Chapter 17
Serafina
O‘Hare at seven-forty on a Sunday night was bright in the way a hospital is bright.
Fluorescent. Indifferent. The kind of light that did not care what you had been doing six hours ago in a stone farmhouse in Wisconsin with a fire and a wool blanket and a bottle of wine that tasted like the hill you could see from your bedroom window.
Marco pulled the Mercedes up at the international terminal curb.
He did not get out right away. He sat with both hands on the wheel the way he had sat at the farmhouse door that afternoon, except this time the threshold was behind us, not in front. He turned the engine off. The rosary swung once on the rearview and hung still.
“I’ll walk you in,” he said.
“You don’t have to.”
“I know. I’m going to anyway.”
He came around to my side and opened my door.
He took my bag out of the back seat—just the overnight, packed in fifteen minutes, the rest of my things still at the apartment because there was no time to go back for them and because going back for them would have meant admitting that I was leaving for longer than the ticket said.
He did not let me take the bag. He slung it over his own shoulder.
The sliding doors opened on the warm antiseptic air of the terminal.
He walked me to the Alitalia counter. He stood behind me while I checked in.
The woman at the desk was efficient and did not look up, and the boarding pass came out of the printer with a small mechanical sigh, and she slid it across the counter between us and said, “Gate M12. Boarding at nine-thirty. Have a nice flight.”
A nice flight.
No chance.
Marco took the bag off his shoulder and set it on the scale. The belt carried it away. I watched it go through the flap at the back of the counter and I did not let my face do anything.
We walked toward security.
The line was not long yet. A cluster of businessmen. A family with a sleeping child in a stroller. The rope dividers made the path shorter than it needed to be, and I counted the turns in the rope because counting them was something to do with my brain that was not what my brain was actually doing.
He stopped ten feet before the line.
I stopped with him.
He did not take my hand. He put both of his hands in the pockets of his coat—the olive one, which he had put back on at the farmhouse door, which still smelled of woodsmoke at the collar—and he looked at me.
“Forty-eight hours,” I said.”I’ll be back.”
“Forty-eight hours.”
“I’ll sit at the table with him tomorrow morning. I’ll talk through the announcement. I’ll settle the thing with Gianni. I’ll be on a plane Tuesday night.”
“Wednesday morning, my time.”
“Wednesday morning, your time.”
He nodded.
“Call me when you land.”
“I will.”
“Sera. Call me when you land. I don’t care if it’s three in the morning here. I don’t care if you only have thirty seconds between the jet bridge and the car. You call, and I pick up, and I hear your voice. That’s the thing.”
“I’ll call.”
“Say it.”
“I’ll call you when I land.”
He took one hand out of his pocket and he tucked a piece of hair behind my ear. His thumb brushed the line of my jaw on the way down. He let his hand drop.
“And any time you need to. I don’t care what the hour is.”
“Okay.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
He looked at me for a long second.
Donatella’s scarf was at my throat. The grey lamb was in the outside pocket of my coat because I had not been able to put it in the checked bag and had not wanted to put it in the carry-on where security might pull it out and examine it under fluorescent light.
My hand went into the pocket and closed around it without me telling it to.
“Marco.”
“Mm.”
“I love you.”
It came out clean.
The first time I had said it out loud. To him. To any other than direct family.
His face did the thing.
The small softening at the corners of his eyes.
The mouth that did not quite smile. The thing that had happened across the kitchen island on the morning of the report and across the oak table in the farmhouse and under the grey Wisconsin sky at the top of the slope.
This time it came with wet at the edges of his eyes that he did not blink back.
“I love you, Serafina.”
He stepped closer. He took my face in both hands the way he had taken it on the stair at the farmhouse, and he kissed me.
Not a long kiss. The terminal was not a place for a long kiss.
It was a kiss that set a stone on top of the words we had just said to make sure they did not blow away, and when he pulled back his forehead rested against mine for one breath, and I breathed it.
“Go,” he said. “And then come back.”
I went.
The plane landed at Palermo in the morning.
