Blood Bound

by Jayson Carcione

Behold my face. It is my mother’s face. My mamma. We share the same slender nose, the delicate brow. Our razor-sharp cheekbones would cut you with a kiss. We have an identical, small olive-coloured mole above the right-side curl of our upper lips. Eyes like black pearls. Our hair is thick and dark as the deepest night, although I wear mine shorter. We have neither laugh lines nor wrinkles. These will no doubt ravage me in time, but my mamma is forever young. She was 35 when she was murdered in the old family apartment I call home—the same age I am now. I am her mirror image. I could be her ghost.  My father certainly thought so. When he roamed the netherworld of the dementia that eventually killed him, he spoke to me as if I was his wife. The things he said to me. He was such a good husband. He worshipped his wife.

I was a baby when Lorenzo Gatti, a plumber and two-bit hood who lived in the apartment above ours with his wife and son, jimmied the lock on the kitchen window and broke into our home. It was late autumn and Mamma was making chickpea soup. He killed her and did unspeakable things to her before helping himself to a steaming bowl. Her screams did not wake the neighbours. No one helped her. No one rang the police. I slept through it all in my warm, beautiful crib. When my father came home, they found me soiled in my own steaming shit. We never ate chickpeas again, but somehow we stayed in the apartment, and I grew up happy in a home full of love. Daddy lived in silent anguish, but his sadness never touched me. I didn’t know sadness until I became a woman. Mamma kept watch over us from the framed photo on the fireplace mantle. She watches me still.

I am the only one left in the building since Mamma’s time. No one speaks of the horror that happened here, but no one really speaks to me either. I get the odd tip of a hat in the lobby, a nod in the hallway, an occasional Christmas greeting. Every Halloween, I buy bags of sweets for trick-or-treaters who never knock on my door.

I have not left the apartment in months, and I would stay confined forever if I could—a cloistered woman on my own terms. I dare not say it aloud, but lockdown suits me. I am happiest in the place where Mamma lived and died. There is solace here. Let the world go to hell as long as it leaves me alone. I admit, I got caught up in the whole community spirit thing in those early days of lockdown. I baked loaves of sourdough and left them outside my neighbours’ doors. I sat on the fire escape and listened to singing from windows and rooftops, I ordered pizza for the building, I bought a case of N95 masks online, and left them in the courtyard of the building. There is talk about lifting restrictions and then we can go back to hating each other.

 *****

Sleep comes easy for me, much to the annoyance of past and fleeting lovers. My head strikes the pillow, and I drift off to the ticking of a clock. It is my old flip-case travel alarm clock that went everywhere with me during my student days in Italy. My sleep is usually deep and dreamless. Yet tonight, the ceiling is in my throat. The walls move. I sweat. My bed is a sinking ship. I open the bedroom window, taste the damp night air. A fox scurries across the courtyard, a raccoon lurks behind the bins. A floating red orb appears and vanishes in puffs of smoke. Someone is having a late-night cigarette in the shadows. Torn paper lanterns from a forgotten summer party hang from withered ivy on the courtyard walls. Yellow light fills some apartment windows, darkness fills others. I grip the window frame. A sudden rush of blood to my head. I could fall from the window, and no one would catch me. I back away and shut the window, and imagine the glass shattering as I do so.

I feel better under Mamma’s loving gaze, but I am cold. I speak to her portrait in Italian. I learned Italian in case her ghost ever comes back to me. I once spent three months in Sicily. I lived in the village where Mamma was born. I walked where she walked as a young girl, gazed upon the same mountains, the same shimmering sea. I had an affair with a man who thought he was a werewolf. He wanted to come back to America with me but would not leave his wife and the Sicilian moon. I told him it was the same moon, but he was unmoved. I am too weak to make it to the sofa. I am flat on my back, outstretched on the wooden floor my father worked so hard to reclaim. The ceiling creaks. The chandelier dims with footfall. The old Gatti apartment has been vacant for years. Lorenzo Gatti died in prison, so I do not think his ghost walks above me. I pass through a fevered night. In the morning, I take an antigen test. It is negative.

