Chapter 25
“Tony was dead before he slipped beneath the water,” Nonna says gently. “There was nothing anyone could have done, the doctors told me. Not even if you or I had been right there. It was his time to go.”
Astonished, I let this news sink in. At the time of his death, everyone assumed a drowning.
No one told me my father had suffered a massive, fatal heart attack.
After the funeral, when I flew back to New York with Lisa, we didn’t talk about Dad’s death.
She wanted to “put the sadness behind us.” I’m not sure she even knew he hadn’t drowned.
She and Nonna did not talk after the funeral that I knew of.
“Thank goodness you were making the cake, Juliana,” Nonna adds.
“Otherwise you would have watched your father die and had to run to get help yourself. He would not have wanted that for you, mia cara. He would have wanted to spare you that memory. Your last memory of him is a good one. He knew you were making something special for him. He knew you loved him, and he loved you and Aurora more than anyone in the world. He died a happy man in the place he loved best, with his girls safe nearby. There are much worse ways to go.”
“He was so young, though,” I protest, as though pointing this out can somehow undo his death, as though it were a clerical error, a glitch in the system, that a man one day shy of fifty would drop dead under a clear blue summer sky.
“Young, old.” Nonna shrugs, her face sorrowful yet philosophical.
“Death comes for all of us, Nipotina. Did my Tony die too young? Of course, but none of us could have changed the outcome, not even you.” Her gaze is pure compassion.
“I miss him too, mia cara. So much. Every day. That’s the way it is to love someone and lose them.
We must remember all the good times, even as we grieve the emptiness of the world without them.
” She gazes into the distance for a moment, and I’m guessing she is thinking of Carlo.
I remember only the scent of his tobacco, and that he was a tall, quiet man, so tall to my toddler self that he seemed to block out the sun.
How has she carried on with life after burying her husband and her son?
“Everything here reminds me of Dad,” I admit. “That’s why I…didn’t come back for so long. I just didn’t know how to face this place without him in it.” My voice is barely a whisper. “And I blamed myself for his death. I felt responsible.”
Nonna squeezes my hand. “Oh, Juliana,” she says with a sigh.
“I wish I had known you felt this way. You have carried this regret and responsibility for so long, but you must lay it down. Let yourself embrace all of the past now. Memory is bittersweet. We must remember the sweet times too, not just the bitterness at the end.” She rubs my cheek with her thumb, swiping away the tears leaking from the corners of my eyes.
“Ah, mia cara, he would not want you to be so sad, carrying such a heavy burden of regret. He would want to see you alive, filled with joy, free.”
“I miss him so much,” I whisper, leaning into Nonna’s touch.
I picture him in my mind’s eye. He was the most vital man I’ve ever known, barrel-chested, robust, with a big grin and an easy way about him.
Thick dark hair, receding slightly, and warm brown eyes.
He taught middle school history at a public school in Seattle.
After Lisa left us, he was the pillar of our family, raising two girls by himself.
He bungled things at times, sure, but he tried his best and was always there for us, always steady and safe. I adored him.
“I miss him too.” Nonna nods. “Every day.”
I’m crying openly now, my shoulders shaking, from grief and from relief.
I feel like I’ve just put down a crushing load I’ve been carrying for years.
I am not responsible for my father’s death.
I could not have changed anything. That revelation makes me feel like I’m floating. It also breaks my heart.
I could not change his death. That was always going to be his last day on earth.
So many times in life there are lasts, and we don’t realize it.
If we knew, we could savor them, hold them close, cherish them.
Instead we breeze through them carelessly.
The last times so often pass by unnoticed.
Only in retrospect do we glance behind us and realize what is gone.
Nonna embraces me, pulling my head down against her shoulder.
She smells like rosemary and laundry soap and a faint hint of garlic.
I feel like a little girl again, the grief as fresh as it was fifteen years ago.
Nonna is patting me on the back like she’s burping a baby.
She’s murmuring things in Italian too low for me to hear, but the sound is comforting.
