Chapter 13
Aurora
I close my eyes and try to sleep on the drive, but despite the very early morning wake-up and the lingering fatigue from the morning after pill, rest doesn’t come.
There’s a hot buzz in my limbs, a feeling of fizz in my chest. Part of it is the new feeling of vulnerability, now that we’re out of the safehold of the big house combined with the fact that Alessandro hasn’t been found yet.
But even more than that is the anticipation of what’s to come.
Today I am marrying Curse Titone.
I wish I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t go into my wedding with Marco feeling like champagne bubbles were bursting in my veins.
I’d spent most of that day entirely numb.
The only thing that broke me out of that unfeeling emptiness was when he touched me in the bedroom, and my body spasmed in automatic defence, sending him bleeding to the floor.
Why can’t I be numb to Curse? Why can’t any of the walls I build between us truly hold? Even now, I find myself watching him from the corner of my eye, my attention drawn to him with an inevitability that shames me.
Instead of his face, I focus instead on his hands as he deftly steers us through Toronto’s pre-dawn streets. The letters of his mamma’s name dance with the tension he exerts, the frangipani flower inked into his pinky appearing to rustle in unseen wind.
A memory enters me like a bullet, like a breeze, like something that could caress and kill me, all at once. It’s the image of Curse, little Accursio, with his missing-tooth smile and his coal-black hair, clambering like a monkey up the trunk of a frangipani tree.
“Oh, just leave them,” I cried from below, even knowing that he wouldn’t understand me. “Accursio!”
No doubt he heard me, even if he couldn’t decipher my English words, but still, he ignored me. He’d seen me admiring the blooms from the ground, and, without a word, had scrambled into action. I smacked my hands onto my own cheeks, fingernails digging in as he climbed higher and higher.
He had no fear. I had enough for the both of us.
“Please don’t fall,” I shouted. I didn’t want him to pick one of those perfect flowers just for me. And I especially didn’t want him to fall in pursuit of one. “Accursio! Just leave them be!”
But he didn’t leave them be. He stretched his lean body, grasping at one, nearly falling, nearly stopping my heart. I glimpsed his face, dappled by sun between petals and leaves. Intent with focus on the flower just out of reach.
Giving up on climbing, he swung his body in a big arc, snatching a flower at the same moment that he let go of the branch. I screamed and ran to him, but he was completely fine, crouched on the sunlit ground, the frangipani flower clenched in his fist. He stood and offered it to me.
I didn’t feel right taking it. The reason I’d admired the flowers wasn’t because I’d wanted one for myself, but because they’d looked so perfect, just as they were.
I believed fervently that Mamma was in heaven.
But I also sometimes believed that she could be in perfect places, like this.
That heaven could exist in the curve of petals and leave, sun and wood.
And Curse had gone ahead and plucked it for me, like he wasn’t battering down the very walls of paradise to do it.
When I didn’t take it from him, he instead tucked it into my hair, balanced carefully behind my ear. One of the petals came away in the process, drifting down between us before being caught up by the wind and whisked away and out of sight.
Just before it disappeared, I made a wish on it.
“I wish that we could get married one day,” I said aloud, blushing fiercely, even knowing that Curse wouldn’t comprehend the words.
I’d told Curse once that wishes don’t come true. That it was stupid to even make them in the first place. But somehow, this one managed to force itself into being. Even if it wasn’t anything close to what I’d imagined, what I’d hoped.
I think about the way the world seems to have twisted itself over and over, like one of Rosa’s treccine from this morning, to bring us back to each other.
I think of the way that wishes can metastasize, can come back to haunt you in ways you never could have seen coming.
I think of that half-crushed frangipani, clutched in Curse’s childish fist. Perhaps that was the first sign that he would take things, break things, when it came to me.
That he’d pluck a perfect flower, end the reign of its bloom, just because I’d smiled up at it.
I’d kill an innocent person to marry you.