Time moves with the hands of a broken clock, and the morning begins in fits and starts. Doors open and shut. The building is awake. I hear laughter in the courtyard, the first rumblings of the street beyond. Restrictions are easing, but the contagion is still with us. I won’t be going anywhere. Still, I go through the motions. I shower, the water is icy and cuts me to the bone, get dressed. I wear jeans, a black cashmere top. I draw the blinds, the wine-dark sky will bring rain. I sit on the sofa, laptop on my knees. Thankfully, it is summer break, and I don’t have to face online lectures, meetings with students, or faculty pow-wows. The laptop blinks into life, but I have no emails. I order groceries for the week, but that’s it. The internet bores me, and I close the laptop. I hit the exercise bike in the bedroom. Last night wiped me out, and I am sluggish when I crank the peddles. I watch the rain fall through the bedroom window. Puddles gather in the empty courtyard, and I fail to break a sweat. I shower again and toast some day-old bread for lunch. I top it with a soggy slice of tomato, a generous chunk of provolone. I eat in the kitchen. There is no trace of what happened to Mamma. Dad ripped up the old kitchen floorboards, stained with blood, and put down terracotta-style tiles. He put in oak cupboards painted blue, gleaming new appliances, and industrial pendant lights that swayed when you crossed the floor. They still do. I wish he kept the kitchen the way it was. Yes, he should have bleached the blood from the floor and scrubbed away the scene of the crime, but I would like to have seen Mamma’s kitchen with my own eyes.—the room of the apartment she loved the most. The room where she fought off the beast as best she could. When the police arrested Gatti, his arms and face were raked with scratches. He was missing clumps of hair. My mamma was a powerful woman.

Lunch is dismal, and I fall asleep on the sofa. When I wake up, it is night, the rain banished. Mamma is smiling, her photo is the first thing I see. She is stunning in the photo. Hair thicker than velvet, lips redder than wine. She sits at a table in the small restaurant my parents owned. Dad worked the front of the house. Mamma ran the kitchen. Her chin rests in her small, folded hands. Elbows on the table with a pack of Lucky Strikes, a glass of wine. A pearl necklace draped around her swan-slender throat. She wears a perfect little black dress. She is beautiful—and so am I, but I don’t care about such things. I blow her a kiss, and wish I could remember the sound of her voice. I wish my father never sold the restaurant, which was boarded up and neglected for years until it became the neighbourhood crack den and then the outpost of a late-night pharmacy chain. The pharmacy is a sterile, garish place, enveloped in blinding fluorescent light. I shield my eyes whenever I walk past it.

Something lurks in the old Gatti place. I hear footfall, things dragged across an unseen floor. Unexplained noise, where there should be none, broken glass, the pounding of a hammer, the faint sound of a man coughing or a dog barking? The rain returns. I wait for a drum of thunder that never comes. Rain scratches the window, and I cannot bare the sound of it. I stumble off the sofa and open the window. The rain burns my cheeks, drenches my hair, and I slam the window shut as quickly as I opened it.  Rain frightens me.

*****

It rains for two days, and he appears through the fishbowl lens of the peephole. He is wearing white painter’s scrubs. His head is cowled with white dust, his eyes unknown behind foggy safety goggles. A N95 mask covers most of his face. I hear his breathing through the door of my apartment, thin, raspy sucks of air through the filtered mask. Blue surgical gloves cling to his hands. He holds a wicker basket wrapped in cellophane and tied with a red ribbon. He raps the door again, and I blink through the peephole. He leaves the basket outside the door. I sink to the floor as his footsteps fade away. I wait until I hear the door open to Gatti’s apartment. I wait until the ceiling rattles before I open the door and take the basket. I keep the bottle of Valpolicella, the bags of dried penne and bucatini. The coffee beans, the cinnamon chocolate bars from Modica. I chuck the parm and the globe of caciocavallo cheese straight into the bin. I read his note over and over: “Sorry about the noise—hoping the renovation won’t take too long…L.”

I fall asleep in the bottle of Valpolicella. The sofa a bed of stone. I hear mice eating the chocolate crumbs on the kitchen table. I imagine the cheese in the bin turning green with mould. L.—Lorenzo Gatti is back from the dead to leave me a gift basket. Lorenzo Gatti back from the dead to renovate his old apartment. But of course, Gatti is dead. Daddy and I saw the guards roll Gatti’s coffin into the burning maw of the prison crematorium. Daddy needed to be sure—and he wanted me to see it. I was 15 years old. Outside, standing on the dead winter grass of the prison grounds, we watched the crematorium chimney spit out tendrils of black, evil smoke. The smoke mixed with a grey wintry rain and the ash fell like snow.

