No Place Like Home (17 page)

“Migg Pissy,” Jordan said, strangled, and at that, Jane started to laugh, too.

“Get up!” The voice was a roar. “Right now! You are making fools of yourselves and everyone here.”

My father, of course. And although it had been a long time, a very, very long time, since any of us had heard that particular tone, it worked as well as it ever had. Like a bucket of cold water, it splashed down over the heat of our giggles and chastened us.

I realized I still had my hand over my chest, that the split seam had left a good six inches of my side exposed, and my rose tattoo was as shocking a thing as any woman had ever done in this family. When I looked up, it seemed they were all staring right at me, disgust on their faces.

My father was looking down at us with fury and a hard mouth. Some demon—or maybe a goddess—pulled out a whip and cracked it. I lowered my hands, tossed back my hair, and met his eyes. “You like the tattoo, Papa?”

And for one long minute, his black eyes burned into mine. He saw me, really looked at me, eye to eye, for the first time in twenty years. It was electric, that second, and long, and I dared to let hope swell in my heart for the space of it. Anger I could manage. Anger could be changed. Distrust, even disgust, or whatever emotion he chose to focus on me would be okay. I’d take it.

But then he cursed, low in Italian, too profane even to write down, and turned his face away, making a sign against the evil eye.

I jumped to my feet, that demon running amok now for sure. “You can’t ignore me forever, Papa! I live here. I’m part of this family!” Tears, and not giggle tears, welled up in my eyes as he kept walking. And in a fit of temper I reached down and grabbed a loose shoe, hauling back my arm to throw it at his smoothly combed head.

Jordan grabbed my wrist in time, and I only threw a curse after him, as profane as the one he’d spit on the ground. I spit, too, and my hair stuck to my cheeks, to those humiliating tears.

He walked out. I didn’t watch his entire progress. I turned my back so that I wouldn’t, but I heard the door swing shut behind him, ringing the little bell hanging from the ceiling, and it was the only sound in the entire shop.

A dozen women stood still as ice, not a whisper of satin or a heavy breath, just frozen, dead silence, but beneath it I felt their emotional hands reaching for me, covering the tear in my dress, patting my hair into place. The younger ones sent their spirits to fret over me, their physical eyes big and round and hoping never to be me, vowing right then to be good mothers and wives so they’d never have to be shunned like that in public.

I tossed my head, feeling my earrings swing cold against my neck. “To hell with him,” I said. “Sorry, Nana. And sorry to you, Jane. I didn’t mean to cause a scene on your big day.”

It broke the silence and they all started talking, whispering like birds, chirping to one another and to me and to the world, spirits lifted by the drama or maybe just their beauty. Only my mother, mouth hard and flat, said nothing. Her large dark eyes burned into mine, censorious and pitying at once. She shook her head.

I lifted my chin and met that pitying gaze with all the force in my body. Quietly, June Cleaver said in my head,
“You’re gonna want your mother one of these days.”

Madonna argued,
“Well, maybe she needs to get a clue about how to love her daughter.”

“
She does
,” June said. “
That’s why she’s disappointed.
”

“
To hell with her then, too,
” Madonna said. And I tossed my head and turned away at the dressmaker’s urging, feeling sick to my stomach and brutalized, but determined not to show it for a second.

“Jewel.”

Malachi’s voice, coming from behind me, so dark and thick and heavy, was utterly out of place. Great. I took a breath, feeling too much chest falling over the top of the stupid dress, the air on my side. Thought about the whole scene just past that he’d surely witnessed.

And my father had seen him, too.

Squaring my shoulders, I turned. And stilled. He looked liked a giant from outer space in that little shop, his angles and darkness and maleness exaggerated by the loops of pale green lace hung on the wall behind him. His black boots had left dusty marks across the thick white carpet; his hands—usually so competent—hung loosely at his sides.

His face, I finally noticed, was ashen. “What?” I cried, forgetting the dress and fight and everything else. “Michael?”

“I had to take him to the hospital. He’s there now.”

“Oh, no, Malachi! The hospital? Why?”

“He couldn’t breathe—couldn’t talk. I called the ambulance.” He shifted, kicking one foot out in an attempt to keep the emotions from turning to something horrifying like tears. “He has pneumonia.”

I closed my eyes, reaching for the calm and good grace necessary right now. “Did he have to have the respirator?”

“Yeah.”

I glanced at Jordan sympathetically gripping her skirts. She knew what I knew, that Michael had strict Do Not Resuscitate orders, which meant he didn’t want the breathing help. He had probably been extremely confused by the time they got him there and been unable to express his true wishes, and Malachi, wanting to do the right thing, had done exactly the wrong one.

