Tipsy now, Marie noted a perilous loosening of her tongue. “It wasn’t Brown I really wanted,” she said.
“Who, then?”
“It was your dad.”
“Come on!” Sicily was clearly as puzzled as she was beguiled. “You had, like, what, five dates? Four? Who falls in love in a month? It’s impossible, except maybe for Kit.”
“It’s not impossible,” Marie said, a bit blearily, standing up as the doorbell buzzed. “I was crazy about him.”
“Really?”
“No fooling,” said Marie, and then spoke into the intercom. “Who is it, Angel?”
“Mister LaVoy, to see Sicily.”
“He works until three,” Sicily said as Marie pressed the button. “It’s one o’clock. That’s too weird.”
“He got out early,” Marie said. “Angel knows Joey. He isn’t going to send up the Boston Strangler dressed as a Chicago fireman.”
“That’s what the Strangler counted on,” Sicily said, and they both turned their eyes to the knock at Sicily’s entrance—and it
was
weird, Marie thought, too soft, as if made by a handful of wet rags rather than a handful of knuckles.
“That’s freaky,” Sicily said.
Marie, only five feet one, stood on her toes to peer out of the security portal. It wasn’t Joey, but she recognized the kid. Motioning to Sicily, Marie moved aside. It was Joey’s younger brother, whom Marie had met maybe twice. His head bowed, Paulie stood holding a newsboy’s cap in his gloved hands, his unzipped parka having slipped from his shoulders to the floor. Sicily stepped back, confused, pulling her shirt away from her stomach in a gesture Marie recognized as nerves. Sicily’s throat and chest didn’t sweat very much—too much skin had been removed for there to be a real pore structure—but when she was frightened, as she was now, sweat burst from her scalp and her stomach: Within seconds, a wet mark appeared on Sicily’s silk undershirt.
“Joey’s hurt,” Sicily said. Marie thought exactly the same thing. Some lazy slate-eyed deity had heard Sicily disavow her angel mother for the sake of her crazy aunt and, with nothing better to do, decided to prove that Sicily was indeed her mother’s child, replete with her mother’s destiny. “It has to be Joey. I know it. Don’t answer the door.”
“Nonsense,” Marie tutted, and pulled the door open.
Paul shuffled back across the hall to the elevator doors, his pallor greased with something else, perspiration like a shining scum despite the cold. He was crying. Voltage sped along Marie’s arms.
“Do you know already?” Paulie asked.
“Know what?” Marie said.
“Where is Joey?” said Sicily.
Paul drooped, bending forward, like a man on skis. Crossing the hall in one step, Marie reached out and pulled him toward her. “Look at me,” she said, holding his shirtfront in one small fist. “Do we know about what?”
“Neal is in jail,” Paul said.
“Neal is in jail? Why?” Marie said. “Is Joey okay?”
“For DUI.”
“Well, that’s not good,” Marie began, loosening her hand as the electrical impulses retreated, muscle upon muscle surrendering. “Joey’s fine, though. Right?”
“And he told them!” Paulie went on. “Neal always drinks like a crazy man from that day to New Year’s Eve, then he quits. So why was he drunk last night? I called Joe and I was, like, it’s two weeks since New Year’s! He’s been picked up before, and why does he tell them now? And Joe’s like, because of me getting married. It’s the guilt. I guess he just felt sorry for Joe. And you too.”
“Sorry for Sicily?” Marie asked. A realization was pounding at the back of her skull, where a headache set its pike.
Angel Flores, the doorman, appeared behind Paul at the open door, huge and somber in his burgundy livery. “I think I may have made a mistake, Miss Caruso. Can I help?”
Marie noticed now that, although there was a clear resemblance, Paulie wasn’t handsome, as Joey was, but plain, as though made from scraps left over after his brother. Half the length of a thumbnail added on to Joey LaVoy’s delicate nose made Paulie’s face ferrety. The cleft in Paulie’s chin was a gash that made him look deficient, where Joey’s was distinguished, a hint of a parenthesis, the only offbeat note in a patrician face. It was as though the genetic code had been scrambled, like a handful of Scrabble tiles.
“Mr. LaVoy said there had been a family tragedy,” Angel said. “I should have been specific. I didn’t think that would be wise on the intercom.”
“We’re okay,” Marie said. “It’s okay to go, Angel.”
“Frank is downstairs now. I’ll just wait,” Angel said softly.
