by Liska Jacobs
I want you to take his iPhone, Marie had told her when she came over for dinner last night. I’m hopeless with these things; see if you can download his music.
That must be what she’s listening to now. It’s club music, of course. The bass more prominent than the rest of it. It vibrates the walls softly, rattling the roof tiles.
I’m worried about Tonio, Paul had said to me when Marie arrived alone. I wanted to remind him that death restructures things. He should know that more than anyone. Marie, who cried and wailed, who could not get out of bed—now wants to drink and talk about her son, she wants to look at his photos and hear us say how beautiful he was. But Tonio, who almost came to blows with one of the police who implied that maybe Donato had been high, and then fought with Matteo’s dad when he got between them—cannot look any of us in the eye.
Paul must be awake now. I hear his voice, and then the music is turned low.
How can a mother describe her love for her son? Marie had said, as we stood on the balcony, sipping the grappa she brought on ice.
When he was born it was like having the points of the Earth change. It is different from a daughter. I was someone’s daughter—but a boy, to give birth to a son, the opposite of yourself—that is a tiny miracle.
I imagine she’s right. When I called my mom to tell her what happened, she was distant and upset with me. No matter the tragedy, she was going to hold a grudge. You should have been here taking care of me, she complained. She listed weeks’ worth of ailments and concerns—and at the end of the phone call I had to promise I’d come home the day after the funeral. Forward me your flight information so I know when to expect you.
I rub out the cigarette, tossing the butt into the courtyard below, where the lemon tree is now lemonless. Someone had picked it clean while we were in Puglia. I picture him perfectly—in that moment before he fell, when he was balancing on the cliff—glancing at me, bright-eyed and confident, a smile on his lips, shoulders browning under the sun. Giving me a look that said, You are wrong, Cilla, I am a man.
Another thing I’d forgotten: grief can ambush you.
The music coming from my niece’s room switches off. I can hear her hiccup-like crying.
I held her while the police questioned us, and made sure she had something hot to drink afterward. I let her wear my pajamas and sleep in my bed with me. She has cried on my lap, my shoulder, and into my neck. If I could ease her pain somehow, maybe it might lessen my guilt.
Yesterday, we spent the afternoon dress shopping for the funeral. I was patient, and obliging, but nothing pleased her. Everything was either too short or too long. She hated patterned dresses, disliked solid colors, would not hear of pants and a blouse or maybe a skirt.
Don’t you get it? she bemoaned. It has to be just right.
How could I explain that I probably understand her grief better than she does? She eventually gave up and followed me around the women’s section of the department store. But it’s got long sleeves, she said when I came out of the fitting room in a tea-length dress. Won’t you get hot?
They’re three-quarter length, I corrected her, and bought it because I wanted something that would cover every part of me.
I climb in through the window and go downstairs to her room. I hesitate outside her door. Her sobbing sounds almost painful. She is probably surrounded by his things—crying into them. Suddenly the smell of him returns. The feeling of his skin after he got out of the sea, the taste of him in my mouth. I owe her comfort, I know this. But going in there must require something I don’t have, because I can’t make myself do it.
* * *
“Ready to go?” Paul says from the living room. He’s dressed in a somber gray suit, sitting on the couch where I first saw Donato. A bouquet of peonies rests beside him.
“Almost,” I say, fixing studs into my ears. “Hannah’s not down yet?”
“She already left for the church,” he says, running a hand over his graying stubble. “She wanted to go with Marie and Tonio.”
I struggle to hide my relief. “Did she find something to wear? She was agonizing over it yesterday.”
“I don’t know.” He sighs. “She was gone when I woke up, and she wouldn’t answer any of my texts. I had to call Marie. Remember how angry she was at Emily’s funeral? Christ, it’s all too familiar.”
“What if we walked?” I need to be moving. I need to feel the muscles in my legs work, hear the heaviness of my step—the simple action of moving one thing from here to there.
Paul looks at his watch. “If we walk quickly. The church is north from here.”
