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bedlamsbardSCHOOL'S OUT FOR SUMMER! *dances* As of today, I am officially a sophomore. Ain't that awesome?
Omerta 5, Nick Bonasera-centric, no canon characters unless you count Stella mentions.
St. Basil’s Orphanage was tucked away on a side street in Queens, smaller than Nick had pictured, with peeling letters half-faded away, so that he had to squint to read them against the darkness of the wood behind them. It was a church, of course, and he might have expected that, but he hadn’t, somehow, had pictured something bigger and more impersonal. St. Basil’s reminded him of the church he’d gone to as a kid in Brooklyn, the tiny chapel with the missing bell and the belltower filled with decades worth of clutter. It was one of the mysteries of his neighborhood, where the bell had gone, and even the nuns and the priests hadn’t known. Or if they had, had kept it to themselves.
The chapel was barely bigger than the visitor’s room at the prison but seemed smaller, because of the pews slanted neatly together, maybe a round dozen in all. Nick blessed himself quickly, some old childhood instinct that lingered still, years after he thought he’d given up on religion. Maybe they were right, and prison helped. It had, he thought. Given him something to hope for and pray to, now that he had something to pray for. Keep my daughters safe…
“Can I help you?”
He turned, wary, hands flickering out in automatic self defense, and changed the motion so that they fluttered down awkwardly to his sides when he saw the woman. Nun, or whatever they were calling them these days. “I’m trying to find my daughter.”
“Usually it’s the other way around.” Light low laugh, like thin prison milk in bitter prison coffee. “She went here?”
“That’s what my ex told me,” Nick said. God, bitch, and if I ever get my hands on you, Odelia, my fucking daughters my kids. “I’m Nick Bonasera,” he added after a moment, when she looked at him expectedly.
“Mary Ann,” she offered, holding a hand out towards him. Nick took it, feeling small, slender fingers caught in his own grip, and the sudden wash of power – he could break those fingers if he wanted to, just squeeze and hear her scream. Could. Easy, like breathing.
He snatched his hand away.
“The orphanage has been closed for seven years now,” Mary Ann said, leading him away from the chapel into the dark of a musty hallway. She flicked a switch, and light pooled suddenly from old-fashioned lamps set in the wall. “Now they send kids away to foster care.” Bitterness, he noted with curiosity.
She pushed open the door to a small room lined with records. “What were your daughters’ names?” she asked, hands hovering over one box, then another.
Nick swallowed, waiting awkwardly in the doorway. “Stella and Astra Bonasera,” he said, and the names were like prayer on his tongue. “They were – Stella would have been five. Astra – maybe six months?”
“Stella?” Mary Ann asked, and he caught the sudden gleam of white teeth in the blurred light.
“Yeah, Stella. D’you –” He licked at his lips, felt hope spread wings and stir. Don’t hope, he tried to tell himself. Don’t, you’ll just make yourself – don’t hope. It might not be her. “Do you know her?”
Mary Ann laughed. “We try and keep track of our girls, especially the ones that stay here all their lives. Everyone knows Stella. She comes back, now and then.” She reached toward a shelf and tugged loose a box, setting it on the desk in the center of the room. “Bonasera…Bonasera – here.”
Nick took the folder eagerly. Pictures fluttered out of the edges and he bent down to scoop them up, feeling his breath scrape raw edges against his throat as he realized – Jesus Christ, this is my kid. My daughter.
Stella, at five. Chin raised defiantly and lips pressed tightly together, as if she planned on fighting the world and was waiting for someone to offer a challenge.
Stella, at nine. Stepped up to home plate with a baseball bat in her hands, eyes narrowed in concentration that seemed too old for her years.
Stella, at thirteen. Beaming and holding up a trophy the size of his forearm with a gold microscope on top and shiny blue plastic going down the sides.
Stella, at fifteen. Caught in sleep, cheek resting on a thick textbook with paper spreading out in flurries around her.
Stella, at eighteen. Her graduation gown was dark blue and sober, with silver and gold tassles that hung around her neck and off her cap, and the camera caught her holding her diploma up.
