Rooted (The Pagano Family Book 3) (13 page)

“No, sorry. I just feel like I’m reading a book with pages torn out. Are you two that serious?”

“
I don’t know
! I didn’t think so. I just wanted a Paris romance. A fling, or whatever. He lives in Maine! Usually it’s
me
that gets all invested and hopeful and then gets dumped.”

“Are you dumping him?”

“No! I…I don’t know. I really like him.
Really
. But I’ve been good this time. I’ve been careful not to get all swept up and stupid like I usually do. And now I’m wicked freaked because he feels things I made sure I wouldn’t feel. I don’t know! I mean, how would we even work?”

Jesus. Rosa was saying things not wildly dissimilar to her thoughts about her and Theo, though she was sure Theo wasn’t wrapped up the way it seemed Eli was. She closed her eyes and took a breath. But Rosa and Eli were different from her and Theo. Rosa was young. So was Eli. They didn’t have history and baggage like she and Theo had. They had time to take risks and make dumb mistakes and correct them later. They had once-in-a-lifetime feelings to spare. To share.

“Don’t worry about how it works. Worry about whether you want it to work. You started by saying that Eli is what you want. Then go for it. If you both want it enough, you’ll figure out the how.”

“Pop would kill me if I moved.” Now Rosa was contemplative rather than combative.

But wow. That was a big jump. “Well, baby steps here, hon. But if it comes to it, maybe he moves. He’s between jobs, right?”

“Yeah, that’s true. He could find something in Providence. Maybe Uncle Ben knows—”

“
No
, Rosie. Don’t even let that thought take root. No.”

She sighed. “Yeah, okay. Can I have my phone back?” Carmen handed it over, and Rosa tapped on the screen. “Don’t have a coronary, okay? I’m just saying something to make him feel better. I know what it’s like to be left hanging, and it sucks.”

“He calls you Rhody?”

“Yeah. I told him I didn’t like him calling me Jersey Shore, and that my accent wasn’t even Jersey. Then there was a thing about my name—Rosa, Rosie, Rhody—and then I had a nickname. It’s fine. It’s cute. Lame, but cute.”

“Yeah. Lame but cute seems to run in that family.”

With a final tap, Rosa put her phone away. She took a sip of her soda and then gave Carmen a long look. “Thanks, Carm. That was only minimal bitchiness on your part.”

Carmen smiled.

~oOo~

When they got back to Paris, the Wilde men were waiting for them at the station, and they fell right back into their intensity. Eli and Rosa were suddenly a bona fide couple. Carmen had done some thinking, and she felt some envy, but she knew that what was going on with her sister and Theo’s son could not be replicated between her and Theo. Too much history, too much baggage. But the week away had refreshed her resolve, given her the distance she’d needed. She had her heart in hand again and could let herself do the thing that felt good.

One night, while she was sleeping in Theo’s arms, her phone rang, playing a Van Halen song. Luca was calling. She’d just spoken to him the day before, catching up on family news, so she knew instantly that the call meant trouble. Her phone was in the living room, and she scrambled to get it before it went to voice mail.

She didn’t make it, but she called him right back, not bothering to wait for the message. He answered on the first ring. “Carm.”

“What’s wrong? Is it Pop?”

“Nah. Pop’s good. Well, healthy. But I got news. I didn’t think about how late it would be for you, though. Sorry.”

“It’s fine, Luc, it’s fine. What happened?”

“Fire at a job site.”

“Fuck! John’s okay? Joey? Everybody’s okay?”

“Yeah. Family’s fine. But the fire wasn’t an accident. One of our guys is dead, too. Tied to a support beam and burned in the fire.”

Carmen sat on the floor, falling in a heap. “Jesus. Who was it?” Theo came out, naked, as she was. When he saw her on the floor, his expression went immediately to concern, and he sat down at her side and put his arm around her. She resisted the urge to shake him off.

In her ear, Luca answered her question. “Norm.”

Norm had worked for Pagano & Sons Construction for at least two decades. “Shit. What are you talking about? Why Norm?”

“I don’t think there was a particular reason. Just the first of our guys they found.”

