Chapter 15
MILA
Sofia holds out the hairpins and steps into the room without asking. She used to stand in doorways. She doesn’t anymore, and I notice it every time, and I don’t say anything because neither does she. I let her in because the dress is already on and her fingers know what they’re doing.
She moves behind me at the dresser and finds the strand at my left temple, twists it back and pins it. She does the same on the right.
She walks out without another word.
The stairs are wide. My feet know them. Tonight every board is a separate thing under my shoes. The wood grain under my soles, the rail that’s been touched by every hand in this family for years, the light from the lower floor warming the wall as I come down.
Maria is at the bottom.
She has a cloth in her hand. She isn’t using it. She’s watching me come down the last three stairs without saying anything, then crosses herself, quick, the way she does in the kitchen over Nonna’s pots when she thinks no one sees, and turns away to the kitchen without looking back.
My chest pulls. It means something, being looked at like that. I don’t have a word for it yet.
I follow her into the noise.
The dining room is loud.
Renzo has Marco laughing, a short, surprised sound that doesn’t fit the serious set of his jaw. Izzy’s wine is almost gone. Giada is in a dress I’ve never seen on her, dark blue, no scrubs.
Cassia is to Dante’s right with the bump full under green silk and her hand on the table like she was putting it there for balance and forgot to move it. Nonna at the kitchen doorway in her apron. Marco in a clean shirt.
There is a man I don’t know.
Dark suit, no entourage, no signal of rank.
He is sitting across from where Nico sits, and he is the only person at the table who hasn’t turned toward the door since the noise started.
His eyes find me the second I’m in the doorway.
One beat, top to bottom, door to table, threat or not, and then he looks back at his glass.
The scar at his right temple catches the chandelier light for a second.
His hands are flat on the table. Still. Not gripping anything.
A careful man. I know what careful costs. I respect it.
I stop in the doorway.
Cassia’s hand stills on the table, just for a second. Then Renzo sees me. Then the quiet comes down the table one face at a time like a hand smoothing a cloth.
Dante is the last one.
He turns his head. He sees me.
“You’re late,” he says. He doesn’t look at Nico when he says it. He looks at me.
I walk to my chair. I sit.
My shoulders drop a quarter inch. I didn’t know they were up.
His hand moves to Cassia’s belly without him thinking about it, just lands there, sure.
Renzo lifts his glass at me. Small. Sideways. No words.
Then Dante looks down the table at the man in the dark suit.
“Mila. Luca Valentino.” A beat. “A family friend.”
Luca lifts his glass to me. One degree of his chin. No words. His eyes are dark and still and he gives me exactly as much as I give him.
I nod once.
Nico’s arm is beside mine at the table. I knew it would be. Maria set the chair. Knowing it and feeling it are not the same thing. The warmth of him reaches me before I’ve decided to let it. His sleeve brushes mine when he reaches for the water. I put my hands in my lap.
The warmth of his thigh is close to mine under the table. I don’t move toward it. I don’t move away.
Nonna comes around with the first course.
I eat.
Small portions. Bread first, then the vegetables, then half the meat. I watched Nonna cook this morning: pots on the stove I have been let close enough to see, steam and garlic and the Sicilian tomato she makes for Dante’s birthday. I can eat what came out of pots I’ve seen.
Giada is across from me not watching. Her eyes are on her plate, on her wine, on the far wall, but she misses nothing. She has been doing this since I arrived. She does not pretend she isn’t a doctor.
I watch Luca.
Not directly.
His glass sits between courses exactly where he set it.
He picks it up only when he means to drink.
He doesn’t reach for his glass unless he means to drink from it.
He doesn’t fill silences. When Marco makes a joke and the table laughs, Luca’s mouth moves, not quite a smile, something more private, and he looks at his plate.
Then Marco says something to Giada and she answers and Luca turns his head one degree in her direction and then turns it back. Away from her. Like a man who has decided not to look, and who made that decision a long time ago, and who is still paying for it. I know that posture. I have worn it.
I look at my bread.
I don’t look back up for a full minute.
Marco stands halfway through the first course.
“Dante taught me that you toast the man on his birthday. You toast the woman beside him longer.”
He turns to Cassia.
“Donna. To the next Santoro. May he have his uncle’s mouth and his mother’s discipline.”
