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bedlamsbardOh, man, I am massively insecure about this chapter. I keep feeling that Stella and Mac are very much out of character, yet I'm afraid to look to far into it, because if I do it's never going to see the light of daylight. So. Feedback much appreciated.
She wasn’t crying.
She didn’t, and she wouldn’t. Flack – damn the bastard – wouldn’t do this to her. If he did, she’d hunt him down and break his nose.
She had no idea where the damp spots on the computer printouts he’d given her had come from, or why her face was wet. He hadn’t done this to her. Hadn’t, dammit.
My father… Her fists clenched on paper, rewrinkling the already crumpled sheets. It could be a mistake. Could be a misunderstanding. Bonasera wasn’t that uncommon a name, surely there was another orphaned Stella Bonasera out there…
“Stella?” Mac rapped on the door, short and precise. “Can I come in? I just saw Flack leave –”
“Yeah,” Stella said, not looking up. Only Mac had the grace to ask, not just barge in like anyone else would have done. “Yeah, come on in, Mac.”
She didn’t look up as he came in and took Flack’s seat, but she could hear him close the door. “Stella, are you all right?”
She raised her head from her hands, tried to wipe away the not-tears – crap, I’ll have to kick Flack’s ass tomorrow – from her eyes with the back of her hand. “I – I’ve been better.” She splayed her hands out over the papers, caught sight of Family: Odelia Tangalakis Bonasera, wife, Stella K. Bonasera, Astra G. Bonasera, children between her fingers. Jesus. I have a sister. She turned a weary smile on Mac. “Flack kind of dropped a bombshell on me.”
Mac fidgeted slightly in his seat. “I put Astra Pagliuca’s DNA through the system,” he said. “Just to see – well, I’m not sure why I did. Too compare it to the real Darin Pagliuca’s, and the John Doe’s, and Nicky Pagliuca’s too.” He paused, looking like he was searching for words. Finally, he said, reluctantly, “It didn’t match up.”
“To the JD’s?”
He shook his head. “To any of the Pagliucas’, Darin or Nicky’s.”
“That’s weird. Is Astra adopted, or from a previous marriage?”
Mac shook his head again. “There’d be alleles in common,” he said. “As it is – well –” He shoved the file folder in his hands at her. “You’d better see for yourself, Stella.”
Stella gave him a bewildered look – what is he talking about? – and flipped the folder open.
Her breath caught in her throat for the second time in less than five minutes.
There, in plain black and white, in genes and alleles and DNA, which didn’t lie – “Oh my God,” she said. “I – I have –” Her eyes flickered down to the matches. Nicholas Bonasera, convicted in June, 1974 for armed robbery and murder three. Released from Sing Sing Penitentiary August, 2005. Beneath that: Stella Bonasera, detective first grade, Crime Scene Unit, New York Police Department. She put her head back in her hands. “Oh, Jesus. Flack –”
“Flack knew?” Mac sounded alarmed. “And he didn’t tell –”
“That was why he was in here,” Stella said dully, “looking like the dog someone put out on the street.” The DNA results crumpled beneath her hand. “Mac, I didn’t know.”
“I know that, Stella.” He started to reach out for her, thought better of it, and started to pull back, but Stella reached blindly for his hand and found it. “Stella –”
She shook her head. “I don’t know if I want to hit something or cry like a girl who got stood up for prom. I’m leaning for hitting things.”
Mac brushed at her face with his free hand. “You are crying, Stella.”
“Then I’ll hit Flack. He deserves it anyway, for – for –” Paper crumpled again. “I need to talk to him,” she said.
“What? Who?”
“My – my –” She couldn’t say father. “Nick Bonasera.” She flipped rapidly through the crinkled paper. “There’s no current address – what about for Mordecai Giovinazzo –”
“Stella, what are you talking about?”
She typed, and clicked, and typed some more, and then clicked again. “Queens. He has a house in Queens.”
“Stella –”
She swallowed, feeling small and young and alone. “I need to talk to him,” she said. “Mac – will you –”
Mac squeezed her hand. “I’ll go with you, Stella.”
