Earthquake I.D. (2 page)

“He doesn't look like Papa,” said the other. “Mama, he isn't like Papa.”

For Barb, simply bending over him took effort. Jay had always been the one looming over her. He was twitching so raggedly that she had to steady herself just to check his eyes. Rolling up into his head, these exposed an unblinking white too clean and sticky for the infected streets, and the corners of his mouth bubbled with foam. After that Barbara couldn't suppress another shudder all her own, another freezing touch of estrangement. The wife sagged on her haunches, astonished at herself. She should at least have pulled her bra back into place. But instead she went for her rosary, rummaging in her purse. A purse of some size and heft, now that she thought about it: a trip purse. You had to wonder why the thieves hadn't gone after her instead of the hunky Jaybird.

But she got her rosary and, crosscut by more contradictory impulses than she could name, lifted the beads to her lips. You never knew what a Hail Mary might accomplish. You never could predict when the Holy Ghost might rock her with one of Its untraceable tugs, welcome and clarifying, unlike any of her other shakes this morning.

But prayer, just now, only afforded her more of the same. She recalled that she was no doctor, and that for all she knew Jay would be up and filling out passport applications in no time. She recalled that strangers were looking on, and should the man come out of this, it might be hours before she found some quiet space in which to let him know the calamitous truth. Still Barbara ached for her husband, in the pit of her bruised chest—and still she was through with him. She could see the end of the marriage even in Jay's bloody face. If the man wore anything you could call a look, it suggested that the muggers' blow had brought home to him the same severe inevitability. The same change of life. He'd lost consciousness to a wake-up call.

“Jaybird,” she found herself saying, lowering her rosary. “The Jaybird.”

But she wasn't left alone with the runny unhappiness of his look, like a broken egg in which blood had spoiled the yolk. She enjoyed nothing like the Anglo notion of “personal boundaries.” Over either shoulder Barb could make out handkerchiefs in the air, faces against cell phones, and already four or even five of the bystanders had butted into the hunched and quivering circle of Barb and Jay and the girls. Someone asked a question she didn't catch, someone touched her shoulder. And while the mother nodded over her rosary, nodded and murmured, there might even have been a bearded man beside her, extending a hand to Jay's thick neck.

It should never have come to this. “Jay, we should've known.”

The husband had a position here: co-site-leader with the United Nations Earthquake Relief The United Nations. But this morning was something else again, a cartoon, cannibals and missionaries. One young woman appeared to be getting the madness on video, an oblong black camcorder at her eye. Now Barb became aware of the cries for help:
Aiuto! Pronto soccorso!
She knew the language, sure, and the handkerchief trick. When Barbara was growing up, when her mom was still at home, the young mother had still spoken the slang of the Naples periphery. Torre del Greco, that's where Barbara's mother had come from. Whereas this oversized delusional case down on the cobblestones, the man who'd hauled the Lulucitas over here, he was only some fraction of an Italian. He was a saintly-come-lately.

Barb even understood one or two of the more complicated expressions.
Ma guarda, sta morendo!
—But look, he's dying!

Then there were the horns of the pint-sized autos, bleating and squawking. Cartoon punctuation. There was the woman scented with lavender who knelt at her ear, a hand between Barbara's shoulder blades. “Give him your love,
signora,”
this visitor whispered, or stage-whispered. “Is your love now that will save him.”

The woman disappeared with a rattle (bracelets? bones?) and Barbara slumped, whipsawed.

“Mother of God.” She choked and tasted vomit. “Jay, this wasn't my idea. You can't say it was
my
idea.”

The man's eyes showed only white. His twitching threw blood onto her hands. Barb didn't realize Dora and Sylvia had started to cry till she felt their faces against her hips, a smeary wet pressure right where Jay had always liked to squeeze. She recalled his current pet expression for her figure, “owl girl,” as in, “Mine forever, forever, my owl girl.” The phrase had been lifted from the twins, who a few years ago hadn't been able to pronounce “hourglass shape.” The shape of a true Italian, the abundant body.

