by CD Reiss
I’m not sure what makes me angrier: the thought that my father was so incompetent that he needed to promise his daughter to be saved, or that my father was involved in such corrupt bullshit, he threw his daughter to the wolves because she was a depreciating asset.
Celia looks away, jaw set, then slides a knife from the block.
“When Nino left me,” she says, pushing the ball of dough to the center of the counter, “I had a choice. Work here”—she cleaves the ball in two—“or live with my father.”
She rolls her sleeve past the elbow, and when she can’t roll anymore, she yanks it over half her bicep to reveal dots of furled skin the size of a pea. I’d seen this kind of wound before. I’m trained to know what they are, and when observed in children, they’d prompt an immediate phone call to the authorities.
“He doesn’t even smoke,” she says with a snarl. “But he buys them for when I disobey. Or burn the gravy. Or when my husband finds someone prettier. Or when he thinks I look too much like Mama.”
She pulls down her sleeve, then wipes her eye with the cuff, taking a brave sniffle before dropping the knife to lift the lid of the soup pot with one hand so she can stir with the other.
I don’t know how these life debts work, but they destroyed my life, and the culture that allowed the debts also allowed Celia’s father to burn her with cigarettes.
I want to go back to missing my father instead of hating him, but that’s over now.
I’m through. Done. Ruined.
With the slam of the front door, Santino’s home.
Men.
Fucking men.
Show up for the food and little else.
Has a man ever choked on Italian wedding soup? Because I want to wish for the possible, and right now, I’d pretend I’ve never heard of the Heimlich maneuver.
“Celia,” I say softly, “you’re safe here. I don’t want to take your job, but you have to go now.” I look at her, and though she’s six inches taller than me, I’m looking down on her. “Right now.”
The security system on the front door beeps. I hear keys clack against the front table.
He’s home.
Celia leaves without another word, and a second later, Santino shows up in the kitchen doorway, standing there as if nothing’s changed between us.
Maybe nothing has.
Everything’s changed between my dead father and me, but it feels as if something’s different with my husband.
I wrap Celia’s dough in plastic and put the lid on the pot of escarole.
Santino picks up two bowls, and without a word, he sets them on the other side of the kitchen bar, where we never eat. He always eats with me in the dining room, and I figure he’s setting them down for me to bring to the formal room. Instead, he gets spoons from the drawer and places one on the right side of each bowl, gets a third teaspoon, and lays it on the parmesan I’ve taken out of the fridge.
“Come,” he says softly. “I’m hungry.”
He slides onto his chair, takes two napkins from the basket, and lays one on his lap. The other, he holds out as I sit, and drapes it over my leg. He picks up his spoon when I’m settled, because no one eats until the king starts, then drops it in favor of the parmesan.
“So,” he says, hovering a spoonful of cheese over my bowl. “Parmigiano?”
“Sure.” I can’t look at him, so I watch the dust settle on the surface of my soup, covering the lumps of sausage like snow on the mountains.
He dredges cheese, then uses his spoon to cut the diameter of his soup. He eats like a man waiting for someone to speak before he does, but I’m not someone. I already sent him that picture. That’s enough communicating for me until he says something I don’t already expect.
“You know then?” he asks finally.
“I don’t know anything.”
“About your father.”
“What about my father?”
“Games make me impatient, Violetta.”
I shrug and eat my wedding-fucking-soup. I don’t look at him, but I feel the impatience he promised along with something new. Curiosity, maybe. He wants to know what I know, and though I assume it’s for business reasons, I tell myself there’s more to it than that.
When my bowl is empty, I wipe my mouth and look at him in the flat light of the kitchen.
He’s tired.
Powerful, beautiful, and exhausted.
“You knew my father,” I say. “You were friends. This isn’t a picture of three guys who don’t know each other. The rest I filled in, but that’s all I know for sure.”
“Is it?” His voice is a threat, but it also betrays worry.
Santino removes the picture of him and my father from his pocket and places it between us. My spit’s dried, but it’s unmistakable on the glossy surface.
“Armando brought this. Gia’s been crying because she wanted to tell me you did this to it, but she stole the keys, and she was afraid.”
“Another frightened woman.” It’s not funny, but I laugh to myself because the pieces are clicking. “Nice work, big man.”
“Why did you spit on it?” he asks. “Because we were friends?”
“Of course that’s all you have to admit to. I knew you’d look at the picture and say, ‘E, allora? This is me and Emilio at a wedding. We lived in the same comune, eh?’”
His smile disarms me the way my imitation of his accent apparently disarms him.
“And you wouldn’t say another word. You’ll just give me that cold, hard look to put me in my place and walk away. But…” I lean forward and put my hands on my knees. “If I spit on it, you’ll know in your heart that I know, because that’s too easy. It lets you off the hook. I want you to know what I think.” Sliding off the stool, I put the spoons in the empty bowls and pick one up in each hand. “I want to tell you what I believe.”
“What then, Forzetta?”
