A Love Most Fatal (Morelli Family #1)

22. Vanessa

22

VANESSA

The kids come over most Saturday nights for a sleepover because it doesn’t matter how many years they’ve been married; Sean and Willa still go on weekly dates and then probably have sex loud enough to wake their neighbors. They are as in love as they’ve been since high school.

Usually the kids come over for movies, ice cream, crafts with their grandma, video games with Mary—there’s never a shortage of family members to entertain them, but tonight in a strange sequence of events, the kids are left with just Nate and myself.

Mary is God knows where doing whatever it is she does when she sneaks out on the weekends, Mom is out with a few of The Mothers, and Leo is making his appearances at our gambling establishments.

And Nate, well, Nate doesn’t leave.

I didn’t want him to assume he had to entertain two 12-year-olds on his Saturday night (not that he is one to have plans), but Artie beelined upstairs and knocked on Nate’s bedroom door before I could tell him otherwise.

Angel doesn’t even have her shoes all the way off before Nate and Artie are ambling down the stairs, talking about the Switch game Artie brought for them to play tonight.

“Auntie.” Angel grabs onto my forearm and lowers her voice. “My stomach is feeling weird.”

“I’m sorry, baby.” I pull her under my arm for a hug. Nate and Artie walk past towards the living room. “Have you eaten? Let’s get you something.”

I poke around the fridge and find a Tupperware of Mom’s bean soup that she made yesterday while Angel fills me in on the slumber party she went to the night before.

“Will you ask Mom again if I can get a phone?” Angel asks, her head resting on her arms on the counter.

“Yeah! Will you?” Artie yells from the living room.

“You have a phone,” I remind them, and they both sigh with different levels of dramatics. The two share a flip phone that can call and send texts.

“But we can’t have apps,” she says.

I ladle enough soup for the four of us into a pot.

“You have an iPad, though,” I point out. The twins also share that, and there are screen time limitations. Willa is better about all that childhood development and parenting stuff than I imagine I would be.

Personally, I love screen time. I get it. This is why I am meant to be an aunt and not a mother.

I nod toward the living room. “And then there’s the Switch. You’re swimming in technology, miss.”

“I do love my Switch,” she says, and looks off in her dreamer stare.

She looks so much like Willa with her plump pink cheeks and light soft hair that her mom braids into various complicated styles. Today, it’s in a simple braid that’s tucked under her oversized tie-dye fleece hoodie. Willa has always loved dress up and that extends to her kids, but she lets them wear the bright-colored, tacky pieces that are rite of passage for little kids. I love that about my sister.

Nate comes into the kitchen with his dog jingling in behind him as I’m serving soup into four bowls; he leans a hand on the counter next to me. I’m getting used to having to look up to meet his eyes at night. The dog circles a few times before dropping into the bed that now lives in the kitchen despite my protests.

Nobody listens to me in this house.

“Do you have any Tums?” he asks in a quiet voice. “Artie’s not feeling great.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

Nate shrugs. “Maybe he’s constipated, I don’t know. Kids have stomach issues all the time.”

He’s so good with the kids, always confident when he talks with them, like they aren’t the most delicate of creatures.

“Angel, too. There’s a medicine cabinet in the bathroom down the hall. Check there.”

“Got it,” he says and strides out of the kitchen.

Angel is still sitting at the counter with her head resting on her forearms and when I rub circles on her back, she turns to look up at me. She’s pale, the pink of her cheeks turned to red splotches and a slight sheen on her skin.

“Oh, sweetie, you really aren’t feeling good, are you?”

Her lower lip wobbles and I know she’s going to start crying.

“No,” she says, and her voice cracks. I pull her in for a hug and her little body shaking goes tense and still. There may be something behind what people say about a woman’s intuition, because I know in an indescribable way that she is about to vomit and move into action, grabbing the nearest receptacle (in our case, the now-empty glass Tupperware the soup was in) and sliding it in front of her. The dog, maybe sensing danger, vacates his bed and the kitchen.

She does vomit, retching into the bowl.

“Nate?” I call loud enough that he’ll hear from down the hall. He rushes back into the kitchen, plastic bottle of Tums rattling in his hand.

