by CD Reiss
My mother was not experienced in the outdoors, yet she took the dangerous way, avoiding the paths and trails. The visitor’s center. The views. She steered clear. We slept on the ground, tucked into low shrubs. She gave me her sandwiches, and when those ran out, we ate dandelion leaves. My mother cried, and I comforted her. I wondered if Giovanna was going to give my black and red scubidù to someone else, but I was too hungry to care.
On the third day, the shrubs gave way to rock and dust, and the climb got steep. In the late afternoon, we stopped. The peak looked close enough to touch. My mother put her head down to rest. She wouldn’t get up. I shook her. I screamed. I even kicked her, but she didn’t move.
I turned my back on her and ran. My mother, who loved me and believed in me. The woman who hid stolen chocolate like little nuggets of grace and made me find it so I could feel the power of self-salvation.
I left her behind.
My wife and I go to the Alfa Romeo in silence.
The doctor may have been satisfied with the results of the exam, but Violetta is not. She squeezes my hand as if she’s afraid I’ll let go, which I won’t. She avoids my gaze as if I’ll see something in her she doesn’t want me to, which I might. When I open the car door for her, she thanks me as if I can’t hear the crack in her voice, which I do.
I walk around to my side and get behind the wheel, but I don’t start the engine.
“Tell me.” I try not to sound demanding, but what can I do? I am who I am.
“I’m fine. Clean inside.”
“Of course you are.” What kind of diagnosis is this? I’m offended on her behalf.
“I mean, there’s no extra tissue. My cervix is closing. It’s over.”
She stares out her window at the ghost town of the rows of empty white tents, each with a card table and two folding chairs inside. A folding sign sits at the head of an unpopulated brick path.
FALL REGISTRATION
LINE UP BY FIRST LETTER OF LAST NAME
“It’s so empty,” she says. “But tomorrow? This quad? This path here? Going to be full of students staring at class catalogs. They’ll see their friends for the first time in months. Size each other up. Who changed? Who’s the same? They’ll review the same food on the same campus and tell old jokes to see if they’re still funny.”
As long as she was my wife, I never cared whether or not she went back to school. One way or the other, it didn’t matter. Now, suddenly it matters that she gets what she wants—not just what I allow.
“Can you still go?” I offer.
“No. It’s too late.”
“They can bend the rules, no? I can talk to someone. Convince them.”
She laughs, looks up at the dome light.
“You are one hundred percent yourself.” She grabs my hand without looking at me. “It’s not against the rules. I can walk up here tomorrow and register. I just don’t want to.”
Of course she doesn’t. How could she go to school so soon after the trauma she just went through?
“Next year,” I say. She doesn’t reply, and we sit for a minute, holding hands in the front seat. Not one person crosses our path in any direction. The campus is holding its breath.
“They thought you did it,” she finally says. “My eye. The miscarriage.”
“I know.”
“I told Dr. Sanchez that if she said another bad word about you, I’d walk out. That no man I’ve ever met knew how to love me like my husband, who’s so good to me I can’t believe how lucky I am. But if he—meaning you—ever laid a hand on me like that, you wouldn’t be taking me to the doctor. You’d be dead and buried.”
Inside, I laugh. It comes out as a smile and a breath. “I believe it.”
“I said I was attacked. Robbed. Mugged. Whatever. I said the authorities in Secondo Vasto knew and were looking for the guy, but…” She looks at our clasped hands. “I told her the mugger drugged me and took me to a second location. You found me and saved me. I told them I wanted to know if I was roofied, so I asked for a tox screen. I know they have a little lab in the back for certain things. They did a hormonal too.”
She stops, swallows. I want to jump down her throat and pull out the words, because Damiano is still coming for her. He’s hovering over this conversation like a vulture, but I cannot say so. I have to bide my time for her.
“I’m going to kill him, Santino.”
“Who?”
“Dr. Farina. I don’t like that I killed someone in a church or anywhere…but Farina?” Her eyes finally meet mine. They’re glassed over with tears. “He didn’t just give me an opioid. He gave me misoprostol.”
Am I supposed to know what she’s talking about? Because I don’t. I’m not a nurse or a doctor or a pharmacist. I’m a capo who extracts tributes and breaks bones.
“I don’t understand.” Even as I say the words, I know damn well what she asked for and why. As uneducated as I am in the ways of medicines and bodies, I know where this is headed.
“It caused my uterus lining to shed.” She blinks, and tears drop down her cheeks. “Without that shot, I’d still be pregnant.”
It’s my turn to look away. No woman could see the murder on my face and still love me the way I need her to. “I will kill him for you. For both of us.”
“Why would they do it?” she pleads through sniffles and a wet cracking sound in her throat. “Why, Santi?”
“So I don’t have an heir to the crown.”
“Fuck that thing,” she says under her breath.
The profanity is like a knife slicing me open, exposing the inside of my heart. Fuck that thing. It’s not important. None of it is. Everything comes down to Violetta and the home we build together.
We will build nothing in a war. I will spend my time protecting her instead of cherishing her. This is not the life she ever asked for.
