Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
Yana
The days pass, and I don’t touch the food. They bring it twice a day. Bread, water, sometimes a warm drink. It sits by the door, goes cold, and the maids take it away untouched and bring more. I drink a little of the water when my mouth gets too dry to swallow. That’s all.
I sleep on the floor because there’s nowhere else. When I fall asleep, I dream about Lucia.
In the dream, we’re in the garden again, and the sun is out, and I’m trying to tell her I’m sorry.
I’m sorry I couldn’t stop it. I’m sorry I wasn’t fast enough.
I’m sorry I came into your house and got close to you, and it killed you.
She doesn’t look angry. She looks at me and turns and walks toward a light at the edge of the garden, and I call her name, and she doesn’t stop, and I can’t move my legs to follow.
I wake up with tears running down my face.
Today, I sit on the floor waiting, and the door opens. It’s Fabiano who comes in. He has a smirk on his face, and he comes into the room and stands over me where I’m sitting against the wall.
“How are you, my lady?”
I don’t answer.
“Bad mood?”
I pull back from him. He didn’t come for any reason except to enjoy this. I turn my face away.
“Giovanni sent me to give you a gift,” he says.
He raises a hand. His men come in and take me by the arms and drag me up off the floor. I’m too weak to do anything. My legs don’t have it in them. I haven’t eaten in days, and my body has nothing left to fight with.
“I want to see him,” I say to Fabiano.
He smiles.
“He’s preparing for his sister’s burial. He has no time for cheap romance.”
“You did this,” I say. “Didn’t you? You set up all of this.”
“I’m afraid you’re confused.” His voice is mild. “You did this. Take her.”
They pull me out, down the corridor, through the house, out the front. They shove me into the back of a car. Thunder rolls somewhere over the house as the doors shut and the engine starts.
Where are they taking me?
The thought turns over and over. Is he sending me back to Kirill?
Just like that. That easily after all of it.
I look at the men on either side of me, at the driver, at Fabiano in the front — four of them.
I’m one of me, and I haven’t eaten, and my hands are shaking from hunger and grief, and I can’t fight four, not like this.
I make myself wait. Watch the road and wait for the moment when I can take advantage of anything and run.
I can’t solve Lucia’s death when I am locked up.
The moment doesn’t come.
The drive is long, so long that the city falls away, then the towns, and then there’s nothing on either side but open land, going gloomy under a sky full of rain. The car slows down, and it stops in the middle of nowhere on a flat stretch of wet ground with no building in sight.
They pull me out into the drizzle.
The rain is cold; it soaks into my hair and my clothes in seconds. Fabiano gets out under an umbrella one of his men holds for him.
“Boys,” he says. “Bring her gift.”
Two of them go to the back of the car. They open the boot. They lift something out of it, they carry it between them, and they drop it on the ground in front of me.
It’s a body.
I look at it. The rain is hitting it and running off it.
“What is that?” I say.
Fabiano smiles.
“You have a brother, don’t you? The one you’ve been searching for all this time.”
I look at the face, and I scream.
The face is gone. It’s been beaten into a red ruin, the features broken past anything I can read, and the sound that comes out of me isn’t a word; it isn’t anything; it just tears out of my throat, and I can’t stop it.
No, no, no, no!
“I heard Kirill had men out looking for him too,” Fabiano says. “For years.”
My knees go, and I’m on the ground. No. No, this isn’t him; it can’t be him.
“Giovanni, did you do the honor?” Fabiano says. “A reunion.”
I press my hands over my ears. No. That’s not true. That’s not true; it can’t be true; he is lying!
Fabiano kicks the body. “That’s your brother. Courtesy of the Don.”
I crawl to it. My hands are slipping in the mud.
I get to it, and I push the wet shirt open at the chest because there’s one thing, there’s one thing I have, the only thing I kept of him, the birthmark below his collarbone, the small dark shape.
It’s there. I look at his body. He’s grown.
He’s a man now. He has shoulders, hands, a man’s chest, and somewhere under all the years, he is still small to me; he is still the boy whose hand slipped out of mine in the dark, and I waited.
I waited fifteen years. I waited and looked and never stopped, and this is what was at the end of it.
This is what they gave me — a body without a face.
I gather him up against me. He’s heavy and limp, and I pull his weight up into my lap and hold his head against my chest.
“I’m here,” I say. “I’m here. I’ve got you. I’m here.”
“An eye for an eye,” Fabiano says.
He lowers himself down on his good leg, so his face is closer to mine.
“Giovanni is quite heartless, isn’t he?”
He sets a gun down on the wet ground beside me. “Surely, you won’t let him go?”
