“So?” My voice is small, like a little girl’s when she’s sitting on the tile floor, refusing to stand up, to unwrap her arms from around her knees, even though she knows she’ll be punished, but she can’t do it because she knows she’ll fly apart if she’s not holding herself together so, so carefully.
King’s hands are tentative on my hips, tugging me back with gentle insistence. My body tenses, and he stops pulling, but his hands are there, warm through my underwear. He doesn’t push. He just sits there, not making me do anything, not even look at him. The tears on my face are silent this time. They come quick and steady, like a rain that could wash away the pain and the dirt and the glue I’ve used to patch myself up every time I start to break, the glue that holds every jagged edge together.
He doesn’t say a word, but he’s there. And I’m too tired to run away, to hide and lick my wounds and take a shot and dance and pretend I’m happy or strong or free. I’ll never be free until I stop pretending. And I’m tired of pretending that I believed her when she said she loved me or that she did it for me; tired of pretending that she’s a hero for striking out on her own as if that made her brave and not just a coward who knew her life would be over if her husband found out the things she did to his daughter in the bathtub. I’m too tired to patch myself up even one more time.
So, I let myself fall, and this man, my husband, my king, he catches me. His hands are rough, but his touch is gentle as he takes me in his arms and holds me. And I know I don’t have to hold myself together alone anymore. Or pretend I’m whole, that I’m not scarred and cracked and dirty like the pavement on the streets outside. I can break apart, fall into a million pieces. I know that he will catch me every time I fall, that he will pick me up and hold all my pieces together as long as I need him to, and he won’t break or drop or lose a single one. He’ll just hold them until I’m ready to start the slow and painful process of building myself back into the girl I once was, before the person who was supposed to love me broke me instead.
That wasn’t love. This is love.
twenty-five
Eliza
I sit in the back of the car, clutching my purse in my lap and staring out at the city bathed in November sun. Every few minutes, I thumb open the bag’s closure and peek inside at the gun nestled there, and my heart does a funny little flip. I glance up at the driver and my bodyguard, busy discussing the Yankees, before checking my phone to make sure King hasn’t texted. Some stupid part of my heart sinks when I see that he hasn’t. He stayed the night with me for the first time since I left him, holding me until morning, when he had to go to work. I didn’t tell him what I was doing today. I know he’d try to stop me, and this is something I have to do before I can go home.
We turn into a sketchy neighborhood, and I sink a little lower in my seat, acutely aware of how much our opulent town car stands out in this part of Manhattan. I’m glad I brought my bodyguard along and not just the driver. King doesn’t use the driver, since he’s the rare New Yorker who actually owns a car, but I’m glad he kept him on payroll—for me, I realize now. He could have cut me off to try to keep me from going out every day back when we lived together, but he didn’t. Maybe he honestly was trying to make me happy, to give me as much freedom as he could within our marriage. I never even attempted to do anything for him.
He never stopped sending the driver or my guard, even when I went home. It’s been months. He could have said I was Daddy’s problem now and cut off my support, but he didn’t, not even before we were dating, when we had no contact. He’s been there, my rock even when I didn’t see it.
We turn into an area of project houses in East Harlem, and the driver slows, glancing at the GPS on the dash where he punched in the address I gave him. I’ve spent plenty of time in Manhattan, and while I know there are bad areas, we never go there. We got out to party, hitting the newest clubs and hotspots where any given night, we might end up in onYour Celebrity Eyes.
King grew in Manhattan, but they lived in a brownstone. His mom is one of the society women that everyone knows for her attendance at charity functions and fundraisers. I know my mom isn’t like that, but I pictured her as an artist, a free spirit in a chintzy little apartment with a balcony where she could smoke clove cigarettes and drink red wine with her actress friends. This street is slummy as fuck, and I’m hoping we’re lost, because that’s better than the alternative.
“Are you sure this is the right place?” I ask, glancing nervously at the sun as it sinks into a murky stew of smog in the west. Suddenly, this seems like a very bad idea.
“I’m afraid so,” the driver says, pulling up along the side of the road. “I’ll stay with the car.”
My heart stutters erratically in my chest, and it’s not because this neighborhood is scary. What am I doing? What if I can’t go through with it?
But then I think of my husband going to work every day, facing the most dangerous men in New York and then coming home to an empty house because his wife is wife still broken despite my best efforts to move on.
I take a deep breath and reach for the door. “I’m going in.”
My bodyguard gets out first, but I step in front of him, leading the way. After scanning the tall buildings of the Jefferson Housing project and rechecking the address on the sticky note where I scribbled it after secretly contacting King’s uncle with connections, I head for the doors. A couple guys stand out front smoking cigarettes and watching us with calculating, suspicious gazes. I hurry inside and start up the stairs. I have to pull my shirt over my nose halfway because the smell of urine is so strong it brings tears to my eyes.
When we reach the fourth floor, we exit into the hallway. An old man lies against the wall, hopefully sleeping, though I don’t stick around to see if he’s breathing. I head for the door to the apartment and knock. I can hear loud music thumping from down the hall, and I have to knock a couple more times. Someone in the next apartment yells for us to shut the fuck up, though they don’t bother opening the door.
At last, the door opens a crack, and a bloodshot, unfocused eye blinks at us from inside. “Yeah?” a woman’s deep voice asks. I can just make out brown skin and frizzy hair in the dim lighting from within.
“I’m Eliza Pomponio,” I say, using my maiden name. It sounds strange on my tongue already. “I’m looking for my mother. Is she here?”
“And who’s that?” the woman asks, her eye moving to my bodyguard.
“This is my friend,” I say.
“Nuh-uh,” she says. “That’s the DEA.”
“He’s not DEA,” I say. “He’s here to protect me.”
“You gonna need it around here,” she says. “A pretty little thing like you, shit. Won’t last an hour.”
“I just want to see my mom,” I say, my voice steady despite the trepidation growing inside me. “I haven’t seen her in ten years, and I heard she was living here. Her name’s Margaret, or Maggie, Pomponio.”
“Maggie, baby,” the woman calls behind her. “You got a kid?”
I hear a quiet voice speak, but I can’t make out the words.
“She says she don’t have a kid,” the woman tells us, looking me up and down with suspicion.