The Girl She Used to Be (26 page)

We retreat to our respective rooms and shower. I do my best to turn myself back into the woman the ladies at the spa created
the day before, but I have not been given the same tools; if I had industry-leading hair gel, makeup, and body creams, not
to mention a decent hair dryer, I might stand a chance.

But as I gaze at my reflection in the mirror, I get a vague sense of what I might be like, feel like, if I’d grown up a suburban
kid, or at least a kid tied to a single suburb, and wound up awake and fresh on this average day. And I pretend how my biggest
event would be running off to the mall to do some shopping or planning a trip for some purpose other than survival.

Alas, today is not that day.

Considering how many times my hair has been colored, it’s in remarkable condition; it’s soft and silky and I find it implausible
that it’s actually attached to my scalp. My fingernails and toenails have survived well too, along with the color and texture
of my skin. My friends at the spa managed to deliver a long-lasting product. The issue I can’t seem to get past is all the
dried blood and scratches speckling my upper body.

Jonathan knocks and I slip on my robe and open the door for him. He is clean-shaven, wearing jeans and a tight-fitting navy
tee, with a slightly darker navy sweater draped over his arm.

“So what does a girl wear when she’s going home to meet your folks?”

He studies me. “Armor.”

Jonathan starts rummaging through the bags of clothes he purchased for me. I’m hoping he’s going to select the skirt and one
of the light blouses, to sort of suggest classiness—or that he might be hoping to impress his family.

Instead, he selects the pair of jeans and a red, formfitting knit sweater; he went one hundred percent practical.

“Red,” I say. “Hides the blood better?”

He frowns as I grab the clothes and take them into the bathroom. As I put them on, I’m amazed at how well everything fits—not
perfect, but surprisingly close. And there is something so alluring, almost amatory, about a guy who buys clothes for a woman.
It requires so much more thought—and attention—than buying something static, like perfume. It’s as though Jonathan already
knows who I am and the terrain of my body, every curve and line, that he has it all memorized, and finding something to cover
it is not only simple, it’s sensual.

When I exit the bathroom, Jonathan is waiting by the door and quickly checks me out. I throw my arms in the air, smile, and
say, “So what do you think?”

“You are… amazing. You look great wearing anything.”

I lower my hands and put them in the pockets of my jeans. “So do you,” I say. I sound juvenile and passive, but I mean it.

“You want some breakfast?”

Despite an increasing anxiety of the coming day, I do, so we go down, exit the hotel, and walk toward the harbor. The air
is cold and crisp but the sun is quickly heating the pavement and I can tell today will be warm.

We find a restaurant with outside seating and let the sun keep us from getting chilled. Jonathan orders various foods for
us—eggs, bacon, sausage, french toast, and a dish that is essentially eggs Benedict but the Canadian bacon has been replaced
with backfin crabmeat—and we immediately dive in. There is no playfulness this time, no buttery forkfuls of pasta or aphrodisiacal
shellfish; it seems we have taken more of a breakfast-is-the-most-important-meal-of-the-day approach.

Or a
last meal
approach.

“Do you ever wonder what your life would be like if you’d grown up in a normal family in suburban Cleveland?” I ask.

Jonathan grins a little and says, “Yeah,” and leaves it at that. I guess he’s not in the mood.

“You know,” I try again, “when I was a little girl I would draw pictures of big houses but never with anyone inside. I always
struggled to draw pictures of people.”

“Really?” He swirls a yolk around his plate with a fork.

“Hey,” I say, annoyed at his disinterest, “you’ve got a big green thing in your teeth.”

He keeps swirling. “Okay.”

I sigh and wait for him to realize I’m relatively pissed. I get nothing. “Wanna
talk about it
?”

“About what?”

“The doom that is clearly emanating from your entire presence here.”

He puts his fork down, takes off his glasses, and pinches his eyes. Then he reaches into his pocket for his Nicorette. He
shakes the box up and down but there is no rattle of relief. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” He rips the thing apart, verifying
there are no pieces left, then narrows his eyes at it like he’s trying to destroy it by way of some occult power. Suddenly,
he slams the box on the table and starts stabbing it with his spoon.

I just watch and say, “I find this… disconcerting.”

He drops the spoon and it bounces on the brick patio a few times and everyone is staring at us. Again.

Jonathan buries his face in his hands and says, “I’m sorry.”

I reach over, pull his hands away, and force him to look at me.

“I just…” he says, “I just wish it could be easier. For
you
.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your entire life has been ruined by my family. You’ve been deprived of a normal existence because my family refused to break
from our world of crime and find a way to become upstanding citizens. And now… now, here
I
am, asking you to face the people who wrecked your life—who had your parents killed—so that they will, God willing, cut you
some slack and let you live in peace. Here I am asking you to trust me and my cockamamie plan.”

I take his hand in mine and tighten my grip. “First of all, I totally trust any man who can use the word
cockamamie
in a sentence with complete seriousness. Second, I agreed to your plan because, well… I really had no place left to
go; it was either this or death.” I squeeze his hand as tightly as I can. “But most importantly, I’ve come to trust you, Jonathan.
And I know that you’ll take care of me. I truly believe it—and no one could be more amazed at that than I am. The last few
days, however many hours it’s been, have been the greatest of my life. I feel like the person I was born to be—
meant
to be—is waking for the first time and I have you to thank for it. And if God had this difficult life planned for me just
so that I could find you and be with you here, now, then it was worth every minute of misery.”

Jonathan shakes his head and looks away. “Don’t say that.”

“Why?”

“I’m not a good man, Melody. Don’t settle for me.”

“What do you mean? Everyone has flaws, Jonathan.”

“Felony-level flaws? Mine are more extreme than most, you know? I mean, what will become of us?”

