Anthony del Blanco is standing just inside the back door. He is older, heavier, clean-shaven, and well dressed, but the demon is still in his eyes. Cocaine is still his bottom bitch, as he used to be fond of saying. She could smell the Early Times bourbon from ten feet away.

“Hi, babe,” Anthony says, closing the door behind him.

“Please,” Lydia says, her voice sounding small and weak and nothing like it had sounded in her dreams for the past three years, that booming, powerful voice of vengeance she had used as she pummeled her ex-husband to a bloody pulp.

“I need a couple of bucks, Liddie. Can you help me out?” He begins to cross the kitchen.

“Anthony . . . please. The kids will be back any second.”

“The kids. How are they?”

“Anthony.”

“Kinda hard to find you guys, you know?”

“It’s over between us,” Lydia says, taking one step backward for every step forward her ex-husband takes. “Over.”

“I understand that, sweetheart. And I’m willing to work with you on it. I really, truly am. Today, though, I need a couple of bucks. Okay? Today it’s about finances. So, why don’t you, for the first time in your stupid fucking life, do the smart thing?”

“I don’t have any money, Anthony. Look around. Does it look like I have money? We’re eating hot dogs for God’s sake.”

“You save, Lydia. You always did. Don’t know how you did it, but you always managed to put a couple of bucks away.”

“Please. Can’t you just be a man and walk away?”

The fire spreads in her ex-husband’s eyes.

She’d said the wrong thing.

Anthony pins her to the wall, holding her by the neck with his powerful left hand, a hand that easily wraps all the way around her throat. “I’m the only fuckin’ man you’ve ever known, Lydia. The only man.” His right hand goes to his belt buckle. “Want me to fuck you right now on the goddamn kitchen floor? Want me to show you what a man I am?”

Before Lydia can stop it, the revulsion rises within her, then boils over. She spits in his face.

Anthony rears back, sets himself, and explodes her nose with a pile-driver right hand.

Lydia sags, her vision clouded by a thick, crimson fog. Anthony holds her up with his left hand, threatens her again with his right, the timbre of his voice rising with his rage, his breath a warm breeze over a landfill.

“You gonna tell me where it is? Because there’s plenty more. You know that, right? Plenty more. I got all fuckin’ day.”

Lydia, at the very brim of consciousness, cannot speak. But she can raise her eyes. And her eyes speak volumes to a man with whom she lived for four years.

Anthony steps to the side and smashes her in the kidney with his right fist. Once. Twice. Three times. Hard, leveraged punches, expertly thrown. Anthony del Blanco was once a promising amateur middleweight boxer. “I’m sorry, what did you say, Liddie? ’Cause I coulda swore I just saw the cunt look and I don’t remember asking you no questions like Are you a cunt? Please show me.” He tightens the grip on the bloodied bodice of her dress. “Now where’s . . . the fucking . . . money?”

Lydia tries to lift her head, fails. Instead, she succumbs to the nausea. A foamy river of pinkish bile leaks out of her mouth, onto her ex-husband’s pantleg and shoes.

Anthony del Blanco now becomes the full animal, and the beating begins in earnest.

Primal. Methodical. Complete.

At the moment when Anthony begins to wonder if he has finally gone too far, he remembers. He walks into the living room, finds The Secret Garden on the bookshelf, removes it. He laughs, wipes his bloody, damaged hand across his mouth. “Shoulda known,” he says, extricating the stack of bills from the book. “Nothin’ ever changes around here.”

He stuffs the four hundred dollars in his pocket, already tasting that first line of coke rocketing up his right nostril. A sensation he will surely reward with a second line, this one up the left. Toot, toot, he thinks, and tosses the book onto the kitchen floor.

“The Secret Garden,” Anthony del Blanco says to no one in particular, stepping out into a dazzlingly bright July day in Lakewood, Ohio, dropping his mirrored aviator sunglasses in place. “Yeah. Right. Big fuckin’ secret, Liddie.”

Lydia del Blanco is prone on her kitchen floor. Her jaw is broken, her right cheekbone is shattered. The first punch had demolished her nose; the cartilage now hangs from her face in a corrupt red mass. Three ribs on her right side are broken, two on the left. The ulna of her right arm is fractured and there is a laceration that runs from the middle of her forehead to the left side of her mouth—the result of being thrown through the glass door of the dining room china cabinet—a deep cut that will require nine hours of surgery in order to repair the muscles, and more than two hundred stitches to close.

She is unconscious and bleeding heavily.

Her son and daughter stand in the doorway, holding each other, trembling in the suffocating summer air that is suddenly brassy with blood, their all-but-destroyed mother lying before them, a trio of melting Eskimo Pies at their feet.

But no tears.

The girl lets go of her brother for a moment, steps forward, kneels on the floor. She makes the sign of the cross, then places her right index finger into the pool of warm blood near her mother’s left ear. She returns to the doorway, considers her brother’s face, the way he stands, now, with his hands clamped tightly over his ears, as if to blot out the silence of this horror.

Without a word, she places her finger gently to her brother’s mouth, leaving a small slash of bright scarlet blood on his lips. It is how she would think of him for years—his dark, frightened eyes; his sweat-matted shock of russet hair; red lips giving him the appearance of a sad little girl. She glances down at her mother one last time, then kisses her brother delicately on the lips, their mother’s blood all that they would ever say of this day.

Nine years later, when Lydia del Blanco dies, a jaundiced stick figure in the charity ward at St. Vincent’s, it will finally free her two children of this moment, free them from all the responsibility of the coming horrors in their lives, free them from the life of an addict mother who will live with a half-dozen men, sleep with ten dozen more, eventually running from heroin fix to cocaine fix to alcohol fix, her face a twisted, scarred mess, never again to resemble the slender young flower in the one photograph her son would keep forever.

A moment, the boy and girl would come to agree, that would free them from fear.

19

Mary says: “I have to meet someone.”

She thinks: What’s happening here? Two beauties in a row. First the jogger in front of my building. Now this guy. My knight in shining armor. I’m going to have to jump onto one of these boxcars soon. One of these days the train ain’t gonna run this way.

He is in his late twenties, early thirties maybe. When he had helped her to her feet she had supported herself against his right thigh and found it was rock hard.

The pain on the left side of her head, where the man had struck her, was minor compared to the wounding of her pride, the swelling of her embarrassment. To be lying facedown in the snow on a city street, humiliated and violated by a common thug, was far worse.

But the man standing in front of her didn’t seem to care.

“Well, at least let me take you to the hospital,” the man says. “I saw him hit you. You might have a concussion. We’ll stop at the police station. You can fill out a report.”

“No thanks,” she says. “I’m okay, really.”

He waits until her eyes meet his before he responds. His eyes are dark, expressive, the color of semisweet chocolate. “Are you sure?”