Sacred Time (19 page)

“That's good.” Malcolm reached for the stone.

But Floria snapped her fingers shut. “You weren't even there.”

“You know I begged them to let me be at her funeral, to send me with someone from the sheriff's office. You know they told me decisions like that are never made quickly, that there's a process to follow.”

“I know…you weren't there when she died.”

He flinched.

“And
that
you cannot blame on process and regulations.”

“I only blame myself. If I'd been there that day—”

“No,” she says. “I've done the same, wondered…what if I'd been in the kitchen with the girls and Anthony….”

“If I were to promise you that I'll never be back in jail again—would you believe me?”

“If? You either promise or don't promise. Don't ask for my belief just in case.”

“I promise. I promise you I'll never do anything to end up in jail again. And I won't ask for your belief till I've proven that to you.” He enveloped her fist with his hand. “We'll take it home with us, your pebble.”

“No.”

“You'll have it as a reminder.”

“Of misery?”

“Of knowing that you'll survive this.”

Though she didn't want to keep the pebble, she didn't have the energy to stop Malcolm; but when he opened the apartment door, she wouldn't go inside. “I'm scared of having it in there.”

“It's just a stone.”

“It'll remind me how…I felt when I found it.”

“You want me to throw it out?”

“Oh no. That's…dangerous. Because it means both—the not wanting to live, and the promising myself to stay alive.”

“Then let me take it back where you found it.”

“Not to the playground.”

“Someplace in the park where you don't go. I'll figure something out.” Gently, he opened her fist. Took the pebble, egg-shaped, a mottled sand-yellow.

For two hours he was gone, and when she asked him where he'd left it, he said, “I considered several hiding places, but none of them felt right till I found a crevice between some rocks. I pushed your pebble in there for safekeeping. Maybe, someday, you'll want it back.”

“No.” But already she imagined going there. Felt the danger. The promise. “Would I find it?”

“I'd find it for you,” he assured her.

In the half-light of church, others are kneeling—most of them women—fast lips murmuring, belief a habit, a birthright. Above the side altar, a faded Madonna is nursing Baby Jesus. For a moment Floria feels exhilarated—she hasn't seen a bare-breasted Madonna before—and she wonders who the artist is. She's glad it's not Michelangelo. Her mother has urged her to visit his tomb in Florence, but from what Floria has read about Michelangelo, it would be exhausting to be around him. Too much like her mother: capable and demanding.

All around Floria, women are praying. Have any of them known the kind of sadness that will never just be ordinary sadness again, once you know what waits for you beneath? Sadness is the trapdoor to the void. Not that it will open each time you walk across it. But you'll be aware of the void. Terrified of the void. Terrified of love. Terrified of anger. Because of that awareness, the border has changed. Though, gradually, you'll have days when you trust that the ground will hold.

As Floria rests her forehead on her linked fingers, she notices the floor with its ancient stone mosaic: worn shades of gray and terra-cotta. That pale dove-gray…she'll make slipcovers in that color, sew curtains and pillows in terra-cotta. Instantly she feels shallow. She's in a church, for Christ's sakes, surrounded by prayer and tears and holy statues. Still…she can get some fabrics. Ask her mother to crochet a matching afghan. And she already has a vase that would match.

When she leaves the church, shreds of mist hang above the piazza like wings of colossal birds, and coming toward her in that mist is a family, exquisitely dressed, the parents' hands linked to the child between them, a girl of eight or nine, who's laughing at the shadow-sky from her velvet collar, bouncing like a marionette, knees knocking and elbows flailing, like children will swing from their parents' hands. The woman's fur coat flows around her like a cape, and within that fluidity, that playfulness, the family seems privileged. Mist and the arches of the piazza separate them from the rest of the world, from anyone who has not sampled that degree of happiness.

If I could be certain—

If I could be certain Bianca is with parents like these—no longer mine but taken care of so exquisitely in a world where, for now, I cannot touch her—maybe, then, this is the closest I will know of heaven. Or maybe that's what heaven is meant to be all along, that glimpse of someone you love being safe forever.
But as the family gets closer, Floria is stunned to see that the girl's marionette dance—suspended like this between both parents—is the only way she can walk. Her crooked limbs twitch as she propels herself forward, mouth open to the sky, not in laughter, but in one unending wail.

