Lola on Fire Read online

  “Already checked that,” the reverend said.

  There was an empty jewelry box, a martial arts magazine without a cover, a handful of mixtapes with faded cursive on their card inserts. Beneath these, a loose, creased photograph. Brody lifted it out carefully, turned it toward him. His heart plunged. Anger blew through him, unexpected and hot. He imagined it curling like woodsmoke from his skin.

  “What is it?” Molly asked, seeing the change in his disposition.

  “Mom.”

  She was young in the photograph. Early twenties. Sharp cheekbones. Light brown hair spilled across her shoulders. She stood next to Karl. They were in a bar or club, judging by the beer signs behind them. Both had their arms folded, their jaws firmed in a mock-intimidating expression, like a couple of linebackers posing for their TV shots. She was prettier than Brody remembered.

  He passed the photo to Molly and forced several cooling breaths.

  “That’s really her.” Molly shook her head. “Wow, Brody, she looks like you.”

  “Goddamn her,” Brody said, then looked at the reverend. “Sorry.”

  Reverend Mathias cocked a disapproving eyebrow, then drew a pair of glasses from his breast pocket and slipped them on. They hid the creases around his eyes—made him look younger. “Let me see that.” He held his hand out for the photograph. Molly handed it to him. “This is your mom?”

  “Yeah.” Brother and sister in unison.

  “And what did you say her name was?”

  “Natalie Ellis,” Molly said. “Née Myles.”

  “Then I guess I did know her, but not well. Met her twice, maybe three times. I’m sure she said her name was Lola, though. You know, like that old song.” The reverend sang a few bars of something neither Brody nor Molly had heard before. They regarded him with blank expressions. “I, uh . . . I guess you’re too young. Anyway, yes, Lola Blythe. Or Byrd. Something like that.”

  Molly offered the slightest smile. “I thought you said you were good with names.”

  “Well, it was a long time ago,” the reverend conceded, but looked at Brody and Molly through narrowed eyes, as if they might be wrong. “We were just kids. I was actually closer to your mom’s cousin.”

  “Her cousin?” Molly said. She looked at Brody, who returned another blank stare.

  “You didn’t know she had a cousin?” the reverend asked.

  “No.” Brother and sister again.

  The reverend gestured at the box. “Should be a photo in there.”

  Molly pulled the box toward her and swept through it. She lifted out the mixtapes and paperbacks, stacking them on top of the vinyls, clearing some space. “So much junk.” She held up a Rhode Island fridge magnet, an empty video game case, a mini Rubik’s Cube on a key chain. Two photographs followed. The first was a Polaroid of teenage Karl in a baseball uniform. The second was of a block-faced man with his stomach erupting from beneath a gray vest, probably Karl’s father. Molly dug deeper into the box, uncovering more junk—a Michael Jordan bobblehead on a broken base, a VHS copy of Top Gun—before finding the photograph she sought. She studied it for several seconds, nodded, and handed it to Reverend Mathias.

  “There she is,” he said, and grinned. “Renée Giordano. Sweet as an apple.”

  Florence sang in the kitchen, occupying the pause as Reverend Mathias slipped away. His eyes were on the photo but his mind was in the past. Florence’s mother slept in her armchair, a blanket across her knees. Her breathing was soft and sweet.

  “We went on a few dates.” The reverend broke out of his reverie. He sat upright, handed the photograph to Brody. “It looked, for a time, like it might develop into something good, something real. And then . . . well, then I took an eight-year vacation, courtesy of the state of Pennsylvania. Renée wrote me a few times, but the letters stopped after a year or so. I figured she’d found someone else. And so had I.” He touched the crucifix around his neck. “We move on, you know.”

  The photograph was circa 1990, the colors mostly aged out of it. Karl sat at the head of a table loaded with barbecued meats. A young Wendell Mathias—with a high-top fade straight out of Kid ’n Play—sat to his right. The woman beside Wendell had a slender neck, coils of dark hair, eyes deep enough to demand gravity. She had one hand on Wendell’s thigh.

  “Renée Giovanni,” Brody said.

  “Giordano,” the reverend corrected.

