by Shay Savage
Is this how all large families behave?
I take a sip of the wine.
“This is wonderful!” I say, holding up the glass. “What is it?”
“Some pretentious French wine.” Nate winks at me. “It will go wonderfully with the main course. Oh! Here it comes, now.”
I glance over at the door as servers in black and white uniforms bring in silver domed trays, much like the ones Nate used for the pancakes. They move to stand behind each guest and then place the trays in front of us with practiced synchronization.
I slide my eyes over to Nate, who’s watching me intently. Am I supposed to take the cover off the tray myself or wait for them to do it? Which fork is which? My heart beats faster with my indecision and general lack of knowledge regarding table etiquette.
Nate reaches under the table and grasps my hand in his for a moment, winking at me. Before I can say anything, the server behind me reaches over and removes the dome, and I stare in disbelief.
It’s a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
“What is this?” I say with a laugh.
“I told Andrea you were a bit nervous about meeting everyone,” Nate says. “I thought this might make you feel at home.”
He’s right. It does.
I relax immediately as everyone—even Nate’s Aunt Kate—dives into their sandwiches. Andrea tells me about making her own peanut butter for the first time and about the homemade grape preserves she found at a local farmer’s market.
When our sandwiches have been devoured, Kate retires for the evening. She pats my hand as she leaves but says nothing to me directly. Andrea refuses any help with the cleanup, so I follow the rest of the group to the billiard room. Servers arrive shortly after, lining the bar with hors d'oeuvres.
“I thought you’d like the sandwiches,” Nate says, “but I also knew they weren’t going to keep Antony sustained through an entire night of eight-ball. I didn’t want him having any excuses when I kick his ass.”
“In your dreams!” Antony grabs a pool cue as Reid racks up the balls. “What are the teams?”
“Cherry is on my team,” Nora says abruptly, “and we’re not playing.”
Nate narrows his eyes at his sister.
“We’re going to talk chick shit,” Nora announces. “That means no boys.”
“Count me out of that shit,” Twos says.
“My sister doesn’t do ‘chick shit,’” Threes says with a laugh. “I think she was supposed to be a boy, too.”
“Fuck you!” Twos punches him playfully on the shoulder.
While the others knock balls around, Nora pulls me over to the couch along the wall near the bar. She grabs one of the trays of appetizers and places it on the coffee table in front of us.
“Antony!” she calls out. “Drinks, please!”
Antony rolls his eyes but still fills our wine glasses before going back to the game. Nate glances over at me, and I give him a nod. He winks at me and then saunters up behind Antony, tapping the back of the pool cue just as his cousin is taking his shot.
“Motherfucker! I would have had that, too!”
I shake my head as they continue on, trying to mess up each other’s shots. Twos makes a point of leaning over the table and pulling the top of her shirt down to distract Reid’s shot, and Threes yells at my landlord about looking at his sister’s tits.
“They’re right there!” Reid yells.
“She’s family, dammit!”
“Not by blood!”
I shake my head and turn to Nora.
“Is it always like this?”
“Pretty much,” she says with a shrug. “I mean, when it’s time to talk business, everyone gets serious pretty quick. You can’t cut that atmosphere with a machete, but when we’re just hanging out, they’re pretty much like this all the time.”
“It was just me and my aunt when I was growing up,” I say. “I’ve never been around a big family like this.”
“You should see it during the holidays,” Nora says. “All the rest of the extended family comes, and it is a true madhouse here.”
“I can’t even imagine!” I say it, but I don’t mean it. I find it quite easy to imagine such a large gathering with a beautiful tree in the living room, people gathered all around, presents passed back and forth, and all the friendly banter between the siblings, cousins, and other relations—blood or otherwise.
It’s a beautiful scene in my head, and I wish the holiday season hadn’t passed so recently.
The nine ball pops off the table and rolls behind the bar, and Antony and Threes start sword fighting with the cue sticks. Reid sets himself up as a referee, and Nate acts as an announcer.
“And in this corner, weighing in a four hundred and fifty pounds—”
“Fuck you!” Reid bellows.
“—and carrying a Predator Panthera pool cue, Reid the Rebel!”
“What a fucking shit show.” Nora rolls her eyes and shakes her head. “Forgive my preacher’s wife language.”
“Was your husband a preacher?” As soon as I mention her husband, I regret it. She must still be in mourning, and I went ahead and brought him up. I’m an idiot!
“Fuck no.” Nora laughs, apparently unoffended by the topic of her late husband. “It’s something my wax technician says. Her husband is a preacher.”
I have a feeling I know what a wax technician is, and I don’t want any more information. I am glad I don’t seem to have upset Nora with my ill-spoken words.
“You and Nate seem pretty close,” I say, trying to change the subject entirely.
“We are,” Nora says. She looks away from the shenanigans and back at me. “We have the perfect love-hate relationship. We bicker all the time and say horrible things to each other, but ten minutes later, we’re laughing and splitting a bottle of wine. We’re the closest in age, and he’s the only reason I survived my ordeal.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t suppose he’s told you about me, has he?” Something in her tone sounds ominous.
“He’s talked about you a bit.”