Cassia laughs into the wine she isn’t drinking. Dante’s hand stays on her belly. The whole table laughs in a wave.
I don’t laugh. It is a good thing, what he said. It is a good table. That is what’s making my throat tight. The goodness of it, which I have no practice receiving.
Between the second and third course, Izzy’s hand disappears under the table. Renzo goes still for half a second. Then his hand covers hers on the tablecloth, visible now, and the set of his jaw eases. Nobody at the table comments. Nobody looks away fast enough not to see.
Dante sees it. Looks at Cassia.
Maria slips in during the clearing. She sets the violin case against the wall behind my chair. Slips out.
I have known it was there since she put it there. I have been not-looking at it the way I don’t look at things that could undo me.
Luca’s eyes move to the case. Then to me. One beat. He looks back at Dante.
Dante is already looking at him.
Neither of them speaks.
Nico doesn’t look at the case. He looks at me. He has been looking at me since I walked through the door and I have been not-looking back and the effort of it is in the press of my thumbs into the seam of my dress.
After the third course, Cassia stands.
She’s holding the wine she hasn’t drunk.
“I have something to say.” She looks at the table, then at her husband. “Not to the table. Not to my husband. He hears me on every other topic.”
She turns.
She looks at me.
“There has been a violin in the music room at Casa Lucia since you’ve been coming. The technician restrung it last week. I think she is asking for you.”
The household stops chewing.
My shoulders move a quarter inch.
The violin case behind me has been waiting all evening and now the whole table is looking at it and at me and there is nowhere else to go.
I push back my chair.
I stand.
I walk to the case, crouch, and open it.
The bow has been rehaired, the strings replaced — Cassia’s doing, all of it, every detail.
The violin is lighter than I expected when I lift it, lighter than the Conservatory instrument, lighter than I remembered, and before I have decided anything my left thumb has found the neck and my jaw the chin rest.
My hands remember before I do.
I stand and turn to face the table.
Dante at the head, Cassia’s hand in his.
Nico three chairs down. Giada across, her eyes already on me.
Marco beside her. Renzo with his hand over Izzy’s.
Luca across from Nico, dark suit, still hands, watching the way he watches everything.
Nonna at the kitchen doorway with Maria behind her.
Sofia standing at the edge of the room. She came in during the third course, quiet, the way she moves when she doesn’t want to take up space.
I look at the table — every face turned up, waiting, and not one of them wants a single thing from me but this.
Nico sets his glass down. The cords stand out along his forearms. I see it at the edge of my vision before I lift the bow.
I tuck the violin under my chin.
The chin rest fits the small place under my jaw that has not been filled in five years.
The bow comes up.
I close my eyes. I open them.
Tchaikovsky.
The Mélodie from Souvenir d’un lieu cher. The piece Papa made me practice for two years before my hands were old enough to hold the bow weight.
The piece I played at my first recital while Mama sat in the third row and Yelena stood at the back of the hall and I could see her moving her mouth along with every note.
The piece Mama used to ask for on winter evenings, when dinner was over and the house smelled like soup and Papa was on the phone in the next room.
The piece you haven’t earned the right to play again. The piece that belonged to the life Alexei took.
You don’t get to have it back just because you’re standing in a safe house with new strings.
The first notes come out wrong.
The pitch wavers in the second bar, a quarter step flat on the long note, the bow too heavy in my grip, five years out of the strings. My stomach drops. The mistake sits in the air.
I hold it.
I let it sit there.
I don’t flinch. I stopped flinching at my own mistakes the year I learned that flinching only tells the room where to look.
By the third bar my hands remember the rest.
The melody arrives. My right shoulder drops. My left wrist loosens. The sound comes up through the wood of the violin into my jaw and my chest and it is mine again, and the room goes quiet, and I don’t look down.
I look at the chandelier. I stop deciding where the bow goes.
Halfway through the piece the table comes back. I stopped looking at it and now it’s just there, the way things are when you stop fighting them.
Cassia’s hand finding Dante’s. Renzo still. Tears on Giada’s face that she doesn’t wipe. Marco not moving. Nonna in the doorway, still. Luca across the table with his glass untouched and his dark eyes on me and then — on Giada.
Nico doesn’t move.
His sleeve is at the edge of my vision, not moving, and then I look.