“I’ll give you some time with the corpse.”
He laughs, straightens up, and he and his men get back into the car. The doors close; I hold my brother tighter.
“Don’t be scared,” I tell him. “I’m here. I’ve got you. Come on. Come on, come here, I’ve got you.”
I try to stand with him. I get my arms under him, and I push up through my knees, his weight dragging at me, and I get halfway up before my strength gives, and he slides out of my arms and hits the ground. The thunder breaks open above us. I go down after him, and my body breaks down into sobs.
* * *
I drag my brother’s body into the side of the road, to a place under bare trees where the ground isn’t flooded.
My arms can’t really do it. I pull him by the shoulders, a foot at a time, and my feet skid, and I fall on one knee and get up and pull again.
He’s so heavy. He was never heavy. He was a small thing with a small hand, and now, he’s this weight I can’t move, and I keep stopping.
The rain runs into the open place where his face was.
I keep wiping it away with my hand. It’s wrong to let it land there. I don’t know why it matters so much.
I don’t know where to put him. There’s nowhere.
There’s no shovel, there’s no box, there’s nothing; I have nothing, and that’s the thing that takes my legs out from under me.
Not that he’s dead. That I can’t even do the last thing.
Fifteen years and I can’t even put my brother in the ground. I press my face into his wet shirt.
I don’t remember picking up the gun. It’s in my hand. It was in the mud where Fabiano left it, and now it’s in my hand, and I’m looking at it like I don’t know what it is.
I look at my brother, and I look at the gun, then I tuck it inside my clothes.
I tell him I’ll come back. I say it out loud to a body in the dark. I’ll come back; I’ll come back for you, I promise. I turn and walk away from my brother because if I stay there beside him, I will lie down and not get up.
I begin my walk back home. I don’t have a direction.
There’s a road, and I follow it. My feet stop feeling like mine somewhere in the first hour.
The night comes down heavy, and the rain comes down even heavier, and I keep walking.
Cars slow down beside me, people look out, then speed up again and leave.
When the day breaks, I am still walking, and by mid-morning, I return to Giovanni’s house.
The gates are open. I walk through them. There’s nothing in me that’s careful anymore. I walk, leaving wet prints up the drive.
“Hey — who are you? You can’t be here —” Someone steps into my path. “There’s no one home; the Lady’s burial is today; everyone’s at the cemetery—”
I push past him. He pulls my arm, and I don’t feel it; I shove harder. I go up the steps into the house up the stairs.
Giovanni is in his room. He turns when he hears me. He’s in black, dressed for a burial. His face is blank. The same emptied face he had standing over Lucia’s bed. Then he sees me, his face breaks open.
“Lupa —”
He comes toward me, and I raise the gun.
He stops.
“I didn’t kill her.” It comes apart in my mouth. “I didn’t. I didn’t kill her, Giovanni. I didn’t —”
“Calm down. Breathe. Breathe with me, Lupa.”
“Christov was all I had.” The gun is shaking, and I can’t make it stop, and I don’t try. “He was the only one. He was the only person who ever —Why would you do that? Why —”
He looks confused, and then he recollects. He killed my brother, and he forgot?
“Lucia was all I had, too,” he says.
“I didn’t kill her!” It tears up out of me. “Why won’t you believe me? Nobody will believe me —” I push the gun forward at him. “My brother. Give me my brother! Tell me that wasn’t him. Tell me it wasn’t him. Tell me, Giovanni, please, tell me it wasn’t —”
“You’re soaked through. Let me run you a bath. Let me get you warm, and we’ll talk, we’ll —”
He steps toward me.
“Stay back!” I scream.
He keeps coming closer, his eyes soft. I fire, and the bullet hits the side of his body.
He staggers, and I fire again, aiming lower, and his leg buckles and he falls.
He doesn’t reach for anything. He doesn’t shout.
He looks up at me from the floor, and a tear slides down the side of his face, and he says, “I would rather it be your hand than anyone else’s. If it makes you happy, Lupa.”
He closes his eyes, and everything in me caves because shooting him hurt.
It hurt worse than I can bear. I stand over him with the gun shaking in my hand, and I understand, far too late, in the worst possible second of my life, exactly what this man came to be to me, and I can’t hold it, none of it, the brother in the mud. Why can’t I bring myself to kill him!”
“I hate you, Giovanni Mondi.” I can barely get the words out. “Meeting you was a mistake. I regret it. I regret all of it.”
I turn the gun away from him to myself, and his eyes fly open.
“Yana! No!”
Before I can do it, everything goes blank.