Dario leads me through the house. He names every space we pass, opening doors to show me that I can enter the second bathroom, the second and third bedroom, the sunroom, and the mud room without tripping an ear-splitting alarm. The garage, the front door, and his office all have biometric locks that open with a fingerprint.
So does a door under the stairs, where he stops and uses his thumbprint to open it.
“We have those kinds of locks.” I’m delighted to already know a thing.
“Where?”
“Whenever they update a door in Precious Blood, they put one in.”
“I prefer when they’re backward.” He indicates I should go through. “Go on.”
The overhead light goes on, revealing a short-ceilinged hall. It leads to a small, dark room with TV monitors showing empty halls, alleyways, the house we’re in right now, the gate at the end of the drive. Flickering shots of the surrounding forest from every angle.
“You had something like this in Manhattan.”
“I have them all over.”
Reaching behind and above me, he makes something beep and sigh. I look up at an open flap of wall. He removes a flat device from the hidden compartment and places it on the counter.
As he sets it up, I look at the screens. I recognize some of the places from the other security room. This one has a path around the house we’re in, a service road out the back, some forest, and a gate that’s more utilitarian than the cast-iron one in the front. Garbage pails are lined up next to it.
“Where’s this?” I ask.
“The service entrance.” He keeps his attention on his setup. “Out back.”
“Huh.” I get closer to the screen. There’s a tiny gap between the hedge and the gate. “Is it open?”
He checks it immediately. “Fuck. Good eye.”
“What is it?”
“Garbage day.” He looks down again. “That shit’s gonna stop right now.”
The light from the device’s screen shines on his face, and I see what I hadn’t seen before. He hasn’t been sleeping. I lay my palm on the back of his neck. I don’t know how to fix this for him.
On the screen, a rectangle appears. I recognize it.
“I put my thumb there.” I hold out my thumb and he takes it gently.
“You did this for Precious Blood.”
“Yes. To get to the food stores. The big kitchen in the basement. Here and there.”
He presses my thumb inside the rectangle, rolling it back and forth. Red swirls appear in the shape of a thumbprint, getting more and more defined until the device beeps and a blue checkmark appears.
“So I can open which door?”
“The pantry’s in the garage.” He taps buttons, swipes away screens, types on a screen-bound keyboard. “And all the interior doors should work for the lady of the house.”
“Oh, I have a title now.”
A little smile teases the corner of his mouth. “I have to restrict your access to the front gate. It’s not because you’re a prisoner. You should be here with me because you want to be, but if you don’t want to be here, I still can’t let you leave.”
“How’s that different from being a prisoner?”
“You have to trust me.”
“I don’t want to run away. I want to go to the store.”
“I’m not worried about you.” A lock of hair drops over his forehead. “Come, I’ll show you.”
He leads me out of the little room to a door near the kitchen and gestures at the keypad. “Go on. Let’s test it out.”
I press my thumb to it, the way I do for some of the important places in the church and rectory. A little light turns from red to green. Dario shoulders the door open.
“It sticks.” With a flick of the light switch, he ushers me into a large, concrete-floored room with a covered car next to the Audi we drove from Manhattan. A tool bench sits against a side. The wall against the house is lined with cabinets. Dario opens one side of a double door, revealing shelving filled with cereal and cracker boxes. Flour. Sugar. Pasta. Cans stacked on cans.
“Well, it looks pretty stocked,” I say. “We should have enough for dinner.”
He opens the cabinet next to it. This one has keys in the door and half a dozen rifles hung vertically against the back.
“Oh,” I say, reaching out. “What—”
“No touching.” He slaps my hand away. “They’re loaded.”
“Are you supposed to have loaded guns lying around?”
“No one’s supposed to be in this house but people who know better. And now you do. Because I trust you, and you’re not my prisoner.” He scans the rows of keys dangling from the interior door. “If I need to use a gun here, in this house, then every second counts.”
“That’s your reason for not making peace?”
