by Liska Jacobs
That square chin and aquiline nose—that dark untamed hair. He must have been a beautiful baby. I can picture it perfectly: baby Donato is fussy, with latching difficulties. Child Donato scrapes his knee riding a bicycle, bumps his head on the playground, makes a mess in the kitchen with the juice. I can imagine scolding him, or cleaning his bleeding knee, or kissing the hurt forehead. For a brief moment, I feel a pull in my womb, a ferocious sting in my nipples.
I take a drag on the joint and exhale just as Hannah comes out with the aperitifs.
“Aunt Cilla!” she cries. “I can’t believe Donato got you to smoke pot!”
Her amusement embarrasses me and I try to sit up taller, straighten my blouse and slacks. But twilight is finally waning, evening is almost here, and my eyes are having a hard time adjusting to the change in light.
“I’m hungry,” comes Donato’s voice, and then Hannah has switched places with him, wiggling in close.
“Sorry it took me so long, Papa called. I said we were seeing a movie.”
Her voice has given me a headache. I can feel the heat of her body through our clothes. It’s reminded me of just after Hannah was born, of those late-night phone calls where my sister cried and told me that she wished she had terminated the pregnancy. I don’t know why I wanted this. I didn’t know what to say. It’ll be all right. Women have babies all the time.
I ask Hannah to get me water but Donato volunteers.
“Silvia,” he calls out. “Come downstairs with me.”
I feel every cell bristle. Of course, they are together, and why should that matter to me anyway?
Hannah puts her head on my shoulder. “Do you think Silvia is very pretty?”
Tiny lights strung across the terrace turn on and I can see her watery eyes. Below I hear Donato’s laugh.
“She’s a lot older than him,” I say.
“Only by five years.”
Her body starts to shake, tears fall on my shoulder. “Hush,” I tell her. “Hush.” Instinctively I look around to see if any of their friends are watching.
“Come on.” I pull her up from the settee. “Call us a ride, and I’ll get your backpack. We can pick up a pizza on the way home.”
I wipe the smeared mascara from under her eyes and point her toward the stairs. I say goodbye to her friends, making up an excuse that Paul wants us home. He’s made dinner. I can tell Donato doesn’t believe this, but he doesn’t say so. When he kisses my cheek, I cannot help it, I press him against me. He feels broader than I thought he would, and that liquid fire at the center of me rejoices.
In the cab Hannah gives in. She is bawling.
“I miss Mom,” she chokes out. “I miss her so much.”
Letting her drink was probably a bad idea, but isn’t she old enough to know her limit? Or at least learn what it is? I knew not to drink a third Bellini at fifteen, or if Guy offered to make me a screwdriver, to drink it slowly because he always made them very strong. I stroke the spot between the shoulder blades that used to comfort Emily. More like her mother then. Sensitive. Delicate. Upset because our parents missed another recital; a boy she liked didn’t return her affection; a wave knocked her into the sand. “I know, sweetheart,” I say. “It’ll be okay.”
She sniffs. “Will you run your hands through my hair? Mom used to do it whenever I was upset.”
Her hair is finer than Emily’s, which had been coarse from flat-ironing and blow-drying.
Shhh, it’ll be all right. Our mom doing something like this when we were small. It only happened a handful of times. After a shower, or bath. We’d sit obediently in front of her, and even though there would be knots, we never squirmed, never complained. At that age we still wanted so badly to be near her that anything, no matter how painful, was worth it.
My eyes well up. I’m not used to smoking weed. The darkness outside the cab feels claustrophobic. Every pothole dangerous.
I remember a statue Paul showed me this afternoon at the university: the she-wolf of Rome. Romulus and Remus at her teats. I can picture it, the engorged breasts, the wolf’s nipples hanging low—the two small children, mouths opened, suspended in that moment before suckling.
She bares her teeth as she turns toward us in fear, Paul had said, describing the wolf’s expression.
Fear of what exactly? Which part of motherhood scared her most?
