by CD Reiss
“Vuole della pancetta?”
“Bene.” He nods approvingly and it suddenly feels like maybe, just maybe, I can do this. “Put it together.”
It takes a minute, but I eventually get out the right combination of words to make him smile and snap his fingers. Celia appears out of nowhere, her usual speed, and Santino orders breakfast. Eggs, potatoes, bacon, and coffee. Just like I asked for.
Celia bows her head slightly and disappears into the kitchen.
“Understanding is not enough,” he says. “You will relearn to speak Italian.”
“I can take it at school.”
“You’ll learn from me, this summer. And when you’re with me, in front of people, you will listen only. If they ask, you will be a dumb American. Never let them see you understand. Agree to it.”
I can’t formulate a situation where I’d need to play dumb. Wouldn’t the king want a proud Italian wife, not an American?
Will I ever understand his life? Will I ever want to?
“Okay.”
“Buon.”
He’s about to leave to go do whatever he does when I’m not around, but I stop him with a question.
“We talked about the day we first saw each other, in the hall? I was twelve.”
“When you were a child?”
The sun’s behind him, and I can only see his outline. I can’t tell if he’s joking or being a narcissist.
“You were terrifying then.”
“Am I still?”
I pause, debating how to answer, as I look at his hands clutching the towel around his neck. The hands that hurt my ass so badly I couldn’t sit the next day. The same ones I want to search under my panties again.
“Sometimes.” Now I look over the pool, because even though I can’t see his expression in the shadow, I can’t bear the intensity of the gaze that burns through me. “You didn’t stay for dinner or anything.”
“I had business with your uncle.”
“That’s what you say when it’s mob business.”
A tension cloaks him. I feel the threat in his posture, but I’m not afraid. He might hurt me, and I might want him to.
“Was I your business?” I ask. “Did you come for me?”
“No.”
I don’t think I believe him. How long has this arrangement been in existence? The day I was taken, Zio told Zia I was never theirs to keep. Have they been waiting for this day for all these years? Did they stop encouraging me to speak Italian and push me toward my dreams of being a nurse to save me from this life or prepare me for it?
Did they want me to fight back? To escape?
“But you remember me. A twelve-year-old in the hallway before a business meeting. How many like me could you have seen?”
“Your eyes caught my attention.”
Bullshit.
Rosetta had my mother’s beautiful, round hazel eyes and long black lashes.
I have boring brown eyes that are wide-set like my father’s. Nothing to see here.
Santino raises his hand and motions for Celia to come out. I smell the espresso as soon as she sets out the breakfast I requested in passable Italian.
My stomach growls, but my mind is racing.
My eyes? What kind of response is that?
How do I get the answers I want when I don’t even know the right questions?
“What did he owe you? My uncle? You said it was an obligation.”
“You don’t want to know any of this.”
“But I do.”
“Eat your breakfast.”
He starts away for a second time, and for a second time, I call out a question.
“Why not Rosetta? My sister?”
I’ve done it again—stopped him in his tracks—but he doesn’t face me. All I see is the sculpting of his back, satin in the setting sun.
“Rosetta was prettier,” I add, standing. “Smarter. More popular. Everyone loved Rosetta, so why would you—the king—take me for your queen?”
Santino turns only his face, as if he’s not truly committed to discussing further. With a flick of his chin, he throws away my sister’s memory. “You are what was offered.”
“Not much of a debt then.”
Santino’s suddenly committed. He’s over me in three steps, closing the space between us. He is hot, passionate, pushing me back with his intensity.
“Fuck the debt,” he growls, his breath on me, half an inch from a kiss I’d be powerless to refuse and that I’d hate myself for accepting. “Everything I have isn’t a fraction of what I would have paid for you. Never doubt that.”
Words melt off my lips, unspoken. He smells like chlorine and lust. Like a symbiotic relationship between pain and pleasure—blood escaping a wound and blood rushing between my legs.
He pushes himself away as if it takes all the strength he has.
This time, I have no demanding questions to keep him with me, and he goes inside without looking back.
All my questions are for myself, and I don’t want the answers.
22
VIOLETTA
I eat meals alone, leaving the desserts I make for Santino on a cling-wrapped plate. The next day the pastry is gone, and so is he. He’s like Santa Claus, eating the cookies children set out and leaving crumbs behind.
Sometimes, I wake up convinced he came to me in the middle of the night. I can smell the lingering scent of his cologne and soap. I’ve never been inside his bedroom, so I imagine the bottles of cleaning products he uses. Expensive. Italian.
But mostly I dream of Malta. And the days I’m going to steal back from Santino for putting me here.
I’ve read every book in the house. Or tried to. All of them, every last one, is in Italian. Even the Bible. It’s hilarious to me that he’s got a Bible. Every mobster I know of is a devout church-going man, despite them running such a filthy operation.
The house doesn’t otherwise have a single personal artifact or photograph, but that changes the day Gia bursts onto the patio, jingling a set of keys.
“Guess what I got?” she asks with half a laugh.
I look up from a book that could be a romance or non-fic about the Camorristi.
