by CD Reiss
I’m ready to wage war against her father, Damiano, Tavie, and even Santino if I have to. I don’t know what caused this beautiful girl to break like this, but I will end them.
“Oh, no, look at your face,” Gia says when she finally gets a look at me. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“But I’m still mad.” Her face scrunches up to stop the next onslaught of tears. “Papa is too. So mad he says he’s sending me back.”
Celia slides the cookies and two cappuccinos onto the table. I thank her with a glance, and she leaves.
“Here.” I lift the plate. “Biscotti makes everything better.”
“I don’t think I can eat.” Gia looks pained to even say it. “I-I’m so sorry, I just… why did you break the flowers? I don’t understand it.”
If I tell her, it’ll all be over. I won’t be putting the lube back in the tube.
“Why is your father so mad?” I ask.
“An insult. He said it’s an insult and he can’t show his face.”
“Is it though?” I say. Gia looks confused. “They’re just flowers. You were ready for the date. Damiano showed up. All anyone had to do was lie about them falling or, you know, make a joke about how you wanted to see how far you could throw them, then you could drive over to Aldo’s.”
Her puzzlement turns inward, as though she’s playing over last night’s scene in her head and can’t figure it out. “Dami said, ‘You backing out?’ and I thought he was talking to me, but my father answered him and said, ‘no, no, no,’ like he was the one who had to reassure him. It was weird.”
“Yeah.”
“Then Damiano left really mad, and I ran out to the street to get him, but Tavie caught me at the gate. He said I was acting like a whore.” Retelling her brother’s insult makes her chin quiver. “But I just wanted to tell him it wasn’t me who broke it.” A fresh teardrop falls, then another. “Then they said it was you, but they won’t say why. Were you just mad at Santi?”
“Well, yes… but—”
“Can you tell everyone?”
“Listen, Gia, those flowers…” Am I doing this? I should talk to Santino before I do. “They weren’t just flowers.”
She’s hungry for answers, and there are plenty I could give her, but there’s only one truth.
“They were a message from Damiano.” I’m doing this. The train has left the station. “To your father.”
“What?”
“That he closed his end of the deal.”
“What deal?”
She’s a product of this culture. I won’t have to explain that much. I want to look away, but that wouldn’t be fair.
“You. You are the deal.”
The vulnerability of her face melts on contact with the truth. “I don’t understand.” False. She’s lying to herself. Stalling acceptance. “Papa said his debts were paid. That’s how they had the money to come here.”
“Damiano Orolio is paying them.”
If I’d been told this before it happened, and if I’d believed it the way she has to, I would have turned the house upside down. Thrown any object that wouldn’t break against every object that would. But Gia’s not me. She’s no stranger to the idea of having her body being used to pay for a man’s foolishness.
“I threw the flowers,” I say. “I was upset.”
“Because it happened to you.”
“Yes.”
She nods, looking at her hands in her lap.
“I thought he liked me,” she whispers, as if that’s the most important aspect of this entire mess.
“I bet he does.” I thumb a tear from her cheek. “Does your family know where you are?”
She shakes her head, looking through the glass doors to the backyard with her mouth tight in an expression of impending trouble.
“You don’t have to call them,” I say. “I can tell them you’re here.”
“Don’t. They’ll ask you questions, then come here to get me and… I can’t right now.”
“Then Santino will tell them.”
Her face lights up. “Can he? They won’t come if he says it.”
“Absolutely.” The word isn’t out of my mouth before I’m already texting him.
—Can you tell Angelo/Marco/Paola that Gia’s at the house with me and she’s fine—
—Why is she there?—
He won’t let me ask questions, but when I make the slightest request, he gets suspicious. I could tell him she just showed up and I had nothing to do with it, but he’s going to call Armando anyway. Let the man earn his salary.
“Done.” I put down my phone.
“Thank you.” She takes an oval cookie crusted with almond shavings.
“If you give me the keys”—I hold out my hand—“I’ll have Armando pull your car out of the driveway.”
She shakes her head and dismisses the idea with a flick of her wrist. “I always park on Foothill. There’s a secret spot.” She dunks the cookie in the coffee, bites, sips, smiles. “It’s good.” Her eyes dart around the immaculate kitchen. “I can’t believe you have a whole person just to cook and make coffee.”
“Celia and I work together.”
“Only for you and Santino.”
Of course, having such a person is a ridiculous indulgence. Since I’m not at school, I could do what she’s paid to do. Celia would have nowhere to go, but explaining the situation would just be defensive and betray Celia’s confidence.
“Yes.” I drink my coffee. “Just for the two of us. I guess more, if we had a party or something.” I shrug. “I don’t know who I’d invite. All my friends… they wouldn’t get it, and I don’t think the family actually likes me.”
“What?” Gia gently rubs her eyes with the pads of two fingers. They’re dry now, but still swollen. “But you’re so… you.”
I’m two people actually. One is a student at the nursing college across the river, and the other was small and silent until Santino dragged her out of the darkness.
“Oh, God, I’m rubbing my eyes. They’re going to get even more puffy.”
