“I came by myself.” He’s holding his leg right above the wound, breathing hard, looking away from it. “I was going to get you and send you back to the old country to protect you. Before they got to you and…”
“Hollowed me.”
“Severed you. You’re welcome.”
They tell you being severed is worse, because you’re cast out and cut off. They say that’s why they don’t bother hollowing anymore. It’s all lies.
“I have to call Dario.” I realize I don’t have my phone.
“He killed our father. He’s not one of us. What is wrong with you?”
Watching the road, I reach back to him. “Give me your phone.”
“He’s a dead man.”
“You better pray he’s not.”
“He’s been stealing our women for years. Remember Tessa? Wanda? Gone. Do you know what he does with them?”
I do know, but when I see the tower of the red brick church creep over the tree line, I lose interest in the question. I have to turn when I get to it, but I forget which way.
I point his handgun at his head, still trying to keep my eyes forward. The car moves like a snake in the road.
“We can fix the pain in your leg right now.” With my thumb, I click back the little lever because that’s what they do in movies to get things moving.
“Jesus!”
“The phone.”
“It’s in my jacket.” He’s wearing his jacket. “Side pocket.”
“No. You want me to move the gun away. Then when I get close enough, you’re going to grab me.”
“I can barely move, Sarah.”
“Take the phone out and toss it in the front seat.”
“You’re not as smart as you think you are.”
I don’t feel smart. I feel scared and out of my depth. But he slowly does what I tell him, as if I’m a bomb that will go off with the slightest unexpected movement.
I may not be smart, but I have power, and having power is better than knowing things.
He tosses the phone onto the front seat. It bounces and flips screen-side up to a picture of him with Daddy and me on my first Armistice Night.
What different people we were.
No. We were the same people under different circumstances.
“Do you know how to use it, Goody? I can show you.”
“No.” His phone is different than the one Dario gave me. I take too long staring at the time and the picture of two people I knew in a different life and have to swerve back into my lane.
“That fucking hurt,” he groans. “Can you take it easy?”
I flick my thumb in every direction over the screen. A keypad shows up. I put in the shape of Dario’s number, but the image just shakes and shakes.
“Why don’t you know how to do this?” he cries.
“Because of you! That’s why! You wanted me useless and now I am, and you can just bleed until I talk to Dario.” Spit flies through my clenched teeth. The road curves. I’m too late on the turn, ending up in the totally wrong lane. I swerve back. “You can just bleed.”
In the rearview, his expression cuts through pain and injury. It’s not quite shock. It’s the aftermath of that shock—the realization that what surprised him is a permanent change in reality.
“I don’t know who you are,” he says.
“Neither do I.”
Even through his agony, he seems to finally understand me.
“Our address,” he says. “From StuyTown. That’s the code.”
I hesitate. Maybe it’ll make the phone explode or give our location to someone I don’t want to have it.
“What’ll happen if I put that in?”
“It’ll unlock the phone. You can call him. Just do it.”
He’s rushing me. I don’t like to be rushed. Dario was willing to give his life to save his brother and I just shot mine. I’m not sure he’d be proud.
“Do you swear it won’t do anything else?”
“Yes. Go on. Put it in.”
“I don’t want to shoot you.”
“You already shot me. I know what you’re capable of.”
“Good, because I don’t.”
I put in the address of our building in Stuyvesant town, where we lived lifetimes ago. The keypad disappears and turns into a grid of multicolored boxes. Right away, I spot the handset of a landline. I’m about to tap on it, as I’ve seen Dario do a hundred times, when the screen clears again and the phone makes a trilling sound.
UNKNOWN NUMBER
Another bend in the road nearly sends me into a guardrail. I give up, pulling over and putting the car into park before I slide down the berm.
The phone keeps trilling. Massimo holds out his hand.
“Either give it to me or pick it up.” He drops his arm to his bleeding leg. “Slide the green—”
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
I’m lost. I can’t drive. The car’s practically in a ditch, and I don’t even know where I’m taking it.
Dario would have a plan. He wouldn’t do anything until he had a roadmap to victory. All I have is a goal. Make a life on St. Easy. Swim with sharks beside my husband.
I have to trade Massimo for him. That’s the way. But I don’t know what to do now.
The trilling is just another thing that—along with the smell of blood and Massimo’s pained breaths—pushes me toward panic.
Slide to answer.
I’m going to crack.
Don’t cry.
Will the phone trill forever?
For a moment I wonder if it’s my father calling my brother, but my father is dead. There is no father. I’m free of my father, but now I don’t know who’s in charge.
“They already know something’s fucked up,” Massimo says. “Just give me the phone if you don’t know how to answer it.”
“I know how.”
I blink hard to hold back the tears and stretch my neck. I’m looking through the top of the windshield at the tree line’s shape against the sky. A red brick church spire rises behind it. Bigger now. Maybe a bend in the road away.
DON’T CRY, COME BY!
I am suddenly calm. I slide the green dot across the bottom of the phone and put it to my ear.
“Hello?”
“Mass—” the man cuts off the rest of the name, but his voice is distinctive enough. I could pick it out of a choir. “Who’s this?”
“I saw what you did, Marco.”
“Wait, hold on.”
Taking the phone away from my ear, I look at the glass. The red dot with the X ends the call, right? I tap it. The grid of boxes reappears. I put my ear to the phone. Hear nothing. Done.
Cutting a call isn’t a big deal, but I feel a sense of accomplishment.
Marco’s gone for now. Massimo’s in the back seat panting like a man giving birth.
Dario admitted he was scared, and he wasn’t as in control as he seemed. It was all an act. Maybe that’s the trick to the whole thing.
With all the calm competence I can find in myself to fake, I put both hands on the wheel and face front before putting the car in drive and hitting the gas. The engine roars like a lion.
I turn to ask Massimo if he knows which way to go, even though he won’t, but he’s mumbling as though he’s got one foot in the next life.