Safe House
“God Doesn’t Rhyme Siblings”
The youngest sibling of three is sixty-year-old Jane. Though christened Jane and not Giovanna, she is heart & soul Italiana. She has never resided outside Syracuse’s Little Italy; she grew up speaking Itanglese at home; educated by nuns, she still goes to mass every Sunday. But she is also a Syracuse University-educated topo di biblioteca, a bookworm, and she can’t look past particular events in The Good Book that require a suspension of disbelief no novelist would bank on. Her pet peeve: To repopulate the earth after the coming Flood, Noah loaded the Ark with one male and one female of every living thing. That is, she fumed, one pair each except: In addition to his wife, Noah brought aboard his three sons and their wives…. “Honest to Pete!” Jane would mutter, “didn’t a man who had lived six hundred years know better than to put the future of humankind in the hearts and minds of three male siblings?”
She prays for her brothers to go bald. Goes down on her knees to it. Sixty years old she’s still “little Sis” to Antony and Enzo, four and two years older, their still-thick backswept black hair and swarthy Calabrian complexions a constant taunt. To her they look and act like Coppola mafiosos. And yet, as regards their physical appearance, she self-confesses to envy: her once blonde hair is thinning and gray; and a quarter hour in the sun and she’d be as lobster-red as a Brit on a Mediterranean beach holiday. She imagines that if Coppola were re-casting, Antony (never “Tony”) would be the consigliere, like Robert Duvall’s soft-spoken formidable Fixer; Enzo would be the surly 5’4” soldier with an overcompensating little-man complex; and she’d be what’s-her-name, the light-complected outlier who gets the door closed in her face lest she glimpse the Italian males’ chimp-like power rituals.
She was thirteen when her mother and sole female ally died. Which left no one she could look to teach her how to live. Abandoned to a tribe of male chimps, each hardwired to seek or retain Alpha-dom (a group of chimps was called a shrewdness, she’d looked it up), her fixed and finite position became Female/Youngest/Weakest. Pressganged for sibling athletic competitions she could only endure as competitions with self, she sought refuge in books. She read through the Onondaga County Library’s collection of Great Books and when she discovered Bartlett’s and other quotation books, they became her go-to for guiding principles. Quotes were quoted because they spoke to the universal heart of things. An early favorite: A sibling may be the keeper of one’s identity, the only person with the keys to one’s unfettered, fundamental self. Lord, what younger sibling hadn’t felt that?
One evening, when Jane was a 12th grade honors student, Enzo came home in fortissimo mode, fungool this! Fungool that! Hands sweeping, slashing, she stood quietly staring until she snagged his attention, then called him a debauchee. Of course the word was foreign to him, but not the superior tone. He flicked his fingers under his chin, spat— “paleface!”—then bit the side of his hand, to her just another lazy non-verbal gesture that males throughout Syracuse’s Little Italy had adopted in juvenile homage to The Godfather. In the way of youngest v. middle siblings, the gestures incentivized. A week later, when Enzo came home loud and gesticulating, Jane upped the ante—dissolute, reprobate—certain she’d trigger the tribal hand-biting thing. But no. Instead, with surprisingly impressive Mastroianni disdain, Enzo called her a foundling. That bemused her. Where on God’s green earth had he come up with foundling? Then: Certo! Antony! Enzo often served as an unwitting proxy for Antony’s stratagems. The taunt targeted the physical difference in their appearance. And it hit home, as those differences, at that age—her brothers were handsome and popular in the neighborhood, she was neither—exposed a nerve. And yet, Jane had her books. And her favorite author was Dickens. She knew that the author had lived next to London’s Foundling Hospital—hence, Nell and Esther, Pip and David and Oliver, sympathetic characters one and all. So Enzo’s particular taunt carried literary gravitas. At the time, she would look in the mirror and whisper foundling, and feel a certain Dickens’-character nobility.
At S.U. she earned an M.A. in 19th Century English Lit—which Antony likened to a degree in Basket Weaving, adding, drolly, that at least with Basket Weaving one ended up with a product one could sell. By then she’d completed her thesis on Dickens’ character-driven classics, so it was no leap at all to take a scholarly interest in parsing Antony and Enzo through the universal lens of Literature. Which is to say she began to read her brothers as characters in a family saga, their actions explicable, even predictable, if she had read them correctly. And it wasn’t long before she understood that the only way she could keep from setting aside their serial family saga was to become engrossed in the narrative, and invested in the characters.
