25. Valentina
VALENTINA
Iwant to be clear about why I said yes, because it matters, and because for the rest of my life people are going to assume I did it for him.
I did not do it for him. We were barely speaking.
For two and a half weeks we had moved through the same compound like two people sharing custody of a grief, polite and ruined, and I had let him coach me on the operation the way you let a stranger teach you to drive, hands at ten and two, eyes forward, nothing personal.
I did not say yes to Maxim. I said yes to the truth.
I had spent twenty-two years being told what my family was by the people who profited from my never asking, and I was finished being told.
I wanted to walk back into that house with my own eyes open and find out, for myself, what I had been born into.
The wire was the same as the gallery, a thread under the dress and a bud in my ear, except this time the voice in my ear was not warm and it was not playing a husband.
It was the work voice, the gray-room voice, handing me the route and the timing and the three things I was to confirm and nothing whatsoever that I wanted to hear.
“You go in as yourself,” he had said, the last real sentence he had given me.
“The returned daughter. Frightened, sorry, home. They will need to believe it, because the alternative is that you got away, and no one in that house can afford to believe a Ricci girl got away.” He had been right.
He is always right. I have started to understand that being right might be the loneliest thing a person can be.
The car let me out at a house I had been a prisoner in for twenty-two years and had never once thought to call a prison, not until I had a real one to measure it against. The Ricci compound throws a particular kind of party, the kind where the art on the walls costs more than the guards and the guards cost more than the art, and tonight it was wall to wall with people I had grown up performing for, the capos and the wives and the careful, watchful men who smile with the bottom half of their faces only.
I knew every face in the room. I had curtsied to half of them.
And I stood in the marble entry I had been photographed in a hundred times, in a dress my captor's people had chosen, wired to the enemy, and understood with a small lurch that I was the only honest thing in the building.
Here is the thing nobody tells you about going home after you have changed.
The home does not change. You walk back into the exact same rooms, the same smell of lilies and money and old cigarette smoke, the same cold and beautiful order, and it all fits you the way a childhood coat fits, which is to say it goes on, it still technically goes on, but you can feel every seam straining against the person you turned into while you were gone.
I had become someone in that basement. I had been seen, and taught, and wanted, and lied to, and I had learned to read a forgery and a man's hidden light and the size of my own worth, and not one piece of it fit back through the door of my father's house.
I moved through the party like a forgery of myself, which, I will grant the irony this much, I was uniquely qualified to detect.
“Valentina.” My aunt Lucia found me first, all perfume and verdict, taking my face in her cold jeweled hands and inspecting it for damage. “Bambina. We were sick with worry. Sick. Where have they been keeping you?”
“A clinic,” I said, which was the cover, the breakdown, the long quiet rest. “I wasn't well. I'm better now.”
“Of course you weren't well.” She said it the way this family says everything, as a thing that was somehow your own fault and would now be managed for you.
“A girl vanishes for ten weeks with her father half in the grave. You will sit with him tonight. You will be good.” She patted my cheek hard enough to sting. “You always were the dramatic one.”
And there it was, the entire architecture of my childhood in four sentences. I had been taken at gunpoint out of a gallery, and they had decided, because deciding was so much easier than wondering, that I had simply been dramatic.
I let Lucia steer me deeper into the house, toward the room where they were keeping my father now, and I went, because finding him was the cover and finding him was also the only thing in that whole building I actually wanted.
The wire lay against my ribs like a thread of ice.
Somewhere in my ear Maxim's voice said, quiet and even, You are clear to the east wing.
You have eleven minutes before the toast. I did not answer it.
I had stopped answering it a long two and a half weeks ago.
But I went where the voice told me to go, because the voice was right, because the voice is always right, and I hated, with a specific and useless heat, exactly how much I had missed it.
They had put my father in the small study at the back, the warm one, the one with his books, because a man does not want to die in a room built to impress people he is about to stop needing to impress.
I had built this entire night around getting into that study.
I had memorized the route to it as a target, a study with a desk and a false bottom and the one piece of evidence that could end my brother.
I had not let myself think about who would be inside it.
And then I opened the door, and my father turned his head on the pillow, and the whole operation went out of me like air out of a wound, because my father was dying.
I had seen him six months earlier, still strong enough to quiet a room by entering it.