In her hotel room, Floria undresses without turning on the light, slips naked between the sheets. She shakes a cigarette from the pack, strikes a match in the dark, throat greedy for that gasp of smoke, and wills herself to believe the parents were bringing the girl to the church at nightfall to be healed.

And that she will be healed.

Must be healed.

But all at once the girl is Bianca—
forever suspended; forever falling
—and Floria crushes her cigarette, jams one palm against her mouth.
Cheated.
Cheated out of her first glimpse of the girl: so playful and lucky and protected; cheated out of imagining a lifetime for the girl as she has imagined a lifetime for Bianca in all these years. Measuring her—what she looks like, what matters to her—by the changes in Belinda. Embarrassing herself by clinging to her surviving daughter. A mother who tries too hard, offers too much. But Belinda has learned to dodge that sticky love in school, in college, in marriage. Instead of living at home while taking classes at NYU, Belinda moved into a dorm. And after she married Jonathan, they rented a back three-room apartment in the West Village instead of returning to the Bronx.

What used to be Belinda's room is Floria's sewing room, but she keeps fresh sheets on the bed in case Belinda ever wants to stay overnight. But Belinda is perpetually in flight from Floria, planning her escape before she arrives. If Floria struggles against that flight, revs up to offer more, the flight becomes urgent, immediate. Recently, though, Belinda has also been in flight from Jonathan, who is clean in an aggressive manner, brushes his teeth after every meal, takes several showers a day; and from what Floria can tell, Belinda is getting ready for a flight more drastic than anything she has attempted before.

As the signora pours juice for Floria, she opens her lips to smile, and her lovely pout is no longer a pout, but the way her lips have to arrange themselves across her protruding gums and teeth.

“Grazie.”

Sun slices the red pulp in Floria's glass—
Blood of Christ; Blood of the Lamb
—and she wonders what it would be like for someone from another planet to walk into mass. Flesh of Our Savior eaten by priests and sinners. Amen. Barbaric rites. Definitely a Leonora thought. Floria reminds herself to tell her.

From the lobby comes the peck-peck of the signora's quick heels as she checks on flowers, perhaps, or deliveries. Light peels shadows from the white columns in the courtyard, and angels spill water from their palms. Did the nuns really choose those naked angels? Or did the signora? Leonora's vote would be for the nuns: “
To make up for all those clothes they have to wear. But why didn't they choose grown naked angels?”

A few days ago the hammering ceased, and after enclosing the scaffolding with green netting, the men went away. Yesterday, the painter arrived with pails and brushes and floated behind the netting as if he were inside the watery glass of the aquarium in Coney Island, where Floria took the twins. While Belinda loved the aquarium, Bianca wailed, “It's going to break,” pointing at the glass. Right away, Floria picked her up and promised the glass wouldn't break, but Bianca was inconsolable. “The glass will break…and then the fishies will break…and then—” Floria brought her nose against Bianca's, eyes against eyes. “Nothing will hurt you. I promise.”

As Floria lights her third cigarette of the morning, she wonders what promises the signora has broken. Quickly, she rolls up two slices of ham, hides them in her napkin, and rushes up the stairs—sixty altogether—to her room, with its massive ceiling beams that support the clay bellies of the roof tiles. She opens her window, feeling mischievous, because the signora would disapprove of feeding the cats, and as she tosses shreds of ham onto the clay tiles, she clicks her tongue—“here…here…here”—and cats pour onto the roof in long, fluid shadows, three, then eight, a graceful swarm in the shape of a fan.

She steps from the polished door of the hotel, leaves the bay behind, and feels the town open around her in its maze, the hushed shade of yet another narrow street, the sudden brightness of yet another piazza. Some of the foundations smell of camphor and damp stone, of cat piss. She doesn't mind the camphor. Like her mother, she ties mothballs and sprigs of lavender into squares of muslin that she tucks into out-of-season clothing, and she advises her customers to do the same. “That's how things last,” she tells them.