Miracle (The Pagano Family Book 6) (12 page)

~oOo~

Joey didn’t stay long; Tina had other appointments, and he meant to go back to his office as well. His visit, and their talk, had restored her, and the afternoon went along like any other.

But after work, she met with her dissertation director, who gave her a mountain of notes on her last two chapters. She had hoped to start writing the conclusion and wrap up years of work, but instead, she had what seemed to be weeks’ worth of revisions first. Though her director assured her repeatedly that revisions were part of the process and she was doing good work, Tina had always struggled with criticism. She didn’t resent it, but it made her feel like an impostor. Like she wasn’t anywhere near as good as people thought she was, and they were finally figuring that out.

She’d had a similar reaction to the feedback on her earlier chapters, but as she approached the end of this long mental slog, it cut more deeply.

On the long drive back to Quiet Cove, feeling tired and dejected and with too much time to think, Tina thought about Ava. That poor little girl, who couldn’t tell anyone what she needed and who couldn’t understand why she’d been hurt.

Not that there was a why that would ever make sense. As a therapist, she should have had room in her mind to consider what made those children capable of such sick cruelty—they, too, were children, and someone somewhere must have failed them—but she couldn’t bring herself to care about them.

Angie’s Challenger was parked in front of the house. As she parked in the empty driveway, Tina rolled her eyes. She loved her brother, but she was not in the mood for him tonight. His primary mode of communication was what he considered banter but she considered insults. He was tough to deal with one-on-one.

It looked like their father wasn’t home yet. She hadn’t expected him—he was closing tonight, so she’d planned to put dinner together and have it ready for him later.

The nurse’s car was gone, and that was unusual. Angie didn’t like dealing with their mother’s more basic needs, so he made a point not to be alone in the house with her. He would sit with her and talk to her, or watch movies with her, or play music for her, but if she needed physical care, he wanted someone around he could call to handle it.

Matt was the same way; they loved their mother and were good sons, but they did
not
want ever to see any part of her that they wouldn’t have seen if she were healthy.

When the nurses weren’t around, it fell to Tina and their father to wipe her ass, in other words.

The house was surprisingly dark and quiet. If she hadn’t seen the Challenger, it might have seemed as if there weren’t anyone at all in the house. She hung her bag and jacket on the hall tree and toed off her boots.

“Angie?”

No answer. Was he not here? Why was his car outside, then?

Adrenaline tripped lightly over her nerves, and the thought entered her mind that she should have picked up one of the old softball bats out of the umbrella stand. She was five-five and about one-twenty. She didn’t know what damage she could do with a bat, but if she aimed for the kneecaps…she turned the corner, and the wavering bluish light of the television glowed from her mother’s open door. No sound, though.

When she got to the doorway, she saw her brother, holding their mother’s hand to his forehead and crying softly.

Had Mamma died? “Oh God!”

Angie jumped up and dropped their mother’s hand. In the glow of the muted television, Tina made his expression out to be guilty—like he’d been caught doing something terrible. He hadn’t…he wouldn’t…

She ran into the room and shoved him away from the bed. “Mamma!”

The left eye, glittering in bluish light, moved up and down. Oh, thank God.

“What the fuck, Tina?”

After a kiss to her mother’s forehead, she whirled on her brother. “What are you doing in here in the dark? Where’s Crystal?”

Angie’s face no longer showed guilt or worry. Now he was angry. But his cheeks were still wet from his tears.

He grabbed Tina’s arm in a death grip and dragged her out of their mother’s room. She fought, her mind and body all but exploding with emotion, but he was bigger, stronger, meaner, and very pissed off.

In the dark hallway, he shoved her hard to the wall and held her pinned there, his hands digging into her shoulders. A framed picture—a pencil sketch of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome—slid on its wire and went askew.

“Don’t you ever come at me like that, you hear?”

She was too freaked out to respond, so she stared back at him, her jaw clenched.

“What did you think I did? You thought I would hurt our mother?”

She stared and remained silent.

“That’s what you think of me?”

