by CD Reiss
My mind is clearing slowly, but I cannot fathom what Santino’s life or death has to do with a priest adding one more sin to a long, long list of them.
“He’s dead.” I scratch my jaw and rub a colony of itches from my right cheek. My hand feels rough as lace. “She killed him.”
I point to some place to the left where Gia exists in my mind, and I’m about to say her name when I realize my hand is lighter than usual.
Father Alfonso leaves, hunched, touching surfaces and walls until he finds the door before he clicks it closed. When I’m alone, I sit straight in the chair. Hold up my hand. My one good eye is full of gunk. I blink. Blink. Blink. When it clears, I know what the candlelight will reveal.
A room with plaster walls.
A tiny, darkened stained glass window.
I can’t see close. The world is crisscrossed by the net I’m caught inside.
But across the room…a thick wooden door. A cabinet with a small statue of the Virgin, surrounded by the unassertive yellow glow of candles.
When I scratch my face this time, it’s easier to identify the roughness of my fingertips.
I’m wearing a veil.
Throwing it back, I see clearly and hold my left hand in front of me. My ring. Rosetta’s ring. A meaningless assembly of rock and metal that my husband etched with a secret and gave to me.
It’s gone.
My consciousness returned moments after I ripped off the veil, and in the five minutes since, the pain in my face has grown with the itchiness I’ve been rubbing from my face and neck.
The door is locked from the outside.
…vasodilation…
I open the cabinet doors, trying not to think about why I’m having a histamine release.
The cabinet is full of church shit. Moving it out of the way, I peer into the back, find nothing, then sit back down on the floor. I don’t even know what I’m looking for. Santino isn’t in the cabinet, and what do I need besides him?
Has he even been fished from the pool yet?
My face itches where it hurts and hurts where it itches.
…a reversal of systemic dilation of cutaneous blood vessels…
Damiano hit me. The blunt trauma to the head wouldn’t keep me unconscious more than a few minutes unless I was in a coma, which I wasn’t.
I’ve been drugged with an opioid. It’s wearing off, and the pain is just about hitting me.
The baby.
I rock back and forth, scratching my face like an addict denied relief.
Shit.
What kind of drug? How much of it? How long? I need the packaging and a Davis Guide, stat. Because I get to keep one, single remnant of Santino, and it’s growing inside me.
Before him, a pregnancy would have been invasive and unwelcome. Catholicism aside, I would have considered the pros and cons of continuing. But I love my king, and this thing we started—this potential life that’s the sum of the best and worst of us—is a product of that love, made real by the dreams we wove for it together.
“I’ll take care of your child,” I whisper to my dead husband. “I won’t let you die twice.”
He neither approves nor disapproves, because he’s dead.
A shaft of light appears against the far wall with the sound of metal squeaking against metal.
My eyes adjust. The effect of the candles dims as the light from the outer hallway enters.
A woman comes in. She holds a tray, and her dark hair is a curly mane pushed back by a gold banana clip.
Her name is Gia, and she shot Santino.
I launch myself at her like a bullet, hands out, tingling face contorted into a growl.
She doesn’t back away, scream, or protect herself, because the drug in my system is a knife driven between my will and my body. I can’t move that fast, so I don’t move at all. Chemicals have dislocated my spirit from my actions, proving that I am now and have always been just a piece of sentient meat.
“I’m listening,” the man who opened the door says. “If I hear anything—”
“Shush, Dami,” Gia scolds.
The door closes, leaving us in the dimness.
“Violetta,” Gia says softly, putting the tray on an ancient table carved with crosses.
“Fuck you.” These are my first words to her, and they’re not strong enough.
“Just stay still.” She takes something from the tray and crouches in front of me.
“Santino. Our baby.” There are no questions or statements attached. I’m just naming the things I love the most.
The painful half of my face is suddenly cold. She’s put an ice compress on the swelling. The light behind her makes her look like a saint.
“That’s not going to do shit.” I push away the compress. “He broke the orbital bone.”
“No, he didn’t.” She puts the cold wetness back on my face.
“I wish you weren’t such a bitch, but wishes don’t make truths.”
She uses a single breath to laugh. “You were always so clever.”
“Not clever enough to see you coming.”
There are voices on the other side of the door, and we both look at it as if we can see through the wood.
When they fade out, I ask, “What did you give me? Which opioid?”
“Does it matter?” She shrugs it off like a passing grade she didn’t study for.
How did I miss the sociopathy? Should I have seen it when she focused on what marriage looked like rather than what it was? Or the first moments I knew her, when I cowered in a strange room as she stood over me, showing me wedding dresses as if it was fun?
“Hold this.” She presses my hand over the compress and leans back to pluck a bottle of water from the tray. “The doctor says you have to be hydrated.”
Mob doctors are the extended professional family of the mob priests and mob lawyers who already ruined my life. But if I want to kill this bitch and her man, I’m going to need my body and mind working at capacity, so I drain it.
“I hate you,” I say, handing back the bottle. “I’m going to kill you.” I shouldn’t warn her, but the message isn’t for her, really. I’m putting myself on warning.