I turn so my gaze meets hers. I won’t say this without eye contact. She can’t think I don’t mean it with all my heart.
“You were given to me,” I say, taking out a handkerchief to wipe away her tears. “I took you as a prize, but I never had to give myself back to you.” Her face is dry, and I drop the hand with the handkerchief into her lap. “But I will. Now I will. Right now. We drive west with the clothes on our backs, and we find your normal.”
Her eyes go wide. When she blinks, there are no tears left, and I think maybe this is it. No more war. No more violence. Maybe I can be as decent as she believes I can be. Maybe I can make her happy.
And when she smiles, I believe I can. But then her face breaks apart into a different expression, and I realize her happiness will now take more than being normal.
12
VIOLETTA
“We find your normal.”
He says it with as much excitement as I’ve ever heard in his voice. As if this gift I asked for and he already refused is wrapped in shiny paper and tied with a big red bow. As if I hadn’t already chosen him over this fantasy normal.
It’s too late. I don’t want normal. I want revenge.
The miscarriage changed me, even before I knew it was intentional. But now, I can’t just walk away from the people who did this. My skin is laced in a web of vengeance.
I squeeze his hands in both of mine. “You wonderful, crazy, gorgeous, dramatic king of a man. They tried to kill you, and running away meant you never getting shot again. But there’s no normal in my future. Not after this.”
“Forzetta, this is not you.”
He’d consign himself to a life of quiet misery because a life without my happiness would be so much worse. I believe him, and it’s almost too much to bear.
“You’re going to let them get away with it?”
“To protect you, I would.” He believes it, but when my eyes narrow in suspicion, he looks away with a little smile. “For a while. When you were settled, I’d come back and bury them all. I’d make it home for dinner.”
I smile with him, then see a bulge in his side jacket pocket big enough to open the slash
into a bright orange smile.
“You got me something to eat,” I say.
He removes the orange. “You’re hungry?”
“Yeah.” I try to take it from him, but he pulls it back and peels away its overly thick rind. “If we stay, what do you think it means?”
Considering my answer, I open a napkin from the glove compartment and lay it open between us. He drops the peels on it.
“I think it means we’re going to take care of Damiano. And Gia. And Dr.—”
“Take care?” He breaks apart the fruit and holds up a wedge for me. “This means what?”
“I’m not hedging.” I reach for it, but he taps my hand away with a tsk. “It means one of us is going to kill them. Dead.”
“So tough, my Forzetta. Open.” I open my mouth, and he drops the wedge onto my tongue. “You’re so eager to lose your soul.”
I chew the orange. The sweet juice explodes, and the tart pith shocks. I really am hungry. “Haven’t I already? When I slashed that guy’s throat?”
He pops a wedge into his mouth, tasting the same sour sweetness but with a different tongue.
“You were kidnapped, drugged.” He feeds me a bigger, double-wedged piece. “Not in your right mind. Maybe God can forgive you, but He doesn’t forgive sober vengeance.”
“That’s a theological stretch.”
He nods, looking at the white registration tents. What’s going on in his mind? Before I figure it out, he shakes his head once as if resetting reality, but doesn’t say a word.
“Santino?”
“I don’t know how to protect you from what’s coming.” He gathers the peels inside the napkin. “Damiano’s still reaching for the crown. That means you.”
Abruptly, he gets out of the car and walks to the trash can. Halfway there, he turns backward to keep his eye on me. On the way back, I notice his attention scanning the corners and curves, the lines of the rooftops, the vulnerabilities of our position. He leans against the car door on my side and talks to me through the open window.
“What do we do?” I ask.
“There will be a war, and I need you someplace safe while I fight it.”
“Such as?”
“The house I bought you, here on this side.”
“In River Heights?” The house he tried to bribe me into complacency with, that we then tried to trap Damiano inside—I haven’t even lived in it a day, and it already has so much history I don’t even want to see it from the outside.
“It’s safe. I’ll visit—”
“No!” I interrupt him, because there won’t be any visiting or living separately. “We’re in this together, you and me.” I lower my voice in case someone appears from the emptiness. “You can’t just go into Secondo Vasto and fight while I sit in some house and wait.”
“You don’t fight.” He leans down and puts his elbow on top of the door. “You live in Torre Cavallo, and if you go up there, you stay. That is my final offer.”
“You want to lock me up so you can do what I should be doing myself.”
“You? You kill one man swinging your arm around like a sleepwalker, and now you’re fighting a war with me?”
“We were going to have a baby, and now we’re not. I’m not going to let that go.”
“You want a family, Violetta? Or are you going to die for what you can’t get back? Before this is over, Secondo Vasto is going to burn, and my wife will not be in the fire.”
I am not an object. I am not a prized possession. He cannot protect what we have by putting me in a locked box and keeping the key handy. No.
“When Gia shot you…” I speak slowly so he understands every fucking word. “I watched you die. My mind replayed it a hundred times, and a hundred times I was helpless to pull you out of that pool and save you. They took away my faith in myself, then they took away our child. If they kill you while I’m not there to do everything I can to stop it… What you’re not getting is that it’s over. I’m over.” My hands are up now, fingers curved, pleading with him to just hear me. “If we’re not side by side, I’m going to go insane.”
