Chapter 43 #2
"Luca," she says. "Bear needs you."
I get up and go.
Gemma
He hasn't said a word in ten minutes. Maybe longer. The oxygen machine hums in the corner and his chest rises in small, careful pulls. His thumb moves over my knuckles the way you'd smooth a wrinkle out of a tablecloth.
I don't pull away. I thought I'd want to. When I sat down I kept my hand loose so I could take it back the second I needed to, but he holds it the way Nina holds mine when she's falling asleep, and I can't take my hand back from that.
His eyes are closed. For a while I think he's drifted off, and I start counting the breaths between the machine's clicks so I have a job to do.
"Gemma."
His voice comes out in pieces. I lean in.
"I'm here."
His eyes open. Pale, wet at the edges, fixed on my face like he's memorizing it against a deadline.
"Do you believe," he says, and stops to breathe, "that I will meet your mother? After."
I don't have an answer ready. I was raised going to church on Christmas and Easter but I stopped thinking about heaven around the time I stopped thinking most things would work out. But he's watching me, and there's a right answer here, and I nod.
He smiles. It isn't a happy smile. It pulls his face down instead of up.
"No," he says. "I don't think so."
"You just asked me—"
"I asked what you believe." His thumb keeps moving over my knuckles, slow and even.
"I've had time to think about it. Months, in this bed.
Ashley— if there is a place people go, she went up.
" He lifts his eyes toward the ceiling, then lets them fall.
"I'm not going up, Gemma. The things I've done.
I made my peace with the direction a long time ago. "
I want to tell him he's wrong. That's what you say to a dying man. But I don't know what he's done and I don't get to hand out forgiveness for a woman who drowned before I could walk.
"I want to ask you a favor," he says.
"Okay."
"Live a long time." His grip tightens, more than I thought he had in him.
"A long, boring, safe life. Grandchildren.
Bad knees. All of it." He pauses, the machine clicks, and he pulls in air.
"But when you die — and it should be sixty years from now, do you hear me — when you get up there, find her.
Find Ashley. And tell her I loved her with my entire heart.
From the day I met her until the day I stopped breathing.
Tell her that, because I won't be there to say it myself. "
I break. One second I'm holding his hand and the next my face is wet and my shoulders are shaking. He's giving me a message to carry for sixty years because he doesn't believe he'll be allowed in the same room as her, even dead.
"I'll tell her," I say, and my voice cracks straight through the middle. "I promise. I'll tell her."
His face folds. Tears slide into the creases and he squeezes my hand. Then the squeeze turns into a jolt, his whole body seizes, and the cough comes.
It's not a normal cough. It comes from somewhere deep and wrong, wet and tearing. His hand rips out of mine so he can press it to his chest. The machine starts beeping. He folds forward and the cough keeps coming, one on top of another, no air between them.
"Cesare—" I'm on my feet. "Help! Somebody—"
The door opens before I finish. Vico crosses the room, and a nurse in blue scrubs comes in right behind him, already reaching for the oxygen mask.
"Out." Vico's hand closes on my arm. Not rough. Firm. "Come on. Let her work."
"Is he—"
"Come on."
He steers me into the hallway and the door shuts.
The coughing goes muffled behind it, which is somehow worse.
I press my back against the wall and stare at a painting of a harbor across from me and count things.
Four boats. Two doors in this hallway. My heart slams against my ribs like it's trying to leave without me and I make myself breathe through my nose.
In for four. Out for four. He's dying. I knew he was dying.
Everybody in this house knows he's dying and it still didn't prepare me for the sound of it.
The door opens again and Vico steps out alone.
He shuts it soft behind him, then stands there with his eyes closed and presses his fingers to his temples, and for a second he doesn't look like the man who threatened my husband.
He looks like somebody standing outside his father's room listening to him cough himself apart.
"She's got him," he says. "It passes. It's been happening more."
"Okay."
He drops his hands and looks at me. "You okay?"
I nod. Then the nod runs out and my head goes the other way, and I shake it, because there's no point lying to him.
Vico crosses the distance between us and puts his arms around me.
My whole body locks up. I stand stiff inside it, arms at my sides.
But his chest hitches once against my cheek, a small broken movement he'd never let me see from the front, and I understand.
He's losing his father in that room. Whatever Cesare is to me, he's been Vico's whole life, and Vico is standing in this hallway hurting worse than I am.
I lift my arms and hug him back.