26. Dante
Chapter 26
Dante
A dalina eats better when she’s cared for. In the meals that follow, I realize where I fell short. I was sending Enzo upstairs to serve her food and leave her alone, but Adalina thrives under my attention. She is like a flower getting sun and light for the first time, ready to enter her spring bloom.
She’s quicker on her feet when she has food in her system, but she’s also more willing to open up.
“What do you do for fun?” I pluck a plump, juicy grape from the stem and gently place it between her parted lips. The soft skin of her bottom lip brushes against my thumb for what feels like the fiftieth time this evening. I can’t help but imagine shoving my digit into her mouth and telling her to suck on it, a desire that has crossed my mind with every bite I’ve fed her tonight.
Adalina sits in a resting position, still kneeling but seated on her calves. “What do you think goes on in the Martinelli household?” She pertly replies. “I don’t get to go to Hobby Lobby every other weekend to pick up a new puzzle or some flowers to make wreaths. If I showed an interest in making soap, do you know what my father would do?” She makes direct eye contact with me when she says, “He’d wait until I presented him with the finished product before shoving the bar of soap down my throat and washing my mouth out.”
Tommaso’s actions disgust me to the core. He is the embodiment of toxic masculinity, deriving his power from belittling and demeaning others. He makes me sick. “Would you want to make soap if he wasn’t in the picture?”
Adalina’s brow furrows in concentration, her posture stiffening as she takes a moment to think. “I don’t know. Probably not. Candles, maybe?” Adalina shrugs. “I’ve never given it much thought.”
I pull another grape from the vine and pop it in her mouth. The thought that crosses my mind is a filthy one, but I focus on the simple pleasure of the moment instead of pursuing it. “You had friends when I saw you at the bar the other night. You must get together with them often.”
Adalina’s delicate features morph into disgust as she lets out a sharp, guttural noise, like a snort mixed with a scoff. “We’re friends because their fathers are friends with my father. Annaliese is around fairly often, but she and I are very different people. She thinks I should be softer, more submissive,” Adalina says with a roll of her eyes. “Anna thinks if I bow to my father’s demands, he’ll go easier on me. But she lives a charmed existence. Her father doesn’t even yell at her, let alone hit her. She thinks it’s because she’s daddy’s perfect little girl, but the truth is her father just isn’t that kind of guy.”
“Some men are, some men aren’t,” I add with a nod of my head. “My father was like that for a while.”
It’s her first glimpse into my life, and she tries to maintain a facade of nonchalance. “What happened?”
I struggle with the decision to open up to her. Can I trust her with my secrets? After all, she only has Enzo and me to talk to, and I know he won’t betray my confidence. In the end, that’s the deciding factor. “My father yelled at me a lot when I was growing up—the in-your-face, spittle-flying kind of yelling. Often because I was too loud or too dirty, but I was a little kid, ya know? I broke my arm once when I was six or seven. I was climbing a tree, and a limb broke under my weight. Mother wanted to take me to the emergency room, but she had to wait until my father drained his energy screaming in my face about what a stupid, impulsive little boy I was.”
Adalina’s gaze hardens as she listens intently to my story of abuse, her expression unflinching. She nods firmly, acknowledging my pain and suffering as if it were her own. We speak as one abuse victim to another, and we understand each other on a level that no one else can get to. “You said he was like that for a while. When did it stop?”
“When Lucia was born.”
Adalina’s face falls. “He stopped because he had a daughter,” she concludes.
I realize that I have to tell her the whole story. I can see the confusion on her face. She’s thinking about how her father’s rage was incensed by having a daughter instead of the opposite. “No, he didn’t. In fact, my mother spent the last two months of her pregnancy on bedrest with the twins because my father knocked her around so badly one night that he nearly detached the placenta or something. I remember her telling me in dumbed-down words why I needed to care for Niccolo and Salvatore. She explained very gently that I needed to look out for them because children incited my father’s anger. She couldn’t protect us because she had to protect the twins.”
She looks at me with rapt intent, her eyes large and questioning.
“I am eight years older than Lucia and Luciano. So when my baby sister was born, I knew what she had to look forward to. I knew that my father would scream at the twins the same way he screamed at me and my brothers. He never put his hands on us, but he put his hands on our mother. I could only imagine that he’d get worse one day. He had to, right? Abuse begets abuse.”
That’s the story I told myself. I was eight, trying to construct a picture-perfect family out of shards and rubble. I had to do something to protect my mother, my brothers, and myself.
“Every day, Lucia grew a little more. She was a loud baby. Where Luciano slept through the night after four months, Lucia wanted to be awake and moving all the time. I loved her, though, because she was the baby of the family and my only sister. And every day, I worried for her future. One day, she’d live in fear of pissing off our father like the rest of us. I couldn’t live like that. I was only eight, and I felt like an old man. I grew up years before I was ready to.” My lips curl upwards into a small, pained smile. It isn’t easy to retell this story, especially to someone who wasn’t there.
“You made him stop,” Adalina accurately guesses in the silence.
I nod. “I had no other choice. My mother wasn’t going to stand up to him. Niccolo was five. Sal was three. I was the only one who could do anything.”
I stabbed my father in the belly the day I turned nine. I watched him crumple to the floor, bleeding out on the expensive marble that made up our kitchen. A metallic smell lingered in the air, like pennies and rust.
For years, Father had been instilling in me the value of family and the importance of protecting those you love. Little did he know that one day, his lessons would come back to haunt him.
“So I get it. You could have been the best daughter in the world, but it wouldn’t have changed your father. You did what you had to do to survive. For some, like Anna, that means being meek and mild and winning daddy’s affection. But that’s not who you are.” I meet Adalina’s gaze. “You are strength and sass and fire. You might not have stabbed your father at age nine, but you found your own way to fight back. That’s rare in this world.”
I see a little bit of myself in Adalina. Perhaps that’s why she’s being granted indulgence rather than imprisonment in the dark confines of the dungeon where prisoners rightfully belong.