Three Light-Years: A Novel

by Canobbio, Andrea

  “And this coworker?”

  “So: he’s just a coworker. I’m definitely not attracted to him, and I’m not even sure he’s interested in me. In any case, I’m not interested.”

  “Sometimes men aren’t interesting, at first.”

  “Sometimes they’re more interesting at first. Anyway, I’m not interested in this guy, I don’t know why he thought to call me at Mama’s house, or rather, I do know, he found the number in the directory, it matched the address where I have proofs sent to me, since Mama has a doorman…”

  “So he’s Mama’s invention.”

  “He’s not a complete invention, it’s true he calls me, he looks for me.”

  “Does he bother you?”

  “What do you mean? Of course not, he’s totally harmless.”

  “What does he ask you?”

  “Do I want to go out, do I want to go to the movies—why do you want to know? Don’t you remember how they are?”

  “No, I don’t remember.” Cecilia laughed.

  Silvia threw her head back. “Remember that guy who used to call the house, breathe heavily for ten minutes, and then hang up?”

  Cecilia felt a shiver down her spine. The memory of it, or she was beginning to feel cold; maybe now she’d feel like going to sleep. “Of course, how could I not remember.”

  Silvia looked at her wide-eyed. “We thought it was someone who had it in for you.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You suspected one of your boyfriends…”

  “Yes, that’s true. But now it seems unlikely. He was kind of a show-off, but he wouldn’t have made calls like that.”

  “You know what occurred to me a while ago? That we had it all wrong.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “It was meant for Mama, he called to scare Mama.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  Silvia didn’t answer.

  “That same old story again?” Cecilia asked.

  Silvia turned toward the window. Outside it was dark, the glass reflected their two cowering figures.

  Cecilia lowered her voice. “Do you really think it’s possible that a man like our father could have had someone else?”

  Silvia shook her head. “No, you’re right. It’s not possible.”

  “Do you think about Papa a lot?”

  Silvia nodded. “Don’t you?”

  “Yes, of course.” But it wasn’t true. She never thought about him. That afternoon, when she woke up from her nap, she realized that she hadn’t thought about him in months. She picked up an illustrated book that Mattia had pulled off the shelves that afternoon; it was called Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region, and was full of drawings of huge blue-green algae.

  “It was nice of Mama to offer you Papa’s books.”

  “She didn’t know what to do with them.”

  Their conversations: at the beginning she felt like the big sister, and maybe she treated Silvia a little condescendingly; by the end she became the little sister, as if Silvia always knew better than she did.

  “If you had to leave something to your children, what would you choose?”

  “The minestrone recipe.”

  They laughed.

  Cecilia rested her cheek on the back of the couch and smelled the beach house odor even more powerfully. “I’d like to choose which memories to leave them. Can I?”

  * * *

  She didn’t like driving at night, and even less so in the gray light of dusk. She didn’t like driving on the highway, where everyone went at a different speed than she did. Some had something to prove, others had good reasons to delay their return home. You had to pass or get out of the way quickly. She didn’t like driving on the highway at night, because it seemed like everyone was aiming their high beams at her, her eyes hurt every time she glanced in the rearview mirror. She didn’t like going back to the city on a Sunday evening after such a long weekend, there was too much traffic and everyone was edgy. She was edgy, too, and there was no real reason for it.

