I know I broke my promise and I hate not keeping my word, but something kind of bad happened to me…， she had eventually written. She couldn’t deal with him asking her if she was all right. It was simply too much kindness. So, she added. I’m physically fine, but … well, “I’m sorry” isn’t good enough to account for me disappearing like that. This is not how you deserve to be treated.
He started and stopped typing a number of times before he eventually sent his reply.
I know. I don’t. But. I’ve been too worried about you to be pissed, frankly.
A pause.
You are right, though. Sorry isn’t enough.
It was the truth, she knew, but it still stung to see it written as fact.
Tell me what you need and I’ll do it, she had replied.
For ten or fifteen minutes, for much of which Olga held her breath, Matteo was silent.
I’m willing to talk. Are you? he finally wrote.
She thought of his eyes and the Coca-Cola brown color of them and she felt very sad all over again. She knew, intellectually, that what happened with Dick was not cheating. That factually, she had been raped, though she despised that word because that meant that she was a victim of something else now. She felt, though, a sense of shame that paralyzed and terrified her. She could barely breathe from the space it occupied in her. She was scared. Not only by the scale of it, but by the revelation that this feeling did not start with the rape, it had been there long before. The rape had merely laid it bare, rendering her unable to mask it with a substitute emotion. If Matteo heard the truth, if he discovered the depth of her defects for himself, then it would really be over. At least now, in the in-between, she had a spark of hope.
Can I have more time? she asked.
If he gave her more time, she decided, she wouldn’t try to gild or varnish herself. She wouldn’t try to charm her way out of his ire.
Por supuesto, mami.
It took her two more weeks. When she finally got up the courage, this day, a rush of adrenaline hit her so hard that she headed straight to his house. But as she approached, she grew paranoid that he’d had a change of heart and wouldn’t let her in, which she knew was irrational. Still, she staked out his house and decided to use the spare key. At the last minute, as the key was in the door, she worried that he might think she was an intruder and wondered if he had a gun. She doubted it, but still wasn’t sure. If he shot me, she thought, he might not ever forgive himself. So, she rang the bell and turned the key and bellowed his name all at once.
“Matteo?” she called out.
“Olga?” She could hear him upstairs, scrambling to his feet. He leaned over the banister and smiled, faintly. Her heart stopped for a moment and she felt nervous but … happy? “How did you…”
“The spare key,” she said. “Sorry about the racket … I didn’t want you to think I was a burglar and shoot me.”
He laughed. “I don’t have a gun and there hasn’t been a burglary on this block since Giuliani was mayor.”
“What are you doing up there?”
“I’m in the Christmas room.”
It was mid-November, Olga realized, nearly Thanksgiving. “It’s almost appropriate.”
“Yeah, I’ve been spending a lot of time up here lately.”
“Can I come up?”
“That would be nice,” he said bashfully.
* * *
THEY WERE LYING in silence on the floor of the Christmas room, the tree lights twinkling, listening to Nat King Cole. Next to each other, but not touching, when Olga blurted out, “I’ve been working for the Russian mob. I’ve been laundering money for them since the TV show, when all the business dried up.”
The night that they went through the letters, the night that every secret anyone had ever harbored came out—including how, as they had suspected, Mabel had been paying all of Julio’s bills for years now—Olga promised her family that if and when she tried to make things work with Matteo she would do so under the premise of total transparency. In her large cache of secrets, talking about the Russian mob seemed, to her, an ice breaker.
“Wait. What?” Matteo asked. “Olga, did they threaten you? Is that what’s been going on?”
Igor could be testy, and she knew she couldn’t—shouldn’t—keep working with them, but what they were capable of seemed to pale in comparison to what she’d been going through.
“No, but I am trying something new—with you, my family. Everybody. I am not keeping anyone’s secrets anymore. So hear me out and you can decide if you want to give me another chance. So that you’ll understand why I vanished like I did.”