by CD Reiss
Loretta doesn’t know I’m coming. If she’s home, I’ll talk to her. If she’s not, I’ll wait. If Damiano’s there again, all the better. This will be over sooner than I thought.
“So,” Tavie says as he drives. “We getting her for leverage? ‘Cos of her and Damiano?”
“No.” I don’t explain further. My cousin doesn’t have to know my reasons even if he knows Loretta’s history. Dami would let her die to get ten centimeters closer to the crown.
The road down to her place can be as treacherous as the conversation I am forced to have with Tavie. He drives the Mercedes around the curves with confidence. If we all get past this, I decide this will be his job.
We’re halfway to Loretta’s when I have enough signal to call the Politos.
“Pronto?” Guglielmo answers the phone.
“It’s Santino,” I say. “I need Madeline to come to her niece. Have her pack a bag.”
He grunts, and there’s a muffle over the receiver. Words spoken in whispers. Then her Zia Madeline comes on the phone.
“Where is she?” Her voice is stiff. Something isn’t right, and I decide not to answer the question.
“Just be ready.”
“Is she up the mountain?”
“You’ll know when you know.”
“I can’t come, I’m sorry,” she says quickly and hangs up.
I’m left looking at my phone. Something is wrong.
“What happened?” Tavie asks.
“We’ll pick up another car and go there next,” I say more to myself than him, counting how many men I think I’ll need. “Someone’s there.”
“Gia?” he asks.
Maybe. Maybe not. But now I know I have to deal with the problem in front of me. Tavie.
When someone is sent into exile, I personally tell the family why. When men are killed, I tell the family how. I promise vengeance if it’s appropriate and let them know when it was delivered. I have to do this every time, in person, or the whole city would erupt into amateur killing hour. It’s a terrible thing, to tell young parents their son was murdered. It’s worse when they’re older. They think it’s time to rest and let their children move forward, then I come to let them know there will be no more forward motion. Everything they took for granted now stops.
Now I owe this boy the same respect.
“Your sister,” I say.
“If I knew where she was, I’d go to her and tell her she’s doing the wrong thing.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Octavio.” I grab a handful of his hair and give his head a playful shake. “You’d tell her to run.”
“I would not.” He pushes my hand away.
“Don’t lie to me. You’d give her your car keys and a full tank of gas so she could get out.”
In a low Italian falsetto of my voice, he replays an incident from our childhood. “‘Run, Tavie, before they get shoved up your ass! Run!’”
“How stupid do you have to be to steal strawberries from Emilio Moretti? Eh? Who does this?” I push his shoulder. “Men get killed for less.”
“I was seven.”
“You were eight. And that only means Camilla’s the one to beat you. Or worse, I have to do it to prove I won’t go easy on my little brother.”
We drop into silence. He’s not my brother, but he is as close as anyone will ever be.
“You would have gone easy,” he murmurs.
“I did. I let you run.”
“Yeah. You were a good brother to me and Gia.”
“Tavie,” I say, trying to tell him the thing I don’t want to.
“I know, Santi.”
“What do you know?”
“Gia. She… You’re going to… You’re really mad at her, and I don’t blame you. She shot you.”
“She did more than that.”
“Don’t say it. Whatever she did, don’t tell me. It’s not my business. But you should let her run away. Send her with nothing in her pockets if that’s what you have to do.”
He’s pleading for Gia when what I wanted to talk about was his father. Give him the option to be far away when we drag the man onto the compound. But we arrive at Loretta’s. I’ll have to do it when we get back.
The white BMW I bought her two years ago is parked at the bottom of the driveway, same as the last time I came, and she wasn’t the only one here then. That tank Damiano drives must have been in the garage. I have to assume he’s in the house, maybe not hiding in the bushes this time, or maybe hiding someplace else.
“I’m leaving this in front of the garage doors,” I tell Tavie. He looks back at me, too green to hide the fact that he wants to know why. “If someone’s parked there, we block it.”
“Yes. Okay. Smart.”
I put a hand on his shoulder and give him a little shake. “It’s going to be all right.”
“Are you sure?”
“I am always sure.”
“Okay.” He gives a sharp nod, convincing himself. “I believe you.”
“Bene. I’m leaving the keys. Get out with me, but stay by the car. Keep your eyes open.”
“I will.”
We get out. Tavie stands in the driveway to watch, and I approach the patio. Before I get there, Loretta swings open the door.
“Santino,” she says, arms crossed.
In those three syllables I hear an unusual guardedness. As though my name is banging up against a metal shield, making it rattle just a little. Once it was clear I was going to marry Violetta, she and I had to stop fucking, and even then, she didn’t put armor around herself with me. She didn’t volunteer information either.
“Loretta.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Pack a bag.”
“It’s not a good time.”
She tries to shut me out, but I stop her, staring through the space between the wall and the edge of the door. Something is wrong, and she can’t say what.
I take out my gun and walk past her, into the house, scanning the familiar living room for danger. I check the corners and closets, exiting to the back patio from the sliding kitchen door, listening for a man in the bushes, the scent of his cologne, or the adrenaline from his pores. All I smell is morning dew.
