Thieves Never Steal in the Rain

by Marisa Labozzetta

  “I met a little girl at the villa, Dad. You’re going to think this is crazy. Her mother is the cleaning woman. The caretaker said her father was a drug addict — the owner of the villa’s son. Dad, I believe she’s Jill.”

  Like a cowering puppy expecting to be reprimanded with a smack on the head, she waited for her father’s reaction.

  “So that’s why you believe. That’s what all the reincarnation talk is about?”

  “Yes.”

  “What makes you think it was Jill?” His interest was genuine.

  “She was born three days after Jill died. She was playing with a miniature wooden horse. You know how much Jill loved horses. She even looked like Jill. Dad, it’s like you said about Harlan being dead: I just knew.”

  “And Elliott?”

  “My husband is a man of science.”

  “You weren’t kidding when you came home and said you had a good trip.”

  Joanna couldn’t contain the smile that broke over her face.

  “The day I met him,” Marco said, “we sat and talked until dark. I had taken your mother back to my brother’s to rest. You know how easily she gets tired. Besides, she didn’t cotton to his wife — who, by the way, he later told me, hated Italy and had a boyfriend back in New Zealand. Your mother has good intuitions; she can sense these things. I went back to the villa that evening. There was something about the guy — we came from different parts of the world but we got along so well, and I had the feeling that maybe we’d met before. But of course we hadn’t. I guess I saw a little of myself in him — for better or worse.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I know my strengths, Joanna, and my weaknesses. I know my fears have led me to walk a straight line in my life — be precise, follow through — but I’m also aware of how inflexible they’ve made me. I like to be right. Actually, I think I am right most of the time.”

  “You’re right more than you’re wrong, Dad. But you are wrong sometimes,” she pointed out. She really wanted to know if something intimate had happened between her father and this stranger, but there was no way to ask. “So, how did you leave each other? Did you agree to keep in touch?”

  “We never talked about that. It wasn’t a subject. There was only that day. And if another time happened to us — if I had been lucky enough to get in another trip back to my homeland — maybe I would have tried to find him again.”

  “Maybe?”

  “Some things are better left alone. They aren’t meant to be built on. They are what they are. Hai capito?”

  She said she understood, even though her father had just spoken of a man as he might have an exotic woman with whom he’d had a tryst, a lover who had opened up a world of mysteries so profound that their ramifications were too overwhelming to speculate about. She said she understood because that was what you said to her father when he asked that, because he wasn’t really asking — he was ordering you not to rock the boat, to leave well enough alone. He was closing a door, and there was to be no more knocking on it. That was how he dealt with his fear. And that was why she now knew for certain that he had never before spoken about the owner of the villa.

  Joanna glanced into the rearview mirror. Her mother was still dozing. Her father continued to process the notion that his granddaughter lived on as the granddaughter of a man with whom he seemed to have been infatuated. Had it been any other man, her father would never even have entertained the idea, but that it might be this man gave it some validity, and suddenly he did the extraordinary: he opened the door again.

  “I had a dream last night,” he confessed. “I never dream, you have to understand. At least I don’t remember my dreams if I do. But last night I went back to Italy, back to the villa. He and I were sitting on the terrace looking out at the vast sky and those green hills, and I kept telling him I thought I had cancer too. We were speaking in Italian in my dream, although he didn’t really speak Italian. He was speaking beautiful Italian. He never looked at me. It was like I wasn’t there. I finally threw up my hands and cried out: ‘Why me? Why me? Ma perchè? Answer me, goddammit!’ That’s when he turned and looked at me as though I was crazy and gave me my answer.”

  “Which was?”

  “‘Why not?’ he said, as smooth and cold as ice. ‘Why not?’ But it wasn’t him talking — it was me, me in his body, that I watched creep back into the villa with all the humility only a dead man is capable of possessing.”

  “You think he came to you, Dad?”

  Her father grew somber again; death was no longer an entertaining guest among them. Staring blankly once more out the windshield, he shrugged the deflated shoulders that had once carried Joanna and that, so long ago, she thought were mighty enough to carry the world.

