Footsteps (41 page)

All Carlo heard was that Trey was safe. They
had him, and he was safe. His chest ached from the pressure of his
suddenly swelling heart. “He’s okay?”

“Yes. He needs you, but he’s well. What’s
your move, nephew?”

~oOo~

It was the deep dark near dawn by the time
Carlo, Uncle Ben, Uncle Lorrie, Nick, and the driver/guard—whose
name, it turned out, was Bobbo—made it to the rank little motel
outside of Watertown, New York, where Ben had told his men to hold
Jenny and Trey. They were alone; Pagano Brothers men were still
looking for the guy who’d been with her.

They were keeping Trey and Jenny in separate
rooms. When Carlo got out of the big Navigator, Uncle Lorrie
gestured for him to follow and led him to a room on the far corner
of the first floor of the two-story motel. Uncle Lorrie knocked.
There was movement on the other side of the door, and then it
opened. A man with a gun nodded at Lorrie and opened the door all
the way. Carlo pushed through, into the room.

Trey was lying, curled into a tight ball, on
one double bed. A woman was sitting up next to him, her back on the
headboard. She was thin and blonde and looked a little like Jenny,
if Jenny had had a much less privileged life. Carlo had no idea who
she was; he assumed the Uncles’ men had brought her on to look
after Trey.

He went to his knees at Trey’s side of the
bed. His boy was pale and sweaty, but he seemed to be sleeping. He
looked so small and lonely, curled up without any of his bedtime
toys, both thumbs in his mouth.

His heart felt misshapen, it was so full of
love and worry and regret, and he laid his hand on his little boy’s
small shoulder. “Trey. Wake up, pal.

As he woke, Trey’s little face puckered in
distress, and he whined and made himself even smaller. Carlo’s
heart broke. “Trey, it’s Daddy. You’re okay, pal.”

Bright green eyes, red-tinged now with tears
and fatigue, opened. His thumbs popped out. “Daddy?” Trey blinked
and opened his eyes more, his body beginning to relax. “Daddy?”

“I’m here, pal. I got you.” He scooped his
son into his arms and held him as tightly as he dared, then just
sat on the floor between the beds. “I got you. You’re okay.”

“Daddy, I don’t wanna stay with Mommy. I
wanna go to Pop-Pop’s. Mommy is mean now.” He began to wail. Carlo
held him even closer, letting tears of his own fall.

“We’re going back to Pop-Pop’s. And you
don’t ever have to see Mommy again. Okay?”

“I want Elsie.” Trey’s sobs continued, and
he curled up into a ball in Carlo’s arms.

“Elsa’s at Pop-Pop’s, pal. She’s waiting for
you.” He kissed his son’s head. He smelled of sweat and cigarette
smoke. Jenny didn’t smoke. He looked around the room; it didn’t
appear that the people who’d been taking care of him did, either.
He wanted to know where the asshole who’d helped Jenny do all this
was.

Trey began to calm, and he shifted in
Carlo’s arms. There was a bruise on his little bicep, taking up
most of the space between his elbow and his shoulder and shaped
vaguely like a hand and fingers. Carlo leaned his son back and took
a good look at him. One of his cheeks was the deep red of a new
bruise, as well. Carlo filled with a murderous, vicious rage.
“Trey, what did you mean, Mommy’s mean?”

“She yells and hits. And Mr. Mark does too
but he hit Mommy and went away.” His sobs picking up again, Trey
fought to be closer, and Carlo pulled him to his chest, tucking him
under his chin.

Carlo was going to be sick. He felt like the
blood in his veins had turned to bile.

“It’s okay, pal. I won’t let that happen
again.”

“Carlo.”

He looked up and saw Uncle Lorrie standing
at the end of the space between the beds.

“It’s time.”

He had chosen to listen to Luca and Bina. He
would not do it himself. While they’d traveled to Watertown, he’d
been tormented by second thoughts, still feeling sure that he was
shirking responsibility for a problem he had created. Knowing that
Jenny had hit Trey, and had allowed someone else to hit him, did
not ease Carlo’s need to handle her himself.