I tug him a little to my side of the table. “We’ll figure that out as we go, okay?”

Jonathan sighs, then stares at me. “I’m sorry, Melody. I only want the best for you.”

“Don’t you see?” I slide my chair around to his side of the table and put my hand on his leg and say, “This
is
the best.”

F
OR THE FIRST TIME SINCE I’VE MET JONATHAN, HE IS RESERVED and quiet and dark. We do not speak much for the remainder of our
meal, nor during the walk back to the hotel. We remain close, holding hands and the like, though the purpose of his grip points
toward pulling me away to safety at any moment, but the words have all but disappeared.

We pack our things (all of my clothes go in his bag) and return to the lobby, where Jonathan disperses random bills and things
happen with speed and attention.

We make our way outside and the sun shines hard on the side entrance, where we wait for the Audi to be delivered from the
underground garage. The valet pulls the car in front of us and has already put the top down, adjusted the interior car temperature,
and turned on the radio; I guess this is part of the service. Jonathan slips him a twenty, opens the door for me, and helps
me in, then gets in on his side and immediately undoes everything the valet set.

We fly through the city streets; the lights remain green for us as though they understand the urgency of our mission. As we
exit the downtown area, we are delivered into a dizzying mixing bowl of beam bridges and trestles that could only have been
developed as a response to repeated population spikes. I try to imagine the math required to make this scene a success, and
realize, for the first time, that while math can solve everything, it demands a creative mind to make it useful. The understanding
of what makes these bridges exist and work—the compression, the tension, the torsion were all contrived by a creative engineer
or architect—was
then
cycled through mathematics to make it real.

All my life I’ve been lacking the vision. Jonathan, you see, is my engineer, my architect.

Within one minute we are booming out of the city on an exit ramp elevated two hundred feet above the water and we are heading
north on I-95 and it is now only a matter of time.

Before we are out of time.

Once we’re through the Fort McHenry Tunnel and on a stretch of highway free of traffic, Jonathan grabs his CD case and selects
a disc by Death Cab for Cutie titled
Plans
—as dimly entertaining as my choice of the Killers disc days earlier. He pushes it in the player and the mellow music drifts
around the interior of the car and he reaches over and rests his hand on my thigh and says, “Three and a half hours and you’ll
be in the presence of the Bovaro clan.”

I gently place my hand on his and ask, “So what do I need to know?”

He turns to me and sighs, throws the car into sixth gear, and punches the accelerator.

White Marsh, Maryland, 91 m.p.h.

“My brothers,” Jonathan says, “all live in New York, one of them still at home. I’m the third of four, and the most independent.
I’m the only one who reads literature; my brothers think reading is noticing the ads for Dewar’s and Tecate in between the
pictorials. Let me give you some background…”

• • •

Elkton, Maryland, 88 m.p.h.

“Jimmy is the youngest and a bit of a stooge to his older brothers. He’ll do what they say and has made no real effort to
understand what our family does or why we do it. I love my little brother, but he’s a total slob—and a caricature of a Mafia
member. He’s got the thick black hair, magnified New York accent, is overweight, and always has some kind of food in his hand,
like a cannoli or a Twinkie. He’s muscle and not much more…”

Brookside, Delaware, 82 m.p.h.

“Gino is two years older than me, and probably the closest to being as sane as I am. He’s smarter than the rest of us. But
he weakens under pressure from my father and will do whatever he says—or whatever any of my father’s associates say—to stay
in his favor…”

Swedesboro, New Jersey, 76 m.p.h.

“Now, Peter… he’s the oldest. And the cockiest. And the most vicious. And the most antisocial. And the best looking.
Frigging Frank Sinatra with a boxer’s build and the mind of a crook. He’s a real bastard. He’s the quintessential mob leader,
and he quite obviously wants to take over for my father when he’s gone. He sees everything my family does as his legacy but
fails to realize that it actually takes a lot of smarts and a lot of self-control to succeed the way my family has—and he
has neither. If he weren’t my brother he’d be my nemesis…”

Cherry Hill, New Jersey, 69 m.p.h.

“My brothers’ spouses? Peter is not married and does not seem to show any side that might be even remotely interested in carrying
on a relationship beyond the two or three minutes it takes him to gain some sort of physical pleasure. As for Gino and Jimmy?
Their spouses would be Connie and Roberta, respectively. Cosmetologists, gossips, gaining weight by the day. But they’d take
you out if you ever disparaged their husbands, regardless of the horrible things their husbands do on a daily basis…”

Trenton, New Jersey, 65 m.p.h.

“As for my mother,” he says, then hesitates.

This is a telling moment, because there is something about men and their mothers—and I imagine it must only intensify within
a Mafia family.

Finally, he says, “She died last year.”

I’m glad I didn’t make a joke.

“Long story short, she had aggressive ovarian cancer, eventually making its way to her lymph nodes, and she was gone in a
matter of weeks.”

Jonathan stares forward, not necessarily watching the highway as much as blanking out, merely trailing the car in front of
him.

“What a life she had,” he says eventually. “The wife of a mob boss, raised four boys into men, threatened countless times,
raped once, then died a painful and miserable death.” He sniffs a little but is not tearful. “You can look back and say, ‘Why
me? Why have my family and I been forced to deal with such misery?’ But… the truth is we all
know
why.” He turns and looks at me and says, “No one deserves it more.”

Rossmoor, New Jersey, 63 m.p.h.

“And then, of course, there’s my father, a man who’s probably done everything wrong in his life, who’s entered virtually every
aspect of crime considered by man since day one. And other than maintaining a faithful marriage to my mother, I’d say he broke
the other nine commandments on a regular basis for the vast majority of his life. All this is true about him, yet I cannot
help but love and respect him.