Chapter 11 #2
I am on my feet before the door has fully opened. They are supporting her as she walks inside. Her face is the color of paper, and her breath is coming in small, fast pulls, and there is a sheen of sweat on her temple and her upper lip.
But she is smiling.
“Angel.”
The maids brace as I take her from them, and I lower her carefully into the chair by the window, the deep one with the high back. Her hand finds my wrist. She is so much lighter than she should be.
“You shouldn’t be up.” My voice has gone soft. I cannot help it. “Lucia, what are you doing out of bed?”
“I wanted air.” She is panting. The smile is still there. “I wanted to see you. Don’t be angry with them. I begged them.”
I look at the maids.
They are trembling at the door — both of them. The taller one has gone the color of dough.
“You let her out of the bed.”
“Sir, she —”
“I begged them.” Lucia’s voice is faint but firm. She has lifted her hand from my wrist to my cheek. Her palm is cold. “Giovanni. Don’t. Don’t be cross with them. I asked. I asked many times. Or did you not want to see me today?”
I lower myself to one knee beside the chair, so she does not have to look up.
“Of course, I wanted to see you.”
“Then don’t be cross.”
“I won’t.”
I look past her at the maids, and I give them the smallest jerk of my chin. They understand, they back out of the room, and the door closes behind them.
Lucia closes her eyes for a moment. The smile stays.
“Water,” she says. “Please. I’m dry.”
“Yes! Yes, here.”
I go to the small fridge in the corner of the study, the one I keep for late nights. I take out a bottle, pour it into a glass, and bring it back. I crouch beside her again and hold it out.
Her hand reaches, and she takes it. I should have seen the shake in her fingers. I am watching her face, not her hand, and the glass is between her fingers for a half-second, then it is not.
It hits the floor between us and shatters.
A shard finds my hand. I feel the cold and the cut. A line opens across the back of my knuckle, and the blood comes up dark and fast.
Lucia yells.
“Giovanni!”
“It’s nothing, Angel. Look at me. It’s nothing.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“A scratch. Truly. Look.”
I hold my hand up to show her. It is a mistake. The blood is moving down my wrist now, and her eyes have fixed on the line of it, and her face is changing the way I have learned to recognize, the way I would do anything in this world not to see.
“Oh no.”
“Lucia. Lucia. Look at my face. Not the hand. My face.”
She is not looking at my face.
She is looking at the blood.
“Oh no. Oh no no no.” Her voice is climbing. “He hit you. He hit you, and I hurt you, I — I hurt you, I-I —”
“Angel.”
She seizes my bleeding hand in both of her thin, shaking ones and brings it to her chest. Her eyes are wide. Her breath is coming faster.
“I hurt you. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I hurt you, I —”
“It was a glass. It was a glass, Lucia. You didn’t —”
“Giovanni.”
She shoves me, and it has not moved me. She does not have the strength to move me.
But I was already off-balance on one knee, and the shove catches me at the shoulder, and I rock back, and my hand goes down to catch myself, and the shards are under my palm, and I go down hard on my hip on the floor.
“Giovanni.” Her voice is distant. It’s like she is searching. “Giovanni, where are you? Giovanni, where is he, where is he —”
“Angel —”
“Giovanni!”
I am on the floor, and blood from my hand is on the rug between us. She is looking past me, through me, into a corner of the room where the light is dim, calling my name into the corner like I might come out of it if she calls loudly enough.
“Lucia! Lucia, look at me. Please! Look at —”
“Give me my brother.”
She is on her feet, somehow, and she is staggering, and her hands are reaching for the empty corner of the room.
“Give me my brother. Where is he? Where is he, where, where, where —”
The door opens, and I look up. So does Lucia.
Yana steps in.
She takes in the room, and Lucia sees her.
Her eyes are on Lucia with a different attention than they had given the room, and her hands come up.
“Ma’am! My brother. My brother, please. I can’t find him.”
Yana walks closer to her.
“I know.”
Yana’s voice is very steady.
“I know. I’m going to help you. Look at me. Look here.”
She is in front of Lucia. She has not touched her yet. She raises both hands slowly and shows my sister the palms.
“I’m going to put my hands on your head. Is that all right? Then we can find your brother, but he can’t see you crying like this. It’ll scare him.