But there was no need to go into that right this minute. “I’ll get changed,” I said, and bustled with as much dignity as possible toward the dressing room, stopping to kiss Jane. “Sorry, babe. Maybe you oughta drop me from the bridesmaid list.”

“Not a chance.” She looked at the woman orchestrating everything. “Can you get the new dresses here FedEx by Monday?”

The woman scowled. “Impossible.”

My grandmother drew herself up—all four feet eleven inches of her, her black eyes turning venomous—and the woman added hastily, “Tuesday. I’ll get on the phone right now. You’ll have to give me some secondary color choices, though.”

“That’s fine.” Jane grasped my elbows and kissed my cheek.

My mother, relieved to have some practical problem to solve, said, “Make them both fourteens, and I’ll do any alterations. They have too much bosom for these dresses.”

Her practicality was somehow reassuring. “Thanks, Mama.”

She patted my arm, inclined her head toward the door. “Go. We’ll take care of it.”

“Shane—”

“We’ll take care of him.”

So I scrambled into my jeans and normal shirt, tossed Jordan the keys to the station wagon, and hurried out to join Malachi, who was pacing in the parking lot like a restless wolf, back and forth. When he saw me he stopped, right where he was in a pillar of sunlight breaking between two buildings, and I saw him struggling for control. Without a word, I went to him and put my arms around him, knowing he’d collapse around me for a minute, and he did. I felt the subterranean trembling in his limbs, his terror, his howling grief and worry, and I just held him tight.

After a minute, he took a breath and released me. “Thanks.”

I nodded, rubbing his upper arm a minute. He took the helmets from their hooks under the seat and gave me one. It was only as I climbed on the back of the bike behind him that I saw my father sternly staring off to the west, ignoring me.

Perfect.

I ignored him, too, and we pulled out to go to Michael.

FROM THE MUSIC BOX MENU:

In the Mood Temptation Torte—A concoction only Andre and Michael could have dreamed up together: rich, dark chocolate cake layered with thick cream and ripe cherries, drizzled with a sinfully delicious chocolate syrup. If this won’t seal the seduction, honey, nothin’ can.

Chapter 12

It wasn’t until we were in the hushed corridor of the ICU waiting room that all of it hit me. The scene with my father—how could I have been so stupid?—the ride on the bike with Malachi’s tight, tense body in front of me, feeling like it wasn’t flesh at all but shaped out of metal or rock, ungiving and absolutely rigid.

And Michael. Of course. But it was harder to let that in, the reality of the fact that he was back in the hospital, the place he most adamantly did not want to be, and worse, hooked to a respirator to help him breathe. I’d learned, though, how that knowledge would come. It would slide in sideways, like fog creeping under a door. By morning, I’d know it. Feel it. The awful reality that he was back in the hospital, edging closer to that—

I sucked in a breath.

For now, I could concentrate on Malachi. In the somehow cold light of the clean, quiet room, he was motion and movement, caged restlessness. He didn’t have to say it, standing up for the fourth time to pace forward to the windows that overlooked the hallway beyond, but he did. “I hate hospitals.”

I only nodded, thinking with a little tear across my heart of Michael, tethered to machines he hated, machines that would save his life one more time.

One more time.

I said, “Did you see Shane at the house?”

Malachi paced two steps. Shoved a hand in his back pocket. Peered at an exit sign. “He called. Said he’ll be late.”

“Malachi, come sit down.”

He flipped a glance over his shoulder. Flight yearning showed along his jaw and I could see the green light of the Amazon flickering beneath the surface of his dark eyes, the glaciers of the Alps, the yellow waters of the Nile. Anywhere, anywhere, but this small, airless, and sterile room.

“Please,” I said, and held out my hand. “I want to talk to you for a minute.”

He moved like a Transformer in a cartoon Shane used to watch, each step thick and heavy in his boots, his knees bending like they were badly oiled. He ignored my hand and sprawled into a chair, leaving one empty between us, then dropped his head into his hands. “What?”

Even there, with so much else that needed my attention, I noticed things about him. The vein up his arm drew my palm. I fit my heart line to the river below his flesh.

“Your brother has a DNR order, Malachi. Do you know what that is?”

A scowl. “I watch television.”

I waited, my hand right where it needed to be. Finally he said, “Do Not Resuscitate.” His neck softened first, bent and let his big head drop. His hair swayed down over his face. “He is going to be so pissed off at me.”

I laughed at the tone—the misery of a kid who has a big punishment waiting. “Yep.”

It startled him. “Why are you laughing?”

