The Lost Daughter

by Lucretia Grindle

  Then came a weekend when Barbara went with her mother to Padua to visit her sister at the university and, somewhat to her surprise, Angela found she wanted to run by herself. As her father’s snores growled behind his bedroom door, she laced up her shoes feeling both guilty and excited, the same way she had felt when she was little and had slipped without his knowledge beyond the confines of the neighborhood.

  The city streets were still with Sunday morning. The first sun caught the shards of glass on top of the walls of the old military barracks, making them glitter like white-tipped fangs. Crossing in front of the Corpus Domini and the Annunziata and the great patterned face of the Schifonoia, her running shoes silent on the cobbles, Angela felt herself fading into the city. Becoming transparent—just another ghost rubbing shoulders with the old men in their black coats, and with the d’Este, and with La Borgia herself. All of them mingling like smoke.

  At the Punta della Giovecca she climbed onto the ramparts. Beyond the walls the fields were washed in mist. She could hear, but not see, a car. Standing suspended between earth and air, Angela felt as if she was on the edge of precipice. Tension thrummed her arms and legs and back. For a second, she had the impulse to turn around. To stop, because what she was doing—coming here to run alone—was a betrayal of Barbara. An infidelity, as surely as the nights Barbara’s father had taken to spending with his students were infidelities. Then she gave herself a little shake.

  Her first step cracked ice in a puddle. The next left a footprint in frost. Her breath bloomed and trembled on the chilly air as heat began to throb into her mittened hands. Above her, the white sky was traced with naked trees. Below her, her feet fell—one chasing another, faster and faster, until she almost believed she was no longer touching the ground.

  When Barbara came around that night, to report on the hotel where she and her mother had stayed, and on what they had had for lunch, and on the fight her mother and sister had had over her sister’s new boyfriend, which made her mother so angry she’d almost driven off the road on the way home—to say all of that, but mostly to say that she had not only not seen Antonio, but hadn’t even thought of looking for him—Angela listened.

  When Barbara finally stopped talking and remembered to ask her what she had done with her weekend, she shrugged and said that on Saturday she had worked in the shop, as she now did every Saturday, and that afterward she had studied for the exams that were looming in front of them. She told Barbara she had gone to the Laundromat, then done some ironing while she watched TV, and said nothing about running. Nothing about the black lace of branches, or puffs of breath, or how with every step she had sensed a piece of herself flaking away—anxiety and pain, disappointment, even happiness, all shedding like scales. She kept it instead to herself. Hoarded it, the way she had once hoarded Antonio.

  She thought of him. She knew she wasn’t supposed to, that Barbara would say it wasn’t good for her. But she couldn’t help it. Sometimes she opened her bottom drawer and rummaged under the old sweaters until she found the blue beads. Then she would crouch, her hand folded over them, eyes closed, rolling each one between finger and thumb. Other times her hand slid between her legs and conjured him, summoned him the way she imagined a gypsy at a fair summoned spirits when she rubbed a crystal ball.

  As the winter deepened, Angela fell into an easy pattern of deception. And was surprised by how much she enjoyed it. She lied mainly by omission. By silence and stealth. And grew increasingly certain that lying made her feet turn faster, made her feel as if she was nothing but a shadow, flying across the frozen ground like the shadows of the crows that dipped and fell above the empty ramparts.

  On the mornings she didn’t run with Barbara, she went by herself, very early. Other times she went at dusk. She took to saying she had to work for her father, then changing in the back room of the shop and slipping down the alley past the storeroom and into Piazza Travaglio where she climbed up the path beside the Porta Paola. From there she would run along the top of the walls—past the flat white roofs of the hospital, past the line of trees above the football pitch, past the Montagnola, past each memory and year as if she was running through her life, outpacing herself until she reached the Angels’ Gate.

  There, chest heaving as her heart slowed, she would come down and pause behind the iron railings of the houses at the top of Corso d’Este and watch the curtained windows. When she turned away, she would see the castle all lit up in the distance, burning in the heart of the city. Sometimes it looked like a fire at the end of a tunnel. Or like the sparkling lure that teases a fish. Other times she imagined its lights must look like the lights birds see when they gaze down from the night sky, silver pinpricks far below where they hover in cold and silence.