If he hadn’t been shouting at her, spraying spittle over her face with the force of his anger, she might have been able to answer, to remember that he was her brother, but all she saw was the enforcer, and she couldn’t speak.

He roared in her face and punched the wall next to her head. Tina cringed, waiting for the blow. He’d never hit her before, but he’d never been like this before.

To punch the wall, he’d let go of her shoulder, and she tried to use the chance to get free. She twisted her shoulders and bent her knees, but he grabbed her again and held her pinned.

“Fuck you, you hear? FUCK YOU.”

Twice more, he punched the wall. Then he backed off and stormed out of the house, slamming the door so hard the walls shook, and Tina barely caught that sketch of St. Peter’s before it fell to the floor.

The Challenger growled to loud life and peeled off down the street.

Shaking, she hung the sketch on its nail and stood in the hallway. The house was too, too fucking dark; she ran to the end of the hall and flipped the switch. That helped—and it made the preceding ten minutes seem bizarre and unreal.

She went back to her mother. “Hi, Mamma. Are you okay?”

Up and down.
Yes.

“Is everything okay?”

Her left eye didn’t move—not yes, but not no, either. A tear slid along her mother’s temple. That wasn’t unusual; she couldn’t close her eyes, and the drops they used to keep them moist sometimes made more tears than necessary. But Tina thought that one was a real tear.

“What happened, Mamma? What did Angie want?”

Side to side.
No.
She wasn’t going to say. A secret, then.

With that, Tina understood: Angie came when he could be alone to tell his mother things he couldn’t tell anyone else. Things that couldn’t be said.

Tina told her mother secrets, too—but the kind of secrets she’d told her when she could talk. Girl secrets. Loves and fears.

Whatever secrets her brother had were likely much darker. Obviously they were: they’d made him sad and angry.

Angie, the Pagano Brothers enforcer, was using their locked-in mother as his confessor.

She’d thought he’d been hurting her. And he probably was.

~ 9 ~

At the Easter Vigil Mass, on Holy Saturday, John’s wife, Katrynn, was baptized into the Catholic Church. She was something like five months pregnant—they’d just learned they were having a boy—but she looked practically virginal, in a lacy white dress and a light green sweater.

Joey had never known anyone who’d chosen to be Catholic before. Katrynn had talked about the process a few times, and it was a lot. A lot of studying, a lot of talks with Father Mike, a lot of ritual—the kinds of things Joey had spent most of his life trying to duck out of.

Katrynn, on the other hand, seemed to like it, and she sure looked happy now. Though adult baptism was part of the ritual of Holy Saturday, it wasn’t all that common for someone in the Christ the King parish area to convert; most everybody was already Catholic. On this day, Katrynn was the only one, so she had the full attention of everyone who’d come to the vigil Mass.

Sabina was her sponsor, and the two beautiful women standing with Father Mike at the baptismal font made quite the picture. In the pew, both John and Carlo wore proud grins.

Joey studied the people in the pew with him, and the pew behind as well. Rosa and her family had come up again—they were making trips twice a month at this point—so his entire living family was there: five siblings, five siblings-in-law, five nieces and nephews, his father, his stepmother. Even Manny and Theo were there, and they almost never came to Mass. Across the aisle sat Nick and Bev and their four kids.

And at his side was Tina, in a little flowered dress, sitting with him rather than with her own family. Mr. Corti and Matt had moved up from their customary pews toward the back and were sitting just behind the Pagano juggernaut. Angie sat on Nick’s side.

Joey remembered his brief days sitting on that side of the pews. He remembered his father’s disappointed, despairing glances. He remembered feeling like he was on the wrong side.

He was on the right side now. Listening to Father Mike’s calm, gentle voice describing the meaning of Easter, a new life and new hope swathed in God’s great love, Joey smiled. Most times, his attention was elsewhere than the altar during Mass; for all his life, he’d gone because he hadn’t been given a choice—even now, at his age, there really wasn’t a choice, and that was why Carlo and Luca, at least, were there, too. Pop expected their presence. He demanded it.

