At first, I pretend to sleep to make sure he drops off. He needs the rest. But it’s hard not to relax in his arms, and the pretending turns real.
Of course, he’s not next to me when I get up.
Putting on a robe, I look out the window. The garage door is open. I pad down there.
The Audi is still there, and the cover’s been removed from the other car to reveal its shining black paint and white pinstriping. It’s lifted from the floor and Dario’s legs stick out from the underside as he makes metal-on-metal noises. I assume he doesn’t know I’m standing here. I’m wrong.
“Can you get me the socket wrench?” he says from under the car. His grease-streaked hand sticks out from under the chassis, palm up expectantly.
I can only see him from the waist down, lying on a big sheet of cardboard. Greasy jeans. Black boots. T-shirt riding up just enough to reveal a tease of hair between his navel and his belt.
Stepping over him to the cloth where he’s laid out the parts and tools, I only take a moment to admire the promise of what’s under his jeans. “Which one is that?”
“The silver one that clicks.”
There are three, so I take a guess, handing him one that looks like an undersized lollipop on one side and a six-sided tube on the other. It must be right because I get no complaints, just the clicking noise he warned me about.
“Calipers.” His hand is out again. “Looks like a crocodile head.”
I try to pick up the tool, but it’s flatter than the wrench.
“Thank you.”
“What are you doing?”
“Been meaning to swap out the brakes for awhile.”
“I mean… why are you doing this now?”
“You can’t drive it with manual brakes.”
“I’m driving?” I say with both fear and excitement.
“Can you get me the light?” I give him the little flashlight. “’Ank-oo.”
Kneeling, I look under the car. It’s raised about a foot, still leaving very little headroom. Dario’s laid a bright light on the end of an extension cord near his crown, making a near-blinding halo around his head. It’s obviously still not enough. He’s got the flashlight in his mouth, trying to see around a corner.
I slide in next to him and take the flashlight from between his lips. At first, he’s disconcerted to find me there. Then I put the light on the calipers, and he turns his attention back to his work.
“I can’t teach you to drive before you go. There’s not enough time for that.” He takes a little sliver of metal from his chest pocket, jams it between two other pieces of metal I have no name for, and measures with the calipers. “But I can get you started.”
“I could drive the other one. The Audi?”
“This one’s cooler. Light me here.”
I move the flashlight where he wants. “What are you going to do now?”
“About?”
“The war. Or peace.”
“You’re not supposed to ask questions.”
“Rule one was always stupid,” I say. He turns his head in the tight space to look at me. The extension cord light is so bright, long eyelash shadows reach across his cheek. “They were all stupid actually. All the rules.”
“Keep it up. You’re going to get yourself punished.” The promise of his hurt makes my thighs tingle.
“Obedience? Cross that off the list.” I swipe the air with my finger. “The truth?” I swipe again.
“You want permission to lie?”
“I don’t need permission,” I say, leaning into him. “But making it a rule just made me want to get around it. Same with loyalty. You had to earn that.”
“Rule five is forever. Your orgasms are still mine, prima.”
“You can keep that one. But…” I pause to make sure I want to say this, and decide I feel safe enough to. “I think you need permission to be at war with my family.”
He turns toward me again. This time, the shadows reveal deeply concerned lines across his brow. I want to sketch the story they tell.
“Do I?”
“If you want me to help you.” I shrug as much as I can in that position. “I can get past doors in the church and the clinic. The rectory. All kinds of places.”
“So can I. Brute force. Pick the locks. Shoot them.”
“What if I got you in with a boop?” I press my thumb to his nose. “Like that.”
He looks away but doesn’t touch the brake. I can tell he wants to know more, but he won’t ask.
“I have thumbprint entry into my father’s office,” I add before he can tell me all the reasons why I shouldn’t be asking questions and he shouldn’t be asking permission. “Maybe you want to get into the fourth floor, or maybe the basement. You’ll be shooting every lock in the place. You’ll wish you had a set of keys, and I think you don’t.”
