John Domini - Earthquake I.D.

Both men needed a long moment, enough time for Barbara to notice a bit of a commotion farther off A shout or two perhaps. Then, Jay:

“The lying, Father. The lying to Barb, it hurts me. It’s — I have sinned, Father. Thanks for meeting me like this, too. I know what it’s like to have to make arrangements on the fly, so thanks, really. And bless me, for I have sinned. But then there’s Barbara, Cesare. Her with her I-want-a-divorce, but nothing happens. I mean, waiting around for my crazy Mom? Plus, the sex? A lot of sex, you ask me. Multiple orgasms — Father, I have to tell somebody.

“Okay, maybe it’s all part of the confusion. Part of the pain, okay. But. She keeps going back to you, too, Cesare. There’s that too. I mean, with whom am I speaking, when it comes to my Barbara? What’s she want?”

Barb had come her closest yet to the stony closet. She was squaring herself away, preparing to step in and speak up. She and Jay needed to talk.

“Does she really want,” Jay repeated, “to grow old alone?”

Barb could see that the Jaybird had started massaging his face again. She thought that she heard him fighting tears, choking, but now there was new noise in the halls. A fresh commotion, substantial, from a group of some size.

“Bad enough,” Jay was saying, “how lonely I am already.”

A group was coming this way, uphill, with scraping footfalls and sharp but indistinct jabber. They moved in bursts, now striding along swiftly and now slowing down. Barbara backed away from her unsuspecting husband. She had the thought that she didn’t want to be spotted, and she fretted about the camera over her head. A foolish thought — wasn’t she planning to tell Jay exactly what she’d heard? Wasn’t she going to throw it in Kahlberg’s face too?

Her husband’s voice had regained its strength. “What is that?” he was asking. “That out in the hall, you hear it?”

The cubicle’s door, sluggish with age, creaked wide. Jay emerged looking down-ramp, his back to Barbara. When the oncoming crowd appeared at the bottom of the hallway, at first she didn’t see them. Instead she studied her husband’s head and shoulders, his hair improbably full despite the bald spot.

“Pop?” asked John Junior. “What are you doing here?”

“Jay?” asked Silky Kahlberg. “Jay, my man? This is a surprise.”

The voices came from opposite ends of the crowd. The liaison officer stood at the front, the farthest uphill, while Barbara’s oldest was among those at the rear, almost out of sight down around the corridor’s corner. The gang presented an unlikely mix, altogether. The mother needed a few moments to sort everyone out, kids and guards and Silky and, about the middle of the group, gypsy Romy in full makeup. The girl in fact looked better than the Lieutenant Major. Kahlberg’s blazer hung lopsided, revealing a corner of his holster strap, and a swatch of long hair was sweat-stuck across his forehead. Barb enjoyed a surge of triumph: gotcha. She’d caught the officer with his silk down. But this exhilaration dwindled quickly when she got her first decent look at John Junior. After all, her seventeen-year-old could move faster than anyone in the crowd, and yet he was the last up the hallway. There had to be a reason — like his younger brother Paul, looking drained, hanging by his spread arms between JJ and Chris. The two older brothers weren’t quite carrying Paul, he still had his feet on the ground, but Barbara’s middle child was clearly bushed. He had trouble keeping his head up, now hiding and now revealing his neatly done collar button.

Beside the boys stood a group arranged in the same fashion, with the two on the outside propping up the one in the center. These were two policemen flanking a handsome African. The black wore serious shackles, wrist to waist to leg. Nevertheless he showed Barbara a smile unlike any she’d seen before, a glowing surprise of a reminder, in pink and gold and weathered ivory, that she had come to this city and castle knowing next to nothing about what she was getting into. Even his cheeks seemed to glow, and one of these was scarred with a pair of crescent moons.

“What is this?” asked Jay. “What are you guys doing here?”

Chris and JJ shared a look, across their sagging brother. It was Dora and Syl who said it first.

The days that followed, the days and the nights, had Barbara thinking often of her childhood visits to Manhattan. Bedtime had felt different over at her mother’s cousins’ place off Lafayette. That branch of the family lived with another world of night noise. Little Barba-bella had come across the East River before her mother ran away, but it was after the disappearance that Barb had spent the nights that now came back to her with the greatest intensity. On those nights she’d been hustled over to the old Little Italy because there’d been word of a lead, a possibility. And in the second-story front space of the cousins’ brownstone, formerly her Mama’s bedroom, the traffic spoke to the visiting girl. Barbara would notice the heart-of-the-borough rumble when she was left alone to slip into her nightshirt, that tender cotton, and her eyes would follow the pattern of the headlights coming through the blinds, a yellow surf across ceiling and wall. She’d pick up the noise in the morning too, before her cousin poked her head into the room and began to wheedle, like the soothing fussbudget she was, about getting dressed for Sunday Mass. During the night, in the streets towards Roosevelt Park, the machinery sometimes offered a bit that she could identify. There might be a horn going off, a truck gearing up, or the squawk and clomp of a dented door. But Barba-bella could hear that sort of thing over in Carroll Gardens. Around her mother’s former home, rather, the night growled through risings and fallings that the daughter couldn’t understand, and she loved the sound precisely for that, because she could never get her mind around it all, because it contained the ignition, transmission, and brake of too, too many others to know. In that motor noise beyond the narrow brick-framed windows, there resided possibilities so wild that her preteen self could no more limit them to particular car parts than she could tuck her fertile visitor’s dreams into neat stories over the morning orange juice. Rather the whole overnight sequence, the horsepower coil that wheeled her into sleep and the sapphire glints left behind when she woke — all this she could only give the shape of hope itself. In the city she heard so much energy at work, at large, that she had to believe some part of it would complete its trek. Some part of that mumbling runaround always made it the entire long way out wherever it had to go and then back again; it returned to the girl, to the pillow-space beside her, chuckling in an accent and smelling faintly of cheese and olives.

The Manhattan traffic had done more for her than any other night-time soundtrack, including that of the good Bridgeport neighborhood where she’d lived as a five-star Mom. She had to admit, too, that the intervening years had hardly felt devoid of happiness. She’d even taken the same fractious reassurance in the stories at the Samaritan Center, the uproar of guilts and resentments that always somewhere revealed, improbably, and if only they could see it, fulfillment for the people involved. Also there were evenings when Barbara found the same comfort in Naples. The Vomero wasn’t so bourgeois that you didn’t get people driving at night. Even after the uproar at Castel dell’Ovo, and even with the chatter of the troops beneath her balcony, she had sleepy moments carried along within the infinite circumnavigations of a vast motor-driven flock, the same as had cradled her ear and spirit years ago in Lower Manhattan. Buildings and people. Downtown palaver without end, forever making the rounds.