Fearless (18 page)

The voices in the kitchen became frantic and angry. Her mother’s got loud enough for Carla to hear her say, “Listen to me, Manny. You’re going to be sorry!”

That convinced Carla to attempt to use her crutches and get closer, to be able to hear ail of what they were saying. Her bedroom was at the end of a narrow hall opposite Bubble’s room. His door was kept closed. The sight of its glass knob (scavenged from the luxury building where Manny worked) was a rebuke. When he was alive, Bubble’s door was never shut and the knob was out of sight. Now it was the first thing she saw if she left her room. She was stopped by its facets; like a hypnotist’s watch they held her vision and mesmerized her. She forgot the crutches and the airless hallway smelling of tomato sauce. She felt Bubble in her arms, she smelled his hair, she heard him make demands.

“No!” she whispered intensely to scare the memories away.

There was shushing and quiet from the kitchen.

“Carla?” Manny called.

She didn’t answer. Her left crutch began to skid on the bare floor of the hall. She wedged it against the wall and waited silently.

“Nothing,” Manny said. “She’s sleeping.” He resumed their discussion about the lawsuit in a whisper.

Carla fit herself into the narrow hall, so narrow there was hardly room for the spread of her crutches. She wedged the rubber tips into the crevices and hung like a puppet, limp from her shoulders down. She didn’t like to use the crutches because she couldn’t get the hang of swinging her weight forward without the handles digging into her armpits. Her body was a misery, aching the full length, from broken leg to bruised middle to sore underarms. She loathed her body anyway: bony and weak, her skin dusky and loose. She wished she could shed herself. That’s why she cherished sleep: her energy and freedom of movement returned and so did her baby boy. From her position in the hall some words became audible, but not enough. She moved closer, the tips squeaking against the wall and floor.

“He told me we can sue the government here in New York,” Manny said.

Aunt Mary, whose voice was always loud and complaining, said, “The government! What did the government do, for Chrissake?”

“They don’t make the airlines use infant seats,” Manny said.

Carla wished her mother would interrupt again and stop them. Tell them: You don’t take money for a dead baby. If not, then she would have to, even though the prospect of facing her aunts and uncles made her sick with exhaustion. She couldn’t eavesdrop indefinitely, though. The crutches were wearing through her skin. Her shoulders felt as if they were about to pop out of their sockets.

“What difference would an infant seat have made?” Uncle Bob asked. He had a degree in engineering, the only college graduate of the older generation, and he enjoyed thoughtful discussions. His question was posed with a mild curious tone, the inquiring student.

“Who knows!” Aunt Mary complained as if the issue were mystical and irritating.

“Carla was holding him on her lap,” Manny said. “You can’t hold on to a baby—that’s why you have to have a car seat when you drive.”

“We used to put Pete on the floor in a little bed,” Mary said. “Remember? Nothing ever happened.”

“You were never in an accident!” her sister Florence said.

“It was safer that way!”

“Mary, how can you be so stupid? There’s nothing holding them down.”

“Excuse me. I don’t understand.” That was Uncle Carmine talking; he was all business, a practical man. “You don’t sue the airline?”

“No,” Manny said. “We do. We sue the airline, the government, the manufacturer—”

“Sure! They made the plane badly!
That
makes sense!” Aunt Mary banged something, gaveling her verdict.

“Will you shut up, please,” her sister Florence said calmly. “Let him finish.”

“I don’t remember what I was saying,” Manny said.

“Listen to me, Manny!”

That was Carla’s mother. Exasperated, ready to take charge. Carla was thrilled to hear her mother take command. She would shut them up.

“Listen to me!” her mother repeated.

“He’s listening,” Aunt Mary whined. “You’re shouting. We’re all listening. What is it?”

“I’m telling you, Manny, don’t use the Irish lawyer.”

“He was born here!” Manny complained.

“He’s an Irishman,” Carla’s mother insisted. “The Irish like doing two things: drinking and stealing from Italians.”

