around and basically sprint through the hospital. Well, sprint as fast as my crutches will let me, anyway. Which, to be fair, isn’t much of a sprint at all. But either way, I make it back to the waiting room.
“He’s out of surgery,” Alda tells me. “He made it. He’s going to live.”
Just like that, it all comes crashing down. It’s like I’ve sort of been holding off on feeling my emotions before I knew what was happening with Carlo. But now all of it drops on my head: Dad, Ben, the baby, Ubert, and now Carlo. I’m crying like a baby, that’s the truth of the matter. Alda holds me, rubbing my back.
“Hush,” she whispers, the mother I always wanted. “It’ll be okay, dear. Everything will be okay.”
Waiting in a hospital for three days is both boring and stressful, which is a combination I never knew existed before. I don’t leave Carlo’s bedside. I twitch every time he twitches, thinking he’ll wake up. Even if the doctors have told me he won’t yet. Alda brings me a change of clothes and some toiletries. Emily reads snippets from her novel to keep us all entertained.
Ubert wakes up, and then Durante. Nario is well enough to swing by in his hospital gown. He stands over the bed, his face tight. I think he’s holding back tears. “I should’ve been there, Carlo,” he says. “Never again. I’ll never abandon you again.”
“Nario,” Alda whispers. She has taken off her veil. This whole floor is basically mafioso-owned now. She places her hand on his shoulder. “Carlo would not want you to blame yourself. You know this.”
He nods, looking unconvinced as he falls into thought.
And then we wait some more.
Sometimes, I’ll wake in the middle of the night with my head resting on the edge of his bed, snoring lightly. I’ll remember his arrogant smile when we first met, standing outside the rec center. How I hated him at first!
I think about that evening we weeded the garden together, working side by side, and how shocked I was to discover that there was more to Carlo De Maggio than met the eye.
“Wake up, you asshole,” I whisper, giving his hand a little squeeze. “You don’t get to make me fall in love with you and then just sleep forever. That’s not how this works.”
This is the sort of soppy stuff I would’ve laughed about before. But maybe being soppy isn’t that bad. Who can blame me?
Two more days pass and Carlo’s induced coma continues. We make a sort of base in his room, with Emily in the corner shrouded in blankets as she taps away at her keyboard, Alda knitting in the other corner, and me with a notebook in hand, sketching.
“I didn’t know you knitted,” I say to Alda.
She smiles. “I didn’t know you sketched.”
Sometimes, Maury and Durante and Nario will play poker on the little side table, swapping Carlo stories as they do. I make myself small so they won’t get self-conscious and stop talking. I learn about the time when Nario was eighteen and Carlo was just a kid, how Carlo got revenge on some thugs that had been harassing Nario.
“Said I wasn’t allowed to walk by this one corner store. Said I needed written fucking permission. You believe that shit? Carlo, he heard about it—and he wasn’t even a man back then—and he goes charging in there with a goddamn baseball bat, smashing the whole place up. Then we learned that it wasn’t even their store, so he made his old man pay for the damage.”
All the men laugh and I smile to myself, thinking soppy things like: that’s my man. He’s my shadow. I love him.
And then, finally, he wakes up.
Carlo’s eyes blink open and his lips spread in that familiar smile. It takes him as long to focus as it takes me to really process the fact that he’s awake. Then I’m at his side, grasping his hand, looking down into his eyes as he seems to come abruptly alert and panics, his mind still stuck where it left off at the fight.
“The baby,” he croaks. “Hazel, the baby—”
“They’re safe,” I reassure him, swallowing back tears of gratitude that he’s come back to me. “We’re all safe.”
He picks his head up and looks at Emily and Alda, who are sleeping in their usual spots. He smiles and lets his head drop. “Thank God for that. How’s your leg?”
I squeeze his hand again. “You mean my very minor flesh wound?