“But he never told you what happened to me, did he?”
At first, I think she must be talking about the recent death of her husband, but that doesn’t quite fit her expression. The death of a spouse is obviously tragic, but it doesn’t happen to someone. Her words don’t fit that topic.
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
Nora looks at me for a long time, seeming to struggle internally.
“It was a while ago,” Nora finally says. “I was with a friend on a spring break trip. We took a cruise out of Miami. When we got to port at Bonaire, one of the islands in the Netherland Antilles chain, we were approached by a couple of guys on the beach. I was all into one of them—a really good-looking guy with dreadlocks. I thought he was the perfect accompaniment to an island adventure, you know? Melissa seemed to be getting along with the other guy, too. He also had long hair, but he was a white guy and didn’t have the cool accent.”
“Melissa? As in, my boss Melissa?”
“Yeah. We were close then.” Nora gives me a hard stare. “You shouldn’t mention this to her.”
“I won’t,” I promise. My stomach feels a little uneasy.
Nora presses her lips together for a moment, nods, and continues on.
“We ended up partying with them, got smashed, and missed the cruise ship when it left that night. I started making arrangements to charter a flight to the next port and catch up with the ship, but one of the guys said they had a boat that could get us there. We didn’t think anything of it. We’d been with them all night at that point, and nothing had happened other than drinking way too much. As soon as we got to the boat, I knew something was wrong.”
My skin starts to turn to ice as Nora continues her tale.
“As they were getting the boat ready to go, we were rather abruptly joined by two other, older guys. One looked like he belonged in the military, with a buzzcut and everything, and he wa
s clearly the one in charge. The other guy was fat and smelled awful. That’s all I really remember about him. Anyway, they showed up, and before we knew it, the guy with the buzzcut pulled out a knife, and we were shoved into the cargo area.”
Nora pauses for a minute, and I’m too horrified to speak.
“All four of them raped me,” she said quietly. “I was pretty sure they were going to kill me, and I would have happily accepted that at one point. I figured out pretty quickly that killing us wasn’t what they had in mind. They kept us there on that boat—still at the dock—for three days, trying to break us. It worked, too. I was broken. If it hadn’t been for Melissa, I’d probably be a sex slave at some drug lord’s compound right now.”
“My God, Nora.” It was all I could think of to say. I have no idea how to respond to a story like this. “I’m so sorry that happened to you. How did you get away?”
“After they decided we weren’t going to resist anymore, they started up the boat, headed to god knows where. Once we were on the water, they let us come up top again. We were traveling along the beach, running parallel to the shore, and I could see a lot of people not that far from us, but I knew they wouldn’t be able to hear us if we screamed. I was absolutely terrified and unable to act, which is just what they were expecting. Melissa wasn’t.
“She grabbed me by the arm and threw us both overboard. She started screaming for me to swim toward the beach, and that’s what we did. We had both been swimmers on the school team, and even though I was completely freaked out, the muscle memory took over, and I swam as fast as I could. The boat was flying along, and it took them a minute to get turned around and head back to us. By then, we were within earshot of other people. The boat came up close to us, but at that point, two guys on windsurfers were heading in our direction. They saw us out in the water and headed our way. The guys in the boat must have decided it was too risky to try to retrieve us, and we got away.
“We reported them immediately. There are a lot of grey areas when it comes to who has jurisdiction over searching for criminals in international waters, and it was a good twelve hours after we reported what had happened before anyone actually started looking. When we didn’t make it back to the cruise ship at the next port, a missing person’s report was filed, and my brothers had already been on the island a couple of days, looking for us. It only took a few hours before Micha and Nate joined us, but it felt like weeks. Eventually, the authorities tried to go out and look for the boat, but they didn’t find anything.”
“Wow!” It’s the only word I can manage. The whole story has made my skin crawl. “What did your brothers do?”
“Micha and Nate were both beyond furious and determined to find whoever had done it and get revenge in my name or whatever.” Nora lets out a long sigh. “I didn’t care about revenge. I just wanted to go home. Micha and Nate fought about it, but Nate is the one who brought me back to Ohio and stayed with me in the hospital. We were close before, but his staying there with me—night and day—until I felt ready to rejoin the rest of the world made us even closer.”
I try to wait patiently for Nora to go on, but when the silence lasts too long, I feel like I should say something.
“Did Micha find them?” I ask, clearing my throat. “I mean, did he find the men who…?”
“He tracked them for weeks, but they always seemed to be a step ahead of him. So, no. He never did find them, not as far as I know.” Nora gets a faraway look in her eye. “Want to hear a really weird thing?”
“Okay. I mean, if you want to tell me.” All of this is weird to me, not just unusual but positively bizarre.
“Two weeks after Micha came back, all four of those guys disappeared without a trace. Their boat was found, unoccupied, out in the middle of the Caribbean about a month later. They were never found—no bodies, nothing.”
“How do you know it was the same boat?”
“The FBI was involved by then, and they found our DNA all over it. They linked the guys to some human trafficking ring and made a few arrests but not the guys who actually raped us. Those guys were never seen again.”
A sinking feeling comes over me.
