Three Light-Years: A Novel

by Canobbio, Andrea

  “No, in fact I told her: Mama always listens to you, and she likes listening to you, and the next day she tells me what you’ve talked about. But she was adamant.”

  “And what do you think? Aside from what you told Michela, do you think I only act like I’m annoyed and irritated with her?”

  “It’s true, though: she exasperates you.”

  “Yes, children are exasperating, that’s nothing new.”

  “But no, I don’t think you only act like that with her.”

  “Good. Because that’s true. I don’t only act exasperated and irritated. I’m pretty sure I let her know how much I love her.”

  “Don’t get angry.”

  “I’m not angry.”

  They fell silent. Cecilia thought that maybe everything was settled, that they could talk about something else now. The two women at the neighboring table, doctors or clerical staff or relatives of patients—all presented less-risky topics of conversation. Instead Silvia resumed the discussion.

  “Maybe, but…”

  “But what?”

  “That talk you had with me, when you thought she might be influencing Mattia in some way…”

  “I was beside myself, I wasn’t serious. You were right then when you told me to cut it out.”

  “Yes. But she might have overheard something.”

  “She heard what she says she heard, that I’m very concerned about Mattia. And it’s true: I’m more concerned about Mattia than about her. I think she’ll get by very well in life. I don’t think she needs me as much.”

  “You’re wrong. She’s thirteen years old. She needs you very much.”

  “I know she’s thirteen, if you didn’t remind me, she would, she tells me all the time, she talks to me a lot and I talk to her, it’s not like she’s all by herself.”

  “Don’t get angry.”

  “I’m not angry.”

  “I told you about it because she was really crying. I don’t think she was putting it on to make an impression on me.”

  “She’s a born actress.”

  “She wasn’t acting. She said it was something she’s felt for a long time. She didn’t know how to make you like her. She used those very words: I want her to like me.”

  Maybe the only way to end that discussion and get out of that café was to actually get angry. Start shouting, ask Silvia if she realized what she’d been through the past several years, tell her it was easy for her to talk, having no responsibilities, knowing there was always someone to cover for her. Get angry and be unfair. Say something obnoxious and apologize a moment later. Get up from the table and walk out of the café. Getting angry would make her feel better and afterward it would make her feel worse.

  It was at this point in the discussion that the shy internist appeared from behind the column. Cecilia grasped at his arrival; in an act of desperation she invited him to sit with them, and when Viberti got up to go and order his usual plate of boiled vegetables she whispered to her sister that she’d forgotten she had arranged to meet her coworker, that she couldn’t send him away, and that they could pick up their conversation later on. If she thought Silvia would get up and leave them alone she was sorely mistaken. Not only did she remain seated and start eating her sandwich and sipping her tea, but she began chatting amiably with the internist. Poor Viberti was more uncomfortable than usual and tried as hard as he could to get a polite, normal conversation going with Silvia. But it was impossible to speak normally with Silvia, the conversation veered off in all directions. Like a cat on fire, her father used to say (she suddenly remembered the summer when her father had made up that expression after reading in the newspaper that pyromaniacs were drenching stray cats with gasoline, setting them on fire, and tossing them into the woods so they would spread the flames as they dashed madly from one bush to another, crazed with pain). For a while she thought she could stay in her seat and observe the scene and maybe even eat the sandwich that she hadn’t yet touched. Instead, she grew increasingly edgy, her chest felt tight and her stomach clamped, and after ten minutes the anger and pain made her leap up like a spring. Silvia had referred to her perennial boyfriend using the old name she’d stuck him with, Enrico Fermi, and among the many things about her sister that rubbed her the wrong way, her obsession with nicknames was particularly annoying. Partly because she was afraid it would rub off—when she called Viberti “the shy internist,” for example. And when she was finally outside, her eyes filled with tears at the thought of her daughter crying and saying, “I want her to like me.” Heels pounding the sidewalk as if to punish the pavement as she strode along, she reached the car, parked in the sun as usual, and too far away.

