Farewell, My Loves

by Jen Tirone

  I mouth to him, I’m okay, but he’s unseeing right now.

  Matteo tries telling him what Domenico ordered, starting from the argument between me and the family the day he was arrested, to the words between Chiara and I at the salon.

  “And you thought, fratello, that there’d be no retaliation from me?” he asked in a cold voice I could barely recognize.

  He began removing his suit coat slowly. Ritualistically.

  “Did you know, Matteo, my wife has a private little joke about me?”

  “Giorgio, what the fuck are you going on about? Did you just hear what I said?” Matteo asks him incredulously.

  “She said once that the grim reaper was an Italian, in an all black three-piece Armani suit, right, bella?” He turns my way but looks right through me.

  I’ve never seen him so detached; it was the scariest fucking thing to see.

  Walking toward his brother without taking his eyes off me, but not really looking at me, he asks “Did you notice what I was wearing today, Matteo?” Like the conversation was still about clothes.

  “Giorgio, I’m okay, amore. Let’s go home,” I try because I’m so afraid of him and what he’ll do right now.

  “Gio!” Matti yells at him in frustration.

  He’s panicking.

  And he should be.

  Gio walks up to me and cups my uninjured cheek and tilts his head like the sight of me like this hurts him.

  Matti reaches to put a hand on his shoulder, when Giorgio suddenly turns and reaches out so damn quickly, neither Matti or I knew his intent even as he wrapped the goddamn piano wire he always has on him around his brother’s neck and savagely jerked him down to the floor.

  Matti started struggling and tried pulling the wire off his neck, but Gio had all the advantage striking him when he put his guard down.

  Matti was facing the floor when Gio straddled his back, and pulls the wire up so high, I thought he was about to snap his neck.

  “Did you really think you could touch what was mine? Did you think, fratello mio, that you could hit my woman, or let someone else do it, and live to see another day?” he tells him calmly.

  I had jumped out of the seat in shock and disbelief over what I was seeing before my eyes.

  He was killing his brother!

  I tried to stop him.

  I yanked at his arms, his hair.

  But Giorgio was merciless. Unrelenting and single-minded.

  It was completely useless.

  He wanted his brother dead and he would make it so.

  Matti was thrashing on the floor with his own blood all over his hands, causing them to slip as he tried to loosen Gio’s hold to no avail.

  His neck was rubbed raw.

  His face, turning purple.

  The terror was choking me like a boa constrictor witnessing my brother-in-law dying at my husband’s hand. It tightened around me and robbed me of air the more helpless I was, because Gio’s grip was iron clad.

  There was nothing that would stop him and I couldn’t look away. I wouldn’t leave Matti like that.

  Then I saw the gun Matti dropped on the floor.

  I wouldn’t have been able to pull the trigger, I didn’t want to, but I wanted to use it to hit Giorgio in order to try and stop him…but I was too late.

  Matti had stopped moving, and Gio took a deep breath and then stepped off his brother to stand up and face me.

  I fell to my knees and threw up.

  I couldn’t look at Matti’s lifeless body anymore, I turned away from him and sobbed.

  When I felt arms wrap around me tenderly, I was devastated.

  Giorgio would kill anyone for me.

  I knew without a doubt now that could include me too.

  I was in a fog.

  A state of shock, if you will.

  Because if authorities asked me what Giorgio did with his brother and the other two bodies, I truly couldn’t recall.

  I would be aiding and abetting the three murders when it came time to pay the price because I would never in my life rat him out.

  I genuinely couldn’t remember much of what happened right after he killed Matteo.

  I can only imagine where his body ended up.

  Matti didn’t deserve a half-assed resting place.

  But then again, I was being sentimental. It had to be the pregnancy and that he was family. I’d been jaded for so many years, because a man who lived by the sword, died by the sword, and that was never more than an afterthought before.

  Seeing what Giorgio did…my God, knowing and witnessing were two very different fundamentals.