When I awake, the morning is dull, but the rain is gone. There is a box of fresh, organic vegetables outside the door. “We should talk, Larry.” I tear up the note and throw it in the trash with the cheese.  I wish I knew my mamma. I need her more than ever.

*****

I know his face. The face I know from urine-coloured newspaper clippings and grainy TV footage. It is the last face my mother saw. If I am my mother’s ghost, then Larry Gatti surely must be his father’s. He stands in the doorway of the apartment, where his mother found him in his crib. I do not know if it was warm and beautiful like mine, but he, too, was soiled in his own shit. He was also covered in blood—the police found traces of his father’s blood on him, crimson fingerprints on his little cheeks. Mamma’s blood, too. Larry Gatti is crying as he tells me this. I am standing two metres across from him. I am wearing my mask and show no emotion, but I am sure that sleep will never come easy to me again. He shows me around the apartment. I have ever set foot on this floor of the building, and now I am crossing the threshold into the home of the monster. I don’t know what I expect to see, but I see nothing. There is no furniture. Nothing hangs on the walls. I see no loose wires sticking out of crevices. No light fixtures. The windows are naked, and I see creeping branches of the apple tree in the courtyard through spotless glass. Larry Gatti has not renovated the apartment—he has purged it. The walls and floors have been plastered and painted white. My eyes water with the scent of thick, pine bleach. It is a morgue without the dead.

What kind of man kills, does unspeakable things to a woman, and then goes home and hugs his baby boy? This is what tortures Larry Gatti—this is all he thinks about. We have shared my bed for a week now, and he tells me many things. We are cursed children, bound by spilled blood—it seemed only right that I let him into my bed. I worry what Mamma would think of me.

Most nights, he cannot stop talking. We lie in my bed, the window is open. The air heavy and damp. He tells me how he and his mother moved to Brooklyn. How he went to live with his maternal grandparents after his mother put her head in an oven. He was a lost boy, shamed and stained by murder, but his grandparents loved him—thank God for that, he says. He thought that was all he needed. When his grandparents died in the first wave of the pandemic, he discovered the apartment was left to him. And the idea grabbed him by the throat—erase everything. Leave no trace. If you erase everything, it didn’t happen. Even memory must be scrubbed and forgotten. At first, he had a mad notion to burn the whole building down. He could not face the thought of more death, but it troubled him how quickly he thought of murder.

He is sitting on the edge of the bed, he faces the window. His shoulders are jagged. I see his backbone through papery skin. His hair is thick like mine and night-coloured, but peppered with flecks of white paint. The sheets are taut, in place. We did not make love tonight.  Erase it all. He says it again. He stands up and begins to undress. Erase it all. He folds his clothes and leaves them on the corner of the bed. He keeps his socks on. Erase it all. He turns to me and smiles. The same smile his father would have smiled. I do not move. I am sitting up, back pressed against the headboard. I pull the blanket to my waist, but it will not protect me. Is his the last face I will ever see? If everything must be erased, then I will join my mother, and this apartment will be cleansed.

He laughs at something in the distance, something unseen. Buttery, thick light fills the window. I close my eyes. I cannot let this happen but fear binds my limbs. The bed lightens. I open my eyes and expect to see him looming over me. A supermoon rises through the scrawny city trees, the wires between the rooftops. He is standing before the window, tangled in the shadow and light of the supermoon. “Love is never enough,” he says. Before I can say anything, he is on the cold stone of the courtyard. His father has claimed another victim.

Someone screams. Lights explode in windows. They all seem to go on at the same time. The night is broken. I am standing where he stood seconds before. Sirens draw ever closer. Soon they will knock on my door. More people fill the courtyard but keep their distance from Larry Gatti. I think his corpse will twitch and rise, but it is one with the stone of the courtyard.  I do not take my eyes off him. Perhaps everything is erased and there will be peace. I do not know if this is an ending or a beginning. I do not know the grief of others. I only know my own.

BIO: Jayson Carcione was born in New Jersey and raised in New York, Jayson Carcione now lives in Cork, Ireland. His short fiction has appeared in The London Magazine, The Forge, Lunate, Epoque Press, Fictive Dream, Across the Margin, and elsewhere. He has been nominated for a Best of the Net 2024 and his fiction highly commended in the 2020 Sean O'Faoláin International Short Story Competition. Twitter: @carcionejay