It was not quite dawn. The Bible peddlers wouldn’t be making their rounds as yet. Drunks might sleep in the stairwell, but they wouldn’t come up knocking. Jimmy Shu, his landlord, avoided most encounters requiring English, and his probation officer called first now, they were pals.
At the door he called out, “Who is it?” pressing his head to the doorjamb to listen. A snuffling, fleshy murmur answered back. He couldn’t tell if it said, “It’s me,” or, “Come see.” He cracked the door.
Her eyes stared out from deep in their sockets, small and unreal. One eye flared red, beyond bloodshot. Swelling puffed her jaw. A long scab flecked her lower lip.
“I had that long, hard talk with Frank,” she murmured.
Taking her hand he led her inside and locked the door. Shel deferred to his touch without remark. He studied her briefly, surmising what had happened and what, to his mind, should be done about it.
He told her to wait and disappeared to the back of the flat. When he returned he was carrying his camera and arming the flash. He positioned her against the white wall and told her to lift her hair. She obeyed, revealing bloody scratches and a bruised knot on her neck.
It’s time, she thought, time to listen to him. It may well have been time all along.
Abatangelo shot five frames, told her to turn front, shot a close-up of her scabbed mouth, her ballooning cheek, her crimped eye. He used Plus-X in addition to a filter, to give the reds a disturbing saturation. She displayed her arms, bruised black where Frank had held her or come down with the gun butt. At Abatangelo’s urging she turned to face the wall again, naked from the waist up, exhibiting the purple-yellow welts across her back. She explained in time that, right before he’d tried to crush her skull with a hammer, she’d managed to groin him, coldcock him with his own gun and scramble to her truck.
“I don’t want to get even,” she said as he disarmed the flash. “There’s no point.”
“This isn’t getting even,” he told her, removing the roll of film and pocketing it. “This is insurance.” He took a blanket from the couch, shook it free of cracker crumbs and wrapped it around her. Setting her down in his only armchair, he tucked the blanket about her knees and told her to stay put.
In the bathroom, he turned the space heater on high and threw open the hot water spigot, filling the tub, tossing in every towel he found except a few he’d need for drying. Moving to the kitchen, he opened the freezer and dug from behind bagged peas and carrots a fifth of Stolichnaya embedded in hoarfrost.
Carrying two glasses and the icy vodka bottle, he returned to Shel. Guiding her up from her chair, he led her down the hall and set her on the edge of the tub. Steam purled about the room, coating the mirror. Moisture frothed Abatangelo’s skin, he opened his shirt and wiped his face with his wrist. He drew Shel’s blanket away, undid her coat, and as he continued to undress her she stared at him with weary bafflement.
“Now that there’s a record on film of what he did to you,” he explained, “we can concentrate on getting the bruises down.”
He poured her a full glass of vodka and told her to drink it. She did. He poured her another. Her body sagged dreamily and she regarded him with sweet, tired eyes. He took her in his arms and knelt beside the steaming water, saying, “This is going to hurt.”
Submerged, her body convulsed. She struggled, whimpering. He refused to let her out, even as the water scalded them both. He gathered the steaming towels from around her, wrapped them tight across her back, her throat, her face. He wrung or pressed them against her skin until she screamed from pain, the sound echoing against the tile. He reassured her with jokes, constantly moving. He sang the few funny songs he knew, gleaned from opera buffa and cartoons. “You’re looking better,” he said, over and over.
In time he slowed his rhythm, letting the towels sit on her body longer. Where it wasn’t puffed or discolored, her skin had the same smoothness he remembered from years before. The hair of her muff rose up softly in the water. Her nipples flared red in the heat.
“I realize,” he began, “that this is a sensitive issue, and you don’t have to answer, but I was wondering if he- ”
“No,” she said, anticipating the question. She sat hunched in the bathwater, shrouded in dripping towels. “I nailed him before it got that far. Besides which, he was cranked out of his skull. What he wanted, was me dead.”
She looked at him with an expression that said, And that is that.
“And now you’re here,” he offered.
“A little the worse for wear.”
The water cooled, Shel settled herself back, eyes closed. So this is where the future starts, she thought. With a beating. A scalding dunk in the healing tub. She watched as Abatangelo wiped flecks of blood from the porcelain. Regarding her body, she detected swelling here and there, but he’d rid her scratches of infection; they were neat white seams. Her skin flushed. My Little Miracle Worker, she thought. Unaware that she was watching, he searched inside her purse until he came across a perfume bottle. He added several drops to the tub water.
“I’m assuming you’ll tell me,” she said finally, flicking tepid water at him, “where it was you picked up your medicine.”
He sat down on the floor and peeled off his shirt and trousers. In only his shorts, T-shirt and scapular he answered her finally with, “You grow up Italian, you learn how to take a beating.”
She shook her head and laughed. “That’s an answer?”
Abatangelo shrugged and poured himself three fingers of vodka.
Shel said, “And after your daily lesson- your mother, she did this for you?”
“No,” he said.
Her eyes softened. “Who?”
“Aunt Nina. My father’s sister. She was the designated guilt bearer of the family.”
She watched him turn away, busy himself. Until you took over, she thought, thinking better of saying it out loud. There simply was no limit to the burden he’d shoulder, as long it was for someone he loved. And if there was one thing to be said for Daniel Sebastian Abatangelo, she thought, it was this: The man loved.
“You look good,” she told him.
He shrugged and drank.
“No, don’t be like that. You look good.”
Her words slurred from the swelling. She eased back, closing her eyes again. The ridiculous songs he’d sung for her echoed in her head, making her smile. And yet a suspicion came over her quickly- tomorrow would never redeem today, not even with Danny there. The future did not start here after all, just more of the same. I am, she thought, depressed. Her heart sank in an utterly familiar way and she looked at Abatangelo as though to ask him to stop it, stop this feeling.
“Hey,” she whispered. He did not hear her.
She pictured Frank reeling room to room, clutching his head, rehearsing his sotted apologies, waiting for her to reappear so he could shower them on her. God help me, she thought. Is there a word in the language, she wondered, in any language, for someone as hell-bent as I’ve been to do the right thing, someone committed to real charity, not lip service, the Good Samaritan and all that, someone who put her own life aside to care for someone else, some lowly forgotten other, the least of my brethren- is there a word for someone who does all that, does it for years, only to see it crushed in three weeks’ time, carried away by a bitter wind of insanity, cruelty, and death? Yeah, she thought, there’s a word. And it’s nothing grand or tragic. The word is “depressed.”
A thread of bile slithered up into her throat. Abatangelo eyed her curiously as she spat toward the toilet.
“Freshen that up?” he asked, nodding to her glass.
She worked her tongue to rid her mouth of the taste of her sputum. “Keep it cold, keep it coming,” she said, holding out her glass.
Abatangelo obliged, the liquor poured happily. “Thank you,” she said.