Jodi Compton - Hailey's War

I got up, found my balance, and went over to the window. The darkened buildings outside appeared, for a moment, generic, then I saw the familiar shape of the Transamerica Pyramid and knew I was in San Francisco. I walked slowly, barefoot, to the bathroom. There, on the skirt of the double sink, was a basket full of toiletries. The labels bore the name of the Fairmont.

The evidence, at this point, indicated CJ. I must have gotten to a phone and called him, and he’d come up and brought me here. He would have needed a place for us to stay, and no one else I knew had the financial resources that made a suite in a five-star San Francisco hotel the logical choice.

I closed the bathroom door and urinated for what seemed like a small eternity, then got cleaned up as well as I could: washed my face and rubbed toothpaste inside my mouth. Then I walked out to the doorway of the suite’s main room, where the Christmas music was coming from.

I was disappointed not to see CJ, but not very surprised to see the person who was sitting on the couch: Teresa Skouras, reading papers spread out on a low coffee table.

I cleared my throat and she looked up.

“Well,” she said. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, speaking carefully, because my tongue was still a little swollen where I’d bitten it.

“Would you like to sit down?” She gestured to a chair covered in the same material as the couch.

I did so. “How long have I been sleeping?”

“Nearly a day,” she said, “but not straight through. You’re in San Francisco, by the way. We’re at-”

“The Fairmont, I know,” I said. “It’s on the shampoo bottles. I can read.”

She glanced down, perhaps taken aback by my rudeness. I was a little surprised by it myself.

She went on: “I looked in on you several times, checked your hand for signs of infection and changed the dressing. There was no serious inflammation and you were never running a fever, so I let you sleep.”

“Are you a nurse?”

“No, but I did some volunteer medical work overseas, right after college.”

“Well,” I said, “what’s Christmas without a saint?”

I wasn’t sure why I was giving her such a hard time. She had saved my life, after all. I cleared my throat and tried to start over.

“Look,” I said, “I think we should talk. Miss Skouras-”

“Tess,” she corrected me. “And my last name is D’Agostino. Using his name last night was dramatic license.”

“Miss D’Agostino, I don’t know how else to say this: You are the last of the Skourases and I am the only person in the world who knows where the Skouras grandchild is. Are we going to have a problem?”

She smiled a deeply curved smile, like a Valentine heart. “That statement contained a rather large contradiction in logic,” she said. “The ‘last of the Skourases’ part. If there’s a grandchild, then-”

“Don’t play games with me.” I leaned forward. “Are we going to have a problem?”

She sobered. “About the baby…” She picked up her cup of tea. “You allowed yourself to be tortured and maimed for that child. I’m fairly sure you didn’t do that after abandoning him in a cardboard box somewhere.”

“But-”

She interrupted. “You tell me, then. Is he safe?”

“Yes. More than safe. He’ll be loved, and he’ll never want for anything. But for me to get him back would be difficult. Making the arrangement that I did was… fraught, to say the least.”

“That sounds like an interesting story,” she said.

“It is.”

“Maybe you’ll tell me someday.”

“That’s it?” I said, disbelieving. “You’re satisfied with that?”

“I haven’t decided if I want to take over my father’s businesses,” she said. “But I do know I’m not ready to be a mother.”

I sat back, still baffled, but silent. I wasn’t sure why I was even arguing the point.

She interrupted my disordered thoughts. “Are you hungry? I can’t imagine you wouldn’t be.”

When she said it, I realized that I was.

She said, “I’ll get you something to wear.”

“I thought you were going to say ‘something to eat.’”

“We can get room service here,” she said, “but first, I’m very particular about coffee, and I have a favorite place for cappuccino. You’ve said you feel well. You might as well get out and stretch your legs after lying down for such a long time.”

When I didn’t move to get up, Tess said, “You’re from San Francisco; you must know how lovely North Beach is on Christmas Eve.”

“I’m not really from here,” I said, “and no, I haven’t been in North Beach at Christmas.”

“Then you should see it.”

That was how I ended up walking around North Beach on Christmas Eve with a mobster’s daughter. I was wearing lost-and-found motley, things Tess had sweet-talked the hotel staff into surrendering: a big fisherman’s sweater and brown wool trousers and leather ankle boots. Everything was slightly too big for me, but comfortable. Tess’s clothes wouldn’t have fit. I’d realized that she was inches shorter than she’d appeared in the projection booth. I supposed it was both my literal and psychological perspective on the situation that had made her seem taller.

Although it was Christmas Eve, Tess had assured me that many of the shops would be open until six for frantic last-minute purchases, both by traditional nonnas and non-Italian yuppies. And, she said, there would be a café or two open late.

As we walked, me navigating carefully in my slightly-too-large borrowed boots, Tess greeted and was greeted by people on the sidewalk. She seemed to invite the courtesy of passersby. They were clearly looking at her, not at me. She wished them Buon Natale , and something lovely and Italian happened to her voice when she did.

“People like you,” I said.

“You don’t,” she said mildly.

“That’s not exactly true,” I said. “It’s just that-”

I broke off then, because we were standing at the doorway to Café Puccini, and a pair of tourists, chatting in German, held the door for us to go in. We did.

At the counter, Tess ordered herself a cappuccino. I opened my mouth to second it, when she interrupted, speaking directly to the man behind the counter. “She’ll have a steamed milk.”

“A what?” I said.

To me, she said, “You haven’t had anything to eat or drink in over a day. You’re not starting with coffee.”

I thought of objecting but realized I didn’t feel legitimately indignant enough to do so.

She came back with two paper to-go cups, handed me mine, and then added a packet of raw sugar to hers. As she stirred it in, I sampled the milk cautiously.

“Is it okay?” Tess asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never had hot milk before, not even as a child.” I tried it again. “It doesn’t taste anything like cold milk.”

“It’s not supposed to,” she said.

“Listen, Miss D’Agostino-”

“Tess,” she said.

“Tess, what I was saying outside was, the past few months have not paid a good return on faith in my fellow man. And I really don’t know anything about you.”

She sealed a plastic lid onto her cup. “Would you like to?”

As we walked back toward the hotel, she told me her life story.

She was from a small Italian clan of fishermen in Bodega Bay, who later ran a bait-and-tackle shop on the water, with a small deli inside. Soon the deli was the heart of the business, with tourists and working fishermen alike coming in for espresso and cappuccino and her grandmother’s sandwiches and pasta salads. Her mother, Anna, worked at the store in her teenage years.