Chapter 9 Marisa
MARISA
A YEAR AND A MONTH LATER
The day begins with a detonation.
Not fireworks, not joy, just the spectacular physics of a diaper losing a negotiation.
Gabe’s face scrunches, Luca catches the mood, and both of them launch into a duet.
The apartment is cold enough that my breath paints the window.
The radiator sulks like a cat.
I kick the wall in the exact spot Lidia showed me, the pipe clanks as if it might try, then pretends to die again for drama.
“Gentlemen,” I say, sugar-sweet, one hand on each bassinet. “I love you. I do not love this.”
Gabe ramps to siren.
Luca takes a tragic pause, considers the ceiling, and adds harmonies that would make a choir weep.
I scoop up Gabe first, because he looks righteous about his contribution, and carry him to the couch that has a permanent mother-shaped dent.
There’s a bottle with three sips left on the coffee table, a cold half cup of espresso next to it, and a stack of unpaid bills auditioning to be coasters.
My shirt wears a museum of formula splatters.
On the floor is a bakery tote holding six loaves of orange-almond stollen I baked after midnight, one-handed, with Gabe tucked under my arm and Luca swaddled in my lap like a pastry I refused to burn.
I strip Gabe with the speed of a woman who has learned that delays lead to disaster.
The wipes are cold.
He lodges a formal complaint.
“I know,” I tell him, kissing his damp belly, knees braced against the coffee table. “I will invent an affordable, heated wipe dispenser and make us rich.”
By the time he is in a clean diaper and a fresh onesie with tiny motorcycles on the feet, Luca has decided the world is ending.
I flip them like pancakes.
Gabe gets propped with a rolled towel and a pacifier he pretends to hate then adores.
I pick up Luca, his cheeks red, eyes furious, and hair sticking up like startled grass.
“You are very dramatic,” I tell him. He hiccups like a metronome. “You get that from your mother.”
He quiets when I hum.
I do not sing well, but I sing often.
Old Dean Martin, the Sicilian lullabies Nonna used to murmur when the dough rose.
Sometimes a tune I do not know the name of, something that sounds like guitar and hands in a kitchen that is not this one.
When they were smaller the sound calmed both at once, a magic trick I clung to in the soft blue hours when the city lifted its shoulders and I thought of the mountains.
It has been a year since I ran at dawn.
A year since I slipped out of that cedar-smelling room and the men who made my body feel like a cathedral and my life feel possible, and I told myself it was fantasy.
I have told myself a lot of things.
That it was one night.
That a woman like me is not built to be wanted at the edges and the center both.
That men like them have whole worlds to guard and no business taking care of mine.
I told myself I was protecting them from a mess that might not be theirs.
If I say it fast, it sounds noble.
If I slow down, it sounds like fear.
The radiator takes pity and coughs up a thread of heat.
I thank it out loud, because I reward good behavior.
Downstairs the trattoria rattles pans.
Lidia, my boss and de facto auntie, sings with the morning radio in a voice that could scold a saint.
She’s a widow who runs her kitchen like a church: sauce on simmer, mercy on repeat.
She pays me in cash when she can, in stale baguettes and leftover veal when she can’t, and always in unasked-for advice.
When I first moved in, she handed me a knife and said, “If you can dice an onion without crying, you can stay.” I cried; she kept me anyway.
There’s a photo of her late husband, Sandro, in a paper hat taped to the fridge—him grinning like he invented gnocchi.
My boys’ pictures live beside him, clipped with a magnet shaped like a tomato.
Lidia tells anyone who’ll listen that the babies are “our best menu item.”
My phone buzzes with a grant reminder I opened at four a.m. and closed when one baby startled and the other answered.
I’ll have to finish filling it out another time.
I barrel through another diaper and set both boys by my knee and chance another glance at my stollen.
The loaves are beautiful in a way that makes my eyes sting.
The sugar crust crackles under my finger.
Orange blossom water whispers.
Rum-soaked fruit sits like small jewels.
Nonna would pinch my cheek and say I finally learned the difference between generous and greedy with raisins.
“Do not be offended,” I tell the stollen. “I will sell you for love and rent.”
Luca sneezes at the smell of nutmeg, which he has done since week two.
Gabe burps with pride and sleeps like a general after battle.
I slide quilts over both of them, patchwork I sewed from old aprons when I was too pregnant to sleep and too anxious to do anything but stitch straight lines.