Those words crash into others, ones from the memory. I don’t know why Curse’s childhood voice suddenly comes back to me now. If someone had asked me a week ago what Curse had said to me after that moment with the frangipani tree, I wouldn’t have had a clue.
But I hear the words now, clear as if they’re being spoken aloud to me, inside this very vehicle.
“What does come l'ala di un angelo mean?” I ask, sitting up so straight and fast that it activates the tension in the seatbelt. I’m terrified that if I didn’t say the words out loud immediately, they’d vanish again. Go back to whatever place they’ve been hiding all these years.
“What?” Curse asks. There’s a darkness in his clipped reply. A warning.
“Just tell me,” I ask. I don’t have a phone to look it up. And neither Robbie nor Leo are in the car to ask. There’s no one else.
I have to ask him. The very person who uttered the words in the first place.
I wonder if he remembers that scene the way I do. If he can picture it as clearly as me, only seeing my own face instead of his. It’s pretty unlikely. I haven’t even remembered this specific moment until right now.
“Where did you hear that phrase?” he asks me, never stopping to look my way. His eyes are as dark and focused as ever, staring out the windshield.
“I don’t know,” I say. He’s lied to me before. Two can play at that game. “I don’t remember where I heard it. I just want to know what it means.” I pick at my nails, then blurt, “Consider it a wedding present for me.”
“A wedding present.” He repeats it with such scalding condescension that I want to wither into myself. But this is too important. I don’t know why. It just is.
“Yes. A wedding present. Surely, I deserve that much,” I bluff.
“What you deserve…” His words trail off, and he lapses into silence so thick that I’m convinced I’ll never get my answer.
I repeat the words internally, trying desperately to memorize them, so that one day I can uncover their meaning for myself.
It’s foolish, I know. But even if Accursio is well and truly gone, I’ll get to have this much of him.
Some new fragment of memory. It feels like a gift, even if Curse scoffs at the comparison.
Come l'ala di un angelo. Come l'ala di un angelo.
I think the words so many times that they begin to take on a rhythm of their own, like a second heartbeat.
I’m so caught up in the pulsing poetry of it, the meaningless sounds of the syllables, that when Curse speaks again – and speaks the exact words from inside my own head – I’m completely caught off-guard.
“Come l'ala di un angelo,” Curse utters. The voice is all wrong, so much deeper than the memory. But the accent, the pronunciation, is just the same. “It means, ‘like an angel’s wing.’”
A hot lump clogs my throat. Tilting my head, I let it rest against the window, allowing present-day Toronto with its buildings and cars and lights to filter in and replace Taormina.
Eventually, we’re out of the dense parts of Toronto, swapping city streets for highway driving.
There’s barely any traffic at this hour – at least, not in the direction we are going.
There are more vehicles going south, travelling to Toronto, than north.
When I mention this to Curse, he tells me that we’re not actually going north yet, that this highway runs east-west, and we’ll be changing to another highway soon.
Explaining the flow of traffic, he tells me that it’s a weekday, and they’re commuters.
I didn’t have a clue what day it was until this moment.
Normal things like calendars and clocks seemed to stop mattering the moment Marco died.
We continue on, eventually shifting north and swapping to the other highway, which Curse calls “the 400.” When I twist in my seat and look out the windows, I find the navy sedan with Leo and Robbie following.
Other cars follow, too, and I try not to think about the fact that any one of them could hold Alessandro.
But even if he’s not here, now, his eyes are in my head.
Just like his father’s. Just like his great uncle’s.
My pulse shudders, and my fingertips tingle with numbness that I try to relieve by curling them into my palms.
Curse is highly alert as we drive, no doubt also keeping Alessandro’s possible whereabouts in mind.
No one does anything odd while we drive, though, and the further we get from Toronto, the more I think we might actually be successful in evading him.
He hit his head pretty hard in that car accident. Maybe he’s still recovering somewhere.
But where?
And for how long?
How long will I be looking over my shoulder, plagued by yet another Messina man?