by CD Reiss
It’s both very late and very early when I slip out of bed.
I swim, shower, dress, and leave without waking the woman in my bed.
10
VIOLETTA
Last night, I let Santino’s intensity run my reactions. I let him break me down over my sister and my father when what I should have done was demand he guarantee he’d remove his blessing from the arranged marriage.
At dinner, Gia had sat next to Damiano and giggled like a little girl. She’d played with her hair and batted her lashes. She wants to be American, but it’s not about handbags and shopping and saluting the red, white, and blue. She was never cursed with the freedoms of America. The high-stakes choices. The hard-won victories.
But the freedom to try is close enough to touch, and I can do at least that.
After Santino confirms he’s stopped Gia from being sold for her father’s debts, I have to work on ending every ‘mbasciata before it happens.
I wipe the dried spit off the photo of Santino, Damiano, and my father and place it on the mantel with others. A woman with her gaze fixed in the middle distance, holding a bundle of joy that may be my husband. Santino young, holding baby Gia. Him with Paola and Marco. I place them in a kind of order—like a family tree. I will learn it. Memorize it. Internalize his relationships as if they are a new inheritance.
Celia and I cook dinner and talk about the garden she’s put in the back. The grocery shopping. The expected arrival of the man of the house.
The water works itself back up to a rolling boil, and the bloated white gnocchi pop to the turbulent surface like bodies scarred with little slits. Their names are known to me. My mother, my father, Rosetta.
Santino appears as if called by them, coming behind me to plant a kiss on my cheek. “The sauce smells good.”
“It’s Celia’s.” I don’t turn to him. I just watch the scarred blobs roll in the heat.
“The gnocchi are hers,” Celia says. “Hundred percent. And perfect.”
“Bene,” he says and starts to leave.
I’ll see him at dinner. I can say something then. But I am impatient. I need to be soothed immediately.
“You freed Gia, right?” The words exit my mouth before I think about them, cut through the air and stop him in his tracks. “From the marriage?”
“You can go,” he says to the space in front of him, but we know he’s talking to Celia.
She swipes the countertop with her palm to pick up nonexistent crumbs and says good-bye. Thirty seconds later, Santino and I are alone, staring at each other over the kitchen island with the water boiling between us.
I scoop the softened balls out of the pot and lay them on a paper-towel-covered plate.
“She doesn’t need to be ‘freed,’ as you call it,” he says finally.
“Why? Her father stopped it? Or Damiano walked? Or did you unbless it or whatever?”
He turns toward me and rests his hands far apart on the island’s counter. “There are things you don’t understand.”
My arms lose their strength, and I drop the spoon. My face is too weak to stay on my skull. I’m going to turn into an empty, gelatinous mound if he means what I think he means.
“Tell me something,” I whisper. “Anything.”
“I can’t accuse him of wanting to steal from me.”
“But I heard him.”
“You did. But the wedding has to happen anyway.”
Quickly now, I scoop the gnocchi from the water, trying to jump-start my brain with repetitive action.
“Gia isn’t built for this,” I say.
“They said the same about you.”
My body runs cold. “Who said?”
“Don’t you know?” He cocks his head to the side.
I think back to Zio sobbing at Santino’s feet. Either pleading for my freedom or weeping in gratitude. It doesn’t matter. The couple who raised me to have a normal life because my sister was the one who was sold thought I couldn’t handle it. Too young and independent. Not built for this.
“You should have listened.” When I dump another load of gnocchi into the water, I’m careless because I’m angry, and it splashes. “I was almost kidnapped and murdered the first fucking week you had me.”
“She’ll learn.” He takes my face in his palms. “You learned.”
“Because you’re only half an asshole.”
“Thank you?”
“This is not funny.”
“Inside that steel chest, you have a soft heart.”
“It’s wrong, Santino. Marriage is supposed to be a sacrament, not a ‘get out of debt free’ card.”
“Isn’t our marriage a sacrament pledged before God?”
He cannot think that anything about our marriage is valid before God, the law, or any kind of moral authority, and yet, he and everyone else I can swing a stick at thinks so.
“No, Santino. Actually it’s not.” I pull his hands off me, set out the plates, and fill them with pasta and sauce as if each gesture is a fine fuck you. “You were married. You had a ceremony. But I wasn’t there for it. It’s was a transaction on our wedding day, and it’s a transaction now. You made a vow to my dead father. I’m just the one who got fucked.”
“Be that as it may, it’s the way these things go. Gia knows this.”
“She’s a kid.” I slide his plate over to him. I’m in no mood for the dining room. “We already lost Rosetta to this tradition, and you killed her.” Everything builds to a crystal-clear point in my head. “It wasn’t pneumonia. It was you.”
Man, that feels good when I say it, but it doesn’t feel good having been said. I think I’ve been fair until the cruelest of words can’t be unspoken.
I’m not going to apologize. I’m high on righteous anger, and if he comes at me, I’ll need the adrenaline.
But he doesn’t come at me.
“I was going to eat first.” He rubs a spot of sauce from the edge of his bowl and kisses it off. When his lips pucker over his thumb, I can’t decide which I want between my legs more, his hand or his mouth. “But you’re going to give yourself agita. Vai.” He indicates I should follow and walks out of the room without looking back.