  They’d had a good time, the weather had been beautiful, her mother and sister hadn’t fought, and there were moments when the children seemed to have forgotten everything; she could read it in their eyes. Now they’d fallen asleep—Mattia almost immediately, Michela an hour later, after repeating no less than four times that at twelve she didn’t fall asleep in the car like a child anymore. They slept with their heads lolling, supported by the seat belts; she’d always worried they’d be strangled, but Luca had explained that no, there was no danger. Mattia, the only one who never took his T-shirt off at the beach, she and her mother debating whether he was ashamed of being too skinny. Did he know he was skinny? Was he cold, like he said? Then again, she hadn’t taken her T-shirt off either. Michela, on the other hand, was worried about keeping her bathing suit top in place, proud of her budding breasts. Silvia knew how to get on her good side. She’d had to leave early; their mother had rolled her eyes. Silvia, still convinced that their father had had a mistress. Of all the possible fixations, the most improbable. The children’s party was nice, nine of them in all; that was the secret, always having kids around. Mattia tagging along, playing whatever the other kids played. Funny because when he was alone, he thought up lots of games. But he played them by himself—he had no interest in recruiting others, in winning them over. For example, the fish market game: oleander leaves served as anchovies, hydrangea leaves were sole, pinecones were sea urchins. Luca was on vacation with “friends,” but she expected that sooner or later the children would tell her, “Daddy has a girlfriend.” Michela would tell her, proud, jealous, delirious. Learn to hide the irritation that delirium caused her.

  To distract herself she thought about the emergency room. The spring-summer season was starting. Like the forest, or fashion, the ER changed according to the seasons. In the summer and before vacations people came to drop off their elderly relatives. In the winter, immigrants and the homeless came to sleep in the waiting room or just to spend a few hours in the warmth. During the Christmas holidays, relatives from the south came to visit their families and took advantage of the opportunity to seek medical advice. Then it was deserted during the World Cup. Last time, in two hours, there’d been only one little old woman suffering from depression. At Ramadan medications were a problem; Muslims couldn’t take them before sunset. Summer brought the elderly: dehydrated, or with pneumonia from air-conditioning. Winter, influenza. Not to mention the pleasure of unforeseen outbreaks such as SARS. Before the divorce, she would reach the end of her shift and realize she hadn’t once, not for a moment, thought about Luca and the children. She’d feel guilty. Now she was thankful that, for six hours, she was forced to think about something else.

  She didn’t like driving on the highway in the dark, she should have left earlier, but the children hadn’t let her. Her mother was staying at the beach house alone for one night, to deal with the ghost. Cars passed her, men alone at the wheel turning their heads slightly to glance at her; did they expect her to wink at them maybe, in the dark, a quickie in the emergency lane? The intrigues in the ER, the intrigues at the hospital, the shy internist. Her children were sleeping. Michela was twelve years old. A teenager, and so you could count on her being argumentative for at least another seven or eight years. How she’d changed: she moved in a different way, as if dancing on pointe, and she was very pretty. Fewer hysterical scenes, though they were perhaps more dramatic. That strange game they’d been playing on the beach. Not as free after Mattia’s problem. Forced to act more like an adult. And then, her period. Checking her jeans every now and then, afraid the pad might have shifted. But at the beach she’d become a child again, running around with the others.

  Hard to go back to that beach; memories populated a place, and Luca always seemed to be missing. Not always, not in all places—their home, for example, had forgotten him; it was as if Luca had never lived there, the children’s clutter covered up the absence of his very orderly things. But the first da
y, when it was time to leave the beach, she’d had the impression that they all turned toward the sea, that they were about to ask, “Where did Daddy go?” Not just Luca, not just him. “Where did the fathers go?” Two fathers gone within three years. What a shame. She slapped the steering wheel in irritation. She couldn’t stand it anymore, the biting sarcasm that still ran under the surface and occasionally emerged.

  “Why did you slap the steering wheel?” Michela asked, awake.

  “The lights in my eyes bother me.”

  “They bother me, too,” Mattia said, awake.

  Both of them awake, she hadn’t noticed. And now she had to entertain them.

  Michela said, “I fell asleep, we’re already at San Pietro,” and then she repeated it to Mattia, who didn’t say anything because he couldn’t remember where San Pietro was and how far it was from home. “We slept for more than an hour!” And again, shrilly: “I didn’t realize we were already at San Pietro.”

  “How much farther?” Mattia asked, not realizing that he was sealing his fate.

  “We’re almost there!” Michela exclaimed. “Don’t you know where San Pietro is?”