*
I can’t do this, she thought half an hour later. I can’t.
Mac reached for her hand. He’d driven, making her pull over after she’d nearly taken out a streetlight and two pedestrians. Hell of a thing for a NYPD detective not on her way to a case. “Stella,” he said softly, and a little bit of Chicago crept through his bland, accentless, no one from nowhere voice. “You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to – do you know how lucky you are, not having a family?”
“Do you know how lucky you are to have one?” she shot back.
Mac blanched white. “I’d change places with you in a heartbeat,” he said. “If you want to be Hamilton Taylor’s child –”
“Mac, you don’t understand,” Stella said, shaking her head. “I made myself out of nothing. All I had was my name. I just – I need to know, okay? I don’t care if he’s a drunken asshole, I just need to know.”
“Know what?”
“The hell if I know,” she said, and Mac gave her a broken, cracked grin. “Something. Everything. Nothing. I don’t know.”
Mac squeezed her hand. “I just don’t want you to break your heart, Stella.”
She cupped his face with her free hand, drew her fingers across the bandage on his forehead. “I’ve spent my whole life not knowing anything about me and knowing everything about strangers I’ve only met when they’re dead and gone. I want know something about me, okay?”
Mac arched into her touch, eyes half-closed. “Okay,” he murmured, then – “I’ll go with you, all right?”
“I wasn’t going to leave you in the car,” Stella said. “You can talk to Danny’s suspect.” She made to pull away from him and get out of the car. Mac caught at her hand.
“Stella – wait –”
“Yeah?”
He pulled her down to him and pressed his lips gently to hers. She lingered a moment, but it was close-mouthed, chaste, so that it could have been a kiss among friends rather than lovers. Or partners. Mac kept his eyes closed even after she’d pulled away, moving slowly but fluidly to undo his seatbelt and open the door after she’d stepped away by the car. He adjusted his badge and his gun beneath the fall of his coat, keeping his eyes away from the small, neat house above them.
There was a soft murmur of sound from the house, tv maybe, or radio, too even and regular for conversation, and there were lights on in what was probably the kitchen, the blinds backlit and impossible to see through. It was a mobster’s house; she wondered if the windows were made of bulletproof glass. She clenched her fists in the pockets of her jacket, then fixed her gaze on the plain brown door, noting with experienced eyes the pockmarks there, bullet holes or nothing, and marched up the steps to punch at the doorbell. Mac followed her, breathing soft and sure and reassuring. Stella dug her nails harder into her palms to keep from reaching for his hand.
The door swung open. It was Michael Giovinazzo, looking sleepy and buzzed, with his dark hair falling in long slow sweeps across his forehead. Or his identical twin, since he looked at her with only the faintest recognition. “Yeah?”
She swept her coat aside to flash her badge. “NYPD. I’d like to talk to Nick –” She swallowed, felt Mac’s hand hover uncertainly over her back before falling away. “Nick Bonasera. Please.”
Giovinazzo – was it Michael or the Mordecai Flack had mentioned? He looked exactly like the Michael Giovinazzo Val Constantine had introduced yesterday – gave her a long look, then turned and yelled over his shoulder, “Bonasera! NYPD wants to talk to you.”
The television muted, and there came an answering voice, warm and familiar in some hidden part of her mind that began jumping up and down screaming at the top of its lungs, “I called my parole officer…”
Stella’s fists clenched harder. I know him. The tall lean man coming down the hall with weary green eyes and curly black hair streaked with gray. I know him. That’s my father. He’d been younger then, more flesh than skin and bone but still slender, with quick sure hands that produced five dollar bills like magic from his sleeves and the scent of mint on his breath. But it was still him, unmistakably, and her breath caught in her throat as he stopped in front of her, recognition dawning in his eyes. “I –”
Stella swallowed. “I’m Stella Bonasera,” she said before she lost her nerve. “Your daughter.”
*
They were sitting on the front steps, about a foot from each other, Stella with her knees drawn up to her chest and her hands wrapped around her legs and Nick – her father – staring blindly out at the night. They hadn’t said much, and everything Stella had thought she wanted to say had already fled her mind, leaving her with this is him this is it over and over again, a senseless rhythm pulsing through her.