This is my kid, Nick realized. My daughter.
Christ, I’m proud of her.
“She got a scholarship,” Mary Ann said, and Nick’s eyes flickered up towards her. Had forgotten, for a moment, she was watching. That would have gotten him jumped in prison, those precious minutes where he relaxed his guard.
Nick swallowed. “Where?”
“NYU. She got her bachelor’s in science – chemistry, or maybe biology.” Mary Ann smiled slightly. “She’s a police officer now – a detective with the Crime Scene Unit.”
What?
My daughter – the daughter of a thief and a conman – a cop?
Nick wasn’t sure how clear the shock on his face was. But – his daughter – a cop? Stella, I didn’t want you to have to deal with people like me. Or the men he’d met in prison, the killers and the rapists and the sick twisted baby-fuckers. Not my daughter.
“Mr. Bonasera?”
Nick closed his eyes, took a deep, shaky breath, then started counting back from ten, picturing the numbers ticking away as he did so. When he opened his eyes he was painfully aware of the tension of his body, of the dust pricking at his nasal passages like he was inhaling gravel with every breath, of the faded color of the pictures he held. “Where?” he asked. “What – what precinct –”
“The 12th,” Mary Ann said. She was frowning at him, small neat lines etching crows feet at the corners of her eyes. “On Mulberry Street, I think.”
“Mulberry Street,” Nick murmured to himself. Detective Stella Bonasera, of the 12th Precinct of the New York Police Department. It sounded good. “What about – what about Astra?”
Mary Ann pressed her lips together. “She was adopted. Give me a moment –” She reached toward the box on the table, then froze, face twisting a little in embarrassment. “Mr. Bonasera – if you don’t mind me asking, and it’s procecdure, but - do you have any ID? This is confidential information, and I shouldn’t have given you Stella’s files without –”
“I understand.” He dug in his pocket for his driver’s license and passport, never mind that both were over thirty years old, and flipped them out towards her.
She barely glanced toward them and waved a hand to put them away. “I have another question – a personal one, I’m afraid, but – why exactly were Stella and Astra abandoned here?”
Abandoned. Christ, Odelia had said she’d left them here, but he hadn’t thought – Christ, abandoned. It was an ugly word, and the realization of it gnawed at him like acid. “I’ve been in prison for the past thirty years,” Nick said quietly. “My wife – ex-wife, now – told me she’d left them here before she took a Greyhound to Nebraska. She never wanted kids,” he added, staring fiercely at the shelves behind Mary Ann. “I didn’t either, but once Stella was born – they were so – they were my blood, you know? My kids. And she – she just –” He shook his head, and said very softly, “Jesus.”
Mary Ann looked abashed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that usually the parents don’t come looking for their children. Usually it’s the children come looking for their parents.”
“Yeah, I get that. Astra?”
She flipped through the box. “Bonasera…Bonasera, A…that’s interesting, there’s no file. Are you sure?”
“Odelia wouldn’t have gone to two different orphanages,” Nick said flatly.
“And I remember Stella having a sister. Do you mind –” Silently, Nick passed her Stella’s file. She flipped through it quickly. “One sister,” she said. “Astra Bonasera. But there’s no record of Astra Bonasera ever having been here. We have records of everything, there should be – there should be a record of the adoption, I know there was one –”
There was an embarrassed cough from the door, and Nick and Mary Ann both turned to see Mordecai Giovinazzo standing there. “Hey, Nick?” he said. “We haveta go.”
Nick hesitated, drawn between his daughter’s past and his future, and glanced back down at the photos in his hand. He reached outsilently for the file and slipped them back in. “Thank you,” he told Mary Ann. “You have no idea what this means to me.”
