Tormenting Her Innocence

ISLA:

Three days.

Three days since I ate. Three days since I slept anywhere with a roof over it. Three days since I went out the second-floor bathroom window of my uncle's house in Yonkers in my socks, with eighty-seven dollars in my front pocket and a bruise on my collarbone the exact size of his thumb.

The eighty-seven dollars are gone.

The bruise is not.

I'm running. I've been running, on and off, since five this morning, when I made the dumb call to fall asleep against a heating vent on Twenty-Eighth and got woken up by a hand on my shoulder I almost recognized. I didn't wait to find out. Up over the chain-link, down the alley, out onto Sixth, and I have not, since, really stopped.

My throat is sandpaper.

My lungs are knives.

I cut left at a Duane Reade, right at a coffee cart, left again at an old guy in a blazer who turns to stare. Midtown does what midtown does. It parts. It doesn't see me. It has its own meeting to get to.

Water. I need water.

There's a park on the next block. I can see the trees. Trees mean fountains. Fountains mean water. I cross against the light. Somebody honks. I don't look.

The gate is open.

I'm inside it and the city goes down by twenty percent, like somebody put a pillow over its face, and I stop on the gravel and I bend at the waist and I breathe.

In.

Out.

The world tilts and rights itself.

There's a saxophone player packing up. There's a woman on a bench with a stroller. There's a family.mom, dad, little girl, maybe four.at a bench under the cherry trees. The girl has an ice cream cone the color of a sunset. Her dad is holding it for her, because her hands are too small to hold it without dropping it, and he's saying something, low, like a secret, and she is laughing the laugh that has not yet been taught about the world.

I have to look away.

It comes up anyway.

My mom on a bench in Battery Park, my dad with one of those soft serves, sprinkles, me at four, soft-serve all over my chin, my dad saying you got more on you than in you, baby, my mom laughing, the boats on the water, the sky.

I press the heel of my hand into my eye. Hard.

'Don't,' I tell myself. 'Don't you dare.'

They're dead.

They've been dead a year and a half.

If I cry, my throat closes, and my throat is closed enough already.

I keep walking.

There's a fountain at the back of the park. A real one.stone basin, brass spout, the kind some Robber Baron paid to put up in 1898 with a plaque nobody reads.

I bend over it. I drink.

I drink like an animal, with my forehead against the brass, water spraying my chin, my eyes shut because if I open them I will start crying and I cannot afford to cry. I drink and I drink and I.

A scream.

It comes from the east. From the back gate. It's a woman's voice, and it's a name, and the name is

"ZIA."

I'm already running.

I don't remember deciding.

That part is over before my body has finished receiving the news. I am at the fountain. Then I am crossing the gravel. Then I am at the back gate. Then I am on the curb. Then I am in the street.

There's a woman in the middle of the avenue.

Mid-thirties. Camel coat. The face of a person who has just made eye contact with the thing that is going to kill her and has lost, in that one second, the use of her own legs. There is a black SUV doing forty-five in a thirty zone, and it is not stopping, and the driver is not sitting up.

I hit her at a dead run.

Both palms against her ribcage. I shove. I shove with everything I have left, which is almost nothing, but it's enough.she goes sideways, she stumbles, she falls onto the curb on the far side of the lane.

The SUV does not, I realize, hit her.

The SUV hits me.

There's a sound.

I don't have a name for the sound, because no one ever taught me a name for the sound your body makes when a two-ton vehicle moving at forty-five miles an hour writes its name across your hip and your shoulder and the back of your head. There's the sound, and the lift, and a half-second where I am.somehow.flying, asphalt below, gray sky above, and then there's the landing.

The landing is the part I won't remember.

The asphalt is cold under my cheek. There's a taste in my mouth that isn't water.

The woman in the camel coat is on her hands and knees on the curb. Her hair's in her face. She's looking at me. She's crying.

'It's okay,' I want to tell her. 'It's okay, zia. I got you.'

I don't have a voice for it.

I close my eyes.

ADRIAN:

I have Chloe on her back when the phone rings.

She's wearing nothing but the necklace I bought her last week.eighteen-karat, three carats, more than her rent.and her hair is fanned out on the pillow the way she's been practicing in front of her bathroom mirror for the eight months we've been doing this. Blinds half-drawn. Room smells like her perfume and a little bit like sweat. My belt's on the floor. My phone is on the nightstand.

The phone is buzzing.

"Don't," she says.

She reaches up. She does the thing she does, where she gets up on one elbow and tries to put her tongue in my mouth, like she thinks we're in a movie, like she thinks I'm going to put my hand in her hair and tell her she's beautiful.

I catch her by the throat.

