City of the Dead

by Kristi Belcamino

  I cast one last glance at the overgrown path and felt a tug of nostalgia for my childhood. When I was little, it seemed like being surrounded by a family who loved me was my destiny. I had no idea it could all disappear and leave me alone in the world. Tough luck, kid, I said to myself, heading toward the house.

  My Budo karate training had trained me not to wallow in self-pity.

  We are but a small part of the whole and we must remember that our own fears and hurts and tragedies are crucial to make us who we are as we strive to become selfless. While our hurt is real, we must rise above them to reach warrior status. We take the pain and use it to grow stronger. We conquer our fears by facing them straight forward and render them powerless before us. We know that our ultimate purpose is not to serve selfishly, but to use our fears and struggles to become stronger so that we may help others less fortunate than us.

  Time to Budo on up.

  I held my key out before me at the front door. I was counting on it still working and it did. The large door swung open and I stepped inside, quickly closing it behind me before I changed my mind. I leaned back against the door, closed my eyes and inhaled. The house smelled like home. And then, suddenly, more than anything in the world, I wanted to bury my face in the smell of my mother. I dropped my keys and bag onto the floor and ran up the staircase. I didn’t stop until I was in my mother’s walk-in closet.

  I ripped her neatly hung clothes off the teak hangers in a frenzy, pressing them to my nose and then throwing them on the ground if they didn’t exude her Chanel perfume smell. It had been too long. They smelled like nothing. Finally, when nearly every item had been thrown on the floor, I collapsed, exhausted onto the heap of silk and wool clothing. I lay with my face buried in a pile of clothes sobbing until the stabbing pain in my gut turned into a dull feeling of emptiness. Finally, I rolled onto my back and looked around. That’s when I saw it.

  A notebook-sized panel in the wall. It was usually hidden by rows of hanging clothes. I ruined my manicure prying it open. Inside was a round vintage hat box papered in gold and silver foil. Nothing else.

  I carefully pulled the hat box out, kicking aside the pile of clothes to clear a spot on the floor. I plopped down with the box and stared at the lid. Maybe my missing birth certificate was in there.

  Over the years, whenever I’d needed a birth certificate, my godfather had stepped in and done something that prevented me from actually ever having to produce the document. I had never actually seen my birth certificate.

  When I went to get my driver’s license at the Monterey office of the Department of Motor Vehicles, Vito had come with me. Instead of waiting in line like I did once with Dante, we were taken to a back office where they processed everything and sent us on our merry way. I never even had to take a driver’s test. At the time, I figured it was because I had passed three racing courses at Laguna Seca before I turned fifteen, but now I wondered.

  I stared at the box for a few seconds, finally said, fuck it, and lifted the lid.

  I was right. And wrong.

  There weren’t any snips of baby hair tied with a ribbon. The box only contained papers, letters and documents. Some were love letters, written in hard to read cursive. I picked up the first stack—saw they were signed by my father—and threw them back in the box. I knew someday I’d be ready to read more details about my parents’ legendary love. Just not today.

  I flipped through the other papers. Looks like some land deeds, titles or something for some property in Italy. I wasn’t surprised to see my mother owned large swaths of land in Italy. My parents, together, had owned houses and property around the world, including a large villa on the Cinque Terre coast. Their favorite place to visit, however, had been their Lake Geneva mansion in Switzerland. The one that burned to the ground with their bodies inside.

  The only thing surprising about that was that the land was solely in my mother’s name. Some dude had given her all this land. It wasn’t my grandfather, either. Some guy named Mateo Antonio Turricci. I wondered if he was the trustee for my grandparents’ estate. But these deeds showed my mother as the sole property owner. All the land was in Sicily so it probably was her inheritance from her parents. It looked like some type of structure and acres of land.

