Page 34 of The Mafia's Christmas Baby
I'm not a woman who surrenders easily to gravity.
The room tilts its chin and I drop into the kind of slumber that does not bargain.
It's deep and dark and free of dreams.
If my name is said, I don't hear it.
If he moves away, my hand does not follow.
The ovens breathe their old heat into the walls and somewhere, very far away, a streetlight clicks from one color to another and means nothing to me.
When I wake, the light is wrong.
It's the blue just before dawn, the color that makes the city look like it has been dipped in milk.
The blanket is neat.
The cot is colder than it should be.
I reach for a shoulder and find fabric.
I reach for his wrist and find air.
He is gone.
My body takes a second to catch up to my head and then the two of them join forces the way your family does when someone you love is late for dinner.
My heart speeds.
My mouth goes dry.
I sit up too fast and the room tilts, which is how I know the sleep I had was not my usual shallow swing.
Panic is a little animal with small teeth.
It bites and then waits.
“Nico,” I say, and the name sounds bigger in the empty room than it felt on my tongue all night.
There is no answer.
There is only the small drip of the sink and the sound of a city deciding whether to wake up or turn over and ask for five more minutes.
I stand.
I move through the bakery like a girl searching for a father in a crowd.
The front board gives under my palm and I catch it before it can complain.
The alley has no one in it.
The sky has the first slice of pink over the roofs.
I step outside because breathing has to happen somewhere and right now, it feels impossible inside these walls.
The air is cold and clean.
It hands me nothing.