* * *
Emily and I are lying out on towels. She is so thin, I can make out every rib, the sternum, the knobby bulges of her shoulders. Her hair is golden and thick, though, which is how I know I’m dreaming. It was so brittle toward the end. I want to lie here even though I’m not sure if beside me Emily is alive or dead. When a coyote is hit on Pacific Coast Highway, the carcass will decay for weeks until all that’s left is bones and fur. I can wait, I’m willing to wait. The sun is warm, and maybe if we lie here long enough the tide will rise and the current will drag us out, maybe the sea will accept us back into it.
My phone vibrates and drops onto the floor, waking me. I’ve fallen asleep in my clothes. It’s not yet eleven. I have a voice mail from Guy. It’s startling to hear his voice, casual and familiar, telling me that Mom is doing well, the production too. He doesn’t ask me to call, but I don’t want to be alone, thinking of that hideous death.
How could I have known it would be quick? Paul had only called a few weeks earlier to say Emily was coming home from the hospital, that hospice had been arranged. I brought a tuna casserole, without peas, which was how Emily liked it when she was little. But she was already in a drug-induced sleep by then. Paul and the caregivers administering liquid morphine every two hours. So thin, I remember saying to Paul, who looked at me bewildered. She’s been thin for months, he said. They asked if I wanted to rub lotion into her hands, put a warm washcloth on her face. She knows you’re here, someone said. I did not want to see her die. I did not want to touch her body. Downstairs I microwaved the casserole and sat and ate it with Hannah while we watched cartoons.
Guy doesn’t answer the first time, so I call again. A third time.
“Pricilla, what time is it there?” I can hear car horns; a radio being turned down. I imagine he’s on a freeway stuck in traffic and I feel a twinge of homesickness.
“Not that late.” I open the bedroom window. Below, the courtyard is in shadow, the lemon tree sagging from the hot afternoon. “I wanted to know how the house is, you didn’t say in your message. Have you gone by?”
He starts to rattle off about watering the houseplants, the garden, collecting the mail—I let him talk, comforted by his voice.
I think of dancing for him, all those years ago. Slowly, slowly. That look on his face, maybe that’s when I learned to recognize lust. If not, then it was when he tucked that flower in my dress at my birthday party, his fingers cool against my breasts. How he licked his lips a little. His want, I learned. But what about my own? I wanted Guy, or maybe I needed him to want me. Another line blurred, but that’s how it is for women. Want, need—one and the same, expanding or contracting to fit the scene.
“Come on! Move it!” Guy curses. I hear him slap his steering wheel in frustration. “Sorry, babe, it rained last night and everyone in LA has lost their goddamn minds.”
Emily had been the only one home when we first had sex. I remember hearing her shouting from the deck. Cilla? Cilla? But I was down on the beach—Guy’s fingers pulling at my underwear, struggling with a condom. I barely had to do anything at all. Cilla, where are you? My sister’s voice, carried by the wind.
“I haven’t been feeling very well,” I blurt out.
“What’s wrong, flu? Those tourist sites are cesspools.”
His concern is real, but his tenderness only makes me sadder because it isn’t the kind that’s between two lovers. Our relationship changed sometime after Dad got sick, or maybe right before. I was so busy with medications and doctor appointments and physical therapy and grocery shopping and cooking that I missed when it happened. A gradual shift, like the changing of a tide
.
“I’ve been having hot flashes,” I tell him. “And headaches, and I’ve been so tired.”
He clears his throat. I think I can hear his engine shifting gears. “It’s probably about that time, isn’t it?”
Now I really want to cry. “I’m only forty-three.”
“Have you seen a doctor?” he asks. He must cover the phone, because I hear him talking but can’t make out the words.
“Is someone in the car with you?”
“No, I’m alone,” he says, but I know he’s lying. Trudy is probably sitting right beside him. I don’t know why I thought it would be otherwise.