  I kept flipping through the papers. Then when I saw a seal on a document that I knew was a birth certificate, I got excited. But it was for my mother. I stared at her vital statistics and the cute little ink prints of her feet and it brought a thick sob to my throat. Beneath that was my brother, Christopher’s birth certificate. I kept flipping through the papers. My dad’s birth certificate wasn’t in my mother’s stash of precious papers. And neither was mine.

  I swallowed. Just another small detail that made me feel unworthy and unloved. I knew my mother had loved me, but also knew she’d always loved Christopher more. It was a wound that would never heal.

  I put the lid back on the box, disappointed. It was just normal official paperwork and sentimental shit anyone would save. I’d still keep the box, though. If it had been important enough to her to stash away in a secret location, then I’d keep it for her.

  On the floor near the front door, I grabbed my bag and my keys. An envelope lay beside them that I hadn’t noticed when I first came in. It was cream colored and had my mother’s full name printed on it: Lucia-Grazia Bonadonna Santella.

  It was odd to see her maiden name. In Italy, most women didn’t take their husband’s surname, but my mother had tried to be as American as she could. The letter didn’t have any postage mark so someone must have slipped it through the mail slot in the door. Someone who didn’t know she was dead.

  The letter couldn’t have been there long. My godfather said that Josie, the housecleaner who had worked for my mother for twenty years, still came to clean every Monday, so it had only been here a day. I tucked it into my purse and took one last look around. The house was spotless.

  I slipped five hundred dollars out of my wallet and put it under a paper weight on a small table near the door with a small scribbled note that said, “For Josie.”

  I’ll never forget meeting Josie’s eyes at the graveside service. She was sobbing, wiping her face with the sleeve of her wool coat.

  Chapter Four

  Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?

  My godfather, Vittorio Domenic Guidi, lived across the street from Carmel Beach in a sprawling stone rambler with Bougainvillea plants spilling onto the sidewalk out front. I parked around the corner and knocked on the heavy oak door. His nurse opened it and smiled. “Gia, your godfather will be so happy to see you.”

  The nurse was a stunning redhead in her twenties who wore her hair back in a tight bun, a pencil skirt, and high-heeled pumps. She looked like a 50s pinup. She had a gentle but firm manner. I’m pretty sure she sweet-talked my godfather into doing everything she needed him to do. He couldn’t resist a pretty face.

  Today, she tugged on my arm to pull me into the house and then leaned over to whisper, “He had a rough night last night. I haven’t given him a bath yet.”

  I was grateful my godfather was filthy rich so he could pay some sweet young nurse to bathe him now that he was ill.

  Every time I visited Vito, he looked frailer. His MS was progressing faster than any of us had anticipated. It hurt so much to see my virile godfather—who, when I was a child, used to lift me up onto his shoulders in one fluid motion—as a weak elderly man. It was difficult to see him withering away. His brain was still sharp, which made the deterioration of his body even harder.

  I found him in his wheelchair in the sunroom, doing a crossword puzzle with all the windows and French doors open to the lush garden of flowers that crept up the small hillside in his backyard. A large sunbeam streamed into the window and illuminated his face as he turned to smile at me.

  “Gia!”

  “Vito!” I rushed over, struck with dismay at how fragile he appeared. I leaned over and kissed his grizzly cheek, hiding my face for a few seconds. He was the only pe
rson left in the world who loved me and he was disappearing before my very eyes.

  “Thank you for coming, Gia. I need your help.”

  My help? My godfather was the most powerful man I knew. Even in a wheelchair, he was all business. He didn’t waste time getting to the point. His face was stern as he turned to me. “It’s about your brother, Christopher.”

  An icy chill trickled through me.

  Of course, I’d never remembered a time when my brother hadn’t frightened me. The hatred in his eyes when my mother praised me. The vehemence that overcame him skinning the squirrels he shot in the woods behind our house. How he somehow got our live-in nanny fired after she told on him for watching her undress.

