21. Adriana
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Adriana
Viviana is waiting outside the building when I come back from class.
I almost walk past her. That’s the thing that gets me later, the way for a second my eyes slide right over the woman sitting on the low wall by the entrance, hood up, hands shoved in her coat pockets, because she doesn’t look like anyone I know.
My sister has never in her life sat on a wall.
My sister sweeps into rooms. She doesn’t huddle.
Then she lifts her head and it’s her. My stomach does the old thing, the bracing thing, before the rest of me catches up and remembers there’s nothing left she can do to me.
“We need to talk,” she says.
“No we don’t.”
I keep walking. I’m almost at the door when she says, “Adriana, please,” and the word stops me, because Viviana has never said please to me in twenty-four years. Not once. Please was for people she wanted something from, and I was never one of those.
I turn around.
Up close she looks worse than she did on the sidewalk the day she told me she was pregnant.
Thinner. There’s a grayness to her, the look of someone who hasn’t been sleeping or eating or doing any of the things that used to be her whole personality.
Her nails, which were always perfect, are bitten down.
“What do you want, Viviana?”
“You ruined my life.” She says it flat, like a fact she’s been carrying around. “I hope you know that. I hope you’re happy.”
I almost laugh, except there’s nothing funny in her face.
“I didn’t do anything to you.”
“You told everyone.” Her voice cracks. “About the baby. About Daniel. You went around telling people my business until there was nothing left, until Father threw me out, until I have nowhere, nothing, no one, and you, what, you get to play house with Enzo Vitale in his penthouse while I…”
“Who’s Daniel?”
She stops. Blinks. And I realize she’s said a name she didn’t mean to say, the way she’s always been careless with the things that matter when she’s upset.
“Daniel’s the father, then,” I say, working it out as I say it. “That’s whose baby it is.”
Her face does something complicated, and for a second I think she’s going to deny it, spin it, do the Viviana thing where the story rearranges itself to make her the wronged party.
But she’s too tired. I can see it. The machinery that used to run all day, the lying, the angling, the performing, it’s broken down.
What’s left is just a scared woman with no audience left to play to.
“I didn’t tell anyone anything,” I say. “I want you to hear that, because you’re going to spend the rest of your life believing I did, and it’s not true.
I never said a word. You told me on that sidewalk and I never repeated it.
Rafael figured it out himself because the timeline didn’t work and you couldn’t keep it together long enough to lie to him properly. That’s not me. That’s you.”
“You expect me to believe that.”
“I don’t expect anything from you. I stopped a long time ago.” I shift my bag higher on my shoulder. “Go home, Viviana.”
“I don’t have a home.” And there it is, the crack splitting all the way open, her voice going high and wet.
“Do you understand? I don’t have anywhere.
Father won’t take my calls. Mother cries but she won’t go against him.
Rafael won’t even look at me. The man I…
” She stops, presses the back of her hand to her mouth.
“I gave up everything for him. Everything. And he’s just gone. ”
I should leave. I keep telling myself to leave. But there’s a piece of me, the piece that spent a whole childhood trying to understand my sister, that can’t stop listening.
“So you ran away with him the morning of the wedding,” I say. “With Daniel.”
She laughs, and it’s an awful sound, nothing like her old laugh.
“Of course I did. You think I was going to marry Rafael? Rafael, who I’ve known since we were kids, who I’ve never once felt anything for except that he was convenient and fun and the families wanted it?
” She shakes her head. “Everyone kept acting like it was this great match. The Costa girl and the Vitale boy. Like it was a business deal with a cake. Nobody ever once asked me if I wanted it. They asked me to wear the dress and show up and smile.”
Something about that catches in me, because they did the exact same thing to me. The dress. The showing up. The smiling. The only difference is she ran and I didn’t.
“And Daniel was the way out.”
“Daniel had a plan. We were going to go away, start over, somewhere nobody knew us. He said he loved me.” Her face twists.
“He said a lot of things. Then I got pregnant, and I told him, and I watched his whole face change. Three weeks later he was gone. No note. Just gone. And I was alone in a rented room in a city I didn’t know with a baby coming and no money and no way to go back without everyone knowing exactly what I’d done. ”
“So you came back to pin it on Rafael.”