A few months ago he asked me to dinner. He sent a PA to pick me up, something he hadn’t done in decades—and then at the film location there was Guy, yelling at the gaffers and grips. I felt sixteen again. The camera crew patiently waiting for him to be satisfied; soon he’d hand the production over to the assistant director and we’d speed off in his convertible. I felt that old reverence for him, a deep, complicated love. When we did leave the set, he took the bends in the canyon at full speed as if we were both young. I remember him putting his arm around me because I had been cold, and how it felt to be snuggled up to him once more, how when his lips brushed my hair I became giddy.
And then, there was Trudy waiting for us at the valet.
You didn’t tell me she was meeting us.
He smiled slyly. Would you have come? He looked so much like a naughty, misbehaving child that I wanted to slap him.
Over dinner I realized he didn’t merely want me to like her, he wanted my approval. How could I give him that? I watched her look around the room while Guy talked, smiling at the bartender, arranging herself so the tables nearby had more to look at. Or when she sulked because she ordered the wrong drink. I always get manhattans and cosmos confused! Even her voice was childish and insincere. I wanted to spit in her drink and scream at Guy, Why am I not enough?
“It’s an inferno here,” Guy says, changing the subject. “We’ve had a hell of a time keeping the studio air-conditioned. And one of the trailers broke. I’m not using Quixote next time, remind me of that. I think it’ll push us over budget. We need another investor.”
“Don’t you have a secretary to tell this to? Or an executive producer?”
“Not as good as you.” I can tell he’s smiling. “I’ve got another call coming in, but can I send you some figures later? I need a second pair of eyes.”
I tell him yes, of course.
That’s my girl.
I hang up. I can feel the weight of his presence, as if he were in the room. I should shower, go to bed, but I don’t feel tired. I find where I’ve hidden Donato’s cigarettes and light one. The night air is warm, the city calm. A pair of spotlights search the sky. I picture Trudy and Guy, driving together, his arm around her. How cruel it is, to get old. To be able to survey a life and see how it’s played out.
Across the courtyard, I hear a window slide open. I freeze, cigarette in midair. A light switches on, and there is Donato, in just a towel. It is shocking to see him, like a flashlight shined directly into my pupils. I can feel them dilate, I can feel my whole body swell and open.
He sees me and tilts his head, running his hands through his hair. He smiles that knowing, teasing smile. I can see his biceps flexing, the muscles in his chest and stomach—the faint ones on his sides that come down to a point where his towel is tied.
Something is happening, I don’t think I could stop it even if I wanted to. I’ve slipped my blouse off, unclasping the hooks of my bra. I watch Donato lean forward, he isn’t smiling anymore. He has that look, the one I haven’t seen on a man in a long time. I suck on the end of that cigarette and blow out toward him, imagining the smoke will travel the length between us. Then I shut the window and close the curtain.
My whole body is shaking. I start to laugh but then remember everyone is sleeping. I have to cover my face with a pillow.
* * *
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Paul has stopped walking to point out another crumbling ruin. This one, he tells Hannah and me, used to be a basilica. Workers are erecting a stage in the remaining façade, electrical equipment already hangs from its arches. Paul calls to them in Italian and they stop to chat.
I lean against a wall, under the shade of bougainvillea, and fan myself with a brochure he got for me at an information center. He roused us early this morning. Cilla needs to walk in the footsteps of the Romans, he argued. Hannah refused to go until Paul promised to drop us off afterward at the day spa. We’ll have earned it, Hannah said under her breath. I assumed she meant because Paul can be long-winded and didactic, not that we’d be navigating a lopsided, shadeless road for miles.
Hannah plunks down beside me. “It is so hot.”
“They’re setting up for a concert,” Paul says to us. “We should come back tonight.”
My niece looks incredulous. “But it’s Saturday! Donato and I wanted to take Cilla to Club Fluid.”
Paul tries to hide a frown. My poor brother-in-law has been trying to keep us entertained with stories of aqueducts and emperors, wealthy patricians and martyrs. But Hannah is fifteen, and all I can think of is that look on Donato’s face. How when he leaned forward, his hands gripped the windowsill. My stomach does a little flip every time and I want to cackle.