That’s not entirely true. I don’t know what to think, so I made a wild and improbable bet on his inability to do a thing. He doesn’t tell me I’m wrong. He doesn’t say anything. I feel my opportunity slipping away in the silence.
I continue, “You need me, and I’ll help you if I know your plan. I can get in so quick.”
He smiles. “Let me tell you about this quick job we did and how not quick it was.” He fidgets with the mechanics of the brakes. “Before I turned twenty, I learned petty shit doesn’t pay. There’s less chance of getting caught doing one big hit a year than a hundred poor assholes who’ll kill you before letting go of what little they have. If the job’s big enough to spread the take between a few guys, you’ll find some underpaid security guard with a sick kid and no insurance.”
He stops. Fidgets. Asks for the light at a different angle. I have a hundred questions already, but I don’t prod him. He trusts me or he wouldn’t tell me any of this.
“The Metropolitan Museum, on Fifth,” he says. “You know it?”
“We went once with class.”
“Really big, right?”
“Seems to be. We only went to the part with the coats of armor and swords.”
“Two and a quarter million square feet holds eight percent of the actual collection. There’s a public warehouse on Madison with a ton of shit and that’s the end of what they have… if you’re not looking. But if you know the right people, you know there’s another storage facility in Newark the size of a city block. Four stories high. Billions in art any schmuck can fence because the Met barely knows what they have in there.”
He goes silent again, but this time, I’m not so patient.
“You robbed that?”
“Nah. Wouldn’t touch it. But the one in Astoria? Where they hide the shit they picked up from a bunch of worthless Nazis and Blackshirts? They haven’t added a single thing to that warehouse since the sixties, and nothing’s come out. The weekend security guy showed me the sign-in books.”
“Did he have a sick kid and no insurance?”
“He puts his daughter through three years of college. Then his wife gets sick. Can’t work. They made too much the year before to get more aid, so…” He waves away the details I barely understand, and I’m grateful. For one, I can’t figure out how you can make too much to afford something, but I’m also not used to a father allowing a daughter to go to college, much less pay for it. Dario continues before I get too lost in the weeds. “He told a friend, and it got to Nico, who brought Samir to me. He’d let us in for a cut. No-brainer. We grab small shit. In and out. Quick.”
“I get it. If I help you, it won’t be a quick thing because of this other quick thing that wasn’t quick.”
“No. It was. Boom, boom. In and out. Done.”
“That’s good, right?”
Dario will not be rushed to a judgment of how good or bad it was.
“Some of it was garbage. Some was worth a fortune. We fenced it all. But Nico, he hadn’t aged out of the system. He had these foster parents on the Upper West Side. Lawyers, and loaded. He saw everything money could buy, and he was greedy. I was too, but for him, because I missed him. So he told them he was staying with me for the weekend, and we went again. Same plan with Samir, but just me and Nico. It went perfectly. We were in. But when we tried to get out, Samir wasn’t sitting in his little box watching Shark Tank. I knew it had gone bad as soon as I saw Lester Holt on the TV. So we backed up into the warehouse, and we hid.”
“What happened to Samir?”
He shrugs. “We’d left our phones behind so we couldn’t be tracked. It was the smart thing. The safe thing. But without them… for all we knew, Samir was dead or fired. Maybe he’d set us up. All we could do was crawl under a rack and wait. We counted the shift changes by when the weekend guards came around with their flashlights.” He wipes the shiny disk. “We decided that if we died rich and never got revenge on the Colonia, that would be a failure. From then on, it wasn’t about money, but the next day, we weren’t even sure if we’d get out alive at all.”
“How long was it?”
“Friday night to Samir’s next shift on Monday night. There was no water, so we stopped pissing ourselves after the first day. We couldn’t even make spit. Nico went into that warehouse a little bitch and came out a grown man.” He hand-tightens a bolt that doesn’t budge. “I don’t want that for you. You’re already a woman.”