“Your husband was going to start a war, Violetta. I thought you’d understand.”
Santino wasn’t going to start a war—I believe that from the bottom of my heart—but a war may have started anyway, and his intentions would have been irrelevant.
“You shot Santino. You brought Damiano to my house. You drugged me when you know I’m pregnant. What am I supposed to understand?”
“That I did what I had to do to be free.”
The morality of what she’s describing is broken, but the logic of sacrificing me or killing someone to escape is as clear as it is cruel. What I can’t sort out is how she’s acting as if the plan worked and she’s free, when she’s got me locked in an oversized, empty closet.
“How can you be free if Damiano is waiting right outside? If you’re marrying him, you’re not free.”
She laughs, then covers her mouth to quiet herself. A square-cut diamond on her finger glints in the candlelight. She’s wearing the ring. My ring. Rosetta’s ring.
“I’m not marrying him.” She scoffs with the absurdity of it. “You are.”
3
VIOLETTA
In this same church, I was forced to marry Santino DiLustro so that he could collect my inheritance—the missing pieces of the Corona Ferrea, the Iron Crown of Lombardy, worn by both Constantine and Napoleon, inset with a nail from the One True Cross, and so powerful, even those few pieces compelled a warehouse full of men to kneel before the one who held it.
The crown’s power should be filed with other superstitions. Like, if you go to mass on any nine consecutive first Fridays of the month, you’re guaranteed a place in heaven. Also, if you’re wearing a brown scapular under your shirt when you die, Our Lady of Carmel will personally pull you out of purgatory and deliver you to paradise on the first Saturday after your death, amen.
>
“I wore that scapular from first grade to third,” I remind the tabletop statue of the Virgin, but not for her sake, for my own.
My zia made me wear it under my shirt. I was orphaned in a new country where I didn’t speak the language, and the feel of the brown felt was a comfort. I could see the ribbons and matchbook-sized rectangles under the thin white cotton shirts of the other kids at school. This was a key to making me feel as if I belonged, and for a few years, I thought I wanted to be a nun. Not out of devotion to the Church or love for God, but because—in my new world of St. Anselm’s—they had all the power, and they wielded it like a coven of psychopaths.
This says more about me than it ever did about them.
“Gia should have been a nun,” I tell myself, rubbing away a last itch from my chin.
I had been stolen from my life, and Gia had wiped away my tears so she could put eye shadow on me. She held up the train of my dress and placed the veil over my face so I could walk into Hell blind.
With her cheerful friendship, she’d somehow lulled me into compliance. I’m smarter this time. Tougher. So much fucking older.
Santino may be dead, but I can still make him proud.
I pick up the Virgin statue and slam it against the little stained-glass window. Our Lady of Plaster smashes against the tight lead web between the glass pieces, having no effect on the window itself, but magically transmutating into Our Lady of Ruins.
My disappointment is like a shot of adrenaline, and it’s just as short-lived. I pick up a shard and run it against the length of my finger.
Sharp.
The Virgin might save me after all.
I open the top drawer of the cabinet and sweep the pieces and dust into it, then notice a long, clear plastic sleeve. Taking it out, I turn it over and laugh to myself.
It’s ridiculously convenient, almost magical, that there should be a sleeve full of scapulars with a white SKU sticker proving they were shipped directly from the Sisters of Our Lady of Carmel in Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA.
Well, if I’m going to die today, there’s no harm in hedging my bets.
I slide one out. A doubled brown ribbon about a foot long connects two rectangles. One has a picture of Mary sewn on, the other with the pale-skinned, blue-eyed Jesus with a thorny, glowing heart in his chest. The brown felt side has a little pocket for a medal that’s going to stay empty right now. I loop the ribbon around my neck, under my shirt, placing the felt side against my skin.
There’s a click from the door, and I quickly shut the drawer, putting the cabinet to my back so the missing statue isn’t noticed.
It’s Gia again.
“It’s a beautiful day,” she says, sliding my veil off the chair. “Did I interrupt something?”
“Just praying.”
Either she knows I’m lying or she’s not impressed by my devotion.
“Cool.” She holds up the rectangle of lace, but all I can see is the ring. “Do you want me to pin this on, or are you going to let it just drape? Either way it’ll cover…” With her nose wrinkled, she draws a circle around her own eye.
“The eye that Damiano hit so hard it’s swollen shut?”
“You’ll think that’s funny when you see him.” She already thinks it’s funny. “You stuck a pin in his eye.”
“I did.” I indicate the veil. “Is this the one you brought from Naples?”
“No,” she scoffs. “That’s for my wedding, whenever that is. My mother’s over on the other side with all that stuff. This is the one you had on when you married Santino.”
I’m not sure if the repeat use is meant as a kindness or an insult, but I won’t give her the satisfaction of either gratitude or anger.
“Drape is fine,” I say.
She holds out the fabric for me to take, but I have a razor-sharp shard in my fist. I bow so she can lay it over my head. When I look up, I have the same view through the netting as I had when I woke up in the chair, except now the light’s behind me and I can see the woman I destroyed everything to save. She looks just fine… as if she never needed to be rescued. All she needed was a little time to figure out how to fuck someone over before she got fucked.
