CONVERTER . . . and a dozen other crashes of godawful car jargon that I’d never get to know, because I was a girl, and therefore stupid when it came to logic or mechanics or business. And to think that these babbling dagos were the specimens of the “practical” gender sickened me. A fly erratically buzzed back out the door.
“Rosemary?” A strange voice emerged from the living room.
Wide-eyed and quizzical, I slowly walked toward the living room and the voice. It was Mugga, sitting in there, rocking on Grandma’s rocking chair and smoking a cigarette. On the couch, Moon sat opposite of him. A puff of smoke billowed from his nose.
“Ang home?” he asked. Another puff escaped when he spoke.
I just stared at him.
“You stupid, girl? I asked is yer brother home?”
I wondered if they were in there when Ang came stomping up the stairs. I wondered if they were sitting there when I walked up. Grandma emerged from the kitchen with a tray of pitzels and a cup of coffee.
“Umm. Yeah,” I answered. “Yeah, Ang’s here.”
“Well, go get him.”
Grandma set the coffee next to Moon without a word. I plodded back up the stairs.
“Ang?” I knocked on the door again.
“Rosie! I said get the hell out of here!”
“Uh. Mugga’s here for you. And, um, another guy.”
This time I ran down the stairs and sprinted out the back door, leaving it open. When I turned out of the alley onto Cascade, I slowed to my usual pace. It wasn’t my usual M.O. to muse on such events, but Moon’s arrogant eyes and Mugga’s silence spired on an unavoidable trail of uneasy hunches. A couple of women with grocery totes passed me. I kept my eyes down. The one with the baby-blue smock brushed against me, and I feared that some kind of telepathy transferred skin to skin, and that she knew.
I spun into the shoe shop. And the little bell dinged.
Char and I rode the Line, as usual. Our items of discussion included berries, the upcoming festa of St. Peter and Paul, and the likelihood of Donnie Vincini becoming a conspirator with Satan himself.
That evening after I finished my bedtime routine, I opened the bathroom door and proceeded to start up the stairs. The TV murmured in the living room. Its lights flashed shifting scenes on the dingy mauve walls and cast long shadows to my feet. Dad reclined, sideways, on the couch, spitting cherry pits into the ashtray on the end table. Remembering my glass of water, I swung back around and headed to the kitchen. But before I got there, I happened to glance at the back door—something of a sixth sense, one might call it. The door was shut, and locked, but something shuffled around on the gravel outside. It sounded bigger than a cat. I ignored it—mainly to assuage my own fear. To me every sound in the darkness was most likely Frankenstein’s monster and therefore ought to be disregarded before seizing me with its imaginative power.
I topped of my water, perfect, and slurped off the meniscus. I decided to drink it down about an inch, before I attempted the stairs. When I strode back out of the kitchen, I peeked over at the back door. The hinge side of the door gapped open about a half-a-centimeter. Just above that bottom hinge, and in that crack, gleamed a little white sliver. Dad sat silent, minus the rhythmic ding of cherry pits. I walked over to inspect the sliver. Its third dimension revealed that the sliver was actually an envelope, a little white envelope sealed by a circle of red wax. Dad coughed. Alarmed, I sprung straight up. Then the back door flung open, smacked me against the wall, and sent my glass of water flying back into the kitchen. Nick emerged from the darkness, and Ang followed him. I slid the envelope into my robe pocket.
Nicky stiff-armed me into the wall when he passed on his way to the living room. “What are ya watchin’ in’ere?”
Without acknowledging my existence, Angelo slunk past and started to his bedroom. The glass didn’t break. And even though water evaporates, I wiped it up and flung the dampened dish towel over the faucet. I took a swig of the remaining water, and decided on setting the glass back in the cupboard. I mean, it was only water.
Before I climbed the stairs, I snagged an empty toilet-paper roll from under the bathroom sink. I had been saving the empty rolls under the sink for some time—eleven cardboard cylinders tucked beneath the drain pipe. I thought that I might make some craft out of them one day.
Once in the safety and privacy of my own room, I clicked on the light next to my bed. The bright red seal displayed two short swords, or big knives, enclosed by a circle. I ripped open the flap around the seal, so that the seal itself remained securely connected to the envelope. Inside, a message was scrawled on the inside flap of the little card.
In red ink: Family is everything.
That’s an odd note, I thought. Family meant a lot to all of us around there. I wondered why someone thought we needed reminding. Neither the envelope or card had an address on it, nor a name. It didn’t say who it came from or who it was meant for. The only logical conclusion led straight to Mugga. Like Hog said, Mugga had, after all, been wandering around town up to something, however I couldn’t seem to conjure why he would leave such a note. Perhaps it was the slogan of his new trucking company or whatever—quite possible, but that letter being wedged in the door frame seemed too glaringly ominous.
I slipped it into the toilet paper roll and tossed it into my box-of-Ang’s-hand-me-downs. It landed beside the crucifix, which I had stored in there once I got home from the church that morning. The chain only brought me bad luck, a sign of the malocchio, the embodiment of a curse itself. It was just too dangerous to carry around.
I couldn’t sleep too well after finding that letter. I wondered why somebody put it there and who exactly it was supposed to be for. Family is everything? Part of me wondered if Hog slid it in there. But, that couldn’t be right. I’d seen the kid’s hand writing, and it was shit-in-ditches, comparatively. He’d be the one to write something like that though, especially after all of that talk about his brother starting a business and all of his snooping around to keep an eye on everyone.
I awoke from a dream in the middle of the night. In it I was a dangling from a grape vine, hanging on the tip of a cluster of grapes, a grape among grapes. The other grapes were Angelo, Nicky, Dad, Grandma, and Popi was at the top, by the stem—a little cluster of grapes trapped, tiny, under leaves in the middle of an eternal row of vines and clusters—stuck.
I guess I never thought too much about everybody else’s family. Our street filled up like little clusters of grapes along a path. Maybe I kind of opened up to the world a little bit that moment. We were just one cluster in a very big interconnected vineyard. That’s what it felt like at least. And it felt far from good.
I heard some kind of noise, so I rolled onto my side and faced the window. The sound was so slight that I didn’t know where it came from, if it was in my room or a mile away. That’s when the hot fear exploded through my veins. All my muscles seized, and my eye darted around the room. The curtains fluttered with an incoming breeze. The sound was clearly steps, shoes gliding along the concrete beneath my window. It was a man I could tell, by the pattern and weight of the steps. They moved slower and slower. And I knew, without a shadow of a doubt—it was him, finally coming to get me—Frankenstein’s monster. He would come for me I knew it. He had come to reward me for my sin. I thought for a moment about grabbing that crucifix and just launching it straight out the window, but I couldn’t, I had to see him first, see him with my own eyes.
My
