John Domini - Earthquake I.D.

As she returned to the storage space, Barbara kept her eyes down, avoiding everyone’s look. Back at the Samaritan Center, Paul had seen — how many counselors was it? Four, five? Enough to keep Barbara from seeking more here in Naples, anyway. Here DiPio had been doctor enough for her, and Paul clearly preferred the reading therapy, the tales of witches and beauties and magic boots or hats. But back in Connecticut, he’d had to start on treatment the very day that Barbara had discovered him and Maria Elena tangled together across the Monopoly board.

The naked girl had howled, she’d jabbered in her witless tongue and leapt to her feet. She’d bent over and shown the mother her ass, her branded child’s ass, with today’s fresh markings, the indents of the game’s plastic houses and hotels. Then English, shouting around one scarred buttock: You liar, what you got all this for? Liar! When Barb had looked to Paul, he’d tried, moaning, to roll out of sight. His Reading Rainbow t-shirt had been up around his neck and his blue jeans down around his ankles; his belly, compared to Maria Elena’s, looked pale as the moon — pale as sperm. He couldn’t hide that, the fluid that dribbled across the colors of an imitation Atlantic City. He couldn’t roll over, he was still so erect.

Barb and Jay and their oldest had protected Dora and Sylvia, and JJ and Chris had protected themselves. But that morning Barbara had allowed the middle child to stay home from school, at breakfast he’d been stuttering worse than usual, and over the next couple of hours, between grunting over the garden’s compost heap and scowling over Ann Landers, the mother had fallen again into that bottomless delusion, her own goodness. What you got all this for, if you not good? She’d fallen dizzily, convinced for an hour or so that her own happy family (“good as bread” was how her runaway mother would’ve put it) might from their own safe and comfortable corner exemplify a fix-it for whole riven and lambasted world.

By noon that same day, while Paul was still in the bath, a squad car had swung by the house. Two officers and a woman in plainclothes together managed to round up Maria Elena, after no more than a minute or two of spine-flaying screams. The screams of a baby, really. One last time the little girl tore around the downstairs, quick for her age but no match for the grownups, yanking off her soaked clothing and offering her disfigured crotch.

Nettie and Trudy, over the weeks that followed, had called in every favor they’d been owed. The Sisters felt responsible, to be sure; they had their own consciences to clear. More than that, it became apparent that they genuinely cared about their lay colleague. They didn’t want to lose what Barbara Lulucita contributed to the Center. A sweet discovery, that was: proof that the Sisters hadn’t just lobbed the mother a few softball duties in order to keep those monthly checks rolling in. A silver lining, that was, maybe. Nonetheless Barbara wouldn’t say she ever got over the final glimpses, the final ear-splitting pleas, of her temporary additional child. Nor could she forget how troubled Paul had looked, that first afternoon in Samaritan Center. The first of Trudy’s and Nettie’s good turns had been getting Children’s Services to shuttle their people over to Holy Name. The Sisters arranged for the boy to work in a familiar setting.

As for Jay, he’d contacted the UN earthquake-relief agencies after his and Barb’s initial session. Springtime grew busy. The family threw together the move across the Atlantic. Something like twenty-five days in a row, the mother went to confession, and with that and with Nettie making so much time for her, she could begin to sound like Chris, saying that Maria Elena was better off thanks to Barbara Lulucita. Or she could sound like some honor-haunted Sicilian, insisting without the least chill of hypocrisy that Jay’s mother should never know. Or she could echo Paul’s CS counselor, who proposed that the boy’s trauma might actually result in long-term psychosexual health. Given the right treatment, the counselor suggested, Paul might develop an exceptional comprehension of physical affection. He might grow up into one of those men who was good at intimacy; he might “achieve”—Barb repeated the expression though she never understood it—”all manner of sympathetic anomalies.”

After Maria Elena had been taken away, Barbara had found comfort in the words others gave her. The difference here in Naples, as she allowed Paul the sort of bathroom break he might need for the rest of his life, was that the mother had worked out something of her own to say. She’d forged her own absolution.

Back in the closet, Barbara shut the door. The chair’s plastic seat was as warm as the last time. “Your father and I,” she began, “you guys must’ve noticed.”

She looked at the shelves, the scraps of homes destroyed a thousand years ago.

“Pop’s told me all about it,” John Junior said.

Barb figured that if she lost control before Paul returned, if she told the others everything, maybe that would be for the best. Maybe Paul should hear it one on one.

“Mom,” her oldest went on, “he says you’ve been way hard to live with. After Maria Elena, what choice did he have except, I mean, something totally drastic?”

“Aw,” Chris said. “He talks to me too, JJ. I’ve heard all this stuff. And Pop also says, like, two-way street.”

‘Yeah, but he says Mom won’t say that. Whatever Mom wants, she gets, but she’ll never admit it.”

“He says he isn’t perfect either. He says that’s why he was at Castel dell’Ovo, because he’d sinned.”

“Guys,” Dora piped up, “what are you talking about?”

“We’re talking,” Barbara said, “about me and your father. About how things have been going between us.”

Say it, Owl Girl. See Naples and die.

“Till now,” she said, “I’ve been holding off because, because—”

The closet door slammed open. The shelves rattled, a terrible racket, and there stood Kahlberg with his gun out. “The girl,” he said. “She’s got Paul.”

The weapon was in one hand and from the other dangled some kind of clothing, hard to see with the way he was blocking the gallery light. He gestured with the gun.

“The girl” Silky repeated. “The goddamn gypsy. She went after Paul and the guide and now Umberto’s down and we don’t know where she took the boy.”

Barb’s two oldest were off the trunk already, sneakers squeaking. The mother’s thinking split in wild directions, confession and memory and Mafia movies. She asked, “He’s — Umberto, he’s down?”

Silky frowned and hoisted the other hand, which turned out to hold a gray blazer. “Got him right upside the head.” He rotated the jacket to reveal, sketched along one lapel, a slant hieroglyph of blood.

With the coat, the gun, and the carrying case still slung across his chest, the officer blocked Chris and John Junior from getting past. “I tried to tell y’all,” he said. “Tried to warn you about that girl.”

JJ stepped closer, inside the man’s gun-hand. “Yeah well, she says you’re crooked. Says you’ve been making deals.”

Across the liaison’s expression flickered something close to the honest contempt that Barbara had glimpsed earlier.

“My girl says she’s going to catch you any day now. You’re going to be making some crooked deal and she’ll nail you.”

“Big shooter,” Kahlberg said, “right now all I know is, I’ve got your brother missing and a man down.”

Yet if Silky wasn’t about making deals, why did the next ten minutes or so — it couldn’t have gone on long, before the gunshots — feel to Barbara like nothing but arrangiarsi? She seemed to spend the entire time striking interior deals, each bargain more one-sided than the last. First she jumped to her feet beside her remaining boys. Do something, blared her nervous system, do something: a need so fierce it might’ve been what she’d wanted all along. She leapt up ready to knock over the Farnese Bull. Yet immediately she had to settle for less. The liaison officer kept his iron between them and the rest of the museum. He declared that there was no way in hell that he could allow a bunch of overexcited civilians to run around loose after an armed kidnapping.