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Chapter 16: Santuario

My only option was to enter through the shattered window, a challenge that was made nearly impossible by my legs. Even if I managed to get past the shards of glass sticking straight up, I would surely fall and hurt myself once I got inside and tried to steady myself.

But the possibility of Santana being trapped inside alone, scared and hurt - or God forbid, worse - compelled me to try. I found a segment of window closest to the wall that was gone, placing my hand against it to steady me. Praying, I lifted my leg with my other hand, hoisting it over the perilous jagged ridge of glass that lined the bottom of the window frame. I set my foot down, hearing the crunch of broken glass under the wooden sole of my shoe. Once it found the sill steady, I tried putting weight on it. Nothing terrible happened. I pressed forward, seeing if my thigh muscle might lift me up off the street, raising me the forty-five centimeters I needed to be securely standing inside the window display.

I pressed my weight into the window frame, hoping to ease the pressure on my legs. As I did, I felt my steadiness falter, and I worried I would tumble into the glass that gleamed before me in the sun, as though it was keen to pierce my skin and spill my blood. My heart raced, and I gripped the window frame tightly. Slowly, I lifted myself as best I could, feeling my other leg leave the pavement of the sidewalk. I rose, unsteady, until my knee could lock and I was less likely to tumble. Lifting my back leg carefully at the knee so as to make sure it didn't snag on the glass shards still stuck in the window frame, I drew it forward until I could see with my eyes that it was safely in the laundry and I could set it down.

Beside my foot was the sign Santana had painted; Fine dressmaking and mending available here. It lay beneath several shards of glass, looking up at the ceiling, as though its words were now mute. There was no mending to be done, no fine clothing to be commissioned. The laundry in itself was dead, and the remains would be picked through by burglars and bums.

As soon as I was steady and had stepped down from the window display, I surged forward into the laundry, wobbling around the counter.

I immediately went to the stairs, trying to ignore my fear as the tapestry ensconced me and I was cloaked in darkness. I called out for Santana again as I made my way clumsily up the stairs, but I heard nothing. As I neared the top of the stairs, I saw that the door leading to her apartment was open, light from the windows seeping into the stairwell. I drenched cold, feeling my heart threaten to jump out of my chest with its frantic beating. I feared Santana had been dragged from her quarters against her will. Though I dreaded what I might find, I had to see for myself if the wreckage from the laundry had been continued upstairs. I forced my feet to move up one step at a time, the journey taking too long while landing me at the door too quickly. I held my breath as I looked through the door frame.

Inside, nothing had changed. The settee still sat pleasantly by the window, the gramophone still stood on its table, and the dishes sat peacefully on their shelf above the sink. The photographs Santana kept were still above the mantel, and the dress she had commissioned still hung proudly on its hanger.

I checked the kitchen and bedroom and found nothing out of the ordinary except that Santana's bed was unmade; she made her bed every morning. Seeing it in disarray made me more frightened than ever. Had she been kidnapped? Forced to flee her home in the middle of the night? I didn't know what to make of it.

As I turned to leave the room, I saw the tin with the pistol in it lying beside the bed. I was frightened to open it. If the pistol was missing, Santana had taken it for a good reason; if the pistol was there, she was somewhere without any kind of protection. Fearfully, I lifted the lid, my body churning cold when I saw the pistol lying in its napkin.

Though I was frightened to touch it, I picked the pistol up so I would have something to protect myself if someone were to surprise me while I looked for Santana. Its metal was cold and heavy in my hand. I checked the attic room where Caterina had lived, finding nothing out of place.

I made my way downstairs, dread snaking its way through my body and rest heavy in my stomach, making me want to retch. Just when I thought all hope was lost, I noticed that the light in the back of the laundry, right over the sewing machine, was on. It shone brighter than it usually did; its light reached farther than it ever had before, even when the space had been neatly organized. After brief examination, I saw that the tapestry that had sectioned off the sewing nook from the rest of the laundry had been torn down, its bright colors crumpled over my chair, which had been knocked on its side. It resembled a woven boulder, its bulk resting heavy on the laundry floor. But when I saw what was placed next to the chair, my heart stopped: Santana's shoes, with their delicate thread pattern on the side, were placed next to the sewing machine, undisturbed.

She wouldn't have left her shoes downstairs for no reason. If they'd been pried off her before she'd been carried away, they wouldn't be set so neatly beside the treadle of the machine. For some reason, those shoes rooted me to the spot, forbidding me from leaving the laundry until I knew with absolute certainty she wasn't trapped under a crate or locked in a cabinet somewhere.

Figuring I ought to straighten up to figure out what had happened to Santana, I picked up the tapestry of the Trinacria and folded it as best I could in the small space. I placed it on the seat of the chair, pushing the chair back to its proper place in front of the machine.

