Sophie's Last Stand

“I want something new. Something fresh, where I don’t have to feel ashamed just walking around in my own neighborhood. I don’t want to live in the subdivision with you guys. I don’t want to bust up what you’ve got going with Ma and Pa. I just want to be somewhere where people love me.”

Darlene was crying now. She looked up at the broken-down house and back to me. “Okay,” she said, her voice soft with tears. “I get it. If this is what you want, at least have it inspected. Bring Joey and Pa over—let them check it out, too. And no matter what,” she said, straightening up and becoming her know-it-all self, “don’t pay the asking price. This dump has probably been on the market forever. Lowball ’em.”

I threw my arms around her chunky shoulders and hugged her. “Thanks, honey. Don’t worry. It’ll work out fine, you’ll see.”

We turned away then, walking back toward the car and jabbering away about shutters and paint colors. I was so lost in my new house trance that I almost missed it, the little prickle of awareness that made me look up and stare out ahead of us.

Mr. Wonderful from the chapel stood in the middle of the sidewalk, the folded up card table in one strong hand and two Scouts by his other side. His smile seemed to reach out and cover me. His presence felt like an electrical current that arced from his body into mine. I had the foolish urge to run to him and say, “Hey, guess what? I’m going to buy that old house around the corner.” But of course, that would be crazy. So instead I looked away, kept on babbling to Darlene and walked right past him.

“Okay,” she said, when we were a half a block away, “what in the hell was that?”

“What?”

“Don’t do that,” she said. “You know what. That guy. What was with you and that guy? How do you know him?”

“I don’t.”

“Sophie, that look, that energy between you two. You know him.”

“No, really, I don’t. I just bumped into him, that’s all.”

Darlene sighed. “That was fate,” she said. “He is your destiny and you walked right past him.”

“Like a fish needs a bicycle, Darlene,” I said.

“Start peddling,” Darlene said. “’Cause, honey, that was some powerful karma, if you ask me.”

“I didn’t. It wasn’t. And I don’t want any complications in my life.”

Darlene was muttering to herself. It sounded like she was saying, “We’ll see. We’ll just see about that.”

I looked down at the brochure from the dream house and forced my attention onto the things I could control in my life. I could make this dream happen. I could turn a pile of wood and weeds into a home. But turning a smile into a relationship, now that was just plain foolish. At least the house was a sure deal. A house doesn’t vanish like a puff of smoke. A house is real. You can reach out and stroke the wood, feel the walls solid and sure. A house is what it is; it doesn’t lie. A house doesn’t write letters from prison saying you’ve ruined its life. A house doesn’t threaten to hunt you down and kill you.

Chapter 2

M y brother, Joey, is a poet. I don’t know if Pa will ever recover from this. If Joey didn’t look and act so normal on the outside, I think Pa might’ve disowned him. As it is, Pa, the retired ironworker, just ignores the poetry part and tries to believe that Joey’s simply an English teacher, a college professor. Each year, when Joey’s newest book comes out, Ma carefully lines it up with the others on the top row of the bookshelf, and there it stays, never read by Pa and misunderstood by Ma.

Joey, for his part, doesn’t spout off rhymes or stare into space all misty-eyed like Darlene. Joey plays rugby on Saturday afternoons. He roughhouses with his kids, is openly affectionate with his wife and can fix anything. Pa holds this out as incontrovertible evidence that Joey is somehow just passing through a phase with his writing.

“Poetry, schmoetry,” Pa says. “He don’t mean nothing by it.”

Ma’s kind of flattered. It appeals to the well-hidden, romantic side of her personality. “He’s writing about growing up,” she says, like this is a tribute.

I’ve read Joey’s stuff, the stuff he doesn’t show our parents. Believe me, it is not a tribute. He talks about all the things we good Italians don’t mention, like the brutality of growing up Catholic, or the pain of living poor when the layoffs happen and the jobs don’t come.

Joey feels everything. He cried when Angela stood holding her father’s arm in the back of the church, right before she walked down the aisle and became his wife. He sobbed when his first baby, Emily, was born and he held her in his arms. He cried when the second baby, Joseph Jr., arrived two years later and cried yet again when the third baby, Alfonse, completed the trio. He laughs hard, he plays hard and he loves his family, all of us, more than we can ever truly know. I watch Joey so I see all of this, but my parents, they miss out sometimes when they don’t allow themselves to see the real Joe.

It was Joey who saw the dream in my old house. Joey who convinced Pa that this would be okay, that we would all pitch in and it would actually be fun, a family thing. He showed up for the inspection with Pa in the car, the two of them ready to find fault with my future acquisition. Instead, Joey wound up rubbing his hand lovingly along the old banister, kneeling down to show Pa the strength in the ancient heart pine floors, and crawling up under the rafters in the attic to feel the “bones” of my new home. It was Joey who won Pa over, and Joey who cheered me on when I had doubts.

“Soph, look,” he said, his fingers tracing the pattern in an etched glass window, “you can’t find detail like this anymore. It’s art. Oh, kid, you have scored here. What a deal!”