“Wait,” she said, turning to splay the file out on the table. She picked through the pictures carefully, then tugged one free and offered it towards him. “Keep it. I’ll keep looking for anything on your other daughter, maybe the records were misfiled –”
“Thank you,” Nick said again, and glanced down at the photograph. It was one of the ones he hadn’t noticed before, an older Stella maybe in her twenties sitting on the front steps of an old building that wasn’t St. Basil’s. She’d rested her elbow on her knee and was leaning her head against the palm of her hand, mouth quirked in something almost a smile and eyes fixed somewhere off to the left of the photographer. If he squinted, he thought he could catch a glint of gold at her hip from beneath her jacket. A professional shot, maybe, or one taken by an exceptionally good amateur.
It surprised him, a little, how little she looked like Odelia. The hair was the same, and the nose – not the eyes, Odelia’s eyes had been blue as summer noon – but the rest wasn’t Odelia’s. He could see the traces she’d left on their daughter, but they were just that, traces. Cheekbones, a little. The arch of one wrist, but beyond that he couldn’t see his wife.
He’d never seen Odelia this old. He’d gone to prison before either of them reached twenty-five, and Stella would be past that now. Would be into her late thirties. Jesus.
My kid grew up, and I didn’t see it. Won’t see it. Can’t see it. Lost.
His fists clenched tight against his sides.
Damn you, Kevin.
*
“You find your daughter?” Mordecai asked as they walked away from St. Basil’s and towards his sober dark grey Jaguar.
Nick swallowed past the lump in his throat. “One of them.”
“Astra – you said the other one was caled Astra?”
“Yeah,” Nick said, trying to remember her. He couldn’t, really. Too long ago, and he hadn’t known her long enough. Just a small milky baby whose mouth constantly twisted in screaming. Not like he remember Stella. “Astra Giovanna Bonasera.” He glanced at Mordecai and was surprised to see the mobster’s face twist in something like surprise and realization. “You don’t know –”
“No,” Mordecai said, sharply and too quickly. “No, I don’t know anything.”
Nick frowned. He’s lying, he realized. He knows something about my daughter.
“Val wants to see you,” Mordecai continued. He flicked dark eyes in Nick’s direction, then away as his car beeped discreetly twice. It didn’t fit in this neighborhood. “Not now – he’s got a meeting that’ll probably go into the night. You’re with me, Laurie Ruggiero, and Ace Aciello. Not my brother; he’s tied up at the precinct where they’re holding Joey. Not Carmine; he’ll be with Val. We’ll grill you over, see if you got what it takes or if three decades in prison rotted that out of you. You were a second-story guy?”
“Occasionally,” Nick said.
“Good,” Mordecai said, looking pleased. “We could use another one. Too many of us on bodyguard duty, especially with Joey in the clink.” He quirked a bitter smile as he pulled open the door to his car. “War tends to make people wary, and we don’t need wary, we need fighters. Blood for blood, and bone for bone, and we’ll pay the price in flesh if need be. Teach the Patrisos a lesson, even if we have to wipe the family off the face of the earth to do it. Nobody fucks with Constantine.”
Omerta 5, Nick Bonasera-centric, no canon characters unless you count Stella mentions.
St. Basil’s Orphanage was tucked away on a side street in Queens, smaller than Nick had pictured, with peeling letters half-faded away, so that he had to squint to read them against the darkness of the wood behind them. It was a church, of course, and he might have expected that, but he hadn’t, somehow, had pictured something bigger and more impersonal. St. Basil’s reminded him of the church he’d gone to as a kid in Brooklyn, the tiny chapel with the missing bell and the belltower filled with decades worth of clutter. It was one of the mysteries of his neighborhood, where the bell had gone, and even the nuns and the priests hadn’t known. Or if they had, had kept it to themselves.
The chapel was barely bigger than the visitor’s room at the prison but seemed smaller, because of the pews slanted neatly together, maybe a round dozen in all. Nick blessed himself quickly, some old childhood instinct that lingered still, years after he thought he’d given up on religion. Maybe they were right, and prison helped. It had, he thought. Given him something to hope for and pray to, now that he had something to pray for. Keep my daughters safe…
“Can I help you?”
He turned, wary, hands flickering out in automatic self defense, and changed the motion so that they fluttered down awkwardly to his sides when he saw the woman. Nun, or whatever they were calling them these days. “I’m trying to find my daughter.”
