He does not speak.
I turn to look at him.
"We are not going to talk about him in this house. The walls of this house belong to the people he leaves behind to listen."
He looks at me.
He understands.
I step out into the dawn.
He follows me.
21
SEAN
Ihave been watching my older brother's chest for forty minutes.
It rises and falls. It does what a chest does when the man it belongs to is sedated on a hospital bed at Lenox Hill at 6:34 p.m. on a Wednesday. The room is private. The blinds are half down. The light is the particular orange of a Manhattan autumn coming through institutional glass.
Alessandro is alive.
The shoulder reconstruction took four hours. The surgeon came out and said the words surgeons say. Clean repair. Eight to ten weeks. He was lucky. Alessandro was not lucky. Alessandro was the lead element in a breach he did not have to be in and got hit because that is what lead elements do, and he is alive because Matteo dragged him into cover before the second round found him.
Matteo is in the chair on the other side of the bed.
Neither of us has spoken for twenty minutes. There is a coffee on the side table next to him that has gone cold. There is a coffee on the side table next to me that has gone cold.
We are the kind of tired men who become after spending thirty sleepless hours within the same eighteen blocks of Manhattan.
Alessandro makes a small sound in his sleep.
Matteo's head comes up.
We both watch him.
He goes still again.
Matteo looks at me.
"He does that."
"Does what?"
"That noise. In his sleep. His whole life. Since he was a kid. He used to do it across the hall, and Mom would get up to check on him and find him fine."
I do not say anything.
I do not say anything because Matteo has just told me something about my brother that has been mine without my knowing it.
I watch Alessandro's chest rise and fall.
"He thinks nobody knows."
"You know."
"I know."
