Earthquake I.D. (29 page)

First thing, back from the meeting Tuesday at two, she and Jay went to the kids.

But once she'd handed out their passports, and once she'd let them see her resting her hand on her husband's knee, how much more could Barbara reveal? What'd happened down in the Museo Nazionale, the last time she'd try to pull out her internal whipsaw? Anyway, the children had already arrived at the same conclusion as Mom and Pop and Attaché Roebuck. They wanted to stay. JJ and Chris were the first to say so, making arguments the parents had heard before. The oldest boy however kept glancing towards the balcony, where his grandmother was waiting, at Jay's request. Aurora had shut the double-glass door, something else Jay had asked for, and settled into a lounge chair wearing a two-piece with a knotted bra. One look at that and the daughter-in-law understood what her children must've imagined about staying on in Naples. The kids saw this city as Adventureland and MTV, their own version of the Italian Romance. Barb understood, and her anger started banging around her ribcage—but what could she say to her nearly-grown boy? What warning could she give any of these kids about the yearnings of the flesh and their more psychotic manifestations, especially around this corner of the urban world? After all, Barbara herself had just given in to romance. Just like that, she was playing the sappiest makeup ballad in the jukebox.

Eventually JJ and Chris finished their say. They looked to Dora and Syl, and the girls looked to Paul. The older boys too, after a moment: it was all on Paul.

But the middle child agreed. He might've been the one who'd actually gotten burnt, while the others were still poking a finger or two into the fire, but he preferred to stay in Naples. Though the way he put it did sound awfully spooky: “There's, there's so m-much g-g-going on, we, we couldn't get o-out even if we w-w-wanted to.”

Jay and Barbara also sat down with the doctor, that first afternoon, but the report on their boy with the healing hands was the same as ever. No abnormalities, no signs of serious dissociation, nothing to indicate he wouldn't benefit from the sort of everyday interaction he seemed to be asking for. The parents found it almost a relief to turn to their new security team, a squad of Italian
carabinieri
and Interpol detectives. The Jaybird's primary concern was that these four men and one woman were all getting a bump in salary for the assignment. “We want guys're on the ball,” he said. “None of those farm-boys Silky used.” Then there was Barbara's Padre Superiore. The evening after the meeting at the Consulate, Cesare surprised them with a house call. Aurora, wouldn't you know it, was the one who met the priest at the door, Aurora in full evening makeup and Balinese head-scarf. Yet in the days that followed, too, the old Jesuit Dominican would work his slow and angular way down the Vomero staircases. During two of the priest's visits, Jay made confession, in a corner of the kitchen. The husband urged Barbara, as well, to unburden herself to Cesare.

“Get it all out,” the husband said. “Get to where you can start over.”

To hear the Jaybird talk, once he and his Owl Girl finished their talk among the tethered fishing boats on the waterfront, a quiet talk but to the point, their marital woes were history. Ancient history—that very evening he started referring to their trouble as “the thing.” No more than that, and the wife agreed. She did agree. Still Barbara found it necessary to pray, daily, intensely, in the privacy of the utilities closet. She prayed that some middle-aged Mother, some Saint of a certain age, might intercede with her God in order to let her know just what the thing had been about. She begged that she might be shown how keep this thing from afflicting her ever again. Over the rosary she at least enjoyed the blood-rush to an alternative muscle-system, alternative and invisible, and in time she felt strong enough to send another e-mail to Nettie. The following morning, dinnertime in Bridgeport, the two women managed a real-time cyber-chat. Barbara got nothing new out of the exchange, really. Her Sam Center mentor reiterated that it would be best for Paul to stay put while he worked through
this developmental stage
, and she assured the mother that mood swings in the parents were only to be expected.
You might look at the work on marital disorders
, she advised,
in Rudolph or Bloom
.

Nothing new, from her bookworm friend, nothing Barbara felt she should copy to her personal files. Nonetheless the electronic conversation left her feeling better. She made sure to delete the chat (Aurora knew how to check the browser History, of course), but she felt bucked up even by Nettie's mystical sign-off:

Remember
, she wrote,
it's always yourself you're meeting out there, day after day. We're always meeting ourselves
.