It’s good to be outside, beneath a cloudy sky. The temperature has dropped, the air more humid than hot. A scooter speeds by, honking as we run across the street. Dried sycamore leaves crunch underfoot.
When we reach the piazza it’s packed with people picking through vegetable and fruit stalls. A vendor presents us a fish fillet as we pass by. I stop to watch a street performer play his violin. He’s dressed in a tuxedo as if going to a fancy-dress party. Paul takes my arm, pulling gently.
By the time we reach the Tiber, I’ve sweated through my dress.
“Are you sure you don’t want to take a cab?” Paul asks, and I tell him again, no, no, I’m fine. I catch him glance at his watch. When we cross the Ponte Sisto, I stop to look down at the river. How wide and flat green it is, how timeless it looks. On the other side, a group of teens have taken over the steps surrounding a fountain, laughing and smoking and drinking out of paper bags. It’s all hills then, and we hike the cobblestone street in silence except for our panting and the rumble of trucks and cars as they pass us by.
“Let’s rest for a moment,” I say when we reach the top. “I need to catch my breath.”
Paul has removed his jacket, both his cheeks are pink, his forehead glistens. The peonies he’s been holding on to look just as sad. “Fine by me,” he says, and plops onto a bench. Behind us, Rome stretches out. Pigeons swoop and glide over the duomos near the Capitoline Hill.
“It’s nice to be in Rome again,” I tell him.
“I keep forgetting you’re leaving tomorrow,” Paul says, unbuttoning the top button of his shirt. “Hannah is going to miss you.”
“I wish I didn’t have to go.” I look at the nearby apartment building where two children are playing on its stoop. I picture our Malibu house, with its wooden façade, worn from the salty air—the crown molding in each room, the chipped blue-and-white tiles in the kitchen.
Try to hold on to something, I tell myself. The pines rustling in the damp wind, the dog barking in the distance, a man leading a pack of ponies to a nearby park—but it’s passing too quickly, and without anything to make it stick. I can almost smell the airport, the jet engines and industrial air-conditioning and food courts. I think I can hear the seat belt click.
“Well, you can always come back,” Paul is saying.
“You’re staying, then? Hannah mentioned your book with Tonio is on hold, indefinitely.”
He shifts his weight on the bench, looks down at his folded hands. “I hope, in time, he’ll reconsider. I suppose I could go to London.”
“Or California,” I offer.
I realize he’s trying not to cry. His face is pinched and red. “Did I ever tell you what Hannah said to me after Emily’s funeral?”
I can feel the parts of my dress that have partially dried, cold and damp. The two children on the stoop are trying to tempt an alley cat with a piece of cheese. Micia, micia, I hear them coo.
“She looked up the stages of decomposition, and she recited them to me. Graphically. She knew about the bacteria and the insects that break the body down.” He shakes his head, tears on his cheeks. “How eventually it just collapses, decaying until bones are all that is left.”
“Hannah needed closure, she was looking for answers.”
“How do you explain death to your child?”
The natural progression of things, the nurse at the rehab center had said. As if it might comfort.
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“The ancient Romans believed,” Paul says, wiping his eyes with his jacket sleeve, “that if you didn’t conduct a proper ceremony and burial, you could be haunted by the deceased. Did we do right by Emily? Did I do right by her? Sometimes I don’t think so. Her diagnosis hit me like a thick fog, and I don’t think I ever came out of it.”
I cover his hand with mine. I want to tell him that I worry about the same thing, but I can’t form the right words.
He breathes heavily. “I thought that if I got a hold over it, really studied death, maybe I’d understand grief. But all I know for sure is that you can’t hold on to anything. You leave it all behind.”
A woman comes out from the apartment and shoos the cat away, taking the children inside.
Paul pushes himself up from the bench. “We’ll be late if we don’t hurry.”
I follow behind, trying not to think of Emily’s funeral—how Hannah wore a black dress from Bloomingdale’s, her eyeliner thick and dark, a smudge of maroon lipstick—she could have passed for twenty-one instead of almost fourteen. Not a single tear during the service, but then—after everyone had gone home and I was cleaning up plates and tissues and corking wine bottles—I found her looking at baby pictures of Emily. Mascara and eyeliner melting down her sweet little face. I remember I took her down to the beach to try to soothe her. What had I said as we walked in the surf? Those same platitudes, the natural progression of things. And I promised to write more. That I would call, that I’d be a part of her life.