  “I don’t believe in coincidences, Dad. I believe that this man came to you to help you. Just as I believe that that little girl was his granddaughter — and yours.”

  That her father did not refute her statement was the best he could do, the closest he could come to acceptance. Suddenly none of it seemed of much importance to him — not Harlan and their relationship, not even the fact that Jill might have been reincarnated. He was far beyond that. His brittle morning anxiety had given way to stoic calm. The secret was out, the greatest mystery of his life solved. Marco had crossed over to join those who know what everyone longs and yet fears to discover: the end to his story.

  “Myra, we’re home,” he tenderly called to his wife. “Wake up, dear.”

  “Already? That was so quick. All that talking you two were doing put me to sleep.”

  “We were speaking about Harlan Bigwood again,” he said.

  “Isn’t he the weatherman on Channel four?”

  Marco gave an exhausted sigh of compassion for his wife as he looked over at Joanna, and their knowing eyes locked in an embrace that erased all fears and their demands — at least for the moment.

  “Why not, dear?” he told his wife, his gaze still fixed on his daughter. “Why not?”

  On the morning of Marco Ficola’s death, Myra goes to the hall closet where, for years before dementia set in, she kept her special outfits. She wore them to weddings and christenings, to church on Sunday; the red suit never failed to draw compliments from other parishioners. Always so well dressed, they said, in an era when the act of dressing up had not just relaxed but collapsed, with shorts and jeans now considered normal attire at Mass. When her mind began to wander in and out of the moment, Marco selected something for her.

  “You might want to wear the black one,” Joanna tells her mother, who removes a periwinkle A-line dress and matching jacket. A handwritten note is pinned onto the lapel: For my funeral.

  “But this is the one I’ve been saving.”

  “For your own funeral, Ma. Not Dad’s.”

  “Well, I just died,” Myra says, in an instant of utter lucidity.

  She had stopped attending Mass that last year, the

  year of Marco’s downward spiral. While the sweet little black hospice girl, as Marco liked to call her, cared for him, Myra busied herself around the house, making coffee for nonexistent guests or finding herself lost in the kitchen when visitors actually arrived. Occasionally she demanded to be taken to the North End in Boston, where her little girl, Joanna, was waiting for her, when in fact, Joanna had moved with them from the North End to outlying Medford 35 years before. However, there were times, like now, when Myra’s comprehension was undeniable, when she looked at her weakened husband and Joanna could see their years together unscrolling before her mother’s eyes. These were times when love worked its magic and her mental decline did an about-face, as on the day Marco had climbed the stairs alone, at his insistence, with every effort his cancer-ridden body could put forth, and took to his bed, where he remained until his death.

  “I think it’s time you started looking around,” Marco told his wife.

  “For
what?” Myra asked.

  “For someone new.”

  Joanna was dumbfounded by the remark. Her father was not a practical joker, and she knew there was no sarcasm in his statement. Feeling like an intruder, she left the room, but aware of her mother’s limited rationality and afraid she might miss her father’s last breath, she left the door open and planted herself on the other side of the jamb.

  “Look for someone else?” her mother said. “At my age? Don’t be an old fool.”

  “I’m serious, ninfa. I don’t like to think of you without a man’s love.”

  Ninfa? Joanna had never heard her father address her mother as a nymph. He was delirious, Joanna concluded, and perhaps referring to an old flame — or maybe one not so old. The end was imminent, and Joanna only hoped her mother hadn’t understood enough to be faced with painful revelations at this late date.

  “You’re out of your mind, Adone.” Adonis!

  “With love for you.”

  “Adone, you won’t forget the promise.”

  “It’s that time, isn’t it? I won’t forget, amore. Ti prometto.”