He sees my niece groaning over her bowl at the counter and doesn’t even pause before retrieving two mixing bowls from the cabinet to the left of the fridge. He hands one to me and practically sprints into the living room with the other to help Artie with what feels inevitable. Even in my distress, I’m a little surprised that he knew not only exactly what was needed, but right where to find it. Has he been here for a month already? Is that all it takes? Only 25 days to learn someone’s kitchen and how to help them in crisis?

“I’m sorry, Auntie,” Angel says after breathing heavily over the bowl for a few moments, the heaving temporarily abated.

“Don’t be sorry, sweetie.” I take out two bobby pins from my hair and secure her bangs behind her ears before I hand her the fresh bowl. “Hold this right beneath your face, I’m going to take you to the bathroom so you can throw up there, okay?”

“Okay,” she says, the most defeated, miserable agreement in history, and her tears have welled and flowed over her eyelids. We are walking delicately to the bathroom down the hall when I hear Artie retch from inside.

Angel, hearing this, starts crying harder and almost throws up again. There are two bathrooms downstairs, so I steer her towards the other one on the other side of the house, walking faster until we are kneeling in front of the toilet where she heaves again.

This goes on, Angel throwing up until her stomach is empty, and then throwing up more bile until she’s thoroughly exhausted and cannot throw anything more up because there is nothing more to expel. At this point, we sit with our backs against the floral wallpapered wall, Angel leaning against my chest with the bowl cradled in her arms.

Nate pads down the hall in his socks, and for reasons unknown, no shirt.

Reading my expression, he explains, “The shirt was a casualty to the stomach bug. I rinsed most of it off, though.”

I wince. “Sorry to hear that.”

“Artie’s taking a shower upstairs, and I think I’ve cleaned up the bulk of the. . . material in the kitchen.”

“You didn’t have to clean that,” I say. If it smelled anything like the rest of it, it was probably heinous.

“How are you feeling, Miss Angel?” he asks, ignoring what I just said. Angel gives a weak thumbs up, not opening her heavy eyes. “How can I help?” he mouths.

I look down at Angel, so sweet and exhausted. She needs a shower and clean pajamas and then to sleep this off. Her brother, too, it sounds like.

“I’ll get her upstairs and cleaned up, you get fresh bowls and put the big throw blanket in the dryer.”

“The one on the couch?” he asks, and I nod. “On it.”

Nate pads away without another question, off to move through the house like he’s lived here forever.

“Nate’s nice,” Angel murmurs. “I like his dog.”

I kiss her head. “Let’s get you upstairs, little.”

After showering, brushing their teeth, and making them drink as much Gatorade as they could without throwing up more, it takes nothing for the kids to fall asleep on half of my bed. They lie close together, Artie’s head pressed against his sister’s shoulder, her ankle on top of one of his. It reminds me of when they were babies. They always napped together, cuddled up like nothing could be more natural or comforting.

I run my fingers through Artie’s damp hair and my heart constricts like a fist is reaching into my chest cavity and squeezing at how much I love them.

My door pushes open slowly and Nate pokes his head through the crack of the door. Seeing the kids asleep, he steps inside quietly with the soft throw blanket overflowing in his arms. He lays it over them and it’s big enough to stretch over me as well. The heat of the blanket fresh from the dryer warms my pajamas and seeps into my skin.

He leaves the room without saying anything, and I find myself disappointed that he didn’t want to stay. On a normal night, we’d be watching a movie together downstairs or laughing about the things he heard in his interviews that day.

Maybe it’s all too cozy for him, he doesn’t want to be friendly with a monster.

I hear his steps up the stairs with the jingling of Ranger’s collar following behind. The noises of the dog used to grate my nerves, but there’s something familiar about them now. A constant reminder of the heartbeat of the house, so many of us living inside.

I’m about to sink further into bed and try to rest when Nate is back in my doorway, this time holding a tray with two mugs.

“I brought tea,” he says.

He’s never been in my bedroom before today, but he makes himself right at home, moving stuff on my nightstand so that he can set down the tray and waiving his hand so that I scooch over towards the kids making room for him to sit. He pulls the blanket over his legs as he sits beside me with his back against the soft headboard.