Carmen suddenly understood. If Luca hadn’t roused her from a deep, spent sleep, she would have caught it more quickly. “This has to do with the Uncles.”

She could hear Luca sigh. “Yeah, I’d say so.”

“Jesus, Luc. You want us to come home?” Theo’s arm tensed at that.

“No! God, Carm, no. Stay where you are. You’re safe there. Except—maybe don’t do the trip to the motherland, okay? Who knows if this is just something local or how deep it goes. Whoever it is isn’t making a distinction between sides of the family. Things are getting all snarled up. Stay where you are, have your vacation. We’re good here. I’m sure the Uncles are on it, and you’re safe where you are. I just wanted to let you know, ask you to cancel Italy. Okay?”

Carmen rubbed her eyes, feeling sad and weary. “Yeah, okay. How’s Pop holding up?”

A long pause told Carmen more than Luca’s words would. “He and Norm went way back.”

“I know.”

“He’ll be okay.”

“Yeah. Tell him I love him, okay? Tell him we’re good.”

“Okay. Go back to sleep, sis. I love you.”

“Love you, too.” She ended the call and set her phone on the nearest table.

“Carmen, something’s wrong.” She turned and considered Theo. She liked that he hadn’t asked an obvious question. He’d made a statement. Now that the call was over, she didn’t want to shrug him off anymore, so she laid her head on his shoulder.

“Yeah. Family stuff. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Are you leaving?” She wondered whether she’d imagined the subtle break in his voice.

“No. Not earlier than planned, anyway.”

He kissed the top of her head and left his lips there to linger. “I’m here if you want to talk.”

Bringing him into the loop about her family was too dangerous a line to cross, too close to home. “I know. Thank you.” She sat up. “Let’s just go back to bed.”

With a nod, he stood and held his hands out, helping her to her feet. Then he led her to bed, tucking her under his arm, her head on his chest.

When she was finally able to sleep again, Carmen dreamt that the house on Caravel Road was burning. She ran in to save her family, but every time she brought one to safety, the others she’d saved would be back in the fire.

She woke, tense and gasping, when Theo shook her awake, his eyes sparking with worry.

~ 8 ~

Theo closed his Mac, shoved it away, and stared out the window at the Eiffel Tower.

He was blocked.

He’d been in Paris for more than two months, and he had five thousand words, maybe a thousand of them worth the space they took up on his hard drive. There were times while he’d been writing
Orchids in Autumn
when he’d written five thousand words—good words, keepers—in a
day
.

He simply could not write. Not even drivel. He’d tried all the exercises he knew to ignite even a flicker of inspiration, but there was nothing. Even when he gave himself permission to write sewage, as long as it was words on the screen, the sewage dried to a trickle in a matter of a few sentences, and then he’d zone out, his mind drifting far away, and he’d come back ten, fifteen, thirty minutes later, still staring at the screen, the thin line of the cursor blinking with steady determination at the beginning of an expanse of white emptiness.

The grant that was paying for this Parisian retreat bound him to write the follow-up to
Orchids
, a prequel of sorts about his early life with Maggie. He intended to have a complete manuscript draft by the end of the year, when he was to return to his regular life as a professor of creative writing and American literature at Colson College in Colson, Maine.

That was the plan, anyway. At this rate, he wouldn’t have the first draft of the first chapter done by then. Fuck.

He drained his crystal glass of bourbon and, deciding he needed another, he stood abruptly, nearly overturning the fey chair with curlicue legs he’d been sitting on. He hated this damn apartment. He felt like a visitor in a museum every single second.

Well, not every single second. He’d become quite fond of and at home in the bedroom.

That brush of thought about Carmen brought an upward twitch to his mouth. Yes, he was quite fond of any space he shared with Carmen Pagano.

He went to the bar and refilled his glass, emptying the bottle of Maker’s 46. That gave him a moment’s pause, and he considered when he’d bought this bottle. Wednesday. Today was Sunday. No worries, then. Even accounting for what he’d had while he was away from the Hunter Anders Museum of Expensively Prissy Taste, he was fine.

Maybe he wouldn’t rush out to replace this bottle, though.