A month after she graduated with that M.A., Antony invited her to what she wistfully hoped would be a celebratory dinner. So of course he chose a traditional il pronzo domenicale, Sunday midday at Grimaldi’s, where he had a regular’s table, never mind that for years after mother died Jane had voiced her opposition to family Sunday dinners at Grimaldi’s, which for decades father and brothers had demanded ad nauseum, and which mother had quietly endured “for the sake of the family,” as she had once confided to her daughter, then, as if that weren’t strong enough, she took Jane’s face in two hands, looked her in the eye, and pleaded, “La famiglia è tutto.”
Antony, in character, arrived five minutes late—Jane, in character, was punctual and once seated set the timer on her phone for five minutes. It dinged as he crossed the room to his table, shaking hands with diners as he came—dressed in his uniform charcoal suit, cream shirt, no tie, black hair swept back, and looking like he’d just had a fifty-dollar razor cut and shave from the stylist he’d gone to since senior year at Christian Brothers Academy. As he took his seat they exchanged pleasantries, he snapped out his cloth napkin and in a casual, small-talk tone, “I spoke to Father. He tasked me with guiding you into law school now that you’ve got that frivolous degree out of your system.”
Her hands in her lap balled and fisted. Maybe the “frivolous” was Antony’s, though it sounded much like Father, in the same way Antony’s words would spew out of Enzo’s mouth.
“And don’t waste our time applying to better schools. I know people. I’ll get you into Albany Law.”
She stared fiercely back at him, her mind racing for a suitable retort, but then the waiter was there, Carlo, Antony had gone to high school with him. No menus, only Antony’s traditional bottle of Brunello. After Carlo had poured, Antony started to order for her and only then did she raise her voice over his, alas, hers high-pitched, sounding, even to her, slightly manic. Carlo pursed his lips at her but haughtily took her order, a raised eyebrow at her choice of entrée.
After Carlo had gone, Antony, ever attuned to the temperature of whomever he was handling, raised a glass to Jane—an acknowledgement of her accomplishment, she supposed, never mind that with her salmon she would have ordered Asti—then he softened the mood by offering up repurposed stories from their childhood. “Jane. Remember the day father was umping and I struck out Enzo with a slow change up?”
Jane humphed through her nose. “You whiffed him every time!” She was relieved the conversation had changed direction, especially now that Enzo was targeted. “His last at bat,” she recounted, “two strikes.” She was enjoying the telling. “Just as the ball left your hand he swung and let go of the bat, aimed it, really, and you ever so nonchalantly stepped aside as the bat flew past.”
A what-else shrug. More big-brother arrogance! It re-fired a taut nerve. Remembering now, she narrowed her eyes at him and in a different tone, “The game was over. But even then you taunted Enzo. Offered a do-over at-bat, five strikes. He stalked off, to this day I can hear him blubbering.”
Antony spread his hands. “If your opponent is temperamental, seek to irritate him.”
Jane regarded her brother, this coldly efficient character.
He leaned toward her, caught her eye, and said, “Some small irritations last a lifetime.”
She nodded slowly. Understanding (again): Antony, the first son, not only had to beat you, but in such a crushing way that in future you’d dare not oppose him.
Still, that had been against Enzo.
Carlo was there with the entrees. When he’d gone, Antony again sought to lighten the conversation. “Of all days for father to have left his movie camera at home.”
“Right!” Jane burst out. “It would have made his ÜberOffspring Super 8 Best Hits. Though it wouldn’t have been as compelling as ÜberOffspring Mud Rugby. Or, hey, remember Über Boxing Day? When he put me instead of you up against Raging Bull?”
“Jane, if only you would allow yourself the whole memory. He took us for ice cream afterwards.”
“The whole memory,” she repeated. “Sì, I shall allow myself the whole memory of the ice cream stinging my split lip.”
He laughed! Stunned, disarmed that she’d caused him to laugh, she gushed, “Remember how he’d throw a party and run those Ȕber films on the living room wall? As if raising your kids like rival gladiators was admirable!”
“Jane, Jane. That competitive spirit has been his gift to us.”
She loathed the Jane, Jane thing, It always made her feel small. “Blessing?” She squinted into the middle distance, as if unable to place the word.
He leaned over his plate. “Remember how happy father was when Mom was alive?” he whisper-cried.