“You let me think my zio sold me, when it was my father who did it.” I put the bowls by the sink so I don’t have to look at him. “My father gave me to you as a guarantee on a debt. I think I deserve to know what I’m worth.”
“Everything.”
“Don’t bullshit me.”
“Your mouth,” he says from right behind me. He moved so quickly and quietly, I didn’t even know he was there until he spoke.
“You’re as stuck as I am,” I say into the dirty dishes, now all too aware of him by the energy radiating from his body.
“And this is what you believe?”
“Yes.”
“All of it?”
He’s so close I can barely turn, and he doesn’t budge when I face him.
“Why shouldn’t I?”
He takes my chin and looks deeply into my eyes. I can only look away for a moment before he draws me back. I set my jaw tight. If I don’t have control over my eyes, I can at least control the mouth he keeps mentioning.
“You are so much like him,” he says, his thumb stroking the cleft in my chin. The rest of my body goes numb so that the nerve endings under his touch can send a signal up to my brain and down to my core at the same time. “He was fierce, and loyal, and he surrendered nothing until he absolutely had to.” He lowers his hand and steps back. “You meant everything to him.”
“Then why?”
He takes another step back, and when that distance grows, so does my panic that it’s not all my father’s fault, but my husband’s. I’d been too comfortable forgiving him.
“Why, Santino? Did you make him?”
“No.”
Santino making another man give up his daughter just to dominate him.
It could be.
It could also be that my father didn’t surrender me. It was possible my parents died to protect me, and Santino shot them for their defiance.
“Did you threaten him?” I say to shut out the tangle of thoughts before everything unravels. “Or my mother? Rosetta?” My voice rises with every word. “What did you do?” I scream, because I can’t let myself believe Sa
ntino killed my father, and my need to wall off my husband from the worst of my fears is scarier than the possibility itself.
Santino takes me by the biceps, bending to eye level. “I did what he asked me to.”
“What did he ask?”
Who could ask the king for something this massive and be indulged?
“He was my boss, Forzetta.”
All the fear hardens into something rigid and brittle, because I believe him, and with that, my world shatters.
24
VIOLETTA
This room again. It brackets everything in my new life. It’s where I go when things end and begin. To be alone. To hide. To be found.
Four walls. Three opaque, broken by a door to the bathroom, a door to the closet, and a door out—all closed. The fourth wall is glass from corner to corner, so clear I feel as if I could walk right off the edge of the floor. This room is one of many in Santino’s dollhouse, with its laughably ornate furniture and walls painted in the stark, white perfection of reproach.
I crouch in the same corner as the night he took me, trying to sink into the same helplessness so I can dig up the same strength, but it doesn’t come. I’m not a hapless victim anymore. I know who he is now, and I know who I am.
He’s the man who carried me up here without a word, and I’m a citizen of a country I hate.
Mostly, I know why I’m here, and this keeps me from protesting my own innocence, because I’m not some bystander in someone else’s war. I’m a player in it, and I have been since the beginning—since I got on that plane. Since third grade, when Rosetta showed me the newspaper with the photo of my parents in the street and I decided the Italian of the article was too much trouble to read. Or the moment I decided to believe a grocer and his wife—who’d never been involved with the camorra—were hit outside his store because someone else was targeted.
The minute I was old enough to stop believing the apparatus to get my sister and me to America just appeared out of nowhere, and believed it anyway, or when I trusted my uncle could keep his hands clean, yet receive a visit from Re Santino as I approached womanhood, I willfully denied the truth.
When Elettra talked about daughters being bartered and I shrugged because I thought I was safe from it, I stopped being an innocent bystander with the credibility to pooh-pooh the backward traditions of my ancestors.
There’s a release to admitting what I’ve avoided calling by its name.
I am a capo’s daughter. I could have figured it out with a little effort and curiosity, but I didn’t want to. The admission gives me enough relief to fall asleep, but self-rebuke keeps the dreams away.
Days go by in that three-walled room. I cut a path between the corner and the bathroom. I’m in there for hours sometimes, soaking in a tub of clear, warm water until I’m shivering.
Am I this prune-fingered body? These blue lips?
Am I the sagging shoulders and cold-hardened nipples?
Where is my father? Where is the mafia? Is it in my body? Passed through DNA, in the tiny cells sloughed off my skin and reborn in my marrow, shit out and made new?
Is it in the habits of my mind? Are my neurons patterned for the routines of a criminal life? To see around hard work. To look for the shortcut. Was my academic laziness—the acceptance of excellent grades with no effort—a kind of fakery? A choice? Or a sin in the genetics of my soul?
It’s dark, then light, then dark, then light in a pattern that’s the same as always, and the same for everyone, no matter what their father thought they were worth.
A splash in the pool wakes me.
Santino’s down there, swimming. Same as always, but now it causes a pit of nausea in my guts.
A plate with a half-eaten sandwich sits on the tray by the door. It must be mine, but I don’t remember eating it.
I recognize the symptoms of mental shock.
I feel everything and nothing.
I’m numb and in excruciating emotional pain.