  When Christopher was fourteen, he was sent away to boarding school in Germany. Within two years he was back home. It was all very hushed up, but I heard my parents talking. I overhead my father say that the headmaster was found dead, with his pants around his ankles and an ice pick through his eye. My mother was hysterical, crying that there was no way Christopher had anything to do with it. My father remained quiet.

  Shortly after he returned home from Germany, Christopher was sent away again: this time to live with a family friend in Argentina. He was supposed to be working on a ranch. For whatever reason, he wrote me every week.

  I never wrote back.

  His letters were long rambling confessionals about his life in Germany and the girl he had fallen in love with there: Bridget.

  She lived in the nearby village. But she would never let him see her house. They had met at the ice cream store one Saturday. Soon, they were sneaking out at night and meeting in a tiny fisherman’s shack on a nearby lake.

  But Bridget was damaged. Her mother turned a blind eye to ongoing sexual abuse by Bridget’s stepfather. When she confessed this to Christopher one night, he promised to save her from her stepfather. He said he would go home with her right then and confront her stepfather, make him stop. But Bridget made him promise not to follow her home. It would destroy her mother, she said.

  The more Christopher begged her to let him help, the more she drew away. She started hanging out with the rough kids in town and soon was injecting heroin into her veins. Still, Christopher thought he could save her. But he couldn’t compete with Bridget’s past and the pain it had caused her. He couldn’t compete with her longing to forever escape from this world.

  Christopher was the one who found her body one night, curled up in a ball in a corner of the shack by the lake. Her wrists slit.

  It was only after her death that Christopher learned that Bridget’s stepfather was the headmaster at his school. When he found out, nothing could stop Christopher in his fury and grief. It wasn’t long after that the headmaster’s body was found.

  When I received these confessional letters in the mail, my blood would rush to my face and I would hide in my bedroom to read them. I wanted to scream and throw the letters at my mother, saying “Your precious son is a murderer!” But I loved her too much to destroy her. Plus, I couldn’t help but wonder whether she might already know.

  Soon, Christopher’s letters to me grew nasty. He would address them to me as “Daddy’s Little Girl.” Soon, they stopped altogether.

  I hadn’t seen or spoken to Christopher since my parent’s funeral.

  Hearing my godfather bring him up sent a wave of apprehension racing through me. I knew Vito had no love for Christopher.

  “What about Christopher?” I braced myself for what he would say next.

  “He is an embarrassment to your family name.”

  “I know.” I clamped my lips together. Even though we were adults, when my parents died, my godfather had taken on the role of our guardian in some ways. He was the executor of our parent’s estate and was really the closest thing left to a family member.

  Even though he’d never liked Christopher, I think he wanted to honor my mother’s wishes to watch out for her beloved son. I waited for him to go on.

  “He thinks now that he is a vampire or some other nonsense,” Vito flapped his gnarled hand in disgust.

  “What? Where is he?”

  “Santa Cruz. Living with some street urchins or something, I don’t know. I try not to pay attention, but when people come to me and say he is doing shameful things to young women, what can I do?”

  I remembered that when I was growing up people who were obsessed with the movie The Lost Boys moved to Santa Cruz and pretended to be vampires. It was more of a cult than anything else. Sort of like cosplay, but more intense. I was surprised it was still going on, but not surprised my brother was involved. But it still creeped me out.

  “What kind of things?” I realized I was holding my breath waiting for his answer. I thought about the headmaster with the ice pick in his eye.

  “Things that in the old country would mean this.” My godfather slowly drew one long finger across his neck. The gesture sent a tremor down my spine.

  “You want me to talk to him?”

  Vito stared at me. “I’m giving him one chance, for your mother’s sake,” he said. “If this doesn’t work, I will have no choice.”

  The thought of seeing him again made my skin crawl. But he was my blood. In my world, you put famiglia first. My mother and father had raised me to respect and honor family above all others. Although Vito was as close as family, he still wasn’t blood. Il sangue non è acqua—blood is thicker than water. My duty to Christopher was to warn him about Vito’s threat. When he drew his finger across his neck, I knew it wasn’t an idle gesture.

