by CD Reiss
My living husband crouches by him.
“Will you accept children lovingly from God?”
“Ke-ke-ke…” Each attempt is a cough.
“Shh, now.” Santino reaches into the boy’s pocket and takes out his phone. He presses the bottom circle to the owner’s thumb, and it opens. The wallpaper is a sunset scene of a happy couple. “Ah. Anna Silvio. I’ll visit her and offer condolences.”
The tender eyes go wide with an expression of terror. Arturo already knows what it’s taking me a moment to figure out. The condolences aren’t benign. They’re a threat, and he’s going to be dead in a few minutes—unable to protect his family or girlfriend—because I killed him.
“And bring them up according to the law of Christ and his church?”
That’s Father Alfonso’s last chant as he’s led away. The king doesn’t move.
“Where is Damiano Orolio?” he asks the dying man. “Where did he run?”
“Dh-dh-dh. Nuh-nuh.”
Santino takes the pressure off the wound I inflicted, letting it spurt life in a jet. There’s no last gasp. No audible last breath of life. Just a silence so deep I have to look down to make sure Arturo’s still lying there—and I see it. Clear as words on a page. His eyes go from living to dead. Full of fear to fully empty. His skin contracts against the muscle by a fraction of a hair.
Last summer, I attended in the ER during the wildfires. A fireman died on the table, and it wasn’t like this. Maybe because we were trying to keep him alive. Or because he had no last words. Or maybe I hadn’t felt as if my own soul was being sucked away when he died because I hadn’t killed him.
The silence from the now-absent priest couples with the departure of a soul, and the sounds echoing inside the church drown out everything.
There’s only Santino, but outside of that, I’m distracted and small, stuffed into a padded box and sealed inside. This is over, but I can’t digest what just happened or what’s going to happen. There’s only this man who rose from the dead and came for me.
Back from the dead, staring down at me, reaching into his jacket pocket for a pack of cigarettes. He opens it with one hand, thumbs one free, and bites the filter to pull it out.
“He got away,” I say, stating a fact, expressing fear, and looking for reassurance in just three words.
“I’ll find him.” Santino goes back into his breast pocket and comes out with his steel Zippo. It’s bent, and he has to use two hands to open it. “Then I’m going to kill him.”
He lights up. I’ve never smoked, but when I smell the raw, unburned tobacco, I realize how much I want to.
“We checked everywhere, boss,” a man says from outside the width of my connection with Santino.
“Get the car,” my husband replies.
The men—maybe half a dozen of them—take off out the transept door. Gas cans litter the ambulatory, about twenty feet away, and the white linen altar cloth is soaked piss-yellow.
“The fuse ends at your feet,” he says.
With a scritch, Santino spins the flint and hands me the flaming Zippo. I take it and get a good look at it for the first time. The steel bends in the center around a bullet-sized indentation.
He had this in his jacket pocket when Gia shot him.
Smoking saved his life.
“Do it now before the fumes catch.”
I look down. There’s a wet, twisted rope of fabric on the floor. A tide of blood from the man I killed soaks it pink. I touch the flame to the end, and it blossoms into heat and light. The church will burn, and I have no will to do anything else.
Santino leads me down the aisle, away from the fiery altar, and out into Secondo Vasto.
The clarity of the afternoon sun is merciless, taming the slightest breeze into submission.
The fire crackles, looking for fuel. I blink away the burn.
Santino can’t take his attention from my black eye. “He’ll die for doing this to you.”
Damiano’s failure to kill my husband doesn’t change the fact that he tried, and who knows what he would have done to me if he’d succeeded in marrying me. Santino’s rage is justified.
There will be more death. The murder I committed, that I haven’t even digested, won’t be the last. Was that one also defensible? I was blank with anger and raw intention. Not a single neuron was firing when I cut into him. How can murder be justified when the killer didn’t have a thought in her head?
“The blood,” is all I can say.