We take a break at a roadside café that has a view of the surrounding fields. A brisk dry wind picks up, pulling at the few ragged pines. Twice it knocks over our umbrella, and the owner comes out to ask if we want to move inside.
“Cities of death,” Paul says, stirring sugar into his caffè. “That’s what Romans called the catacombs. The Christians called it a coemeterium, a place of rest.”
Hannah rolls her eyes, pushing her spoon around in her melting gelato.
“Horror ubique animos simul ipsa silentia terrent,” Paul recites.
“What does that mean?” I’ve ordered a sparkling water, which is flat but ice cold.
The wind outside blows a pair of bikes over. The owner goes out to pick them up, the waitress helping him.
“It’s from the Aeneid. A student in the fourth century quoted it when he saw the catacombs for the first time. Everywhere horror seizes the soul, and the very silence is dreadful.”
“Ugh! Papa, you are so morbid,” Hannah cries, dropping her spoon onto the table.
Paul looks hurt. “Maybe I’m not explaining it right.”
When we reach the catacombs Hannah and I slip out of our sandals to cool our feet in a fountain. She laughs when I splash her. But as our tour group readies for the descent, she becomes withdrawn. I notice she’s biting her nails. Is something the matter? But she shrugs me off.
A cold air emits from the mouth of the entrance. I hear a child from another family start to cry. “Shh, shh,” the mother says. The light getting darker and darker, the temperature dropping.
“You do not want to be last,” the guide jokes when we’ve reached the first underground level. “Two days it will take for me to find you.”
Laughter echoes in the long black corridors. There are carved-out holes in the walls where bodies once rested.
“The bones,” Paul whispers to me, “have been moved. They’re two levels below us now. More than half a million of them.”
It’s dimly lit but I can make out Hannah on the other end of the room, her arms wrapped around herself.
“Paul, do you think this is a little much for Hannah?”
The tour group has stopped to admire a relief of the Virgin Mary, the blue of her dress still vibrant.
“Emily talked to her about death,” Paul says. “To try to prepare her.”
“She was barely twelve.” I’m surprised by how upset I sound.
“No, I mean before her diagnosis.”
It takes me a moment to realize what incident he’s referring to, but then I can hear my sister and me screaming at each other in the nursing home parking lot.
We’ve read books on dying, Emily shout
ed. She understands what’s happening.
She’s four, I yelled back. Dad is dying in there—he’s barely conscious. This is not a fucking teachable moment.
I refused to let them go in. Hannah started to cry—frightened, I’m sure, by our screaming, how red and sweaty my face had become. And I used those tears to get Mom on my side. See? I cried. She shouldn’t be here, she’s too young. I knew as Emily sped off that she would not return. In her mind, I had prevented her from saying goodbye to her father. Which, in a way, I had.
I fight an urge to describe to Paul how labored my dad’s breathing had been at the end. It haunts me still, I want to tell him.
“Hannah didn’t need to see her grandfather like that,” I say instead. “It would have scarred her for life.”
“I’m sure you’re right.”
The tour group moves on to the next crypt. This one has a statue of a woman lying on her side, head turned toward the floor. Fake oil lamps flicker on either side of it.
“St. Cecilia,” the guide says. “This is how the body was found when it was exhumed. They tried three times with the axe.” He makes slashing motions to his neck. “But they could not cut through.”
There is a flurry of photography.
“They left her here like that?” I ask.
“Sì,” the tour guide says. “To die alone.”
I can see Dad, the version of him in death. It happened a few days after Emily and Hannah’s failed visit. His mouth slack on one side, his cheeks gaunt. I went with Mom to pick out the coffin. Polished mahogany finish, plush cream interior. I read over the contract for her, made sure the mortuary had my cell number. I ordered catering and sent out e-mails and fielded phone calls. When Emily texted, I replied that I had it under control. Of course you do, she messaged back. How complicated our relationship had become—to start out like two tiny vines and end up a rat’s nest of branches and thorns. We barely spoke during the service.
“Thank God,” Hannah says, climbing the stairs out of the catacombs two at a time. “I thought that tour would never end.”