Chapter Twenty Eight #2
“Then stop acting like you were the only one who failed her.”
I stand.
The chair scrapes back against the floor.
I look at my sons, these men who were boys when their mother died, and for the first time, I understand that my silence did not protect them as I wanted it to.
It left them alone with their own versions of that night.
For a moment, none of us speaks.
Then I lower myself back into the chair.
“What do you remember?” I ask.
Matteo’s eyes drop to the table.
Tomasso answers.
“Coming home and knowing before anyone told us.”
My jaw tightens.
“The house felt wrong,” he says.
I do not interrupt him.
“There were too many cars. Too many people trying not to look at us. Nonna was crying in the sitting room.”
Nonna.
Anna’s mother.
I had forgotten that part.
No.
I had not forgotten.
I had buried it under blood and sirens and the sound of my own heart.
“Ricardo took us upstairs,” Matteo says.
Of course. My brothers and Anna’s mother had arrived shortly after. I don’t even remember how they knew to come. Had I called? I must have.
Ricardo had taken them away from the worst of it. Lorenzo handled the doctors. Diego nearly put his fist through a wall and then stayed with the boys the rest of the night.
“Will you tell us what happened?” Tomasso asks.
I look at him.
“You know what happened.” My voice is flat.
“Yes, but will you tell us what happened?” Matteo says.
I realize then how very little I’ve told them over the years. One more thing to feel guilty about.
How could I have been so wrong about so much?
“I was out,” I say, my voice still flat.
I hate the sound of it.
“I had a meeting. Nothing important enough to remember now. Nothing that should have taken me out of the house that night.”
Matteo’s mouth tightens.
“She told you to go.”
I stare at him.
He gives a slight shrug, but his face is strained. “I heard her.”
Of course he did.
Always listening.
Always quiet with a book in his hand, hearing more than anyone knew.
“She told you she was tired of you staring at her as if she might break,” Matteo says. “She told you to go be impossible somewhere else for two hours.”
A sound leaves me. Not a laugh so much as a pained sound.
That was Anna.
Exactly Anna.
She had been irritated with me that evening. Beautiful and rounder than she had been the week before, one hand braced at the base of her back, glaring at me because I asked if she wanted to sit down for the fourth time in ten minutes.
Go, Mario. Go frighten someone who is not carrying your child. I am tired of your face.
I went.
I went because she was smiling when she said it.
I went because the doctor had been there that morning and said everything looked stable.
I went because I believed I would come home to her annoyed with me, not gone from me.
“She was alive when I left,” I say.
Neither of them answers.
“She was alive,” I repeat, though I do not know which of them I am telling. “She was irritated. She was tired. She wanted lemon ice. I told her I would bring it home.”
Tomasso closes his eyes.
Matteo’s hand tightens around the stem of his wineglass.
“The housekeeper found her,” I say.
The words come slowly now.
Not because I do not remember.
Because I will never forget.
“She called for help. Then me. By the time I arrived, the paramedics were already there.”
I look at the table, but I do not see it.
I see marble.
Blood.
Anna’s hand limp against the floor.
One of the paramedics turning toward me with a face that already told me the bad news.
“She hemorrhaged,” I say. “Fast. Too fast.”
They said even if I had been there, even if I had been standing beside her when it happened…
That is the part I have never believed.
Doctors say things like that to the living.
They give us words to survive on because they need to leave the room and move on to the next body, the next family, the next tragedy.
Even if you had been there.
Nothing you could have done.
She would not have suffered long.
Lies, maybe.
Mercies, definitely.
“I should have been there,” I say.
Tomasso’s voice is quiet now. “You could not have saved her.”
“You do not know that.”
“Yes,” Matteo says, and his voice cuts through mine. “We do.”
I look at him.
His eyes are bright, but determined.
“We asked.”
The words stun me.
“When?”
“A long time ago.”
“Who?”
“Doctors. Lorenzo. Ricardo.” His mouth twists faintly. “Anyone who would answer us.”
My sons.
My boys.
Going behind my back for facts because I had given them silence.
I close my eyes for one second.
That is all I allow.
“What did they tell you?”
“That it happened fast,” Tomasso says. “That she lost too much blood. That the pregnancy was risky from the beginning. That being home or not being home would not have mattered.”
My throat closes.
Matteo leans forward slightly.
“You think you abandoned her,” he says.
I do not answer.
Because yes.
That is exactly what I think.
Every day for ten years.
“You didn’t,” he says.
I look at him.
For a moment, I do not see the grown man sitting across from me.
I see the boy at seventeen, pale and silent in a black suit, accepting condolences with the same steady face because he thought that was what I needed from him.
I had needed him to be a child.