Lucia is shaking, but she nods. She would nod at anything in this moment, but Yana asked anyway.
Yana steps in. She brings both hands up to my sister’s head and presses there with her thumbs, just at the soft hollow above the cheekbone. She rubs in small, slow circles. Her face is calm. Her voice has gone lower.
“You want your brother.”
“Yes —”
“You want to know where he is?”
“Yes —”
“Breathe with me. In through your nose. Out through your mouth. Like that. There you are. Again. There you are.”
I have not moved from the floor.
Yana’s hands stay at Lucia’s temples. She steps slightly to the side, the smallest pivot, just enough to clear my sister’s line of sight to the place I am sitting on the floor.
“There he is,” she says quietly. “Look. There. He is right there.”
Lucia’s eyes move, and they find me on the floor.
For a long second, nothing changes. Then her face changes. The wild thing in her eyes sinks back down. The breath she has been pulling in short, fast jerks.
“Giovanni?”
She is herself again.
“Giovanni. Why are you on the floor?”
She steps out of Yana’s hands. She hops the small distance toward me with her limp suddenly more pronounced because the adrenaline has gone, and what is left is just the bad leg and the long tiredness. She lowers herself slowly to her knees beside me.
She looks at my face.
“Giovanni. You’re red. Are you?” Her thumb comes up to my cheekbone. I feel her brush it across my skin. It comes away wet. “Are you crying?”
I had not realized.
I brush the heel of my hand across my eyes, and there is a smear. I do not bother to look away. I reach for her, I pull her in against my chest, I hold her, and I do not say anything for a long moment.
“There, there,” she says. She is patting my back as if I am the one who needs comforting. “Why are you on the floor, fratellino? You should not be on the floor.”
I press my mouth into her hair.
She pulls back gently. She looks at my face again. Then her eyes shift past me to Yana, who has not moved from the spot two steps back where she stepped to clear my sister’s sightline.
Lucia’s face lights up.
“Oh. Oh. You. You’re the kind girl. You brought me water.”
Yana’s mouth opens.
Before she can speak, Lucia is reaching her thin arm toward her with a kind of delighted urgency.
“Why haven’t you come to visit me again? I have been waiting for you to come back.”
Yana looks at me.
I sit up. I clear my throat.
“Lucia, she has been busy. She will visit you when she can. Right now, you need to rest; you have had a difficult morning —”
“Giovanni.” Lucia turns her face up to me again. She is studying me. She turns back to Yana, then to me, a small grin spreading across her thin face.
“Are you…” she says to Yana in a voice that has gone shy and warm. “Are you his fiancée?”
Yana does not answer.
“Oh.” Lucia’s hand comes up to her mouth. “Oh, silly me. Of course, you are. He told me about you. He didn’t tell me your name —”
I close my eyes briefly.
She is delighted by her own deduction. “You two should be married. Why have you not married? I’m sorry I was too sick to come to the engagement party. I should have been there; I —”
“We’re not married yet,” I say carefully.
Yana’s face shows something I have only seen on it a handful of times — pure scandalized indignation.
“Why not?”
She turns to Yana.
“Is he bullying you? Is he? Oh, please forgive him. He is sweet, truly. He used to bring me drawings when we were small. He once kept a kitten in a box for three weeks so our father wouldn’t find it. He is gentle; he — he hides it. He is shy with women.”
I am, somehow, going to die in this study.
I look at Yana.
She has recovered, and her face is doing exactly what I expected it to do: nothing. There is a careful absence of any reaction Lucia could read.
But I have watched her for weeks now. I have studied her face the way I study every face that matters to my work. There is something at the corner of her mouth, very small. There is a flicker of color at the line of her jaw.
The faint heat of being perceived in a way she did not ask for.
It is gone in less than a second.
She brings her face back into the soft warmth she wore at the Marchetti estate for Carlo De Luca. The performed warmth. The Yana of dinner parties.
“He is not bullying me,” she says to Lucia. Her voice is steady and kind. “Don’t worry.”
“Good.” Lucia squeezes her own hand into a small, triumphant fist. Then she yawns, like a child yawns when the day has caught up with her. “Oh. I am so tired.”