Then with her girls' pressure on her, with a fresh awareness of her body and its semi-exposure—with that Barb understood that the strangers in the street had put an end to their touching. The family huddle had become something to avoid. Not that the cacophony had let up, the Good Samaritan uproar, echoing round a well of medieval stonework. But a buffer space had developed around mother, father, and children, a bit of breathing room that made Barbara picture her downed group as Nativity figures, a Christmas crèche. Of course the Neapolitans were famous for these, every family had its
presepe
, terra cotta and balsa wood; maybe that's what brought the image to mind. Now when Chris and John Junior returned from their fruitless chase, the two teens were shepherds late to the manger, hanging back.

Paul however joined the Holy Family. The middle child found a stretch of Mom-space that Dora or Sylvia had left uncovered, perhaps pressing in on his knees, a penitent. The eleven-year-old was one more grinding discrepancy between what Barb needed to do and the way she must've looked. This mess was more like theater than ever.

But the boy went for Pop. Paul got hold of his father's twitching head.

Among the children Paul was the one who took after Mom, the most Italian, and not so much for the spongy silk of his hair or the glinty espresso of his eyes as for his hands: expressive hands, mindful. Since the trouble over this past winter, the boy's hands had been more articulate than whatever he'd had to say. And anyone with so close a view as Barbara's, here above Paulie and Jay, might've thought that, every day since last winter, the child had been working towards today's laying-on of hands. They spidered across Jay's dripping face as if each fingertip held a pair of kissing lips. When the boy reached under his father's chin the gesture recalled the bearded passer-by from a minute ago, the man who'd butted in to check the pulse. And when Paul began speaking, Barb at first only saw the lips moving. Subtle lips, feminine. Like he was the one whose mother had been born in Torre del Greco.

Yet if Paul looked like a local, he sounded like he came from the far side of the moon. Barb noticed the hitches in Jay's breathing, and she knew what they might mean, but she still couldn't begin to make out whatever it was that Paul had begun to murmur—though at the same time, his dreamer's babble struck the mother as familiar. Perfectly familiar: any stay-at-home parent would recognize the curve of her boy's preteen back, the spells he was casting. If this were all a Christmas
presepe
, nobody made it so more than Paul, because just then he was the only genuine kid on the scene, the only one who still could project a living mystery over Mother and Father and the rest. Paul was more the youngster than the immobilized girls at Barbara's hips. If you gave him balsa wood, he'd put up a whole metropolis.

“Ma guarda,”
someone declared behind her.
“Poverino. Pazzo.”

Poor boy? Crazy? Maybe the middle child's response was the only one that made sense. Paul worked with his father's head in ways that seemed to encompass every fevered zig and zag of Barb's last few minutes. He'd slid unafraid into the epicenter, with soothing fingers. Keeping up his just-audible babytalk, the boy patted back and forth across the face, the gore. When a fresh trembling racked the head, Paul cradled the jaw and unhurt ear, surprisingly strong. At last he settled on a bizarre dual hold. One hand touched the center of the crushed temple, seeming to poke down the wedge of exposed membrane, while the other reached into the half-open mouth. All the way in, this child reached, prying apart the man's teeth until he could get a grip on the tongue. Barb couldn't miss it, Paul had the tongue, and she suffered another gag reflex. The image of the city as a diseased love-bite flared again in her mind's eye, and it paralyzed her, while at her hips the girls lifted their faces. Dora and Sylvia made small noises, disgusted, fascinated, like the neighborhood voices behind them.

Dio…Ma che pazzo…

Paul maintained his soggy two-handed grip for perhaps half a minute. His murmurs never let up, and finally Barbara picked out a few words.

“This, this is all he needs,” Paul said. “J-Just a touch, that's all.”

The boy sounded winded, but otherwise the same as he had for months now, his voice on the verge of breaking. Barbara's first response came in the wrong language,
“Poverino.”
As Paul let go of his father's head, his small fingers glistening, she still couldn't move.

“Paul?” she managed. “Paul, I can't believe…”

“C'm, C'mon.” He faced her. “What's everybody getting so, so, so upset about? Soon as Pop went down I could tell that this w-was a-all he needed.”