  He was an animal.

  I only remember being carried to a car in his arms because I felt him do it.

  Then I remember being carried into a hotel, washed up, dressed and then taken home, again, because I felt it.

  I know Giorgio spoke to me, but I couldn’t listen.

  I couldn’t see past him strangling his brother to death.

  I couldn’t hear past the morbid sounds of gunshots, mania and choking gasps playing on repeat in my head.

  All the bodies... all the blood.

  “Gianna, listen to me, baby, please,” Gio started to break through the fog.

  “Are you hurt anywhere else? Do I need to take you to the hospital?”

  “Giorgio, how could you do that—” my voice cracked, “to Matti?”

  “Gianna, please, did they hurt the baby?” he begs me.

  “No,” I whisper. “Matti stopped them... you should have believed him,” I condemned him, looking at the man I couldn’t recognize anymore.

  I would never stop seeing that side of him for the rest of my life.

  “Bella, do you remember the letters we used to write each other, when I left Italia?”

  The letters?

  What was he talking about?

  “You just—you just did what you did, to your brother,” I stressed, effectively out of the fog now. This wasn’t time to talk about love letters!

  “I remember one of your letters asking me why I wouldn’t write about much of the details from my everyday life anymore,” he continues.

  “Gio! For God’s sake!” I yell in frustration.

  Has he really lost his mind?

  “Just hear me out, baby. I need to tell you this,” he says as he strokes my hair, trying to settle me back in our bed for his fucked-up moment of story time.

  Belatedly, I realized I was lying on my side, he was sitting next to me, running a hand from my hair down to my hip.

  I honestly think Giorgio had to be in shock too.

  “I was fifteen when I came to this country. You know that, but leaving Italia, and leaving with my father after having grown up without him during some of the hardest times in war, you can imagine how shiny the city of lights of New York could be to a newcomer. I was ready to work hard, work in anything and everything. I had a focus. I had to save as fast as I could to get back to you.

  “I decided I would never speak Italian again until I had a decent hold of English first. I spoke terribly but I pushed myself, refusing to be limited by something as trivial as a lack of communication because I was embarrassed. Right after we were settled in, after I sent you my first letter, I came home to tell my parents about my first job sweeping the floors of a barbershop. After my proud announcement, my father took me out for a ride. I thought he was taking me out to celebrate this milestone, this initiation into manhood.

  “He explained that our family wasn’t going to be the help. We were going to be the kind of family who hires the help, because we had better things to do. He told me out of all his sons, I was most like him. And that he’d be making sure it was me who helped get the Moretti’s to the top. So he took me to a nightclub, strolled in like he was the boss and told me to stand on the side and keep quiet. He wined and dined some man named Vinnie and when dessert was finished, and they all stood to say goodbye. My father, instead of kissing both cheeks of who I learned during the dinner was his best frie
nd, he kisses Vinnie right on the lips with what I learned was the kiss of death, and took out a revolver to blow his face off at point-blank range.

  “I threw up my dinner all over my shoes, not because I thought what he did was heinous, but because I knew I could do that just as easily, and it was only the adrenaline that made me expel the food,” he said, running his hands into his hair and then pulled at it in frustration.

  “I knew he was right, I was just like him, but I tried not to be all the years I spent my days with you. I knew that I wasn’t a good man and especially not for you, but I still had to have you. You were always mine, my only treasure in this fucked-up world,” he says as he reaches out and traces a finger across my eyebrow, then down my cheek.

  “My father told me to clean myself up, gave me the revolver he had just used, and said I had to go and track Vinnie’s brother down that night and do the very same, because it wasn’t the bloodline—but the blood shed—that initiates you into La Cosa Nostra. It’s a sad thing to admit I didn’t even hesitate and I didn’t even blink when I put the nozzle in his mouth while he was asleep and pulled the trigger, watching his fucking brains decorate the walls of his bedroom.”