“An annoying habit of making me guess at what’s right in front of me?” I lick my finger and flip a page in a performative lack of curiosity.
“The café was slow today,” she says breathlessly, trying to keep up with her mix of Italian and English. “And so I borrowed these from Santino!”
She jingles the keys again, and I look at her sideways. What do the keys open exactly? Are they a way out? Is Gia delivering his trust on a little silver ring?
“What do you mean by borrowed?”
“Come on!” She skips away, calling over her shoulder. “Let’s decorate this museum of a house!”
I’m barely done drying my hands, but she snatches the towel away and pulls me outside by the wrist. The keys apparently open the garage, and inside the garage is a closet, and inside the closet are locked crates of things that haven’t been opened since Santino moved here from Naples.
Gia grabs a crowbar off the wall, still babbling like a brook. “Before you moved here, he said…” Gia deepens her voice to sound like Santino as I open the closet. “‘Put things around. Make the house look like home.’”
The light goes on automatically to reveal stacks of wooden crates stamped FRAGILE—STATI UNITI—FRAGILE.
Well, she failed, but I had to give them both credit for trying.
“I never got to these,” Gia says, straining.
The top of the first crate comes up with the squeak of steel nails and the crunch of pine under the crowbar. Inside, a painting of a seaside landscape and a gold statue of a naked lady.
“Wow,” I say, blown away by how tacky it is.
“I know,” Gia says. “It’s beautiful.”
How the hell did I end up here, in a storage closet with a girl who admires this monstrosity?
Meanwhile, Scarlett is having the time of her life on
vacation. Sunsets, parties, new friends laughing over drinks.
Taking the crowbar, I work on the next box, then the next while Gia assesses the value of the contents. When was the last time I went to get my nails or hair done? I can’t remember. What I do remember is the vacation of a lifetime I was supposed to go on this summer.
How difficult can it be to convince Santino we should leave the country for a vacation?
Maybe if I phrase it right. We’d be safer. We could relax. We could learn each other as husband and wife without worrying about kidnapping.
“Violetta!” Gia cries, and I realize I’m sweating and panting with slick palms blistered by the edges of the octagonal metal. I’ve taken the crowbar to every single box, cracking them open with violent thrusts and tossing the lids away without looking inside the crates.
The crowbar drops against the concrete floor with a hard clank then two smaller clicks, until the tool settles and all we can hear is the hard rasp of my breath.
“Are you all right?” Gia’s afraid now, and that feels all right. Part of me wants her to be good and scared so I’m not the only one.
I wipe my brow with my sleeve. It comes back dark with sweat.
“Let’s see what we have,” I say, dropping to my knees in front of a crate the size of a coffin. “Something here has to not be gross.”
She kneels on the other side of the box and we pull the lid off together. The last of the nails squeak in protest before it’s completely off. Inside, a big, wooden box and three smaller ones rest inside a bed of shredded paper. They have simple silver latches, saving the crowbar a few minutes of work.
I unlatch the big one. Another statue. Not a golden woman this time, but a lidded jar with a horse painted on it. The blue glaze is cracked in an all-over pattern and the lid once had something protruding from the center, but it snapped off at some point, leaving a flat circle of reddish ceramic.
“That’s interesting.” I reach in to remove it, but think better of even touching it.
“It looks old,” Gia replies, utterly disinterested as she flips the latch on a smaller box that’s the size of a toaster.
“What’s in there?”
“Boring.”
She closes it and moves to the next, but I’ve already learned that though I like Gia, she and I have different aesthetics and life values, so I pull it out and flip the lid. It’s full of photographs. The top one is of two people I don’t recognize standing on the seashore in a black and white world. I flip it over. Tiny gray AGFAs run diagonally across the white side, and 1963 is written in blue ink.
The old world existed in a time before digital.
“I like this,” Gia says.
I glance up. She’s holding a blue glass egg that’s nice enough.
“Me too.”
Agreeing with her makes her smile, and she puts it to the side so she can reach for the next box.
I flip through the pictures. Santino’s easy to pick out in each.
One of a group of sweaty boys, arms draped around each other as if they just got done winning a ball game or a brawl in the dusty field behind them. Even then, Santino had a handsomeness a layer of dirt couldn’t hide. The straight line of his nose and fullness of his lips are traits he carried from childhood in one hand, the cockiness, he carried in the other.
In the next group, he sticks out. All the boys are in suits with worn cuff edges and crooked ties, holding big white candles. Confirmation. That would make him twelve or thirteen, which means I was…I frown, doing the math in my head.
I wasn’t even alive then.
“You okay?” Gia asks, glancing up from another ancient artifact shaped like a terra-cotta horse with the head cracked off.
“Yup.” I flick the confirmation photo to the side.
The next picture’s just Santino in a courtyard between four apartment buildings, standing at the rim of a limestone fountain. He’s a young man now in jeans and a T-shirt that’s two sizes too big. His hair unfolds in the wind, and the shirt sticks to his body on one side.
He’s wiry, angular, ready for violence. When did he join the mob? When did this become his life, when only a few photos before that he looked so young and happy?