  Vito stared out the window, his fingers fiddling with the newspaper on his lap and then he turned, his eyes somber. “Tell him that if I don’t hear that he has stopped his depraved ways on his own, I will make him stop. He should have been locked up years ago, but your mother forbade it.”

  I vaguely remember my mother and Vito arguing once late at night about Christopher. But until now I hadn’t realized that Vito wanted Christopher institutionalized and that my mother had prevented him. I wondered why my father hadn’t been part of that conversation.

  The last thing I wanted to do was see my brother. But I would. I would find him and talk to him for my mother’s sake and for Vito.

  “Vito,” I said, taking his hand in both of mine. “I’ll talk to him. I’ll have him call you, okay?”

  “Good girl, Gia. I know you are a woman of your word, like your dear mother, God bless her.” He made the sign of the cross and then twisted the newspaper until it was a cylinder. I knew my parents’ death still hurt him. Every time I went to visit my parents’ graves, there were signs that my godfather had been there right before me—fresh yellow roses, my mother’s favorite.

  “Let’s go eat some lunch. Concetta fixed ravioli and pork roast.” Before he would let me wheel him into the dining room, he reached down and scribbled something on a corner of his newspaper, ripped it off and put it in my palm, patting my hand with both of his.

  Christopher’s address.

  Chapter Five

  Santa Cruz Vampires

  By the time I got to Santa Cruz the sun was setting to the west, casting everything in a hazy golden light. The address Vito had given me led me to a small shack with a ramshackle front porch. It was on a large weedy lot next to a motel.

  I knocked on the door until my knuckles hurt. I tried to peer through the dirty windows, but heavy black curtains blocked my view. Finally, after I kicked the door a few times, a pale-faced boy with sensuous full lips, black jeans, and no shirt answered the door with a large yawn.

  A slow smile spread across his face as he took me in from head to toe, taking in my black leather miniskirt, the buckled boots that stretched up to my thighs and my ripped, too tight Morphine T-shirt.

  But I didn’t have time for his admiration. I was in a hurry to give my brother Vito’s message and then get out of town.

  “Who are you? Where’s Christopher?” I scowled.

  He scratched his belly and yawned again. Then shrugged. “I’m Bobb
y. Don’t know. He lives here, but I never see him during the day.”

  “You don’t know where your housemate is?” My voice dripped antagonism and sarcasm.

  “Listen, I just moved in last week. I barely know the dude.” He cracked his knuckles. I stared, waiting.

  Then he smiled. “I have to tell you—you don’t seem like his type.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “You aren’t simpering and dumb.” That sounded about right. I stifled a smile.

  “I’m his sister.” I narrowed my eyes at him.

  He cleared his throat and grew serious. “You’re his sister?”

  I chewed my lip and looked away. This was taking way too much time. “Not my fault.”

  He laughed and instantly got a point in his favor.

  “I need to find him.”

  “Like I said, I just moved in here last week so I don’t know him very well.”

  “You’re lucky.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Is there something I should know?”

  “Probably.” I said blowing out a big puff of air. If this guy didn’t know my brother was bad news he would find out soon enough. “Now, where is he?”

  “I really don’t know. Honest. I’m meeting him at the Reverend Horton Heat show later. Around nine. I don’t think he’ll be back in town until then.”

  “I need to talk to him now.” I knew I was pouting and sounded like a child. I drew back my shoulders to try to salvage some dignity.

  The boy shrugged. “Sorry.” He looked over his shoulder. “You hungry? I just made some lentils and brown rice.”

  Of course he did. I tilted my head, examining him.

  “You’ve got to eat, right? Plus, you have a few hours to kill. He’s not going to be back until nine. I know that. He said he was going somewhere his cell phone didn’t work. The mountains around here … spotty cell service, so probably up there somewhere.” He yawned again and stretched his arms above his head.