She swallowed, and Nick turned toward her immediately. “Why –” she said, and licked her lips as her voice cracked. “Why did you leave?”
“I got arrested,” Nick said. “My partner and I – anyway, we were in the middle of a bank vault when the alarm went off and the police came. He shot one of them, then escaped the way we’d come in.”
“Through an air vent,” Stella said, thinking of the robberies she’d, the big ones that got turned over to the crime lab.
He blinked a little. “Yeah,” he sighed. “They never caught Kevin, and I took the fall. Did thirty years in Sing Sing.”
“My mother –”
“Odelia,” Nick said, and a soft tender smile curved his lips, replaced with a hard frown. “Odelia Tangalakis. Six months in, she set me divorce papers, and the next thing I know she’s calling me from a Greyhound station in Omaha, telling me she left my daughters at an orphanage. An orphanage.” He shot her a sudden panicked look. “Was it – bad, growing up there?”
“Not like in the books, no,” Stella rested her cheek against her arm, heard the murmur of Mac’s voice from inside the Giovinazzos’ house. They were identical twins, dammit, Michael and Mordecai and she couldn’t tell one from the other. “It was – it was good. Better than growing up in a foster home today. Three meals a day and good clothes – not the height of fashion, but they were sturdy. And school. And morals, which have evidently left sometime in the past decade and a half.”
“I went there,” Nick said softly. “It seemed like a – a good place.”
“It was.” She chewed on her lip and wished for gum. She’d gone through her last stick today, and forgot to ask Mac to stop by the cornerstore by the lab to buy some. “They were good to me. Never had much of an urge to go all Bloody Mary on the place, not like some foster homes I’ve worked.”
Nick stared at her for a moment. “Why?” he said finally.
“Why what?”
“The police.”
Stella leaned her head back, tried to pick the stars out of the mess of artificial city lights. Failed utterly. Take her out of the concrete jungle and she’d probably perish of boredeom. “Well, they give you a badge and a gun, and you get to shoot things.”
“Ah –”
“It’s not the helping people,” she said. “It’s the knowing. Maybe I don’t know where I came from, but I can get inside these people’s lives – these people who maybe might never be identified, might be buried in a potter’s field without anyone ever knowing they existed – and I can make them mean something. So that they can – I don’t know – rest knowing someone knows who they were and why they died. Justice. I don’t know. I just do it, you know?” She paused, stared at the stark lines of his face and the confusion there. “You don’t. It’s okay. Most civilians don’t.”
“I can try.”
“Don’t bother. It’s complicated.”
Nick leaned forward, elbows braced on his knees. “What about Astra?” he asked. “Is she with you? Do you know –”
Her fists clenched. Astra. Astra fucking Pagliuca who wasn’t Pagliuca after all, was a lie and a Bonasera and her sister. “No,” she said. “I don’t. I didn’t even know I had a sister till today.” Suddenly she was exhausted, was weary with the knowing and the being. She stretched upward, getting to her feet with a painful twinge in her bad leg. “I need to go,” she said.
Nick followed her forlornly. “Stella –” he said.
She pushed the door open. “Mac?” she said, and he came out of the kitchen with his shoulders tense and wary.
“Are you all right, Stella?”
“Let’s go, all right?”
He touched her arm, turned and nodded to the Giovinazzos and Nick but didn’t say anything. As soon as the door closed behind them, Stella turned furiously toward him. “I need to get drunk very, very badly,” she said. “You know anything in the neighborhood?”
Mac gave her a worried look, but said reluctantly, “I might know a place.”
“Good.”
She wasn’t crying.
She didn’t, and she wouldn’t. Flack – damn the bastard – wouldn’t do this to her. If he did, she’d hunt him down and break his nose.
She had no idea where the damp spots on the computer printouts he’d given her had come from, or why her face was wet. He hadn’t done this to her. Hadn’t, dammit.
