8. A Doctor has been Called
Chapter 8
A Doctor has been Called
M y eyes opened to the scorching light of a new day. My entire body felt as if it were on fire, no place as concentrated as my chest. It felt as if staples and bolts were pulling my two sides together, the line meeting at my heart, and the skin had become hot and stiff. My mouth was parched, as if the flames had started a fire on the inside. My head throbbed with the echoes of a ringing bell still trapped inside my skull.
Down to the marrow of my bones, pain radiated through me.
It was almost as if the healing process had already started, but on a body that was empty of all its insides. Each stitching of the flesh that had been torn apart mended together in a pain so great, an anguished, a weak roar seemed to come from a hollow enclave inside of me.
The lion was dying.
Perhaps I was too.
My second heart could not be saved.
My teeth clacked, and my bones trembled. I was feverish. Though all I felt was the fires of hell. Perhaps it was the ice lingering in my veins causing the clash.
The world beyond me was a kaleidoscope of broken colors in the harshest light my eyes had ever seen .
“Look at me, Rocco.”
“ Silenzio ,” I said, my voice as dry as a rotted branch. It cracked.
“Look at me, Rocco,” the old voice ordered again.
I had thought my eyes were open, but they had closed. Whatever I was seeing behind them was a figment of my imagination, or the drugs my wife had dosed my whiskey with the night before.
Was it the night before?
In all my time on this earth, I had never not known what time or day it was.
“You can see me, ah?” Prozio Tito sat on a stool with wheels, holding up his fingers, waving them, as if he wanted me to repeat how many I saw.
When he stopped waving them, and the air around them no longer seemed to stutter, I said, “ Due .”
He fixed his glasses and nodded seriously. “I did not think the drug affected your vision, however…” He lifted a hand toward me. “It took you the entire night.”
“Frankenstein,” I said.
“This is how you feel?”
“ Si .” In the time the drug had taken me, it had turned me into a new monster. A monster that did not need any of his valuable organs, not even his heart, to stay alive.
Prozio Tito sighed. “The drug the Russians are now selling is the worst I have ever seen on the market. They have solidified it from liquid only to pills. This is what Rosaria slipped into your whiskey. The drug paired with the whiskey made your blood thin. Even without the drug or alcohol, you were in danger of bleeding out. The gash was deep enough to pass meat and expose bone. Glass had to be extracted from the wound before it could be stitched up. You are blessed to be alive.”
I did not respond to that.
“Listen to the old gangster doctor,” Brando said. “He knows his shit.” My brother’s tone was not humorous or sarcastic. He was stating a fact. Even at Prozio Tito’s age, he was still one of the most knowledgeable doctors I had ever known.
Dario said something after Brando.
Romeo said something after Dario.
Mac said something after Romeo.
I ignored them all, remembering the visions that had attacked me after the whiskey and drugs had settled into my system. It was the same sort of visions that had attacked Brando and Mac when both men had experienced the new drugs the Russians pushed on the streets, but this was my first battle with it. It still seemed to linger in my blood.
The only way I could describe the visions—I was trapped inside of myself, and I could not free myself from all the hellish nightmares. It had felt like a never-ending war within myself, and the stake—love. Perhaps even life.
My father walked into the room and called my name. A part of my mind accustomed to obeying gave the order to, but the part of my brain that was still affected by the drugs and blood loss ordered me to close my eyes and ignore him.
“Rocco!” he snapped at me.
“Papà,” I responded, my voice lax.
“Look at me.”
This time what I heard underneath the order made my eyes open. My father stood in front of everyone in the room , and he did not look like himself. Perhaps my mind was playing tricks on me again. He looked disheveled, as if he had been turned inside out. He was all human except for the heart of a lion. His voice commanded, but it did not command with the authority of a general to his soldier, but of a father to his son.
He nodded. “Keep them open. Keep them on me.”
I nodded, and with all the energy I had left, fought to keep them that way. “Rosaria,” I said.
Usually after she stabbed me or wounded me, she brought me pasta as a peace offering. However, I remembered. I remembered why she had drugged me. Sliced the skin over my heart open. She had run to freedom. Possibly to the Russians who had given her the drug in pill form. Perhaps my father had punished her already and killed her.
My eyes locked with his. He ordered all the men out of the room, except for Prozio Tito. Perhaps the old doctor would still be needed.
In a voice truer than my grandfather’s voice had been all those years ago, my father gave me the truth of what had happened after my body could no longer sustain itself. As I lay in a pool of my own blood, the songbird had flown away from the Fausti name. In her rush to escape, she had an accident that sent her flying over a cliffside on the way to a port town in Napoli. The same town where we had met all those years ago while she performed an aria truer than air. An aria that had entered my blood stream, and growing claws, stabbed them deep inside of me.
The songbird did not land, but had crashed.
My father’s truth was as sharp as a newly forged blade to sensitive skin. It tore apart the line that was beginning to mend, the pain ten-fold.
“Rocco,” Prozio Tito called.
My head was going in and out of itself again.
“Rocco,” my father called.
I sat up, and an excruciating growl fought to tear out of me stuck in my chest. There was no release, no medicine, no remedy to free it.
“Take me to her,” I said, attempting to get to my feet.
My father did not help me. Prozio Tito could not any longer, but even if he could have, he would not have. No one called for my brothers. Or Mac.
These men understood me.
I did not want help.
Help could not save me from this.
The pain kept me on my feet, kept me moving, as though I was still alive, even if the battle was about to take me .
Rocking from side to side, I finally found my footing and clothes.
By the time we left for Naples, I felt nothing, even though sweat poured out of my body as if it was raining and I had gotten caught in the downpour.
Rosaria had taken me with her, and my self-prophesying thoughts had come back to haunt me.
We are both dead.
As I stared down at the place where she could not find her wings to fly, I saw my body lying next to hers, but with seeing eyes and moving limbs.