Why was Margie starting this game again? Milo would be released within months. What could she possibly have to gain?
Part Three
42
Erin
Monday, 15 April 2013, is a day that no Bostonian will ever forget. It was Patriots’ Day, and it started unusually because a lot of the city was closed off for the annual Boston City Marathon. We were an all-female company, and I let the moms have the day off because schools were out and Carla and Suzie both had family members running the marathon.
I was editing a memoir I had acquired quite by chance by a young woman born a conjoined twin who had lost her sister in the operation that was supposed to separate them at the age of twelve. It was a complicated story of love and loss and sacrifice. The physical struggles they faced together as children and the emotional scars left behind were profound. I hadn’t published a memoir before, but Carla had alerted me that this could be big. The writer was forty-five years old and had one prosthetic leg, and she had endured sixty-five surgeries in her lifetime, and yet the story was full of hope and gratitude for her life.
We had a TV in the office lobby, usually tuned to CNN but silenced. I was working through the manuscript at my desk when I heard Ruth saying, ‘My God,’ and at the same time my phone began to buzz. I picked up and it was Dad.
‘Where are you, honey? Are you in the office?’ I could hear the concern in his voice.
‘Yeah, I’m fine, what’s up?’
At the same moment Ruth burst into my office, exclaiming, ‘There’s been explosions at the marathon. I think they’re bombs!’
Dad heard what she’d said. ‘That’s what I was calling about. Don’t leave the office, you hear me?’
I thought of Carla and Suzie, who were lining the route. I walked into the next room. Ruth had turned up the volume. ‘Okay, Dad, I’m just watching now.’ There were chaotic scenes on the TV as plumes of smoke were seen emanating from two sites near the finish line on Boylston Street. People were running away but there were lots of others lying injured on the ground. The image of one man, a bystander with half his leg blown off, is seared into my brain.
I assured Dad that I was okay. Ruth and I abandoned our work and sat grimly transfixed by the news and the images of horror unfolding in our city, but something else caught my eye too. After a while the same footage was being played over and over. It was shaky, from someone’s camera phone I guessed. A blast from the right-hand side of the street, people falling all round and then screaming and shouting.
As the commentators talked over the images, I identified Milo running towards a man on the ground who appeared to have been hit by shrapnel, blood pouring from his right thigh. Milo lifted him up and put his arm around the man’s shoulder, then half carried the man out of shot. Another man followed him, pointing away from the blast site. I hadn’t known Milo had been released. Surely my family should have been informed. Did Dad know?
But the Boston bombing was a bigger story than Milo, and I spent hours on the phone that day. The cell towers in the area were overloaded, and we could only text. Carla and Suzie were fine but Carla’s cousin, who had been standing as an onlooker near the second bomb site further up the street, had bad foot injuries. Surgeons fought to save his lower limb. For days,twenty blocks of Watertown not far from where I lived were on lockdown as it became clear that this was a terrorist attack, and the perpetrators were two brothers with a Chechen background who had been radicalized online. If they hadn’t been caught, they intended to target Times Square next.
It was a terrible time in the history of Boston. Three young people died, including an eight-year-old boy, twelve people lost limbs and two hundred and eighty-one were injured.
But Milo was out of prison and, watching the images over and over, I realized that the man who had followed him out on to the street was his old school friend Ben Roche. At least Margie’s messages would stop now.
43
In 2015, my therapist suggested something I had never considered. She said that I was letting Milo control my life. I couldn’t trust anyone because of him. If I allowed him to dictate my life, I was going to be on my own. I knew she was right. I didn’t want to be alone forever – I thought I might die of loneliness. But I couldn’t face online dating. How could I trust some random man?
Vince was a friend of Saima’s brother-in-law. I met him at a dinner party in her house. Saima and her husband had obviously had an argument before we arrived. Binto was snapping at her, ordering her about, complaining that she’d forgotten the oyster crackers when she was laying the table, while he sat on his ass doing nothing. There were two other couples there, and one older guy. I gave Saima sympathetic looks and Vince, the older guy, seated opposite, caught me and glanced at me while turning his head slightly to the side. I think we were all in silent agreement that Binto was a putz. Later, when Binto went to have a cigar outside with one of his work buddies, while ‘the little wife’ went to the kitchen to get dessert, Vince leaned over and said, ‘I mean, what kind of name is Binto anyway? His real name is Reginald.’ I bust out laughing. When we were all saying goodnight on the porch, Vince offered me a ride home, but I had my car. ‘Damn,’ he said, ‘can I at least get your number? Or am I too old for you? I’m too old, right? Just tell me straight out, I promise I’ll take it like a man.’