“You should go,” Loretta says from behind me.
I turn to her. She leans against the jamb with her arms still crossed. I wonder if they’re locked that way to hide something besides her heart.
“I haven’t seen Damiano in days,” she says. “If that’s who you’re looking for.”
“He knows I’m coming for him.”
“When you’re like this, no one gets ahead of you,” she scoffs. Her arms drop to her sides, and she backs into the kitchen. “Come inside, it’s buggy out.”
Is she saving me from a trap or drawing me into one?
Outside is better for me. More options. If men are out here and I go inside, I’m stuck there.
“Sit.” I pull out a patio chair for her. “And close the door behind you.”
She’s so efficient at doing what she’s told that I can’t read whether this was her plan or not. There’s neither satisfaction nor disappointment in her manner.
I do not sit. I stand where I can see everything, with my back to a small, enclosed area with a barbecue and no way to surprise me from behind.
“I’m alone,” she barks loudly. “I told you.”
She didn’t tell me she was alone, so she’s not.
“Have I ever lied to you?” When I stay silent, she looks at her lap, and the shield slips. “The way you lied to me for years?”
“I was always honest about what I could be to you.” I look over the garden terraces built into the mountain below, sniff deeply for cologne, check for movement in the garage windows.
“Not with your words but with your mouth.” The last word comes from the bottom of her lungs. It’s not loud, but it’s still a shout of the heart.
“You lied with your body.”
I feel no pity, no guilt, nothing. She may be telling
the truth, but she’s also stalling. Giving me room to locate whoever is here.
“And this is why you sold your body to Damiano? To get back at me?”
She sighs, shaking her head. “Do you have a cigarette?”
I take out the pack and offer her one. She wedges it between her lips, and I use my dented Zippo to light it.
“I heard how your lighter got like that,” she says. “You’re going on a murder spree, then you’re going to have a baby and a happy little family like it never happened.”
“There is no baby anymore.”
She pulls on the cigarette again, looking at me as if I’ve done something unexpected.
But the baby is gone, and I can’t let her talk about it as if it’s going to be born. It’s a curse in her mouth.
“Condoglianze,” she says, then turns over her shoulder to blow out smoke, making a pointed look upward, then at me.
I’m a split second from death. I know it without looking.
With all the energy I have, I straighten my legs and launch myself backward, toward the house and under the balcony, just as a bullet bursts into the tiles an inch from where I was standing. Her eyes widen, but she’s too terrified to move.
Without thinking it through, I jump away from a secure position to grab her and pull her into the house, saving her from a second shot.
She doesn’t waste a moment.
“Upstairs and in the front and—!”
I yank her behind me and shoot the man coming down the stairs. She growls, and I turn to see what’s happening. A thudding sound is followed by a second man falling backward into a table. She’s holding a ceramic vase.
I shoot the falling man twice before he has the chance to come back at us. Loretta drops the vase and holds up three fingers, then points toward the front door.
“Stay down,” I command, then throw her down because there’s another gunshot, and I don’t have a moment to wait for her to get out of the way of whatever’s coming.
Following the edges of the room, I go to the front of the house. From the bottom of the window, I see a trail of smoke, but no Tavie. Aiming above where he could be standing, I shoot the window. I lean out the jamb to find a car speeding away and Tavie lying on the ground with a lit cigarette still between two fingers.
“Fuck!” I climb out and crouch by him.
His eyes are open, and his breaths come in short hic-hic sounds. Calling his name will do nothing, but I do it anyway because he’s focused on me, yet looking past me. The front door opens, and light streams over the hole in his chest.
“Puh-puh.” A bubble of blood forms between his lips and stays there because he can’t get out another syllable. He’s trying though. Damn this kid, he’s trying. He’s living with a weight on his heart, and in a few seconds, he’ll die with that weight unlifted.
“Don’t worry, Tavie.”
“Dun-duh.” The bubble pops.
“I won’t. I won’t do it. I’ll figure something out. Do you hear?”
“Aa.”
I don’t know what that sound means, but it is the last one Octavio Polito will ever make. The cigarette drops from his fingers.
Loretta comes out and stands over us.
“Are there more?” I ask, closing my cousin’s eyes.
“Just the three.” She steps on the smoldering butt. “It’s starting, isn’t it? The war for the crown?”
“Yes.” I take out my handkerchief. Emilio tried to protect his daughters from this exact war, but he only delayed it and moved it over an ocean. I cover Tavie’s face. “Riposi in pace.”
I light up a cigarette. I have the feeling I’m going to need to buy a pallet of cartons before this is over.
“How did they know I was coming?”
“They didn’t,” she says. “They’re everywhere. Like roaches. Waiting where they think you’ll show up.”
They’ll be at Mille Luce. And my own damn house. And Anette and Angelo’s. And it’s confirmation that they’ve set themselves up with Violetta’s aunt and uncle.
“Pack a bag.”
“Why?”
“Just do it.”
