I stay scrunched up under the bed, my heart pounding so hard I’m sure my parents can hear it.

  “Gia, stay where you are, but answer me!” my dad yells. “Are you okay?”

  I try to answer but can’t at first. “I’m okay,” I manage to say, my words coming out haltingly, ragged, through my tears.

  “Gia, are you okay?” he yells again.

  “Yes, Daddy, I’m okay!” I manage to shout.

  “Thank God!” my mom yells.

  We all wait one minute, two minutes, three…and then hear sirens and know that help is coming and whoever did it is probably far away already. I crawl out from under the bed and make my way to the door. The floor is splintered with shattered glass and my feet start to bleed from the cuts, but I don’t care and keep going.

  My parents are crouched on the floor of their room, huddled together and it’s like I’m seeing them for the first time because they look old and scared and helpless. My mom is lying there with her legs pulled up and I see red veins crisscrossing her milk-white skin and she’s crying and screaming, “God help us, God help us, what’s wrong with this world?”

  Anthony comes in and his arm is bleeding because a bullet must have grazed it, and my mom yells, “Oh my God, what happened? What happened?”

  “It’s nothing, Ma,” Anthony says, but the blood is dripping down his arm in a steady stream, leaving a red trail on the pale blue carpeting. My mom jumps up and goes to the bathroom to get peroxide and gauze and I grab a towel to press against his arm to stop the bleeding. And my dad is calling 911 for an ambulance and Anthony’s yelling, “they’ll pay for this,” and everybody is searching for their clothes and I run back to my room to find jeans and shoes and when I come back my dad is buttoning his shirt and standing by the side of the window. He presses numbers into his phone and stares into the night.

  “You know what to do,” he whispers. “Now.”

  And just the command of his voice makes me feel sick inside. When will this war ever end?

  When someone tries to wipe out an entire family—or at least scare an entire family—that’s big news.

  “If it bleeds, it leads,” TV reporters say, so pictures of our house with the windows blown out are all over the papers along with pictures of Anthony being driven to the hospital in the ambulance even though the bleeding slowed down and the bullet didn’t lodge in his arm.

  The phone is ringing constantly and flowers start arriving, which is dumb, but people like to show they’re sympathetic. And I am walking around thinking about Michael’s warning and how he knew something and then in spite of everything around me spiraling out of control, it happens to be a school day, so I bandage all my cuts and stuff my feet into boots and get dressed and go.

  Everyone is either looking at me like I’m radioactive or coming over and saying, “Gia, Gia, I’m so glad you’re okay.”

  “I’m fine, thanks,” I say about a thousand times, only I’m not because I’m totally freaked by the thought of going home and sleeping in my bed again. If that isn’t enough, my mind keeps replaying the warning from Michael, but I don’t have to think anymore about him because my phone rings at lunch and it is him.

  “Gia, are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, we’re all fine, except a bullet grazed Anthony’s arm and he had to have stitches.”

  He exhales. “I was worried. I’m glad you’re okay.”

  But that doesn’t exactly do it for me and I have to go to class so I hang up and this time I try not to think about what could have been.

  We move into Ro’s house for a few days while our windows are being replaced with bulletproof glass. It feels weird to move next door, but Ro’s family is like mine, and her mom is like my mom’s separated-at-birth twin, and our dads work together, so there’s constant food and noise and I feel safer there. Then I start to think about Christmas in Europe with Clive, which could not come at a better time, so I ask my parents.

  “Go, go,” my dad says, relieved that he has a place to send me. “Yes, you can go, if the parents are with you.”

  I begin to count the days, the hours, and the minutes, because I need to escape.

  From New York.

  My family.

  My school.

  And my life.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Clive and I are actually at the airport, waiting to go to Paris. His parents, all upset by the news, called my parents and told them about the trip and promised that it would be good for me and that they’d be with us 24/7 yada, yada, yada, and that they’d watch out all the time and more than that, they’d treat me like their own daughter. Anyway, we have more than three weeks off and if I were home, all I could do is get in trouble.