But now, with Trey crying into his neck, his
tiny arms nearly choking him, the rightness of the decision he’d
made became clear. He was Trey’s father before anything else, and
he would not set his son aside to deal with Jenny. In the simply
practical and utterly philosophical realities both, he could not
put his son down. His arms were too full to kill.

Carlo nodded. “I don’t want anything to
scare Trey.”

“Understood. George here will drive you to
the all-night diner down the road. Maybe Trey would like an egg
cream? We’ll meet up with you when it’s done.”

“That sound good, Trey?” He shifted Trey in
his arms so he could see his face, that bruise pushing bile through
his veins again. Trey wasn’t sleeping, but he didn’t respond. He
lay there, blinking, and slid both thumbs into his mouth to
suck.

As Carlo stood with his now quiet, limp son
in his arms, Uncle Lorrie asked, “There anything you want to say to
her?”

Was there anything he wanted to say to the
woman he’d once loved, who’d borne the beautiful son in his arms?
To that woman, he might have something to say. But that woman was a
mirage. Maybe she’d never been real.

The woman who’d abandoned them? Who’d taken
his son from his family at gunpoint? Who’d hit him and scared him?
For her, words were both inadequate and unnecessary. There was no
vocabulary sufficient to express his rage, his hatred, or the
debilitating fear and loss he’d experienced on this day.

And there was nothing he needed to say to a
woman so soon to leave this life. As far as Carlo was concerned,
she was dead already.

And Trey was in his arms again.

“No. I’m not letting him go for anything.
Just end it and let’s go home. Please.”

Though he was still unconscious, Joey had
stabilized while Carlo and the Uncles were on their errand to
collect Trey, and the family had scheduled shifts at the hospital
so that people could get sleep or food, or could work. Peter had
rented a car and gone back to Providence, taking Rosa back with
him. She did not want to miss her first week of classes.

That had caused a ruckus with her siblings
and father, but in the end, no one stopped her from going back to
Brown. Of all the Paganos, Rosa was the one Sabina enjoyed least.
She was a pleasant young woman, for the most part, but she was
badly spoiled and self-centered. More than once, Sabina had heard
one of the siblings refer to Rosa as a ‘princess,’ and it was an
apt description. Like the princess with the pea, she was.

Rosa and Joey didn’t get along, but it still
seemed wrong for her to leave. She loved Trey deeply, Sabina knew
that. At least she could have stayed to see him home safely. But
instead, she fretted about missing the first week of the new
college term.

Well, Sabina didn’t know about college.
Maybe the first week was especially important. But she thought
about what Carmen had told her:
If you care about Trey and Joey,
and about Carlo, you stay with the other people who do. Even if it
hurts. That’s family.
Rosa needed the same wisdom.

But she was gone. Carmen and John had taken
the first shift at the hospital, and everyone else dispersed, but
only to their homes nearby. Luca had taken Carlo Sr. and Sabina
back to the house. Carlo Sr. had put his arm around her and said,
“Come on, honey. Let’s go home.”

Home. Was this house her home already? Was
that the right thing?

No matter. Is was a real thing, she thought.
A true thing. Not quite three months since she’d gotten free of her
stark, lonely, debasing life with Auberon, she had found herself in
the bosom of a large, loving, chaotic, complicated family.

Carlo Sr. was weak with fatigue and stress,
and he allowed himself to be persuaded to go to bed when they got
‘home’—after a deep glass of scotch. It was nearing dawn, so Luca
left to get the shifts going for the work day. Sabina, unable to
sleep, and knowing Trey and Carlo would be home in a few hours,
made a pot of strong coffee and then busied herself tidying up,
while Elsa followed her around the house. The housekeeper had been
there while she and Joey and Trey were out, but still Sabina
cleaned the clean kitchen and fluffed the fluffed throw pillows in
the living room. She went up to Trey’s room and set up his bed with
his shark sleeping bag and all his shark things. She took the dog
outside and swept the swept patio. And then she simply wandered the
house.