By Roman standards, the church is unassuming, but it’s grander and older than anything I’ve seen in Los Angeles. I can smell the incense as we climb the steps, pale colored light falling over the pews from stained-glass windows. “Donato was baptized here,” Paul is telling me, but I’m looking for Hannah. I want to feel her in my arms, smell that thick earthy scent of her hair. Tell her I’m truly sorry.
There is Silvia. I recognize her black hair and green eyes. And beside her, Cristiano, looking choked up, and the two British sisters—but no Hannah.
“Cilla,” Marie cries, throwing her arms around me. “You are trembling, amore.”
Tonio puts his hand on my shoulder, heavy like a weight. “Thank you for coming,” he says.
“I understand,” Marie is saying. I understand. She looks older. There are lines in her forehead, around her mouth. Her eyes are so much like Donato’s.
“Like a son,” she squeezes my hands. “He was like a son to you.”
Several rows away I see Agostina, with Matteo and his dad, and a woman who must be Agostina’s daughter. They are talking in hushed, serious tones.
Marie crushes me against her, kissing both my cheeks.
There are other people waiting to offer their condolences, and Paul is steering me away.
“Hannah has saved us seats.”
I spot her then, blond and lean and commanding a room even in death. My sister’s ghost. She’s talking with Marie’s girlfriend whose son was best friends with Donato. He’s with them too, head down, biting his nails.
“Gabriel,” I hear my niece say when we reach them. “You remember my aunt.”
I’m ready to shake his hand, to provide a comforting hug if it means I can hurry up and hold my niece, give her the comfort and guidance I should have offered since arriving—but then he flashes a sly grin, eyebrow raised. For a moment I’m sure that Donato has told him everything, but then that look is gone, and he’s passive, maybe a bit melancholy, talking to his mother with his finger back in his mouth.
* * *
I drink the first two gin spritzers quickly. At some point there is a third. The pulsing lights in Club Fluid make the mourners turned partygoers look sped up and slowed down simultaneously. Watching them is nauseating me, I have to look away.
I was ill prepared for the funeral. Never mind that in the last decade I have lost both my father and sister—or that just this year I went to a funeral. One of Mom’s old actress friends had died in her sleep. Or a few months ago, Guy called because his dog had escaped and been killed by a truck on Pacific Coast Highway. None of this mattered. When I sat beside Hannah and realized that there, behind the priest, was Donato’s body, I began to shake. The same dark curls and plump lips, the same broad shoulders and wide masculine hands, so large for a boy his age. There he is, I told myself, but could not keep from feeling that gap, the indescribable space that a person once occupied. Like a black hole, invisible and impossibly infinite.
The music in the club escalates, the dancers jumping along with it. The DJ is shouting in Italian. I catch Donato and danza—dance, dance, the DJ cries. The crowd is in a furor. Sylvia and Cristiano have closed the club especially for this party. I can see Hannah and her friends, they must know the song. They shout along with it. But where is Donato’s best friend, Gabriel?
I thought I felt his small eyes watching me the entire service, and afterward, when we followed the hearse to the cemetery, there he was again. Standing beneath the vault where Donato’s casket would rest, watching as Paul and I laid the bouquet of peonies at its base.
You and Donato were close? I tried as we walked to our cars, but he only nodded, pursing his lips a little as he looked me over. And then my niece and Paul appeared, and I had to focus on them.
A pretty girl in a short black dress approaches where I’m sitting with Paul and several of his colleagues from the university. She offers us another cocktail.
“Not for me, grazie,” Paul says, his colleagues refuse as well. But I need to stay until I can get Gabriel alone.
“I’ll have a gin spritzer,” I tell the girl.
Paul looks at me surprised. “Don’t you have a flight in a few hours?”