  The truth is my parents didn’t need convincing. They wanted me out of the way because my dad is going on trial. It’s going to be a media circus and they see Europe as a safer universe. So they thanked Clive’s parents and my dad told them he was grateful.

  “I’ll remember it,” he said.

  I try to forget about the trial and my worries about him and what will happen because Super Mario always gets him out, and I live in the moment and the time in Paris and Rome and Milan and London seems to rush together in a joyous nonstop blur of extraordinary old hotels with suites with gilded antiques and door-size windows and marble baths and feather beds and long-stemmed roses and chocolate croissants and room service forever there to satisfy your every wish, at your door in minutes with endless wine and coq au vin and all kinds of pâté and stuff. And everything comes hidden under enormous silver domes and Clive doesn’t think anything about all of that because for him this is just his normal abnormal life.

  But I am constantly like, “I can’t believe this, I can’t believe this,” which he thinks is funny, but finally one day he stops laughing and looks at me seriously and shakes his head.

  “Yes, but, Gia, all this isn’t what makes you happy, you know?”

  “Maybe not, but it doesn’t make you unhappy either, you know?”

  “You’ll see” is all he says, looking back at me.

  In between going to boutiques and perfume stores and looking at shoes and dresses and hats and T-shirts and underwear and taking pictures of everything that I love because the article will be mostly a collage of cool pictures of out-there fashion that I love, we go low end and visit cheapie department stores, which are Europe’s answer to Target and Forever 21, then to flea markets like Les Puces de Saint-Ouen in Paris and Porta Portese in Rome and the Portobello Market in London. And I buy things off tables, like beaded necklaces and lacy thongs for less than five dollars and we bargain because you’re supposed to and take care with our wallets because of pickpockets.

  Clive is watching all this and we’re goofing on people and his parents. We stop for onion soup in a little café and it arrives all steamy and smells like heaven and has a thick glob of Swiss or whatever cheese melted all crisp over the top. I just about faint because it’s so delicious and then I have to go to the bathroom only there really isn’t one, it’s just a hole in the ground that I have to squat over and I tell Clive and he laughs.

  “I forgot to tell you about the ancient bathrooms.”

  It’s a trip to see plumbing from the seventeenth century, especially when you’re in completely new surroundings with someone who’s your best friend, not counting Ro.

  At night after walking our feet off all day long we usually go out to dinner by ourselves or with Claude and Alice and then sometimes they go upstairs to bed and we sneak out and go walking by the Seine.

  “That’s where you see all of humanity,” Clive says.

  We watch lovers and homeless peo
ple and pickpockets and mangy stray cats and homeless dogs and take pictures without letting anyone know we’re taking their pictures, but then we get totally exhausted too and go to sleep at two a.m. and wake up when the sun shines inside the room through the enormous windows that look out on what seems like a panoramic painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  Only it’s not.

  It’s a living canvas. It’s a sweeping view of slanty Paris rooftops and the church of Sacré-Coeur high, high up in the distance as if it’s tucked away where it’s safe and close to heaven and it’s all so fairy tale enchanting that I can’t stop taking pictures and want to cry because when things are so perfect it almost hurts to look at them and you want to inhale everything and hold it inside you.

  My phone doesn’t work here, which is just as well because I needed a break from my Michael obsessiveness, and anyway, maybe it will help both of us to be an ocean apart.

  For our last few days we go to Milan and after visiting the Duomo and walking on the roof and gasping at the view, we go to a department store called La Rinascente.

  “Go up to the bathroom,” Clive says.

  “Do you think I’m three and don’t know if I have to go?”

  He grins. “No, Gia, that’s not what I meant. Go up to the bathroom and look out the window.”

  “What for?”

  “Just go.”

  I take the escalator up and find the bathroom and go in and look out the window. And freeze. I’m staring at a painting in a museum, I think at first. Only it’s not. It’s the real world and it’s the Duomo right there, framed by the window like a painting and lit by the golden afternoon sun, and it’s the most beautiful, spiritual sight I’ve ever seen, so I tear up again, which is crazy.