Chapter 3
LEILANI
Two years later
Letter to myself
You come into this world with a clean slate.
Pure, candid, putty clay in everybody’s hands with no memories and not a morsel of knowledge.
You have no idea what life was like before or what it will be like after you leave.
You don’t know how to ride this monster, spread your wings, and solve the riddle of this dark, painful thing life is.
How can you dance if you don’t know the moves?
How can you live with intent if you lack knowledge?
You’re tiny, helpless, and made of euphoria since the magic of dark hasn’t touched you yet.
As time passes, you keep cooing in the background as the grown-ups in the room write their sordid tales into your story.
Life is a merry-go-round, blinding lights, bright as fuck colors, fuzzy words without a meaning, and warmth or coldness you can’t tell apart.
Scraps of memories begin to form, yet they won’t stay with you for long.
A few more years get whisked away by Father Time, and you begin to see what the beautiful life everyone has talked about really is.
The memories morph into a hodgepodge of nonsense, static noise, some good bits, and nostalgic yearnings for things that have never happened or might happen, perhaps too late, when you’re already regretting everything.
What you see is different from what they instruct you to see.
Regardless, the grown-ups are convinced they’re virtuous, sinless, untouchable figures, who can twist reality for their own fading gains.
Callousness rules their lives, tainting yours, yet nothing can stop them or make them pay for what they do.
You become a living, bleeding thing, aching and burning like flesh tossed into a blazing fire as things get real.
Your story turns into a mix of crippling fear, disgusting panic, and bitter desperation as you lose control of who you are.
No one knows how to fight this grotesque monster called fear, or how to tame it or destroy it.
You play it by ear, since you’re still small, fresh, frightened, with not a pinch of wisdom in your body, and don’t know what to do.
And then you make a friend.
A good, loyal, kooky buddy who takes you places, and before you know it, your new friend––aka your unhinged imagination––rearranges things in your head, lending you a sense of power.
And that’s when real life begins.
LEILANI
Later that day
Sicily throbs in my blood with the force of Etna, the sweetness of plumeria, and the hypnotic movements of the breeze lifting off the Mediterranean sea.
Sicily has become the sister I’ve never had, the wild story I’ve fostered inside me, the beginning and the end of everything I’ve known over these two long years.
She’s quietly held my hand as I have grown into myself and watched me run up the dirt footpaths to the olive trees, where the birds, kittens, and butterflies miraculously live.
Swallowtails, blues, whites, coppers, hairstreaks, and above all, Aurora dell’Etna, the one I treasure the most every time I see.
It must’ve been named after Rory––I always joke, because I love to see that beautiful girl laughing.
Aurora, my only real friend and sole respite I get from time to time, knows some of my secrets, my pains, my dilemmas, and my impossible quandaries.
She doesn’t have it in her to blink in resentment or pass judgment on me. She’s pure, flawless, and untarnished by the crazy life.
She’s also smart, accessible, and supportive.
A saint.
I may be as clever as she is, but every one of her other traits has skipped me entirely.
How does she do it? Putting up with me and never giving up?
The answer to that question is impossible to grasp. Honestly, I’d run for the hills if I had a friend like myself.
She says I’m fine, and she genuinely believes it.
Coming from her, it doesn’t sound like mockery or flattery, but in my world, it is the ultimate lie.
Fine is the last thing that I am.
I’m hard on a world that’s shaped me into a puzzling woman of sensual mysteries and dangerous excesses.
I’m depraved and irretrievable, knowing no limits and having no qualms with doing immoral things. Nothing is too maddening, unlikely, or extravagant for me.
I live outside the lines more than inside them, and my vile nature matches my ferocity.
I’m like a butterfly, a flower, a dream with only a few seconds, hours, or maybe a long night ahead of me to live before the summoning of death comes.
I’m that volatile and intense. And then I’m worse.
My life is like the sea. Broad, limitless, hugging the sky and punishing those souls who dare to sail my waters while wrestling with my moods.
Moving from silent and comforting at one moment to seething with fury and hungry for revenge at the next.
Carving out nooks in my shallow conscience to bury the ghosts of their wrecked ships without remorse.
My closet is not full of skeletons.
My soul is.
So… I’m not easy to live with or be friends with.
But Rory––Aurora––likes me the way I am, even when I spin at a destructive speed, dismantling everything in my path like a tornado.
She likes me drunk on the dark of my soul, taking unpredictability to a different level, and removing every ounce of normality from my contrived existence.
She is unique in that regard.
Sunk in thought, I trace the length of the freshly squeezed lemonade, wrapped in condensation, with my finger, studying the world contained in the tulip-shaped glass, the bottom muddy with pulp and granulated sugar, left unstirred per my request.
Nona is fully aware of every pinch of weirdness percolating the minds of my five alter egos.
Like Rory, she never questions it.
She’s also paid to keep her mouth shut, and her loyalty is aging better than my body, but this is about more than hush money to put up with my disruptive nature.
Her life grows around mine like matted strands of ivy crawling up the walls of a dilapidated house.
She’s been with me from the beginning.
Much younger back then, she held me in her arms as I was entering this insane world and becoming part of my dysfunctional family.
Life and death linked hands that day and danced as I––a tiny body, and a pure new soul to be damned––expanded the Gallo family.
It was a hot summer night in August––a Thursday, to be exact––when I stepped into this world at around nine in the evening.
Three more hours, and the wall clock to my left will mark that time of day, closing the circle.
Twenty-one years have passed since I was born.
I’m twenty-one today, and he still thinks I’m too young.
It was a sweltering, humid day in New York––the entire month of August was––and my mother left nothing to chance.
Her hair, makeup, manicure, and pedicure looked impeccable, done by the best beautician on Long Island.