  The photograph was old, but the kindness hadn’t seeped from Renée’s face. It shone ahead of her beauty, in itself remarkable. But beauty fades, whereas kindness endures, and this—this—was what Brody homed in on, with the instinct of a butterfly to nectar.

  He imagined her now. A successful crime novelist. A concert pianist. A senator. Did she live in a loft in Brooklyn Heights, or on a ranch in sunny Cali? Dreams hit his mind and rippled. He imagined Molly fanning shell grit from one hand, fowl squabbling around her ankles. He smelled morning coffee and freshly laundered towels. How would it feel to wake to a clean house, to the sound of livestock braying, or perhaps the Pacific roaring, before stepping down to breakfast with family? How would it feel to belong?

  “Do you know where she is now?” Brody glanced at Reverend Mathias, but only for a second. Renée Giordano, even in an old photograph, was hard to look away from. “She’s Mom’s cousin, which makes her our, what . . . great-cousin?”

  “Second cousin,” Molly said.

  “Right. She’s family.” Brody lifted his eyes again, rolled them toward Molly. “Blood?”

  “Yeah,” Molly replied, and then, “What’s going through your mind, Brody? You think she can lead us to Mom?”

  “I don’t know.” Brody shook his head. “I guess I’m thinking we can crash with her for a week or so, keep a low profile. We had no idea she existed, remember, so Jimmy Latzo won’t, either.”

  “You can’t be sure of that,” Molly said.

  “Where can we find her?” Brody asked the reverend.

  He removed his glasses, slotted them back into his pocket. “I haven’t heard from Renée in . . . more than twenty years. Heck, closer to thirty.” Something flashed through his expression, maybe an alternate life, one where he hadn’t been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Renée’s body had kept him warm at night, instead of God’s light. “I looked her up a couple of times, out of curiosity, the way we do with the faces from our past. The internet makes that so much easier.”

  “That’s how we found you,” Molly said.

  “I saw on Renée’s Myspace page—that’s how long ago this was—that she’d moved to Bloomington, Indiana, and landed a job with the Colts a short time later. Events coordinator, or some such. I wished her well, said a prayer for her, and moved on.” The reverend angled his head to look at the photograph, still in Brody’s hands. He inhaled sharply, then said, “Fast-forward a couple of years. Super Bowl Forty-One. Colts versus Bears.”

  “I remember it well,” Brody said. “Manning was on fire.”

  “Don’t I know it? We put up a big screen here in the hall, because you can follow God and the Bears. And then, after the game, with the Colts celebrating on the field, who should I see over Tony Dungy’s shoulder but my old girlfriend, Renée Giordano.”

  Brody looked at Molly and nodded. He’d made up his mind.

  “She looked happy,” the reverend said. “Inside happy. Not just happy that the Colts had won. And I was happy for her.”

  He drifted again, eyes glazed. Brody drifted, too, imagining moonlight over the woodlands of Indiana, the silence of a safe neighborhood, drinking craft beers and playing Cards Against Humanity with family he never knew he had.

  Florence clanged pots and pans. She sang along to The Temptations, “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” and her sister harmonized.

  Before

  AKA Natalie Ellis, Née Myles

  (2007)

  “Hey, Ethan—”

  “Nat, Jesus, where—” His breath caught in his throat, an upsurge of emotion somewhere between relief and fear. “Whe
re are you?”

  She closed her eyes, the handset pressed to her ear. Traffic ripped by. A street she didn’t know the name of. A city she was passing through. The phone booth smelled of cigarettes and plastic. There was a small bag at her feet.

  “Natalie?”

  “I’m not coming back, Ethan.”

  She had to be strong, and she had to sell her hardness. All those years of repressed emotions, of having sawdust in her heart, and these last thirteen, with Ethan and the kids, were an earthquake. She had laughed, cried, and dreamed with them. She had loved like a supernova, and been vital for every second.

  “I’m leaving you,” she said.

