Bedtime had felt different over at her mother’s cousins’ place off Lafayette. That branch of the family lived with another world of night noise. Little Barba-bella had come across the East River before her mother ran away, but it was after the disappearance that Barb had spent the nights that now came back to her with the greatest intensity. On those nights she’d been hustled over to the old Little Italy because there’d been word of a lead, a possibility. And in the second-story front space of the cousins’ brownstone, formerly her Mama’s bedroom, the traffic spoke to the visiting girl. Barbara would notice the heart-of-the-borough rumble when she was left alone to slip into her nightshirt, that tender cotton, and her eyes would follow the pattern of the headlights coming through the blinds, a yellow surf across ceiling and wall. She’d pick up the noise in the morning too, before her cousin poked her head into the room and began to wheedle, like the soothing fussbudget she was, about getting dressed for Sunday Mass.