  He pauses, lost to himself, reminiscing his horrid story.

  “I remember thinking, my Gianna deserves better than this. She deserves a simple and honest life, a good husband and good children. That’ll make her most happy. You didn’t need any of this staining the beauty that’s all you.

  “But I couldn’t do it, bella. No matter how long I stayed away, I couldn’t keep away. I bought so many tickets to Italia over the years we were apart, but I knew I couldn’t uproot you from everything, and not offer you the best. It had to be when I could give you everything. When I could give you the world.

  “I knew I couldn’t give you a decent life the honest way. I had hoped you were still innocent, not just sexually because I’d lose my goddamn mind, but innocent with everything in the world. And when I finally went for you, because my black fucking heart couldn’t beat without you anymore, I wanted to fall to my knees and thank God for blessing a debauched man like myself, in preserving you for me like we were never apart. It didn’t hurt he made you blossom into the most buxom babe I’d ever laid eyes on,” he said with that charming smile he knows how to disarm me with.

  “Besides your aesthetic beauty, you were radiating with unsoiled loveliness. That’s why the endearment—bella—rolled off my tongue the minute I saw you. I wasn’t lying when I told you your innocence was alluring. But I never meant it intimately.”

  The tears were rolling down my face, mourning the boy in him we both lost.

  Domenico in prison was the only moment of incorruption we were ever going to have in this life.

  “You have to know, Gia, no one, not any fucking person in this world touches what’s mine. I’ve been madly in love with you all my life, never hiding my feelings. Matti knew, more than my father could ever know. That’s why he tried to explain his way out of it, but he had a choice. He could have come to me first.

  “I’m that fucked up of a man; killing my own brother was no skin off my nose to make an example out of him. All is fair in love and war, and by hurting you, war was declared. I don’t even know what I’m going to do about my father. People only live to make their mistake with me once, but not long enough to regret it,” he finishes and I couldn’t help shuddering from his blasé words.

  Gesu Cristo, how does he do that? How does he go from being a killer, to a tender husband, back to a cold and calculating executioner so seamlessly?

  I don’t know how to feel. I just know there has to be something innately wrong with me too, that I love him still.

  All I do is let the tears fall and speak for me because I was whirling with this revelation.

  I resented him all these years.

  A tiny part of me felt driven into Michael’s arms with his constant choice of the family organization, instead of me, his real family.

  But Gio never had a choice.

  He had the tendency, sure.

  And it was exploited by his father, and I was so sorry for him.

  He never had the chance to be a better man.

  Gio watches me cry for a long moment with affliction in his eyes and he says in a gravelly voice, “That’s your soul purging, isn’t it? That’s your heart showing me the pieces I’ve torn it in. And they keep scattering further apart the longer it takes me to mend you,” he poetically recognizes.

  “How do you love me being what you are?” I ask, sobbing now as he looks at me, because it feels as if he’s finally witnessing for the first time the toll this has all taken on me.

  “I’m sorry, bella. I’m sorry I’ve fucked up everything. But I haven’t for a second stopped cherishing you with my dark heart. It will always be you, Gianna. E il nostro destino, G & G sempre. We were created for each other and nothing will ever change it. No matter how bad things get, I wouldn’t make it without you, Gianna. I won’t even try to. I lost all sense of reason when I saw you hurt earlier,” he says as he looks to the side of my face that they punched.

  I was beginning to feel the tightness that was forming on my cheek. I also felt the swelling on my lips.

  Nothing was more prominent though, than the exhaustion I felt deep in my bones with the misery that is my life.

  “Giorgio,” I cry out, “how do we fix this? What do we do?”

  He crushes me to him in a punishing hug and in a gutted voice he says, “Bella, we just have to keep putting the pieces back together everyday, somehow.”

  The plan was to deny everything to everyone.

  No, I didn’t see anything.

  No, I didn’t get hurt by anyone.

  No, I don’t know anything.

  No. No. No.