  Her voice was a flatline. Not the merest blip, no hint of a heartbeat. It didn’t matter; Ethan heard the words, not the deadness with which they were delivered. He started to contest, as she knew he would, to plead, like any person who faced the unknown, saying that things were great between them, that they had everything to look forward to, and couldn’t . . . Jesus, Nat, couldn’t they at least talk—

  “Nothing to talk about,” she cut in. Cold. Cold. Cold. And then she told him a miserable lie, and prayed she’d never have to tell a worse one. “I don’t love you anymore.”

  She hadn’t thought it would come to this, because Jimmy—that reptile, that walking fucking cancer—was supposed to die. He’d been in a coma and on life support, yet he’d clawed his way out and continued to breathe—to get stronger, in fact. “You need a backup plan in case anything happens to me,” Karl had advised her, and for all her caution and intelligence, this was the best she could do: to leave her family, assume a new identity, and hole up in a different part of the country.

  She told Karl to make sure nothing happened to him. “Stay close to Jimmy. I need your eyes and ears. But be smart.” The years ticked along. Did they erode Karl’s vigilance, his cunning? He usually called her on the first of every month, but when August and September passed without contact, she started to worry.

  She gave him another week, then hit the internet. A report from the Altoona Mirror—found only minutes into her search—confirmed her fears. The headline alone had been enough.

  Altoona Resident Found Beaten, Drowned

  He didn’t squawk. Of that Lola was sure. Not Karl. Not ever. He’d suffered at Jimmy’s hands, like so many before him, but he never gave Lola up. If he had, Jimmy would have found her by now.

  But how long before Jimmy made the right connections, received accurate intelligence, and came knocking? He cast a broad net, and without Karl to keep her informed, Lola felt exposed. Worse, she felt that her family was exposed.

  Her other option was to go on the offensive, like she had in 1993. But she was too unpracticed for a close-quarters assault. She could hit Jimmy from long range with a high-power rifle, but that wasn’t exactly straightforward. To begin with, it would take weeks to learn his routine, which in turn would require getting dangerously close. Also, Lola would probably have to position herself in a built-up location. This wasn’t like shooting from the window of a book depository in 1963; modern police, with all their tech, would have her surrounded within minutes of her pulling the trigger.

  Every offensive measure required a talent she no longer possessed, or a risk she wasn’t willing to take. Of course, the surest way to keep her family safe was to give herself up. Failing that, she had to run.

  It broke her heart, though. It broke everything.

  “This can’t be happening,” Ethan said. Poor Ethan, who had no idea who she was, and how dark and deadly her past. She’d filled herself with lies and allowed them to leak out over the thirteen years of their marriage. “Please, Natalie. Come home. Whatever’s wrong, we’ll make it right.”

  Hard, she thought. Be hard.

  “Nat . . .”

  It was one word, and not even a full word. One syllable of her false name. Yet she heard the brokenness in it, like something made of sand, cracking, sifting between his fingers. She closed her eyes again and covered her mouth, because her own emotion wanted to spill from between her lips—the feelings that had reshaped her, that had moved like a plane over her rough edges. She could count on one hand the number of times she had cried: when Grandpa Bear had died, when Vince had died, when her children were born. Tears threatened now. Her chest bubbled and ached. She shook her head.

  Hard.

  She would not allow Ethan one iota of her heartbreak. She had to distance herself completely. No forwarding address. No weekend visits. It was a stony foundation upon which to rebuild—for all of them—but infinitely safer.

  “Your things are here,” Ethan said. “Clothes. Bathroom stuff. Books.” He drew a damp breath. She imagined him smearing tears away with the heel of his hand. “Everything.”

  “Nothing I need,” Lola said.

  There were a few essentials in the bag at her feet, some of it taken from a safe-deposit box that Ethan didn’t know about: her Baby Eagle and two boxes of ammo, a change of clothes, basic toiletries, $420 in cash, the faux-leather folder that Grandpa Bear had given her fifteen years ago containing two new identities (there had been three, but she’d just expired one of them). Lola had considered taking a few photographs of the children, but her heart would shatter every time she looked at them.

  Life had been easier without emotion. As it would be again.

  As if channeling her train of thought, Ethan said, “Your children are here.”

