Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Luca
Gemma sits with her knees pulled up under her, the cushion still between us, her socked feet tucked under the edge of my coat where I dropped it on the couch. Her hair's coming loose from the ponytail. She hasn't fixed it. That, more than anything else tonight, tells me she's settled in.
"I'm sure not every Italian man is in the mafia," she says. "Statistically. There has to be at least one accountant."
The corner of my mouth moves before I catch it. It must look strange on my face. I haven't done that in a long time.
"That's true," I say. "Some are accountants. Some teach. Most of them never see a gun."
"See? I'm not entirely a tourist."
"How long you've been there?"
"For two weeks."
"Two weeks. A tourist for sure."
She smiles down at her glass. It's a small smile, tired around the edges. I look at her too long because apparently my eyes don't want to leave her.
I don't talk. Not like this. Not about any of it. Most days my voice barely gets used and it suits me. But Gemma's sitting there waiting, and I have this pull in my chest that I don't recognise. She wants me to say more. I want to give her more.
So I do it.
"I told you Calabria and Naples," I say. "That's where I was a kid. Not where I work."
"Okay."
"The family I work for is the Sartoris as you already know. They run things out of two places. Chicago. And the south of Italy, mostly Sicily now. I live in Sicily. Have for years."
"You live there." She says it flat, like she's checking she heard right.
"A house outside Palermo. It's nothing. White walls. Bad plumbing. There's a lemon tree in the yard that the old woman next door takes the lemons from before I get to them." I stop. I didn't mean to say the lemon tree. "I'm there most of the year."
"And the Chicago end?"
"I come over for work. A week. Two weeks. Then I go back. It's been that way for years."
"So why are you here now," she says. "If you live there."
There it is. I should give her the short version. I open my mouth to give her the short version.
"Two months ago I got shot," I say. "Twice. Shoulder. Thigh." I tap the thigh without thinking and pull my hand back. "The shoulder's fucking fine. The thigh still doesn't want to behave."
Her eyes go to my leg and back to my face. She doesn't say anything stupid. She doesn't say sorry. I appreciate that more than she knows.
"Who shot you?" she asks.
"Doesn't matter. They're not around to do it again."
"Right." She takes a sip of water. Her hand isn't quite steady. "Okay."
"Valentino is the Sartori in Sicily. He runs me. He told me to stop. He said go to Chicago, sit in the apartment, see a doctor, don't do anything." I shake my head. "So I'm here. Taking weeks off. Allegedly."
"Allegedly."
"I'm bad at it."
That gets a real laugh out of her. The sound goes through me in a way I don't want to name.
"You're bad at resting," she says.
"I'm bad at resting indeed."
"Shocking."
"Mm."
She sets the glass on the floor by her foot. "Two months. Was it bad?"
"They thought I wasn't going to make it. When I got hit I even thought I wasn't going to make it. But I did." I roll my shoulder without meaning to. The exit wound pulls. "That's all of it."
Her hand moves on the couch. Toward the cushion between us. It stops halfway, fingers spread on the fabric, like she remembered partway who I am.
I look at her hand. I don't move mine.
"I'm glad you didn't," she says.
"Didn't what."
"Die."
I drink.
She watches me not answer. She doesn't push. Her hand is still on the cushion between us, fingers spread, going nowhere.
I set the glass on the floor beside my boot.
"Can I ask you something else?" she says.
I already know I won't answer it. She's going to ask the one thing I won't open. I should tell her to leave it.
"Ask," I say.
She breathes in. Lets it out slow.
"What you said the other day. About the kid. About a parent watching." Her voice is low, careful, the way you talk to a dog you don't know. "What did you mean?"
I hear my own pulse in my bad ear.
I pick up the glass again. I drink.
"I'm not going to fucking answer that," I say.
She freezes for half a second and then her whole face goes red, throat to hairline, the slow climb you can watch happen. Her hand pulls back from the cushion like the fabric burned her.
"Right," she says. "Sorry. I shouldn't have — I'm sorry, that was — I just meant —"
"Gemma."
"I wasn't trying to —"
"Gemma."
She stops. Her teeth catch the inside of her lower lip. The color in her cheeks goes deeper, blotchy along the jaw where she's pale to start with. She looks like she wants to crawl under the coffee table and die there politely so as not to make noise.
"It's fine," I say.
"It's not. I shouldn't have asked. You've been —"
"Stop saying sorry."
Her mouth shuts. The pull on her sleeve gets worse.
I lean forward, elbows on my knees, and watch a piece of her hair fall out of the ponytail and across her cheek.
"You didn't do anything wrong," I say. "I'm just not going to answer that one. That's all."
"Okay."
Somewhere two floors down a door closes too hard. I count the seconds it takes the building to settle, the way you count between lightning and the sound. Old habit. Bad one.
She's still red. Still won't quite look at me.
"Your turn," I say.
Her eyes come up. "My turn what?"
"I've been doing all the fucking talking. I've answered more in one night than I have in a year. Your turn."
"That's not how this works."
"It's how it works tonight."
She lets out a breath that's almost a laugh. The color in her face starts to walk back down her neck.
"What do you want to know?" she says.