I don't squeeze. I just hold. The tendons under my thumb tighten and let go, tighten and let go, and her pupils blow open the way I like.

"You don't kiss me, whore."

"Adrian."

"You don't kiss me. You don't talk to me. You open your mouth when I tell you to open your mouth, and you don't open it any other time. Do we understand each other."

"Yes."

"Yes what."

"Yes, Adrian."

"Good girl."

The phone is still buzzing.

I flip her over. I push her down by the back of the neck until her face is in the pillow, until she's where I want her, until the only part of her I can see is the long line of her back and the curve of her hip and the place my hand fits, exactly, on the bone.

"On your knees."

She moves. She knows the routine. I have her by the hair at the back of her neck, I am about to push her face down where her face is going to be for the next ten minutes, and the fucking phone is still buzzing.

I reach for it.

It's Lucas.

Lucas does not call me. Lucas calls my father. Lucas does not, in three years of being my father's right hand, telephone the personal cell of his only son for any reason short of one of two things.

I pick up.

"What."

"Adrian."

"Are they alive."

"Both. Your mother's unhurt. Your father's on his way. San Vincenzo Memorial. Now."

"Ten minutes."

I hang up.

I am off the bed. Into my jeans. Into the boots. Chloe is on her elbows on the mattress with her hair in her eyes and her mouth open in the dumb soft confused way it gets when she has not, in the last ninety seconds, been told what to do.

"Adrian?"

"Get out before I get back."

I'm on the stairs.

I see my mother first.

She's in the chair outside the OR. Julian is next to her. She's bent forward with her face in her hands and her shoulders are doing the small narrow shake of a woman who has been crying for twenty minutes and is, for a politeness she cannot afford to drop, trying to keep doing it without sound. Julian has his hand between her shoulder blades. He looks up when I come around the corner.

He nods.

She's alive.

I cross the corridor. I get there before she sees me. I go down on one knee in front of her chair. I take her hands off her face. I put them in mine.

"Mama. Look at me. Are you hurt."

"Adrian."

"Are you hurt."

"No. No, cucciolo, I'm.I'm not.there was a girl ."

"Where's Papa."

"Inside. With the doctors. Adrian, amore, there was a girl ."

My father comes around the corner from the OR side. He's still in his suit jacket, and his suit jacket has my mother's lipstick on the lapel from where she cried into it, and his face is the face he has at the kitchen table on the mornings Lucas calls him before sunrise. He puts his hand on the top of my head.just one second, the way he used to do when I was eight.and he goes past me and he sits down next to my mother and he does not say anything.

Lucas is at the end of the corridor.

I go to him.

"Talk."

"Black GMC. New plates. Ran them already.registered to a shell, traces to a holding company, traces to the Reyes family in Newark. Driver's still at large. The dash cam from the 7-Eleven across the street puts the car parked in the same spot for forty minutes before your mother walked out of the museum. He was waiting, Adrian."

"He was waiting for her."

"He was."

I close my eyes for one second.

Open them.

"And the girl?"

Lucas's face does the thing it does. Which is not a thing. "She's in surgery. They put her under three hours ago. They don't think she's coming out."

"Who is she."

"No ID. No phone. No wallet. Nothing in her pockets but a water bill from a month-to-month sublet in the Bronx that's been canceled six weeks. She's fifteen, sixteen, they think. Doctors are still working."

I look back down the corridor at my mother.

She has her face back in her hands.

Three days later, the girl is still under.

Three days, and my mother is still in that same chair with the same red eyes, and my father is still in and out of meetings with the head of neuro and the head of trauma and the head of every other goddamn department in San Vincenzo, and the bill they're running could pay off the mortgage on a small island, and the girl is still under, and they will not, will not, leave the floor.

I tell them they're being stupid.

I tell my father.at the kitchen table at my grandmother's house, the morning he comes home for forty minutes to shower.Papa, she ran into the street. Nobody pushed her. That was her choice.

He does not look at me.

"Adrian. Do you know who you sound like."

"Who."

"Nobody you want to be."

He goes back upstairs.

I'm at my grandmother's that night. Eleanor Vance is seventy-two, walks with a cane, runs three foundations, and she is the only person on either side of the family I have not, at some point, told to mind her own business.

I kiss the top of her head on the way out.

"I'm going to the hospital, Nonna. Just for an hour."

"To see the girl."

"To see Mama."

"Mm."

She takes my chin between her thumb and her forefinger, the way she's been doing since I was four.

"Adrian."

"Nonna."

"Be careful, amore. Sometimes the girl in the bed is the girl you don't see coming."

I laugh.

I kiss her again.

I leave.