“Usually it’s the other way around.” Light low laugh, like thin prison milk in bitter prison coffee. “She went here?”
“That’s what my ex told me,” Nick said. God, bitch, and if I ever get my hands on you, Odelia, my fucking daughters my kids. “I’m Nick Bonasera,” he added after a moment, when she looked at him expectedly.
“Mary Ann,” she offered, holding a hand out towards him. Nick took it, feeling small, slender fingers caught in his own grip, and the sudden wash of power – he could break those fingers if he wanted to, just squeeze and hear her scream. Could. Easy, like breathing.
He snatched his hand away.
“The orphanage has been closed for seven years now,” Mary Ann said, leading him away from the chapel into the dark of a musty hallway. She flicked a switch, and light pooled suddenly from old-fashioned lamps set in the wall. “Now they send kids away to foster care.” Bitterness, he noted with curiosity.
She pushed open the door to a small room lined with records. “What were your daughters’ names?” she asked, hands hovering over one box, then another.
Nick swallowed, waiting awkwardly in the doorway. “Stella and Astra Bonasera,” he said, and the names were like prayer on his tongue. “They were – Stella would have been five. Astra – maybe six months?”
“Stella?” Mary Ann asked, and he caught the sudden gleam of white teeth in the blurred light.
“Yeah, Stella. D’you –” He licked at his lips, felt hope spread wings and stir. Don’t hope, he tried to tell himself. Don’t, you’ll just make yourself – don’t hope. It might not be her. “Do you know her?”
Mary Ann laughed. “We try and keep track of our girls, especially the ones that stay here all their lives. Everyone knows Stella. She comes back, now and then.” She reached toward a shelf and tugged loose a box, setting it on the desk in the center of the room. “Bonasera…Bonasera – here.”
Nick took the folder eagerly. Pictures fluttered out of the edges and he bent down to scoop them up, feeling his breath scrape raw edges against his throat as he realized – Jesus Christ, this is my kid. My daughter.
Stella, at five. Chin raised defiantly and lips pressed tightly together, as if she planned on fighting the world and was waiting for someone to offer a challenge.
Stella, at nine. Stepped up to home plate with a baseball bat in her hands, eyes narrowed in concentration that seemed too old for her years.
Stella, at thirteen. Beaming and holding up a trophy the size of his forearm with a gold microscope on top and shiny blue plastic going down the sides.
Stella, at fifteen. Caught in sleep, cheek resting on a thick textbook with paper spreading out in flurries around her.
Stella, at eighteen. Her graduation gown was dark blue and sober, with silver and gold tassles that hung around her neck and off her cap, and the camera caught her holding her diploma up.
This is my kid, Nick realized. My daughter.
Christ, I’m proud of her.
“She got a scholarship,” Mary Ann said, and Nick’s eyes flickered up towards her. Had forgotten, for a moment, she was watching. That would have gotten him jumped in prison, those precious minutes where he relaxed his guard.
Nick swallowed. “Where?”
“NYU. She got her bachelor’s in science – chemistry, or maybe biology.” Mary Ann smiled slightly. “She’s a police officer now – a detective with the Crime Scene Unit.”
What?
My daughter – the daughter of a thief and a conman – a cop?
Nick wasn’t sure how clear the shock on his face was. But – his daughter – a cop? Stella, I didn’t want you to have to deal with people like me. Or the men he’d met in prison, the killers and the rapists and the sick twisted baby-fuckers. Not my daughter.
“Mr. Bonasera?”
Nick closed his eyes, took a deep, shaky breath, then started counting back from ten, picturing the numbers ticking away as he did so. When he opened his eyes he was painfully aware of the tension of his body, of the dust pricking at his nasal passages like he was inhaling gravel with every breath, of the faded color of the pictures he held. “Where?” he asked. “What – what precinct –”
“The 12th,” Mary Ann said. She was frowning at him, small neat lines etching crows feet at the corners of her eyes. “On Mulberry Street, I think.”
“Mulberry Street,” Nick murmured to himself. Detective Stella Bonasera, of the 12th Precinct of the New York Police Department. It sounded good. “What about – what about Astra?”