I told him I’d be shocked if he took it like a woman and gave him my number.
On our first date in Legal Sea Foods, I learned that Vincent Delgado’s wife, Anjelica, had died in a car crash four years earlier. He was fifty years old and had two boys aged nineteen and twenty. I was thirty-four. Vince was a mechanical engineer and had his own company installing and maintaining air-conditioning units in factories, offices and all kinds of commercial buildings.
His sons were smart boys, living and studying in Berkeley, California. Despite the distance, they were close to their dad and called and visited every vacation. He flew out to San Francisco once a month to spend the weekend with them.
We bonded quickly. He and his boys were ice hockey fans, and we went to see the Bruins play whenever we could, with or without the boys. They were taken aback by my age, I guess. Carmine and Nick did everything together. I thought they were sweet. They never said anything disrespectful to me and I made it clear that I was devoted to their dad and would never try to replace their mom. They were Italian-American Catholics and, though they didn’t attend church, they were good people in the way that mattered.
My dad was the one who was upset – he was only nine years older than Vince and couldn’t accept that I could fall in love with a man with such an age gap. I was forced to point out the ten-year age gap between Kathy and him, and that stopped him in his tracks. Poor Dad was ageing rapidly as he tried to keep up with Kathy, who loved to travel, particularly to ski resorts in Colorado and Utah. Dad broke a wrist the first time but bravely went the next few years until he broke a hip. This was before the fire that ruined his hands. Without the full use of them, he had slowed down a lot. I talked to Kathy, explained to her that maybe Dad should think about taking early retirement, at least from theinvestment business. Kathy wasn’t the brightest, but she accepted this, I thought, until the following year when they went to Miami, and she took him skydiving. I was horrified, but Dad was totally exhilarated by the experience. He’d been harnessed to an experienced skydiver, and insisted that I should try it. I decided to butt out then, and told myself it was none of my business.
I also had to tell Dad that my relationship with Vince was none of his business. But, feeling bruised by my previous experiences, I hired a private investigator within the first two months. Vince had one DUI when he was seventeen, but apart from that, he was clean as a whistle.
Mom met him when she visited the following year, 2016. She wasn’t bothered by the age gap but worried that one of his sons might fall in love with me. Vince and I laughed about that. Both boys were in stable relationships with Californian girls. They had no interest in me. Carmine told me he was glad that his dad had a new relationship, because he’d been broken-hearted by the death of Anjelica, and now that he had me, they didn’t have to worry about him as much.
Anjelica was ever-present in our relationship. She had been outgoing and gregarious. Vince’s friends often mentioned her when I was around and then would look apologetically at me. In Vince’s house, her photo stood on the piano. She looked nothing like me, a striking brunette with a megawatt smile, heavy eye make-up and crimson lipstick. He talked about her sometimes, recalling what she used to order when we were at his favourite restaurant, how she hated the garbage collectors because one of them had wolf whistled at her through the window when she was breast-feeding Nick. She had been outraged and called the cops and the waste-management company. He said she never wore jeans as she considered them too masculine. He was not being critical. Vince rarely commented on what I was wearing – I don’t think he noticed.
He proposed a year into our relationship. I had sensed it was on the cards and that maybe Vince thought that five years was a respectable amount of time to leave between burying one wife and marrying another. Apparently, his sons had already given their approval. I said yes. I told myself that this was love. There didn’t have to be sparks and whistles, just a man I could trust.
Vince needed to know if I wanted children, and how many. I could see his relief when I told him I didn’t want to have any. I said that my career was too important to me. Vince had raised two awesome young men, and now admitted he never wanted to change another diaper in his life. He had been a hands-on dad, and Anjelica had been a wonderful mother. He didn’t need to say that it would be impossible for him not to compare us.
