Page 23 of The Mafia's Christmas Baby
“Drink,” I tell him, because I will always be a nurse before anything else.
I hold the glass to his mouth and he takes a swallow.
He watches me over the rim and does not pretend he is doing any other thing.
My hand is very steady for a person who has decided her life is ridiculous.
We sit like that for a stretch of minutes that could be long or short.
Time is not trustworthy in rooms that remember your childhood.
The fever slides down a notch.
The night outside seems to lean on its elbows and eavesdrop.
I press the cloth again and think about every rule I have ever been given.
Don't get involved. Don't tie your life to a man you can't introduce to the women at church. Don't mistake heat for safety.
Then he says my name like a question that already knows the answer and all the rules go and sit in a corner to sulk.
“Elisa,” he says, and there is a plea in it that is not performative. “This is not safe.”
“Neither is crossing the street on a green light,” I say. “Life is not safe. Even people with clipboards can't fix that.”
The corner of his mouth lifts like he can't help it.
The smile does not change his face into something else.
It reveals the thing I have been suspecting since I cut his shirt away—that the quiet is not a lack.
It's a discipline.
It's a weapon and a refuge.
He sleeps in it.
He breathes through it.
He has built himself a house out of it.
Maybe I'm stupid.
Maybe I'm tired.
Maybe I'm an optimist in the way my mother accused me of being when I was twenty and convinced I could save every drunk in Mulberry Street from himself.
What I am right now is present.
What I am is very awake in a room full of sleeping ovens with a man who wants to walk out of my life intact and can't do it tonight.
He shifts closer.
It's not much.
He is careful with his own body and I want very badly to be careful with it too.
His hand comes up, not fast enough to startle, not slow enough to give me time to think of another wise thing to say.