My father… Her fists clenched on paper, rewrinkling the already crumpled sheets. It could be a mistake. Could be a misunderstanding. Bonasera wasn’t that uncommon a name, surely there was another orphaned Stella Bonasera out there…
“Stella?” Mac rapped on the door, short and precise. “Can I come in? I just saw Flack leave –”
“Yeah,” Stella said, not looking up. Only Mac had the grace to ask, not just barge in like anyone else would have done. “Yeah, come on in, Mac.”
She didn’t look up as he came in and took Flack’s seat, but she could hear him close the door. “Stella, are you all right?”
She raised her head from her hands, tried to wipe away the not-tears – crap, I’ll have to kick Flack’s ass tomorrow – from her eyes with the back of her hand. “I – I’ve been better.” She splayed her hands out over the papers, caught sight of Family: Odelia Tangalakis Bonasera, wife, Stella K. Bonasera, Astra G. Bonasera, children between her fingers. Jesus. I have a sister. She turned a weary smile on Mac. “Flack kind of dropped a bombshell on me.”
Mac fidgeted slightly in his seat. “I put Astra Pagliuca’s DNA through the system,” he said. “Just to see – well, I’m not sure why I did. Too compare it to the real Darin Pagliuca’s, and the John Doe’s, and Nicky Pagliuca’s too.” He paused, looking like he was searching for words. Finally, he said, reluctantly, “It didn’t match up.”
“To the JD’s?”
He shook his head. “To any of the Pagliucas’, Darin or Nicky’s.”
“That’s weird. Is Astra adopted, or from a previous marriage?”
Mac shook his head again. “There’d be alleles in common,” he said. “As it is – well –” He shoved the file folder in his hands at her. “You’d better see for yourself, Stella.”
Stella gave him a bewildered look – what is he talking about? – and flipped the folder open.
Her breath caught in her throat for the second time in less than five minutes.
There, in plain black and white, in genes and alleles and DNA, which didn’t lie – “Oh my God,” she said. “I – I have –” Her eyes flickered down to the matches. Nicholas Bonasera, convicted in June, 1974 for armed robbery and murder three. Released from Sing Sing Penitentiary August, 2005. Beneath that: Stella Bonasera, detective first grade, Crime Scene Unit, New York Police Department. She put her head back in her hands. “Oh, Jesus. Flack –”
“Flack knew?” Mac sounded alarmed. “And he didn’t tell –”
“That was why he was in here,” Stella said dully, “looking like the dog someone put out on the street.” The DNA results crumpled beneath her hand. “Mac, I didn’t know.”
“I know that, Stella.” He started to reach out for her, thought better of it, and started to pull back, but Stella reached blindly for his hand and found it. “Stella –”
She shook her head. “I don’t know if I want to hit something or cry like a girl who got stood up for prom. I’m leaning for hitting things.”
Mac brushed at her face with his free hand. “You are crying, Stella.”
“Then I’ll hit Flack. He deserves it anyway, for – for –” Paper crumpled again. “I need to talk to him,” she said.
“What? Who?”
“My – my –” She couldn’t say father. “Nick Bonasera.” She flipped rapidly through the crinkled paper. “There’s no current address – what about for Mordecai Giovinazzo –”
“Stella, what are you talking about?”
She typed, and clicked, and typed some more, and then clicked again. “Queens. He has a house in Queens.”
“Stella –”
She swallowed, feeling small and young and alone. “I need to talk to him,” she said. “Mac – will you –”
Mac squeezed her hand. “I’ll go with you, Stella.”
*
I can’t do this, she thought half an hour later. I can’t.
Mac reached for her hand. He’d driven, making her pull over after she’d nearly taken out a streetlight and two pedestrians. Hell of a thing for a NYPD detective not on her way to a case. “Stella,” he said softly, and a little bit of Chicago crept through his bland, accentless, no one from nowhere voice. “You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to – do you know how lucky you are, not having a family?”
“Do you know how lucky you are to have one?” she shot back.
