There's a ringing in my ear as I stalk down the hall, toward the upper balcony of the club, my sleeves rolled halfway up my arms and shirt unbuttoned at the neck. Not as put together as I like to look when visiting The Brickyard, but it ismyclub after all.
I feign casualness as Sasha and I stride past the staff, who do a good job pretending not to look surprised to see me here after I’d retired with strict orders not to be bothered. When I reach the balcony, it takes only a moment to locate her. Even in the throngs of people, my eyes are drawn to Mary Morelli like magnets.
She’s not in her typical uniform of tight, short, and all black, instead wearing dark jeans that hug her muscular legs and a multi-colored Christmas sweater. When one of the yellow lights slides over her, she is like a flushed visage, pink cheeks, and a halo of frizzy brown hair.
It’s been months since she last came here, not once since last summer when she was almost too late to save her sister. I thought she might have found a different club to frequent, and maybe she has, but tonightshe’s back.
Marianna used to enter alone with her flirty smirks and narrowed eyes, catching every receiver into her web like flies buzzing about her. The bartenders always offered her free drinks—which she never took—the bouncers thrilled to see her and the patrons stared; everyone was weak to the enigmatic pull into her orbit.
I’ve seen her when she’s working. In the light of day, she is hard lines and no smiles, the single best enforcer for the Morelli crime family. She is formidable and intense, but in these walls, she became something entirely different.
In her months of absence from this place, I both yearned to see her and was relieved to be free of her. And here she is again, like she never left.
Just when I’d decided to never think of her again.
She dances with abandon—the freest thing I've ever seen. It's impossible to look away as she closes her eyes and tilts her head back, moving with the music, dancing alone, dancing with anyone who approaches her, dancing, and dancing, and dancing. And from the second story, I watch.
I used to try to look away, but these attempts were short-lived. My determination to forget her this year has already been forgotten as I stare at her now.
I don't know how to look anywhere else when she is here—this strange, vibrant creature.
Marianna Morelli is propulsive and consuming. I am addicted to studying her. It’s been four months since I spoke to her last, at her sister’s wedding to the math teacher. I saw her again, two months later, laughing with her cousin in a restaurant. I wish I could say I thought of her as infrequently.
“You should go to her,” Sasha says.
“Thank you for the input.” I’ll settle for watching instead. It’s probably less devastating than having her laugh in my face when she sees the unquenchable interest in my stare.
I release a long sigh, but my eyes narrow on the place she dances now. She’s squeezing her eyes shut, not smiling, maybe not even breathing. She shakes her head, and then her eyes open and land on a dancing pair. She puts herself between them, and it seems all is back to her normal ways of bewitching strangers.
“Could be you down there,” Sasha says, but holds his hands up in mock surrender at the glare I point at him.
“Please, Alexei. Go do your job before I fire you.”
He chuffs a laugh and claps me on the shoulder. It is the first touch I’ve had all day.
“Merry Christmas, brother,” Sasha says before leaving me to my brooding. Marianna dances on, her arm sliding around a woman’s neck while a young man slides his hands down her sides. She kisses her, and then him.
I’m debating how long I’ll torment myself here and decide I’ll stay until she leaves with them. Then I can drink myself to sleep in peace.
This is when she breaks away from them.
Marianna pushes away from the couple who look on in obvious confusion and longing, and her shoulders rise and fall as she spins, disoriented on the dance floor.
Her face is drawn up, anguished.
I do the one thing I promised myself I never would: I go to her.
2
MARY
When my dad died,I was in a bad way. His death couldn't have been avoided. That’s what the doctor said. Even still, I believed I could have prepared us, if not stopped it entirely. Like, if I knew anything about heart attacks ahead of his, I might’ve been able to warn him to go get a check-up.
I believed him invincible. I was wrong.
And now, for the fifth Christmas Eve in a row, we celebrate without him, and we wish he was here. We sit around the table, laugh, play games, eat sweets until our teeth hurt, and miss him. The people around the table have remained, for the most part, though in the last year, we lost one brother-in-law and gained another.
It’s been only six months since a man I believed I could trust almost killed my sister. We all thought we could trust him. He was family, the brother of my sister’s husband, the godfather of my niece. The image of his gun to Vanessa’s head flashes through my mind as she tells a story now and I wince. His dead body wasn't enough; I needed to know that everyone who was even tangentially involved was dead.