But on this day, sitting in the middle of the pew with family all around him, with Tina at his side, with John and Carlo smiling up at their wives, and Pop sucking on his oxygen and dabbing proud tears with a white handkerchief, Joey really heard what Father Mike had to say.

He felt it. New life and new hope. Yep.

~oOo~

“Joey! Joey!”

Joey started awake, bringing the sensation of cold hands clutching his bare shoulder from his dream into reality.

“Joey!”

It was Adele. He lifted up on his elbow. The room was still dark, just the gold wedge from the hall light through his open door, but he could see enough to see that his stepmother was crying.

And he knew.

“Pop.”

He didn’t make it a question; no need. Adele nodded, and she sat hard on his bed as sobs rushed forth. Joey put his arm around her, and she leaned on him.

Through her wails, she tried to explain. “I always check on him…when I get up at night…to powder my nose.”

Joey couldn’t process any emotion. For months, they’d all been standing on the edge of this cliff, waiting for their father to fall off, knowing they couldn’t save him. They’d had endless meetings about what to do, how to handle his affairs. He’d written his own obituary. All of his funeral arrangements were already set. He’d had a lot of opinions about how things should go.

He was going to be buried with their mother, in the plot they’d bought together years before. The headstone was there, their wedding photo framed in the center. One side was inscribed for their mother, the other side with Pop’s name and date of birth, waiting for his final date. And now they knew it.

There was no room for Adele nearby. She would be buried, when that time came, with her first husband. Joey wondered what it would be like for Adele to stand at his father’s grave and always see that she had not been the true love of Pop’s life. But, then, he had not been hers, either. They had come together late in life and eased each other’s loneliness.

All of that talking and planning, all of that waiting, and yet, sitting here holding his grieving stepmother, Pop’s end seemed sudden and unexpected. What Joey felt more than anything was shock. He was numb with it.

“His chair?”

Adele nodded. When she showed no signs of calming down, Joey hugged her close for a few seconds, then pushed her gently to sit unsupported. He stood. For a moment, he stared at his tank, in its customary place on the table next to his bed. He was wearing the cannula, as he always did when he slept.

Did he need it? He took off the cannula and took a breath—a deep one, by his measure. No. He was okay. With a second thought, he hooked the straps of its pack on his shoulder anyway, so that it would be close if the situation changed.

While his weeping stepmother curled up in the middle of his bed, he went downstairs to start the process of putting his father to rest.

He found Pop in his recliner. The television was on; the Netflix menu screen glowed steadily in each lens of Pop’s glasses. The cheap digital clock with the huge numerals glowed green and informed him that it was 2:31 AM.

First, Joey checked for a pulse—but he knew as soon as he set his fingers on the cool, too-firm skin of his father’s neck that he wouldn’t find one.

He’d gone in his sleep. Quietly, at rest, in his home, in his chair. No hospitals, no fussing, no grand, weepy goodbyes. No tubes or machines but his oxygen tank. The way he’d wanted to go.

“Pop.”

It was then that Joey knew he’d need his tank. He crouched by his father’s body and hooked the cannula tubing over his ears, setting the prongs in his nose. Then he rested his forehead on the leather armrest of Pop’s chair. He didn’t cry, but the numbness of shock had given way to something else. An emptiness bigger than his body or soul.

This was grief. He remembered the feeling from the time of his mother’s death. He’d been fourteen then, and he’d stood on the sidelines of the bustle of mourning and felt lost. His brothers and older sister had talked almost nonstop about him and Rosa, about how to ‘handle’ them and who would step in for their mother—and for their father, because Pop had been a zombie for years after.

They’d all talked about what they had to do to take care of their younger siblings, but they’d barely paid them any actual attention. Rosa, at nine, had been dramatically, ostentatiously weepy, and everybody held her on their laps and dressed her in pretty clothes for the vigil and the funeral and the wake. But nobody had really
seen
her.