The man on the daybed was a rough draft of that man, a sketch the artist had given up on, the big hands gone to paper and bone, the famous voice reduced to something he had to gather himself before he could spend.
Cancer, someone had said, back in the part of my life when I had been allowed to overhear things.
I had filed it away the way you file a fact about a man you are afraid of.
I had not understood, until that exact moment, that the man I was afraid of was also only my father, and that he was leaving, and that some small childish part of me had always assumed he would be there forever to be afraid of.
“Valentina.” He said my name as though confirming it really was me, and his eyes filled, which I had never once in my life seen happen, not at my mother's funeral, not anywhere.
“They told me you were resting. I did not believe them. You do not rest. You were never a girl who knew how.” His hand moved on the blanket toward me, an inch, all the distance left in him.
“Come. Let your old father look at you.”
I crossed the room and sat on the edge of the daybed and took the hand, the terrible weightless hand, and I was the agent of his enemies wearing a wire that recorded every word he said, and I was also his daughter, and the two of those did not cancel each other out.
That is the thing no one warns you about a complicated love.
It does not resolve. It just sits in your chest, both things at once, at full volume, for the rest of your life.
He held my hand and he told me, in the broken half-sentences of a man running low on words, the things he had never once said while he still had breath to waste on pride.
That I had my mother's eye. That he had kept every clipping of the little gallery talks I gave at school, in a drawer, which I had never known and which quietly took me apart.
That he was sorry, generally, vaguely, for nothing he was willing to actually name, which is the only kind of apology a man like my father has ever known how to make.
He loved me. He had always loved me. He had loved me the way you love a painting you keep locked in a vault, completely and uselessly and without once thinking to ask the painting what it wanted.
And it was real. That was the unbearable part of it.
It was clumsy and it was possessive and it had helped to build the cage, and it was also entirely real, and he was dying, and I had come here to rob him.
Behind his head, on the shelf I had memorized off a map, stood the desk with the third drawer and the false bottom.
Maxim's voice in my ear had gone gentle now, almost kind, the work bleeding into something it was not supposed to be.
Valentina. When you can. I know. So while my father drifted, his hand loose in mine, I did the worst thing I have ever done.
I let go of it. I crossed to the desk. I opened the third drawer on the left, and I lifted the false bottom he had been so sure no one knew about, and there it was, exactly where my younger self had filed it, the oxblood leather and the water stain shaped like Italy, the book that was going to bury my brother.
I did not take it. I only needed proof that the memory and the reality were the same animal.
I opened it to a page at random, and they matched perfectly.
Every number sat exactly where I had left it.
I photographed three pages with the small device sewn into my sleeve, and I set the book back, and I lowered the false bottom, and behind me my father said, in the soft voice of a man who has only been pretending to sleep, “It was never meant to touch you.”
I turned around. He was looking at me with a clarity I had never once seen in him, the look of a man who has finally stopped pretending, and for one second I understood that he had always known exactly what he was, and had spent the whole of my childhood building walls high enough that I would never have to find out, and had failed, the way every wall in my life has eventually failed, and was lying here at the very end of it watching the failure finish itself in real time.
“I know, Papa,” I said, because there was nothing else to say, because you do not argue with a dying man about the shape of his love.
“I know it wasn't.” It was the kindest lie I have ever told, and I have lately been keeping company with a man who could have graded it.
Maxim's voice came low and urgent. You have the pages.
You need to move. The toast is starting, and Marco will come looking for you the moment he counts the room and finds you standing in it.
I bent and kissed my father's forehead, cool and dry as old paper, and he had drifted back under, or had decided to let me believe he had, and I said goodbye to him in the only language the two of us had ever truly shared, which is the language of the things you leave unsaid, and I went to the door.
I almost made it. I had my hand on the cold brass of the handle, three pages of my brother's ruin sewn into my sleeve and my father's clumsy, enormous, broken love sitting in my chest at full volume, when a hand closed around my arm.
It was not hard. That is the thing about Marco.
He has never once in his life needed to grip.
The hand settled around my arm with the easy confidence of a man who has never been told no by anyone he could reach, and my brother's voice arrived at my ear, warm and delighted and smiling, the single most frightening sound in that entire house.
“Little sister.” A pause, while he savored it. “You've been gone so long. Let's catch up.” Another pause, and I felt the smile stretch wider against the air at my back. “Somewhere private.”