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Not that I had much of a life, thinking back. Even if I hadn’t been witness to a murder or stolen information from a cop, I still owed the Sons of Celtmoney.
Everything was ruined. And if I somehow did survive this, how could I even think of school as a possible scenario? How could I face Sara?
My heart contracted as I imagined Sara calling my phone and panicking when it went to voicemail over and over again. She’d worry and wonder, probably never getting any answers. Or maybe there’d be news of my suicide.
But eventually, she'd forget. Everyone would forget, just like they had with Mom.
There’s no point, is there?
Maybe if I’d had a family, there would’ve been. I’d have someone to lean on and things wouldn’t have gotten fucked up to this point. I rubbed at my chest, wondering at the numbness there, the absolute lack of will to do anything except lie down and wait for all of this to end.
I didn’t want to do this anymore.
I couldn’t do this anymore.
Curling into a ball against the wall, I let the tears fall without even noticing them. Time seemed to yawn and stretch out,forgetting about me too. And for the first time in a year, I let myself think about my mother.
I wondered how Mickey had known her and tried to dig back in my memories, wondering if I had in fact remembered a cookout or something from his backyard.
But instead, I remembered always bugging my poor mother about this or that. When I was about eight, she had told me that I “had a bad attitude and needed to be more grateful.” She’d been right. I’d just whined about what we didn’t have and why we had to live in our neighborhood, even though I now missed the blue house on Corey Hill in Brookline more than anything.
As I got older, I listened less, argued more – making my mother furious. In high school, I’d flirted with getting in with a bad crowd but art had kept me from falling too far. I’d been desperate to go to art school which my mother, of course, had disagreed with.
But looking at her life and how hard Marina Fioreno had to work, I could understand. She’d just wanted something steady for me, perhaps fearing that I’d fall down the same rumpus path as my musician father. An important difference between him and I, though, was that he had been a conman first and a musician only when it suited him.
It blew my mind that they'd fallen in love, gotten married and had a kid, especially when I thought back to the epic blowouts before he left.
And then it was just the two of us, drifting apart until I came home one day and my mother was dead.
I found her lying in the kitchen, her eyes wide and terrified, tracks of tears on her face and blood pooling on the weird blue tiles that had been our kitchen floor. We’d always made jokes about those tiles, wondering if the former owners had wanted to live in an aquarium or something.
A sob squeezed out of me and my heart burned with agony.
Maybe if I’d been a better daughter, my mother might have found life worth living.
And now, I’d gotten involved in this dirty business, wheeling and dealing, just like my jackass father and his loser ways. If I hadn’t gone to Mickey Weiss’s house, he’d probably be alive and on his way to spend retirement with his parents in Florida.
I’m one of the bad ones that Ma always talked about,I realized and another, louder sob shook out of me.No, I’m worse than that. I’m worse than my father.
Harsh, bone-cracking sobs emanated from a ragged place deep inside of me. I didn’t even know I could make sounds like that. At that moment, I truly believed in hell.
And those people who’d done bad things must have been the ones to figure out hell existed. Because someone as fucked up as me had to go someplace that would mete out some sort eternalpunishment to me for the pain that I’d caused. This world, as punishment enough as it was on its own, did not amount to the comeuppance I deserved.
I’m so sorry, Mom.
Making a fist, I pressed it into my heart and wished that I'd never been born.
“That seems excessive,” someone said, and I stilled then shoved myself upright. Tyler was standing over me, the door to the horrible room open and light flooding in. At that moment, he looked like an avenging angel, backlit by heaven's radiating incandescence. But his eyes burned into mine and scorched me from head to toe. “I haven’t even decided what to do with you yet.”
How had I not heard the door open? Had I spoken out loud? To my mortification, as I tried to slow my sobs, I got the hiccups. Then I went to mop my face and shuddered when I realized my sleeve was crusted over with blood ? Mickey’s blood.
“Finish the kid off quick and painless, Ty,” someone said and Tyler briefly glanced back. An older guy stuck his head into the room and made a face at me. “It won’t hurt.”
Tyler sighed and rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “Yes, thank you, Uncle Nestor.”
“Nest, what the fuck?” I heard Heavy call down the hall. “How’d you get down here again? Come on, it’s time to go back.”
“I gotta make a call first,” Nestor barked, and Tyler rubbed his forehead as Heavy appeared and hustled Nestor off. “Don’t forget to kill her quick, Ty. And tie a bow on the bag. Least you can do for a lady.”