  Her chest throbbed. A hardy tear squeezed itself from her closed eye and raced along her cheekbone. She imagined Molly sleeping with her crutches beside the bed, and Brody, with his toys boxed away and his favorite rock band posters on the walls, yet still young enough to want the bedroom door ajar. They had closed their eyes on a normal world, and would open them to it being fractured.

  Hard.

  “I don’t need them, either,” Lola said, and there it was, only minutes later: a worse lie, still.

  Two cruisers barreled down the street she didn’t know the name of, all lights and sound. A digital billboard flashed hypnotically, selling first Taco Bell and then, ironically, cholesterol meds. Lola looked at her watch. The train to St. Louis left at 1:35. She didn’t think she’d settle in St. Louis, but she could shed Natalie Ellis’s skin there—become one of the two women she kept in the folder Grandpa Bear had given her.

  “You can’t do this over the phone, Natalie. A goddamn phone.” This was the first time Ethan had raised his voice. In fact, he’d seldom shouted in all their years together. He was gentle and bighearted. “I’m worth more than that.”

  “No,” she said. “You’re not.”

  Lola ended the call before he could say anything else, and stood for several long seconds staring at the grime and cigarette burns on the pay phone’s handset.

  Cold. Cold. Cold.

  She then picked up her bag, walked three blocks of whatever street this was to the train station, and boarded the 1:35 to St. Louis.

  On to the next life.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Jimmy had twice-weekly massages, regular mani-pedis, fine whiskey tastings, and poker nights (quality cigars required) with his associates. But the hour he spent every day in the gym would always be his favorite time.

  Music thumped from in-ceiling speakers, something loud and angry, to get the blood pounding. Jimmy applied ten-pound weights to each side of the barbell, bringing the total to seventy pounds. He curled eight reps, strict form, not swinging his back at all. He counted to twenty, then curled another five. Not bad for sixty-two.

  He looked at his reflection in one of the many mirrors, enjoying the way his muscles moved beneath the embroidery of scar tissue.

  “The Italian fucking Cat.”

  Jimmy was not a spiritual man, but he believed the universe followed certain lines. As he looked at his scarred body, he remembered the old neighborhood—Chase Street, specifically, behind Sicily Pizza. Mario Antonutti would sometimes bring out burned calzones or leftover slices, and there’d usually be a rabble of kids
hanging around to intercept those scraps before they hit the dumpster. Only this one time, Jimmy, maybe seven years old, was out back all by himself when the door opened and Mario came out with three-quarters of a Sicilian pie—a solid rectangular base, topped with spicy sauce and singed, salty pepperoni—and there must have been something wrong with it, but to Jimmy it looked like the greatest pizza in all of history. He sat cross-legged on the ground and wolfed down the first slice. Into his second slice, a cat leaped briskly onto a nearby trash can and watched him eat. Jimmy couldn’t stop looking at the cat. Its left eye was sealed from fighting, it had half of one ear missing, and its calico fur was punctuated with scar tissue. “Nobody fucks with you,” Jimmy said to the cat. “Even dogs run away.” The cat responded with a hiss that sounded like paper tearing. Jimmy smiled and nudged the box—with more than half the pizza remaining—toward the cat and they ate it together.

  * * *

  Another eight reps at seventy pounds. Then five more. Jimmy dropped the barbell. It thudded at his feet with a forceful sound. The veins across his chest and in his throat bulged. He circled the gym and flexed.

  “Nobody fucks with you.”

  He was not a big man, but he was strong. The son of an Italian steelworker, second-to-youngest in a household of twelve, he had to be strong. His old man would consistently drive him into the ground with the same force he’d use to shape steel, and Jimmy always popped back up. Sometimes he was hurt bad—a broken collarbone, six cracked ribs—but he rarely let it show and he never cried. Strength coursed through the Latzo DNA, as unequivocal as their olive coloring and brown eyes. “We were forged from the volcanic rock of Mount Etna,” his Uncle Victor used to claim. Another family story recounted that, in 1878, while working on the Brooklyn Bridge, Luca Latzo—Jimmy’s revered and respected grande nonno—threw four men to their deaths, reason unknown.

  * * *