Mary Ann pressed her lips together. “She was adopted. Give me a moment –” She reached toward the box on the table, then froze, face twisting a little in embarrassment. “Mr. Bonasera – if you don’t mind me asking, and it’s procecdure, but - do you have any ID? This is confidential information, and I shouldn’t have given you Stella’s files without –”
“I understand.” He dug in his pocket for his driver’s license and passport, never mind that both were over thirty years old, and flipped them out towards her.
She barely glanced toward them and waved a hand to put them away. “I have another question – a personal one, I’m afraid, but – why exactly were Stella and Astra abandoned here?”
Abandoned. Christ, Odelia had said she’d left them here, but he hadn’t thought – Christ, abandoned. It was an ugly word, and the realization of it gnawed at him like acid. “I’ve been in prison for the past thirty years,” Nick said quietly. “My wife – ex-wife, now – told me she’d left them here before she took a Greyhound to Nebraska. She never wanted kids,” he added, staring fiercely at the shelves behind Mary Ann. “I didn’t either, but once Stella was born – they were so – they were my blood, you know? My kids. And she – she just –” He shook his head, and said very softly, “Jesus.”
Mary Ann looked abashed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that usually the parents don’t come looking for their children. Usually it’s the children come looking for their parents.”
“Yeah, I get that. Astra?”
She flipped through the box. “Bonasera…Bonasera, A…that’s interesting, there’s no file. Are you sure?”
“Odelia wouldn’t have gone to two different orphanages,” Nick said flatly.
“And I remember Stella having a sister. Do you mind –” Silently, Nick passed her Stella’s file. She flipped through it quickly. “One sister,” she said. “Astra Bonasera. But there’s no record of Astra Bonasera ever having been here. We have records of everything, there should be – there should be a record of the adoption, I know there was one –”
There was an embarrassed cough from the door, and Nick and Mary Ann both turned to see Mordecai Giovinazzo standing there. “Hey, Nick?” he said. “We haveta go.”
Nick hesitated, drawn between his daughter’s past and his future, and glanced back down at the photos in his hand. He reached outsilently for the file and slipped them back in. “Thank you,” he told Mary Ann. “You have no idea what this means to me.”
“Wait,” she said, turning to splay the file out on the table. She picked through the pictures carefully, then tugged one free and offered it towards him. “Keep it. I’ll keep looking for anything on your other daughter, maybe the records were misfiled –”
“Thank you,” Nick said again, and glanced down at the photograph. It was one of the ones he hadn’t noticed before, an older Stella maybe in her twenties sitting on the front steps of an old building that wasn’t St. Basil’s. She’d rested her elbow on her knee and was leaning her head against the palm of her hand, mouth quirked in something almost a smile and eyes fixed somewhere off to the left of the photographer. If he squinted, he thought he could catch a glint of gold at her hip from beneath her jacket. A professional shot, maybe, or one taken by an exceptionally good amateur.
It surprised him, a little, how little she looked like Odelia. The hair was the same, and the nose – not the eyes, Odelia’s eyes had been blue as summer noon – but the rest wasn’t Odelia’s. He could see the traces she’d left on their daughter, but they were just that, traces. Cheekbones, a little. The arch of one wrist, but beyond that he couldn’t see his wife.
He’d never seen Odelia this old. He’d gone to prison before either of them reached twenty-five, and Stella would be past that now. Would be into her late thirties. Jesus.
My kid grew up, and I didn’t see it. Won’t see it. Can’t see it. Lost.
His fists clenched tight against his sides.
Damn you, Kevin.
*
“You find your daughter?” Mordecai asked as they walked away from St. Basil’s and towards his sober dark grey Jaguar.
Nick swallowed past the lump in his throat. “One of them.”
“Astra – you said the other one was caled Astra?”
“Yeah,” Nick said, trying to remember her. He couldn’t, really. Too long ago, and he hadn’t known her long enough. Just a small milky baby whose mouth constantly twisted in screaming. Not like he remember Stella. “Astra Giovanna Bonasera.” He glanced at Mordecai and was surprised to see the mobster’s face twist in something like surprise and realization. “You don’t know –”
“No,” Mordecai said, sharply and too quickly. “No, I don’t know anything.”