His rare passion startled Jane. Warmth spread through her like a shot of grappa after Midnight Mass. Mother had been a saint, everyone but everyone knew it. But Jane thought of those twenty years of marriage as Mother’s own gender cross to bear, giving birth to three children while married to an ego-goitered self-styled Renaissance Man who believed his creative side shouldn’t be constrained by the traditional vows of matrimony.
“If she’d lived,” Antony said, “She would have stayed with him.”
Jane blinked away tears. Antony nodded sympathetically. He spread his hands palms up and hunched his shoulders. “Of course, she would’ve had to keep looking away from the other woman.”
Jane stiffened in her chair. Other woman? She hadn’t known of a special goomar.
Antony had gone back to sawing away at his T-bone. She waited for him to resurface…but the steak had his full attention. Steak as stage prop. She might have laughed. But he had her! Like a mouse that sniffs there’s cheese to be had but the trap obvious. And yet, she just might nibble the cheese without springing the trap. She took a forkful of her dry salmon, chewed as he chewed. Dining. Just dining. Until, as if it were an afterthought, “Other woman?” She looked him in the eye. This was crucial. They were brought up in the Calabrian way, to believe eye contact vital, a sign of openness. But Antony had a tell. About to lie strategically he would look her full in the face, but from the first word it was as if opening his mouth hinged his gaze to a spot the center of her forehead. Jane called that spot K, for kryptonite, as it was his only weakness she was aware of.
She listened with her eyes.
He looked her full in the face. “You know, his parallel life. ‘L’altro,’ Enzo and I called her.” He swirled the glass, drank, put the glass down.
“I’d almost forgotten.” She studied him closely. “Remind me.”
His eyes fastened on hers. “Irish? Came over during the Troubles?”
“Uh, huh,” she nodded. He reached for his wine, breaking eye contact. “Pray, brother, continue.” It came out sarcastic, but he ignored it. He could afford to, he had her in the palm of his hand.
“All those nights father got a call,” he reminisced conversa-tionally. “He’d listen, then repeat an address and hang up the phone. Pick up his black doctor’s bag, you remember, it was always ready to go on the hall table, and off he’d go. He’d reappear the next day and tell mother the patient had needed crisis care through the night. When it got to the point patients needed that care night after night after night, when father finally pulled into the driveway, mother would flee. I watched the whole scenario play out again and again. She’d rush out the back door as he was coming in the front. Like some Marx Brothers movie.”
A tightening in her chest, her heart constricted. How had she not known what Mom was enduring? Which morphed into doubt. Either Antony spoke the truth or he was wise to his K tell and was playing it back at her like some le Carré double agent (his favorite author!). She had gone along as if she had a vague memory of the Other Woman. But, no. Niente.
“L’altro wasn’t Black Irish.”
She gave a tiny laugh but gaped at him in disbelief. She struggled to grasp the why of him having said it. Then: Oh, Lord, the artistry to say she wasn’t Black Irish, rather than she was blonde. It was reminiscent of Enzo’s taunts, yet so creative! And Antony’s taunts always had a purpose. What was in it for him? “I have a vague memory of her,” she finally managed, “but her name escapes me.”
“Oh,” Antony brushed this away, “it was so long ago. She died in childbirth years before mother. I was a child. Four? Five?”
She did the math; she was been when Antony was four. “Which?” she asked too urgently, her heart thudding. “Four or five?”
He squinted into the middle distance. Mocking her? Frowned. “Four, I think. Yes, four.”
“What was her name? I’ll find her obituary.”
“Oh, sorry Little Sis, getting old, memory’s a sieve.” Pause, one beat, two. The middle distance again; then squinting hard, as if at something murky out there. “Wait! Hold on. I can hear father calling her…uh…almost, almost….” He covered his eyes with a horizontal hand, like Carson’s Carnac the Magician. She fisted her fork, was it sharp enough to pin his other hand to the table?
Suddenly his hand uncovered a eureka look and he looked her full in the face. “Sinead. Right, Sinead. Like that singer who disparaged Il Papa.”
Blank moments in time. Finally, she shook head as if coming out of a spell. Did he know that she knew that Sinead was the Irish equivalent of Jane? Of course he did. Was he really actually claiming that l’Altro was her mother and had died giving birth to her! Her mouth had gone dry, chalky. She stood from the table, took a few steps away before turning to study him, as if she needed height and distance to do so. And to gather herself. It was a plotline right out of Dickens! Intentional? Had he employed it especially for her? Was any part of it true? As calmly as she could, she retook her seat.
