10. No Man is an Island
Chapter 10
No Man is an Island
T he susurrus of the wind seemed to echo as swirling voices inside of my head. Real but not real enough. The cavernous hollows inside of me held these messages as close as a lover would.
My eyes narrowed against the glare of the sun and the water. I stared at it as it passed underneath the yacht, the voice of yesteryear whispering in my ear.
Rosaria adored this yacht. We had honeymooned on one that had been similar.
She and Scarlett had warred on one, creating a fissure between them that could not be fully mended.
Glancing up, I saw that Scarlett sat next to my brother, her eyes faraway. I wondered if she was recalling that time as well.
Everywhere I looked. Every step I took.
I could not escape the memories, which had turned vicious, as my wife had preferred.
Fitting.
She would take pleasure in that.
The memories were ghosts haunting a ghost.
I allowed my head to hang as I stared at my hands, which dangled, as if I had no power nor will to control them. If I was ordered to move by my father, I would have, but with no conscious thought behind it.
Rosaria’s death had become mine. Though my mind was alive with haunting memories.
The most recent ones:
Traveling to Louisiana to visit my son, who had been shackled as my father had been. His body was strong and resilient, but his eyes allowed me to see a battle he could not win. When I told him of Rosaria and what had happened to her, it was as if cold and hot clashed at once. Grief and relief warring. Rosaria had torn him in two, split him down the middle as she did me, and he could not mend the two sides together.
My father sitting me in his office and ordering me to take a leave of absence from my position in the family to locate my heart again.
However, Rosaria’s death had affected my father as well. He went on about her truth, how she had claimed our love for women could make us weak, but damned if he did not love how our weaknesses for our women made our women that much stronger. A woman took her man’s weakness and made it her own, protecting his vulnerable heart as though her life depended on his for both of their survivals. She would carry his heart and shield it from the world.
I did not understand this.
How could I when I had never known a love like the one he shared with Margherita? A love like Brando and Scarlett’s? Dario and Carmen? Romeo and Juliette? Mac and Mariposa? Or any of the fated matches in my close inner circle. I had always gazed upon these unities, attempting to learn what made them tick, what made them whole only together.
I had always gazed upon them with, what I realized now, a starved heart. As a pauper would do to a full meal.
My great love, the honor of my life, as my grandfather had reminded me years ago, was the famiglia . And I was being exiled from it on a fool’s quest to find something that could never be returned or awakened.
The lion in my chest, my second heart, had grown silent.
I had been programmed to serve my famiglia , and it was expected of me to rewire and become what I did not understand. I was cursed in love. The sins of the father falling on the son, though my father had somehow escaped them. My son was also cursed in love.
Somehow, though, I knew that I would never be the same, even regarding my family. Because the hope that a love greater than the famiglia existed had sustained me over the years, even if thin. And that hope had perished with Rosaria somehow.
Eyes were hard on me from across the distance.
My older brother stared at me.
Our eyes held until we dropped anchor, and I stepped off the yacht and onto Aria Island.
The saying goes that no man is an island.
Certainly, I was not this one. This one was a bright aria in the daylight and an entrancing moonlit sonata in the darkness. It was an island created for romance, even if it had its dark history, tales of survival that only made it even more romantic. The men of our family brought their women to the island to fall in love—for the first time or time and time again.
I was the haunted side of the island where the castello existed in front of the sea. Darkness had consumed me—the voice of Rosaria Caffi trapped with me. We were as we always were: two sides connected, but constantly pulling in the opposite direction.
Rocco Piero Fausti was the area of the island where no soul dared to tread. Internally, I was as haunted as the halls, where visitors claimed they heard voices screeching and singing. I was the water surrounding it, beautiful on the outside, but deadly below the surface.
Love came to me to die.