“Well, it isn’t funny, but the tone of your voice—”

“I don’t have anybody else, Jewel,” he said gruffly. “Nobody. It’s always been just me and him.”

Not quite true. I said nothing but held the name of his father in my mind—Abe, Abe, Abe. He must not have heard me, though, because he just stared at the steel toes of his boots with misery.

“If he could,” I said, “Michael would stay, just for you.”

“How can you be so calm about it?” he asked fiercely. “Just let him go?”

“What else is there to do?”

“Fight.”

“It’s not my fight. Yours, either.”

“Then I’ll make him fight.”

“He’s done fighting, Malachi. He’s tired.”

“He’s only forty-five years old!”

I thought of the sun lines around Michael’s eyes, the fan of them radiating out into that magnificence of cheekbones, the bones that had made him so photogenic. I thought of the deep, clear blue of his irises when he had asked me to promise I would not make him suffer as Andre had.

Malachi stared at me with narrowed eyes, the adventurer’s battle arm ready to chop down trees and wade through snake-infested waters, but absolutely helpless against the minute invaders that would take his brother. I gave him Michael’s words to me. “They’ve been really great years.”

Malachi, the alligator-wrestling tough guy and ladies’ man, bent his head and wept.

I moved over to the next chair so I could reach him and put my arms around his massive shoulders and let him cry into my neck. “I don’t want him to go,” he said.

“Me, either, hon.” I took a long breath, pushed the reality away. “Me, either.”

* * *

They let us in to see him for five minutes at a time, one person, once every hour. I lied and told the hospital personnel that he was my brother so that all the others in my family who would eventually show up could take their turn with him. It was the least I could do to make up for my scene at the bridal shop—let everyone who loved Michael sit with him a few minutes each day. I gave up my time for them. Nana Lucy would need to pray. My mother would need to pet his brow and talk to him sensibly. Jordan would need to check his meds and make sure they had everything right. She would cry when she saw the respirator, as I had.

When my five minutes came, late in the day, I paused outside the door and took a long, centering breath, trying to shape myself into a canvas upon which Michael could paint anything he needed. I opened the heavy door and went into the dim, windowless room. The only sound was the whoosh of the respirator. A light blinked on the IV machine.

His body was so thin now that he looked like a skeleton beneath the covers, his collarbone peeking out of the top of the blue-printed cotton gown. For Andre, we’d made some in brilliant peacock shades because he’d been so offended by the sheer ugliness of hospital attire. The memory made me smile as I walked quietly to the side of the bed, loathe to disturb him if he was honestly sleeping.

But he raised his fingers in a feeble wave as I came up, and his eyes were open. “Hi,” I said, smiling. I brushed his hair off his brow and rested my palm on his forehead. “Sorry, buddy.”

A shake of his head—
don’t go there.
His lids closed and I felt the ease that my hand lent him. I started to sing quietly, a lullaby in Italian, and brushed his hair back gently, over and over, the same gesture I used to use to lull Shane to sleep.

It’s so hard to know, these days, how to deal with someone who is dying. It used to be normal—even I remember the elderly aunts and grandfathers who were cared for in the houses in my neighborhood, the odd younger person nursed through the end stages of cancer or some other shocking thing that drained them of life too early. It wasn’t exactly common, but it wasn’t uncommon, either. In those days, before everyone was whisked off to the hospital for the end, the women in my world took care of the dying as a matter of course. I rode with them as they took meals to shut-ins, as they scrubbed kitchen floors or vacuumed carpets for the ill one. I heard my grandmother reading to my grandfather every day, heard her whistling even when I spied her wiping away a tear when she bathed him.

So easy. Michael’s hands were cold and dry and I took a bottle of lotion from the table and warmed the lotion in my palms, then rubbed it on his knuckles and wrists, smoothing lotion all the way up to his elbows. When the nurse signaled that my time was over, I kissed his fingers. “Love you,” I said with a smile. “I’ll break you outta here just as soon as possible.”

He couldn’t smile around the tube in his throat, but he blinked, once, slowly.
Yeah.

Malachi found me in the kitchen at nine. The sun had set. Shane was at the restaurant and would spend the night with Jane at her new house. Shane and Jane. The names ran through my head in a litany, rhyming absurdly.

“Jewel,” Malachi said.

I glanced up from the masa in my bowl. “Hi. How you doing?”

He ambled in, a little frown of puzzlement between his brows. “Who’s coming over?”

I looked up. Twenty-seven peach pies cooled in the racks by the wall—ready for delivery Monday morning. A lasagna with spinach and pasta reclined on the counter next to chocolate chip cookies stacked in golden mountains. On the stove bubbled the meat and chile mixture that would go inside the tamales—I’d had to make a special trip for the corn husks—and the candle I bought in that aisle was burning in the window, a rose-scented Virgen de Guadalupe.