My judgment is totally damaged, because I trail him through the house and down the basement stairs. In my bored hours, I explored down here, checking the locks on the doors and the boxes on the shelves. Santino opens a door with a code and opens it to a room with walls of gray sheetrock. The nails have been smoothed over with joint compound and the seams have been taped, but the rows and rows of shelves shoved full with boxes went in before a painter could even start.
Santino brings down a shoebox to a white plastic table and flips open the top, reaches in, and pulls out a gun. He lays it on the table without a second thought.
I pick it up and inspect it. It’s the kind with a carousel of bullets, like you see in westerns.
“Whoa!” He snatches it away and puts it back where it was, still within my reach. “This is loaded.”
“Sorry, but… if you don’t want me to get it, don’t leave it in a random box.”
“Take it. Just don’t point it at me.” He flips through the box. It seems to be full of documents and photos. On paper. He’s too old school for a digital camera.
I pick up the gun. “It’s heavy.”
“My grandfather shot at a few fascists with it.” He takes out a folder and drops it on the table. “Supposedly.”
Opening the folder reveals more pictures, and when I see them, I lay the gun down, disinterested.
Rosetta was seventeen the last time I saw her, and that is the Rosetta I see in the 4x6 glossy rectangle, sitting on our Zs’ stoop in wide-leg jeans and a tank top. No makeup. Hair coming out of her ponytail as if every strand was intentionally set free.
The chronology in the box must be random, because the next picture is my father, Rosetta, and me outside the market that I thought was his primary place of business. He’s in a suit no grocer would wear to the shop. She’s on the cusp of puberty, and
I’m as tall as her elbow.
“Why am I frowning?” I say.
“Your father denied you a second lollipop.”
“Man. I am not happy.”
“Violetta is buona come il pane, he used to say.” He chuckles, describing my father’s belief that I’m as good as bread, which is pretty solid as Italian compliments go. Then he twists it around, “But the attitude on her is brutta come la fame.”
“Ugly as hunger?”
He shows me another picture of myself at about four with my arms crossed and a sour puss from here to next week. Yeah. Daddy was right.
“Where did you get these?”
“Your father gave them to me in his will. He thought I’d give them to Rosetta, but…” He shrugs and lets the rest of the sentence say itself. “I was a kid too. The first time the Tabonas tried to kill him, they threw him into a water tower with cinderblocks around his waist.”
As he speaks, he takes out pictures one by one, and I’m blindsided by my first few years of life. The people in the square at the center of the apartment complex, the little stores, the tight streets, are all completely different than I expect and yet, exactly as I remember.
“I fished him out. Cut him loose but…” He shakes his head. “The water was dirty and he had an infection in his lungs. Said where Franco Tabona failed, bacteria could succeed. But that’s why he trusted me with his daughters.”
“Didn’t know you so well, did he?” I say slyly.
“I was almost eighteen. Plenty of time to disappoint him, but I did promise, and I kept that promise. I made sure you both were sent to America, and I came here, established my business, then introduced myself.”
“And you fell in love with her.”
“She was beautiful, and I loved her.”
How can I be angry at him? How can I hold this grudge so tightly when his remorse is loosening my grip? We both loved the same woman. I shouldn’t hate him for that, but I do.
“But no,” he continues. “I never loved her the way you think.”
Instead of triumph, I’m enraged. How dare he not love her?
“We said we were going to the other side to get things for the wedding.” He flips through the box, tossing random photos on the table, but he’s looking for something in particular. “That was the story we told, but it wasn’t entirely true.”
“You were going to marry her there because she was too young to marry here.” I pick up a Polaroid of Rosetta leaning over a white cake and blowing out two candles in the shape of a 1 and a 3.
“When I took her to Italy, she was seventeen. I was already too old for her, but it was what it was, and then…” He finds what he’s been looking for and puts it on the table, tapping the corner. “This.”
I gasp. It’s an ultrasound, which is enough to be shocked over. But there’s so much more to it.
“Not normal,” I say. “This is ectopic.”
“Fine, yes,” he says with anger that’s not directed at me. “An ectopic pregnancy. We leave here with a blood test to get married on the other side, because her child will not be a bastard. And the doctor in a casa del diavlo?” He sneers when he says the house of the devil—it means the boondocks—as if he had the chance to set fire to it, but didn’t. “That doctor missed what a nursing student can see right in front of her.”
“Oh, God.”
“I was in the city for a few days taking care of some business,” he explains more calmly, because now it’s on him. “She said she was fine, so I went, and when I came back, it was over.”
I put the sonogram down next to a photo of them in the strange place made of old stones. It’s not exactly the same piazza where Santino fed me orange wedges, but it could be any of the hundreds more in Napoli. There, he looks a hundred years younger and a hell of a lot happier, in a sport jacket and shirt open at the collar, squinting in the sun with his arm around Rosetta. Her left hand rests on his, and that diamond—my diamond—flashes in the Mediterranean light.
“It wasn’t pneumonia,” I say.