My husband takes my chin and makes me face him. He inspects my expression and makes a sharp tsk.
“No,” he says. “You did what you had to do.”
“I’m still a murderer.”
“Yes.”
He leads me to the curb where a black Mercedes is pulling up. He opens the back door for me. I assume he’s disturbed about the same thing that’s weighing on me. His Forzetta committed murder and should feel guilty and traumatized. I should pray for my eternal soul and make reparations to God and Arturo Tabona Meatball Eyes’s family. I should spend the rest of my life mortifying the flesh in penance.
But all that seems pointless. It’s impossible because nothing after this moment will ever happen. My senses are frozen in horror, and my heart barely feels as though it’s beating. I don’t want to feel bad. I don’t want to be sorry. I’ve never prayed much, and I’m not starting as I run from a burning church, but an unwelcome awareness tugs at me. I don’t know what to think or what feelings to put in place of the ones I refuse.
Santino joins me in the back of the car. I take his hand and hold it so tightly my knuckles pale. He puts his remaining hand over the doubled fist, and I lean into him, comforted. In all the thick, unthinking guilt—in all the gray dullness protecting me from what I’ve done—he is the only reality. He is my anchor.
“She’s not in the trunk,” says the driver, an older guy with a receding hairline. He slaps the back of the passenger’s head. “Tell him why, stunad!”
“Fuck you, Gennaro.” The passenger is a younger guy, but probably older than me. Tightly waved dark hair. He turns around to face us, but averts his eyes.
“What happened?” Santino asks. I feel as if I’m seeing all this and reacting through him, because I’m wrapped in a hundred layers of gauze.
“She was crying.”
“Oh, boo-fucking-hoo,” Gennaro mocks.
“Is this true, Carmine?” Santino’s tone is soft. Almost inviting. “You let her go because she cried?”
“She’s Gia! Our little waitress!” Carmine defends himself with the obvious notion that a woman you know is a woman who’s harmless. “She was scared, so she started kicking and twisting all around. What was I supposed to do? Hit her?”
“Dami and Gia.” Santino rubs his eyes. “We lost both of them.”
I don’t know enough about his business to know what resources he has to find her, but there’s one thing I do know for sure. If Gia was ever a powerless victim of cruel traditions, it was before I met her. She’s neither helpless nor powerless now, and she will not hesitate to kill anyone between her and what she wants.
“Next time,” I interject, but it’s someone else talking. Some other Violetta with a strong, definitive voice. “You show her a little respect.”
Gennaro—stopped at a light—twists around to look at me as if I’ve argued Carmine wasn’t gentle enough, but that’s not what I’m saying at all, and my husband knows it.
“You underestimated her,” Santino says. “That was your second mistake. Your first mistake was losing sight of what she did to my wife. Gia’s going to cry again. I promise you that.”
Santino’s house always seemed impregnable with its front gate and men walking the ramparts, but the castle was breached, and I don’t know if I’ll ever see it again.
“Gia has my ring,” I say softly as the car twists up the road. “She can find the lawyer.”
“She just likes the stone.”
“I’m sorry, Santi. About that and somethin
g else.” My hands don’t know what to do with each other, lying in my lap like helpless fish pulled from the water. “Dr. Farina was there. He gave me at least one shot. He didn’t tell me what was in it, but I was unconscious for a few hours, and if there was something else… I don’t know, but…whether it was just one thing or more, it’s not safe for…” I stop because I can’t say baby yet—not to him and not while the situation is so delicate—and I can’t say any of the other words to define this thing that’s still so small and means so much to me.
Tears burn my left eye and fall painlessly from my right.
“It’s going to be okay.” He kisses the top of my head.
Am I talking to myself in his voice? I feel him. I know he’s here. But my heart refuses to believe it. It’s locked against relief.
“I don’t have the right to worry about the baby,” I whisper. “Not after what I just did.” I hear myself dancing around painful words, and I’m angry at myself for playing mind games with my own conscience. “To that kid.”