Mac blanched white. “I’d change places with you in a heartbeat,” he said. “If you want to be Hamilton Taylor’s child –”
“Mac, you don’t understand,” Stella said, shaking her head. “I made myself out of nothing. All I had was my name. I just – I need to know, okay? I don’t care if he’s a drunken asshole, I just need to know.”
“Know what?”
“The hell if I know,” she said, and Mac gave her a broken, cracked grin. “Something. Everything. Nothing. I don’t know.”
Mac squeezed her hand. “I just don’t want you to break your heart, Stella.”
She cupped his face with her free hand, drew her fingers across the bandage on his forehead. “I’ve spent my whole life not knowing anything about me and knowing everything about strangers I’ve only met when they’re dead and gone. I want know something about me, okay?”
Mac arched into her touch, eyes half-closed. “Okay,” he murmured, then – “I’ll go with you, all right?”
“I wasn’t going to leave you in the car,” Stella said. “You can talk to Danny’s suspect.” She made to pull away from him and get out of the car. Mac caught at her hand.
“Stella – wait –”
“Yeah?”
He pulled her down to him and pressed his lips gently to hers. She lingered a moment, but it was close-mouthed, chaste, so that it could have been a kiss among friends rather than lovers. Or partners. Mac kept his eyes closed even after she’d pulled away, moving slowly but fluidly to undo his seatbelt and open the door after she’d stepped away by the car. He adjusted his badge and his gun beneath the fall of his coat, keeping his eyes away from the small, neat house above them.
There was a soft murmur of sound from the house, tv maybe, or radio, too even and regular for conversation, and there were lights on in what was probably the kitchen, the blinds backlit and impossible to see through. It was a mobster’s house; she wondered if the windows were made of bulletproof glass. She clenched her fists in the pockets of her jacket, then fixed her gaze on the plain brown door, noting with experienced eyes the pockmarks there, bullet holes or nothing, and marched up the steps to punch at the doorbell. Mac followed her, breathing soft and sure and reassuring. Stella dug her nails harder into her palms to keep from reaching for his hand.
The door swung open. It was Michael Giovinazzo, looking sleepy and buzzed, with his dark hair falling in long slow sweeps across his forehead. Or his identical twin, since he looked at her with only the faintest recognition. “Yeah?”
She swept her coat aside to flash her badge. “NYPD. I’d like to talk to Nick –” She swallowed, felt Mac’s hand hover uncertainly over her back before falling away. “Nick Bonasera. Please.”
Giovinazzo – was it Michael or the Mordecai Flack had mentioned? He looked exactly like the Michael Giovinazzo Val Constantine had introduced yesterday – gave her a long look, then turned and yelled over his shoulder, “Bonasera! NYPD wants to talk to you.”
The television muted, and there came an answering voice, warm and familiar in some hidden part of her mind that began jumping up and down screaming at the top of its lungs, “I called my parole officer…”
Stella’s fists clenched harder. I know him. The tall lean man coming down the hall with weary green eyes and curly black hair streaked with gray. I know him. That’s my father. He’d been younger then, more flesh than skin and bone but still slender, with quick sure hands that produced five dollar bills like magic from his sleeves and the scent of mint on his breath. But it was still him, unmistakably, and her breath caught in her throat as he stopped in front of her, recognition dawning in his eyes. “I –”
Stella swallowed. “I’m Stella Bonasera,” she said before she lost her nerve. “Your daughter.”
*
They were sitting on the front steps, about a foot from each other, Stella with her knees drawn up to her chest and her hands wrapped around her legs and Nick – her father – staring blindly out at the night. They hadn’t said much, and everything Stella had thought she wanted to say had already fled her mind, leaving her with this is him this is it over and over again, a senseless rhythm pulsing through her.
She swallowed, and Nick turned toward her immediately. “Why –” she said, and licked her lips as her voice cracked. “Why did you leave?”
“I got arrested,” Nick said. “My partner and I – anyway, we were in the middle of a bank vault when the alarm went off and the police came. He shot one of them, then escaped the way we’d come in.”
“Through an air vent,” Stella said, thinking of the robberies she’d, the big ones that got turned over to the crime lab.