  * * *

  (An update on settings: the hospital has been largely decentralized, the oldest buildings demolished, my father’s section no longer exists; the Emergency wing was torn down, set up elsewhere, razed, completely rebuilt; Cecilia’s house was sold and divided into two smaller apartments; my father’s house hasn’t changed; their café is still there, and this is what amazes me the most, after all these years they’ve replaced the furnishings, naturally, but the column, the column is still standing, “like an ancient ruin,” Silvia would have said.)

  * * *

  A few days later, all of a sudden, she found herself thinking about how hateful her sister could be. She thought of how she had protected Silvia when their father was ill. She’d made sure she didn’t see him fall to pieces. She’d arranged her sister’s visits so that he’d seem like a retired old general, rather than a cancer victim. At the hospital one night, her father had ripped out the IV drip; they’d found him half-naked in the hallway pushing a wheelchair, he no longer knew which ward he’d run away from, he was convinced he was at the supermarket. When he returned home he’d confided to her that he was afraid of seeing Silvia alone, and she advised him to always take a Xanax before seeing her. It was odd to discover that her father behaved like all other human beings, that he ran away, and cried, and felt hopeless because he was afraid of dying.

  * * *

  The day the boy returned to the hospital, he wasn’t starving to death in an examining room in the ER, but was waiting for her in the outpatients’ department in Pediatrics. It was Antonio Lorenzi who called her and, in a light, playful tone that Cecilia didn’t care for, told her that her son had come to see her, with Luca, as a surprise.

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing serious, he had a little fainting spell at school, but he’s fine.”

  She felt like she was going to die.

  “Come on up and we’ll tell you all about it,” Lorenzi added.

  Her heart was in her throat and her legs were unsteady and two flights of stairs were unthinkable in that state, so she got into an elevator with two male nurses pushing an empty gurney. The elevator started and then immediately jolted to a stop; the nurses tried pressing a few buttons at random but nothing happened, they were stuck.

  “Are we stuck?” they asked each other. “Are we stuck?” they asked her, but she was too frightened to reply. “Well, what the heck’s going on?” one of them asked. “I’m a little claustrophobic,” the other man said, though he seemed very calm.

  The first one leaned toward the control panel, sounded the alarm, spoke into the microphone alerting someone of the situation.

  A voice crackled from the microphone: “I’ll check.”

  “Nothing we can do but wait,” the two men said, looking at her again.

  Cecilia lowered her eyes to hide her panic.

  “Are you claustrophobic, Doctor?” they asked her indifferently, with no hint of irony.

  “No, thank you,” she replied mechanically.

  The two exchanged glances. Another crazy lady, they thought. Or: There’s not one normal person in this place. They tried pressing the buttons some more and the elevator suddenly started moving again. When it stopped at the first floor, the doors opened and the two nurses got out without saying goodbye. “You see, it all worked out,” one said to
the other.

  She stayed in the corner, leaning against the metal wall, stuck in place, because her legs refused to respond to her commands, and her commands were uncertain and confused.

  Then the same voice as before crackled from the microphone: “So, tell me exactly what the problem is.”

  Cecilia leaped forward, got out of the elevator, and took the stairs.

  The first person who came up to her was Luca and she took refuge in his arms, unable to speak. Luca kept repeating “Everything’s okay,” stroking her hair, and they stayed like that, holding tight to each other as they hadn’t done in years. He told her that the child had fainted at school, that the teachers hadn’t been able to reach her (her cell phone was dead), and the ER’s number was always busy, so they called him.

  They drew apart only when Lorenzi came out of the outpatients’ ward and walked over to them and said to her, “You’re white as a sheet, wait, you can’t go in to see him like that,” and he led them into the doctors’ lounge. This time the shy internist wasn’t there waiting for her.