“I have a cucumber I can slice up.” I try to sound casual. No pressure. But I’m desperate for her to stay. “That’ll help with the swelling.”
I quickly chop a cucumber into cool, wet coins and place them on a plate.
“You’re so thoughtful, Violetta.”
“No, I’m so selfish. I’m so sorry I wrecked your flowers and your date.”
“You were upset I didn’t know. And now I do.”
She’s half right, but I don’t correct the other half.
Gia and I walk upstairs and down the hall, arm in arm. She pauses outside of my old room and touches the doorjamb. “Do you remember your first nights here?”
“I do.”
“You were pretty upset.”
I have several choices to make here. I’m not sure which one is the least painful for this young beauty illuminated by sunlight, red-cheeked from grief, and I decide that though the whole truth would be cruel, a lie would be worse.
“It was scary.” I go into the room first and put the plate of cucumber slices on the night table. “I hadn’t been away from home before. Not even to stay in the dorms at school.”
Focusing on my boring history of sleeping arrangements is the most innocuous angle I can think of.
“I’ve been away from home for a long time.” The way Gia says it—the coldness that settles over her—worries me. Before I can lead her on and change the subject, she sits on the bed facing the windows that overlook the pool. The sunlight on the water glints up at us.
“Here.” I pat the bed. “Lie down.”
She does and closes her eyes, folding her hands across her chest. Her next words come out as a whisper. “I won’t be scared.”
You should be, Gia. You should be terrified.
“Of what?” I feign ignorance and put the cucumber slices over her eyes.
“Our first night. Because Dami’s nice, Violetta. He really is. A
nd he has a house halfway up the hill with a view. And a Cadillac. And he said his businesses are doing really well, but he didn’t want to brag. And somehow it’s all ruined.” She sucks her lips between her teeth. “I don’t know what happens to me now.”
Downstairs, the security sensor on the front door beeps, then keys clack on the front table.
The man of the house is home early.
“We’ll figure it out.” I throw a blanket over her. “Just rest here for now and we’ll talk in an hour.”
Santino’s footsteps cross the living room, probably on his way to the kitchen to look for me.
“Thank you,” she whispers.
“My pleasure.”
Quiet as a secret, I tiptoe from the room and close the door. On my way downstairs, Santino’s deep voice crawls in from the backyard. He’s on a phone call, pacing the circumference of the pool.
I open the sliding glass door just enough to slip out, then gently close it. Santino stands on the other side of the pool, legs apart, large and imposing, a statue under the high point of the sun. He looks like an angel. An angel of death, perhaps, but an angel nonetheless. He’s speaking in rapid Italian, the kind my inexpert ears can only pick up every few words of—like debt and escrow and flowers, and names like Damiano and Marco are especially clear.
But his gaze tells me more than words in any language.
He’s not happy with me.
“Si. Ciao.” Santino drops his phone in his jacket pocket, looking at me across the water.
“You’re home early,” I say.
“Where’s Gia?” He crosses his arms.
“In my room.”
He looks up at the windows I’ve often stood behind to watch him swim.
“She’s taking a nap,” I add. “She’s very upset.”
“Of course she is. You smashed her flowers.”
“So?”
“You fucked up her life.”
“Fucked—what? No, no, no.” I stomp around the pool to his side, ready to throw him in if I have to. “Totally unfair. I’m trying to save her and you know it.”
“My sweet little American wife, these symbols have meaning. And actions have repercussions.”
“So the deal is off?”
He sighs the way you might before explaining the function of the circulatory system to someone who should already know how a heart works, then he gets behind a patio chair, shifting it into the shade. “Sit.”
I sit, and he moves a matching seat across from me. Pauses, leans forward with his fingertips tapping between his knees. I feel like a student about to be reprimanded by a very hot teacher.
“Marco lives inside Cosimo Orolio’s territory,” he says. “Dami is in mine. They received a blessing from both of us. This is not just some kind of permission. It’s a promise of protection.”
“I thought Damiano and his father weren’t speaking.” I’m proud of this nugget of knowledge.
“We’re all speaking when it’s business.”
“Of course. Gia’s life is just business.”
“You broke the flowers, and you are mine. So I broke them. I cut off the deal, and now I have to stop Damiano from going back to his father and inciting a war over it.”
“A war? Over this?” That doesn’t make any sense. A single arranged marriage shouldn’t be the difference between peace and war. “Does this have anything to do with what you told me last night? About the crown?”
“It has everything to do with it.”
At this point, I could say none of this is my fault because I didn’t know then what I know now. If he’d been more forthright, maybe I would have behaved differently. Maybe. But what’s the difference?
“What’s going to happen to Gia?” I ask.
“That’s up to her father.” He shrugs and leans back. “The man raised me. I know his way. He’ll punish whoever has the least power.”
“How?” I whisper, as if the most powerless person—who’s in my bed with cucumbers over her eyes—might hear me.
“By sending her home, where he’ll find someone else.”
“Has he considered not gambling?”
Santino ignores me, because to him and every other man in this town, Marco isn’t the problem as long as Gia’s the solution.
