LITMIR.BIZ

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Part I

      Fracture

      “Terrible things happen all the time. This is the terrible thing.”

      —Martin Amis, The Killings in Atlanta

      When Amanda Gatti went to bed the night of July 10, 2009, she thought her marriage was over. “Don't go to bed angry,” that piece of marital wisdom, like so much of its kind easier to prescribe than follow, seemed futile in a moment of such fracture. The night's volcanic and far-too-public fight had exhausted her. She crawled into bed and waited for sleep to deliver her from the trials of the night, to prepare her for the morning and the trials it must bring.

      A few hours before sunrise, Amanda descended the stairs of her suite in Hotel Dorisol, Porto de Galinha, a seaside resort in Pernambuco, Brazil, where she was on a second honeymoon of sorts with her husband, iconic boxer Arturo Gatti, and their ten-month-old son, Arturo Junior. The baby needed his bottle. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see her husband. He looked as he might reasonably be expected to considering his behavior only hours earlier: naked but for his underwear, a crumpled heap. Knocked out.

She'd seen it before, suffered it before, too. Gatti was, in Amanda's words, “a completely different man when he was drinking.” And he'd been drinking. The crowd outside the pizzeria that served as the setting for their latest fight could attest to that. So could her body, bruised and bloodied as it was. Drunk, angry with her for refusing to join him at a local bar, Gatti had shoved her to the ground.

      “He wouldn't let me take my son,” she would later admit. So, hurt and exhausted, she left Gatti with their son, who was asleep in his stroller.

      When she came back to their room sometime later, Amanda found Gatti sitting, his arms around a crying Junior, his blood spattered on the baby's bib. Amanda didn't yet know it, but a crowd had witnessed Gatti assault her. It responded with street justice. After she left the bar to return to the suite a mob twenty-deep attacked the boxer. Gatti fought back in a rage but bore the marks of a man hit by fists, rocks, even a bicycle.

      “I guess it's over, huh?” he asked. Resorting to a question can be easier than stating the answer—especially an answer you don't want to hear, don't want to speak. A question retains some hope. A question can be a dare.

      “It's over,” she told him before going up to bed.

      So Amanda said nothing to her husband as she came down the stairs in the early morning, perhaps because with him in that contorted repose, in his peace, she found a little of her own. Perhaps because there was nothing to say, nothing left to fight for—and no fight left. Not enough anyway. Junior needed his bottle, too, and whatever closure she might reach with her husband, at that groggy hour it came second to the needs of their son.

      Back to bed then, bottle in hand. Imagine her stealing

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