He offered up a sympathetic look. “Listen. Jane. Granted, father was a godawful husband, no question. Still and all, you have to respect what he’s accomplished in life.”
“Wealth isn’t everything.”
He lifted his chin at her plate. “The salmon edible? Honestly, Jane, after all these years you should know fish isn’t what they do here.”
“Proper parenting has a significant impact on sibling relationships”
That graduation dinner was thirty years in the past. Since that dinner Antony had gone silent about the Irish Woman, as if all he had to do was plant the seed to bedevil Jane. And though Jane was as intrigued as any Dickens’ character about her origins, she had refused to get drawn into such a cliched plot. In retrospect, which is as useless for humans as it is for fictional characters, she might have played on Antony’s ego to reveal more. Better yet, invited Enzo for puttanesca and Chianti and poked second son’s open wounds inflicted by their father. But no, she had let sleeping siblings lie. Or rather, lying siblings sleep.
And so, Jane will learn the hard way: Like Esther Summerson or Oliver Twist, she had no authorial or editorial control over her own story. Also, that Plotful News will accelerate the story’s rising action.
On a sticky August afternoon, while walking the Erie Canal towpath with Nell, her long-time companion—a doddery, milky-eyed, floppy-eared beagle—her phone buzzed. When she saw it was Antony calling, she felt a gut twist of agita. It wasn’t that she had some black-cat foreshadowing. Her guardedness was triggered by Antony having phoned. He phoned rather than e-mailed or texted if he required deniability. Still, parsing the family males’ motives and actions had long been second nature to her, so before the call shunted to voice-mail, certain he wouldn’t leave an audio trail, she picked up. “Brother, you’re phoning?”
“Jane, I’m calling a family Zoom meeting.”
Zoom! She likened Zoom to an Orwellian plot that had lain dormant, waiting for a global pandemic to hatch. She suspected Antony had opted for live and visual because he could think on his feet faster than his siblings. “Must be serious,” she joshed. “What for, said Zoom?”
“Father’s dead.”
“Oh!……..…I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry? Who are you sorry for?”
“No. I mean… fuck!”
She pictured Antony holding his iPhone away in shock, he’d never heard his little sister use the F-word. But then he let her flounder. And she couldn’t admit she felt befuddled because, if she were honest, what little emotion she felt, felt most like relief. Nell sat, eyeing her with milky-eyed sympathy. Well, at least here was one living thing she could rely on. She knelt on the towpath, Nell ass-waddled over to be petted, and that settled Jane. Only then, as if she’d needed time to compose herself, she spoke into the phone in a small, desolate voice, “How?”
“Coronary competing in the Lake Placid Swimathon.”
“He died in the water?!”
“Perfect, no? Eighty-four and of course he was leading the Seniors Plus until the guy in second caught up and found Dad dead in the water, so to speak.”
“Ah, he would’ve liked going that way. Well, providing he crossed the finish line first, then went.”
Laughter in her ear! Father was dead and they were sharing a moment!
“The Zoom is with Zio Duilio.”
He’d caught her with her guard down. After a few beats, she grumbled, “Already with the will?”
“Uncle said there’s a time-mandate involved. Sounds like Dad, no? So, we have to act. But there’s a problem.”
Of course there is! He was waiting for her to ask, to become fully involved. She took pleasure in making him wait.
“Enzo seems to be gone.”
“What do you mean gone?”
“His apartment’s been cleaned out. His landlord hasn’t a clue, neither do his goombahs.”
“Uh huh. A disappearance. Standard plot device.”
“Come again?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“What I understand, Jane, is that Zio insists it’s in our best interest to Zoom as soon as possible, with our without Enzo.”
“Was it Zio’s idea to Zoom?”
“I offered my table at Grimaldi’s, but he’s on a restricted diet.”
“Thank heaven for small mercies.”
“That’s harsh, Jane, even for you. The heart thing’s genetic, right? Nonno? And now Dad? So I have to ask: Do you nurture some grievance against your Italian half?”
Her Italian half! So there it was, after all these years. He’s whole, she half. She was struggling to mount a retort, when she heard, “10 A.M. Monday, I’ll e-mail the link.”
“What about Enzo!” But Antony was gone. A virtuoso of the last word.
