The lobby of Saint Barnabas smelled exactly the same.
Vinnie had not been inside this building since he had walked out of it on his own legs in January of 1999 with Enzo holding his elbow. He had driven past it twice — once at four AM two nights ago — and each time the smell had been a memory not a smell. Now the smell was real. Pine cleaner over old linoleum, the cafeteria three corridors away frying something in butter, the faint chlorine of a mop bucket no one was using.
He carried a card and a basket. The basket was from the place on Mulberry: pears, a wedge of pecorino in paraffin, a small tin of olives, a bottle of fizzy water Adriana would actually drink. The card was sealed. He had written it himself in his desk that morning. Christopher. Glad you're still here. The Marchetti family is at your back. — V.
He took the elevator to the third floor.
The third floor was where they had moved Christopher after the ICU. The nurse at the station looked up at Vinnie, glanced at the basket, glanced at his face, said Three-twelve, end of the hall, family only without checking if he was family. Vinnie thanked her and went down the hall.
Three-twelve had its door propped open six inches.
Christopher was propped up at maybe forty degrees in the bed. His left side was bandaged through the gown, the bandage thick. An IV line went into his right arm and another tube went down to a bag clipped under the bed and a third line came out of his nose. He was awake. His eyes tracked Vinnie at the door for a second before they decided to be friendly.
The chair on the right side of the bed was Adriana.
She stood up when he came in. She had been there long enough that her makeup wasn't fresh and her hair was held back with a different hair tie than the one she had probably arrived in. The hair tie was the kind of detail Vinnie noticed and put away. She was a beautiful woman in the way that women in this part of New Jersey could be beautiful — full mouth, eyebrows shaped, gold cross on a thin chain at the hollow of her throat. She was twenty-two and looked twenty-five and was tired in a way Vinnie had only ever seen on women in waiting rooms.
"Mr. Marchetti."
"Vinnie."
"Vinnie. I'm — Adriana. Chrissy's, you know. I'm — "
"I know who you are."
She shook his hand. Her grip was small and warm. He set the basket on the rolling table at the foot of the bed.
Christopher's right hand came off the blanket.
Vinnie took it. The grip was weak. The grip was sincere.
"Marchetti."
"Christopher."
"Tony told me."
"Tony talks too much."
"Tony said you put your whole crew on it."
"It wasn't that big a crew."
Christopher's smile broke through the painkillers like a fish breaking the surface of dark water. He laughed and then winced and his free hand went to his side and Adriana made a small sound and put her hand on his shoulder.
"Don't laugh, baby."
"I'm not laughing, Ade."
"You're laughing."
"It hurts good."
He looked at Vinnie. The eyes were a little glazed but the focus was real.
"I won't forget this."
"You don't have to remember anything. You're alive. That's the part."
"No. I'm gonna remember."
"All right."
Adriana, behind him, was looking at Vinnie with both hands folded over the bed rail like she was bracing for an exam. He turned to her.
"You holding up?"
"I'm — yeah. Yeah. I'm okay. His mother's been here every other shift. My mother brought a casserole. Like a hospital wants a casserole. I'm just — I'm just — " She laughed, then put her hand to her mouth and the laugh got smaller. "I'm just glad he's loud again. I knew when he started telling the nurses they were doing it wrong that he was — that he was — "
"Coming back."
"Coming back."
She turned and looked at the windowsill.
The flowers were there.
A modest arrangement — yellow and white, the after-hours guy on Bergen had done his best at three AM — and the small plastic placard said only Get well soon. No name. The card had a piece of cellophane around it. Adriana had untied a corner of the cellophane and tied it again.
"Those came the morning he was outta surgery," she said. "Whoever sent 'em didn't say. I been trying to figure it out. His mother says it's gotta be one of his cousins. But none of his cousins would think to send flowers."
"That's nice that somebody did."
"Yeah." She looked at the arrangement for another second. "Whoever it was — they were nice."
Vinnie did not look at the flowers.
He pulled the second chair, the one against the wall, over to the foot of the bed. Sat down. The system warmed at the edge of his vision and he ignored it. He had not asked it anything. It was offering anyway. He pushed it back to its drawer.
It pinged once more, quieter.
[Subject: La Cerva, A. Vulnerability marker: elevated. Future risk vector — federal interest. Recommended posture: observe.]
He acknowledged it and let it close. The room came back to the room. The IV machine ticked. Christopher's color was actually all right. The bandage was clean.
"So they got him," Christopher said. His voice was quieter now, more itself.
"They got him."
"My uncle didn't tell me where, but the way he wasn't telling me where, I knew."