“I’ve already packed, and I don’t have to be at the airport until nine.” I get up, so he and the others can slide out of the booth. “Besides, one of us should stay with Hannah.”
He looks for her on the dance floor. The music has changed, more fluid and deep; the blue lights ripple over the dancers like water.
“At least she’s smiling,” he says, pointing.
We watch Hannah for a moment, twisting her hips, hands above her head, eyes closed. Not a smear of dark eyeliner, not a smudge of red lipstick is out of place.
She had been stoic during the service. I want to be with my friends, she told me when I asked if anything was wrong. The only time she took my hand was after the coffin was fitted into its slot in the cemetery vault, and a worker began to brick up the space. She nearly crushed my fingers.
“I’ll make sure she gets home at a decent hour,” I tell Paul, but he shakes his head.
“I said she can spend the night with her friends. They should be together right now. It’s part of the grieving process.”
The pretty girl in the short dress has returned with my cocktail and I gulp it down because everything is happening too soon. The funeral is over, the party is coming to an end. There is Matteo’s dad, helping Agostina with her jacket. She waves to Paul and me, Matteo’s dad nods. He had stopped to talk to Paul as we filed out of the church. Mi dispiace, he said to me, touching my hand lightly. I watch them disappear toward the exit. I’ve lost track of Marie and Tonio. It must be past midnight; they’ve probably gone home.
“Good night,” Paul is saying, hugging me. “I’m going with you to the airport, so this isn’t goodbye.”
“That’s not necessary,” I say against him.
“It’s the least I can do,” he says, still embracing me. He says other things. About how sorry he is that my trip ended this way, how nice it was to see me, and how he hopes the situation with my mom improves.
I swallow; a good man. At least my sister had a good man.
“Mom has to like one of the nursing homes I picked out, right?”
He nods. The first visit is scheduled for next Monday. A date that is fast approaching—it will come and then march right on through me.
“You’re a good daughter,” he says, and when he lets go I stumble.
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�Maybe go easy on the gin, though.” He laughs. “Good night, Cilla.”
He squeezes my hand, and then is gone. Absorbed in that mass of revelers, now swathed in red. I realize I’ve been clenching my jaw for hours. I finish my drink, feeling the alcohol smooth it out.
I watch the crowd of young people—sweaty and pungent and dancing like mad. A strand of hair is stuck to my niece’s face. Her eyes are still closed. I shut mine too, just for a moment, just to feel the bass vibrate both of us. When I open them, she is no longer on the dance floor.
I take my glass and push through the crowd. She’s not in line for the bathroom, or at the bar, or in any of the booths. I go to the second floor, where it’s darker and the music is less frenzied and madcap. Just a few weeks ago Donato and I danced here. The feeling of his hands on my waist, how wonderful my body felt under them.
I search the room but Hannah isn’t there either. Although I’m not sure—it’s hard to see. I circle the floor, trying to make out the figures on the couches. It’s stuffy and smells reminiscent of the rental car after Donato and I had sex in the backseat. I thought Paul or Marie or Tonio—any of them—might recognize that intimate yet universal smell. But none of them did, and the next time we were all in the car, I only had to keep my window rolled down to air it out.
I catch sight of one of the auburn-haired British sisters, disappearing through an unmarked door. At first, I think it’s locked, but then the knob gives, and I’m standing in an industrial stairwell, fluorescent and bright.
“Hannah, are you in here?”
The door shuts behind me, and the cacophony from the club—the music, the DJ chanting, the riotous crowd—sounds far away and muffled. I think maybe I hear voices, another door opening and closing. “Hello?” No answer.
The next floor is locked. I can feel the gin now, burning in the pit of my stomach. I keep climbing until I reach the top, where the door gives easily and I’m outside, on the roof overlooking the Villa Borghese Gardens.
“Zia Cilla.” I hear Silvia’s velvety voice. She’s sitting with several others, beneath strung-up lights and a cloud of cigarette smoke. I recognize Cristiano, lying on the ground beside her, fussing with a record player, and there is the British sister, leaning over the edge of the building.