There’s a stretch of babies I don’t recognize. Grown men around a dinner table. A meal overlooking the beautiful Kodachrome countryside.
All of these are from Italy. No family, no events, are documented from his time in the US.
There’s nothing here he values. Even the photos of himself prove the point.
I flip through the rest quickly, and freeze at Santino’s features again because this time, they’re knife-like in their intensity and definitely not because I’ve memorized them.
He’s next to a young man of the same age with a scar on the side of his mouth. He looks vaguely familiar, as though I’ve seen another photo of him somewhere. They stand on either side of a man who takes my breath away.
Not because I’ve memorized him, but because I didn’t have to.
That dimpled chin. The wide-set eyes. The hundred subtle ways I see him every time I look in the mirror.
I am him.
He is me.
The rage that boils in my heart belongs to the man who made me.
Of course Santino knew my father for a long time. How else was the debt incurred? Suddenly, unexpectedly, I’m face to face with the man who sold me.
My father.
I could blame Santino because he’s plenty responsible, and he’s alive to be blamed. The real fault though? The real blame lies with this smiling, dimple-chinned, slicked-back asshole. The man who—in death—abandoned us and promised his fucking daughter to a man nearly a decade and a half older. If we weren’t in America, I probably would have been married the day after my first period. A child bride, stolen and erased.
A glob of regret and anger has been forming in my throat, and when the moment comes that I have to release it or choke on it, I spit on my father’s image. It lands right between his—and my—wide-set eyes, and it feels right. It feels like his penance.
“Violetta!” Gia cries, dropping a handful of shredded paper as if shock loosened her fist.
The compulsion to wipe it off, apologize, be the dutiful daughter I never had a chance to be, nearly overtakes me before I swat it away.
I hand Gia the globby photo. She looks at it as if it’s made of shit, and maybe it is. I lay it on top of a box where she can reach it.
“Give that to your cousin,” I say, “the next time you see him at the café, and tell him I know.”
I walk out before she can agree.
I reject this marriage.
I reject this husband, his rules, and the culture that put us together against my will.
23
VIOLETTA
It was never Zio. My uncle didn’t have the power to trade, sell, or give me away. It was my father, and the more I think about that photo, the more I know he wasn’t some hapless victim of the camorra.
He knew. Zio kneeled at Santino’s feet, begging for my life, because my own father had used it like a stack of coins.
My father knew Santino as a young man, and that photo wasn’t of three men who happened to meet one another at a party. They were close, and the ties were warm, tightened with business deals and slave trades.
Spitting on my dead father didn’t bring as much joy as I’d hoped, but it was a tangible action, no matter how useless, against the man responsible for putting me here.
Because now I know it was him, and I’m losing my mind.
Santino’s coming home, and I have no idea what I’m going to say to him. Imagining his full cheekbones lined with my spit, I pace the edges of the backyard and find an unkept row of weeds.
I pull the dandelion leaves.
They’ll come back, and so will I. He can’t keep me anymore.
The deal is off. He can spank my ass red a hundred more times, but I’m never going to stop running any more than a dandelion will ever stop growing.
> Storming into the kitchen, I decide to bake it all into a pie and serve it up.
There’s already a pot of Italian wedding soup on the stove, which is almost too ironic to be a fucking joke.
I find a few leaves of escarole in the crisper, capers in the fridge door, and enough 00 flour to bury the entire city.
“No, no!” Celia cries, shuffling in as I blanch the dandelion leaves, her arms out to rescue them.
“What?” I ask as if I don’t know what her problem is, dumping chopped pinole nuts over the dark greens, waiting for her to claim I’m invading her territory so I can set her straight, because I’m done with being window dressing. Yes, I’ll run and run, but as long as I’m here, this kitchen is mine.
“You can’t put dandelion,” she says, arms crossed because this should all be obvious. She purses her lips into a tight line and shakes her head as if she’s having a seizure.
“Dandelion leaves work as long as you chop them fine and add a pinch of sugar.” I look over to check on her, then back at the sautéing vegetables. “That’s what Nana said.”
Celia stands over the ball of dough I’d started for the crust, unwilling to contradict anyone’s nana. Her neck breaks into hives, and her throat convulses with a hard swallow.
She’s afraid, and her fear pisses me off even more.
“Was your father in a compromising position too?” I jab at the greens, because fuck this pie and fuck Santino for scaring every woman in this house. “Did Santino buy you as a cook before he bought me as a wife? Were you sold for protection? Was your father also so deep into the mob that he sold you off to get something else he wanted? Huh?”
Celia’s not answering, but as the leaves wilt, I keep asking questions that have nothing to do with her.
“Were you here when your precious Re Santino bought me? See, the way I figure it, Rosetta got sold first. To who? I don’t know. But whoever he was, he didn’t get what he was promised when she died and I can only imagine how pissed off he was. Because if I understand the rules right…and I do…he’s entitled to the next daughter in line. Me. But daddy went and pawned me off to Santino. Maybe the guy was relieved I was taken.” Turning off the heat, I damn myself with truth. “No one wants the little one. The ugly one. La seconda scelta.”