Paul began to wipe his face, leaving a snail trail of snot across the suede cap in his hand. “Neal is friends with those police in Parkside. Half those guys he went to school with. Denny Schuman and Ryan Pray. Even that girl we all thought was a dyke, Clarice Dooley? Even some of the old guys his father played softball with.”
“I don’t get it,” Sicily said. “Make sense. What’s Neal got to do with Clarice Dooley?”
Marie did know Neal. You rarely saw Joey without the big thick guy who seemed to have no more brains than he absolutely needed, who sported a perpetually goofy smile and a cheesy sprayed tan. Neal worked with his dad, finding underbooked charters for small business groups. He was successful, but you knew he’d never do a thing on his own. Once again, Marie’s forearms began to prickle.
Something is coming
, she thought. Paulie was not making sense.
He told them. He told them
. He told them what?
“I said not to do it,” Paul pleaded.
“You told Neal not to get drunk,” said Marie.
“No! Oh, God, God and Christ. I said,
Neal, don’t do that
. I was just a kid too and I didn’t know from anything, but I couldn’t talk him out of it, and, to tell you the truth, I didn’t think there would be nothing but a little smoke. Neal was twelve. I was eleven years old. Joe was thirteen. Neal was like, we can get Christmas break extended to a month. Smoke damage. That’s what he said. Smoke damage. It was this little candle like my mother would light for her miscarriages. One candle. He snuck it off the shelf in back, where they sold them for a buck to put up in that stand by the altar.” The voltage came in waves now, up over Marie’s shoulders to her neck. She hauled Sicily back into the apartment and plumped down with her onto the couch. Sicily’s whole body was shivering. “Last night Neal was just driving too
slow
, not too fast. This has happened before. They let him sleep it off, the cops. But this morning he wakes up and goes,
I started the fire—
” Paul snapped his fingers. “It was like his brain just shut down. Boom! He confesses! Now!” Paul’s eyes widened.
Go figure
, he seemed to be saying.
Marie was holding Sicily’s wrist, stroking her hand, when Sicily sprang up like a dog at the end of a chain, nearly jerking Marie’s arm out of the socket. Sicily leapt at Paulie, raking her nails along his cheeks until beads of blood burst from the marks. “No!” Marie cried. Angel had to help force Sicily back into her apartment, with Marie on the other side, holding Sicily as she had when Sicily fought her restraints to scratch at her wounds after a surgery, with a traumatic might. Angel boxed for exercise at Jim’s Gym, where Marie also worked out, and his young face reddened with the effort. Marie would have bruises in the morning. Sicily’s fingers were individual, powerful creatures, clamping and pinching, twisting away. At last, Sicily fought only in bursts and finally not at all. She went limp, then sat up and gagged, helplessly spitting into her hands—nothing more than a bit of rice and bread, but Angel looked away. Marie ran for paper toweling.
“Breathe out,” Marie said. Sicily tried but kept gulping the air thirstily and hyperventilating.
Good grief
, Marie thought.
Let’s not have a blackout too
. “Sicily, look right at me.” Sicily did, her gray eyes nearly metallic. “Sicily, breathe out. Angel, there are lunch bags in that side of the pantry. Little brown bags …” As though he’d lived there with Sicily, Angel was back in two steps, shaking a brown bag out like a leaf.
How few people really listen
, Marie thought, trying to form the open end of the bag to accommodate Sicily’s difficult mouth. Marie had high-strung friends, prone to designer drugs. She’d seen plenty of panic attacks and, on the night Jamie died, she’d had one herself, while waiting in the airport with Brown Stuart. The CO
2
never failed—that and the concentration. “Breathe. Fill it up like a balloon.” When Sicily’s breathing slowed to a shallow pant, Marie realized that she was gasping too. She motioned Paulie inside. They had no neighbors, but she would not conduct her private life in the hall.
As soon as the door was closed, Sicily, now hoarse, said, “You … you told Neal not to set the chapel on fire?”
“Yeah, I did,” Paulie said.
They were interrupted by gentle knocking at the closed door: Mr. Sansone, the retired police officer who lived on three, with the other doorman, Frank Abuela. Marie hadn’t even heard Angel call them. They stood with their hands empty and overlarge, shrugging and looking at each other as though it was their job to stand behind Angel and lift their shoulders up and down, backup singers in a silent performance. And yet their presence, as witness—the very bulk of men the age Jamie would have been—was of some passing comfort. But Sicily’s eyes roved back and forth along a strip of wall over Marie’s head. What was Sicily seeing?
When her niece tried to stand, Marie braced for more combat.