"You don't need to know where."
"No. I don't."
Adriana sat down. Took Christopher's hand again. He let her have it.
"You know what I was doing," Christopher said. "When they came at me."
"What."
"I was on the phone with the kid at the AT&T store about my service plan. Service plan. My mother told me I had to call them, switch the plan, fix the bill. Christopher, you can't keep paying these fees. So I'm in the parking lot, on the phone with the cell guy, on hold, and I see these two dipshits — and I think, those are the kids who hang out at the strip mall on Route 4, and then they get out of their car, and I think, oh, those are the kids who hang out at the strip mall on Route 4 and they have guns."
Adriana made a sound that was not quite a laugh.
"And then?"
"And then I pulled out my own — and the Sniffles one, he came up close, and I gave it to him, and the other kid started shooting like an idiot from too far away, and I went down. And I'm on the asphalt, and I can hear the cell phone, the kid at AT&T, he's still on the line. Sir? Sir? Are you there? And I'm thinking, yeah, kid, I'm here, I just got shot, change my plan to the one with the unlimited weekends."
He laughed and didn't wince this time. Adriana laughed too — the involuntary one, the one she didn't choose. She covered her mouth.
Vinnie laughed.
Then they were all three quiet for a moment that was not awkward. The IV machine ticked. A nurse went past the open door and didn't come in.
"Marchetti."
"Yeah."
"My uncle wants to come by the lot tomorrow."
"He told me."
"He hasn't been excited about a piece of business in three years. He's been talking about it since this morning. He told my mother. My mother called Ade and asked what color a contractor's shirt was supposed to be."
"What did Ade say."
"Blue," Adriana said. "I told her blue. Was that wrong?"
"Blue is fine, Adriana."
"Okay. Okay good. She's gonna iron him a blue shirt." She smiled the first real smile she had given him since he came in. "She's a piece of work, that woman. But she means well."
Vinnie stood.
"Christopher."
"Yeah."
"You need anything that the basket doesn't have, you have Adriana call Tommy. He'll bring it within the hour."
"You don't gotta do that, Vinnie."
"It's what people do."
Christopher's right hand came up off the blanket again. Vinnie took it.
"Thank you."
"Yeah."
Adriana stood too. He shook her hand a second time.
"It was nice to finally meet you," she said. "Chrissy talks about you. He says you're the smart one. He says you don't say much but when you say something, Tony listens."
"Tony hears everybody."
"He hears you different."
She held his hand a second longer than the handshake required. Then let it go.
He went out the door, down the hall.
At the elevator he pressed the button and waited. The fluorescents in the hall buzzed at a slightly different pitch than the fluorescents in the room had buzzed. The nurse at the station looked up, looked back down. The elevator doors opened.
He stepped in. The doors closed.
The car descended. He watched the floor numbers above the doors.
On the way down, he thought about Adriana with her thumb on the cellophane of the placard he had sent, trying to work out who would think to send a man flowers without a name on it. He thought about her gold cross. He thought about the small involuntary laugh.
He thought about a girl in a wood line.
The girl in the wood line was a thing he had watched on a television in a different life, in a room with a couch he could still remember the corduroy of. The girl had walked toward what she thought was a flight to Canada and instead had been walked toward what Silvio Dante did for a living when it came down to that. There had been pine needles and the careful, gentle word a man used when he was bringing someone somewhere she would not come back from.
That was years from now. That was canon.
That had also been a story he had watched on a couch in 2018, fictional, with subtitles on because his roommate had been on the phone with her mother.
The elevator passed the second floor.
He could try, he thought. He could stay in her life. He could make himself a person who had been kind to her in a hospital. He could ask after her at family events. He could make the thing happen, fifteen months from now or two years from now, that interrupted the path. Or he could leave her alone, which was also a kind of trying — the kind where you stayed out of a future you might break worse by trying to fix.
The system did not weigh in. The system did not have a function for this. The system gave him a number and a flag and told him she was vulnerable to a federal interest and then it shut up and let him be the one to decide what a decent man did with that.
The elevator reached the lobby.
He walked out across the linoleum.
The Cadillac was at the curb, engine running, Tommy at the wheel with the Star-Ledger folded on the dash. Vinnie got in. Closed the door.
"Newark."
"Newark."
"The lot. I want to walk it before tomorrow."
Tommy pulled out into the morning. The hospital fell behind. Vinnie watched the windows of the upper floors slide past in the side mirror and did not pick which window was Christopher's.
"Tommy."
"Yeah."
"Concrete Tuesday?"
"Concrete Tuesday."
"Good."
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