Chapter 10 - The Garden City Road
The preschool at Saint Jude’s Academy sat behind a low wall of red Pennsylvania brick, thirty yards back from the maple-lined avenue in Garden City.
It was three in the afternoon on a bright, freezing Tuesday in late January. The autumn leaves that had been blowing across the asphalt on the day Isabelle died were long gone, buried beneath four inches of packed, gray crust that had turned to slush where the station wagons were idling by the curb.
I sat in the passenger seat of the dark blue Cadillac.
Grace Bennett was driving. Her left arm was out of the sling now, though she still moved the elbow with a slight, stiff hesitation when she turned the wheel hard into the curb. She wore an ordinary camel-hair coat she had bought at the mall in Roosevelt Field with the first check from the pier corporation, and her brown hair was tied back with a simple black ribbon.
In the back seat, Nora was asleep with her head in Olivia’s lap. Sophie was tracing circles on the steamed-up glass of the window with the tip of her mitten, her small tongue tucked into the corner of her lips in fierce concentration.
"You don't have to get out, Dominic," Grace said, her hands resting at ten and two on the steering wheel, her slate eyes watching the double doors of the school where the nuns in their black habits were beginning to shepherd the children toward the cars.
"I know," I said.
"They haven't been on this street since October of twenty-one."
"I know that too," I said.
I looked at the brick archway.
It had been repainted. The white trim around the iron gates was fresh, the gold leaf on the letters—*Suffer the Little Children to Come Unto Me*—had been touched up by some parishioner with a ladder and a pot of sizing. There was no mark on the curb where Isabelle’s car had jumped the flagstones. There was no lead in the trunk of the oak tree where the driver’s third shot had gone wild before he cleared the gate.
Olivia looked up from Nora’s hair. Her eyes met mine in the rearview mirror.
"Daddy?"
"Yeah, Livvy?"
"Is this where Mommy’s car stopped?"
The air inside the Cadillac became very thin, very cold, smelling of wool and the lemon lozenges Grace kept in the glove box.
"Yes," I said. "This is where it stopped."
Sophie stopped tracing her circles on the glass. She turned around in her seat, her small knees tucked under her, looking at the brick wall with that flat, ancient seriousness she had inherited from my mother.
"She dropped my green mitten," Sophie said. "The one with the little bell on the thumb. She told the man that if he touched my coat, she would cut his throat with the tire iron."
I closed my eyes for two seconds.
Just two seconds. Long enough to see Isabelle standing by the open door of the station wagon, her scarf whipped by the October wind, her teeth bared like a wolf defending her litter, screaming at two men with guns while sixty mothers in fur coats hid behind their steering wheels and prayed for the police to come from the boulevard.
She hadn't cried.
She hadn't asked for Dominic Romano. She hadn't mentioned the commission, or the docks, or the sixty men who carried iron in Brooklyn because they were afraid of her husband.
She had just reached for the tire iron.
"She was very brave, Sophie," Grace said from the front seat. Her voice was not gentle; it was hard, solid, like a foundation stone that wouldn't move an inch if the whole house fell down around it. "She was braver than any man your father knows."
Sophie nodded once. A short, definitive motion of her chin.
"I know," the child said. "She told me that before she got out. She said, *Sophie, don't you ever let an old dog tell you which way to walk in the grass.*"
Olivia looked out the window at the nuns.
"Can we go home now, Daddy?" she asked. "Grace said we could make the apple dumplings with the brown sugar if we finished the spelling words."
I looked at Grace.
Her slate-gray eyes didn't turn to me; they remained fixed on the road ahead, where the traffic on the avenue was beginning to thin as the commuters headed west toward the city.
"Put the car in gear, Grace," I said.
She dropped the lever into drive.
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The heavy Cadillac pulled away from the red brick wall without a sound, its tires crunching into the slush, turning east toward the Long Island trees where the snow was still white on the hemlocks and the gates were open wide enough for three little girls to see the water from the porch.
***
