Chapter Thirteen #2
“She has a father and he came to the school and he had a coat and he picked her up like this.” She demonstrates.
She puts both arms straight up over her head, holding an invisible child, and her face is not sad.
That is the thing I cannot get out of my body afterward.
She is not sad. She is doing research. “Up like that. In the air.”
“That sounds nice.”
“Yes,” she says, and eats a piece of pasta, and swings her legs, and says, “Where is mine?”
There it is.
Four years. I have been waiting for this question since before she could speak, and I built the answer years ago, I built it carefully, out of true pieces, the way you build anything that has to hold weight. It is a good answer. I have rehearsed it in the shower. I have said it out loud in the car.
“You do not have one,” I say.
“Everybody has one.”
“That is true. Everybody has one somewhere.” I put my fork down. “But some people have one who is not there. And when somebody is not there, for a long time, then after a while they are not there in a way that means they are not yours.”
She thinks about it.
“Is he dead?”
“No.”
“Is he far away?”
“Yes.”
“How far?”
“Very far,” I say.
And that is the lie.
Not he is dead, I did not say that, I have never said that, I have been very proud of that, I have held it up to myself in the dark like a receipt. I never told her he was dead.
The lie is very far.
He is two kilometers from this table. He is in a hotel on Via Manzoni with wet trousers, or he is on a plane to London, or he is standing in the rain outside a building she has never seen, and he is not far away at all, he is the nearest he has been to her in his entire life, and I have just looked into my daughter’s face and moved him across a continent with one word.
“Very far,” she repeats, testing it. She is not upset. She is filing it. “Like Australia.”
“Like that.”
“Does he know about me?”
And this one comes at me from an angle I did not build a wall on.
She is four. She is holding a spoon. There is tomato on her chin and she is asking me the only question that matters, the one I have never once allowed myself to ask in an empty room, and she is asking it with her legs swinging.
“No,” I say. “He does not know about you.”
“Why not?”
“Because I did not tell him.”
Sophia frowns. It is a real frown. It is the frown she makes at a building.
“Why not?”
I look at my daughter across a small kitchen table in Milan.
Here is what is true. Here is what I have known for four years and said to nobody, not to Ines, not to a doctor, not to the ceiling at three in the morning.
I did not keep her because he did not deserve her. That is what I say. That is the thing I have on the shelf, ready, polished, and Ines has heard it and believed it.
I kept her because I could not survive being told she was not enough either.
If I had stood in front of him with a child in my body and he had done that thing again, that half second, that lean forward and then nothing, if his mother had put a hand on his arm one more time, then I would not have been a woman who was left.
I would have been a woman whose child was left.
And I could not have carried that. I was twenty nine years old with one hundred and forty euros and I could carry my own ruin, I could not carry hers.
So I never gave him the chance to fail her.
Which means I never gave him the chance not to.
“Because,” I say, and my voice is perfectly normal, and that is somehow the worst part, “he was busy.”
Sophia looks at me.
She is four, and she cannot read a face the way an adult reads a face, and she reads mine anyway, and something goes across her that I have never seen there before, a small closing, like a shutter going over.
“Okay,” she says.
She gets down from the table. She takes her plate to the counter, which she is not tall enough to reach, so she puts it on the chair, which is her system.
“Sophia.”
“I am going to do my drawing,” she says.
And she goes.
I sit at the table with the tap dripping and the pan cooling on the stove.
I have told that lie, or one of its cousins, for four years.
In a maternity ward in Turin, to a midwife with kind eyes who asked me if there was anyone to call.
On the birth registration, in a box, with a pen that was chained to a desk.
On school forms. To women at playgrounds who are not asking, who are only making conversation, who say and Papa?
the way you say and how was the weather. To a notary. To a bank. To a landlord.
Hundreds of times. It has always gone down like water.
I taught myself to say it without a pause.
That took about a year. The pause is the thing that gives you away, the half beat before the answer, and I practiced until there was no half beat, and I have been proud of that, and I would like the record to show that I have been proud of a very small and ugly thing.
I get up. I do the pan. I do the plates. I wipe a table that is already clean.
Through the doorway I can see her on the floor of the front room with the paper and the box of pencils, on her stomach, ankles crossed in the air, and she is drawing a house.
She is drawing a house with no front wall, which is what she draws, so that you can see all the rooms, and I have known for two years that this is because she wants to know what is inside things and I have told myself it is charming.
She is putting people in it tonight. She does not usually put people in it.
I stand in a doorway in my own home with a dishcloth in my hand and I watch my daughter draw two figures in the kitchen of an open house, one big and one small, and then I watch her stop.
She holds the pencil over the paper. She does not draw anything.
She is looking at the empty part.
I go to the sink and I run the tap over my hands for longer than my hands need, and I look out of the window at Milan, at a wall of shutters and somebody’s laundry and a satellite dish with a pigeon on it, and I think:
He is two kilometers from here.
He signed a document today with his own hand and did not change a word of it, and the document says he may not speak to me, and I wrote that clause myself, standing in a corridor, and I was proud of it for about six hours.
Because what I actually did today was sell a man thirteen weeks of standing near me and call it a punishment.
I sit back down at the table with my hands flat on the wood.
Four years. Hundreds of times. Water, every time.
And tonight, in my mouth, it tastes like something.