But as I did, the feet of the chair caught on something; the woven rug that had rested beneath my feet as I sewed day after day was bunched, preventing the chair from sliding forward. As I leaned down to examine it, it appeared as though it was caught between two floorboards. I moved the chair aside so I could fix it. But when I tugged at the rug, it didn't budge. It was jammed into the floor. Frustrated, I lifted the other end of the rug and flipped it over to see what was holding the rug so snugly in place.

And there, to my astonishment, was a trap door, its metal latch resting in a small hollow.

The rug had been caught in the trapdoor sometime between when I had left the shop the day before and when the laundry had been ransacked.

I paused for a moment to consider if I should lift the door. Perhaps that was how the vandals had entered the laundry - if there was a secret passage underground, they could have entered without a key. And yet, given the care they'd taken to smash the front window to shards, it seemed unlikely that stealth had been their concern.

Taking a shaking breath and gripping the pistol in one hand, I lifted the latch and tugged until the small door opened on its hinge.

Squinting into the darkness, I made out a ladder and some large metal machines in the room below. There was no light but for what shone above me in the rampaged sewing nook, and my shadow blocked much of the view.

"Santana?" I called timidly into the space.

My voice didn't echo against anything, and I thought it unlikely that I was peering down into a passageway. The space seemed more like a storage room or root cellar than a tunnel.

I paused, holding my breath to listen. I heard a small scuffle, but I couldn't make out if it was a rodent or something else.

It was quiet for a long quivering moment.

At last, a voice.

"I'm down here."

Relief flooded through my body such that I could have flown down into the space, I was so eager to make sure she was all right. Desperate to get to her, I considered the ladder and how difficult it would be for me to descend. I knew I could lower myself with my arms part of the way, slowly dropping from one rung to the next until I was on the ground. It wasn't a deep room, so I didn't think twice about tucking the pistol into my corset and positioning myself to sink down into the room. If Santana could see me, she didn't say anything about the way I maneuvered myself down. It would have been much more difficult had I not had fear buzzing through me, my mind set solely on ensuring that Santana was unharmed. At last my boots touched the ground. I set the pistol down at the base of the ladder, glad to have it off my person.

"Where are you?" I asked in a frantic whisper. The darkness and the fear in Santana's voice told me not to make any sudden motions or noise.

"Over here," Santana whimpered from the other side of a large metal machine. I walked toward her voice and was able to barely make out her body huddled in the corner, her legs drawn to her chest.

"Stai bene?" I asked desperately.

Santana didn't answer, and I felt fear surge through me. I crouched in front of her, squinting to see if she was hurt, willing my eyes to adjust to the dark quickly.

"Stai male?" I asked.

"No," she said. Her voice was as frail as I had ever heard it, sounding like a small child as she cowered in the corner.

"Cos'è successo?" I asked.

"They think I snitched on them," she said, tears clogging her voice. "I didn't!"

Realizing she needed powerful soothing, I searched out her arms with my hands. "I know," I hushed, though I didn't know whom she was referring to.

"I'm not a snitch," she said desperately.

"I know you're not," I said, trying to draw her body toward mine.

But she was so rigid and terrified, she stayed stuck in the corner. Instead, I ran my hands up and down her arms. They felt foreign from how they'd felt the day before, their tenseness overwhelming and unfamiliar.

I didn't know what to ask first. My questions had a way of frightening her. So rather than ask who had plundered her business, I glanced around, trying to decipher what kind of machine we were hiding behind and what purpose this secret room served.

"Where are we?" I asked.

She sniffled. "My father used to work here in the middle of the night while I was sleeping. I wasn't allowed to ask questions or come down here unless it was an emergency." Her neck loosened enough to look up at the great metal machine. "It must be a counterfeiting machine," she said. Her head turned toward me. "He was imprisoned for counterfeiting money."

Always grateful when she volunteered information about herself without me having to ask, I nodded, hoping she could see that I wasn't put off by her father's illegal activities. I knew they had no reflection on her.

"What happened before you came down here?" I asked.

She wiped her face before she said, "I couldn't sleep, so I came down here to practice my sewing. I wanted to surprise you with something simple like an apron or pillowcase. When I heard the front window shatter, I dove down here as fast as I could. They didn't see me."

I sat motionless, imagining how frightening it must have been to be jerked out of the tranquility of sewing by such a violent commotion.

I pictured Santana huddled where she was now, listening to her shop being torn apart above her. If it had been me in her position, I would have died of terror. My heart would have been pounding so hard, it would have exhausted itself into stillness.

I found her hand and squeezed it.

"They think I told, but I didn't!" she said, as though I were the one accusing her of snitching. "I wouldn't betray them."

