11. Alessia
— ? —
Alessia
Now - The Morning After
I don’t go to the prison first.
I tell Euridice I’m going, and I let her put me in a car, and then I sit in the back of it with my hands in my lap and give the driver my father’s address instead, and I watch her building get smaller in the mirror and feel like a liar for the whole first mile.
There are two news vans at the bottom of the drive and an officer at the gate who can’t be more than twenty-five.
He looks at my license for a long time.
“Ma’am, the residence is sealed.”
“I know what it is.”
“Then you know I can’t-”
“My mother’s rosary is in the drawer of the table in the upstairs hall.
” I keep my voice level, because if I let it do anything else I won’t get to the end of the sentence.
“Her Mass is in five weeks. I’m not standing in a church without it because a man I’m not related to any more made some choices. ”
He looks at the vans. He looks at me. He is somebody’s son and he has clearly been standing at this gate since six this morning with nobody at all to talk to.
“Twenty minutes,” he says. “Don’t go in the study.”
The tape across the front door has been cut and re-taped, and the house smells the way it has smelled my entire life, wax and cold stone and the ghost of somebody’s cigarette, and for about four seconds my whole body walks in expecting my father to be in the study with the door half open.
Then I get to the dining room.
Nobody has touched it.
The plates are still on the table. One at every place.
The primi have gone gray and solid in the dishes and there’s a serving spoon lying on the cloth where somebody dropped it and one of the little glass dishes of salt is knocked over with the salt fanned across the linen.
Zia Carmela’s cardigan is over the back of her chair.
My cousin Marco’s phone charger is still plugged into the wall by the sideboard.
My coffee cup is on the floor where I dropped it, in a dry brown stain the shape of a country nobody has named.
And there’s the chair beside mine, pulled out at an angle, with a clean plate in front of it and a napkin nobody unfolded.
I stand in the doorway of my father’s dining room for a long time.
“Alessia.”
Rosa is in the kitchen doorway with a roll of packing tape in her hand.
She has worked in this house since before I could walk. She taught me to make ragù standing on a chair at that counter. She cried at my wedding louder than any of my aunts, and she’s standing here now in her coat with her hair coming down and a box of my father’s things at her feet.
“They said I could take the kitchen,” she says. “Nothing else. Only the kitchen.”
“Rosa-”
And then she’s across the room with both arms around me, smelling of soap and onions and the whole inside of my childhood, saying something in Italian I’m too far gone to follow.
We stand in the wreck of Sunday lunch and hold on to each other.
“It isn’t true,” she says into my shoulder. “Whatever they are saying on the television, it isn’t true.”
I don’t answer.
She pulls back and holds me out at arm’s length and looks at my face, and whatever she finds there makes her own go white. “Alessia. It isn’t true.”
“He killed a man, Rosa.”
“No.”
“He had a man killed. There’s a road in Italy and a car that went off it and a brake line somebody cut, and my father paid for it.” It comes out flat and horrible. “He’s going to tell me so himself in about an hour. I’m going there from here.”
Rosa takes her hands off me.
She goes back to the box at her feet and picks up a wooden spoon and puts it down again, and her chin is going, and when she finally speaks she won’t look at me.
“He carried my husband’s coffin,” she says. “When Beppe died. Your father. He came down to Salerno and he stood in the rain and he carried the front left corner, and then he paid for my boys to finish school and he never said one word about it to anybody. Not even to me.”
“I know.”
“Thirty-one years I have worked in this house and that man has never once raised his voice to me.”
“I know that too.”
“Then how-” She stops and presses the back of her wrist against her mouth. “How am I supposed to put both of those into the same man?”
And there it is. The thing I’ve been carrying up and down Euridice’s hallway since two o’clock this morning, said out loud in my father’s kitchen by a woman in her coat.
“I don’t know,” I tell her. “I’ve been trying since yesterday. I can’t make them fit and I can’t make either one of them stop being true.”
“He is a good man to me.”
“He was a good man to me too.” My voice finally goes.
“That’s what I can’t get round, Rosa. He wasn’t pretending.
Everybody’s going to want me to say it was a performance and it wasn’t.
He taught me to ride a bicycle on that drive.
He sat up the whole night after Mamma died and he didn’t let go of my hand once.
That was real. He meant every second of it. ”
“Sì.”
“And he killed somebody’s uncle.” I can hardly get it out. “Somebody sat at a table like this one and got told. Somebody’s Sunday ended the way mine did. And then my father came home and had dinner with me and asked about my week.”
Rosa crosses herself.
I sit down.
Not in my chair. I don’t know why I do it and I’m going to be thinking about it for years, but I walk the whole length of that table and sit down in my father’s chair at the head of it, in front of his plate, with his napkin still folded beside it because they took him before the secondi.
From up here you can see every one of them. Every face at every place. That’s what he had, every Sunday of my life. That’s what he kept telling me he was protecting.
I put my hands flat on the tablecloth and I cry in my father’s chair until there’s nothing left in me, and Rosa stands by the sideboard with her tape in her hand and lets me do it, because she is the only person left on this earth who is grieving exactly the same man I am.
When I’m finished she brings me a glass of water and a cloth and waits while I put my face back together.
Then I go upstairs for my mother’s rosary, which is the only true thing I said at that gate.
It’s in the drawer of the hall table where it’s been since I was seven.
The beads are worn smooth and they still smell faintly of her, jasmine and something underneath it I have never been able to name, and I put them in my coat pocket and keep my hand round them the whole way back down the stairs.
Rosa is waiting at the bottom.
“The table by the front door,” she says. “They went through it and they said it was nothing and they left it. Take what is yours before somebody else does.”
So I open the drawer.
It’s the table where he dropped his keys every day of his life. Sunglasses. Reading glasses with one arm mended. A rosary that isn’t my mother’s. Three foreign coins, a church raffle ticket, a shirt button.
And at the bottom, face down, a photograph.
I turn it over.
Two young men on the back of a boat with a cliff behind them, both of them laughing at whoever’s holding the camera. The one on the left is my father at about thirty, thin and brown and beautiful, his shirt open and his hair still black.
The one on the right I have seen exactly once in my life, in a folder on my husband’s desk, with a date typed underneath him.
I sit down on the bottom stair with the photograph in both hands.
On the back, in pencil, in handwriting I’d know anywhere because it signed every report card I ever brought home:
Riccardo e io.
He didn’t kill a stranger.
He killed his friend. And that photograph has been in the drawer by the front door since before I was born, and he never once took it out, not when they stopped speaking, not when he decided what he was going to do about it, not afterwards.