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“So I can’t attend your wedding, son, not to that family,” he said, sadness and bitterness in his voice. He hung his head and shuffled out of the room.
“Pap, wait! I didn’t know, Papi!” Carmelo called but no, the door shut on him and Carmelo was left standing in the cold garage by himself.
Carmelo
Carmelo sighed and looked down at the boxes his father had been thumbing through.
Photos. Old photos. Some black and white, some sepia. Some crinkled and well-handled. Others stuck together from never being looked at. His mother and father, so much younger, happy, smiling back at him. Fuck, his mother had been raped. His father had had to endure watching. It put a new lens on his parents, how he felt about them, how he respected them. How he valued their sacrifice. They’d been the victims of the Zakarian Syndicate. And now he was betraying them.
But Lena wasn’t like that, was she? She said things had cleaned up, she said she wanted to do things differently.
Then photos of Mario and Carmelo as a baby. Mario, wrapped in a blanket, embroidered with a little duckling. A newborn, Carmelo thought it didn’t look anything like Mario, it was just a generic little squishy cute newborn. But his mother had embroidered the blankets, he’d been told that. There were other things around the house that were embroidered by her hand, too. A duckling for Mario. Lots of photos of Mario as a baby, his mother looking beautiful and glowing and holding Mario, his father, so much younger, much more hair, slimmer, smiling. Before the rape, before things got ugly with the Zakarian’s.
Carmelo picked up another box, pulling the lid off. He pulled out a handful of photos from the front. This was the last box of photos. It was Carmelo’s box. He knew that because after his mother died, there were no more photos. And Carmelo’s birth caused his mother’s death. Hemorrhage, apparently. And Mario had always blamed him for it, always hated him for it. It came up in every argument, it simmered beneath the surface. The guilt Carmelo felt was like a rope around his neck. Maybe that’s why he’d thrown himself into work, packed off to the police academy as soon as he could. Lingered longer at the fireside in the MC clubhouse that was appropriate for the local Police Sergeant. He felt a warmth in their company that he hadn’t known before.
He pursed his lips and pulled out a few photos. These ones were not well thumbed, they were stuck together and didn’t separate easily. The first one was his mother in the hospital, smiling, looking tired, looking still pregnant. Maybe that was before he was born? He spread the stack in his hands, looking. One dropped to the floor, twirling as it fluttered down. Carmelo bent to pick it up, and looked at it.
Him as a baby, a newborn. Maybe his mother was still alive by this point, clinging to life, bleeding out. He shook his head and let out a breath. The fragility of life. Him as this tiny little newborn. Helpless, completely dependent on people around him. And his mother, giving her life to carry him into the world. Fuck.
He stared at himself, the little newborn baby. Wrapped in a blanket, embroidered with a horse. A baby horse. A foal.
Carmelo tilted his head and itched the back of his neck. No, hang on, that wasn’t right, he had had a baby chicken. He was sure he’d seen photos of himself as a baby before and Carmelo had been bundled up in a blanket with a little chick embroidered onto it. There was a box with the blankets somewhere in this garage. He’d seen it, his father never threw anything out. He turned the photo over to see if there were any dates. Yes, stamped on the back, half faded, was a printed date, the year before Carmelo was born. He leafed through the other photos quickly, trying not to damage them. His heart felt erratic and loud in his chest. There were more photos. His mother. Pregnant and smiling in a hospital bed. Baby newborn. Wrapped in a chick blanket, on Carmelo’s birthday. He blinked at it, holding it in his hand. And then he put it side by side with the other photo, of the baby in the foal blanket a year before.
Apart from the blanket, the actual babies didn’t look any different. They were just little newborn babies, asleep and tiny. Maybe the date was out, or his mother made another blanket, maybe the foal one got lost or…
Carmelo held the photo in his mouth and got to digging. He grabbed boxes from the metal shelves in the garage. Dust swirled everywhere and Carmelo felt it catching in his throat, but he didn’t stop for that. He found Mario’s blanket, the baby duck now faded but beaming back at him from the slightly moth eaten blanket. And then Carmelo’s. Yeah, as he thought, his blanket was a chick, a little yellow thing with an orange bill. Not the baby horse. There were no other blankets, the baby horse one was gone.