I had not slept. I had sat in the window seat with the grey lamb in my lap under the airline blanket and I had looked out at the Atlantic and then the Mediterranean and then the coast of Sicily coming up through the cloud, and I had run the math on the next seventy-two hours with the discipline of a woman running inventory on a warehouse she was responsible for.
Papa at the table in the morning. The calls to the Commission.
Gianni’s position handled with care but handled.
A flight booked out of Palermo Tuesday night. Wednesday morning, Marco’s time.
The wheels hit the runway and my stomach did the small lift-and-drop that runways always did, and I told myself the lift-and-drop was the altitude and not the thing that had been building in my chest since somewhere over Portugal.
Customs took nine minutes. The agent stamped my passport without looking at my face.
I came out through the sliding doors into the arrivals hall and I scanned for Tommaso.
Tommaso had driven my father for twenty-one years.
He was sixty-three. He wore a grey flat cap in winter and did not wear it in summer and he had a mole on his left cheek shaped like Sardinia, and when he picked me up from airports he stood at the near end of the barrier with his hands folded in front of him and a small flat sign with my name on it that he held even though I had known him since I was five.
Tommaso was not there.
A younger man was there. Mid-thirties. Dark suit. No sign. He recognized me before I recognized that he was there for me, and he stepped forward and said, “Signorina Scordato,” and he reached for my bag.
“Where’s Tommaso?”
“He is not working today, signorina.”
I let him take the bag. I followed him out through the automatic doors into the Sicilian morning.
The air was warm. The light was the light I had known my whole life, that particular pale gold the Palermo sky held in the hour after sunrise, and I breathed it in and it smelled like home and also did not.
The car was a black Mercedes. Not my father’s Mercedes. A newer one. The plates were not the family plates.
I got in the back.
The driver closed my door with more care than was necessary. He got in the front. He pulled away from the curb and took the exit ramp out of the airport, and he took it in the wrong direction.
My father did not use the autostrada route home.
He had not used it in my lifetime. He used the coast road.
The coast road was longer by fifteen minutes but it passed the sea and he liked to see the sea in the morning, and the drivers knew this, and Tommaso would have taken the coast road without asking.
This driver took the autostrada.
I did not say anything.
I sat in the back of the car that was not my father’s car with the driver who was not my father’s driver, and I watched the inland hills go by the window—the flat brown fields, the distant outline of Monreale on its ridge, the one I had described to Marco yesterday without knowing I’d be seeing it the very next day.
Forty-five minutes later we turned onto the long drive that led up to the compound.
The gates were closed.
It was ten-fifteen in the morning. The gates were open from seven to seven every day of my life.
They had been closed the morning of my grandfather’s funeral and they had been closed for two hours the afternoon of the 2003 crisis and they had been closed otherwise for exactly no reason in twenty-eight years.
They were closed now.
The driver keyed a code into the box and they swung open. He drove through. They swung closed behind us.
The house rose up at the top of the drive the way it always did—long, low, the old yellow stucco faded to the color of weak tea, the bougainvillea at the southwest corner going into its late bloom.
Ornamental orange trees along the front.
The fountain in the courtyard running because my father liked the sound of it.
No one was on the steps.
The staff met the car. Always. One of the household women would be on the steps when the tires came around the last curve because someone at the gate would have called up to say the car was coming, and by the time I was out of the door there would be someone at the top of the steps with a hand out for my bag and a kiss for my cheek.
Maria, usually, who had been in the house since my mother’s time, or her daughter Giulia.
No one was on the steps.
The driver opened my door. He set my bag on the gravel. He did not offer to take it inside. He got back in the car and he turned it around in the courtyard in a single smooth motion and he drove back down the drive toward the gate.
I stood there with my bag in the gravel.
The fountain was running. A bird was in the orange trees. The sky was that pale Palermo gold and the air smelled of the bougainvillea and the dust and, faintly, the sea past the rise.
I picked up my bag.
I climbed the steps. The front door was unlocked.
I pushed it open and I stepped into the entry hall and I set my bag down on the tile and I waited for the thing that always happened when you came into this house, which was the sound of someone in another room registering that a door had opened and calling out to ask who it was.