“Do you think Micha did something to them?” I ask in a low whisper.
Nora gives me a long look.
“He would have if he had found them,” she says with conviction, “but I don’t think he did. He was planning another trip back, taking Nate and Antony with him, but before they could finish the arrangements, the boat was found, and those fuckers were all presumed dead.”
“Wow.” Again, it’s the only word that seems to fit. “I’m so sorry you went through all of that.”
“I’m sorry to throw it all right there in front of you the first night we meet,” she says with a shrug, “but it’s all part of therapy for me. I’ve found it’s best to get it all out there in the open right away, so maybe you’ll understand my occasional bipolar behavior.”
“Thank you for telling me,” I say, placing my hand on top of hers. “I’ve never heard of something like that happening to anyone, but I’m glad that I heard it from you.”
“I try not to think about it,” Nora says, “but I’m not stupid. I know how much it fucked me up. If it weren’t for Nataniele, I’m sure I would have slit my wrists.”
I swallow hard, trying to come up with some words of encouragement or inspiration, but I have none.
“It terrified him to think of me doing something like that to myself,” Nora says. “Nate’s sure my soul would be damned to hell for suicide, so I promised him I wouldn’t do it. I take my meds, go to all my counseling and group therapy, and use him for a punching bag when nothing else works.”
I start to let out a laugh, assuming she’s making a joke, but quickly realize she means it. I’m even pretty sure she means a literal punching bag.
“You understand why we’re so close now,” Nora says. It’s a statement, not a question.
“Yes, I do.” During my interactions with Nate over the past couple of days, it became clear to me that his family is very important to him, and this further confirms it. I glance over at him, seeing him in a new light, the role of protector, and it fits him perfectly. “I’m glad he was there for you. I can’t imagine going through something like that. I mean, I watch the news on occasion, and I know things like that can happen, but I never expected…”
“Nataniele is very important to me. I’m also really glad he’s met you, you know.”
“You are?”
“Very much so. Nataniele…he’s not been himself since Pops passed.”
My mouth drops open.
“Pops? You mean, your father?”
“Uh-huh. Just last month. He didn’t tell you?”
“He told me about your brother. He’s mentioned your father once or twice but not that he had passed. I’m so sorry.”
After all the time we’d spent together, how could Nate not have mentioned this? He’s talked a little about his father but nothing to indicate he had recently died.
“It was quick and unexpected,” Nora says with a sad smile. “He had a brain aneurysm and died in his sleep just after New Year’s. It hit Nate really hard. First Micha and then Pops. Nataniele never expected to be running the family, and he wasn’t prepared for it. Sometimes I wonder if he’s just going to put a bullet in his brain.”
I gasp.
“Joking.” She shrugs a shoulder. “He doesn’t like to admit it, but my brother really is very Catholic. He’d never do something like that. He’s still capable of screwing things up for himself though.”
I can’t help but wonder if she’s referring to me, but she’d also just said she was glad he met me. If not me, what does she mean? I stare at this woman who had been through a horrible ordeal, then lost a brother, a father, and a husband in such a short amount of time. How was she even standing here and not permanently residing in a mental hospital? I barely survived losing my aunt.
Maybe that’s what having a large family is really all ab
out—having people to support you when you lose someone.
I glance up at Nate. He leans over the pool table and makes a final shot, sinking both the eight ball and the cue ball. He curses, drops to his knees, and shakes the pool cue up over his head.
“Loser again!” Antony laughs.
Nate turns his gaze to me, smiling glumly. His eyes flicker in Nora’s direction, and his face falls a bit. I wonder what he’s thinking as he pulls himself from the floor and joins us.
“He’s cheating,” Nate says, pointing to Antony over his shoulder. “I know he is. I just can’t figure out how.”
“You were cheating, too,” I remind him. “You deserve to lose.”
“Oh, my heart!” Nate places his hand over his chest and cries out as if in pain. He glares down at me. “You’re supposed to take my side in this, you know.”
“Am I?”
“Yes.”
“I wasn’t informed of the rules.”
“He tends to make them up as he goes along,” Nora says.
Nate takes my hand, insisting I play the next game on his team. I’m terrible at pool, miss constantly, and we’re destroyed by Nora and Antony. The teams switch around, we drink more wine, and the night goes on.
Though thoughts of Nora’s horrible experience still haunt me, I’m completely enthralled by the large family dynamic of the Orsos. I’ve thought about such gatherings, but I’ve never been a part of one, and they do this every week! Twos and Nora corner me, and despite Twos’ claim not to do “chick stuff,” we start making plans to get our palms read in Cincinnati while the boys go to a soccer game.
In what feels like an instant, I have a group of girlfriends. I’m not entirely sure how it even happened. Everyone is so accepting, and I feel completely welcomed. I join in the jokes and laughter. I’m not embarrassed when Nate pulls me onto his lap, kissing me hard right in front of everyone. I imbibe too much wine, and when the evening draws to a close, I know I can’t drive myself home.
“You can stay,” Nate says softly. He takes my hand and presses his lips to my knuckles.
My skin begins to tingle, and I’m very tempted to take him up on the offer, but I decline.