  Now he was telling her how much he loved her and that she had always been his only love. But he was speaking in Italian, which Myra, a Polish Jew before her conversion to Catholicism, had never quite mastered. Still, she answered him in Italian, telling him that she also loved him, her Adonis, and then she bent over the bed and kissed him long on the lips, her head trembling. Joanna had never seen her parents so intimate; the Ficola men frowned on displays of affection as offensive to others and signs of weakness. Joanna’s parents now presented a singular tableau, a window on over half a century of togetherness. And what was this promise they talked about? What could her father possibly promise to do for her mother, when he was a breath away from death? Joanna should have been moved to tears, but instead laughter escaped her lips like air out of a punctured balloon. It was not a laugh of derision or even of jealousy. (She and her father had always enjoyed a special bond, often at her mother’s expense.) No, it was a laugh of sheer delight and gratitude for discovering that she had been wrong about her parents and their marriage all these years. There had been passion, possibly even heightened by an indiscretion. She had been so wrong, and the laughter, after all these months of tension, felt good.

  “Stai zitto!” Be quiet! Her father chastised her for her outburst. A broad smile broke out on her mother’s round face, its delicate skin seasoned with creases and two large brown spots. Her father let out what would be the last attempt at a chuckle, followed by a labored gasp for air, payment for the jocularity.

  ***

  Joanna’s husband, Elliott, takes on the task of informing relatives and friends of Marco’s passing. Joanna’s cousin Nancy is hanging curtains when the phone rings. She’s standing on a ladder, her back to the bed, while her son Pierre uses the king-sized mattress for a trampoline. She doesn’t want to wait until the curtains are up before she stops him. Besides, she has to teach him this isn’t acceptable behavior.

  She gathers up the yards of fabric along with the rod and descends the ladder, careful not to trip on the cloth. Draping the curtains over a chair, she positions herself in front of Pierre and tries to stop him, but the grinning boy is having so much fun she can barely slow him. She cups his fleshy face in the palms of her hands and stares directly into it. Clearly and slowly she pronounces the words: “No jumping on the bed.”

  “But Uncle Marco likes it!” His squirms to wriggle out of her grasp and resumes bouncing, his belly convulsing with pleasure with every giggle he lets out.

  “What?” As often happens, she’s misunderstood the slurred speech of a deaf boy who is being taught to communicate orally.

  He turns his gaze slightly upward, appearing to be smiling at nothing. She brings the smooth cheeks opposite hers again, signaling for him to focus on her mouth. She is set on teaching Pierre to speak; each morning he attends kindergarten at a renowned school for the deaf that uses only this method. She is fearful that his inability to hear will put him at a disadvantage in life. “There are times everyone must learn what comes naturally to Pierre, and ignore what they hear — forget,” her Uncle Marco once told her. “How else would family survive?”

  “What did you say?” she asks Pierre again, having corralled his attention.

  “Uncle Marco likes it.” There is no mistaking his words this time.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s here, jumping with me on the bed.”

  When the phone on the nightstand sounds, she sets the boy free. The call comes as no surprise.

  “I have some bad news,” Elliott tells her.

  “I know. When?”

  “Early this morning, around six.”

  ***

  After she hangs up with Elliott, Nancy calls her cousin Barbara to tell her of their Uncle Marco’s death. Barbara worries that her father, Marco’s older brother Joe, is too feeble to make the drive from New Jersey to Boston to bury the first of the six Ficola brothers to die.

  “His legs swell, Nancy, and he has to stop so often to pee, and with all that traffic slowing us down, he’s afraid there won’t be a rest stop when he needs it.”

  “For God’s sake, he’s a man,” Nancy says. “He can pee anywhere.”

  “He’s a Ficola man. They only pee in a toilet — a men’s toilet, or urinal, as the case may be. Once he was about to explode and still he wouldn’t use the ladies’ room in a pizzeria. They’re proud.”

  “They’re stubborn. Find a way. Bring an old coffee can. Do something. He has to come. He’ll regret it if he doesn’t.”

  “It’d be easier if Lenny was here. Lenny is good with him.”

  No, it wouldn’t. It wouldn’t be at all good if Lenny were there. Right now Joe Ficola can’t stand the thought of his son-in-law, let alone the sight of him, but Nancy does not say this to Barbara because, in her broken heart, Barbara already knows.