Paul and she were so close that the boy's white shirtfront brushed against Barb's shaming nipple, and with that the mother regained her mobility and a sense of priorities. Lifting her hands from her husband was like lifting weights, but Barbara sat up and wrestled the cup of her bra back into place. She took her boy by the shoulders.

“Paul, we don't want to disturb him. Can't you see he's badly hurt?”

He was winded, gulping, lost. Barbara thought of her two older sons, their hopeless effort to follow the thieves.

“Badly hurt?” one of the girls asked.

And her two oldest, how were they doing? Barb found Chris and JJ hanging back as before, out of their depth on the first day in town.

Mama, did you say Papa was badly
hurt?”

Girls, Barbara thought, he could be dead already. At her knees the big body had gone slack.

“C'mon, guys,” Paul said. “A-all he needed was a little touch. A little p-pep talk, maybe too.”

“Paul, please.” Her voice was a load likely to spill. “What's got into you?”

“But couldn't you tell that was, that was a-all he needed? Couldn't you just, just
feel
it?”

The crowd surrounding them remained subdued, keeping a distance.

“Badly hurt, Mama? Badly hurt?”

“I could feel it,” Paul repeated. “I just knew.”

“Hey,” Jay said, sitting up. “What's all this on my
face?
Anybody got a mirror?”

He sat up, on the raised step that passed for a sidewalk. Frowning, swabbing his eyes, Jay propped his broad back against the palazzo wall and stretched out his hefty legs where he could, fitting them around the kneeling Barb, around the two erupting girls and out to the feet of the crowd. Everyone had been startled a step closer, maybe a couple of steps, just like that. Meanwhile grunting and frowning, a big American doing his best with aging joints and a spreading belly, Jay settled himself just in time for Syl and Dora to tumble hard into his lap.
“Papa!”

They hit the man with such force that dried blood flaked off his face and spattered their tender hair.

“Hey,” Jay said. “Easy there. Looks like Papa might be bleeding.”

The crowd was noisy again, recharged. The family too was a different animal. Barb wobbled back onto her haunches, back until she would've fallen if her two oldest hadn't sunk down behind her, Chris and John Junior coming into the huddle with faces slack and wowed while the twins went on cuddling Pop. Only Paul didn't fit the pattern, Paul again, finding a place apart along the wall. Barb sank into the heavy smell of two teens who'd been up the block and back, of her own 360-degree whirling, while before them Jay fell into a scab-flicking match with two eight-year-olds. The impossible coagulation dotted the mother's kneecaps and skirt.

But Paul kept separate, rather prim on his knees. His shirt remained white except for street dust and his look was weary but serene.
Told you so
.

Barbara would've fallen if not for her two teenagers, and she couldn't seem to get a decent look at her husband's injury. Hadn't the thieves cracked his skull open? She had no trouble remembering the welling blood, the bulging viscera. Could a touch and a whisper really have fixed it? A touch and a dream? Certainly her Jaybird appeared, against the clean white mortar of the repaired lower wall, as handsome as ever. Jay's looks had if anything improved since he'd hit forty, his hair richly Mediterranean and his face flexibly Irish. At times his head suggested one of those noble and tragic officer's portraits from the Civil War.

But before Barbara could finish her examination, a local got in the way. The interloper might've been the same as before, he had the goatee. This time the mother could peg him as a professional type, and more than likely a doctor. With those glasses, those wattles beneath his beard, he looked to be pushing seventy. As he once more reached for Jay without asking, an old man with a task, his stare metallic, Barb had no choice but to acknowledge it had all taken place the way she remembered. The head-wound had been real, and divorce was the only solution. The blow could easily have killed her husband, or it could've left him strapped in a wheelchair and brain-damaged—all threats to which the Lulucitas should never have been exposed in the first place—all of it no less of an actual alternative life than her own twenty years as a good wife and mother.

Under the old man's spectacled stare, the twins broke off the scab fight. When he reached the father's neck, Jay tucked his chin. “Hey!”

He tucked his chin and hiked his shoulders. An owl, Barb thought blackly. You have the nerve to call
me
an owl.