“I can’t help it,” I said. Wiping my hands on my very grimy apron, I reached for a glass of water and took a long drink. “Help yourself. I didn’t really make dinner.”

He frowned a little, then shook his head and reached for the burner knobs on the stove. “Why don’t you go take a shower and we’ll go out?”

“Out?”

A restless shrug. “Yeah.” His eyes, clear and dark and unapologetic, met mine. “I think I’d like to get drunk. You need it even more than I do.”

“Hmm.” I weighed the danger of being alone and drinking with Malachi against the idea of trying to go to sleep naturally whenever I finally exhausted myself here. A cord of tension throbbed in my neck and I blinked. “I don’t know.”

He took the spoon out of my hand. Put it gently in the sink, turned off another burner. “You’re wiped out, babe.”

“Yeah.” I let my hands fall to my sides. “All right. Let me put the food away and catch a quick shower.”

“I’ll take care of the food.” He untied the knot of my apron at my belly button and somehow I didn’t mind the forwardness. For once, maybe it would be okay to let someone else take care of things. “Anything particular I need to know?”

“Stuff that spoils goes in the fridge.” I pulled the apron off over my head. “There’s Tupperware above the sink for the rest of it.”

“All right.” He moved with the solid sureness of a man unafraid of anything—even a woman’s kitchen—and opened the cupboard, cocking his head over his shoulder. “I can handle it, Jewel, I swear.”

It didn’t take long, since I decided not to wash my hair. A quick shower to wash away the flour and food, the grime of a long, bad day. I tossed through my drawers for something wicked, setting my jaw as I thought of my father this morning and my mother’s scolding eyes, and to spite them, I chose a black leotard with a deliciously low-cut neckline. To hide the extra flesh around my middle, I put on a vest that didn’t interfere with the view of my tattoo. The hair came down, long tangles of curls. In the low light, I could be mistaken for five years younger—which was enough for me just then. The final touch was a wicked little necklace Michael had given me for Christmas one year, a delicate string of dark metal and red beads that brought just the right attention to my cleavage.

“
That’s my girl
,” Madonna said.

June had nothing to offer. It was probably too slutty for her to bear.

When I came back down, Malachi was standing on the porch. He didn’t say anything about my appearance, which did slightly hurt my feelings, just handed me the helmet and we rode out. I directed him to a cozy bar not far away, one that was agreeably dark and had an excellent jukebox for the stray couple who wanted to dance. Some nights there were a lot. Some not so many.

We settled in a booth near the single pool table and the small dance floor close to it, and ordered from the weary young woman. “Tequila, gold,” Malachi said. “Straight up, with a beer chaser.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Serious about this, aren’t you?” To the waitress I said, “Tomato beer for me.”

“Bottle or draw? We got Miller Lite and Bud on tap.”

“Draw. Bud, I guess.” Live dangerously—a few extra calories wouldn’t kill me this once.

“I’m sorely disappointed, Ms. Sabatino,” Malachi drawled. “Not even one shot?”

“Trust me, me and tequila don’t mix.”

The waitress looked at me. “Make it two shots,” Malachi said before I could shake my head.

I asked her to change a five-dollar bill to quarters for me, and while we were waiting for our drinks, I went to the jukebox and started punching in numbers, guessing Malachi the southern boy would like Thorogood and Lynyrd Skynyrd, of which there was a plentiful selection. Never let it be said that rednecks live exclusively in the south. He joined me, nodded at the selections, and added some Springsteen. And then some Bonnie Raitt, who slices and dices my heart every time with that earthy voice of hers. “You don’t strike me as the sort to enjoy Bonnie Raitt,” I said with a little smile to cover my dismay. I didn’t want him to like her. It gave him another layer, and he already had more than I wished to acknowledge. So much easier if he was just unapologetically a bad boy doomed to a life wrestling alligators.

“I’m full of surprises, sugar.” He winked, naturally, and showed that long line of smile.

I shook my head with amusement and peered down at the song list. Five more. I flipped the page and made a soft sound of surprise. “They have ‘Longing for You’!” I punched the numbers in delight. It had been Michael’s best work—both in lyrics and voice—and had been the only truly successful song he and Billy ever recorded.

“Man,” Malachi said, “I haven’t heard that in so long.” He chose a couple more songs, then took my hand to lead me back to the table. I saw women noticing him, shooting me small, quickly hidden glances of envy, and grinned. “What?” he asked.