A year is a long time to carry a secret and a short time to become a mother.
I did not tell the men.
I did not call when I saw the plus sign, did not text when the doctor said two heartbeats, did not send a photo of the ultrasound that made me sit on a curb and cry because two bright beans looked like the beginning of a new country.
I kept telling myself I would tell them when I was braver.
Bravery kept rescheduling.
The phone buzzes again.
Lidia texts like a person throwing a tennis ball at a wall.
You alive? Oven is being a donkey. Also vendor canceled for Ravenwell. I gave your name. Answer the phone when they call or I will come up there and beat my own door with a broom.
I blink.
The Ravenwell Holiday Food Festival is the mountain event of winter, where elite chefs trade stories with women who’ve been making caramel corn since Reagan.
The pastry competition gets written up by small papers and sometimes big ones if the winner is heartwarming.
I’ve dreamed of it the way choir kids dream of the solo.
My phone rings. “This is Marisa.”
A brisk woman introduces herself. “We had a last-minute drop. Can you do six stollen by noon for judging.”
I stare at the tote like it heard the future first. “They are already baked,” I say. “Still warm enough to smell like my Nonna’s kitchen.”
“Bring them,” she says. “Ravenwell square. Check the white tent. We’ll put you in at the end.”
I hang up and look at my sons.
Gabe snores like a tiny furnace. Luca frowns at the ceiling as if deciding whether to trust daylight. Helium fills my chest, then dread.
“Field trip,” I whisper, keeping my voice bright so the apartment doesn’t catch on to my nerves. “You will be perfect angels. I will bribe you with songs and kisses. We will show the mountains we know our way around sugar.”
I move like a woman at work, because work is church and a map.
Bottles in the warmer.
Diaper bag with the precision of a medic: extra clothes, extra diapers, muslin that smells like home, wipes, the pacifier Gabe insults when he is trying to be brave, the pacifier Luca adores like a grudging romance.
Formula. Wallet. An apple-ginger cake for good measure because I’m always baking to get rid of stress and always have something or the other lying around.
Nonna’s rosary in the side pocket because it weighs less than guilt and more than luck. And the stollen.
I text Lidia: Thank you. I will bring you back a ribbon or a scandal.
She replies with four egg emojis and a heart shaped like a tomato.
Then: The Subie has gas. Do not let Marco borrow it. He thinks fifth gear is a myth.
Lidia keeps the old Subaru in the building’s “family orbit,” as she calls it.
When mine stalled last month, she handed me her keys and an espresso and said, Women who work get the wheels.
On the stairs I meet her, apron dusted with flour, hair wrapped in a scarf the color of egg yolk.
She scans the car seats, my face, the tote, and nods like a general blessing a mission.
“You have it,” she says. “Do not argue with the road. Do not argue with judges. Smile like you will forgive them later. If you get a ribbon, bring it back. If you do not, bring gossip.”
I hug her fast and promise both.
She tucks a foil-wrapped bundle of garlic knots into my arm. “In case the angels get hungry.”
She taps Luca’s nose until he blinks up at her like she hangs the moon. To me, quieter, “Drive safe, bella. Call when you land.”
The Subaru waits at the curb like a tired loyal dog.
I love it with the kind of affection a person gives the thing that hauls her life uphill.
I buckle car seats with a focus that would impress a parachute instructor.
Gabe grumbles, then sees his turtle toy and forgives the universe.
Luca studies my face and decides not to cry for the next five minutes. We consider this a win.
I check the weather. Light snow. Nothing serious.
The GPS says two hours.
I kiss both babies, press my mouth to their warm, soft foreheads until my heart steadies, and whisper a prayer learned young and never unlearned.
We start north.
Brooklyn thins into gray river and old warehouses, then into a highway spine.
I sing badly and the boys doze.
Near Yonkers I think I could still turn back.
Halfway up the Palisades the sky opens pale and winter blue and the trees stand up straight, and an ache sits behind my ribs that is not sadness or joy, just the knowledge that there are places where I have been loved and left.
I try not to think about the lodge.
I fail.
Memory moves like a hand at my shoulder.
Roman telling me to breathe.
Deacon listing comforts like a man counting beams.
Cruz smiling like a summer that plans to be kind.
I grip the wheel until my knuckles pale.
“You will deliver,” I tell myself as the city falls behind and the mountains step forward. “You will smile. You will leave. You will not look back.”