Under the best of circumstances Carla didn’t enjoy listening to their collective wisdom. She had thought at least her mother was defending the dignity of her loss. A surge of rage came up through her crutches. She bolted down the hall clumsily, whacking the tips into the wall and the floor, jarring her shoulders and head. “Get out of here!” she yelled as she reached the kitchen entryway. “I can’t take listening to your stupid opinions!” She lost control of the right crutch attempting the turn. She reached for the wall, missed, and stopped a fall by taking hold of the nearest support, the refrigerator handle just inside the entrance. The working part of the kitchen was narrow and painted yellow. At the far end, open to the living room, was a small dining ell, almost entirely filled by a yellow Formica table with a metal band around its edge. Right now the table was especially dominant; Manny had put in the extra leaf to accommodate her aunts and uncles. “It’s none of your business! You don’t know anything about it!”

They ignored her scolding. Aunt Mary smiled idiotically at her, as if Carla were a toddler having an amusing tantrum.

Aunt Florence called out blandly, “Hello, honey.”

Her mother turned to Manny and accused him: “I thought you said she was sleeping.” Manny was out of his chair in a rush to prop up Carla. Both uncles peered at her as if she were a total stranger. Uncle Carmine added a frown to his perplexity, the way he might if caught in a subway car with a rude and deranged panhandler.

“Get off me!” Carla yelled at Manny.

He ignored her and wedged his shoulder under hers, becoming a crutch. “Let go of the other one and I can get you over to my chair. You want to sit?”

Carla looked at the crammed box of the dining ell. The yellow paint seemed to have aged since she last noticed it, the color changing from what had been a bright mustard to the dried-out and dingy look of something left out overnight. Five very old, wrinkled and foolish faces watched her. They were packed into the space like eggs in a carton. “I’m not a child!” Carla yelled at them.

“Of course not,” Uncle Bill said.

“I want you to leave. This is my home. I want to be alone with Manny.”

“That’s not very nice,” her mother said, using a familiar phrase of criticism.

“I don’t give a shit about being nice!” Carla yelled back. She was crying, although she felt angry, not sad. “There’s nothing to be nice about,” she mumbled in a blubbery voice.

Manny picked her up. He wasn’t much bigger than she, yet lifting her appeared to be effortless for him. She was furious at his presumption. She yanked on his thick black hair. “Put me down!”

He cursed at the pain and shouted: “Let go! That hurts!”

“Put me down!” She pulled again, outraged and glad to hurt him.

Manny cursed and pleaded, “Let go! I’ll take you to your room and get them out.”

“We’re going, we’re going—” Aunt Mary called.

Carla released Manny’s hair. “My mother too!” She didn’t care if they all hated her or if she never saw them again. She was more than indifferent to their opinion of her; she wanted them to dislike her. She wanted the connection to them severed from both ends. “I want you out of here, Mama. Go home, Mama,” she called back almost in tears. Manny bumped the foot of her broken leg into the wall and that sent a pang up to the tender spot where it was mending. She moaned.

“Sorry,” he mumbled and hurried her into the bedroom, dumping her on the bed. He immediately touched his hair—tenderly, as if expecting to discover raw scalp.

“Get them out!” Carla shouted.

Aunt Florence appeared in the doorway. “Honey, we’re just crazy old people. Don’t pay any attention to us. We love you.”

Carla pressed her face into the bed and held her breath. Her leg ached. She concentrated on the pain. Vaguely she heard her mother complaining, probably about where she could go. Go to California, Carla pleaded in her head. She was thirsty. She couldn’t get herself a drink since the crutches were still in the kitchen. She mused: It’s a good thing Bubble is dead, I couldn’t take care of him. Aware of the callousness of that thought, Carla was disgusted. She pressed her lips together; squeezed her eyes tight, and voicelessly shouted into the mattress:
You’re horrible. You’re horrible. You’re horrible
.

Eventually Manny came in with her crutches and offered her espresso or tea or beer. She said no and sat up to watch him. Manny straightened the room, gathering the clumps of tissues and disheveled magazines and half-empty glasses of juice and cans of soda. She followed his every move.

“What?” he asked after he was done and she was still staring.

“Where did my mother go?”

“Florence’s. Just for tonight.”

“I don’t want her to come back here.”