“But you’ll be alive.” He takes my wrists. “This is not negotiable as long as you’re a target.”
He’s too definite. This is the man who shoved me into a car and forced me to marry him. The same guy who threw me over a table and told me he’d wait to fuck me until he decided I wanted it badly enough; who shot a man for me; who dies protecting me.
I have reached the limit of my influence over him.
“What if we get the crown?” I say. “Now. Today. Then it stops being my inheritance.”
“And what will you expect then?”
“Damiano tries to get it from you.” I shrug. “You win the war easily because everyone follows the crown, and we decide whether to stay and make babies or run away and make babies.”
“We will get the crown.” He lets his fingers slip along my wrists so they can weave in mine. “I’ll take care of Damiano.” He squeezes my hands and holds them to his chest. “Not you, Forzetta. Say it for me.”
“You will take care of Damiano.” I can say it. I can even believe it. He lays his palms on my jaw, and I put my hands over them before reciting the names he’s skipped. “And Dr. Farina. And Gia. Right? All of them?”
“All of them,” he whispers as his thumb brushes my lower lip. “I will bring you their heads.”
His bloody promise enters my system like a drug. I gasp from the power of it. My cheeks get prickly hot, my heart thwacks against my ribs like a playing card clipped to a bicycle spoke, and my lips are drawn to him as if they’re solely responsible for sealing this deal.
He meets me halfway, leaning into the car and folding me into a kiss that defies gravity and reason. It’s a kiss of agreement, that when our tongues meet, so shall our minds. We share an idea of vengeance and justice. We sign a contract to trade our souls for satisfaction, for each other, for a thousand more kisses just like this one.
Connected at the mouth, we agree that murder is the way forward.
Santino drives the Alfa Romeo east. Our shadow precedes us like dark sentinel, scouting the highway at sixty-five miles an hour.
“When we get it,” Santino says, “we go back. You stay at Torre Cavallo, and I will gather everyone at the church.”
“The one we burned down?”
He thinks for a moment, smirking. “Probably not.”
There’s more than one church, and basically, if Santino doesn’t think it matters, it doesn’t. The process of displaying the pieces of the crown to assure loyalty is steeped in traditions from the other side of the ocean. I don’t pretend to understand them.
“Do you really think people are just going to be like, ‘Okay, Re Santino finally has the crown, so we’ll fight and die for him,’ like it’s nothing?”
Coming toward us at a low angle, a charter plane heads into the farthest points of the sky, disappearing into a dot.
“Yes.”
“And the Tabonas are just going to give you Damiano?”
“He’ll have fewer friends.”
I sigh and slide down my seat. I don’t believe he’s right about this, but it’s a nice story.
“Maybe we can have the life you want.” He puts his hand on my knee, slowing down for the increased traffic. “At home. Where we live.”
“Maybe,” I humor him. “How many babies do you want?”
“Three is enough.”
“Really?”
“You want four? Four, I can do.”
“I figured you for a traditional fourteen or fifteen kid kinda guy.”
“You want to spend twenty years pregnant? Or do you want us to enjoy life a little bit?”
“I want to enjoy life a lot.” I smile.
“Bene. We have a deal.”
Is this the first time we’ve agreed on something without compromise? Is it the first time we came into a life goal with the same idea? We may never agree on where to live or what community to belong to, but the size of
our family seems bigger than even that.
“I have a business question,” I say.
“You can ask it.”
“Have you ever tried to expand your territory over the river?”
“My… What?” He pops his blinker and checks over his shoulder, and I catch a glimpse of an expression of incredulous disbelief.
“Your influence,” I say. “Your kingdom. Is the river really a boundary?”
“No. I kept it small to stay under the radar. To keep from exposing myself. To protect you.”
“You don’t have to anymore.”
Every surface on my body buzzes. I’m aware that I could have lost what I carried for a hundred reasons.
When they gave me that drug, they took something more than physical from me. They stole my autonomy. My humanity. My hope. The hum of righteousness chases away despair, and the risks of our revenge overwhelm the pangs of grief.
The conflicts bind into a new thing—a virus that infects my cells, reproduces and flows into my bloodstream like an invading army. It is weightless. Even as I sit, my spirit lifts to the ceiling of the car.
“Cosa c'é?” Santino asks, sensing something is happening with me.
“Nothing.” I push the dashboard button that opens the sunroof. “I just need a little air.”
The window over us slides open, whipping the wind through my hair. I stick my hands out to feel the pressure of the air. The speed. The resistance.
I am grief, and I am rage, but I am also vengeance. I understand so many of Santino’s decisions now because I understand the power of making them.
Unlocking my seat belt, I get my legs under me. The dashboard lights up with danger and angry beeping.
“What are you doing?” Santino asks.
“Everything.” I kiss his cheek. “Because of you.”
He doesn’t understand.
“Buckle in,” he commands, but it’s too late.
I am lifted through the sunroof.
“Violetta!” he shouts.