“No dress this time.” She shrugs.
“You held my train.”
“I remember!” She smiles warmly.
“I’m going to kill you,” I say with a flatness I don’t recognize.
She squints, barely registering the threat, then chuckles and shrugs as if I must be joking.
“I mean it.”
“Oh, believe me, we know.” She fusses with my veil. “We ran up a thousand dollars in international phone bills planning for you to be super mad. But…” She steps back to look me up and down. “I think once we have the crown, it’s not going to matter what you want or how you feel.”
“Who’s going to marry you? After all this?”
“Here’s a secret, Violetta.” She leans so close I can smell her flowery perfume. “When a man loves you, he loves you no matter what you do.”
By the look on her face, I know she has a specific man on her mind. Maybe I know him. Maybe I can use it to break her confidence. But before I can ask who loves her that much, the door behind her creaks open.
She steps back, and I see my future husband in a simple, ill-fitting suit that makes him look like a football player borrowing his smaller brother’s clothes. He obviously doesn’t believe in the prohibition of seeing the bride before the wedding. He only gets one eyeful though. The other is poorly bandaged. I get no satisfaction from it, because his thick hands are clasped in front of him as if one holds back the other and I notice a glint.
Santino’s diamond crown ring is at the base of Damiano’s right pinkie.
I look away, unable to bear the sight of it. “You need to get that eye looked at by a real doctor.”
“We gonna do this easy?” he asks me. “Or we gonna do this hard?”
I mirror the position of his hands, though on me, it’s not a threat, but a false submission, hiding the sharp edge that protrudes between two fingers of my fist.
“Easy,” I say. “It’s going to be real easy.”
“Good.” He reaches for me, but I curl back.
“On one condition.”
“You don’t get conditions.”
Obviously, I have zero power in this situation, and he has no reason to give up any of his. But there is a ceremony to attend to, and I’ll have plenty of opportunities to kill him later, so he may be pliable.
“I want to bury Santino,” I say quickly. “Properly. I know you haven’t. Let me do it. Then you can put me in the hole with him. I don’t care.”
“I can do that.” He shrugs with the magnanimity of a kindly king. “I respect the dead.”
4
SANTINO
In the waiting room of an Italian hospital, Camilla told Damiano and me that the numeric key was a lawyer’s license number, and years later, a young woman named Theresa Rubino told her cousin that her lover, Roman, was getting an important and secret thing engraved inside Violetta’s ring.
This whole drama… It was never about Damiano and Gia’s ‘mbasciata, her father’s debt, or the string of overlooked insults.
Gia didn’t resign herself to a forced wedding for the sake of peace or the security of a marriage. The bride was never confused or moody.
I shouldn’t be so surprised when she shoots me.
She always wanted to be free.
Time slows down into details without a story. Crystal-clear events shuffle like the wht-wht-wht of a deck of cards.
I stand at the pool and follow the sound of pounding fists up. I see Damiano holding her up against her window. Then—and only then—do I understand my mistake.
wht-wht-wht
Before the bullet, the error is the first ache in my chest. Then I see Gia, and the pain bursts through me. The heat. The pressure. The life pushed out of my lungs in a blast of air. I feel myself go flat and weightless.
wht-wh
t-wht
I am in a shroud of noise. It’s everywhere, like God. Thick as all my sins against Him. Loud as the crunch of a footstep to the insect it’s about to crush.
wht-wht-wht
Falling backward into the pool, the last thing I see is Violetta in the window with her mouth open. I can’t hear her, but I know she’s screaming from a different time, a distant place, tying the spaces between us with her voice. But then all I see is sky.
wht-wht-wht
When I see Gia pointing a gun at me in my own house, I understand their plan. In that moment between when I drop my gun and step back, it’s so clear I could write a book on it.
If I’m dead before Violetta collects her inheritance, Damiano can marry her, and he will have access to it.
wht-wht-wht
I go down with empty lungs. Face up. White foam closing off my route to Violetta.
Though I know what’s happened, who did it, and why, my body takes a breath before I shout to my wife.
Wait for me.
I’ll be there. I’ll come. I’ll swim. I’ll crawl. I’ll fly on wings of fire.
My lungs fill with water. It’s excruciating. My limbs jerk, but my mouth forgets and breathes and breathes. The water sucks me down into solid silence, and I breathe liquid because I have no choice. I will die unredeemed.
My last thought is that Violetta was right.
This all could have been avoided if I’d outlawed ‘mbasciata the moment I saw her cry.
It all flashes before me so fast, I have time to remember everything.
My mother is sad, then she is happy. Her hair is tied back, but half of it has escaped already. I follow her up a mountain. Vesuvius. She’s going to heal herself at the opening of a dead volcano. It’s been days uphill, grasping at rocks and scrub, and we’re barely a quarter of the way. I am hungry.
Paola visits me in a place with many children. She promises to take me home one day. Then she keeps that promise.
Mario sleeping on the couch. Fighting with his wife about how much I eat.