I had not known how to ask.
Tomasso speaks next, voice rough.
“You lost her too, Papà.”
Too.
Such a small word.
It guts me.
For ten years, I have thought of Anna as my guilt and their grief.
I did not understand they had been watching me carry the guilt and calling it grief because they had no other name for it.
“I was responsible for her,” I say.
Tomasso shakes his head. “She would hate hearing you say that.”
A ghost of a smile crosses my face. “She would.”
“She’d throw something,” Matteo says. “At your head.”
“Probably not the good china, though,” Tomasso adds.
A silence follows.
This one is different.
Not easy.
Never easy.
But not closed.
I reach for my wine, then stop before I touch it.
“I should have spoken to you about it.”
Neither of them pretends not to know what that costs me to say.
“Yes,” Matteo says.
Tomasso nods once. “You should have.”
I look between them.
“I thought I was protecting you.”
“We know,” Matteo says.
“That was part of the problem,” Tomasso adds.
I let out a quiet breath.
Fair.
Cruel, but fair.
Anna would have liked that too.
“You were seventeen,” I say.
“We were her sons,” Matteo replies.
I nod slowly.
Yes.
They were.
They are.
“And yours,” Tomasso says.
I look at him.
His face holds a rare seriousness now.
“You didn’t have to disappear into being our father so completely that you stopped letting us see you were her husband.”
I have nothing ready for them.
No answer. No defense. No order to give.
For once, I let that be.
“I did not know how to lose her in front of you,” I say finally.
Matteo’s expression shifts.
Tomasso looks down.
“We didn’t know how to lose her in front of you either,” he says.
There it is.
The thing we have all spent ten years not saying.
I nod once, but it is not enough.
Nothing is enough.
Still, for the first time in years, the room does not demand silence from me.
“She wanted a girl,” I say.
Both of them look up.
The words surprise even me.
But once they are out, I keep going.
“She said if it were another boy, she would blame me personally.”
Tomasso gives a quiet, broken laugh.
Matteo looks down at his glass, but his mouth softens.
“She told me that too,” Matteo says.
“Of course she did.”
“She said there are too many men in this family; it needed diluting.”
That time, I do laugh. It’s rough and painful, but it’s a laugh.
Tomasso smiles down at his plate.
For a moment, I can almost hear her.
Not like a ghost. Not some ridiculous fantasy.
Just memory.
Anna in our dining room, one hand on the curve of her stomach, telling all three of us that if the baby was a girl, none of us were allowed to frighten her suitors.
The ache comes so hard, it overtakes me.
I let it.
My sons are still watching me.
This time, I do not look away.
“I miss her,” I say.
Three words.
Ten years late.
Matteo closes his eyes briefly.
Tomasso’s jaw works once before he says, “We do too.”
I nod.
The food is cold now.
Anna would be furious.
And somehow, for the first time in a long time, that thought does not cut only one way.
It hurts.
But it also brings her back into the room as she was.
Not blood on the floor.
Not silence.
Not an article’s careful wording or strangers’ disgusting curiosity.
Anna.
My wife.
Their mother.
The woman who wanted lemon ice and a daughter and a house full of noise.
I sit back in my chair and look at my sons.
“Then we will talk about her,” I say.
Tomasso swallows. “Now?”
“Now,” I say. “And again. Not all of it tonight. But enough.”
Matteo nods slowly.
Tomasso does too.
For several moments, none of us says anything.
Then Tomasso reaches for the serving dish in the middle of the table and makes a face.
“Mamma would be furious that this got cold.”
I look at him.
Matteo says, “She would blame you.”
“Me?” Tomasso looks offended. “Papà is the one who started brooding over lamb.”
“I did not brood.”
Both my sons look at me.
I pick up my wine at last.
“Fine,” I say. “I brooded.”
Tomasso breathes out something close to a laugh.
Matteo’s mouth curves faintly, but I realize he’s not done when he continues watching me.
“What?” I ask.
“There is something else,” he says.
Tomasso glances at him, not surprised.
Which tells me this is not spontaneous. Not entirely.
I set my wine down again. “Go on.”
Tomasso shifts in his chair, and for once, the movement is not restless. It is discomfort.
“Mamma would hate this part too.”
“What part?”
He looks around the room once, as if the answer is in the walls.
“This house,” Matteo says. “You. Alone in it.”
I go still.
“I am not alone in it,” I say carefully. “You both live here.”
Matteo’s gaze drops briefly to the table, then returns to me.
“Papà, you know wh—” Tomasso starts.
“No,” I say.
Tomasso’s mouth tightens. “Papà—”
“No.”
The word comes out harsher than I intend.
But there are limits.