  When they were younger, she used to sing to them, on car trips without Luca, to make them fall asleep. Sluggish, buckled into their car seats, bothered by car sickness or by the seat belts, the children hardly ever joined in. They stared out the window, and rarely cried. What was wrong with letting them look out the window, with being quiet? She couldn’t help it. She had to know what they were thinking, occupy their minds, put them to sleep. She would sing songs from cartoons or songs they were learning in kindergarten. She never abandoned them.

  “Let’s play a game: tell me your three best memories from the past few days.”

  Silence.

  “Mine are: when we fed the seagull on the pier and the evening we walked to town with Grandma and your aunt, when we put on our shawls.”

  She was lying: her favorite memories were the first morning at the beach when the children came running back to her every now and then, and Saturday night when she browsed through the notebooks with Silvia.

  “That’s only two,” Mattia said.

  “Tell me yours and I’ll tell you my third.”

  She lied out of habit: she imagined that the memory of the seagull might be one of Mattia’s favorites (fascinated by their feathers, he’d pull his hair back, flattening it over his head to imitate their sleekness) and that the memory of the walk might be one of Michela’s favorites (proud to walk by herself a few steps ahead with her aunt and seem older). She was used to suggesting. Like she did with patients: “Do you also feel a heavy sensation? Does the pain go away after eating?” And the brief satisfaction of confirmation when they replied: “Yes, it goes away after eating.” Except for the doubt, later, that she may have influenced them, the doubt that they’d said yes to make her happy.

  Michela said, “My favorite memories are: first, how cold the water was, because I really didn’t expect it, and second, the walk.”

  “That’s only two,” Mattia said.

  “And then the scent of pitch pine, which I’d never smelled before.”

  “Now you have to tell us yours,” Cecilia said to Mattia, “come on, don’t make us beg.”

  “The seagull,” Mattia said.

  “That’s only one…”

  “The head, wings, and orange legs,” Cecilia spoke for him.

  “No fair helping!” Michela said.

  No fair helping, no fair suggesting, no fair knowing other peoples’ memories, reading minds. Now tell me your three favorite memories from when there were four of us, the questions she would never ask, and now tell me your most awful memories, tell me all of them.

  * * *

  She might wake up at two o’clock, three o’clock, four o’clock. But the worst was waking up at five, no hope of losing consciousness again, too late for a pill, too late for a whole chocolate-coconut bar, or two fruit yogurts, or a package of vanilla wafers. “So much the worse for you.” To wake up, in the early morning hours, the bed full of scratchy thoughts like cookie crumbs. The dreaded morning hours. From the other side of the house she heard the second bathroom door slap lightly against the jamb every two or three minutes. A faint draft, she had to remember to close the door before going to bed. She didn’t feel like getting up right now. The house seemed to be breathing softly.

  At the beginning of their separation, three years earlier, she would wake up furious in those dreaded morning hours. Before waking up she’d already be dreaming about being angry with him, and as soon as she opened her eyes she wanted to clobber him. She’d sit cross-legged on the bed and look at him. She had a rolling pin, which wasn’t a club and wasn’t a mallet and wasn’t just a piece of wood. It was a rolling pin, and with that utensil used for rolling out dough, inherited from her grandmother, which her children sometimes used to flatten clay, she wanted to bash him not in the groin, but on the mouth. Whack him on the mouth for what he said when he was awake, but most of all because often, in his sleep, he’d be smiling. Punish him as if he’d done it on purpose, she who couldn’t even yell at the children without feeling guilty.