The woman sounded a bit like Paul, that time. But these days Barbara was seeing messages a lot more troublesome. There was the pseudo-Cyrillic on the website, Number One, and then there was the conversation she overheard outside the door to the girls', while she stood holding the sheets for the room's new, third bed.

“Do we still think,” Dora was asking, “Mama and Papa are going to divorce?”

Now what would Nettie say about a mother standing breathless outside her children's door?

“I thought we said we don't, any more,” Sylvia said. “No, I want the bird.”

“I know what we said. Come on, you know it's not a bird.”

“Our family is very good. Like, when Paul does a miracle, that shows Jesus is with the family. It reveals the Word of Jesus.”

“Maybe.” After a moment, Dora sighed.

“Dor-ra. I know it's not a bird. I know we said it's a singing Siren.”

The other remained quiet so long, Barbara gathered herself to walk in. Then: “That was pretty weird, in the museum.”

“Yeah.” The mother pictured Sylvia frowning, trying out a new complexity. “But, since because Paul wasn't hurt, that just shows like, Jesus is still there—”

“I wasn't talking about Paul. What happened with Paul was an adventure, like in the movies. What I was talking about was Mom.”

“Oh, Mom. You mean when she took us in the room.”

“Now that was weird.”

“That was very weird. It was like hide and seek.”

“It was hide and seek and telling stories, but they didn't go anywhere.”

There was a rap of plastic on linoleum. “Paul saved us. He got us out of there.”

“Right, he did but then since—that means, the people he's saving, it's us. We used to think Mama and Papa were getting a divorce.”

“Look. It was weird, but it wasn't that weird.”

Barbara cleared her throat, shuffled her slippers, oldest tricks in the book. She walked in and at once began tucking both the linens and “the three girls” back into their more crowded arrangement. A little high-energy group activity, as they called it around the Connecticut Children's Services. Anyway, even CCS couldn't say for certain whether it was best if Mama talked with the girls about what she'd heard. The guidelines for good parenting were full of that word “boundaries.” Barbara wound up letting Dora and Syl work out their own solutions, in this case. Herself, she heard something else, in the conversation. She realized that if the twins had been talking about divorce, they would've been overheard. Even Kahlberg's drivers had spoken enough English to understand that. Then there'd been the boys, a lot louder than the girls.

Talk in the streets. That night, in bed, Barbara shared her conclusions with the Jaybird, a born-again wife whispering with her recuperating husband.
I
‘
m saying, they got it off the kid-wide-web
.

Such was the soundtrack by which Barbara pledged allegiance to her renewed commitment: whispers in bed, the putt-putt of a keyboard, and rosaries beside the washer and dryer. She couldn't speak of the thing more openly—not with the other woman in the house. Yet the very fact that she and Aurora never exchanged a significant word seemed to make the gaudy seventy-something all the more haunting. Aurora, for instance, turned out to have made it possible for John Junior to duck out of the apartment, Tuesday afternoon while the parents had been down on the Bayfront.

On the spur of the moment, that afternoon, the oldest and second-oldest had taken a jaunt over to Castel Sant'Elmo. Elmo—an Italian corruption of Erasmus, the patron saint of sailors, in honor of whom seafarers had come up with the expression “St. Elmo's fire.” The stuff wasn't really fire, rather a kind of static electricity, just as Erasmus wasn't truly Elmo, or the saint of fire. But the counterfeit had stuck. If an American thought of St. Elmo, he thought of fire, because of
Moby Dick
or a dumb movie. Or perhaps the American was a bookish teenager fascinated by invisible forces like an electro-magnetic pulse. Chris would make the connection, yes. He'd know where to find the castle, too. Sant'Elmo was a brooding heap almost as old as dell'Ovo and the same dirt-yellow. It stood on the heights of the Lulucitas' neighborhood, ten minutes' walk from the apartment.

Nonetheless JJ would never have gotten to the castle, while the parents were out of the house, if his grandmother hadn't gone to bat for him. Aurora had accompanied the boy down to the piazza, and she'd made sure to keep the policemen she'd spoken with out where the TV cameras could get a clean shot.

My good-looking young grandson here
, she'd told the officer in charge,
is withering away, positively withering away, from sitting around the house all day
.