“What else was I supposed to do?” She looks at me like it’s obvious, and the horrible thing is that in her world, it was.
“Rafael would never have known the difference. We’d have been married, the baby would have a name, I’d have my life back.
It would have been fine. It would have all been fine if you hadn’t… ”
“If I hadn’t what? Existed? Married him when you left him at the altar? Walked in on the two of you?”
She doesn’t answer that. She just looks at me, and I watch her shift gears, watch her decide to get to the thing she actually came down here for, because of course there’s a thing. There’s always a thing with Viviana.
“You have to help me,” she says.
“What?”
“You heard me. You have to help me, Adriana. I can’t go back to Father, I have nowhere to live, I have a baby coming and not a cent to my name.
” She lifts her chin, and there it is, the old imperiousness flooding back into her face even now, even like this.
“You’re going to give me money. Or you’re going to ask him for it, which is the same thing, because we both know that card in your wallet isn’t yours.
He won’t even notice. People like Enzo Vitale don’t notice numbers that small. ”
I just stare at her.
“I’m your sister,” she says, like that settles it.
“We’re blood. And you owe me. You took my husband, you took my place, you took my whole life and you’re living it in a penthouse, so the least you can do, the absolute least, is make sure I don’t end up on the street.
After everything you took from me, you owe me that much. ”
And there it is. The reason she sat on a wall and said please. Not to apologize. Not to understand anything. She came to collect.
I wait to feel something. The old hunger for her to finally see me. Triumph, maybe, that the golden girl is the one with her hand out now. Or grief, real grief, for whatever we might have been if our parents hadn’t pitted us against each other from the start.
Nothing comes.
There’s just a flat, gray sadness, what you feel looking at a building that’s burned down, where you can’t even be angry anymore because the thing that made you angry is already ash.
She gambled her whole life on a man holding the ceiling up over her, the same way she always gambled on Father holding it up, on Rafael, on being beautiful enough that someone would always carry her.
And the ceiling fell. And she never learned to stand on her own, so now she’s standing in front of me asking me to be the next one to hold it.
I think about Lucia’s room. The cheap one near campus.
“I’m sorry it happened to you,” I say, and I mean it, which surprises me. “I’m sorry he left. I’m sorry about the baby, and Father, all of it. I wouldn’t wish any of it on you.”
Her face opens, just slightly, like she thinks this is the part where I cave. Where the money comes out.
“But I’m not giving you anything,” I say.
“Not his, not mine. And before you say it again, I don’t owe you.
I didn’t take your life, Viviana. You threw it away and I got handed the wreckage, and I’ve spent every day since climbing out of it on my own.
You want to talk about what’s owed? You never once stood up for me.
Not when Father screamed at me, not when you made me feel like nothing in our own house, not on the day they shoved me into your dress because you’d run rather than face what you’d set up.
So no. I wouldn’t wish any of this on you, but I’m not writing you a check, either. ”
“You’re going to leave me with nothing?”
“I’m going to leave you with the same thing I had. Yourself.” I start to walk backward. “It’s more than you think. It took me twenty-four years to find out. You’ve got a head start, because at least now you know nobody’s coming.”
I leave her there. I don’t look back. And the whole ride up in the elevator I keep waiting for the guilt to catch up with me, the second thoughts, the pull to turn around. It never does.
***
Enzo knows something’s wrong the second I walk in. He always does.
“Viviana,” I say, before he can ask. “She was downstairs.”
His whole body changes. That stillness that means he’s already deciding what to do about it. “Did she touch you? What did she say?”
“She didn’t touch me. She just talked.” I drop my bag by the door, kick off my shoes.
“She ran off with a man. Daniel. Got pregnant, he left her, she came back to pin it on Rafael.” I sit down heavy on the couch.
“And then she asked me for money. Yours, really. Told me I owed it to her, that we’re blood, that it’s the least I could do after I stole her life.
” I let out a breath. “It’s so sad, Enzo.
It’s so stupid and sad. And the worst part is I understand exactly how she got there, because they did the same thing to both of us.
She just made different choices than I did, and now she’s got nothing. ”
“What did you tell her?”