“It’s a serious situation,” Angel said to Frank and Mr. Sansone.
“Auntie, I won’t hurt him,” Sicily said. “Paulie. Listen. You are saying that Neal set that fire. That’s what you’re saying.”
Paulie nodded. The tiny wounds high on his cheekbones had stopped bleeding and begun to swell and gel, as if the welts were stuck with dots of jam.
“Did you see him do it?” Sicily’s voice now was cold as a coin, every syllable’s timbre the same.
“I only saw when he came back out. The priest’s door was open—like, not open, unlocked. But none of the kids in the fire came out that way.”
Slowly, Sicily turned away, speaking to the broad expanse of window. “Joey always said the door was locked. He told my mother that the door was locked. But it wasn’t. So Joey knew. Joey always knew. The altar was on fire. None of us would ever have gone toward a fire. Or through the priest’s door. It would be like going backstage with God.” She stopped. “Neal opened that door. That was why the fire went up so fast. That air from the door.”
Paulie said, “Neal went back and closed it.”
“If he closed it the first time, everybody could have lived,” Sicily said. “At least, there was a chance.”
Marie put her arms around Sicily. “Was it just you?” Marie asked. “Who was there?”
“Just me,” said Paul. “Just me. Joey came later, after the bell.”
“No it was not just you,” Sicily said dully. “You’re lying. Joey was there. Joey was the first person I saw after I fell down in the snow. He said … he said that was the first time he knew he loved me.”
Marie rubbed Sicily’s back. She was hearing nonsense. Neal Polachek had committed murder? Neal had killed twenty-two kids and two adults and brutally damaged six more kids for life, and the boy who put his body inside Sicily’s body, his heart into Sicily’s hand, he knew? He accepted and lived with this?
“He said that was
what made him love me
! You talked this over, didn’t you? Neal told you ahead of time. You tell me right now.”
“Only that day. It was a prank, Sicily. He didn’t plan like … some school shooter. Neal is a good guy.”
“Neal is a … good guy,” Sicily repeated.
“A good guy?” Marie said. “You scummy little idiot! Look at my niece. Look at her! Neal and you and Joey knew those kids. Dominic Kelly can’t walk without an oxygen tank. He’s like eighty but he’s only twenty-four. Sicily’s father
died
. He died, at forty-four years old. All these families’ lives—and you didn’t tell.”
“What good would that do, lady?” Paulie asked. “Joey wanted to make it right. He’s getting married to her to make it right. He’s the kind of guy who could do that. He’s giving up the life he would have had to make her happy. We were only kids. Neal just couldn’t stand to see Joey go through with this.… He’s his best friend.”
“Go through with it,” Sicily said. It was as though they all had their parts but hadn’t memorized them yet. “Go through with it. So it was mercy. Joe never wanted me.”
“Get out of here,” Marie said to Paul. “Go away.” Angel nodded and began to herd Paul toward the door.
Sicily said, “Neal was old enough that he could do time. Maybe even now Joey and Neal could go to jail. They were thirteen. Letting someone kill someone else. Not prevent … standing still for a crime. That’s a felony murder. You could do time too. Why does it matter so much that Neal was a kid? Shannon Finnucan was a kid. She’s in Queen of Heaven now. Tess Reagan was a kid. Victoria Viola was my friend. Keely DiCastro was only ten. So were Emma Bakken and Simone Sinico and Gabriel O’Connor. Byron Lynch lived next door to you. My dad was holding Danny Furtosa when they burned! I was a kid. Why did you come here?”
“I didn’t want you to hear it,” Paul said. “On the news.”
“It wouldn’t be on the news,” Marie said. “Not by name. We would have thought it could be anybody. There’ll be an inquest.”
“But there was going to be that party tonight. Neal couldn’t let—”
“Shut up,” said Marie.
The buzzer sounded. Angel looked questioningly at Marie, who leaned over and turned on a lamp. The room, which had grown murky and dim as cloud cover piled up outside, snapped back into focus. There was a sudden urgency.
Sicily said, “Did Joey send you? Did he want you to tell me?”
“No,” Paul said. “Of course he didn’t.”
When Marie interviewed people, she studied their faces: The very vigor of Paulie’s shocked expression was proof he was lying, and she knew that Sicily, who was acute this way as well, saw it too.
Angel spoke into his phone, then said, “Jerry Krause came in to help, Miss Caruso. And—” Angel jerked his head in Paulie’s direction. Sicily’s beloved had arrived.