Complete Corruption (Corruption #1-3) (56 page)

I hadn’t been afraid when we’d crossed over the border into Mexico. He’d packed clothes and cash and hid his wounded arm under a sleeve. It hadn’t been so bad, nothing a little unguent and a kiss couldn’t fix. My hands had second-degree burns, and though they looked awful, I only had to fold them to hide them. I had nothing. He thought I wasn’t coming, so I had only the clothes on my back, the crap in my bag, and some valuables I wouldn’t part with.

We’d crossed the border when the traffic was so dense we would have only gotten stopped if blood were dripping from the trunk. Then we made it a point to laugh and joke as we went through Border Patrol, as if we were no more than a loving couple looking for a fun weekend. I think we were so high on adrenaline that nothing was easier than manic laughter.

The explosion had made the news immediately. It had been contained in the tunnel. The report stated no deaths and one injury.

“They’re not saying we’re dead,” I’d said.

“It’s been an hour,” he’d replied, but he furrowed his brow.

“I saw that tunnel. Nothing would have survived it.”

“Things happened we didn’t expect. Our exit wasn’t clean.”

“I’ll go back and die again,” I said.

He laughed and drove the Toyota safely and sanely southward. I talked when I didn’t want to think about my family. I knew my memories of them would cloud and get distant until I could only remember little things. I played with the radio, and before we even hit San Diego, the news of Daniel Brower’s collapse as mayoral candidate hit the airwaves.

The TV was on in the bar, hanging above us, blaring Spanish, the light shining through the miasma of cheap Honduran cigarettes. Antonio could only decipher some of the news, but the pictures told the story. They showed an Italian wedding, joyful yet staid, and a room full of people, each with a story, each living a different version of the events until suddenly, arrows were superimposed on the screen, pointing at three men in suits.

As one, they whipped off earpieces as if in pain.

“What happened?” I asked.

He leaned his back on the bar, looking very pleased with himself. “When you pressed your home key…”

“No bomb. Thanks for that.”

“They got their wires from the bathroom attendant. Then you put this radio signal out. A very loud, high-pitched squeak. Very loud. His little team was exposed. He looks like the ass he is.”

I must have gotten sullen. My face, which hid everything from everyone else, was pure bright-yellow signage to him. It always had been. From the minute he beat some guy on the hood of a car, he’d known what I was feeling.

He put his fingertips on my chin. “It was for your own good.”

“You didn’t want to fight for us. You were just going to leave.”

“I didn’t want you to spend your life fighting. I want life to be easy for you. I want you to be happy. If I humiliated him, and he lost the election, he’d back off troubling you. I’d be gone. You’d be happy. That’s all I ever wanted. More than wanting you for myself, I want you to have a good life.”

“If it hadn’t worked out the way it had—”

“Don’t.”

“Are you upset that we’re here, together?” I asked.

“I’m upset that you scarred your soul for me. That’s the biggest sin I live with.”

“That’s not what I asked.” I looked at my orange juice then at the specks of pulp on the side of the glass, as if they could help me divine what he was thinking.

“Theresa,” he whispered then drifted off.

“Never mind,” I said, waving it off. “It is what it is. I think I’m just tired.” I shut down. I didn’t want to talk anymore. I wanted to pretend everything was perfect. If we’d been alone together I would have taken my clothes off and tried to drown my sorrow in pain and pleasure.

But being let off the hook wasn’t going to fly with him, not for one second. He put his beer down and took my head in his hands, thumbs on my cheeks and fingers at the back of my head. “Listen to me, and listen very, very carefully. We have a difficult list of things to do, and I need you to be the woman you are, the woman who can run the world. So, I’m going to say this once. Are you listening?”

He was so intense, so close. He couldn’t lie or obfuscate from that distance. “Yes, Capo.”

“I didn’t dream of this moment. I did try to leave you, but it was for your own good. I wanted to free you. I admit I was ready to walk away. And I admit that when you shot Paulie, I decided you had to come with me to protect yourself from being accused of his murder. I had to tell myself I was protecting you. But, my Contessa, I was so happy to be forced. I felt it was a gift. I had an excuse to take you and have everything I wanted. I can’t lie to myself. Yes, I want to protect you from being hurt, but I just want you. Plain and simple.”

“Antonio, You’ve been trying to get away from me since the minute we met. If you do it again, it will be the last time. My heart can’t take it.”

He nodded, looking at the bar surface. “I didn’t dream God could make it possible for me to have you. But He made it impossible for it to happen in any other way. Do you see what that means? It means I was destined to defile you. I live with that every day. My destiny is to destroy.”

“Maybe I was destined to be destroyed.”

“
Shh
. Listen. I want you to have a normal, sweet life, but I can’t give you that. I will never be that man for you. Never. But here you are, with me. I am happy, and I carry the weight of my guilt for that happiness. So, don’t fool yourself; I don’t just want you, I hunger for you. My skin needs your skin against it. My mouth needs to taste your mouth. I. Am. Happy. But my soul has never been so stained.”

I swallowed a tablespoon of gunk. “I’m sorry,” I said through my tears. “I’ve made such a mess.”

“I forgive you. Can you forgive me?”

“I love you. You are my only, my one and only. And if I have to turn my life upside down, or go to hell to be with you, so be it.”

“That’s not to be undertaken lightly.”

“It never was. Never,” I said.

His eyes scanned mine as if deciphering the full meaning of the message: that I’d always understood what being with him meant and had grabbed it with both hands from the beginning. I never shared his doubts, and I think, for once, that comforted rather than troubled him.

“If I ask you this, I want you to answer it after you think about it. Don’t rush.”

“Ask what?”

He breathed lightly, almost a sigh, then brushed his fingers over my cheek. “Will you be my wife?”