The boys fuss in polite shifts.
We stop at a gas station that sells secrets and coffee.
The bathroom is a small horror and I love it for having a door that locks and water that runs hot.
I change both babies with military efficiency and a soundtrack of nonsense syllables.
I feed them in the front seat while an older couple argues about rock salt by the ice freezer.
I decide I will not explain my life to a stranger today.
Once we cross into the blue rise of foothills, gray turns to white.
The forecast said light snow.
The forecast is a liar with a good haircut.
Flakes begin fat and lazy, then sharpen and grow serious.
The road narrows.
The trees lean in.
The GPS has opinions, then loses them.
The boys sense my shoulders rise.
I sing every song I know without a verse about poor choices.
Gabe giggles at a chorus he likes.
Luca frowns at the snow as if he can reason with it.
The Subaru climbs.
Dotted lines vanish into white wash.
The slope lifts its chin.
I tap the brake and the pedal answers with a grumble.
“Not far,” I tell the car and the boys and the universe. “We are not far.”
Cell service drops without a goodbye.
The GPS stares like I betrayed it.
The mountains shrug.
Nonna said these hills are older than our pride; they do not bend for anyone who forgets humility.
I slow.
I consider turning back.
I consider the tote on the seat, six loaves that smell like Christmas and chances.
I consider two small boys who deserve to see their mother try when no one is watching.
Snow thickens until the air feels like wool.
Wipers sing their tragic opera.
I let the tires find the ruts left by braver wheels and follow their story up the road.
“Almost,” I say, because sometimes saying it makes it true. “Almost there.”
We are almost nowhere.
We are in a white room where trees are ghosts and the road is memory.
A curve appears without warning.
The incline asks a question.
The tires kiss something slick and decide to dance.
The car jerks left, then right, then left again.
My stomach drops.
I steer into the slide like a woman who took one winter lesson at nineteen and once drove a delivery van on a dare.
The Subaru fishtails.
The nose kisses a drift.
We hang for a beat between momentum and rest, then stall.
Silence slams down, fast and complete. The only sound is the breath I am not taking.
Then both babies cry, because they are alive and because their mother made a noise she did not mean to make.
I put my head to the wheel for one heartbeat and let my fear walk around the car and leave.
I sit up.
I turn the key.
The engine coughs and fails.
I try again. Nothing.
The world narrows to two babies and snow hammering the windshield.
“There is no one here,” I say, not to frighten myself, only to name the fact. No headlights. No houses. No service. Only white.
I reach back and find Luca’s foot where he kicked free of his blanket.
I tuck him in.
He calms by degrees because his brother is crying louder and someone has to take notes.
I find Gabe’s pacifier and place it with the finesse of a bomb tech.
He takes it, spits it, wails, then decides on a compromise and sucks like his life depends on it.
“Okay,” I say, breath fogging, mind clearing. “We do the thing where we do not panic.”
The heater is dead, which means the warmth we have is leaving in neat parcels.
I pull quilts from the tote and layer them over the car seats until both boys are bundled like small luxury pastries.
I tug my hat down, pull gloves on, and do math I hate.
Walking with both in this mess is dangerous.
Leaving them while I scout eighteen feet is worse.
The lodge is somewhere in these hills, but my last known direction was toward town.
I rest my forehead on the wheel.
The car smells like orange, sugar, and baby shampoo.
A tear escapes, hot, then cools on my cheek.
I wipe it away.
I am a woman who drove into the teeth of winter for bread and hope.
I do not have time to be tragic.
Wind hits the car and rocks it on its struts, not hard, just enough to remind me the mountain does not care about my schedule. Snow covers the side mirror.
The outside world is blank.
“Breathe,” I tell myself, and do. Then I talk to my sons like we are in on the same plan. “New idea, my little profiteroles. We wait. We sing. We are exactly as brave as we need to be, and not one ounce more.”
I sing. They fuss. The car stays still.
White presses closer, quiet and relentless.
I watch the road that is not a road anymore and think about a kitchen that smelled like cedar and ginger and a man who told me to breathe like he had earned the right to ask.
I press my knuckles to my mouth and laugh before the cry can get through, and inside the laugh there is a small, sharp prayer.
Please. Let someone find us.
The wind answers with a careful shove.
The snow lifts and falls.
No lights. No engines. No signal bars waking to save us.
Only white, and the brave, soft noise of my sons reminding me I am not alone.