He blinked a little. “Yeah,” he sighed. “They never caught Kevin, and I took the fall. Did thirty years in Sing Sing.”
“My mother –”
“Odelia,” Nick said, and a soft tender smile curved his lips, replaced with a hard frown. “Odelia Tangalakis. Six months in, she set me divorce papers, and the next thing I know she’s calling me from a Greyhound station in Omaha, telling me she left my daughters at an orphanage. An orphanage.” He shot her a sudden panicked look. “Was it – bad, growing up there?”
“Not like in the books, no,” Stella rested her cheek against her arm, heard the murmur of Mac’s voice from inside the Giovinazzos’ house. They were identical twins, dammit, Michael and Mordecai and she couldn’t tell one from the other. “It was – it was good. Better than growing up in a foster home today. Three meals a day and good clothes – not the height of fashion, but they were sturdy. And school. And morals, which have evidently left sometime in the past decade and a half.”
“I went there,” Nick said softly. “It seemed like a – a good place.”
“It was.” She chewed on her lip and wished for gum. She’d gone through her last stick today, and forgot to ask Mac to stop by the cornerstore by the lab to buy some. “They were good to me. Never had much of an urge to go all Bloody Mary on the place, not like some foster homes I’ve worked.”
Nick stared at her for a moment. “Why?” he said finally.
“Why what?”
“The police.”
Stella leaned her head back, tried to pick the stars out of the mess of artificial city lights. Failed utterly. Take her out of the concrete jungle and she’d probably perish of boredeom. “Well, they give you a badge and a gun, and you get to shoot things.”
“Ah –”
“It’s not the helping people,” she said. “It’s the knowing. Maybe I don’t know where I came from, but I can get inside these people’s lives – these people who maybe might never be identified, might be buried in a potter’s field without anyone ever knowing they existed – and I can make them mean something. So that they can – I don’t know – rest knowing someone knows who they were and why they died. Justice. I don’t know. I just do it, you know?” She paused, stared at the stark lines of his face and the confusion there. “You don’t. It’s okay. Most civilians don’t.”
“I can try.”
“Don’t bother. It’s complicated.”
Nick leaned forward, elbows braced on his knees. “What about Astra?” he asked. “Is she with you? Do you know –”
Her fists clenched. Astra. Astra fucking Pagliuca who wasn’t Pagliuca after all, was a lie and a Bonasera and her sister. “No,” she said. “I don’t. I didn’t even know I had a sister till today.” Suddenly she was exhausted, was weary with the knowing and the being. She stretched upward, getting to her feet with a painful twinge in her bad leg. “I need to go,” she said.
Nick followed her forlornly. “Stella –” he said.
She pushed the door open. “Mac?” she said, and he came out of the kitchen with his shoulders tense and wary.
“Are you all right, Stella?”
“Let’s go, all right?”
He touched her arm, turned and nodded to the Giovinazzos and Nick but didn’t say anything. As soon as the door closed behind them, Stella turned furiously toward him. “I need to get drunk very, very badly,” she said. “You know anything in the neighborhood?”
Mac gave her a worried look, but said reluctantly, “I might know a place.”
“Good.”
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-06 03:15 am (UTC)Stella and Mac going off so she can get drunk? *That* should be fun.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-07 12:37 am (UTC)Hmm. I never thought of that, although it makes sense. They trust each other more now, I think, than they had before Chicago - Stella's see Mac's worst secret, and now he's seen hers. Although it wasn't really a secret, so much as a matter of not-knowledge. I think he's mimicking what he thinks she'd do were their positions reversed, which is not necessarily a bad thing, apart from the part where he has no idea what he'd do on his own.
I also like how Stella's meeting with her father plays out; it's low-key but emotional, and it never goes over the top into melodrama.
Oh, good, I was worried about that. I was worried it wasn't emotional enough, because we've heard Nick's story so many times now.
Stella and Mac going off so she can get drunk? *That* should be fun.
Oh, you have no idea. I don't think there'll be any bloodshed, but there should be almost-sex-up-against-a-wall.
Uh, she gets very drunk.