  On evenings like that, the walk back along the Corso made Angela feel as if she was drifting back down to earth. Or being reeled in. Every step making her more solid, more prone to the rules of gravity and memory. Until, by the time she got to Via Mazzini, passing the spot where the gates of the ghetto had once been, she would be worrying about her exams, or her father’s books, or being late for school or dinner.

  Her father still did most of the cooking, but Angela helped him. Sometimes she did it all herself. And she was thinking about jointing a chicken—about the quick, firm whack of the cleaver, and the clean split of bone, and cut of skin—and about whether she had remembered to buy enough carrots, and if they might be out of oil, when on the first Thursday in February she came around the corner into Via Vittoria and mounted the steps and put her key in the lock and smelled burning.

  Her immediate thought was that something had spilled on the stove and rolled into the gas flame, or been forgotten in the oven. That her father must have turned it on, then gone downstairs to the Ravallis’ to borrow salt or butter or the onions she had forgotten to buy and that any second he would reappear, swearing, as if the oven itself was the miscreant.

  She ran up the stairs and pushed open the door to the apartment. A haze shimmered in the kitchen. Whatever it had been was surely blackened by now.

  “Oh, Papa.”

  He had grown more forgetful, preoccupied by the shop and by his diatribes against the supermarket, and—she knew, although they never mentioned it—by the mushroom cloud of debt that refused to shrink no matter how much of her savings account, which admittedly wasn’t much to start with, she squirreled back into the cash trays.

  Angela darted through the doorway, eyes fixed on the pan that sat smoking on the stove. She turned the burner off and, pulling her sweatshirt sleeve over her mittened hand, grabbed the handle and tipped it into the sink where it sizzled and hissed like a devil in the Purgatorio. The burning oil made her eyes tear, so it was not until she had shoved open the window and was trying to fan the sheet of cold air that she turned and saw her father.

  He lay on the far side of the old scarred table. The chopping board he had been working on had tipped and fallen beside him. Red chunks of tomatoes—the first from Sicily, sold out of a van on Corso Porto Mare—oozed on the tiles. His face was contorted. His mouth open, as if someone had punched him suddenly in the stomach. Flung over his head, his hand still held the coring knife.

  “He’s not dead. He’s not dead.”

  Everyone tells her this. The ambulance people who bring a chaos of bleating sirens and flashing lights. Signora Ravalli who rides with her in a police car to the hospital. The doctor who comes, trying not to look as if he is in a hurry, to tell her that something is very wrong with her father’s heart and that they will do the best they can. Even Signor and Signora Pirotti, who have left their supper and come to sit with her in the waiting room.

  “He’s not dead,” they say, and clutch her hands as if it is supposed to bring some comfort. Which it does. Even if Angela is not sure what it means. Not really. Because even though everyone tells her that her quick thinking has saved his life—that he had a massive heart attack, and that if she had not returned and found him and called the ambulance, well, things
would be very different. Even though everyone tells her this, she is not sure what she is supposed to think about it.

  Because he looked dead to her. He felt dead, when she touched him. And he feels dead now, lost somewhere behind those doors she cannot go through where they are cracking open his chest and reaching in to grasp his heart the way she has seen him crack open the chest and reach in to grasp the heart of a lamb or a cow. Angela closes her eyes and wishes that she did not know what those organs look like. Liver, kidneys, the round and oozing heart. But she does.

  Sitting in the hard molded-plastic chair, she reaches into the neck of her sweatshirt and feels for her necklace. The gold is warm from the heat of her body, and as she rubs it she imagines that she is rubbing off the A for Annabeth. That she is freeing it. And that it is breaking apart—swirling into a million tiny pieces that rise and finger their way through the closed doors and fly down the labyrinth halls of this hospital where her mother left the world and she came into it, until they find her father and settle themselves. Nest like birds on his cracked open heart. And form an A. For Annabeth and Angela.