“Yes.”

“I told you not to rush.”

“I’ll tell you again tomorrow. Same thing. Yes, yes, yes.”

We crashed together, mouths open, lips entangled, arms tightening around each other for the first moments of commitment, nothing between us but love.

The bartender wiped around our glasses, whistling. Antonio held my face fast to him then kissed my cheek and whispered in my ear, “I just heard your name on the news. They aren’t sure we’re dead.”

“We failed, then?”

“We were only buying time. We need to go.”

“No time for a good-bye-to-Tijuana screw?”

“Plenty of time for that later,” he said.

I smiled, imagining “later.” His body was mine, and I watched it move as he put a few bills on the bar and pulled me toward the door, every finger a lightning rod for my desire. I took a glance at the TV and jerked him to a stop. He followed my gaze up there.

Jonathan’s name was in the little tape below a reporter who stood outside Sequoia hospital.

“What is she saying?” I thought I was speaking in a normal voice, but I barely breathed it. I scoured my mind. Had Jonathan been at the wedding and I didn’t know it? Had he been hurt by something I’d done?

“Something went wrong. The heart, like you said,” Antonio said, knotting his brow as he deciphered a language he only partly understood. He pressed his lips together the way he did when he was reluctant to say something. “It’s bad.” Antonio shook his head. “I don’t know all the medical words, but they say he will die.”

The TV flipped to a
futbol
game, and the bar patrons cheered. The room suddenly smelled sweatier, wetter, and more florid than it had.

“I like your brother,” Antonio said.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t have words. I had only a dead weight in my chest where a light heart should have been. I couldn’t swallow. I couldn’t feel my fingertips. Where had my elation gone, and my need for Antonio and only Antonio? Was it that easily swept away?

“We’ll keep the news on in the car,” I said. “Maybe they’ll say something else.”

I walked out into the heavy heat of the street. It was December, and I was sweating. The concrete flower boxes and indecipherable color-soaked graffiti that had charmed me on the way in seemed to mock me now, and the bent street with its dented cars no longer spoke of a charming over use but instead invoked an angry entropy, a sick god of destruction. The plaster cracks over every inch of the city twisted themselves into a net that wanted to catch me and drag me away from Antonio.

“I want to go somewhere with winters,” I said when he caught up to me. “Can we do that? Can we live somewhere with snow?”

“You need to go back.”

“No!” I shouted it to block out the knowledge that I needed to go, more than anything. I’d underestimated the pull of my family. I’d left them as if they’d always be the same, for the something different that Antonio embodied, and they changed as soon as I turned my back.

A man in a straw hat, one of many passing us, turned to watch as he walked.

“I can’t do anything about it,” I said, slashing with my arms. “I can’t donate my heart. I’m using it.”

He took me by the wrists stilling them. “Contessa, my love. He’s your brother.”

“I can’t. I made a choice. I chose
you
.”

“And I chose you. I am yours. You are mine. I’m going to make you my wife and steal your name from under you. But if you turn your back on your family, you won’t forgive yourself if he dies—”

“Don’t say that!”

“It’s a reality,” he said.

“I’ll forgive myself fine. I can turn my back on my brother because I can’t help him. He doesn’t need me. My presence is meaningless.”

He paused, looking across the street at the
putt-putting
, half-functioning cars and the stacked stucco buildings. Then he looked back at me. “I won’t let you take the rap for Paulie.”

“Are you serious?” I said. “You think I’m letting you take the blame for that?”

“My prints are on the gun. You will not go to jail for Paulie, as God is my witness.”

“You brought me here to keep me from taking that rap, and now you—”

“No," he said. "I brought you because I love you. Because I need you. Because heaven gave me a reason to have you.”

“And what about Irene? And Donna Maria?”

“I didn’t promise you this would be easy. It’s ten times worse now.”

He shook his head as if he wanted to say things and didn’t, as if words wanted to tumble out, and he held back the tide. I balled my fists and steeled myself for a fight. Jonathan had six more sisters and two living parents to care for him. A prodigal sister wasn’t necessary. If I went to see him, it would be for me, not him, and despite what Antonio might think, I wasn’t feeling selfish.

“If this happened in twenty years,” I said, “when it was supposed to, we could slip back without a problem, and I could see him. If we go back today, we destroy everything.”

He held his hands out. “Isn’t that what we do?”

I wanted to cry with frustration. I shook my head, looking into the traffic, the noise, the bedlam we had more than embraced. We’d gotten on the cliff of normalcy and jumped into the chaos face first. Of course, that was what we did. I couldn’t deny it anymore.

“I don’t want to,” I said.

“He’s your brother.”

“And damn him for it.”

Antonio kissed me slowly in the fetid heat, and I tasted the sweat of his cheek, the beer on his tongue. His lips were a promise, a blood bond, a kiss of greeting and good-bye, and the years in between.

“I won’t let anything happen to you, Capo,” I said.

“I know.”

“Are you sure about this?”

“Yes.” He sighed and looked up, as if seeing the narrow street for the first time. “I smell the beach.”

“Let’s walk on it,” I said. “We can decide what to do together.”

He slipped his arm around my neck, and we walked to the end of the block. The beach was a right turn and a few blocks away. We traversed it three times before our plan was set, and then, as if it was our job to dive headfirst into chaos and ruin, we began.

Fine, per adesso.

RULE.

Complete Corruption - Part Three

There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love.
— 1 John 4:18

Would that life had the symmetry and passion of Italian opera, without the absurdity.
— Anonymous

daniel

here was soot all over everything. Black ash and dust. Big stones made newly small. The size and shape of the Carriage House of the Gate Club had changed from the foundation upward with an explosion, much like my career. The building remained but had withstood the equivalent of a San Andres earthquake.