He was alone in the apartment today, by his request. Eli was spending the day with Carmen and Rosa, even going to Mass with them at Notre Dame. Then they were visiting Versailles. As far as Theo was concerned, he had plenty of artsy-fartsy décor right where he was, and he’d rather use the day to work.

He needed the day to himself. He needed to fucking write, to get something down, and Carmen was a delightful distraction. They’d been together for six weeks or so—if ‘together’ was what they were. They spent most of most days together. They ate most meals together. They slept most nights together. They were going off to spend the next weekend in Avignon together, and he’d booked a romantic hotel. But even when she was curled up with him, sleeping quietly, her body woven with his, he didn’t feel like she was ‘together’ with him. Even in sleep, even when he could not possibly get closer to her, he could feel her holding him off. He couldn’t quite explain how he could feel it, but it was there. Even in moments of playfulness, even in passion, even when he had all of her in his hands, he had none of her, really.

In five weeks, her French sojourn would be over, and she’d be gone. He knew that when she left, she’d be gone from his life completely. He wondered how long it would be before she forgot him completely.

He drained his bourbon again, staring out at the balcony, watching birds perching on the building across the street, his thoughts dark. He set his empty glass on the bar next to the empty bottle, walked into the bedroom and opened a drawer, pulling out a large, worn, handmade leather journal. A gift from Maggie when his MFA had been conferred, more than twenty years ago. He plopped down into the wingchair over which Carmen always tossed her clothes, and he opened the leather tie. The journal was refillable; he had banker’s boxes at home in Maine full of the previous contents. This was where he wrote his poetry. He probably wrote fifty poems for every one he published—hundreds of poems, thousands of attempts—and every draft, from the first wobbly words to the polished piece, had been written in this book since he’d had it. He’d never written a poem in any way but longhand. Ink on paper, the heel of his hand sanding the words as it passed over them, pushing them into being.

Being a poet, perhaps more than any other career in the known world, was a calling, an act of love, not a career choice at all, despite the burden of student loans he and Maggie had struggled for a decade to pay. Any other artist—painter, musician, novelist, sculptor, weaver, anything—had at least a glimmer of hope that their labors might someday feed them. People bought paintings in galleries, in restaurants, at flea markets, at art shows. Musicians might get recording contracts or work as studio talent, or play gigs in seedy bars. Fiction writers, biographers—memoirists—might see their work displayed on a prominent table at a bookstore, might be interviewed on a morning talk show. Might earn a living from their work.

Nobody paid for poetry. As was the way of this work, most of his published poems had been published in poetry journals—the ‘little magazines’ of the literary world. For them, he was paid in ‘copies,’ usually two. The small presses who published chapbooks of poetry printed runs of a few hundred, a few thousand at the most, and they languished on shelves of tiny bookstores. Even the anthologies published by bigger houses offered little compensation to the poets on their pages.

And the odds of getting an academic job,
especially
with an MFA in poetry, were somewhere around the odds of being struck by lightning while eating a banana split and dancing the Macarena. In Death Valley.

No. A poet became a poet, studied the art and craft of poetry, locked his life onto its tracks, because he had no other choice. Words demanded their due.

Theo had been lucky. He’d gotten the elusive academic job. But that had turned out to be very little about the writing of poetry or the teaching of the art. More than anything else, he taught lower-division literature courses to theaters of a hundred or more disaffected post-teens. When he was lucky, for three hours a week, he also taught a poetry writing seminar to the half of the class who hadn’t registered thinking that writing poetry would be an easy class.

It was not an easy class. It was not an easy calling. It was a thing that could only be done for love of it. The need of it.

Without his words, he was nothing.

He pulled the pen from the portfolio and turned to the first blank page. Left-handed, he wrote only on the left side of the pages, what to most would be the underside of a sheet of paper. On the top, as was his custom, he wrote the date and his location.

And then he wrote the lines, the images, that had driven him into this room, to sit in this chair and open this book.

Sunday, July 17, 2016—Paris, Rue Girard

Black,

Red and gold.

A sun burnt Raven, a crow.

Blackbird. Black bird.

Flutter, flee, fly

Out. Away.

