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Nine
No there’s none, there’s none, O no there’s none,
Nor can you long be, what you now are, called fair,
Do what you may do, what, do what you may,
And wisdom is early to despair:
—Gerard Manley Hopkins,
from “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo”
The air was ripe with memory as Lorenzo strolled with Sabina through the park. Their woven fingers called to mind another day much like this one, a little over five years ago. It was her sixteenth birthday, and he had taken her for a walk during an unseasonably warm May afternoon. It was the first time he had mustered up the courage to reach for her hand, and when she gripped his in return, giddiness had all but lifted him off the ground.
Maybe, had he done it more often over the years—had he not been so afraid of how his body responded to the touch of her—time would have tempered that reaction. But he’d been so careful, measuring out each touch, weighing the risk of each embrace. Wisdom? Failure? Some odd mix of the two? Regardless, the result was the same.
Heat still filled him at having her fingers in his. And his heart still warmed when she tilted a smile his way. His pulse still tripped when they claimed a bench and took the first bites of their pizza, and she leaned into his side.
At some point since their engagement, she’d given up such gestures of affection. Only now, when she dared to lean into him again—when there was so much between them she was trying to lean across—did he realize it. Only now did he see how much she needed that physical comfort. How much he did too.
Once the pizza was gone, they took to the familiar path again. It wound out before them, the sky blue overhead, pink and purple toward the horizon. Too many people walked with them—and not just the neighbors strolling through the park, the parents chasing their children, the little ones squealing and laughing. No, they walked with the invisible specters of their parents, and of Roman O’Reilly. But most of all, they walked with the ghosts of the Lorenzo and Sabina of yesteryear, who had forgotten how to laugh together, who had let the world steal their joy.
“That’s a serious face.”
Lorenzo grinned to shake himself from his pensive mood. “I was just remembering your sixteenth birthday. We came here for a walk, and you let me hold your hand.”
Sabina squeezed his fingers. “I remember. I thought you were just trying to make me feel better after Tony insulted my new dress.”
“Oh, you give me way too much credit. My motives were purely selfish.” He glanced down at her perfect face. He knew it so well, had studied it so long, but still she left him in awe. It wasn’t just the features she’d inherited from her mother, the dark eyes that went on forever, the rosebud shape of her lips. It was the fact that those deep eyes were always looking for how to help someone else. Those lips were always encouraging someone. It was the fact that she loved her mother’s face, called her so beautiful, knew she resembled her but never seemed to realize it made her beautiful too. She took care of her appearance not for herself, but to please her family. Always, always that was what drove her. Family. Little G and Serafina—God rest her soul. Mama Rosa and Manny. She loved fully and deeply, from the inside out.
How could he not want to be one of the people she loved? To be the one that she loved?
She smiled up at him now, making him realize how little she’d done so in recent years. How had he not noticed? “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “It still made me feel better. You always had that effect on me. And it didn’t hurt that Bianca Esposito, who had just moved to the neighborhood and thought she was the prettiest thing in the world, saw me strolling along with a college man.”
Chuckling, Lorenzo tried momentarily to put a face to the name but gave it up. “I don’t remember her. So she obviously wasn’t as pretty as you.” No one ever was.
“Sweet and blind, Enzo. You never noticed the other pretty girls.”
“What was to notice? None of them had anything on you.” They were quickly closing in on their usual exit from the park, so he slowed them down just a touch. He looked around, just because it was so true: no one else was as beautiful as Sabina. Not the trio of girls under the tree, not the mother pushing a pram, not the graceful woman there by the statue of Columbus.
Though his gaze moved on, it flew back to the statue. The woman under it. The two muscle-bound men lingering not far behind her. She was familiar. So were they.
Client? No. The vague image he had of her didn’t involve either a courtroom or a conference room. What then?
“Bona sira,” Sabina called, waving at the woman.
He relaxed, though not entirely, given the goons who came to attention at her greeting. They moved a few inches closer to the woman. “You know her?”
The woman’s face lit up, and she lifted a hand too. “Good evening, Sabina!” Her voice, unlike most of the neighbors of her age, bore no trace at all of an Italian accent. For that matter, she didn’t look particularly Italian—not that all of Little Italy really was Italian, of course…just most of it.
Sabina gave his fingers a squeeze. “Only to say hello. I see her around the park, occasionally at church—not at Sunday mass, that I recall, but if I go with Mama to light a candle or for daily mass, sometimes she’s there. Why?”
“Just trying to figure out why she looked familiar—but that’s probably it.”
It wasn’t though. He tried to catalogue her features without staring—she was probably in her forties, had auburn hair with a single streak of gray at the right temple, wore nice clothes, jewels around her neck.
He looked her way again—he shouldn’t have. The two goons took a menacing step toward them, one of them putting a hand on his hip.