“Time for your medicine, cara,” I say. “Let me take you back.”
“All right.” She lets me lift her. Her arms are around my neck. She is as light as paper. As I stand with her, she lifts her head toward Yana again. “Will you come visit me? Will you come with him next time?”
Yana glances at me.
“Yes,” she answers.
“And take me around the house. He keeps me in that room. I told him I am rotting in that room. He won’t listen.”
She has turned her face up to mine again, accusing.
“I won’t listen?”
“You won’t. Tell him.” She looks back at Yana, who looks like she has just been handed a grenade. “You were right; inside is making me worse.”
“Bed,” I say to Lucia. I lift her.
I carry her back through the corridors. She is half asleep against my shoulder by the time we reach her room. The nursemaids have remade the bed. They lower the lights for me. I sit on the edge of the mattress, lay her down carefully on her good side, and pull the blanket up to her shoulder.
“Giovanni.”
“Yes, Angel.”
“I will see you tomorrow. Yes? You promised.”
“I promised.”
“Take me out for air. Even just to the garden.”
“Every day. From now on. I swear.”
“You’re busy.”
“I am not too busy for you.”
“You are. You always are. It’s fine.” She closes her eyes. “Your fiancée can take me out on the days you cannot. She seems strong. She can take me.”
“Lucia —”
“I like her.”
I look at her face.
She is smiling with her eyes closed. The smile that she only does when she is sleepy and pleased, and the pain has stepped back for a few minutes.
“You don’t even know her, Angel.”
“I know enough. She is kind. She is gentle. I can see it.”
I think of Yana.
The pin in her hair was sharp enough to open a throat.
The muscle along her shoulder where I gripped her in the study.
The way she put my sister out with two fingers against the side of her neck.
The way she shot four men in three seconds in a Marchetti bathroom and dragged my paralyzed body out across the marble.
Kind.
Gentle.
There is nothing anyone with eyes should be able to mistake for kind or gentle about her.
And yet my sister, who can no longer reliably tell what year she is in, has met Yana for the second time in her life and is calling her gentle with the smile of a woman who has just decided something.
“She is not staying,” I say carefully. “She is a guest. She will be going home soon.”
“Mm.”
“Angel.”
“I heard you.”
She is drifting now. The medication is taking her down. She turns her face into the pillow.
“But I like her,” she murmurs. “Let her spend time with me while she is here. Will you let her?”
It is not a question I can answer. The answer is complicated and dangerous, and I do not have the time to sort out the answer in this moment, with Lucia falling asleep in front of me and my own hand still bleeding through my fingers where I am holding it pressed against the cuff of my shirt.
She does not need a complicated answer. She needs a soft one. She needs to fall asleep without the next episode being triggered by my refusal of something her brain has decided she wants.
“Yes,” I say. “I will let her.”
“Good.”
She is almost gone.
A nursemaid steps in quietly with a tray. A glass. A syringe. Two small bottles. She begins the afternoon medications.
“What is that one?”
The nurse looks up. “Don Mondi?”
“That ampule. The clear one. I do not recognize it.”
“It is — I’m sorry, Don Mondi, I do not recall the name from memory. I can —”
“Who cleared it?”
She hesitates.
“Fabiano, sir. Yesterday evening. He brought it from the doctor’s office himself. He said the doctor had recommended a small adjustment.”
I look at the ampule.
“I want a full report tomorrow. Every medication she is currently receiving. Alongside the name of the doctor or specialist who prescribed each one. Direct to me. Not through Fabiano.”
“Yes, Don Mondi.”
I bend and kiss Lucia on the forehead. Her skin is warm. She is already breathing in the deep, slow rhythm of sleep.
Yana is in the study when I return.
She has not sat. She is standing near the window where Lucia was, her arms at her sides, her face composed. The shards on the rug have not been cleaned. A small smear of my blood is still on the floor.
I close the door behind me.
I go to the desk and lean against its edge.
“There is an art show,” I say, “in a few days. I have business there. I will be attending as Giorgio Ferrante. You will come with me.”
“As what?
“As his assistant.”
“I see.”
“Prepare. We leave Friday.”
She nods, but she doesn’t go.
I wait.
“And my proposal,” she asks, “about your sister.”