“Ah,” he says in realization. I expect him to excuse it. Tell me it wasn’t my fault. Tell me I had to. Offer forgiveness I won’t take for myself. But he doesn’t.
He just says, “It changes a person.”
Santino puts his arm around me and kisses my head. He doesn’t say more, doesn’t tell me it’ll be all right or to hush. He just gives me something to lean on until I’m strong enough to fight again.
He holds me close as the car heads down a familiar road. I recognize the green house to the left and the copse of oaks.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“I’m taking you home.”
Home? I don’t have a home. I was taken from my parents’ house, then to my aunt and uncle’s in America, which I was forced from.
None of those places are home to me. Home is with Santino.
But when the car makes the last turn and stops at a familiar gate that guards a modern house filled with gold-painted furniture, I freeze.
There’s a pool behind it, and that’s where I watched him die. I can’t sleep in a bedroom overlooking it. It’s a murder weapon.
“No,” I say.
“No?”
I get out of the car and walk to the gate, the gravel crunching under my feet.
This house. It has too much inside it. Bad memories. Bad decisions. Not just him dying in the pool. But me crying in the corner. Gia beaming over my wedding gown. The look on Santino’s face when I put a gun to his head.
I hear his footsteps on the loose rocks behind me, and when he puts his hands on my shoulders, I relax, but not enough.
“I can’t go here,” I admit.
“I thought you’d prefer it.”
I turn to face him. “Prefer it to what?”
He nods slightly and brings me back to the car, and I follow, trusting I’ll never have to spend another night in that house.
Secondo Vasto is a triangle. Two sides are tucked into the mountain range, and the river—with its single bridge—is the hypotenuse. The shape of the horizon has always oriented me, even now, heading up the foothills to a fortress I’ve only ever seen from below.
We stop at a set of cast-iron gates at the highest buildable point of the mountain. Stone guardhouses stand on opposite ends of the gate, each flat on top and big enough for two men and their guns. One is built into the sheer rock face. The other is attached to a wall that drops off the steep end of the earth. The day Santino took me to Loretta’s home, this was the house he pointed toward on top of the hill. The one he said his men watched from.
The gates open, and we take a driveway that cuts through a pristine lawn. On the dropside is the back of a white house with a cupola atop the roof—like a watchtower over the world—standing against an expansive view of Secondo Vasto. Five smaller buildings are built into the rock-wall side.
“Welcome to Torre Cavallo,” Santino says. “Your grandfather built this for his American mistress.”
“She must have been something else to need this kind of protection.”
“They say it was to protect her from his wife.” He shrugs. “But he died badly, and his mistress died old.”
Good for her, I guess.
“When we were kids, we told each other no one lived here,” I say, looking out the window. “Rosetta went to school, and the kids told her Altieri Cavallo haunted it to make sure his mistress never had another man. To punish him, when she died she wouldn’t let him follow her to the land of the dead, so he’s stuck here.”
“I haven’t seen him.”
“When I found out my mother’s maiden name, I asked Zia if this was her house, and she laughed. She said that was a different Cavallo family. She said I shouldn’t read anything into names, and I believed her. My father was a grocer. You know?” I look at him, and our eyes meet. “I always thought of you as more of a Cavallo than me.”
His arm tightens around my shoulders. “I’m as much of a Moretti as you, but not by blood.”
That sounds right. Emilio Moretti was more of a father to him than to me. I didn’t even know him.
We pull up, and Carmine gets out to open the gate and close it when Gennaro drives us through. Santino helps me out of the back. A handful of men rush out the front door, barking news in Italian. I learn their names from listening. Vito is the tall one. Florio with the brown suit. Remo, whose handsome face matches something already in my brain.
“Remo Priola?” I say, still rattled but trying to find an anchor in the chaos, and this guy is it. “From St. Anselm’s? Third base?”
