Deadly Confessions

PROLOGUE

The Night God Looked Away

The first sound is glass.

Not a window. A picture frame. Mamma's wedding portrait above the console table in the foyer, the one she straightens every morning because Papa hangs it crooked on purpose to make her laugh.

It hits the marble floor and the glass breaks. The laughter that should follow doesn't come.

I sit up in bed. My nightgown is twisted around my waist. My stuffed rabbit, Signora Bianca, is on the floor where she fell during the night. The clock on my nightstand reads 11:47.

Voices.

Not my parents' voices. Low. Male. Too many of them.

Then Mamma screams.

The sound goes through me like voltage. It penetrates through the mattress, through my bones, and through the walls of the apartment that have kept me safe for ten years. A scream that doesn't sound like her. That sounds like something being torn from the inside out.

I throw the covers off. My feet hit the cold tile. I take two steps toward my bedroom door and stop because my hand is on the knob. Something tells me not to open it.

I hear Papa's voice. Loud. The voice he uses when he argues with Father Domenico about politics at Sunday dinner. The voice that fills a room.

"Non lei. Non lei, vi prego."

(Not her. Not her, please.)

Something heavy hits the floor in the hallway. The sound a body makes when it falls on marble.

I know because I fell last winter running in the corridor and hit the same marble and cried for twenty minutes and Papa put frozen peas on my elbow and called me la mia guerriera and I wasn't a warrior.

I was ten years old with a bruised elbow.

And the sound my body made when it hit the floor was small.

This sound is not small.

I back away from the door. My bare feet make no noise. I go to the closet, push past the dresses Mamma bought me for school and crawl among the winter coats that smell of mothballs and her perfume. Jasmine. She wears jasmine in her hair on Sundays.

I pull the coats over me and sit with my knees against my chin and put my hands over my ears.

It doesn't help.

Mamma is screaming words I can't make out. Then I hear, "La mia bambina. Per favore, la mia bambina." (My baby. Please, my baby.)

She is begging for me.

I should open the door and run to her. Be brave, the way she tells me to be brave when I don't want to go to school or when the other girls are mean. When I cry about stupid things that don't matter.

I don't move.

Then I heard a loud bang that sounded like a gunshot.

The screaming stops.

Silence fills the apartment the way water fills a glass. Complete. Heavy. Impossible to breathe through. Then a second gunshot. I flinch so hard my head hits the closet wall and I bite my tongue until I taste copper.

I stay in the closet. I count my heartbeats because counting is the only thing I know how to do.

I count to six hundred and twelve. That is ten minutes and twelve seconds if my heart beats once per second.

I know it is beating faster than that, so it has been less than ten minutes, but it feels like ten years.

The front door opens. Closes.

Footsteps leaving.

More silence.

I wait. I count to three hundred. My tongue throbs where I bit it. The blood tastes like the coins Papa keeps in a jar on his dresser, the ones he lets me sort by year on Sunday afternoons.

I push the coats away. Crawl out of the closet. Stand in my bedroom with my twisted nightgown and my bare feet and open the door.

The hallway light is on. It is the light Mamma leaves on for me when I wake up from nightmares and walk to their bedroom. The warm one. The safe one.

The hallway floor is red.

Not all of it. A trail. Starting at the foyer and going toward the living room.

Red on white marble. The marble Mamma chose when they renovated.

She showed me the samples and asked my opinion.

I picked the white one because it looked like a castle floor.

Like something from the stories she read to me before bed.

I walk toward the living room. My feet are in the red. It is warm. I can feel it between my toes. Warm and thick. I know what it is, but my ten-year-old brain will not say the word.

Papa is face down by the sofa. His left arm is extended toward the hallway. Toward my room. He was reaching for me. Even at the end, he was reaching for me.

Mamma is on her back near the window. Her eyes are open. Her jasmine perfume mixes with something sharp and chemical that burns my nose. Gunpowder. I know the smell from the fireworks Papa takes me to see over the Bay of Naples every New Year's Eve.

The apartment smells like fireworks, jasmine, and copper. I stand in the doorway and look at my parents. My knees give out.

I sit on the marble floor in their blood. It soaks through my nightgown.

I open my mouth and nothing comes out. The sound is stuck somewhere between my lungs and my throat, and it will not move. I sit there with my mouth open in a silent scream, looking at my mother's open eyes.

I don't know how long.

Then I hear a key in the front door, but I don't move. If they've come back to kill me, fine. Fine. Let them. The picture frame is broken in the foyer and Mamma's wedding portrait is facedown in the glass. I don't care anymore.

The door opens.

"Dio mio. Dio mio, no."

(My God. My God, no.)

Father Domenico.

He comes around the corner, sees my parents, and his knees buckle the same way mine did. He grabs the doorframe. His face goes white. His mouth moves. The sounds that come out are those of a man whose world is ending.

"Fratello mio." (My brother.)

He’s crying. His hands are shaking. He looks at Papa's body and then at Mamma's. Then he turns to me.

Sitting on the floor. Small. Covered in their blood.

He crosses the room and takes off his coat, the black one he wears to Mass, and he wraps it around me. His hands are gentle as he lifts me up like I weigh nothing. My arms hang at my sides as my nightgown drips on the marble.

"Vieni con me, cucciola. Ti tengo al sicuro."

(Come with me, little one. I'll keep you safe.)

I look at his face. Tears on his cheeks. Red eyes. He is holding me the way Papa held me when I fell last winter. Like I’m the only thing in his world.

He carries me toward the door. Over his shoulder, I see the living room one last time.

Papa's arm is reaching for me. Mamma's eyes open.

I close my eyes, praying that I can wake up from this nightmare.