How to Save a Life

“I messed up, Rie,” Tommy says, bringing me back to the present.

The knot in my stomach tightens. I turn to take in just how seriously Tommy messed up this time and find him staring out ahead, his face tight, his gaze vacant.

“How bad?” I’m compelled to ask because judging by his expression I would guess really bad.

“Bad.” He chews on the inside of his cheek. “I owe money.”

“…I’m no hero, that’s understood. All the redemption I can offer, girl, is beneath this dirty hood with a chance to make it good somehow. Hey, what else can we do now except roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair…”

Bruce’s words spill over my thoughts and fall through the cracks, float away on the wind. Not even Bruce can lessen the tension building in the Jeep. A metric ton of weight sits on my chest. I can hardly breathe as I force the words out of my mouth. “How much?” The silence continues for another minute and with it my anxiety grows. “How much, T?”

“It was a poker game… a fucking setup…”

The Jeep drives onto the Verrazano Bridge and the whirring sound of the deep tread tires on the metal grate coupled with the wind has me practically shouting. “How much?”

He exhales tiredly. “Thirty.”

Thirty. Thirty thousand dollars. The gravity of it presses down on my chest and bile shoots up the back of my throat.

“Pull over,” I croak as soon as we reach the other side. When he takes too long, the panic spirals out of control. “I said pull over!”

He makes a hard stop in a dark deserted alley between two brick buildings. I jump out and walk in circles, trying not to breathe too deeply the smell of motor oil and garbage hanging in the air. Anything to stave off the imminent projectile vomiting.

“You okay?”

“No! No, I’m not okay.”

Lacing his hands behind his head, he stares up at the night sky with a defeated look on his face, and I’m torn between wanting to smother him in his sleep and feeling bad for him. This is our relationship in a nutshell.

“Thirty thousand…” I still can’t wrap my head around it. “What the fuck is wrong with you?!” Other than looking sheepish, he doesn’t even try to defend himself. “Who do you owe?”

“Ivan DeloRusso.”

Ivan is the local mobster. Although he pretty much sticks to gambling, this is not the person whose wrong side you want to be on.

“Fuck.”

“I’m sorry.”

I have five thousand set aside for my business insurance. If you’re not bonded, there’s slim to no chance of finding work in home repair. It’s career suicide, but there’s no choice. It’s Tommy. And we always have each other’s back. Even now, when I look at him, all I see is the boy with the perpetual black eye.

After my dad died, my mother spent weeks in bed crying, mourning, doing everything other than taking care of her twelve-year-old daughter. Which meant I spent my summer sitting on the front stoop, watching life go on without me, wondering when it would get better, when my mother was going to be normal again. Spoiler alert: never.

It wasn’t all bad. People looked in on us. They were kind and helpful. The fraternity is a strong one. They brought food, sat with her. Everyone in the neighborhood knew what was going on with Bonnie James, but resources were stretched thin. We weren’t the only ones suffering. Other first-responder families were facing similar ordeals.

There was a man renting the house across the street. Single, around mid-fifties. His name was Marvin Stills and he was always nice to us. We’d known him for years. He’d wave when he got home after work, ask us if we needed anything, took in the empty garbage cans and placed them by our garage when my mother forgot which was often.

One afternoon, as I watched him mow the front lawn, he stopped and asked if I wanted to see his bunnies. He kept a hutch in his backyard, near the detached garage. So I followed him, eager to do anything other than watch everyone else go on with life and not eager to go back inside and listen to my mother cry.

I often think about that moment. What if I’d said no? What if I’d gone back inside and watched TV? Would my life be different now?

Marvin wasted no time acting on his impulse. In hindsight he’d probably been planning it for a while, biding his time like any seasoned predator. As soon as he ushered me into the backyard, out of sight of the street and behind the garage, he pushed me to the ground and covered my mouth with his dirty palm. It reeked of body odor, and motor oil, grass clippings. To this day I hate the smell of recently cut grass. I didn’t realize what was happening until I was on my back and he was ripping my pink terry cloth shorts off.