Black silk wraps around my fist, my throat.

I am entangled, bound.

Theo lifted the point of the pen from the page and read what he’d written. Not much. Rough and ungainly. The stunted product of a blocked writer. But they were the words that had wanted out, that had escaped around the edges of the block, and he always trusted that impulse. Maybe he’d find the seed of this next memoir of his marriage in the words that wanted out.

He read them again. That wasn’t Maggie.

That was Carmen.

And then he understood why he was blocked. He couldn’t write a memoir of the beginning of his love of Maggie because he was immersed in the beginning of his love of Carmen. A love even his subconscious saw was doomed.

Well, shit.

There were no more words. The air around him, inside him, was still and silent. He closed the book, tied it shut, shoved it back in the drawer and went out to buy bourbon.

~oOo~

He woke up on the sofa in the library. His head was thick and heavy, clanging like a broken bell. Struggling to his feet, he went out into the main room and heard noise in the kitchen.

Eli was making food. A roast, maybe. Some meat thing. There was a heap of chopped onions on a cutting board, and several golden potatoes were clustered on the counter. He was alone, a white canvas apron over his t-shirt and jeans.

Theo rubbed his hands over his face and squinted at the clock on the wall. After six. “Where’re the girls?”

“They’ll be over later. I’m making dinner.”

The lights in here were fucking bright. Theo went to the counter and grabbed the bottle of aspirin, tapping two—no, three—into his hand and swallowing them down with water from the tap. He didn’t bother with a glass.

Eli stood stock still, a large knife in his hand, and looked him over. “Dad, you okay?”

“Yeah, why?”

“You were gonna spend the day writing, and I come back to find you passed out on the couch next to half a bottle of booze.” He paused. “Was that new? There’s an empty on the bar, too.”

Maybe it was the way his heartbeat was banging around on his brain, but that pissed him off. “You’re keeping track? Who’s the parent here?”

For a couple of beats, Eli just stared. When he spoke, his voice was cold. “You. Do what you want. But you’re drinking a lot. More than you have since…since after Mom. I’m just asking if you’re okay.”

Theo had believed he’d kept the drinking back then to himself—and under control. The thought that Eli, who’d been twenty at the time, had known and made note…and what about Jordan, who’d been only fifteen? Instead of feeling guilty, though, he was just angry. “I’m fine. I’m going for a shower.” With that, knowing he was being irrational and not giving a shit, he turned and left his eldest son to his cooking and his judgments.

~oOo~

Theo woke that night and found Carmen sitting up next to him, motionless, staring at the moonlit curtains billowing from the open windows. The night had a chill that had raised prickles on his flesh as he’d slept. She sat bare, with the covers pooled at her waist.

“Carm? Again?” Lately, she’d been dreaming badly most nights.

She flinched at his voice and looked over her shoulder. “Did I wake you?” Not an answer to his question, but she never answered questions about her dreams. Or maybe it was ‘dream’ in the singular, the same one. He didn’t know. In that as in most things, she was closed to him.

“I don’t think so. I think the cold did.” He rose up on an elbow and took her arm in his hand, pulling her to lie with him again. “You’re freezing.” He tugged the covers over their shoulders and snugged her against his chest. She let him, tucking her head under his chin, tracing her fingers through the hair on his chest.

She took hold of his pendants. She did that often; he didn’t know what to make of it. She’d called them ‘poignant’—it was a word she’d used often enough with him that he’d noticed, and in his constant quest to discover anything he could about her, he’d tried to make it meaningful. She thought his history poignant. She thought his writing poignant. She thought his pendants poignant. Poignant—moving, emotional, heartbreaking. Powerful. A compliment, maybe. He thought she meant it as such. Yet there was more meaning in her use of that word, but he either couldn’t find it or instinctively shied from it.

He pressed his lips to her temple, smelling the faint linger of her perfume. She always wore it now. She’d told him that she didn’t habitually wear scent, so, desperate for signs of connection, he took her new habit of dabbing perfume on the spots behind her ears as a sign for him, a sign that he wasn’t making a total fucking fool of himself and sending his heart to the gallows while he did.