Nick frowned. He’s lying, he realized. He knows something about my daughter.
“Val wants to see you,” Mordecai continued. He flicked dark eyes in Nick’s direction, then away as his car beeped discreetly twice. It didn’t fit in this neighborhood. “Not now – he’s got a meeting that’ll probably go into the night. You’re with me, Laurie Ruggiero, and Ace Aciello. Not my brother; he’s tied up at the precinct where they’re holding Joey. Not Carmine; he’ll be with Val. We’ll grill you over, see if you got what it takes or if three decades in prison rotted that out of you. You were a second-story guy?”
“Occasionally,” Nick said.
“Good,” Mordecai said, looking pleased. “We could use another one. Too many of us on bodyguard duty, especially with Joey in the clink.” He quirked a bitter smile as he pulled open the door to his car. “War tends to make people wary, and we don’t need wary, we need fighters. Blood for blood, and bone for bone, and we’ll pay the price in flesh if need be. Teach the Patrisos a lesson, even if we have to wipe the family off the face of the earth to do it. Nobody fucks with Constantine.”
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-18 01:46 am (UTC)I like Nick. A lot.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-18 02:00 am (UTC)Nick is lost. He's in over his head in more ways than one. Thirty years of his life gone, and it's not just his life, it's his daughters' - both his daughters, who never knew their father or their mother or any of their relatives. He's lost in the world, in that it's moved on and ahead while he stayed - not exactly frozen in time, but sort of suspended, y'know? He doesn't really have a purpose, nothing more than anger directed at his ex-wife and his ex-partner, who got him into this whole mess. He lost his daughters, and he lost his life.
I like that he can't see his wife in Stella, but he can't see himself, either-- in appearance and in occupation.
*snort* Can you imagine what that must be like, finding out that your beloved firstborn daughter's a cop? One who regularly gets her hands in other people's messes, both literally and figuratively? Especially considering Nick's former occupation, and where he's been for most of her life. Now, when he finds out about Astra...
I like Nick. A lot.
Nick is awesome. A little scary at times, but still pretty cool.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-18 03:06 am (UTC)I think it suggests how prison has influenced his feelings towards power and control - he might have been lacking that power over others in jail, and so maybe that's why it's such a rush to feel it now. Or maybe it's just a part of who he is, as frightening as that is. And by the way that he draws away so quickly, that suggests to me that he doesn't like this side of his personality, that he finds it as frightening, and perhaps out of place, as the reader does.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-18 11:55 pm (UTC)Well, I don't like to make distinctions like "good" and "bad", because when it comes down to it, that's impossible. Human nature's not clearcut like that. When it comes to Nick (and most of the Constantine Family), it's not that he's a bad guy, but he's not a good guy either. Does he love his family? Yes, very much so. Not his ex-wife so much (but that's only understandable), but he wants very badly to find his daughters. Is he a criminal? Yes. While he wasn't guilty of the crime he did thirty years for (murder), he was a thief and he was a conman and he was very good at what he did.
I think it suggests how prison has influenced his feelings towards power and control - he might have been lacking that power over others in jail, and so maybe that's why it's such a rush to feel it now. Or maybe it's just a part of who he is, as frightening as that is. And by the way that he draws away so quickly, that suggests to me that he doesn't like this side of his personality, that he finds it as frightening, and perhaps out of place, as the reader does.
Well, prison's a tough place. Nick's not, by nature, a violent guy, but he was forced to be. The rules of the outside world are different from the rules inside, and at this point in time, he's only been out of prison for a few hours. He's still adjusting, and he's going to look at everything from the eyes of a con. Kill or be killed. An automatic calculation of another's weaknesses, just in case they come for him. It's - he kind of has to step back and realize with Mary Ann, that's he not in danger, that she's not a threat. And he may know that consciously, but thirty years of instinct is pretty hard to break.