I picture my father splayed out limply on the pebbled shore of the lake.
Someone driving by had seen him floating face down and called the emergency services.
When I saw his body, he was dripping, clad in his swim trunks, his black thatch of hair falling over his brow, his warm, dark eyes closed forever.
He looked like he was sleeping, lying there, except that his limbs were too slack and his barrel chest did not rise and fall.
I refused to believe he was really gone until I knelt beside him and laid my head on his bare chest, his curly dark chest hair still slick with lake water, my ear pressed frantically right over the heart that had gone silent.
And in that moment I felt my own heart crack right in two.
Now I pull back, wiping my tears on my sleeve, and gaze at Nonna with new eyes, seeing the deepening wrinkles at the corners of her eyelids, the stripe of silver showing at the roots of her hair.
I lost a father that day, but she lost her only child, her son.
And then she lost me when Lisa swooped in and insisted I fly back to New York and move in with her and Ted immediately after the funeral.
Aurora was in college, already dating Will and although she grieved Dad immensely, she did not experience his loss quite the same way I did. His death almost destroyed me.
For years, every time I thought of Italy, all I could see was my father’s body laid out on that pebbled strip of beach, his eyes closed, face peaceful and slack, as though he had lain down and drifted off for a nap from which he would never wake. And I believed it was my fault.
“So there really was nothing we could have done to save him?” I clarify.
“Nothing,” Nonna says firmly. “Only the good Lord knows when it’s our time to go, and it was Tony’s time.” She crosses herself and murmurs a little prayer under her breath.
I sniff and wipe my tears away with my sleeve. “I blamed myself for so long,” I confess, still trying to come to grips with this bombshell. For years my grief and guilt have been entwined with every memory of my dad and this place. I don’t know how to feel. “What do I do now that I know the truth?”
“Now you figure out how to live again,” Nonna says gently.
“For so long you’ve been avoiding and blaming yourself, but now that you know the truth, you are free.
Your father would not have wanted you to live this way—trapped in guilt and fear.
To live bound by fear is to live a small life, a pinched life.
” She pinches her fingers together to illustrate.
“So often people think that fear keeps them safe, that it protects them, but that is a lie. So often fear is a prison, not a salvation. Fear is a ball and chain. It makes you imagine the worst that can happen and then forces you to live in the shadow of that terrible imagined thing. Fear can rob you of the life you were meant to live. It does not keep you safe, it keeps you small. You were made for bigger things, Nipotina, starting with a life set free by the truth, by reality. What is here. What is now. That is what matters.” Nonna raps the table firmly.
“A life set free.” I roll the words around in my mouth. They send a little shiver right through me. “I’d settle for fifty good recipes,” I grumble, shooting Nonna a shy half grin.
She chuckles. “How about today you try for just one. One good recipe that means something to you.” She pats my hand. “You made a wonderful merenda and pretty good biscotti. And the pasta was not bad either. Now for the next step, how about you make us lunch?”
“Okay.” I nod, still sniffling but feeling much lighter and more hopeful.
I try to think about all the meals from this region that my father loved to eat.
All the recipes I made over the many summers spent in this kitchen cooking with Nonna.
I was so small when I started helping her in the kitchen.
Every summer I spent many happy hours here, learning the dishes of my heritage.
Nonna is right. Surely, I can make one good dish.
A simple lunch. What should I make? I concentrate, thinking of Dad, not straining to remember but letting a memory rise to meet me. And to my surprise, it does.
“Risotto con la tinca,” I declare aloud.
“Dad always loved that dish.” The risotto with the sweet, firm flesh of the freshwater fish from Lake Garda had been one of his favorites.
I remember that now, how his eyes would light up, how he’d always have seconds and scrape his dish clean.
It hurts a little to recall how much he enjoyed that dish, but it makes me happy too.
He always ate with gusto; he lived with gusto too.
I could use a little more gusto in my life.
Less fear, more gusto. I like the sound of that.
Nonna nods, looking satisfied. “First we go to the fish market. Then you cook for us.”