I think about that. I could ask her about Dominik. About the burn on her wrist that she keeps her sleeve over without knowing she does it. About whether her family in Wisconsin have any idea what she's been carrying for years.
I don't ask any of that. I'm not going to make her bleed to even the score.
"Tell me something good," I say.
"Good?"
"From before all this shit. Something that doesn't hurt to say."
She turns the empty glass on her knee. Her thumb finds the rim and goes around it once, twice. The hair on her cheek shifts when she tilts her head.
"That's a weirdly hard question," she says.
"Take your time."
Gemma
I shift on the couch so my feet tuck under me.
"Something good," I say. "Okay. Right."
He waits looking at me.
"My family was just normal," I say. "That's the something good. I know that's not a story."
"Tell me anyway."
I look at my hands in my lap. I curl my fingers in and take a breath.
"My parents stayed married. They still are.
My mom teaches 3rd grade and my dad does something with insurance that I've had explained to me ten times and still couldn't say back to you.
We had a dog named Oscar. Golden retriever.
He died when I was sixteen and I cried for a week.
My dad cried too, just in the garage where he thought I couldn't see. "
Luca's quiet. His eyes don't move off me.
"We went on vacations. Not anywhere fancy besides Italy that one time.
The Dells, one time Disney, a cabin up north every summer with my mom's sister and her kids.
I got presents at Christmas, on my birthday and I never had to ask if we could afford them.
That sounds like nothing. I know. But I didn't know it was something until I was older. "
"It's not nothing," he says.
"I had a brother. Have. Sorry, he's still alive, I just—" I press my palm flat to my forehead and laugh once, embarrassed.
"Aidan. He's two years older. He was the kind of brother who let me hang around.
Like, his friends would come over and they'd be playing video games and I'd just sit on the arm of the couch and he wouldn't tell me to go away.
That meant a lot. I think I knew it meant a lot even then. "
Luca tips his head, listening.
"I didn't have many friends," I say. "I was shy.
The teacher wrote it on my report card one year like a problem to be solved.
My parents tried. Sleepovers, summer camp, dance class.
None of it stuck. They felt bad about it, I think.
That was the one thing they didn't quite know how to fix.
But it was okay. I had Aidan. And his friends were nice to me, and his girlfriends were nicer, actually—they'd do my hair and let me try on their lip gloss, pretending I was their little sister too. "
I notice I'm smiling. My cheek hurts a little from it, like the muscle's out of practice.
"There was this one girlfriend of his, Megan—different Megan, not your Megan—she had this curling iron that was hot pink and she taught me how to use it without burning my ear off.
I thought she was the coolest person who had ever lived.
They broke up after six months and I was more upset than he was. "
His mouth twitches once. That's all I get.
"Sorry," I say. "I'm talking way too much. I do that when I'm nervous."
Luca shifts a little where he sits, his good leg stretched, the bad one bent. He doesn't say anything for a beat too long.
"If that's you nervous," he says, "then nervous is fine by me."
I look at him.
He clears his throat like the words got stuck on the way out and he wants them back. "Get some sleep. We've got shit to do tomorrow."
"Right," I say. "Okay."
I unfold my legs.
I stand up. He doesn't.
"Goodnight," I say.
"Night."
I close the bedroom door behind me with both hands so it doesn't click loud. Nina is a small lump in the middle of the bed, breathing slow, one foot kicked out from under the blanket. I tuck it back in. Her skin is warm. I sit on the edge of the bed.
If that's you nervous, then nervous is fine by me.
I say it again in my head, slow, to make sure I heard it right. I did. He said it. He said it like he didn't want to, like it slipped, and then he covered it with the bit about sleep, but he said it first.
It's not a nice thing. He didn't say anything kind, really.
He didn't tell me I was funny or smart or that he liked hearing me talk.
He said nervous is fine. That's almost an insult if you turn it sideways.
He's basically saying I babble and he doesn't mind.
It's like being told your bad haircut suits you.
But still.
I press my palms together between my knees and squeeze, just to have somewhere to put the feeling. My face is warm. I can feel it.
The last person who said anything close to a nice thing to me was Mariela, three weeks ago, telling me Nina has good manners and I must be doing something right.
Before that, it was a customer at the diner who tipped me eight dollars on a twelve-dollar bill and said keep it, sweetheart, you look beat. Before that I don't remember.
Dominik used to say I looked pretty when we were going out somewhere and he wanted me to wear the dress he picked. That doesn't count. I figured out a long time ago which compliments are for me and which ones are for the man saying them.
This one wasn't for him. I believe he didn't even want to say it. That's why it lands.
I lie down next to Nina on top of the covers, careful not to make the springs creak. She smells like the shampoo Megan brought, the green-apple one. I put my hand on her back so I can feel her breathe. In, out. In, out. It's the only thing that has ever fully slowed my heart.
I roll onto my side, facing the wall, facing him through the wall, and I close my eyes.
Nervous is fine by me.
I press my mouth into the pillow so I don't make any sound at all. And I finally let myself cry. For the life I'm living. For being so stupid when I needed to be smart. Because Dominik wasn't going to be a problem if I'd left him after Nina was born.
I cry because I'm twenty-eight years old and I haven't lived the way I wanted to. I've never felt that I do control my own life.
And that hurts.