Don, I Left as You Wished novel · Chapter 24 of 32

Chapter 24: The Night Before

Santo read it over my shoulder.

He read it twice.

Then he put the car in park, in the middle of Bay Street, and a cab behind us leaned on its horn.

"No," he said.

"I haven't said anything."

"You don't have to. I can see it on your face. No."

The cab went around us. The driver gave us a finger out the window.

"Pull over," I said. "Then say no."

He pulled over in front of the closed bakery.

"He wants you on a boat at night in open water," Santo said. "That's the plan. It was always the plan. He's just stopped pretending it's a honeymoon."

"I know."

"So you don't go."

"And the gardener?"

"Has two men on his door."

"For six weeks? For six years?" I turned in my seat. "Dino doesn't need to get in that room. He needs a nurse with a pillow and a bad night."

Santo didn't answer that.

"The detective said one more leg," I said. "One more, and he can make it stick. Dino will say it on that boat. He can't help himself. He told the story of me drowning at our own engagement party because he liked the sound of the laugh."

"He'll say it right before he puts you over the side."

"Probably."

"Roz."

"I swim like a fish, Santo. His father said so. Twice."

He put both hands on the steering wheel and held on.

"I'll take it to the detective," he said. "Let the police put somebody on the boat."

"Dino said alone. If a cop's within a mile, he never opens his mouth, and the gardener has an accident in October instead."

He looked out the windshield at the painted-over windows of the club.

"I just told six men I'd never trade you," he said. "And now you want me to put you on Dino Torrisi's boat."

"You're not putting me anywhere."

I put my hand on his wrist.

"It's open water," I said. "In the water, I'm in charge."

He laughed, once, like it hurt.

"That's not fair."

"No."

"I can't even come and get you."

"No. You can't."

He sat with that for a long time.

"Always," he said finally, very low, like he was giving up something heavy.

We had six weeks.

We spent them training for a race.

Lane Four swam at Coney every morning, a hundred and twenty-three kids and the grandmother in her church hat.

The pledges climbed every night on Joanie's phone.

The thirty-first of July came and went. Tullio had nothing left to send.

The old man with the cane brought his wife to the first grown-up class in a flowered cap.

She went in past her knees and screamed.

Then she went in past her waist.

At night, in his mother's pool, Santo swam widths.

He did ten in a row, and then twenty.

He floated on his back in the deep end for ten minutes with his eyes shut.

He never swam the length, over the drain.

"Not yet," he said, when I asked.

Joanie made me do every stupid drill from our lifeguard course.

I swam in jeans.

I swam in the dark, and after two hours of laps, with my arms dead.

Getting out of a weight belt at the bottom of the deep end.

The first time I did that one, Santo was standing at the edge.

I went down to the drain with ten pounds on my waist and sat by the ring.

I counted, found the buckle and came up.

He was on his knees on the stone when I surfaced.

"Eleven," I said.

He didn't think it was funny.

Neither did I, really.

On Monday the thirty-first of August, we went to my walk-up in Red Hook for the first time since July.

It smelled shut up. My plant was dead.

The bathhouse roof showed over the rooftops two blocks down, above the Torrisi sign.

I got my racing suit out of the drawer.

Navy, faded at the seams. I'd set the record in it at twenty.

"If I'm going on that boat," I said, "I'm going in my own suit."

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