  * * *

  It is almost midnight when the Pirottis take her home. Her father is doing as well as can be expected. She can’t see him, can’t even glimpse him through a glass window until tomorrow, at visiting hours in the afternoon, and perhaps not even then. So there is no point in her sitting there. The nurse says she should have something to eat. That she should get some sleep. She is a nice woman with gray curling hair that escapes from her cap in little horns. When she brings out a pile of forms and asks Angela if she is old enough to sign them, to be legally responsible for decisions about her father’s care, the lie skips out like a heartbeat. Deception, Angela thinks, is truly second nature to her now. She swears and signs on the line.

  If they notice, which they almost certainly do, the Pirottis say nothing. When they were young, girls her age got married. During the war they picked up guns and shot and got shot at. For the poor, at least for those who labor with their hands, childhood is a modern invention. Like birth control pills and divorce and feminism, it’s made up to get you out of doing what everyone really knows you have to do. Besides, they’ve all heard what happens if someone like her father doesn’t have a daughter, or a wife, or a son. He could be moved anywhere. Shuffled and forgotten like a pack of worn-out cards. This, after all, is what families are for, to grab your hand in the crowd. There is, of course, her father’s cousin who raises the vealers. He passes through Angela’s mind like a shadow. And vanishes just as fast. She hasn’t even called him. She can’t imagine what she would say.

  When they reach her building, the Pirottis want to come inside. Signora Pirotti offers to spend the night. But Angela shakes her head. After all, she’s hardly on her own. In the ghetto no one is on their own. The Ravallis are downstairs. Nonna Franchi is around the corner. Barbara lives five minutes away. She’s surrounded. But all she wants is to go back to the apartment. Alone. She can’t stand the idea of sympathy, or crying, or anyone else’s food.

  Behind the closed door and freed of the burden of other people’s eyes, Angela wonders if she had not gone running, if she had been here, could she have changed this? The doctor said no. More or less. Not that she asked him directly, begged for his absolution as if he was some kind of priest. But he called her father’s heart a ticking time bomb. Said that the only miracle, other than the fact that he had not died instantly, was that this had not happened years ago.

  Angela thinks of that now and wonders if her father knew. If when he held a pig’s or an ox’s heart in his hand, he understood that there was something wrong with his own—felt it, reluctant in his chest like a clock that has to be coaxed into running.

  If he did that, if he urged his heart on day after day, pushing it to one more beat, Angela knows he did it for her. She knows this just as she knows that, if he is holding on now, if he is clinging to the fragile web that stops him from joining her mother, he is also doing it for her. The knowledge makes her stop. She stands on the stairs as if his love has turned her to stone.

  Unable to tolerate the box of her own room, she sleeps on the sofa. She wraps herself in the old maroon blanket that usually lies folded across the foot of her parents’ bed and puts her father’s slippers on her stockinged feet. During the night they fall off and flap onto the floor as if they’re trying to walk back to their place beside his chair.

  When Angela wakes up, it’s dark. Stiff from propping her head on the uncomfortable armrest, she smells the stale woody scent of cigars and thinks, just for a second, that she has fallen asleep in front of the TV and had a bad dream and that she can hear her father snoring, the grunts and snuffles jumping like puppies at the door of his bedroom down the hall. Then she smells the charcoaly beef smell and the greasy residue of burned oil and sits up, her clothes tight with sweat, her arms and neck aching.

  The strip of sky above the roofs is the dirty black of winter dawn. The stars, if there were any, will be fading. Angela looks at her watch. It’s half past five. She wonders if her father is still on this earth, or if he’s gone, if while she was sleeping he slipped away to join her mother, and realizes with a pang that a part of him has probably wanted to do just that for a very long time. She saw him kissing Signora Ravalli once, years ago. But other than that, as far as she knows, he’s never glanced at another woman. He’s gone to his shop, and sharpened his knives, and driven out to see the veal calves, and mixed sausage meat, and worked in the cold room without feeling the warm, slick rub of another naked body. The band of someone’s arms around him. He’s locked the shop and smoked his cigars and walked home to cook dinner, for her. So he could read her a story, lay his hand on the top of her head. Pass her a crumpled envelope and tell her to buy a dress.