"Betray who?" I asked.

She seemed to retreat. She answered, her voice more timid. "My father's friends." She paused. "They think I told the police about the crates."

I thought of all the strange, brusque men who frequented the laundry, never dropping off their wash but always picking it up. I had known something was amiss in the laundry, but now I understood. Something was being trafficked through the laundry that they didn't want the police to know about.

"Those men took care of me after my father was put in prison. They made sure Nonna and I could stay in our home. All they asked was that they be able to use the shop for their business."

I nodded, squeezing her hand to let her know I didn't think her sinful for doing what she had to do to care for herself and Caterina. There were far greater crimes than trying to survive.

"I don't know who told," she said, growing more distraught, "but it wasn't me."

"I know it wasn't," I said for the third time.

It was quiet for a moment, and I felt her fright and frustration swirling around the room at a furious pace.

"Could it have been one of the Hebrews?" I asked.

Santana considered for a moment before shaking her head. "They always worked out back. Even if they'd known, they wouldn't have been able to tell the Irish policemen. They only speak Hebrew."

An idea came to me. If I was correct about the medicine that Santana had tried to give her nonna, I had an idea of what might have been in the crates.

"Did your nonna know about the crates?" I asked.

Santana paused before saying, "Si."

A heavy silence settled in, and I felt none of the flurrying. I felt Santana on the brink of a wave of tears and wanted to fortify her against it.

Still, I had to say what we both were thinking. "Perhaps she didn't realize what she was saying to the doctors at Bellevue."

Santana curled into herself again, pained at the reminder of her lost nonna. And yet she knew I was right. She cried for a minute before she calmed.

"Perhaps," she said.

We returned to sitting in silence, letting the heavy, musty air weight us down.

"I worry they'll come after you, too," she said. "They retaliate against anyone they think is an informer."

My body surged with panic before I realized that none of the men knew I could speak. I'd played mute with all of them, not realizing it would potentially serve me.

"But they think I'm mute," I said.

"It doesn't matter to them," she said.

I sat in the chill, realizing how much danger I'd been in since the day I walked into Santana's shop. Still, thinking of all the grace she had brought me, the courage I'd found in her companionship, and the vows we'd said to each other the day before, I couldn't bring myself to regret it.

"You can't come back to the shop," she urged me. "I'll find somewhere to go, but you must find other work."

All at once I remembered what I had come to tell her, the horrible news I had to impart. I was going to be pulled from her embrace in a matter of hours, thrust onto a terrifying train with Mamma and Luca and Papà and nothing else familiar.

But I didn't know how to begin telling her that. Instead, I spoke of the single element of joy.

"Papà found us yesterday," I said, my voice devoid of the jubilation I had felt when I saw his face.

Santana sat up straighter, alert. "He did!" she said, happiness seeping into her voice.

"He did," I said. The silence of the room rested heavy, resembling the way I felt about what I had to say next. "He's taking us upstate."

"When?"

"Today."

It was silent, and I heard Santana begin to cry. After a moment she sniffled, "At least you'll be safe there. They wouldn't follow a woman out of the city."

Her resignation to parting and her hopelessness that our union could endure the crimes committed against us thrust me into agony.

I knew that if I were to leave her, she would have lost everyone she loved in the world. I couldn't bear the thought of it for even a moment.

"I don't want to leave you," I said, feeling my throat tighten. "I can't leave you."

"You have to go with your family," she said. "They'll protect you better than I can."

Tears streamed down my face now. "But who will protect you?"

She trembled, not answering immediately. "I'll find somewhere to go," she said. "I could change my surname, perhaps, just in case."

I thought of how Papà had adopted a new surname that afforded him the opportunity to start fresh in a new place. I wished I could give her my surname, the way a husband would give his to his wife.

"My mother's," Paloma said.

Just as Naomi became Mara, so did Santana Morello become Santana Lopez. It was quiet as we trembled with grief.

"Santana Lopez sounds nice," I offered.

She nodded and reached through the darkness to find my face. "I love you, Brittany," she said, as though it were the last thing she were going to be able to say to me. "Please don't forget how much I love you."

I put my hand over hers where it rested on my cheek, willing it to absorb the tears that fell there. Santana said nothing, only shivered with fear and sadness.

As I imagined being carried away to another city where the streets were once again unfamiliar, I knew I would never feel as though Santana were safe enough unless she was with me.

"Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee," I said, my voice shaking, in stark contrast from the silver way the words of Ruth to Naomi had been spoken the day before. "Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God."

The final word was cut off by a sob from Santana, who was once again curled into herself.

But I was determined. "Come with us," I urged. "Mamma and Papà would be glad for the company of such a good friend and hard worker. Papà said we'd have to take in a boarder in the house he's found for us upstate anyway."

