Chapter 160: The Ward

The prison hospital ward smelled like disinfectant and old radiators.

They were searched twice and made to wait forty minutes in a room with plastic chairs bolted to the floor. Yara had expected Rafael to be restless. He was not. He sat with his hands on his knees and looked at the wall and did not move, and she understood that whatever he was doing internally required all of him.

At two-forty a guard came and said they could go in. Twenty minutes.

Marco was in the third bed.

Yara had prepared herself for how he would look and the preparation had not been sufficient. He had lost perhaps forty pounds. His face had gone hollow at the temples and his hands on the blanket looked like something belonging to a much older man.

He was awake.

He saw Rafael, and something moved across his face that he did not attempt to hide, and then he closed his eyes briefly and opened them again.

“You should not have come,” he said.

“I know,” Rafael said.

He pulled the chair over and sat down. Yara stayed standing near the foot of the bed, close enough to be present, far enough to be out of it.

Neither man said anything for a while.

“Four to seven,” Marco said eventually. “They have revised it since I wrote. It is now closer to two.”

“I know,” Rafael said. “The facility told us.”

“Efficient of them.”

“Yes.”

Another silence.

“I did not write that letter so you would come,” Marco said.

“I know that too,” Rafael said. “I read it three times. You were extremely clear.”

“Then why are you here.”

Rafael was quiet for a moment.

“Because you stood next to me at my mother’s funeral,” he said, “and you did not say anything, and it was the only thing anybody got right that entire year.”

Marco’s jaw worked once.

“I have thought about that day more than any other day of my life,” he said. “Including the ones I am in here for.”

“Why.”

“Because you were twelve,” Marco said. “And I was twenty-six and I had no idea what I was doing and I stood next to you because I could not think of anything else to do.” A pause. “And it turned out that was the correct thing. Which taught me the wrong lesson for the next thirty years.”

“What lesson,” Rafael said.

“That being present was the same as being good,” Marco said. “I was present for everything. Every night, every decision, every war. I never left. I thought that was the whole of it.” His breathing was shallow and he stopped for a moment before continuing. “It is not. A man can stand next to you for thirty years and still be waiting for something he thinks he is owed.”

Rafael did not answer that.

“I am not going to apologise,” Marco said. “I put it in the letter and I meant it. An apology would be for me, so that I could go out having said it. You would have to receive it and do something with it and that is not a job I have any right to give you.”

“Good,” Rafael said. “I did not want one.”

“I know.”

The silence that came then was different from the earlier ones. Not comfortable. But not fighting anything.

“Do you need anything,” Rafael said. “Practically. Is there anything I can do.”

“No,” Marco said. Then, after a moment: “There is one thing. Not for me.”

“Say it.”

“There is a woman in Queens named Rosa Ferraro,” Marco said. “She is seventy-eight. Her son worked for me twenty years ago and was killed doing something I sent him to do. I have been sending her money every month since. It comes through a lawyer and she does not know where it is from and she must never find out, because if she finds out she will stop taking it, and she needs it.” A pause. “It stops when I do.”

Rafael looked at him.

“How much,” he said.

“Eleven hundred a month.”

“For twenty years.”

“Yes.”

Rafael was quiet.

“It does not balance anything,” Marco said. “I want to be clear that I know that. One woman in Queens does not weigh against what I did. I am not offering it as evidence of anything.”

“Then why tell me.”

“Because she is going to stop receiving money in two months and nobody else knows she exists,” Marco said. “That is the entire reason.”

Rafael nodded slowly.

“It will continue,” he said.

Marco closed his eyes.

“Thank you,” he said.

The guard came at three.

Rafael stood. He stood there for a moment with his hand on the back of the chair, and Yara watched him try to find something to say and fail to find it, which she thought was probably correct.

“Rafael,” Marco said.

Rafael looked at him.

“She fixed you,” Marco said, and his eyes moved to Yara at the foot of the bed. “I could not. I want you to know that I understood that at the end, even if I understood it too late to be any use.”

“She did not fix me,” Rafael said. “She just did not need me to be anything other than what I was.”

Marco almost smiled.

“That is what I meant,” he said.

They went out.

————————————————

In the car Rafael did not speak for the first twenty minutes.

Then he said: “Rosa Ferraro.”

“I will find her by tonight,” Yara said. “The lawyer, the account, all of it. It will not miss a month.”

“Thank you.”

He looked out the window.

“He is going to die in two months,” he said, “and the only thing he asked me for was for a stranger to keep getting eleven hundred dollars.”

“Yes,” Yara said.

Rafael was quiet a long while.

Her phone rang as they came onto the bridge.

It was Sorina.

“Yara,” she said, and something in her voice was wrong. “Where are you?”

“Coming back from the facility. What is it.”

“You need to come to the flower shop,” Sorina said. “Now.”