  Angela sits on the edge of the sofa and knows what she has to do.

  It’s chilly in the bathroom, even when she turns on both bars of the heater. But she takes a shower anyway, and dries her hair. She braids it, tight, watching her face in the mirror, the elastic held between her teeth. She gets dressed and makes herself strong coffee, skirting that piece of the floor. She cuts bread from the loaf and eats it standing up because she doesn’t want to sit at the table, or see the stain from the tomatoes that has sunk into the wide-grained wood and will have to be scrubbed away and even then will probably not vanish altogether, but linger like the handprint of an unwanted guest. When she starts to wash her cup, she stops. She can’t turn on the faucet. The burned pan is still in the sink, blackened lumps of beef curled in it like dead mice.

  In the hallway she pulls on boots, a hat, and her coat. When she realizes she will have to reach into the pocket of her father’s coat for his keys, her throat tightens, the silence of the apartment washing around her, the stillness behind her father’s bedroom door booming in her head. She takes a deep breath as her fingers finally reach out and meet the soft, worn wool. She has to close her eyes and bite her lip.

  When she finally steps outside, the cold is like a slap. Angela’s glad. She turns away from the Duomo and the university and school. As she goes down Via Vittoria and into Via Carbone, she hears the prayer in the rustling of the pigeons and in the click of the street lamp as it switches off. Then, under the familiar whispered words, she hears something else—the high, tuneless, notes of her father’s whistle, scattering before her like pebbles.

  * * *

  “I don’t get it,” Barbara says. “I mean, I just don’t get it. What the fuck are you doing?”

  It’s the night before Valentine’s Day, exactly a week since Angela’s father had his heart attack and she started opening the shop by herself. Barbara runs her hands through her hair, digging her fingers into her scalp and pulling at the ends to show that Angela’s making her crazy.

  “It’s like you’re quitting.”

  Her voice rises to something close to a shriek. If the shop was still open, Angela would tell her to calm down. But it isn’t, so she doesn’t bother.

&n
bsp; “It’s like you’ve just decided to be a fucking quitter,” Barbara announces. “Shit!” She bangs her fist on the cash register, making it ping. “It’s like you’re giving up fucking everything!”

  In place of smoking, Barbara has taken up swearing. Fuck is now her favorite word, although she knows lots of others, too. Angela’s not sure where she’s learned them all. From the bathrooms in the bus station? From her sisters? She has no idea, but she supposes she’s lucky not to be called something worse than a fucking quitter. A syphilitic cunt, perhaps? A witch’s tit? Those are two of Barbara’s current favorites, along with various anatomical references to Jesus, whom she’s decided she no longer believes in.

  “I mean.” Barbara takes a deep breath and lowers her voice, trying another tack. “I mean”—she says—“I understand, Angie. I do. Really. I do. Shit. But your dad’s OK. I mean, he’s going to be OK? Right? And you’re still telling me you’re not coming back to school?”

  Angela does not point out that legally she could have left school a year ago. That lots of people do. People who have to do boring things, like working in a factory, or taking care of their parents and paying bills and putting bread on the table. People who do not have, for instance, white shag rugs. Or cases of lipsticks named after flowers. Nor does she point out that her “dad,” whom she has never called Dad in her life, is anything but OK. That he’s OK only if you count being alive, and sitting up once, and being able to mumble for a few seconds at a time because you can’t talk, much less feed yourself or walk or go to the bathroom as OK. She doesn’t say it. Any of it. Any more than she actually says she isn’t going back to school.

  Because she doesn’t have to. At least not to Barbara, who knows it already because she has always had the disturbing ability to know Angela—better it seems sometimes, than Angela knows herself. Which is why they are such good friends. Which is why Angela does not mind her swearing any more than she really minded her smoking. Because Barbara is Barbara, and the luxury of not having to explain to her, or even talk, feels like leaning back in a hot, perfumed bath. Feels like closing her eyes and letting her limbs float while the water creeps up to her neck, and chin, and mouth.