Chapter 38
MILA
I am going to play for them today. I decided before breakfast, before I could talk myself out of it, and I have been talking myself out of it ever since. I am doing it anyway.
The garden in the late afternoon is the garden Lucia planted. Jasmine at the corner of the iron bench. Bougainvillea climbing the back wall. Nonna’s herb bed by the kitchen door. A dead woman’s garden, tended and loved and still blooming. The right place to play my mother’s song.
I walk in wearing the soft dress Cassia put in my closet days ago. The chain at my throat under the high collar. The wooden cross in my right pocket. The violin Nico brought me in my left hand. The bow in my right. My heart is loud. Not fear. Not only fear.
The household assembles without being called. Nobody told them. Nobody had to. My chest aches at that.
Cassia waits at the edge of the garden by the kitchen door. The dress no longer hides the swell of her belly. Her hand has been on it all afternoon. Dante has not left her side.
Sofia sits on the iron bench at the corner. Isabella’s arm around her shoulders. Sofia’s notebook is on the bench beside her, closed. She has not written in it today.
Nonna is at the kitchen door, wiping her hands on the apron Lucia gave her years ago.
Giada leans on the porch railing in jeans and a soft sweater.
Not scrubs. Renzo and Izzy stand near the back wall, his hand at the back of her neck, the ring on her left hand catching the light.
Marco leans at the gate. Maria hovers on the porch.
Nico is in the doorway. He has not approached. White shirt, sleeves rolled. The cufflinks are on. The watch is on his right wrist. The mask is folded somewhere I have not seen it since the river.
I do not look at him. If I look at him first I will play only for him, and this song is not only for him. I look at the bench.
I walk to the spot in front of the bench where Sofia is sitting. My hands want to shake. I do not let them. I tuck the violin under my chin and the rest fits and for one breath I am eight years old in Mama’s kitchen and she is alive at the stove.
I close my eyes. I open them.
I play.
Tonkaya Ryabina. The full piece. I have never played it whole anywhere but Mama’s kitchen in Moscow, and my hands have been waiting years to do it.
The intervals are Russian. Russian for generations.
The minor key, the third bar bending into the fourth, the shape my grandmother taught my mother, who taught my sister, who taught me, who taught Sofia.
Five of us now. Five voices in one song.
Halfway through the second verse, Sofia hums. The bar I taught her in a music room with the windows shut. Her voice is small. It wavers. It holds.
My eyes sting and I do not stop playing. I do not dare.
Cassia’s hand finds Dante’s. Sofia keeps humming. I keep playing.
The third verse. The fourth.
The household does not move. Nonna wipes her face on her apron once.
Giada is still at the porch railing. Dante’s other hand is on Cassia’s belly without him looking.
Renzo’s hand stays at the back of Izzy’s neck.
Izzy’s hand is on Renzo’s chest. Marco has his hand flat on the iron of the gate. Maria has crossed herself once.
Nico in the doorway has not moved. His hand is at the doorframe. Knuckles white against the wood.
I do not look at him. I play to him anyway. He knows it. I want him to know it.
The last verse. I take the long note at the end. Mama’s note, from the kitchen when I was small and she was alone and thought no one was listening. The note holds as long as my arm holds it.
Then it is done.
Nobody in the garden moves.
I lower the violin. I do not bow or curtsy. My jaw is tight against the sob trying to climb my throat. I will not let it out. Not yet. Not in front of them.
Nonna is the first to break the quiet. She wipes her face with the apron and does not pretend she didn’t.
“Madonna santa.” She shakes her head at the jasmine like it owes her something. “Lucia’s garden ain’t heard nothing that sweet since she planted it, cher. Not once.”
Sofia’s eyes are dry. She is smiling. Small. Real.
“I didn’t plan to do that,” she says. Her voice is rough from the humming.
“You kept it,” I tell her. “I hoped you would.”
The bench. The woman whose bench this is. I say it to her, just loud enough for the man in the doorway to catch the last phrase.
“On nashyol menya.” He found me. “V kontse.” Eventually.
The household does not clap. It is not that kind of household. They hold the silence with me for one full breath. Better than applause. They are holding my dead with me.
Then Cassia moves. She crosses the garden slowly, one hand under her belly, Dante close behind her. She has a small velvet cloth folded in her right hand. They stop at the bench in front of Sofia.
“We were going to wait,” Cassia says. “Dante wanted an occasion.” Her mouth curves. “I told him the occasion would announce itself.”
She unfolds the cloth in Sofia’s lap. Inside is a locket. Gold. Small. Slightly tarnished. The chain that goes with it is the width of the one I have worn for years. The chain at my throat has been waiting for this locket since I was a child.
