He Used My Pregnancies to Cure His Mistress, So I Told Every Family novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Spade and the Vault

Elena digs at her daughter's sealed vault until Marco and his mother arrive, Marco tells her to be a quiet wife, Nico takes her out, and a nurse's text names a laundromat.

Nico drove to Belleville anyway.

He did not say why he changed his mind.

I think he knew I would get out at the next red light and walk the six miles in my good shoes.

The cemetery gate was chained, and he had the key on his ring.

That told me how often he had been here.

Our daughter's grave sat at the top of the hill, under a young maple.

The stone was small and white and said only BARZINI, with two dates a day apart.

I had not been able to read the dates since the funeral.

Behind it was a concrete vault with a brass plate, the kind that takes a man with a cart to lift.

"Get me a shovel," I said.

"Elena."

"You had my wrist when I signed the consent forms. You had the key to this gate. Get me a shovel, Nico."

He stood beside the stone with his hands at his sides.

"I can't."

"You carried her. You wouldn't let anyone else carry her."

"I know."

"So tell me why I can't see her."

His jaw worked.

"Marco ordered it closed," he said. "I've told you that."

"That isn't an answer."

"It's the one I have."

The caretaker's shed stood by the second gate, with its padlock hanging open on the hasp.

I walked to it in the dark and found a long spade leaning on the wall.

I carried it back up the hill and drove it into the earth beside the vault.

It went in a hand's width and stopped on concrete.

I tried again.

Nico said, "It's poured, Elena. It's four feet of concrete."

"Then I'll dig around it."

I dug.

The grass tore, and the soil under it was wet and heavy.

My palms blistered in the first minute and split in the third.

He stood there the whole time and did not stop me.

He did not help me either.

At some point I began to talk to the stone.

I said the name I had picked for her, out loud, for the first time in six weeks.

My voice sounded wrong in the open air.

Then headlights swept the hill.

Two black cars came up the gravel road with their lights on high, and a third behind them.

Marco got out of the first one in his Sunday suit.

Rosaria climbed out of the second, with a rosary wound around her hand.

Four of his men spread out across the grass without being told.

"Look at her," Rosaria said, and began to cry.

Marco walked up to me slowly and put his hand over the spade handle.

"Amore," he said. "Give it to me."

I held on.

He bent close, so the men would not hear, and the gentle voice dropped away.

"Silvia is carrying my heir," he said. "You are a good wife. You were a good wife for seven years."

"Marco."

"Be a quiet one now."

I looked at him.

I had married this man in a white dress, with his father weeping in the front pew.

I had made his coffee every morning for seven years and ironed the shirt he wore to my babies' funerals.

"You stood in the waiting room," I said. "Each time. You stood there while they took her out of me."

"I stood there because I loved you."

"Did you love me on the twenty-seventh week?"

For one second his face did not move.

Then he turned his head toward the men.

"She's hysterical. Take her home. Get the doctor to the house."

Two of them started up the slope.

Nico stepped in front of me.

"Don," he said, very evenly. "She's cut her hands. I'll bring her in myself."

"Step aside, Nico."

"I carried your daughter to this hill," Nico said. "Let me carry out the rest of it."

I did not understand what he meant.

Marco studied him for a long moment.

"Bring her in," he said at last. "By midnight."

He kissed his mother's cheek and walked back to the cars.

Rosaria stopped beside me, her black coat smelling of church.

"You embarrassed your husband in front of the families," she said. "Eat something. Apologize to Silvia. We will forget it."

I said nothing.

When their lights had gone down the hill, Nico took the spade out of my hands.

He opened my palms and looked at the blisters.

"Get in the car," he said.

"If I get in that car you'll take me to him."

"I won't."

"Then where?"

"Somewhere with a first aid kit."

My coat pocket buzzed against my hip.

I took out the phone and looked at the number I did not know.

The text was four lines.

Mrs. Barzini. It's Gina, the night nurse. Don't call back.

I have copies of everything. The laundromat on Mulberry Street.

Come alone.

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