His hair is wet, little drops of water on his neck and the collar of his sweatshirt, and I watch the damp skin on his neck as he situates himself.

“Here,” he says. My eyes move first to his face, then down to the mug he’s holding out to me. I take it and decide that the best thing to look at is the steam that floats off the top. I’m not thirsty, but I love the hot cup in my palms.

“Thank you.”

“You know, every day it gets less glamorous to be you than I thought,” Nate says.

“Maybe being an aunt isn’t glamorous,” I say. “But otherwise, being me is pretty deluxe.”

He gives me a wry look like he sees right through that and then burns his tongue on his tea. We both laugh, but quietly, to not wake the little ones.

“They adore you,” Nate says, looking at the drooling kids. They both wear old college shirts of mine, and beneath them, their chests rise and fall as they sleep. Artie makes tiny snoring sounds.

“I was so young when Willa had them, and she was so young, I had no clue what they would be like. But Willa wasn’t afraid. She was so confident, so in love.”

“And you?”

“I was seventeen. I didn’t know anything about babies, and Willa was so sure it would work out. She was going to have the kids and raise them and be the best mom and go to law school, and to her credit, she’s done all those things.”

Angel shifts, and her head burrows against my side, the same way she did when she was a baby. There were two months where she’d only sleep if she was in someone’s arms or pressed right against her brother. I remember being so petrified of breaking them when they were that small.

“Do you want kids?”

“In the abstract, yes,” I say. “This legacy won’t die with me.”

This legacy being the family, the responsibility, the business. If we weren’t in the position we are, none of them would be safe.

Ours isn’t just a life you can get out of, it’s a generational curse, or blessing, I’m not sure, but as my father always used to say, it is what it is. Nothing else to it.

“I’ll have a kid, or more than one, and God willing they’ll like each other and lean on each other, and then one of them will take over when I’m gone.”

“What about one of these two?” Nate asks.

“They’re kids,” I say.

I can’t explain that it makes me ill to imagine either of them where I am, having to do the things I’ve done. The things any of us have done. None of our hands are clean but the children’s.

“They’re just kids.” I say again.

It’s code for I love them too much to think about their hearts, big as the sky, turning cold and hardened.

“And yours won’t be?”

“No, it’s just—Angel and Artie are too good. It’s something within them, Willa and Sean are so loving, so tender with them. If it’s a matter of nature, I can’t imagine my kids will be so. . . sweet.”

Nate is quiet for a long moment, digesting this I think, or maybe agreeing that my children would be callous little devils.

“I think you’ll be a good mom,” Nate says. “With Claire and your sisters around, it’d be hard not to be.”

We both lean our heads back against the fabric headboard and I let my eyes flutter shut.

“I do have good sisters,” I agree.

“Well, one good sister,” Nate murmurs. “Mary might scare the baby.”

We huff matching laughs through our noses, and I sink a little farther into the bed, into the night, into the quiet warmth of this moment.

“What about you? I bet you want four.” I can already imagine his kids—frizzy hair and long limbs, and uncoordinated but curious, and smart; probably just perfect.

“Maybe,” he says. “I was an only child and I’ve always wanted a sibling. I’ll teach them things like fractions and card games, and my mom will spoil them rotten.”

I crack my eyes open to look at him. His face is close enough that I can count freckles across his cheeks and the high point of his nose. A very good nose.

He will be a good dad. His kids will have green eyes and they will be too-smart, tiny know-it-alls. He’s made for a quiet, safe life, with a quiet, safe partner.

“Lucky kids,” I blink my eyes closed again and sigh. Nate plucks my mug out of my hands and puts it on the side table and in my drifting state I know he’s about to leave.

“Stay,” I say, and then, because he looks struck dumb by the request, I add, “They might be sick again.”

He doesn’t disagree. There’s nothing left for them to throw up, surely, and even if there was, I could handle it on my own. I can handle any number of things on my own, but I didn’t realize how nice it is, sometimes, to have someone whose job is to handle things with you.

He settles back down beside me, our sides pressed together, and I follow the kids to sleep.