Joey didn’t let me back down on my dream, not for one minute. “You’re a Mazaratti, Soph,” he said. “Look at you—you divorced that piece of crap husband, you took your name back, you remembered where you come from and now you’ll be where you belong—with family, starting over.”

He drove the rental truck up to Philly with me that very week, loaded my belongings and waved goodbye to the old neighborhood as we pulled up onto I-95 heading south.

“Don’t look back,” he said. “I never have. I don’t miss it and I didn’t leave half the baggage you’re dumping. I say good riddance to bad rubbish, Soph. Step out there, make yourself a life and don’t worry about Philly ’cause Philly ain’t gonna worry about you.”

It was also Joe who convinced Ma that the reason I didn’t move into the planned community with them and Darlene was because I had a mission to teach inner city kids and needed to be close to my future students. Now this was all bullshit, but Ma bought it on account of it was Joey doing the sales pitch.

So it made sense then that it was Joey I called when I got into trouble—big trouble. I called him at his community college office, before I called Pa and before I could control my emotions. I called him not because I didn’t know what to do and he did, I called him because he would know what to say. He would know how to put the picture back in focus without shattering the lens.

“Joey,” I said, when he came to the phone, “you gotta get over here, quick.”

“What’s wrong?” Joey’s voice was strong and deep and, most of all, calm.

“I was…I was working in the backyard….” I clutched the cell phone, pressing it to my ear. I kept gulping, swallowing, standing there in the weeds, staring at the ground and trying not to lose control. “You know, hacking at those vines so I could get to the trash pile and haul it out to the bin.”

“Yeah?” Joey didn’t get impatient like Pa would’ve done; he let me tell the story in my own time and manner.

“I hit something, Joe, with the machete, and when I did…” I swallowed very hard, looked at the long, thin blade stuck where it had landed, and tried to continue. “It, like, sank into something—you know, something soft?”

“Sophie,” Joe said, “tell me about it.”

“Joey, there’s someone dead in my backyard. I was just chopping weeds and I hit her. Joey, I think I might’ve killed somebody.”

I heard him exhale. “I’m coming,” he said, and hung up.

I stood there as if the gravity of the universe was pinning me to the planet, and stared at the body in front of me. If I’d really thought about it, I would’ve realized that she was probably dead before I hit her. How else could she have come to my backyard, rolled up in dark green plastic and positioned herself beneath bushes and weeds, waiting for my impending discovery? Who alive or conscious would wait for death like that?

Besides, there was no blood when I hit her. I mean, I knew, instantly, that I’d hit something that was flesh and blood. I shuddered because I could still feel the initial hit and then the sinking in of the blade. I’d knelt down, tugged at the plastic and fell backward as it gave in my hand, revealing the slim arm of a woman, the side of her body exposed to the bright morning sunlight.

That’s when I’d called Joe. Now I looked back at her and realized how I’d known she was dead. It was the paleness of her skin, an ashy-gray tone that live bodies just don’t have. The machete blade stuck upright from the middle of her chest, but there was no blood. I reached down nonetheless and touched her forearm. It was cool, even on a hot summer’s morning. She was definitely dead.

I lifted the cell phone once again and punched in 9-1-1. I drew in my breath and forced myself to say the words slowly and clearly. “My name is Sophie Mazaratti, I live at 618 West Lyndon Street and I have just found a dead woman in my backyard.”

It didn’t take much beyond that to get the ball rolling. The police station is only two blocks away. I live in the highest crime area in town. Three cruisers were in my driveway before I could hang up. The officers found me still rooted to the spot, the cell phone clutched in my hand and the body sprawled out in front of me.

“Jesus,” the first one said.

I crossed myself and turned around to face him. He looked like a kid, like he wasn’t old enough to shave. His eyes were huge when he saw the body, and he stopped just as I had, frozen, his ruddy complexion paling as the reality of what he was seeing hit him.

I could see his fingers twitch and he seemed to want to unsnap his gun even though a gun would be no protection against a dead body. He looked at me. I didn’t look like a threat—at least, I hoped not. I could see my reflection mirrored in the window of his squad car. I looked like the Blessed Virgin only with dark, curly hair and blue eyes. I can’t help that I look like a kindergarten teacher, and at this moment I was actually thankful. With a dead body in the backyard and my fingerprints on the machete, innocent and harmless were just the qualities I needed to portray to this trigger-happy first responder.

The young cop’s partner arrived, paired up with two other cops from the two other cars. Everybody was young and anxious and clearly experiencing something out of the ordinary. Hell, a machete sticking out of a body, that’s not ordinary in almost anyone’s experience. The three other cops stopped short in a clump of dark uniforms and aviator sunglasses. Two were women. One of the women was tall and big-boned, but the other one, a blonde, was about my size. I found myself ridiculously thinking, I could take her. What is it about cops that make people start feeling claustrophobic?

“Did you call us?” the blonde asked.

I looked back at the body. I sort of figured that part would be obvious. Who else was gonna call, the victim? “Yeah. I’m Sophie Mazaratti and that, there, is a dead body.”