Before the Zoom meeting she practiced unruffled facial expressions in the bathroom mirror. Then she had to update Zoom so she was late logging in. No Enzo. Antony and Zio Duilio already in their Holly-wood Squares. Zio in a white dress shirt with red suspenders. His flyaway white eyebrows made him look older and now, to Jane, lesser. The last time she’d seen him, maybe six months ago, they’d bumped into each other at Destiny Mall, he with a woman not Jane’s aunt.
“Ah, Jane, amata nipote.”
“Zio. Haven’t seen you since… well, long time.”
“I have here your father’s last wishes.” He patted the papers before him, produced his glasses from his breast pocket and perched them low on his hooked nose. “Mio fratello entrusted me with this sadly complex duty.”
She knew foreshadowing when she heard it. She looked to Antony’s square. He seemed comfortable, composed. Why not? He was that most blessed of Italians, first born and male. But where was Enzo?
As if aware of her scrutiny, Antony looked straight into the lens of his camera and said, “Our sole intention is to honor Father’s wishes.” She heard “our” as her cue to second the sentiment but she thought, Bleak House, how the Plotful Will at the book’s center took on the character of a diabolical protagonist.
Zio cleared his throat and dropped his head to read the paper. Ha! She thought, a Bleak House minor character fleshed out with scruffy eyebrows and perched eyeglasses.
“Your father’s opening statement.” Zio peered out and without looking at the paper, “My offspring will come to understand that this last will and testament is the patriarch’s opportunity to render a final assessment.”
“Here we go!” Jane blurted out.
A fraught silence…….
“Jane, Jane.”
She steamed. Zio waited. It felt like an added rebuke.
“I’ll say up front that I counselled your father against such a complicated mechanism to determine his primary heir, or heirs.”
Primary heir, or heirs? She jerked her gaze to catch Antony’s response: Unfazed, as though he knew what was coming.
“You, the fruit of my loins: Antony Peter Bottachiari, Louis Enzo Bottachiari, and Jane Frances Bottachiari have seven days from the reading of this will to prove who among you is not the offspring of Cora Bottachiari, my legal spouse.”
Not Mom’s offspring? L’altro! Not black Irish! Her stomach churned. She felt a tightening of her throat that made it difficult to breath. She looked to Antony but he sat as before, as if none of this surprised him.
Zio peered over the top of his perched glasses, straight into his laptop’s camera—she thought he was focusing on her, preparing her for heartache. “Four years ago your father became a fan of the book Die With Zero, and he was always one to accomplish a goal. After I finish honoring his debts, the Adirondack property will be all that remains.” He paused and looked out. He, or she, who is not the child of Cora, will inherit my legacy, the historic Adirondack White Pine Camp, once President Coolidge’s summer residence, and everything within the estate.”
She swallowed her breath. Not? Not the child of Cora! She shot Antony a ha! look, but he sat as before. Heart thudding, unable to look away from Antony, she scoffed at his adamant cool. But it was consistent that this character wouldn’t reveal anything. Showing emotion had been boot-camped out of him at Wharton.
“There’s a proviso.” She turned back to Zio. He paused several dramatic beats, then read the coup-de-caveat. “You have exactly one hundred sixty-eight hours, from the time the will is read, to present evidence of your DNA as processed by DNA Testing of Syracuse. Your uncle, my brother, who has sworn to remain impartial, is also authorized to submit your samples to DNA Testing. If sample results are not available by the expressly designated time—when this reading is finished, synchronize your phones to the National Institute of Standards and Technology—White Pine Camp will pass to my three progeny and thus, my active parenting complete, I hereby absolve myself for all conflict when you three attempt to share the estate. I have stipulated that DNA evidence be beyond counter legal action. Ethnicity is insufficient, so don’t waste time with Ancestry or 23andMe and the like. To educate: Cora’s offspring will share some ninety percent DNA. The outlier, not Cora’s birth child, will share fifty percent, give or take, with Cora’s offspring. So you see, it’s a straightforward matter of comparing three DNA samples.”
Jane’s self-esteem grinned into her camera. When Antony looked away, triumph went to her head like nitrous oxide. Her psyche thrummed from the high of her brothers’ comeuppance. Antony raised his face to his camera. Sought her eye. Fervently she hoped for some kind of acceptance. He held up two fingers and a set of thumbs to fix her in a frame. Goosebumps shivered her. He spread his hands, palms up, hunched his shoulders. A tight, knowing smile that from him had to be a threat. Jane’s smile collapsed. She averted her gaze. Pretended to flip through her notebook. When she looked up Antony was gone. She jumped up and leaned over her laptop, as if it might give her a better sight line into Antony’s home office. His square blinked away.