He blinked back at the photo. His eyes weren’t tricking him. There was a photo of a fat little sleeping baby wrapped in a blanket with a baby horse embroidered at the top of it the year before Carmelo was born.
He held onto the photo and went through the rest of the boxes again. There was no sign of the baby horse blanket again.
He took a breath in, as if to say something, even though he was the only one in the garage. He pulled his phone out of his back pocket and dialed.
It rang a few times, the rings felt slow and loud against his ear. Then someone answered.
“Hey, look, I know it’s late but can I just log a request… yeah you can make a start in the morning, I just… oh sure, great thanks. Can you run a search for me of Lucia Rossetti please. Haha yes that’s my surname, it’s not a relative, haha…” Carmelo lied shamelessly. “For hospitals… giving birth… yeah, can you check her maiden name, too, it was… Garbondi. Yep, any kids born to her…”
Carmelo gave dates including his and Mario’s. It should just be them two, right? Maybe his head was making a bigger thing of this than it needed to be. It was just a blanket. It was probably him or Mario in it, or maybe a cousin or something, they had fucking loads of second cousins, it was probably nothing.
In his position, he could also ask the team to check for the members of the Zakarian Syndicate active in New York around that time. He could probably track down who did this. The actual man who… he shuddered to even think it, raped his mother. Carmelo could pull a few strings and bring him to justice. That justice could be called Phantom and the end of his throwing blades. Carmelo ran a hand over his short hair. He’d probably have to check with Colt and New York would have totally different players and probably its own gang and MC power balances going on… anyway, those people would be his father’s age or older, they might not even be alive anymore…
And now, how did he feel about marrying Lena? Marrying a family member who had been responsible for such an act against his family? It hurt more than he wanted to admit to himself. Fuck, he was falling for her. Their game of cat and mouse had become warped in his head, and in his chest. At first he was dodging her, the wedding, the whole thing. But it had swiftly become a case of both of them trying to dodge everyone else as they hooked up and had the best sex of their lives. For Carmelo anyway. Now, it felt a thousand times more complicated and heavy. Now it felt like a messy web of spider’s silk, with only a lurking, venomous bite waiting for him in the middle.
Thoughts churned in his head, Carmelo tried to see the consequences, tried to follow the threads to untangle the knot. But it was too big, too messy right now for him to attempt. There was nothing more he could say to his brother or father tonight, that much was clear, so he decided to let himself out and head home. Carmelo couldn’t shake his turmoil as he opened the main door of the garage, slammed it again behind him, and slunk off into the night. He kept the photo. It was pristine but it would be just as well-thumbed as the others when he was through with it.
Carmelo
Carmelo was half way through his bench press workout, exhaling through a punishing set, when his doorbell rang.
Wearing gray sweatpants, topless with his music pumping out of his headphones, he was surprised he heard it. He grabbed a hand towel, wiped his face and slouched off to the door, making a mental note of how many reps he’d done so he could pick back up as soon as he’d dealt with the post or whoever it was interrupting his peace on a Saturday-
“Hi!”
“Lena!” She was all sunshine and brightness. Immaculately dressed, hair done, makeup fresh, perfume wafting in. Carmelo was suddenly aware of his topless sweaty state. The photo of the baby in the horse blanket felt like contraband he needed to hide from her, and the thoughts he’d been having over the last few days felt like a physical betrayal.
“Hello!” She beamed again, looking genuinely happy to see him. “Can I come in? I mean, I was just in the neighborhood and wondered if you were in…” She trailed off, and cast a glance behind her.
Carmelo looked down the empty hallway, too.