  Barbara’s husband, Lenny, is in New Mexico, living and working for a time on his college roommate’s pinto bean farm, partly to help pay his children’s college tuition but mainly because he can’t face the scrutiny of family and friends back east. The most successful of the cousins’ husbands, Lenny had become greedy, subject to illusions of grandeur, and had assumed the lifestyle of the wealthy clients whose money he managed, sinking his family into insurmountable debt. When the economy took a nosedive, Lenny literally lost the ranch — the house he’d rebuilt on a larger lot, in a more lavish style, than the one that had burned down — and everything else they owned, along with his professional reputation. Barbara moved in with her parents, while she took steps to become recertified in the school system. In the interim, never completely down on her luck, she landed a position at the public library as a substitute for the reference librarian on maternity leave.

  “I can’t understand it. How could he have let this happen?” Joe repeatedly asked his brother Marco when he first found out. He spent his days conjuring up explanations, ranging from a mistress to insanity, that might have led his son-in-law to indulge in such irresponsible behavior. Over and over an embittered Joe demanded agreement on his theories from Marco, who listened but refused to speculate about Lenny’s motives and who, bereft of a grandchild and battling cancer, never compared the magnitude of his grief with his brother’s.

  Joe has no intention of missing his baby brother’s funeral. An empty Medaglia D’Oro can at his side, he and his Yankee wife get into Barbara’s back seat and set out on the New Jersey Turnpike.

  “It’ll be good to be back in Massachusetts,” observes Norma, a crusty New Englander who refuses to dye her hair like her sisters-in-law and wears little makeup. “Better off” is usually her response to the news of someone’s death. It isn’t so much what she says as the coldness with which she says it that has chilled her relationship with the Ficolas over the years.

  “How can you say
a thing like that at a time like this?” Joe asks his wife. “He was my brother. I’m in mourning, for your information.”

  “I didn’t mean the occasion was a happy one. For heaven’s sake, Joe. I only meant — .”

  “I know what you meant. I’m sorry.”

  The apologies come as a surprise to Barbara, who thinks death is a cruel teacher, a bitter dose of medicine to mellow both the frigid and the grumpy.

  “I hope Rosemary doesn’t bring that boyfriend of hers,” Norma says.

  “Avery is not her boyfriend, and why do you care?” Barbara asks.

  “If he’s not her boyfriend, then all the more reason for him not to be there,” Norma says. “I heard her own children won’t be able to make it. This is a family matter. He isn’t family. Besides, he gives me the willies.”

  “Because he’s gay?” Barbara asks, vexed.

  “No, Barbara, I don’t care about that. It’s that other business he’s hiding.”

  Myra is referring to Avery’s lengthy prison term for a crime to which the family is still not privy nor can they research it, since Rosemary won’t reveal Avery’s last name.

  ***

  They can’t shut the lights off on Marco Ficola’s car. One of Barbara’s twins has driven it to Medford from his college in upstate New York.

  His Uncle Marco had sold Matthew the car for one dollar. He had sold it rather than given it to Matthew so that, God forbid, if anything ever happened to Matthew while he was in the car, it wouldn’t have anything to do with Marco having passed on bad luck. Barbara hadn’t given Matthew any knives for his new apartment, either; she sold him a set for a penny. In this family superstitions have been passed down through the generations: no shoes on the table (even new ones in their boxes); no opening umbrellas inside the house; no bestowing compliments without invoking God’s blessing. And while Barbara and her cousins would prefer not to observe these paganisms, they cannot ignore them — just in case there might be some truth to them.

  Marco had bought the new car with a sunroof and leather seats just before he fell ill. He had never been an extravagant man; he simply wanted this car, and had finally allowed himself to indulge. Before long, however, Marco found himself being driven in it to doctors’ appointments and chemotherapy and radiation treatments. And so, his only grandchild dead, he sold the car for one dollar to his brother’s grandson.