Rattled, she was relieved to see Zio still sitting his square. “Uncle, I’m the one, right?”
He was tapping away at his phone. Done, he leaned forward on his forearms. “Jane, your father insisted the proof be in the DNA.”
“The proof will be in the DNA! What was the Irish woman’s name?”
His eyebrows jumped. He hesitated too many beats. “I have no knowledge of an Irish woman,” he said. “And to the point, your father insisted his bequest instigate a competition in which I remain impartial.”
“ÜberOffspring Do Inheritance.”
“If you wish to put it that way, yes.”
“Where’s Enzo?”
“Aye,” Zio quickly replied, “there’s the rub.”
Antony’s departing smile clicked. “Antony had prior knowledge of the will.”
Zio looked all about, as if to ensure no one was listening. “I will only say that my secretary had a notion someone had been in the office the night after your father died. I thought nothing of it because nothing was missing.”
“The will was there.” His silence served. “Ergo, Enzo suddenly disappeared. Pushed by Antony.”
“Careful,” Uncle said.
“Careful? Of what?”
He put a hand to his brow and sighed, as if weary of reasoning with a child. She imagined if he were within reach he might have patted her head, as the childless uncle had done when she was a toddler. Now he looked sternly into his camera, and said, “Antony has a reputation for getting his way.”
“Reputation, shmeputation.”
“If you value your own character, prepare to take a beating from those who have none.”
After Zio blipped out, Jane set her phone’s timer to the NIST. Next, something she hadn’t done since returning from her graduation dinner at Grimaldi’s, she checked her birth certificate and re-confirmed the signatures: Cora Maria and Anthony Peter Bottachiari.
She drove to the Onondaga County Courthouse, to search death records for the County, 1963-1964, but was informed that only a spouse, child, parent or sibling could access death records. She tried to explain that she was the birth child of the woman whose death record she sought, but she had no proof. She went to the County Library and spent hours searching the digitized “Syracuse Post-Standard” for obituaries of a Sinead, or a Jane. When she didn’t find either name on her own birth date or for days unto weeks following, she reasoned that neither Sinead nor Jane was her birth mother’s real name, just a twisted Antony taunt. Or… again she considered her birth certificate: Mother had agreed to adopt me and then raised me as her own. Because the Irish woman died giving birth? Or because father wouldn’t allow his progeny to be raised outside the family. All of it fit. But then, how had he felt about raising a girl?
The following day she went round to the bocce courts in Onondaga Lake Park, where for decades her father had “rolled with amicos” he’d known all his life. Ever aware of her arrogante reputazione in the neighborhood—never-married and college-educated—Jane had to rely on her status as Anthony Bottachiari’s daughter. When she parked and approached the courts, the old men gathered round to pay their respects. That done, she casually asked if they’d seen Enzo around. Head shakes, seemingly sincere. She pounced, “What can you tell me about mio padre’s Irish goomar.” They looked away, or at the ground. She waited, wordlessly eyed each in turn, each in turn looking away, until the oldest, elfin, olive-skinned, white-whiskered Udo Pugliese, looked her full in the face and said, “Of this we will say nothing. Niente.” Jane shot the old man a quizzical look, said it seemed an odd use of Omertά. Now the men looked agitated, the very word was not to be spoken. Seeing she’d gone too far, she turned and walked away, tall, prideful, yet chiding herself for not knowing better: in their blood and bones, the old men would always be Old Country.
Some forty hours remained. Enzo still missing. Walking back to her car, she was imagining how purgatorial it would be to share the Adirondack estate with her two brothers (stepbrothers!), when her phone buzzed an incoming text. An unrecognizable number, but a local area code. She tapped, read: Safe house 59 Seneca St.#4. Enzo won’t be there Thursday, 4-8 PM, his toothbrush or hair on comb good for his DNA sample. I have the authority to submit. Keys in the mailbox. Zio. She considered. The interior logic synched: Zio, the second son, weaker, ever subordinate to his alpha brother, would have the last word. In literature, the lesser brother was a timeless character; and in the end, she thought, we are all just characters with histories and motivations. She had gone for DNA testing the first available day, anxious to confirm this new identity she was stepping into, to become, at long last, securely herself. Antony’s hubris pushed him to appear for DNA testing on Day 2. And Enzo? Enzo had been led by the nose down the garden path to a safe house.