All her life, she kept her hair long like mine.
Hers was a lighter shade of brown, while mine looked like dark-roast coffee beans from the start.
The genes responsible for her light-gray eyes collided with the ones dictating my father’s dark-green gaze, and I ended up with two popsicles between my dark eyelashes, shifting their color like the sea kissing the tip of Italy’s boot every day.
She always wore custom-tailored clothes or brands altered to fit her growing bump.
You wouldn’t catch her wearing anything off the sales rack, and I bet my freshly squeezed lemonade that she wanted sex from my father up to the moment she was due to give birth.
Word is––staff likes to gossip––that my father didn’t fall for her tricks.
She liked his women to be voluptuous on certain parts of their bodies, but a protuberance around the midriff wasn’t one of them.
So my mother wore her best clothes that day and almost had a cigarette in the morning to assert her never lost independence and nonchalantly show to the world, and mainly him, that a baby would never change her life.
Despite being accurate about the latter, her failed efforts only mangled her existential crisis and hardened her soul.
All was in vain, as my father didn’t want to participate in the ceremony that day.
My coming into this world wasn’t life-shattering, possibly not even an event.
For one, he was pissed I was a girl. He wanted a boy, a stupid cliche, I know, but so incredibly true.
And then, his accompanying her to the hospital hadn’t appealed to him in the slightest.
It wasn’t something he would do––he even told that to my mother. What he’d do and did do was his secretary, and also my aunt Flavia––my mother’s sister.
Two years older than Bianca, my aunt was less worldly than her sister. In other words, she didn’t sleep around, and my father liked that about her.
Have I mentioned that my mother was eighteen at the time?
Yeah.
She was.
A poor rich girl, she’d had everything handed to her, except the power to control a man.
Silly, silly woman.
She thought that by having a kid, she’d make my father pay attention to her and take her seriously.
That never worked, but my mother had never given up trying. I’ve inherited that trait from her, and man, does it serve me well or what?
A quiet laugh rolls off my lips as I stare out the floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the patio, and move my eyes over the green-lit pool adorned with floating candles and pink petals, the dark sea and bright lights of Syracuse moving in the distance.
Sprawled out on my bed that’s fit for a princess, lying on my stomach with my chin propped on my folded arms, I take it all in.
Flavia is not coming tonight––I don’t think she is.
She’s having problems with her husband.
Nona and Alexandra have handled the RSVPs, so they know who’s coming and who’s using an excuse not to attend.
It’s an honor to be invited to a Gallo gathering, so they’d better have a good explanation for saying no to us.
In my case, I’m only interested in one person––him––but his whereabouts are more guarded than a secret of the state in times of war.
My mind wanders back to what happened the day I was born in New York.
Knowing my mother, I can say with certainty that she had planned to make my father jealous.
Her gynecologist was young and good-looking, and he happened to be married, but that has never stopped my mother from targeting someone.
She hoped her flirting with another man would put a dent in my father’s confidence.
No matter how cunning her plans were, most things didn’t work on my father.
He was rich and powerful, and broke into a woman’s heart for no other reason than to trash her most precious possessions.
Joseph O’Connor and Bianca Gallo were a match made in hell, and nothing stopped them from ruining everything they touched––sometimes literally––in their lives.
See now why I couldn’t be a saint like Rory?
Living with my father was hazardous at best and insane at worst. And living with my mother was dangerous at best and sheer lunacy at worst.
Nothing stopped them from forcing their abject world onto me and making me who I am today.
So she had her gynecologist ready to assist her in giving birth in a private hospital. She was fancy like that.
All her life, she knew how to stir up drama and take care of herself while using and abusing other people.
Everything she’d instilled in me came with perfect examples of her ruining other people’s lives.
A silent sigh leaves my chest as I break away from recollecting things I don’t enjoy.
The condensation grows on the glass beneath my fingers while my eyes hover over the trees guarding this side of the house.
The sea and the sky make love in the distance, a quiet prelude to the dusk floating over the shoreline, decked out in bejeweled tones of blue, pink, violet, and orange.
There, at the end of my world, a night dipped in variegated shades of sin wraps around a different universe that exults in crowded restaurants, open-air cafes, noble churches, and preserved ruins drenched in history.
Life happens at a brisk yet quiet pace with fashionable dresses, and men eagerly looping their arms around the women’s bodies, smiling to distract them and conceal the hunger of their flesh.
There, at the end of my world, freedom swirls at a dizzying pace, beaming with promises.
I could be there, dancing alluringly and sultrily kissing the men, with my back pressed to the warm stone of a church, cheating on everything and everyone on this earth.
Allowing the men to feel me up, run their hands up my skirt, touch me, and offer me the relief I want from him.
I’ve looked for him in random men so many times that I’m now sick of it. The disappointment and lying to myself have been too much to take lately.
No matter how hard they get, how famished they are, and how deft they are with their hands… No matter what they say, how they touch a woman’s body, or if they give them pleasure or not… Nothing compares to him.
So even if I want sex and find some relief, bitterness and deep frustrations still gnaw at my psyche.
I could have all that. The big romantic gestures, the flowers, the words… Oh, the words.
And then their kisses, their skin against mine, sticky with sweat, their hands kneading my breasts, parting my folds, teasing my point of pleasure to exhaustion.
They could mistreat my body in the most delicious ways, yet in the end, they wouldn’t be him.
I wouldn’t have him on top of me, with his eyes gleaming, unfocused, cloudy with pleasure.
With his lips flashing spellbinding smiles.
On the other hand, the men I’d use to get my rocks off––as Bianca had done so well her entire life–– would lose their minds over me, and I might get them killed, when all I want is him.
I will have him.
Even if I pay for it with my freedom or my life.