  Lorenzi made her sit down, meanwhile reassuring her, it was a simple fainting spell, no need to worry, everything seemed all right, they would do a CAT scan but it was clear that there was nothing. Then he said: “Hey, I hadn’t seen him in two years, but I thought he was in great shape,” and Cecilia was grateful to him, it was an acknowledgment of her as a mother, not a compliment from one doctor to another.

  Luca said something but she wasn’t listening. Lorenzi cited a similar case. She, too, thought of one. After ten minutes, without finishing a sentence, she said she felt better and they stood up to go to the ward.

  Mattia was sitting on the gurney with his back to the door, his legs dangling and his head tilted back. He was looking up at a louvered window. Cecilia wondered how long he’d been in that position, how long he’d been looking at the window from that angle. He could see only the sky so there was nothing to look at as he sat there thinking his thoughts with the blue in his eyes.

  “I’m okay, I want to go home,” he said, shrugging off his mother’s hug. He sounded like an angry teenager, complaining to his parents about not being allowed to go out at night.

  She explained that it was best for him to spend a night in the hospital: it wasn’t anything serious, but it was safer to remain under observation and have a little checkup the next day.

  The boy shook his head and said he was fine, he wanted to go home right away.

  “I’ll sleep here with you, tomorrow morning I’ll take you around the hospital and in the afternoon we’ll go home, I promise.”

  “I can’t stay here for a month, vacation is coming up soon and I have to go to summer camp.”

  “You won’t be here for a month.”

  Finally, Luca and Lorenzi intervened, seeing perhaps how defenseless she was, that she lacked the strength to persuade or force him.

  “You’ll go to camp, I promise,” Cecilia added at the end. She prayed the boy wouldn’t start crying, though it was much more likely that she would be the one to burst into tears.

  * * *

  Later she returned to the ER to trade shifts so she could be free for a day. Then she phoned her mother to go to pick up Michela; she didn’t want to ask Silvia because she’d noticed that she seemed tired lately, up nights working to meet a deadline. Nevertheless she called her, too, and asked her to stop by the house to pick up a pair of pajamas and a toothbrush for the boy. Silvia assured her that she would go get them a bit later.

  Mattia wouldn’t eat, but he was fine, he was lying on the bed looking out the window, still angry but now resigned to spending a night in the hospital. Being there with him in those circumstances was difficult; Cecilia felt she was annoying him, so she came up with things to do. She went to buy a small bottle of mineral water to put on the bedside table, a large sketchbook, and an Asterix comic book, and then went looking for a towel. She spoke with Lorenzi, she spoke with another pediatrician, she spoke with the head nurse and another nurse, each time she went back to see Mattia and told him what everyone was saying, that it was nothing, that the next day they would do a fun test with a huge doughnut that would go around his head, and draw a perfect map of his brain. Mattia nodded, but wouldn’t talk. At some point, thankfully, he began reading Asterix in Britain.

  Cecilia went to wait for Silvia in the hallway and sat down on one of the iron benches just outside the glass doors. She tried looking up at the sky to see what kind of thoughts the prolonged observation of that color in that exact shade could induce and concluded that they couldn’t be too bad, the child was just sulking to express himself and she happened to be the closest person handy.

  “What happened?” she asked him once they were alone.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “But where were you?”

  “In class.”

  “And what were you doing?”

  “Listening to the teacher; Miss Elisa told us she’s going to India.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then all I saw was black. When I opened my eyes I was lying on the floor and I saw faces all around me and the teacher said to stand back, that I needed air, but I was breathing okay.”

  “All you saw was black?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it awful?”

  He thought a moment and then replied: “No, because I wasn’t conscious of it.”

  “And then you were okay?”

  “Yes, but the teacher insisted on calling Papa. I mean, first she called you and you didn’t answer, and I told her again that I was okay, and she called Papa.”

  “My phone was dead,” Cecilia said guiltily, as though confessing a terrible sin.