“Look, whatever happened, it won’t happen again. You’re smarter now. You can predict what can go wrong.”
“No, Sarah. Samir’s wife needed him. He got a replacement for three hours and figured he’d be back, but she ended up in the hospital and it took all night. It was too risky to show up on a day he wasn’t working, so he showed up when he was supposed to. When my brother didn’t come back on Sunday, his fosters went batshit. They didn’t let me see him for two years.”
“That, you should have known was going to happen.”
“Once the unexpected happens, Sarah, the consequences get predictable… and they’re all bad.”
“Nonsense.” In this cramped space, overreach seems within bounds. There’s no room for polite little dishonesties. I’m just saying what’s on my mind. “All of that was preventable.”
He leans back as far as he can, as if he needs to see me from farther away to figure out if I’m serious.
“Isn’t there a way to carry a phone you can’t track?” I say. “Like shutting it off or something? And you knew Samir’s wife had health issues. You didn’t ask if he was in the habit of leaving his post? Or if she tended to call with problems in the middle of the night? And you had no extra men, no lookouts… no one for just-in-case who could have been like, ‘Hey, Samir, please don’t just leave without pulling out Dario and Nico, because they have no water and didn’t even pack a granola bar.’ I mean, what did you expect when you were so reckless?” When he doesn’t answer, but stares at me under the glare of the light bulb, I can’t help myself. “And as far as Nico’s parents go, I don’t care if they were foster or not, they were responsible for him. I promise you, our children are not coming and going as they please. Spending the weekend with who?” I scoff. “How old were you, Dario? Out of your teens, even? Barely a man. My God, money couldn’t buy them good sense. What did they think you two were up to?”
He blinks so slowly that for a split second, I think he fell asleep under the car. But he opens his eyes, grips the edge of the chassis, braces his arms, and slides out. I start to wriggle myself in that direction but stop squirming when I feel him grip my ankles. He slides me out along the cardboard, and when I’m out, he helps me up.
“You’re staying here. So you’re safe, yeah. But also.” Reaching into the engine, he removes a cap. “I don’t want you to have weight on you. I’d rather you hate me than drag around guilt you had a part in something you didn’t want to happen.” He pops a yellow top from a jug of blue liquid. “So no thumbprint. Not a single boop.” He pours the liquid from the jug into the hole he uncapped, silent, deep in his thoughts until the container is empty. Still pensive, he screws the cap back on. “And we can’t wait any longer. I’m going to kill your father.”
He waits for me to object, but I do not.
“I can get you the keys to everything.” My hesitation comes from wondering if I should hesitate, but there’s no need to. Dario and I have to win this if we want to live in peace. “If it’s useful to not shoot your way in and out.”
“It could be.” He’s not exactly distrustful—but managing his expectations. He tosses the jug into the trash can. “Tell me.”
“Can you get into the church again? You probably won’t be able to go the same way as last time.”
“There’s another way.” He steps toward me with his shoulders at an angle, as if he’s not ready to believe I can deliver what I promise. “The skylight over the back stairs.”
I try to imagine the safest pathway through, but I need to engage my eyes and hands. There’s a thick, square pencil on the tool bench. I stick it behind my ear. “Let me think.”
I leave the garage and pace to the living room with my mind in the halls and rooms of my youth. I feel them. The thick air, the smell of mildew in one place, and the constantly changing smell of food cooking in another. The broken and the repaired. The old and the new. I am physically present in my mind and mentally detached from my body.
Grabbing the arm of the couch, I pull it away from the wall.
Dario’s behind me. If he touches me, or speaks, the spell will be broken.
Sliding the pencil from my ear, I make a line. Then another. I narrate what I draw. Here are stairs. Here is a hallway. This is a door that’s behind a thumbprint, and here’s one waiting for a key or clever hand.