  She was pregnant and she was furious. It wasn’t planned and it wasn’t welcome and she couldn’t afford to be and she had no desire to be and she had two children she loved dearly, they were enough for her, and she had made it through the hardest part. Mattia was in first grade and she had no intention of starting over again with another one. Mattia was a problem child in any case and she wanted to devote herself to him without any distractions, she didn’t want to give him a new reason to be jealous and cause problems for him. She’d had the girl when she was twenty-three, even before she got her medical degree, but she’d stayed on track and had soon begun her internship. At twenty-six she was pregnant again, but she hadn’t taken more than a two-month leave and had continued on without missing a year. She’d completed her residency with a daughter who was already in school and a three-year-old son who didn’t talk much but made you love him. At thirty-two she was working in the ER, it was what she wanted to do and she was doing it. She needed stability, not another child.

  After living through nine years like the past nine years. Having gone through her father’s illness and death—she’d been the one who diagnosed his tumor. Her father had died two months earlier. Did she really need an unwanted pregnancy to balance the loss? It was what life had handed her, the doctor responsible for her father’s diagnosis. Forced to stop and think about what she wanted from life, forced to realize that there was something wrong and sense that it was something quite serious and being tremendously afraid to face it. So instead you become furious.

  She wanted to remove the obstacle as if the obstacle were the one and only source of her rage. But if that were the whole story she could have avoided telling Luca. Guessing his reaction, and having no intention of discussing it, she could have lied to him and taken care of it herself. Instead, she’d dug in her heels and crossed her arms, or her legs. Sitting cross-legged on the bed, she watched him smile in his sleep and waited for him to wake up. She told him she was pregnant and, without giving him time to appear surprised or happy or concerned, she added: “I can’t keep it.” So he was forced to react to the second piece of information; the first had been left behind. The unplanned pregnancy, the possibility of a third child, they’d never talked about it. Saying “I’m pregnant and I can’t keep it,” she’d dictated the terms of the conversation. “What do you mean you can’t keep it?” “I don’t want to keep it.” He sat up, he was silent, letting the news she’d just thrown down between them settle. “But why?” he finally muttered. And she told him angrily, “Because I don’t want to.” “It’s something we need to talk about calmly, we can’t just decide like this.” She wanted to say, “We can’t? I’m the one who’ll decide, we’re not deciding together,” but she kept silent.

  There was nothing she could do about it. Or maybe there was, maybe she could have discussed it with him
and persuaded him to accept the decision she’d made. If she’d cared about him. Only then did she realize that she had no desire to and no intention of sitting down and talking to make the decision easier for him. He had to accept it and that was that. Wasn’t it his business? Well, it was also his business, he was her husband, how could she deny it? If she didn’t want it to be his business, it meant that something had changed and she hadn’t noticed, she hadn’t wanted to notice. So let’s say it was also his business, but she would rather it wasn’t. And getting to the point of learning that she was pregnant and realizing that not only didn’t she want to be pregnant in general, but that she especially didn’t want to be pregnant by him—getting to that point made her furious.

  What had happened to their love the last few years? It seemed like nothing had really happened, but that wasn’t true. Luca had agreed to take on a big client in Rome, he was never home, and on weekends he often shut himself up in his room to work. He’d been very uncertain about whether to take on that responsibility. He’d agreed primarily because she’d told him that they would manage (she was used to saying it, she was programmed to give that response). But at the time she’d said it, she didn’t know what she was saying. Or maybe she did, maybe she knew very well and had said it to encourage the dissatisfaction that was beginning to germinate in her to take root and grow stronger.

  And as she continued thinking about the death throes of their marriage, she tended to date the beginning of the end further and further back; sooner or later she’d have it coincide with the starting point, in accordance with the principle whereby only the origin is whole and uncorrupted and cells begin dying at birth. Luca’s absence had brought out the worst in both of them. Just as she was completing her residency, just when her father fell ill, just as Michela began taking catechism seriously enough to worry them, just when Mattia, who spoke little and poorly at four years of age, had to go to a speech therapist. Instead of bringing them closer together, instead of making her feel she couldn’t do without him, Luca’s absence had flipped a switch in her head so that when he was around she felt an appalling urge to fight with him. And still she wondered: How could such ordinary things (distance, fatigue, worries about work and the children) have estranged him from her? There had to be something else.