“It’s reason enough.” He snaps a set of keys off the interior door. The keychain says MET 5th AVE. “Everything is now a risk. Our life is land mines and armor with weaknesses we won’t know about until it’s too late. We’ll never be some nice, happy couple living on a ranch. But soon you’ll know how to use these rifles. You’ll know how to drive this car.” He holds up the keys and reaches across me to the car cover, pulling it off partway to reveal shiny black paint. “You’ll know what to do, no matter what.”
His phone chimes. He looks at the screen and puts it away.
“You have to go?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“Past one of the screaming doors?”
He looks at my hands and I realize I’ve been wringing them so hard the skin is red. He takes them.
“My palms are all sweaty.” I try to pull away, he won’t let me.
“I made you scared.”
“I’m being silly.” I squeeze his dry hands with my wet ones. “We’re in a fortress and I’m as safe as you can make me.”
“Listen to me. Every day you’re here, you’re going to learn how to be as safe as you can make yourself.”
“I don’t even know what I’m nervous about.” I fold our hands together so our scars match. “Will you be home for dinner?”
It’s such a wife question that the tightness of his mouth breaks into a looser smirk. “Wouldn’t miss it.”
The kitchen is infuriating. Every cabinet looks like a wall. There’s a drawer that’s actually a refrigerator. A faucet behind what I think might be the stove, except there are no burners or coils. A piece of counter slides over to reveal a bank of buttons with little pictures as if I’m a toddler who can’t read, not a grown woman who was reading grownup books before anyone else in my cohort.
Out here, in the world, that’s not enough. I don’t know what I don’t know.
Some buttons work the lights. Others open window blinds. The vents blow warm air. Then cool. A television pops up out of the counter. There’s a news show on. I’ve seen boring television news before, but infrequently. A woman in a red jacket looks at the audience—me, everyone—and talks about a murder, a robbery, a panda.
Why is this so surprising?
Either this television is different, or I’m different.
I comb through the cabinets, making a list. I need to check the garage pantry for something I’m sure I saw. Pressing my thumb against the pad like Dario did makes a red light turn green, but the door is stuck.
“I have that,” a man says as he enters. He’s in a black suit without a tie. His hair is slicked back and his face is cleanly shaven, but he has a five o’clock shadow at noon. He presses his thumb on the pad and the door unlocks like a sigh. “I’m Benny. This blue button is me.” He shows me a little blue circle on a panel of buttons. “Whatever you want… just press it and my phone rings. All right?”
“Thank you.”
“I’m sorry about this.”
“I’m used to sticky doors.” I hope he doesn’t feel as if he has to explain that to me.
He shoulders the door open the way Dario did. The cool, musty air of the garage streams into the house.
Will Benny follow? Is it okay to even talk to him? What if he follows me into the garage? And we’re alone? And Dario sees us? Will he hurt Benny?
“Thank you.” I try to put on airs, hoping he hears the dismissal in my tone.
He nods and steps back. “When should I come for your list?”
“Half an hour?”
“I’ll be back then.” With a short bow of deference, he’s gone.
No harm done. I’ve dodged a hundred bullets in five minutes. Or none. I can’t figure out anything anymore.
I get to the pantry inventory and stuff the expired and stale into a plastic bag I find under the tool bench. Then I reorder the shelves, taking down the things I want for the inside kitchen.
Being alone with Benny wasn’t a big deal. Dario wouldn’t have hired him if he didn’t trust him.
I don’t remember being this nervous when I was alone with Vito and Gennaro in the suite. Thinking back, I’m sure I wasn’t. Ripped away from my life and stuck into a world that felt completely alien, I was too afraid of death or rape to concern myself with what made Dario angry. My mind was too paralyzed with what was different to realize all the things that were the same.
We were taught that outsider women were as unrestricted as men—having dangerous jobs and loud voices but walking around in a constant state of terror. Grandma said outsider men do not protect their women.
But when I press a button near the television, the images change, the stories change, and I see how much I have to learn about being a woman.