“It was with his things,” Cassia says. She does not say the name in Lucia’s garden. “I cleaned it myself. No one else touched it.”
Sofia lifts the locket and holds it out to me.
I set the violin in its case at my feet. The bow on top. I sit beside her. She lays the locket in my left palm.
The gold is warm from Sofia’s hand. I would know this locket blind.
I open it.
Inside, the photograph my father had made the autumn I was small.
Four faces in Mama’s kitchen, morning light on the table.
Papa. Mama. Yelena. Me in Yelena’s lap. The photograph is smaller than my thumbnail and I remember everything it is too small to show.
The eggs on the table. Papa’s black coffee. Yelena’s chin resting on my hair.
My hands shake. I let them shake. My whole family in my palm, alive, before any of it. Grief and gladness arrive together and I cannot tell where one stops.
I close the locket and my fist around it. I lift my hand to my throat, open the clasp, slide it on, close the clasp. It settles in the hollow of my throat where it has always belonged.
Nico crosses the garden. He stops in front of me at the bench. Sofia and Isabella to my left. Cassia and Dante to my right.
He pulls a small velvet bag from his inside jacket pocket. I know the bag. It held the wooden cross at the river. Cufflinks before that, when I asked him about it once and he did not answer.
He opens the bag and hands me what is inside.
A second locket. Lighter in my palm. The gold a different gold. The same shape, but the engraving on the front is a small line of leaves, not the family crest, and the clasp sits at the side, not the top.
“It’s different on purpose,” he says.
I look up at him. His jaw is tight. His voice is low and even. His shoulders are not.
I open it.
Yelena. A small print from his painting, the canvas in the alcove off his bedroom, made to fit inside. Her face fills it. She is singing.
I look at her face for one breath. Two. He gave me my sister back singing. My chest hurts. The good hurt. I want to keep it.
“She belongs beside them,” Nico says. “Not instead of them.”
“Spasibo.” Thank you. My voice is not steady. I do not need it to be. “Ty vernul yeyo mne.” You gave her back to me.
He nods once. That is all. It is enough.
I open the chain, slide the new locket on beside the old one, close it again. Both lockets settle together at my throat.
The garden empties slowly. Cassia and Dante into the house. Sofia and Isabella follow, Isabella’s arm at Sofia’s elbow. Renzo and Izzy past the gate. Marco after them. Giada into the kitchen with Nonna. Maria has been in and out the whole time.
Nico stays.
I sit on the bench with my violin in its case at my feet. Neither of us speaks.
His hand finds my shoulder. Light. It has rested there this way since the boutique. Heat comes through the fabric where his palm rests and my pulse picks up. Not fear. Want. After everything, my body has decided he is safe to want.
The garden goes quiet around us.
The early evening at Casa Lucia. The clinic is still climbing out of its rebuild. Scaffolding on the back wall, the reception desk gone, Lucia’s photograph in a temporary spot at the side wall. The music room is half-finished. Wallpaper down, windows open, piano covered in a sheet.
He drove me here without asking why. He opened the door at sunset and walked me to the music room and stopped. He has not stepped in.
I take my violin out of the case. I close my eyes. I open them.
I play Bach. The Chaconne. The piece my father made me practice for years. The piece I have not played in years. The Bach we played in Moscow was heavier, slower, the long notes held longer. My father said Bach in Moscow was Bach in church. He preferred church.
The garden was Mama’s song, for all of them. This is Papa’s, for one man.
I finish. I lower the bow.
Nico is on the threshold without his shoes. His shoes are beside the door. He is in his socks on the half-finished floor of Casa Lucia. His eyes are dark and his breath moves wrong, shallow, like he has been holding still for too long.
My throat goes tight. The heat of him reaches me from across the half-lit room and my breathing goes uneven. I played for him and he knows it and I am not sorry.
He crosses the room. He stops in front of me. Close enough that I could touch his jaw. I do not.
“Eto bylo dlya tebya.” That was for you.
His breath catches, rough in the quiet.
“Spasibo, Mila.”
I want him to touch me. The wanting is loud in my body, louder than the music was.
His hand lifts toward my face and stops, just short, his fingers near my cheek but not landing, and the want of it pulls low in my belly, sharp.
He drops his hand. He takes mine instead.
We walk out of Casa Lucia together, past the scaffolding and the half-rebuilt door. We drive home.
In our bedroom, the lockets stay at my throat. Both of them. The wooden cross goes on the nightstand where I have been setting it at night since the river.
Yelena. Mama. Papa. Nico’s parents. All of our dead, in two lockets and a wooden cross on a nightstand.
I am the one who is still here. I press the lockets flat against my skin until my heartbeat is under them.
I am going to live for both of us. For all of you.