John Domini - Earthquake I.D.

Round her arms and waist lay a swill of wine, discolored by chunks of ceiling. Round her head burst a phenomenal outcry, a sighing and bawling that might’ve been scraped from the walls of the gut. A din out of the Old Testament, its first comprehensible word was God . “God, thank God!” Then still more sighing, tumultuous, half-vocalized, and full of joy.

She wondered about the echo in the battered underground space. The nearest support pillar stood at an unnerving tilt, angled her way above one shoulder. But down closer to her stood Jay, the first person she noticed, and he was the one who sang out the most extravagantly, wringing every last remnant of breath from his thanks. He’d been crying but he didn’t wipe his face, his handsome head and face, still worth a look when it was bruised in five places. His hands were occupied with his two oldest, grown boys who were making less noise than he but appeared more out of control. JJ and Chris grimaced and wobbled from foot to foot, leaking tears, figures out of a midsummer night’s drunk. As for the two girls, each stood knotted around a different brother’s leg, mewling wetly and yet helping their father keep the two teens from falling on Mom.

Down at everyone’s feet huddled Paul. The eleven-year-old had his head sunk on his folded arms; he peeked at her over wine-stained shirtsleeves.

Barbara, working against the uproar, tried to concentrate on the boy. Stained sleeves? Also her middle child wasn’t crying Hosanna, but he was crying a bit, and now he yanked up his collar and wiped his nose on it. He might’ve pulled his shirt untucked. The mother of course understood what he’d done, she sat there unwounded, actually refreshed, but she wasn’t sure whether she still knew this child. Paul remained her prettiest; The Moll would envy those eyelashes, and the thick and pet-able curls that covered his preteen head. He must’ve looked like a doll, Mr. Paul, even when he’d had his fingers in Mama’s mouth. But now those fingers dripped doughy clots of plaster, steeped in juice-like blood.

Blood had caked at the corners of Barbara’s mouth as well.

“Must’ve been like this back on Day One,” her husband was saying, or singing. “Owl Girl, I mean, Jesus God ! This is how it must’ve been for the rest of you guys, Day One in this city.”

Sitting up straighter, Barbara got a look at herself Not that she wanted to neglect her eleven-year-old, looking so shaken, so weakened, but she needed to know the damage. Round the neck of her dress lay a thick mud-red, more than wine and revealing her unprotected nipple. A fresh and ragged hole gaped in one lapel, and around it the sticky maroon business lay smeared the thickest. Underneath, under fabric and collarbone, a faint buzz radiated. Pins and needles, more painkiller than pain.

Barbara frowned, the last spooky shudder of her dream draining away, and she looped her bra back where it belonged. She doubted the children noticed, and anyway they’d seen their mother half-undressed plenty of times before. Many the weekend morning she’d come to with a couple-three youngsters giggling across the bed, her in a flimsy nightgown and the Jaybird in boxers and a T. The difference today was, they’d been delivered to Mama’s bedside by the police.

“Paul.” She reached for the boy. “I know what you did. I know what you did, Mother of God. Thank you.”

“My ma-an.” The husband’s voice broke again. “My Mr. Paul. I mean, even this he can fix, even one in the throat .”

Now Dora and Syl fell on her, they could see Mom could take it, though Barbara kept working her way towards Paul. She budged over the wet gravel of the floor, against the girls’ murmurs and nuzzling. Once again, flakes of dried blood drifted down into the twins’ puff-blossom hair, and noticing that, the mother also began to take in the damage done by tonight’s quake. The tremors didn’t appear to have had much impact. At a glance you could see that most of the ceiling and its support remained in place, what with all the light pouring down from the street. Could that be daylight, still? Or was it the combined glare of official vehicles, television crews, and the cars and bikes of gawkers trying to get a look? In any case Barbara figured that the basement had lost only a few more barrels and chunks of ceiling plaster. It didn’t take much of a shock — when a man was a bundle of nerves to begin with — to jog him into firing a gun.

But never mind that guy, the clandestino who’d almost killed her. Never mind, once Barbara got hold of her middle child and pulled him into her lap. As the twins made a place for the scrawny next-oldest, the mother felt her teens hugging her too, kneeling into the muck to press their faces against her sopping back. Still she paid the most attention to Paul, taking fresh note of what a slob he’d become all of a sudden. His shirt appeared to have lost its starch, streaked with mud and wine and worse. With that she was racked by a bout of shivers and cottonmouth, and sank deeper into the fold of her children. Embraced by ten hands, she curled up and closed her eyes.

Eventually Paul’s breathing calmed and dried. “Mom,” he said.

She couldn’t respond. She couldn’t shake off one of the twins probing along her mother’s collarbone. The girl ran a finger over the center of the healing, the target buzz, and Barbara became aware of a roughness, a scar. Only then did she notice that Jay had squatted beside the group. He’d hooked an arm around them all.

“Never again,” he said. “Going off half-crazy, like we did, I mean. Never again for this family.”

She made some room between one of daughters and one of her teens, finding the Jaybird’s face.

“Barb, oh God, I mean, no way, never, forget about it. Next time this family makes some kind of move, we’re whole , we’re together on it. That’s the new basis.”

There might’ve been a reply partway up her throat, a throat full of knuckles, unstable yet from all her children’s touches. Jay tried out a smile and she managed a nod. She managed a neck-stretch, bending first towards one shoulder and then the other, and the group hug began to weigh on Barbara. It began to recall the burdensome climb up from the sotterraneo, and the more suffocating heap of laws and paperwork that she and Jay faced next. She, Jay — and at least one other person in this cellar.

Barb sat up, wriggling off Paul and the girls as she extended her legs. The teenagers backed away without needing to be told.

“Listen, Jaybird.” She had decent tone. “What’s happened to me, I know, I realize — what’s happened to me and you both, here in Naples — it’s really something, but it’s not the whole story. Where’s Fond, I’m saying? Where’s his man?”

“That’s my Mama,” John Junior said.

The older boys came around one shoulder. “Five minutes after a near-death experience,” JJ went on, “and she’s back to being the Good Samaritan.”

“To put it mildly.” Chris pulled off his glasses. “She’s going for, like, the Guinness Book of Samaritans.”

She could play catch-up. “Actually,” Barbara said, “I’m just trying to nudge up above Worst Parent of the New Millennium.”

“That’s my Mom.”

“Mom, I’m telling you. Like, Pop came out of this place screaming for help—”

“All right, I hear you, my guys, my good big guys.” The rancid stuff on her tongue helped keep her sober. “And I’m saying, we’ll talk. Your father’s right. Wherever we go next, first we’ve got to all sit down and talk.”

The teens’ solid front remained unnerving. “What?” JJ asked, straight-faced. “Like back at the museum?”

“Bro. Cut her some slack. The museum, that’s ancient history.”