“She’ll get used to being home again,” he says. “Don’t expect her to come back.”
He lets those words fall heavy into my lap.
Shit. Shit-shit-shit.
“This is the way it is,” he continues. “You cannot change it. Even if I let you. You cannot.”
I caused this. I destroyed those flowers because I was pissed off, because I was trying to change a system that nearly ruined me, and in the process, I may have ruined Gia.
“I wasn’t… I didn’t know! I thought I was helping.”
“I need you to promise me something,” he says with a cartoonishly fake layer of patience.
“What?” I won’t agree to anything until I’ve thought about it, but I need to shut up to hear.
“You need to stop trying to fix the world.”
“I can’t—”
“And.” He holds up his hand to stop me, so I clap my mouth shut until he finishes, because once he does, he’s getting a piece of my mind. “And I’m going to trust you. I’m going to trust your nose is out of everyone’s business, and you’re going to leave things alone and prove to me you won’t make another mess like this.”
My arms are crossed so tightly, my forearms hurt. My jaw aches from clenching it shut. I have a twitch in my left eye that squeezes the sunlit corner of my vision, making Santino’s face go from dark to light and back again in a rhythm.
I start to answer, but he presses his fingers to my lips. “Don’t. Don’t tell me my trust will be betrayed, because it won’t be. You will do the right thing. You. Will.”
As soon as he removes them, he stands, and I look up at features obscured in shadow, blocking the light of the sun.
“What about the war?” I ask.
“If I can’t stop it, I know how to fight it. But it’ll happen fast.”
“How fast?”
“It may have started already, so…” He takes me by the chin. “I’m going to trust you.” He drops his hand. “Don’t surprise me.”
He walks away, touching my shoulder as he goes, trusting me so much he doesn’t even look over his shoulder to make sure I won’t stab him in the back.
17
SANTINO
My wife’s temper tantrum in my uncle’s front yard may get her exactly what she wants—an end to Damiano’s ‘mbasciata with Marco.
Gia will be sent home and Violetta will miss her. Gia will live. My wife might not be so lucky.
I’ve been playing a game of chicken with death my entire life. Staring it down in the face, telling it to play by my rules. It’s a game people lose by having something to tether them to life. No one rested in the rooms of my heart, so I feared nothing and no one.
Violetta turned the tables, and even still… I love her more than I fear her.
Santino DiLustro, you are a fucking sucker. A babbeo. You’ve sold your heart to this woman.
I was destined to spend my days looking Death in the face, and I was always destined to love Violetta.
When weighed against love, death is light as a feather.
The Mercedes slides to a slow, comfortable stop outside the nightclub. Gennaro’s been here for a couple of hours already, making sure it’s safe. He opens my door and damp night air floods in.
“Santino,” he says. “All good.”
“Grazie.” I give him the keys to park it.
A line of kids my wife’s age line up against the wall, faces changing color with the flashing neon sign above. !!Laser-Topia!! To prove the point, lines of laser lights dance around it. I find the crowds, the noise, and the lights vulgar, but the kids love it, it’s safe, and it’s more neutral than Mille Luci.
I fix my cuffs, nod to the bouncer who removes the velvet rope, and walk i
nside with nothing more than a raised hand of recognition from the woman behind the plexiglass and another security guard.
It’s not like the nightclub in Vasto where Emilio’s crew did his business after dark. Éternité was an old-world oasis in the middle of a city that seemed to be forgetting the past. Big bands, slicked-back hair, three-piece suits. Our way of life was preserved there. The tourists who found it thought it was quaint, and we let them believe it, because it gave us a cover for a business that was not quaint at all.
“Santino.” A familiar voice comes from behind me as I’m about to enter the loudest part of the club. The woman it came from wears a dress that could be red or white—it’s hard to tell with the color of the lights—with a crossover at the neck that hides what it’s legally required to hide and no more.
“Loretta.” I kiss her cheek, and she doesn’t encourage me to linger like she used to or look at me with an unspoken offer on her face. There was a time I would have pushed her through the first door I could find and fucked her like an animal behind it, but no more. I never had to tell her that was over when I married Violetta, and she never had to confirm.
“Tommy’s waiting for you.” She’s the manager here. I got her the job as a way to keep her occupied when I wasn’t fucking her, and it turned into a passion. A woman needs something to do before she marries and has children.
“Good.” I wait for her to take me to him, but she doesn’t.
Her brows knit. I know this expression. It’s worry, but not the kind for the future consequences of today’s hardship. No. This is immediate concern that something will happen on today’s clock. “What’s going on, Santi?”
She never got into my business and doesn’t expect a detailed answer. Not from me. I can’t speak for what Damiano tells her.
“Cosa?” I ask.
“Everyone’s carrying.”
“So?” There’s nothing strange about that. The only thing strange is her worry that anyone’s going to shoot up the place.
“Re Santino finally rolled his ass in here!” Tommy, the club’s owner and Loretta’s boss, interrupts in a white suit and black shirt. “They was going to start without you.”