Joey had mourned quietly and alone. Carlo had sat him down on the first day of the vigil and told him to make things easier for Pop—to be strong, to be a man. So he had been. He’d stood still and silent and watched while his mother, the only one who’d thought he had something to offer the world, who’d thought he might be something someday, was lowered into the ground.

The vast, empty loss he felt now, crouching at the side of his father’s lifeless body, was familiar.

With another breath as deep as he could draw, he stood again and turned off his father’s oxygen and unhooked the tubing from his cold face. He switched on the lamp next to the chair and picked up the remote and turned off the television.

For no reason he could discern, he fluffed out an old knitted afghan and smoothed it over his father’s legs and chest. Then he bent down and kissed the cool forehead.

“Bye, Pop.”

It needed to be called in. The paramedics, or the morgue, or somebody had to come and take him from the house.

In his pajamas, Joey didn’t have his phone. He picked up the old cordless landline phone, preparing to call Carlo, who could come over from next door and handle the talking to authorities.

But as he was about to press Carlo’s number, Joey didn’t want to. He wanted to handle it himself, not have his big brother come and take over.

He dialed 911 instead.

911. What is your emergency?

“Not emergency. My father…” He breathed in the oxygen and swallowed past the sudden boulder in his throat. “My father…passed. …Expected.” He didn’t know if that was true, now that it had happened. Could a loved one’s death ever be expected? “Don’t know…what to do.”

Sir, are you ill? Do you need assistance?

Yeah, he needed assistance. He needed someone to come and do what needed to be done. But Joey understood that her question had a different focus. “Fine. Anomic aphasia. Need help…with my father.”

And you’re certain he’s deceased?

“Yes. No pulse. Cold. He had…heart failure.” There was a word he wanted, but he couldn’t find it. He closed his eyes and tried to trace the path from meaning back to the word. “Terminal.”

I have dispatched assistance to 183 Caravel Road, Quiet Cove. They should arrive within ten minutes. Is there anything else I can assist you with?

“No. …Thank you.”

Help is on the way.

Joey hung up. Movement caught the corner of his eye, and he turned to see Adele in the doorway, sniffling and wiping her eyes with a sodden tissue. He picked up the box of tissues on his father’s table and took them to her.

She plucked three from the box and blew her nose. “I loved two men in my life and lost them both.”

Joey nodded; he wouldn’t have known what to say even if all the words in the English language had been lined up for the chance to be spoken.

Now it was time to call Carlo.

~oOo~

Tina slid her arm around his waist, under his suit coat. Joey dropped his arm around her and gave her a squeeze.

“You okay?”

He shrugged, then nodded. He was okay enough.

“Your dad was important—he meant a lot to the Cove. People loved him.”

Joey nodded again. Pop had been a good man all his life. Everybody in Quiet Cove knew that he and his family were the ‘other’ Paganos, the side of the family that worked inside the bounds. He’d built a solid company that had employed local people, and he’d treated those people well. He’d been involved in town events and governance. Quiet Cove had been his family almost as much as the people who shared his blood. He’d had his adversaries in business, but Joey couldn’t think of anyone who would consider him an enemy.

After the funeral, the house bulged with people who thought highly of Carlo Sr. In almost every room on the first floor, and overflowing into the back yard on this sunny late-April afternoon, people dressed in somber colors stood in mumbling groups, holding stiff paper plates and clear plastic glasses. The little kids ran around, weaving in and out of the grey clusters of legs. Every now and then, someone would laugh. The sound would ring out oddly in the rumble.

Joey stood on the sidelines of the bustle of mourning and felt lost.

Five days after Pop’s death, Joey had yet to feel anything about it except that big hole that had opened in his chest and brought him to his knees beside the recliner. He was dazed and empty, full of nothing but a numbness that ached.

He and Pop…Joey didn’t know what to feel about the way he loved his father, or the way his father had loved him. Joey had never measured up. He’d never stood out, except as an invalid and a family project. His father had never expected him to achieve anything greater than self-sufficiency, and after the shooting, he’d stopped expecting even that. There had never been any question in Joey’s mind that his father loved him, but Joey had felt that love as a charity, given without being earned.