Chapter Fifty-Four
I do it on a Thursday, because everything true in this child’s life has happened on a Thursday, and I am not going to teach her that Thursdays are safe and then hand her this one on a Sunday.
I do it at half past six, in the gatehouse, with thirty minutes of the hour left, because I am not going to do it at the end and let a man walk out of a gate afterwards.
He knows. I told him on the Tuesday, on the telephone, in nine words, and he did not ask me one question and he did not ask me to wait and he did not say thank you, and there was a silence on that line that went on so long I checked the screen.
The kettle is on because Marco puts it on at six out of habit.
Sophia is on the table, which is still not allowed and which has become a thing that neither of us mentions.
She has her boots on the chair and she is drawing a cornice on the back of a delivery note and she is pressing hard enough to go through it.
I sit down on the chair opposite her.
“Sophia. Put the pencil down.”
She looks at me. She puts the pencil down flat, parallel to the edge of the table, and I do not know when she learned that, and I do know when she learned that.
“You know Adrian,” I say.
“Yes.”
“He is your father.”
I have practised it in a bathroom in Milan for nine days and I have written four versions of it in the back of a notebook and I have said all of them out loud to a mirror, and in the end I say six words with a full stop on them, because she is four and I am not going to make her wade through my feelings to get to the fact.
Adrian is standing against the door frame with his hat in both hands.
Sophia looks at him.
She looks at him for a long time, with her whole face, the way she does everything, and I have never in my life wanted so badly to say something and I sit on my hands and I let it be quiet.
“Is he going to live in our house,” she says.
“No.”
“Does Giulia know.”
“Yes.”
“Does Matteo know.”
“No,” I say. “Matteo does not know anything.”
“He does not,” she agrees.
And then she picks the pencil back up, and I feel the whole of my chest come down about two centimetres, and I think, for one second, with total stupidity, that it has gone in and that it is finished and that we have all got away with it.
“Where was he,” Sophia says, to the delivery note.
“In London.”
“For all the time.”
“For all the time.”
She thinks about that. She puts one line on the paper and does not like it and rubs it out with her thumb.
“You said he was not anywhere,” she says.
And there it is.
She asked me in April. She was three and a half and she was standing on a chair at my kitchen sink with her sleeves pushed up because she wanted to do the plates, and she said, in the middle of it, without any weather in front of it at all, where is my father, and I stood beside her with a plate in my hand and I said, he is not anywhere.
She has been carrying it for eight months. She has had it in her hand the whole time, the way she carries a stone in a jam jar, and she has taken it out and looked at it, and she has never once mentioned it again, and I thought that meant she had put it down.
They do not put anything down. That is what nobody tells you. They are just very small and they cannot reach the shelf.
“Yes,” I say. “I said that.”
“Why.”
“Because it was not true and I said it anyway.”
“Why.”
“Because I did not want to tell you the true thing,” I say, “and I was not brave enough to say nothing.”
She looks at me.
She is four years old and she looks at me the way Ines looks at a contractor, and I sit in a chair in a gatehouse and take it, and it is the worst thing that has ever been done to me by another human being and she is not even trying.
“Where was he,” she says again.
“I have told you. In London.”
“Then why did he not come.”
And I turn my head, and I look at her father, who is standing in the doorway of a nine by eleven room with a hat in both hands, and I have not planned this and I do not decide it, I simply find that I am not going to do it for him.
I did it once, in this room, in October, with four words, and I have thought about it every night since, and I am not doing it twice.
“Ask him,” I say.
Sophia turns round on the table.
“Why did you not come,” she says.
And Adrian Kastellanos does not speak.
I want it written down properly. He does not look at me.
He does not look for a way round. He stands there with his hat in his hands and his mouth open about a centimetre and nothing comes out of it at all, and it goes on for nine seconds, and I count them on the clock over the sink because I cannot look at either of them.
“He did not know where you were,” I say.
“Why not.”
“Because I did not tell him.”
And my daughter looks at me for a long moment, and then she asks the question. The real one. The one I have been standing in front of for four years with my arms out like a woman holding a door shut in a wind.
“Did he ask.”
“Yes,” I say. “In August. He asked me if he could come and see you, and I said yes, and that is why he comes on Thursdays.”
“No.” She is impatient with me now. She has been impatient with me since she could speak. “Before. When I was born. Did he ask then.”
The kettle clicks off.
“No,” I say. “He did not know you existed.”
“Why not.”
“Because I did not tell him.”
“Why not.”
“Because I did not want to,” I say.
And there is nothing after that. There is no second half of it.
I have had four years and fourteen investigators and a green folder and a ballroom in London and a hospital in Turin with nobody in the corridor, and I have built the finest cathedral of reasons that any woman has ever built, and I could stand up in a room with four hundred people in it and lay every stone of it out, and I have.
And in a gatehouse with a photograph of somebody’s dog on the wall my daughter says why not, and the honest answer is four words long, and it will not carry a cathedral, and it never was going to.
“You were cross,” Sophia says.
“Yes.”
“With him.”
“Yes.”
She turns round on the table again and looks at him.
“Were you cross,” she says.
And this time he speaks.
“No,” Adrian says.
“Why not.”
“Because she was right,” he says, and his voice is flat and clean and there is nothing on it at all, and he does not add one thing to it, and I stand up and go to the window because I have to do something with my face.
Sophia thinks about it for a while.
I hear her get down off the table. I hear her boots on the boards. I do not turn round.
“Do I have to call you a thing,” she says.
“No.”
“What do I call you.”
“Adrian.”
“That is what I call you now.”
“Yes,” he says.
“Then nothing is different,” Sophia says, and she picks up her pencil and her delivery note and she goes out through the door into the yard, past his leg, and she does not touch him and she does not look up at him, and she goes and sits down on the step of the loggia in the cold to finish her cornice, because the light is better out there and she has been telling me that since June.
Neither of us moves.
Behind me, in a room nine feet by eleven, my husband makes a sound that I am not going to write down.
“Do not,” I say, to the window.
“I am not.”
“You are.”
“I know,” he says.
I stand at the glass with my arms folded and I watch a four year old draw a wall in the dark with her tongue between her teeth, and I do not go out to her, and she does not want me to, and it takes everything I have got.
At seven o’clock he goes out into the yard and stands about six feet from her with his hands behind his back and says, “That is the hour,” and she says, “I know,” and does not look up, and he walks to the line and takes off the hat and signs himself out.
He is at the gate when she says it.
“Adrian.”
He stops.
“The window is on the wrong side,” Sophia says.
“On yours or on mine.”
“On yours.” She sits back on her heels. “You always do it.”
“I know,” he says. “It is because I am left handed.”
“That is not a reason.”
“No,” Adrian says. “It is not.”
And he goes out through the gate of the Cassaro Palazzo, and my daughter finishes her wall, and I go and get the site book off the trestle and I take it back into the gatehouse and I sit down in the chair.
I open it at the back, at the page from the twenty ninth of August, where there is a sentence in my hand and two names under it.
And I write, underneath, in the margin, small, because it is not a site record and it has no business being in that book and I put it in that book anyway:
Told her. She asked who said no. It was me.