Chisa
HE WAS GONE BEFORE I woke up, and by breakfast I’m teaching my daughter fractions in the kitchen of the house I was thrown out of, as though the whole of last night happened to somebody else.
“Seven eighths take away three eighths.”
“Four eighths.”
“So what’s another way of saying four eighths?”
“A half.” Rica sighs so hard it moves her worksheet. “Mama, why do they make it complicated if it’s just a half?”
“Because mathematicians hate children.”
Vico’s the one who answers her, and Rica laughs while I do my best to keep a straight face as I tell her that’s not true at all.
The next twenty minutes have Vico joining us for our math lessons, and by the end of it, Rica is unfortunately convinced the uncle she adores is telling the truth.
Mathematicians hate children, absolutely!
At dinner, Daniele is back from Miami, and he sits himself down next to me.
He’s brought presents, because he always does. A snow globe for Rica. A scarf for his mother. For me, a paper bag of little almond biscuits from a bakery he swears is the only good thing in the state of Florida.
“For the sister-in-law I’m not allowed to talk about,” he announces, setting them in front of me.
“Daniele,” Camillo warns, from behind his newspaper.
“What? She’s sitting right there! Eight years of nobody saying her name in this house, and now she’s at the table and we’re still doing it.” He leans back in his chair, entirely at ease, then smiles at me. “You’re much prettier than the photograph, by the way.”
“What photograph?”
“Ah,” says Daniele.
Everybody at that table finds something to look at. Ana Lucia examines her soup. Vico develops a sudden interest in the salt.
And I sit there with my face going hot, because somewhere in this house there’s a photograph of me that all of these people have seen.
“Eat your dinner,” Ana Lucia instructs her youngest son placidly.
He doesn’t. He turns his chair towards me instead, props his chin on his hand, then starts asking about Rica. What she likes. What she reads. Whether she’s musical. Whether she gets the temper from her mother’s side or theirs.
He’s charming, warm, completely relentless. Inside ten minutes he’s made me laugh three times, and it’s at this moment that Marcello joins us, and the whole table goes silent until...
“Talk about awkward.”
Vico always says the best and worst thing ever, and just like that, Marcello is glaring at him while his brothers are smirking, Ana is coughing, and Rica is asking her dear Uncle Vico what’s awkward.
After that, the conversation around the table resumes...somewhat. I mean, Daniele still makes me laugh, which I’m grateful for, but I also can’t help noticing how my husband looks like he’s this volcano that’s about to explode at any moment.
“Come and see the boathouse tomorrow,” Daniele urges me over coffee. “Properly. There’s a boat in it that hasn’t moved since I was nine, plus a family of ducks I personally—”
Marcello suddenly gets to his feet, but his voice is gentle as he asks his mother to look after Rica while he has a word with me.
Alone.
Everyone looks at us with unconcealed interest as Marcello takes my hand, and while I have no idea what this is all about, I make sure to give Rica a smile so that she knows everything’s okay.
Because it is.
Right?
But as soon as Marcello has me alone on the terrace—
Oh!
He’s suddenly cupping my face, and the fierce glint in his dark gaze has me catching my breath.
“Say it!”
I don’t even have a chance to answer, with Marcello already kissing me, and then—
“Sei mia,” he growls against my mouth. Rough, ragged, not remotely kind. “Say it.”
And now it’s my heart that’s skipping a beat.
Sei mia.
He taught me those words when we had just started dating, and even though I know I really shouldn’t say it at all...
“I’m yours.”
The words just come out helplessly because they’re true.
They’ve always been true.
No matter what.
I’ll always be his, and Marcello...
“I can’t believe you made me jealous of my own brother.”
His admission makes me want to laugh and cry.
It’s silly on one hand, but on the other?
The fact that he’s being so unreasonably possessive...
Doesn’t that make him mine, too?
And the moment I think of that...
“Marcello.”
I find myself pleading with him one more time.
“Can’t you p-please...”
Because it’s been eight years, and nothing’s changed.
“Please just tell me what made you do that.”
We should be hating each other by now, but we don’t, and so surely that says something?
Surely that means something?
“I...I know there’s this folder you saw. But you never told me—”
“It was proof,” he says tightly, “of how you betrayed me.”
All I can do is listen, numb with shock, as he tells me about a route the Burgess paper travelled in November, which four people knew about. One of them was asleep in a car.
He tells me about five calls to a Toronto number from the phone in the front hall, at three and four in the morning, when only one person in this house was ever awake. Everybody knew who she was.
He tells me about a restaurant downtown. A corner table. A man reaching for the bill.
And when he’s done, and he looks at me with cold, dark eyes—
“That’s not—” My voice isn’t working properly. “Marcello, I don’t even know what half of those are—”
“Two men died.”
The air between us turns sharp with tension.
“Emilio Garcia,” he grates out. “He was in his forties. He drove for my father before he drove for me. There was a boy in the car with him, nineteen years old, whose mother worked in my mother’s kitchen.”
I can’t breathe.
“They came off a quarry road outside Gary that November. I buried them both. So when I was handed eleven pages saying my wife had sold them—” He stops. “That is what was in the folder.”
And I realize that’s why...
That’s why he can’t allow himself to forgive me.
Because he thinks...
“You think I killed them,” I whisper. “D-Don’t you?”