59 Seneca was in a once-highbrow neighborhood gone to seed and now, from what she’d heard at church, low-income families had taken over. She turned into the neighborhood, slowed, reading numbers, braked for a faded blue and white Virgin Mary on the small rectangle of 53’s front lawn. She parked in front of Mary, got out, crossed herself, kissed her thumb. The sky was thickly overcast, everything quiet. No traffic, no children playing, no one in sight. On foot, she passed 55, 57, as she quick-stepped by 59 she glanced up at the two-story, red brick Victorian, downstairs picture window boarded up, all other windows with blinds drawn. Descriptive of a safe house. Several steps past, she stopped, returned, hurried up the walk and up the porch steps to the front door. Everything speeded up now. Four mailboxes, no doorbell, no buzzers. Apparently the home had been divided into rented quarters. She reached into #4’s box and found two keys. It was encouraging to get the front door key first try. Inside, a wide center staircase, its runner threadbare, like Miss Havisham’s in Great Expectations. Heart racing, feeling clandestine, she went lightly up the staircase; 4 was to the left. She stood before the door, pulse in her ears, knocked, waited. Realized she was holding her breath, exhaled. Knocked. Waited. Raised the key to the lock as the door swung open. Her forced smile collapsed. Burqa! “Oh!” she cried. “Sorry! So sorry!”
“Please?” A quavering voice muffled by the burqa. The brown eyes huge with fear.
Jane grimaced, aware it was absurd to ask, “Enzo?”
“Please?” A pleading desperation in her voice.
Jane waved it all away, wheeled, retreated. As she started down the staircase, 4’s door quietly closed. Out the front door, she dropped the keys in the mailbox and went down the porch steps, the walk, and only then struggled to analyze. Not Zio. Antony. Enzo. Antony and Enzo? Why #4? How were keys managed? She had to see Zio, describe this outrage, perhaps he’d abandon his hands-off stance. She checked her phone’s timer. Twelve hours ten, pocketed her phone. Distracted, she walked arms folded, head forward—composing her grievances to Zio—looked up to see her car listing to curbside, misstepped on the broken sidewalk and almost lost her balance. Steadied herself, saw the flat tire. Instantly understood it wasn’t bad luck. It didn’t seem Antony’s style. She stood, engrossed by an image—Enzo leaning casually against her car and bending from the waist to stab the tire with his stiletto, the stiletto she’d always scoffingly called an affectation! —so didn’t hear the footsteps approaching from behind until they were upon her. She wheeled to someone looming, tall, hat brim down, she clenched as he shouldered right through her, she was off her feet and back-slammed the ground with an outrushing oomph that left her gulping for air. Stupefied. She lay sprawled between sidewalk and street, puffing, blowing. When her breathing settled, “Please, Lord, not the hip.” She moved this way and that. Nothing broken. Wobbly, she got to her feet. Crossed herself, kissed her thumb. Looked down the street, but the brute was gone. Lord, what had just happened? One of Enzo’s goombas? Antony’s messenger? But Antony delivered his own messages, the payoff to see defeat written on the vanquished’s face. She studied the nearby homes’ windows, half expecting to catch Antony with binoculars raised. Nothing. Again she parsed: the false safe house tip-off, the tire, and now this, all seemed to suggest an alliance between the brothers. A quote came into her head: Your worst enemies come disguised as family. Again she looked up at blank windows and shouted, “I won’t be intimidated!” No response. She sighed in resignation, thought: AAA, home, call Zio. She got out her phone, contacts, AAA, finger poised, but the phone in her hand vibrated an incoming text. Again a number she didn’t recognize. She hesitated. Her finger hovered, tapped. Have you seen your mother, baby, standing in the shadow? She stared open-mouthed at the text as the lyric played in her head. She scanned blank windows all around, shouted, “Is there no limit?” As if in reply the phone moved in her hand, as if someone had eyes on her. She gawped at it, on the edge of tears, but then, oh Lord, unable not to, just as she’d never been able to put down a good novel, especially a Dickens, she tapped the text and read: As Dad suspected, you never learned to compete like a man.
Bruce Petronio was awarded a Distinguished Artist Fellowship, New Jersey’s top literary award. His work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Tucson Weekly, Ninth Letter, Hawaii Pacific Review, and other publications. He has been a resident artist at Ucross, Blue Mountain Center, Fundación Valparaiso (Spain) and Hawthornden Castle (Scotland).