“She’s not.” Manny looked exhausted. But he seemed to have unlimited energy and no tears. She hadn’t seen him cry, really weep, over his son’s death. He had teared up a little at the priest’s sentimental talk about Bubble bouncing in Jesus’ lap—“Leonardo knows only His goodness, blissfully ignorant of His awesome power.” Manny had lingered at the graveside. Her mother commented on it while Carla pressed her face against the limousine’s glass and looked up, above the level of the headstones, wishing to see unlimited sky. A helicopter buzzed past and her mother said, “Poor Manny. Look at him.” Carla turned and saw her husband at the foot of the opened ground, a solitary and unmoving figure. There was something unusual about the sight, apart from the fact that he was in a suit and standing sentinel by a grave. She didn’t know what—until he moved. It was seeing him at rest, stilled and sorrowful. That was the last time for such calm. Since then he had fussed around the house, serving drinks, rushing out to buy forgotten groceries, making mysterious phone calls in a hushed mumble. Whenever her eyes met his, Carla talked to him with them, in the silent and expressive language of their marriage. He answered in the clumsy words of their grief: “Can I get you something? Does the leg hurt? Are you hungry?”

Manny was tired. She noticed his shoulders were slumped, his eyes were burned out, the skin surrounding them charred. “Hold me,” she said.

He did, moving to the bed and sliding behind her so she could nestle in his arms and lay her head on his thick and lulling chest. But he did so in the same hurried and dutiful manner he rushed out to buy more groceries for her mother to cook. She wondered how patient he would be about making love. They hadn’t since the crash. That must be two weeks, she figured, a long time for them, even since the baby. Carla didn’t trust a marriage without lovemaking. She knew men and she especially knew Manny, and Manny was the kind of man who, if he didn’t desire his wife, couldn’t be trusted to keep his heart faithful. There were men who had no connection between their two beloved organs, but for Manny loss of desire would be the death of love. She had no sexual feelings. None. Her body, if it wasn’t in pain, was numb and foreign to her. And she couldn’t imagine ever having them again. But she had no illusions about Manny. Maybe his need for sex was why he couldn’t talk to her in words or looks. She urged herself to touch him.

Instead he talked. “Tomorrow I’m calling a lawyer and making an appointment. He’ll come here if you want. But you got to talk to him. This is a lot of money we’re talking about. And we can do good with it.”

Carla held her breath. She thought she was going to be angry, but she was tired of feeling apart from her husband and she let the crude words flush out of her head, catching hold of the last phrase. “What good?” she asked dreamily and was happy to feel sleepy again. She could make another journey away from misery.

“For later,” Manny said in a low harsh tone. “It can do a lot of good later.” He said “later” as if planning a revenge.

She was frightened by his ominous voice. “What—later?” She raised her head from his soothing chest. “What are you talking about?”

Manny pressed his chin against his chest to see her. That doubled his chin and puckered an old scar. “For Leonardo’s brother or sister. We could use the money for their education.”

Manny’s words made a weird hole in her memory. She fell in and searched for a brother or sister of Bubble’s. She was happy and anxious all of a sudden. Who were they?

“I always worried about Leo’s schooling…” Manny sighed heavily. His chest rose up and caught her head. “Something good has to come out of this,” he mumbled.

And the obvious shivered through her, a wave of nausea as she understood Manny meant children she didn’t have yet, children they would create all over again; with her body changing shape again; feeling the pain of birth again; fighting the grinding war of infancy again; again watching it grow day by day until—centuries from now—they would have another two-year-old who could be killed at any moment. It was insult. An ugly joke. That was why Manny didn’t cry over Bubble. He planned on getting a new son; like changing a bulb in his building’s hallway, indifferently replacing his dead son with a new baby.

“Get off,” she said glumly. She lifted her head and pushed at his billowing chest. “I want the bed to myself.”

“I didn’t mean right now!” Manny squealed.

“I need more room. Lying like this hurts my leg.”

“It shouldn’t hurt you anymore.”

How do you know what hurts?

“I asked Dr. Galletin,” Manny insisted. “He said it shouldn’t hurt anymore.”

“Well, guess what?” she answered with lugubrious scorn. “I got news for you and Dr. Galletin. It does hurt.”

12

Carla’s family ignored her fit of anger, just as they had ignored her during childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. The next morning her mother and aunts were back, cooking, cleaning, gossiping.

Carla said nothing. She was so hopelessly angry at them there was nothing she wanted to say. All morning they came in and asked questions.