Chapter 8
CECILIA
Constantine knocked twice before opening the door, which told me something about him and his father that I filed away without examining too closely.
A man who knocked before entering his dying father's room was a man who understood that dignity mattered more than convenience, and that some courtesies became more important, not less, when everything else was being stripped away.
"Pop." His voice was different at the threshold of this room. Quieter, with something underneath it that he kept out of every other conversation I'd heard him have. "I brought someone to meet you."
Dante Venosa was propped against a bank of pillows in a large bed that suited him even now, when the illness had taken enough of him that the scale of it should have made him look diminished.
It didn't. He had the kind of face that held its authority regardless of circumstance, dark eyes that were sharp and entirely present, and the particular quality of attention of a man who had learned over a long life that looking at something properly was rarely wasted effort.
He looked at me the way his son looked at things, which was to say completely, without performance.
"So," he said. "You're the Avola girl."
"I'm Cecelia," I said. "The Avola part is something I'm working on leaving behind."
He was quiet for a moment. Then he smiled, and I understood immediately where Constantine had gotten the smile he kept almost using and then pulling back from. "Come in then, Cecelia. Sit down."
Constantine took the chair against the wall without being asked, settling into it with the ease of someone who had spent considerable time in this room, and I took the chair beside the bed and folded my hands in my lap and waited, because this was Dante's room and his time and I wasn't going to fill it with noise just to manage my own nerves.
Dante looked at me for a long moment without speaking, the unhurried assessment of a man who had no patience left for anything except the truth. "You're not what I expected," he said finally.
"What did you expect?"
"Someone more frightened." He shifted against his pillows. "You're frightened, I can see that. But it isn't the first thing." He tilted his head slightly. "What's the first thing?"
I thought about it honestly. "Angry," I said. "I think the first thing is angry."
He nodded slowly, as if this confirmed something he'd already suspected.
"Good. Frightened women make poor decisions.
Angry women make purposeful ones." He reached for the glass of water on his nightstand and I stood without thinking and handed it to him, and he accepted it without making anything of the gesture, which I appreciated.
"Tell me about the vineyards. What do they look like in October? "
So I told him. I told him about the way the light changed in October, going golden and specific in the way of light that had passed through leaves before it reached you, and about the particular smell of the harvest, and the sound of the workers in the early morning moving through the rows.
I told him about the stone walls that had been there longer than anyone could remember and the gap in the eastern wall that I had slipped through in the dark on the night I left.
I told him more than I'd intended to, because he listened the way certain people listened, with his whole attention, and that kind of listening had a way of drawing things out of you.
I was aware of Constantine against the wall behind me, quiet and still, taking none of it and all of it in simultaneously.
At some point in the telling I stopped being aware of him as a presence I needed to perform for and simply talked, the way you talked when you forgot to be careful, and I only registered that he had slipped out of the room when I heard the soft click of the door and turned to find the chair against the wall empty.
Dante watched me notice. "He does that," he said, without explanation, and somehow none was needed.
"My great-grandmother was from England," he said when I turned my attention back to him.
"She used to describe the countryside there in exactly that way.
The specific quality of the light. She said you could always tell where you were in the world by the color of the light in the afternoon.
" He looked toward the window. "I've always wanted to test that theory. "
"It's true," I said. "Chicago light is completely different from Sicilian light. It's harder. More direct. There's nothing filtering it."
"That sounds about right for Chicago." He looked back at me with the hint of a smile. "Has my son been treating you well?"
The directness of it surprised a small laugh out of me. "Yes. He has."
"He's not always easy," Dante said, with the frankness of a man who had earned the right to it.
"He holds things very close. Always has, even as a boy.
His sister was the one who wore everything on her face.
Constantine was the one you had to watch to understand.
" He paused. "But what's in there is worth the patience. I want you to know that."
I looked at my hands. "He barely knows me."
"He brought you here," Dante said simply.
"For Constantine, that's a considerable statement.
" He shifted again, and I could hear the effort in it, the way his breath caught slightly with the movement.
"He told me about your friend. The young woman who helped you.
" His voice gentled. "I'm sorry. That kind of loss doesn't resolve quickly. Don't let anyone tell you it should."
My throat tightened. "She deserved better than what happened to her."
"Yes. She did." He said it without qualification or comfort that would have rung false, and I was grateful for that. "The best thing you can do for her is live well. Loudly and well, in a way that would have made her happy to have helped you." He looked at me steadily. "Can you do that?"
"I'm going to try."
"Good." He nodded once, as if the matter were settled.
We sat in a comfortable quiet for a moment, the kind that didn't need filling, and I thought about how strange it was that I had been in this house for less than two days and was sitting in this room feeling more genuinely seen than I had in twenty-two years in my father's house.
The door opened softly and Lucia looked in, her eyes going first to her husband and then to me with a warmth that was becoming familiar. "I thought you might like some tea," she said, and it was clearly directed at both of us without favoring either.
"Come in, come in amore.” Dante waved her through. "We've been talking about light."
"Have you." She set the tray on the nightstand and poured without fuss, handing me a cup before her husband, which I noticed and which seemed to be the natural order of things in this room rather than a pointed gesture.
"Cecelia, has he told you about the time he tried to take a photograph of the light in Venice and dropped his camera into the canal? "
"That story isn’t flattering to me," Dante said.
"No," Lucia agreed pleasantly. "It isn't." She looked at me with a smile that invited me into the joke, and I felt something loosen in my chest that I hadn't realized was still wound tight.
She stayed for one cup of tea, talking lightly about nothing consequential, and then excused herself with the graceful efficiency of a woman who understood when two people needed to be left alone again.
The door closed behind her and Dante watched it for a moment with the expression Constantine wore when he thought no one was looking, the one that was quieter and more unguarded than his public face.
"Forty-one years," he said, not to me particularly.
"And she still makes every room better by being in it.
" He looked back at me. "That's what you want, Cecelia.
Not a transaction. Not a strategy. Someone who makes every room better.
" He was quiet for a moment. "I think you already know that. I think that's why you ran."
"Yes," I said. "That's exactly why I ran."
He nodded. Outside the window the winter afternoon was fading, the light going gray and flat in the way of Chicago light that I was already learning to read differently from the light I'd grown up with.
"My son is going to want to talk to you soon," he said.
"About something practical that is also, whether he admits it to himself yet or not, something more than practical.
" He looked at me directly. "I want you to listen to what he says and then make your own decision.
Not the decision fear would make for you. Your own decision."
"What if they're the same decision?" I asked.
"Then you'll know it's the right one." He reached out and patted my hand once, briefly, with a hand that had once been large and was still precise. "Now. Tell me what you know about Sicilian wine, because I have opinions and I suspect you're going to disagree with most of them."
I laughed, a real one, and moved to sit on the end of the bed so Dante didn’t have to turn his head to look at me.
We argued companionably about wine for another half hour while the light faded in the window and the house moved quietly around us, and I thought that Dante Venosa was the father I should have had, and that thinking so felt less like grief and more like something I intended to hold onto.
Constantine knocked twice before opening the door to tell us dinner was ready, and when he looked at his father and then at me and saw whatever was on both our faces, something in his own face settled into a quietness that looked very much like relief.