I’m confused with crystal clarity in every thought.
When I stand, my knees ache and my back jolts with pain, but I shake it off and go to the window.
The midnight moon reflects the water’s ripples in a funnel of glitter. It’s sliced apart by the Santino-shaped blade as he laps across the pool, swimming like a shark trapped in a too-small aquarium. Like me, in a glass-walled dollhouse with nowhere to go, because I’ve always lived here. I’ve never truly been in the wild.
Not that we are anything alike or that we understand each other. He took me from one cage and put me in this one that he constructed around himself.
Maybe.
He doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt, but I don’t either.
Maybe.
Whatever’s happened in my life, there’s only one person who knows and understands what it is, and that’s not me.
So I go downstairs, through the dark house, and outside, where Santino comes up for air on the side of the pool and catches sight of me when he shakes the water out of his hair.
“It’s good to see you,” he says, and for once, I believe him.
It’s good to see him too, but I don’t owe him a kind word. Or maybe my resistance is just the fake American playacting I’ve been doing my whole life.
“What are you looking at?” he asks as if he doesn’t know.
An American captor under an American moon, I want to tell him.
Instead, I’m honest.
“You.”
His features are dark in the moonlight, so the predatory grin that crawls across his face is stripped of the pleasing costume. Teeth glow white and perfect—sharp in the front to bite me to pieces, framed by points to break my skin, and flat near the jaw’s source of power so my body can be ripped apart.
He pushes back from the wall and does a somersault underwater. His abs glow in the pool’s light as he pushes off. He must know he’s as beautiful as any sleek cat at the top of the food chain. He must know he can use this to lure me, shock me with a venomous bite so he can luxuriate in eating me, discarding the bones, and leaving the rest in a dollhouse built into the side of a hill.
I’m terrified of these visions. When he gets out of the pool, dripping and shining, my blood quickens to run away, go back to my three-walled room, but I can’t. Like a gazelle abandoned in the high grass, I sit still, waiting for the death I was born for.
“I don’t want to hear any more lies,” I say.
“What don’t you believe?”
That I know myself.
That my life before you was the one I was meant to live.
That you give a shit about me.
He almost looks boyish in the light, shadows erasing the lines and scars and ferocity sitting in his cheeks. His hair is tussled, his teeth gleam. He smells of soap and chlorine. I want to press my nose against his neck and breathe it all in.
“I’m sorry, my little violet.” He cups my cheek and strokes me with his thumb.
I find myself leaning into it, lapping up all the attention he’s willing to give.
Where’s Forzetta in this moment? When did she become the little violet, turning her face toward a monster’s palm to tempt her lips into kissing it?
Before I can, he takes his hand away from my cheek to crouch in front of me.
“This hurts you more than being dragged into a car,” he says.
Looking at the space between my feet, I nod.
“Why?”
He’s being more than nice. He’s showing compassion and I want to hate him for it, but I just don’t have the strength. I have no one else to talk to.
“I thought I was different.”
Those words, with their partner, but I’m not, fog my vision. I don’t look at Santino. I can’t. It’s just me and the concrete between my sandals, where a star of darkness has appeared from a drop of water that fell from his body, or a teardrop that fell from mine.
“I thought,” I continue, but the lump in my throat stops me for a moment. “I thought I didn’t
fit in here. I thought you came and dragged me to a place I didn’t belong. Backward. I thought—” I swallow hard again, and another two dark stars join the first between my feet. “I thought I was better than this life and better than you. I’m sorry if that hurts your feelings but not really.”
He gathers my hands in his as if he is gathering risen dough—gently, but with conviction. “My feelings aren’t hurt.”
“I never had a chance,” I say. “This is who I was from the start. Everything else was fake. I was acting and I didn’t even know it.”
“Forzetta.” He takes my chin and turns my face up to him, but I can’t look into his eyes right now. I’ve somehow gone from a little violet to Forzetta, but I feel neither delicate and beautiful nor powerful for my size.
“You know what this means?” I ask, still turned away, facing a fichus in a pot that I have no interest in.
“No.”
I can tell he has some ideas what I mean, but none of them are correct, because he had me dead to rights from the beginning.
“This means I can’t fight it.”
He lets his hand drop, but the rest of him is still. In the pause, I hear his thoughts in my head and snap my attention back to him.
“You want to say I shouldn’t have ever fought it,” I snarl.
“No.”
“Then you want to say it’s Zia’s fault for raising me this way. Or America. Or you want to say it doesn’t matter as long as I accept it, right?”
“What I want to say”—he stands, and my eyes follow his as if they’re on a leash—“is that I’ll miss the fight.”
Sure, he would. Resistance keeps it exciting. I thought I was better than my situation, and he knew it. He used it to control me, without letting on where the control was coming from. What’s more entertaining than a puppet that thinks it’s a real girl?
But he doesn’t seem self-satisfied. He seems ashamed, and that isn’t as rewarding as I assumed it would be.
“Do you think he would have told me?” I ask. “My father?”