“Hey.” He smiles. “When they said Violetta, I kinda figured it was you.” He glances at Santino and puts up his hands. “I played baseball.”
“You were good too.”
My husband nods at him, then brushes a lock of hair from my face. “You can walk? Or should I carry you?”
“I can walk.”
“Bene, allora.” He offers his arm.
Silently, the men part like a sea of reeds, making room for us to pass into the house—as much my property as it is Santino’s—arm in arm as if we’re king and queen returning home.
The entrance is gilded, carved, painted, and inlaid with intricacies of stone and wood. A naked woman holding a pitcher rises in the center of a waterless marble fountain set in front of the curved staircase.
“Wow,” I say dryly. “Altieri’s mistress and your grandfather went to the same interior design school.”
Santino scoffs. “It’s fine for business.”
He leads me upstairs, and as I peer into the rooms we pass, I notice there are no pictures on the walls or decorations anywhere, and the sharp-edged, clean-lined furniture is as much a mismatch here as the gaudy, overdone furniture in Santino’s glass-and-stucco house. There are double doors on each side of the hall. One set is open to reveal dark wood and warm light.
“That’s my office. Like at home.”
“You should keep the doors closed if it’s off-limits.”
“To you, it’s not.”
He takes me across the hall. There’s a narrow, twisting staircase in the center. Bright light filters on the steps from above.
“The cupola.” I stop to look.
“I don’t want you up there,” he says as he opens the double doors to the bedroom.
Before I can ask why, something inside me twists. I bend and cringe, but it passes as quickly as it came.
“Violetta?” He shuts the door. “Are you all right? I’ll call you a doctor.”
“No doctors.” I don’t mean to be this definitive, but I can’t bear the thought right now. “I think I’m hungry.”
“Celia’s making something for you.” He puts a hand over my jaw, brushing his thumb along my bottom lip.
“She’s up here?” I have never been more delighted.
“Si.” He says it absently, running his fingers over my forehead, my bruised eye, my jaw and throat—touching me as if he’s rediscovering something he lost.
I find myself mi
rroring his appreciation in the same way. I touch the shape of him. The body I thought was cold and dead is warm and alive. The unattended beard on his cheeks, down his neck to the hair on his chest, and the shape I can feel through the shirt.
The way we trace each other isn’t sexual. Not at first. Initially, we are exploring in silent appreciation of everything we love and almost lost. It’s the first moment I’ve had to take in that the vacuum his death created is now full again.
“I want you to know something,” I say, unbuttoning his shirt so my fingers can discover what my mind is only now accepting.
“What is it?” he whispers, efficiently pulling off my T-shirt and leaving the scapular sticking to my skin.
He’s here. He’s really here. Somehow, I still can’t believe it. I won’t let myself. Even when I run my fingertips over his face, I’m afraid to accept it. My fear won’t let the facts stick.
“I don’t know when I stopped wishing you dead,” I say, gently touching the bruise over his heart. “But when I lost you, my life felt thinner…like someone had shaved half of it off. That was what it was like before you came. I was half a person, and I’m never, I swear it, never going back to that again.”
“You won’t, Violetta.” He takes my chin between his thumb and the crook of his index finger, holding it so tightly it hurts just enough to stab through the lingering sadness. “You won’t see my back the rest of your days.” He brushes my nipples with the backs of his fingers. “I’m only walking toward you or standing by you.”
“Or lying in bed next to me.”
A smile creeps up one side of his mouth. “Or making you scream to heaven.” He undoes my pants and slides them down, kneeling in front of me.
“Take me there.”
I don’t have to ask twice. Kissing as we pull off each other’s clothes, we’re two people with the same goal, falling onto the bed in a knot of limbs, exploratory grasps, and hungry strokes, like lovers at it for the first time. My legs wrap around his waist. I want every bit of my skin to touch every bit of his. To be so close we can’t be pulled apart. His erection slides into me as if we were always one body, temporarily separated.