  “I’d fucking kill him again, if I could, the betraying bastard,” he muttered to himself before I could fully hide the marks forming with makeup.

  Giorgio was struggling to keep his shit together. He couldn’t look at my bruised face without losing it.

  I think his brother’s death, at his own hands, will be the kill to finally crack him. Most of his executions, murders, crimes, whatever way you want to put it, weren’t personal, and this one was in every way.

  I slathered on layers of makeup to attempt hiding it from everyone, but most especially from Gio.

  He wasn’t handling any of this well, and as calm as Giorgio could be, his cage had finally been rattled.

  Charlie, our doorman, tried to check up on me. He warned us that when I’d been dragged out earlier, he had called the police too. Turns out, Charlie was the one to contact Gio when he realized his brother was rushing me out in the cold, pregnant with no coat or shoes.

  Everything wasn’t just a mess anymore.

  Everything was mayhem.

  Giorgio decided we needed to play it cool with Domenico. Since he wasn’t to be trusted, we needed to be proactive and reach out to him first—and right now.

  “Bella, I hate putting you through this. I wish we didn’t have to. All I want to do is run you a bath and hold you in my arms. But I need you to just keep to yourself at dinner. Don’t, no matter what my mother says, what my father does, don’t let your temper get in your way. Please. I’m begging you, Gianna, just let me do all the talking.”

  I was so ashamed.

  I may not have started the mess, but I sure as hell contributed to it. Blood was on my hands too for running my fucking mouth. Still, things should never have gone as far as they have on all accounts of the chaos.

  I hoped the pregnancy would blind everyone, even if it’s just for the moment we needed to get past this dinner and buy us time.

  I don’t know what Giorgio said to Charlie and I don’t know what he did to clean up... the trouble earlier today. I just know Gio called his parents and Nico, and supposedly Matti, to join us for dinner to celebrate wonderful news. We were going to act as if nothing happened and then become concerned that Matti hasn’t shown.

 
; I wanted to throw up.

  Just a few hours ago I tried to stop it. I watched him die. I watched my husband kill his brother, saw a life being taken away for the first time in my life, and I need to pretend enough concern for his no show.

  Lies. Lies. Lies.

  The pile of them only continues to grow.

  We were going to Pistacchio’s for dinner. Giorgio arranged for them to decorate the restaurant to add to the part of our happy news.

  I don’t know how he does it, but it makes sense he’s gotten as far as he has, being as cunning as he was.

  I wore a long black tunic with black capris and flats. I know I needed to “celebrate,” but my conscious kept pulling out every black piece of clothing I owned.

  I hid the pregnancy from the Morettis for seven months. I’m hiding the truth behind the pregnancy for the rest of my life. Now I’m hiding my brother-in-law’s whereabouts, too.

  Black.

  Black, black, black.

  It was now the color of my soul.

  Giorgio had to be delusional when he imagined all that radiating nonsense he continues to romance me with. His black soul claimed mine the day I was born because he recognized it since then that we were one of a kind.

  I tried to camouflage my mouth as best I could, but it was clear it had been busted.

  My cheekbone was swelling too. It hadn’t completely bruised yet, but it will by morning. That was easier to hide with tons of concealer and an absurd amount of blush, and my hair left down in a wild array of curls.

  I even had on a beret, as ridiculous as I looked, but I needed it to help keep my hair in my face.

  Giorgio assured me he told the restaurant to dim the lights and set up votive candles on every table. He was banking on the shadows to distract from my bruises.

  I don’t know how Gio was going to talk his way out of everything.

  When we arrived, I thought I was going to have a heart attack.

  I didn’t know how I was going to get through this.

  Chiara and Domenico were already sitting at a table. Nico was removing his wife’s coat with the hostess.

  We walked in and the goddamn shrew immediately jumped from her seat in shock, and without acknowledging me asked Giorgio if her prayers came true and she was finally going to be a nonna.