It was a beautiful, old arts and crafts
house. Carlo had told her that his father had restored it all,
nearly single-handedly, and every room showed his tender care. The
heavy walnut woodwork and gleaming wide plank floors, the leaded
glass windows, some with stained glass, others with period-true
wavy glass, the flagstone fireplace—even after more than three
decades and six wild children, the house showed little wear. There
were some places in the house—the smaller bedrooms, the mudroom,
the rathskeller in the cellar, where there was a wet bar and a game
and TV room—that had been lived hard in, but the family seemed to
treat the rest of the house with respect. The rooms were used every
day, but they were never ill-used. The resulting effect was a
perfect balance between beauty and comfort.

Sabina loved old homes like this, with
distinct rooms and long hallways. She supposed they weren’t ideal
for large entertaining, but they were cozy. Even this big house was
cozy. Auberon’s house—his mansion—had also been old, but he’d had
it gutted and remodeled, so that there were large, flowing spaces
with easy movement from one room to another. And everything had
been done in light neutral tones. To Sabina the whole house had
seemed like the inside of a refrigerator.

She walked down the long hallway between the
living and dining rooms and the kitchen. Carlo Sr.’s study, the
guest room, and a bathroom fed off this hallway. It wasn’t a
particularly wide space, and it seemed all the narrower because
both sides were almost entirely filled, ceiling to floor, with
family photos. Sabina adored this hallway of history. She had
lingered a little several times, but there were too many photos to
take in all at once. And she had yet to ask Carlo to give her the
tour of them. She would like that, to have names for all these
wonderful faces.

Sabina didn’t have this kind of history. She
had no photos of her family in Buenos Aires; it had not occurred to
her grieving, lost, eight-year-old self that she should want them.
Tia Valeria had been impatient with photographs, insisting that
people spent too much time peering through viewfinders and not
enough time looking around at the wide world, so she had no photos
of her time with her aunt. And she wanted no photos of her time
with Auberon. Ironically, because he was a person of whom people
took photographs, and she had often been at his side, there were
probably hundreds of photos of her time with him.

But this, this beautiful, various
archive—no, she had nothing like it.

The photos ranged from very old, toned in
sepia, obviously heritage photos of ancestors—posed shots clearly
taken in Italy, of dour-looking women and men standing in front of
olive trees or cottages. Other old pictures were even more formal
and dour, the kind of professional portraits of the time. Sabina
thought it odd that people in very old photos never, ever seemed to
smile.

There were black and white photos from the
40s, 50s, and 60s—she could tell by the fashions—and these people
were all smiling, sitting around tables, dressed to the nines. On
lounges at swimming pools, dressed in bathing suits and big hats.
At the beach—this beach—dressed likewise. Sabina wasn’t sure who
most of these people were—except that in photos starting in what
Sabina thought were the 1960s, she recognized a young, handsome
Carlo Sr. with an absolutely gorgeous, raven-haired woman, almost
as tall as he. She must have been Teresa, Carlo’s mother. There
were photos, too, of the Uncles as young, dashing men, and their
wives, as glorious beauties. These photos were mostly in color.
There was something extra alive about the colors and patterns of
60s and 70s fashion. So wild, so big, so vibrant. So sexy.

And then the photos of the children. These,
Sabina could identify without trouble. So many photos of Carlo,
Carmen, Luca, and John wearing wetsuits, surfing, skateboarding,
having birthdays, graduating. Vacations at the Grand Canyon and
Niagara Falls. Trips to Europe. Baseball games. Football games.
John playing his guitar. Carlo smiling next to a model of a
building. Carmen surrounded by green plants. Luca in a boxing pose,
bare-chested, wearing red shorts and what looked like boxing gloves
with much less padding. That must have been a promotional shot from
the ‘MMA’ he’d done. She knew that, because there was also a photo
of him fighting, his bare foot connecting with another man’s
face.

There were far fewer photos of Joey and
Rosa. Baby pictures, toddler and young child pictures. But the few
there were petered out quickly, while Rosa was still a flat-chested
little girl in pigtails, and Joey was wearing braces. Then high
school graduation photos, and nothing else. There were more photos
of Trey on this wall than of Joey and Rosa combined.