“This…” I make an X then a circle around it. “Is a maintenance room, and next to it is the site director’s office, which is a thumbprint lock on a steel door. There’s a cabinet on this wall.” Tap tap… then I draw another X. “The keys to everything are inside it.”
“What does everything mean?”
“Once, I forgot the keys to our apartment. I got sent down here for the spare set.”
“Your personal apartment? With your father?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what else is in there?”
“No. Can I finish?”
“Go on.”
“So the cabinet has a combination lock. But there’s a bathroom back here.” My cheek’s pressed to the plaster as I tap the boxes I drew. I switch my focus from the pencil to the man leaning his shoulder on the wall. “But it’s from the original construction, and every wall cabinet in that building is connected to another in the adjoining room, separated by a tin sheet.” I push off the wall and stand straight. “So if you go into the bathroom, the medicine cabinet’s on the other side. Unscrew the back with one of those fancy tools you have.” I toss the pencil on the table. “Take the keys. Do what you have to do.”
He comes to me, hands out, and holds my face still while he breathes me in from chin to temple.
“You’d do this for me?” He’s still long enough for me to look into his dark-webbed eyes.
“I’m doing it for me.”
“This can’t be undone.” His whisper is a warning.
“I’ll wait for you here.”
“First you drive, then you wait.”
I nod, leaning even closer to him. Our lips meet, and with a kiss, I betray my family and my father.
Dario takes the car out to make sure the brakes work the way they’re supposed to, but before he gets out of the garage, he winds up stopping so short the tires stretch to ovals.
I rush over to his window. “Are you all right?”
“Perfect. Let me get the fluid going.”
I watch, closing my sweater around me as he takes the car around the driveway a couple of times, stopping and starting until he’s satisfied. Finally, he parks in front of me.
Putting my hand on the top of the door, I lean into his open window. “Is the fluid going?”
He opens the door but doesn’t get out. “Let’s do this.” He spreads his legs and pats the leather seat between them. “Come on.”
After a moment of suspicion, I let him guide me into the front seat with him. It’s set back far enough to let me lean comfortably into his chest and take in the dials and levers around the steering wheel. He takes my hands and places them on the top of the steering wheel.
“Is this how everyone learns?”
“The wheel is a clock. Hands at ten and two.”
“You hold the wheel by the bottom.” I put my hands where he does.
“Forget what I do.” He moves my hands where he wants them.
“Sometimes you don’t even use both.”
“Put your feet on top of mine.”
Arguing about the steering is getting me nowhere, so I find his feet with my own. We’re attached everywhere with pressure at the extremities.
“Okay,” I say. “What now?”
“Relax.”
“I am relaxed.”
“Relax more.” He kisses the back of my neck. “Close your eyes.”
“What? How—”
“Do it.”
“Fine.”
“Now breathe so deep I feel it.”
I do it, taking in air until my back presses against him, then I exhale.
“Do you feel me?” he asks softly.
I do feel him. Over my hands. Under my feet. Breathing against my neck. I feel his growing attention at my lower back.
“I feel you.” I wiggle against him. “There.”
“That’s for later.” He moves my foot with his. “This is stop. This is go. Gear shift is here.”
“Remember that time I drove already?”
“The time you almost killed someone? Yes.” He puts my hand on the knob-ended stick behind the wheel. “The car is locked when it’s in park. Push stop.”
My foot sinks on the stop pedal.
“Then you can go from park.” He clicks down. “To reverse.” The car jolts. “Neutral is the same as park without the lock, and finally, drive.” The car jerks in the other direction.
“Drive is after reverse,” I note. “That makes no sense.”
I feel, more than hear, his laugh. “Open your eyes.”
I do. The world looks the same, but he’s with me, making sure I don’t fail.
“Now, go.”
This time, obeying him is easy. He guides my turns, my stops, my feet on the pedals. His touch starts out hard and controlling but softens to the power of a feather floating down to the ground.
I’m doing it—actually doing it—and it’s fantastic.