Santo's childhood bedroom was on the second floor. It had been converted into something more neutral over the years—the posters gone, the furniture upgraded—but the bones were still a boy's room. Too small for a man his size. The ceiling felt low. Thesingle window faced the neighbor's brick wall, letting in a stripe of grey October light that fell across the bed like a bandage.
He looked terrible.
Propped against three pillows that were doing the structural work his abdominal muscles couldn't, shirtless, the white bandaging around his left side bright and fresh against skin that had gone the color of old cement. On the nightstand, beside a glass of water he hadn't touched and a bottle of antibiotics he probably had, a metal basin held the old bandages—balled up, stained the diluted pink of blood mixed with saline.
Dr. Ferraro, a quiet man in his sixties with steady hands and the particular discretion of someone who'd been treating bullet wounds without filing police reports for three decades, came twice a day. Morning and evening. He'd been here an hour ago. I'd heard him on the stairs, the soft murmur of his voice giving instructions to Santo that Santo would half-ignore, the click of his medical bag closing like a period at the end of a sentence.
"You look like shit," I said.
Santo's eyes, dark, bloodshot, ringed with the purple-grey of a man who hadn't slept properly in two days, found me in the doorway. His jaw worked. The muscle there twitched.
"You should see the other guy," he said, through clenched teeth.
I sat on the edge of his bed. The mattress dipped under my weight. I saw the wince he tried to swallow. The involuntary tightening around his eyes, the way his breath caught and held before releasing in a controlled exhale that was meant to look natural and didn't.
"Ferraro says the stitches are holding," he offered. Unprompted. Information volunteered by a man who normally treated personal details like state secrets.
"Good."
"Says I'll be up in a week."
"Also good."
"I told him three days."
"Of course you did."
He almost smiled. The corner of his mouth lifted and then his body punished him for the movement and the almost-smile became a grimace that he turned toward the wall.
There was an orange on the nightstand. I'd brought it up from the kitchen twenty minutes ago along with the water he wasn't drinking and the toast he'd eaten half of before his jaw got too tired from chewing. It sat there—bright, incongruously cheerful against the basin of bloody bandages—and I watched him look at it.
He wanted it. I could tell by the way his eyes kept returning to it, the way his right hand flexed on the blanket. But his grip was gone. The bullet had torn through muscle on his left side, and the trauma had traveled — inflammation, the doctor had explained, compromising the neural pathways that controlled fine motor function in both hands until the swelling subsided. He couldn't close his fingers hard enough to break the skin.
He wouldn't ask.
That was the thing about Santo. The defining characteristic, the load-bearing wall of his entire personality. He would not ask for help. Not from his brothers, not from the doctor, not from God. He would lie in this bed and stare at an orange he couldn't peel and his pride would choose hunger over the admission that his body had failed him.
I picked it up.
The peel came off in long spirals that I dropped into the bloody basin because there was nowhere else, and the citrus smell hit the room like a small, bright explosion. Sharp and clean against the antiseptic air.
Santo watched me peel it. His face did something complicated—the pride warring with relief, the refusal to need anyonefighting the reality that someone was giving him what he needed without making him say please. I separated the segments. Set three on the plate beside his toast.
He ate.
"You fought," he said.
Not a question. A statement, dropped into the silence between orange segments like something he'd been carrying and needed to set down.
"In the house. When they had you." He wasn't looking at me. His eyes were fixed on the strip of grey light from the window.
"I did."
"That was good." A pause. His jaw worked again — not chewing this time, just processing. "Most people freeze. You didn't freeze."
"I was terrified."
"Yeah." He turned his head. "Brave and terrified aren't opposites."