“It was not.”
“Did she know she was given to you as a reward?”
“No. She didn’t have to.” He gathers up the photos except for the ultrasound photo, clicking the sides against the tabletop like a deck of cards, then drops them all in the folder. “That baby? It wasn’t mine. I never touched her. How could I? She was a sweet girl. A nice girl, but never… never.” He cuts the air with his hand. “We became friends, but not more. I swear it.”
“So.” I hold up the sonogram. “Whose is this?”
“A boy at St. Anselm’s.” He snaps it away from me and puts it on top, closes the folder, and puts it in the box as if he’s too angry to talk without keeping himself occupied. “In the locker room.” He grabs the gun around the outside, away from the trigger. “He took her against her will.” He waves the handle of the pistol at me then drops it in the box. “Then asked me”—he snaps the box closed—“and her uncle for her hand, since she was ruined. The oldest trick to get a wife who doesn’t want you.”
I have to physically clamp my mouth closed to keep the nasty rejoinders from leaving them. He’s too emotional over this to look in the mirror and compare himself to the boy who hurt my sister, and I’m too vulnerable right now to fight with the story half-finished.
“I was insulted by his stupidity. And his parents.” He slaps the box back on the shelf, still angry after all these years. “Wringing their hands that their son had to marry a whore. He was trapped, they said. But I saw them… inside their hearts… they knew their stronzo son would never do any better. Rosetta wouldn’t stop crying. Even after I promised her she’d never marry this animal, she wept because who would have her? Who?”
I’m frozen in shock and sorrow, nearly crying as he asks who would have my beautiful sister.
“I said ‘me.’ I would have her. And not because her father had already given her to me. I never had to tell her that.” He rubs his eyes, shielding himself from the sight of me. “I would have taken care of her and her baby and never touched her. I swear it.”
“But she died.”
When he takes his fingers away, his eyes are rubbed red. There’s a weight on him I’ve never seen before. It’s regret, but also deeply-buried grief, pushing up through years of false control. For a moment, I’m not the only person who lost Rosetta. He lost her too.
I’m not alone. I’m truly with him, and I can’t help but put my hand over his, because we’re together in this. The same pain. The same loss.
“To this day, I don’t know if the doctor didn’t see what you could, or if someone threatened him. Or paid him to not know. I still don’t know if she could have been treated. But it was a mistake and I am sorry for it.”
My questions can wait. Unable to stand another second of vulnerability, I rush to him, arms open to hold him as he shakes.
11
VIOLETTA
It’s one thing to know he didn’t choose Rosetta first, didn’t take her to bed, didn’t love her more.
It’s another thing to know how much he did love her, did protect her, did choose her.
Now instead of loving him in spite of my better judgment and hating myself for it, I love him and I have to say, my judgment is doing pretty great.
I feel complete and finished. Adult. Polished to a flashing shine. It’s all going to be all right. I let myself relax, thinking the conversation in the basement changed my husband’s mind about Damiano’s offer for Gia and he’ll remove his approval of the wedding.
I live in a dream where my husband’s land is peaceful and all is right with the world. We eat. We swim. He fucks me with fierce tenderness and sweet violence. I cook with Celia, and when she’s not in the kitchen, she creates the garden and cares for the dirt beds, choosing seedlings of cucumbers, peppers, and of course, tomatoes.
I call Gia every day. We talk nonsense five times. I keep my ears open for word of a big dinner or event, but she says nothing. I slide into complacency.
One morning, in reaching for a new toothbrush, I knock over a box of sanitary napkins. As I slide them all back, I wonder how long it’s been since I used one, and in the rush to the calendar, I know damn well already how the numbers are going to add up.
My periods have always been inconsistent, which is why I didn’t think to count the days since my last until it was late in the game. Stress, poor diet, the flu—I’ve missed a cycle for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes I’ve missed it for no reason at all, but it never mattered before. It added up to a bunch of saved pads and reduced aggravation.
Now, it’s different. Though it could be my body reacting to travel through international time zones, for the first time, I could actually be pregnant.
It’s too soon to go to the doctor for a test, and I have another couple of days before I can even consider myself so late that I’m an idiot not to get a drugstore test.
Santino’s in his office. Through the closed doors, I hear him talking to his guys.
I won’t interrupt.
Before I can walk away, I hear Damiano’s name in the muddle of lilting Italian murmuring, and I’m slapped out of my complacency. I lean into the door to make sense of the conversation. What I piece together is that Damiano’s made reservations at a restaurant. Two tables.
Could be nothing, but it’s something. It’s the end of Gia. Short of breath, blind with shock, I run to my room and lock myself behind the bathroom door.
Before I freak out, I have to know the facts, and that means maintaining Santino’s complacency. My late period will distract him. If he thinks he might be a father, there’s no telling how he’ll react. He could get even more protective. Good chance he’ll hide any news that might upset me, and he knows Gia getting sold off would put me right over the edge.
After my shower, I’m so sure my period could come any minute, I stick a pad onto my underpants as a preventative measure.
Santino’s already at the table when I come downstairs. He glances over the top of his paper and returns right back to it. “Good morning, Violetta.”