“You bought this house to keep me,” she says. “You’ve told me where to go and where to work. You brought death to my door. Maybe I want to make my own decision.”
Fuck this crazy fucking woman for not moving.
“Please. For the sake of every libretto writer in the world. Basta.” My shout echoes off the side of the mountain, but she does not move. “My wife needs you.”
Done hesitating, she goes for her fucking bag.
10
VIOLETTA
The bleeding tapers off. The pain subsides. I curl into the hot water bottle and sleep for twenty-five hours, only getting up twice for the bathroom like a zombie.
The spark inside me was snuffed, along with the hope that Santino and I could ever melt into the world’s background and just be together with this child.
Tears don’t come when I try to cry it out. Instead, my stomach growls like an angry cat. I need to eat. Opening the closet out of sheer curiosity and optimism, I find my clothes have been moved here. The dresser drawers are full of my things. It’s as if my life’s been transported whole cloth from Santino’s house to my newly claimed family fortress in the mountains.
I shower, line my underpants, and—because I can’t bear the thought of being constricted or even seen—I put on a black tank top and loose pants.
My left eyelid is brushed with a web of broken purple veins and hangs lower than the right. Matching semicircles hover inside a sickly yellow corona.
The wound reminds me of what I’ve gone through. Santino is alive, but the rest of it really happened. I was kidnapped, drugged, treated like an object with temporary value, and only saved by a miracle. The life seeded in me wasn’t so lucky. I’ll never know for sure if it was the drugs or the stress or if I would have lost it anyway, but what does it matter?
They were careless and disrespectful with my family and me.
That one broken eye squints to see something it can’t when all the light gets in. A shadow behind me and before me. A darkness that’s not anger with Damiano and Gia. I do not feel a fiery rage at the thought of them taking everything from me for the sake of an ancient artifact. What I feel is stretched—as if some internal organ has expanded and hardened, or an intangible that I carried inside me has found its shape. It’s a feeling given form, and it’s the colors of the bruise—purple and yellow—mixed to mud, fired to solid ice, and left to harden in the cracks of my heart.
When Santino saw me in my Z’s hallway, I was a child. He saw something I thought was the woman inside me. It wasn’t. He saw this calcifying mass of darkness in its shadow form. It fills in my broken places, holding me together, making a shell over the grief and despair.
Now I can say to my reflection what I’ve been too sick and afraid to think.
“They’re all going to die for this.”
Celia smells like basil and rosemary, and it’s comforting that no matter how much I change, some things in the world stay the same. In the middle of our embrace, my stomach logs another complaint.
“Let me get you something,” she says.
“Just toast, if you can. Where is he?” I ask, sitting in the little kitchen nook.
I don’t have to say his name. The pronoun is enough. I need to know how he’s planning to kill the people who destroyed my pregnancy. Even if they didn’t mean it and I miscarried from stress or the opioids. Even if what they almost got away with had nothing to do with the actual bleeding, it’s their fault. I want a list of the plans, the timing, and the amount of pain he will inflict. I want veto power on anything too merciful.
“Around.” Celia sets about making the toast on a cast-iron skillet—old school—while I wonder where exactly “around” is in this compound. “It’s been a little hectic around here.” She touches a corner of bread and snaps her arm back, shaking her hand from the heat. “Men coming and going. And one wom
an.”
She picks up a butter knife and waves it toward the back doors, where rows of tables are being set up. A woman in a green dress unfolds chairs.
Loretta.
“What is she doing here?”
“There are fifty men here.” Celia shrugs and slides the toast onto a plate. “I can’t do everything myself.”
Santino brought Loretta to help? I don’t know what to make of his choices. I find it hard to believe she doesn’t still desire him the way any normal woman would. If he thinks he’s going to live in some backward paradise where the husband keeps a wife and a mistress under the same house, he has something coming.
Loretta slides open the door and enters the kitchen, seeing me right away. “You’re up!”
When she double kisses me, I stay stiff and unresponsive.
“Ah, your eye,” she says with concern.
“You should have seen it when they brought her,” Celia interjects.
“You put ice?”
“Yes,” I say coldly. “It’s fine.”
“I heard what happened,” she says with a glance at my belly. “I’m so sorry.”
She can go fling herself off the side of this goddamn mountain. She’s lying. She’s glad. I can see her face clearly…and I’m wrong.
She’s not a liar. I’m lying to myself.
She doesn’t look disingenuous at all. She’s a woman giving sincere condolences, and I’m a child looking for trouble.
“Thank you,” I say.
“You’ll try again. You go to the doctor. Get cleaned up. All done.”
“You have experience.” I hear myself getting sour again, suspecting she lost Santino’s child. It’s too intimate with him. Too much like stealing something from me. My insides are tearing themselves into pieces.
“I was engaged to Elio Sala,” she says, relieving me of images and ideas I cannot bear to hold. “Santino’s cousin. And since I was older, no one expected there to be blood on the wedding sheets.” She shrugs. “Anyway. Our baby didn’t make it, and neither did he.”
“Is that the Elio who…?” Celia stops herself and redirects. “From the baseball field?”