JJ used the same argument on Barb: Mom, I'm sick of this. When she pressed him, the boy upped the stakes. “You're telling me I have to stay home all day, every day?
Forget
about it. Book me a flight to La Guardia.”

John Junior defended Aurora too, saying she'd made him laugh.
Think of the benefit to your womenfolk
, the grandmother had told the cops.
The girls in this city have been pining away, absolutely pining away, for lack of their eye-candy
.

On top of that, JJ pointed out, Aurora had known better than to bring Paul downstairs. She'd understood that Paul and the girls had to stay in the apartment, and she'd made sure that the two older boys had a plainclothesman bodyguard, too, while they enjoyed a bit of sulfur-dusted air and sun. As for Sant'Elmo, JJ claimed, it was handy. “I mean, Mom, do you think you could remember we're the same as anybody else? We're just normal young Americans.” If you asked him, the folks around the Vomero were doing a better job of that than his own mother. During his time outside, John Junior got the distinct impression that the local miracle-frenzy had started to fade. The believers in the streets had been content with a wave or a nod, and none of the media had bothered to follow the brothers out of the piazza. JJ could swear he'd heard a newsstand owner shout
lascia li stare
, leave them alone.

Really, the boys' little “prison-break” was nothing that Mom should worry about. “We had a good time, over there. Sant'Elmo, it's got all these neat places to hide.”

The mother's voice tightened, though with the grandmother in the apartment she couldn't shout. Had JJ forgotten how, just the day before…?

The boy rolled his eyes. “Nobody's gunning for
us
, Mom. That was all about Our Man in NATO.”

Barbara's husband had given her the same assurances, or reassurances, during their walk along the waterfront. Of course the couple had their protection inching along the boulevard behind them, a Consular sedan, bulletproof. Roebuck had arranged the car, the driver, and the armed guard. But Barbara and Jay got the time alone that the husband had announced they “could use,” following “a meeting like this, a roller coaster.” The two of them strolled close by the small boats tethered to the rocks, wooden craft many of them, hand-painted. With the rumble of the other traffic, with the breeze and the sea, husband and wife could speak from the heart. The Jaybird had pointed out that up at the Refugee Center, during the near-month since his near-kidnap, the American Boss had often spent as much as an hour out of sight of his flak-jacketed protectors. If Silky's crooks had wanted a piece of him, they'd had plenty of opportunity.

Barbara had nodded but frowned. Even as she and her husband talked, she'd noticed a refugee African on their tail. When they'd gone out along the breakwater, she'd called Jay's attention to the man, an obvious
clandestino
. The poor guy hung back behind the Consulate's Audi, in a torn t-shirt bearing a broken pillar.

The Jaybird had rolled his eyes—the expression that John Junior would imitate a few hours later. He'd asked if his Owl Girl was frightened of beggars all of a sudden. Frightened of the homeless, in this city? The husband could understand she'd been shaken up; her change of heart made everything more vulnerable, more precious.

Barbara had cut the man off, letting him know what she'd seen on the website.

Jay had taken the news calmly, looking over their skinny tag-along. The African stared back over their freshly-polished ride, no doubt trying to assess whether they might give him a Euro. Barb at first hadn't felt her husband's touch at her hip.

Today, he'd told her, we start over. It's all going to be on another basis. No lying and no doubletalk.

They confronted their two oldest that evening, as soon as the boys revealed how they'd gone waltzing off to Sant'Elmo. Once more the parents asked the grandmother to step out onto the balcony, and Barbara allowed herself to bark a bit. Yet all she and Jay got for their efforts was another wild pixel chase through the Lulucita pages on the ‘net. She wound up reading not only the saint-of-fire business again, but also a number of messages she hadn't picked up before. JJ and Chris knew where all the secrets were, a link that played a song about the Camorra, and another that called up a movie clip, or was it two clips? One moment you saw Jack Lemmon and Sophia Loren, the next Lemmon and Mastroanni. The two teenagers knew about them all, and they argued that every piece of input, in every format, was intended as a message for the family. Every word was meant for Jay and Barb and the kids. Whenever the people who'd followed Paul's story got together to chat, not a line of agate type went by without some private high sign to the Lulucitas, a compliment or a warning or a nudge. Every posting was intended to close the gap between the person at the keyboard and the American
santa famiglia
, a wireless laying-on of hands.