  In front of the elevators two colleagues were talking with a tall, thin man who wasn’t wearing a doctor’s coat. Ever since the hospital administrator had been arrested, any man in a suit and tie who didn’t look like a doctor or a patient was assumed to be a plainclothes revenue officer. She recognized one of the two, she’d taken a CPR course with him in which they simulated chest compression and ventilation with an Ambu bag on a life-size mannequin. The mannequin’s name had been Ken, but she’d forgotten the name of that coworker. During the coffee break, he’d told her all about his daughter, who in the first five years of her life had been bitten by a dog, a rabbit, and a mouse (they lived in the country, and the little girl had walked into the dining room where the family was gathered, waving the index finger to which a small gray mouse was tenaciously clinging), had swallowed a coin and a battery from a Swatch (they discovered the battery before stitching up the dog bite, when they did a chest X-ray), drank a few gulps of dish detergent, was nearly drowned (pushed from a pier by a younger child), and had broken her arm flying off a swing. According to her colleague, some children couldn’t help it, it was as if they were born without whatever gene urged caution, as if they lacked the innate ability to recognize danger. Now his daughter was sixteen and had learned to be careful. But they’d gone through five years of terror. (As her coworker said that, he was smiling, he wasn’t terrified in the least, that wasn’t real terror.) Five years of terror, Cecilia thought; maybe years of terror are never more than five, maybe there’s a rule or a law that establishes the maximum number of consecutive years of terror. The small group broke up, and she went back to the boy, who in the meantime had fallen asleep. She returned to the hall and noticed that the sky was a warmer shade of blue, a color that would continue to fill her with positive thoughts, thoughts tinged with joy, in fact, like those dreams in which nothing happens yet you experience an intense feeling of happiness.

  Silvia’s silhouette appeared as she approached from down the corridor, walking along an imaginary diagonal line, veering to the left, then pushed back to the shady side of the hall by the light pouring through the windows. Cecilia didn’t move and Silvia noticed her presence at the last minute, maybe because she didn’t expect to find her sitting out there, maybe because she was preoccupied. She seemed preoccupied as she h
ugged Cecilia and asked for the latest update, distant and certainly less talkative than usual. Cecilia thought her sister must be upset, like she herself had been a few hours ago (like she still was); she thought Silvia, too, might be afraid that it was starting all over again, just when it seemed to be behind them. She didn’t have an exclusive on terror.

  Silvia hugged and kissed and cuddled Mattia, then pulled his pajamas out of her bag, first the top and then the bottoms, and laid them out on the bed next to him, shaping them into a full-length figure. Cecilia and the child watched her, not knowing what she was doing. When she realized it, she took the pajamas and folded them again, then handed them to Cecilia, saying, “Here you are.” She seemed ill at ease. She began joking, saying that if you asked her, Mattia had pretended to faint because he was sick and tired of being in school. Suddenly she went back to being the boisterous sister, chatty as ever. She insisted on a detailed description of the fainting scene, and without letting Mattia finish, told them about how she’d passed out once in college. She had ended up stretched out in front of the lectern with professors all around her, as if she were the subject of an examination. The boy laughed.

  When it was time to go, outside the room, Silvia asked if Cecilia had been frightened.

  Cecilia said yes, very much so. “And you?”

  Silvia didn’t understand.

  “I mean: Were you frightened, too?”

  “Oh, yes, very much so, me, too.”

  “Did you have an argument with Mama?”

  “Me? No, absolutely not.”

  “You seem strange.”

  “I haven’t even talked to her.”

  “Do you think she’s worried?”

  “I’ll stop by and see her, then I’ll call you or send you a text. Do you want me to bring Michela to spend the night?”

  “No, it doesn’t matter.”

  They said goodbye.

  Mattia had started reading the Asterix comic book again. She should find something to say to him, but she couldn’t think of anything. Someone had put a sticker on the closet door. It was very high up, she couldn’t read the inscription around the Madonna’s face, Lourdes or Czestochowa, Fatima or Medjugorje. She took off her shoes and climbed onto the bed next to Mattia’s, but before she got a chance to read the words she saw Silvia reappear in the doorway.