"But I'm not family," Santana argued.

I felt something brewing inside me, a great force I was unfamiliar with. I felt strong and undeterred by my legs or poverty or sex.

I tried to sound stern through my tears. "Santana, you are family. I promised God to love and protect you always, and I will not leave this city without you."

Something in Santana's chest gave way like a dam, and she fell forward onto me.

"Will you come with me?" I asked. "Or will I have to carry you out of the city myself?"

"Si," Santana said. "I never want to come back to the Bowery again."

"Then I shall see to it that you never have to," I said, feeling courage and pride replace the fear and grief that had lodged itself in me. "You shall live with us as long as you desire."

"Forever," Santana said, reaching for my hand. "I promised you and God as much."

She found my hand and laced her fingers with mine, squeezing as though she might draw from my courage. As it was, I had enough to give her for the rest of her days.

We sat there together for a long time, unready to face the streets above or the dangers that lurked behind every corner.

"Are you sure your mamma and papà would be alright with it?" she asked, uncertainty flickering in her voice again.

"We mightn't have survived in America if it hadn't been for you. Their gratitude will be enough for them to welcome you until they grow to love you."

Santana nodded against my chest, trying to smooth her breathing. "Perhaps when the baby comes, I can care for it, if your mother has to work."

"Won't you work?" I asked.

"I have some money to last me a good while," she said. She produced a tin that was hidden against the machine. "I want to help you find dress commissions that you might continue doing what you love. Perhaps - perhaps even open a shop someday."

I squeezed her to me, never so grateful for her love and loyalty.

"I should like that very much," I said.

Peace came to rest around us. I knew our journey north on the train would be frightful, and the weather further north just as cruel. The struggle to survive would never abate and my legs would always be twisted.

But for the first time since I'd entered the Bowery, I was hopeful. The dreams I had for my life in America were no longer grand; the milk and honey at my table would be scarce and hard-earned, and my riches would never fill coffers. But the possibility of waking in Santana's arms, never having to retire from her company, praying by her side each day, and living out our days in quiet content was wealth and fortune unlike any I'd imagined. Though our wombs would never know life, the dresses we would make together would bring us pride and security as we aged. Imagining living together as our skin weathered and our hair grew silver was the first feeling of home I'd had in America.

"Shall we go?" Santana asked.

I nodded, but Santana made no move to get up. I supposed she was collecting her courage and strength for the journey ahead. So long as she was with me, I had courage enough for both of us.

After a long while, she extracted herself from my arms and stood. She picked up her tin of money and helped me to my feet, leading me around the counterfeiting machine. She climbed the ladder first, opening the trap door before reaching down to help me as I struggled up the rungs, pistol once again tucked in my corset. Finally, we both stood in the sewing nook for the last time. We looked at the rack of thread on the wall, took in the gleam of the sewing machine. It seemed abandoned now, though we hadn't left yet. Alessandra's wedding dress lay on the floor, the dressform having been knocked over in the rampage. I hoped she would come find it. I had greater worries than delivering it to her now.

Santana bid me stay concealed while she ventured upstairs to collect a few belongings. Fear coursed through me again as I worried that perhaps one of the vandals was laying in wait for her to venture into her quarters. I gave her the pistol to take with her in case. But above me I heard only her soft footsteps.

It was only a few minutes before she descended again, carrying a traveling bag barely big enough for a few outfits. She had covered her head with a shawl like the ones women wore in Napoli to conceal herself while we walked through the streets of New York for the last time. She gave me a sad smile before taking my hand and leading me toward the door. She unlocked it and held it open as I stepped out onto the sidewalk. She followed, not bothering to close the door behind her.

As we ventured toward a new life in a strange place, the early morning sun was gentle as it shone on our faces. We spoke little, taking in the passersby, the noisy carts and automobiles, the children with patches on their knees, wondering if things would be as strange and familiar in our new place. So much was uncertain.

But as she took my hand for a moment, giving a gentle squeeze, I knew that some things weren't uncertain at all. The sun would rise each morning and set each night, and Santana would be by my side to witness it in all its glory.

Author's Note

I began writing this story one month before I became disabled by a sudden mystery illness (since identified as Lyme disease) that cost me many things I held dear. Through some powerful kismet, this version of Brittany had presented herself to me — funny legs and all — right before I became sick. She provided comfort when I was angry, hopeless, and grieving the loss of my mobility and independence, and remains a source of inspiration and strength, as well as a powerful reminder of how fortunate I am to have access to quality medical care.

To all the people out there who persevere despite disability, chronic illness, poverty, and the world giving you every reason to give up: you have my unwavering admiration and respect. You, of all people, are deserving of every kind of love imaginable.