“Incoming!”
The deep voice echoes off the library’s high ceiling as a paper airplane whizzes over Scarlett’s shoulder and drops onto my anatomy book. Scarlett yips in surprise, looking behind her at a group of backward-cap-wearing, goatee-sporting frat boys in shirts with arm holes bigger than their IQs. One jogs toward us under the pretense of retrieving his projectile. The librarian abandons her desk and strides toward them like a woman ready to single-handedly tear down the patriarchy.
“Hey,” Goatee greets me with a smile. His teeth must have cost his parents a fortune, but no amount of money can brighten eyes dulled by entitlement. “You wanna keep that?” He juts his chin to the plane that is perched on my textbook. The name RANDY is scrawled on a wing over ten digits.
“You can keep it if you want,” his friend says with a wink.
Casually, I pass the plane back. Goatee takes the hint with the grace of a newborn Labrador and turns his attention to Scarlett. Before he can offer her his number, the librarian’s heels click over.
“Back to your seats,” she whispers sotto, shouting and hissing at the same time, which they must teach you in library school. “Or go.” Her arm juts to the side, one long red nail directed to the door. Between the heels and the nails, I suspect she has an exciting life outside the university library.
“This?” I wave my hand at the entirety of the library and the boorish douchebags swaggering out of it. “I won’t miss.”
“You don’t like being interrupted by a couple of keggerheads?” Scarlett sniffs. She’s never been the one to care about frat boys, but give her a brooding loner, and she falls down swooning. “Maybe rethink your summer in Greece then. I mean, fraternities are Greek. It’s probably in their blood.”
Our summer plans always varied, but I hadn’t left the United States since I arrived from Italy as an orphaned five-year-old, so I could barely wait to get to my trip to Santorini and Malta.
“They’re European,” I reply, totally invested in my daydream of relaxing train rides from beach to pristine beach, where all the boys wear caps frontward and their facial hair commits fully to either a beard or skin. “Different.”
“Men are the same everywhere.” Scarlett flips her own page. “Be careful, you’ll get…you know?”
“Sunburned?”
“Is that what you call it in Italian?”
A hard shush comes from the librarian’s desk.
“This is my leap into adulthood.” I straighten myself up as tall as possible. “Not a leap into kissing my way across southern Europe.”
Mostly. Kind of. My hopes and fears are pretty similar.
“Well,” Scarlett whispers, “summer can’t happen until we pass this trauma unit final.” She flips to chapter five.
An old familiar itch settles between my shoulder blades, one that chases me during every study session as I imagine myself faced with true bodily trauma, and knowing exactly what to do about it. Prevent further injury, stabilize, transport if necessary. That’s it. Everything else feeds into those steps, and nothing else matters in an emergency.
All I’ve ever wanted to do is be a nurse, and learning about minimizing shock and stopping bleeding never feels like studying. It’s natural, like an extension of my body.
“I’m going to grab something to eat.” I shoulder my satchel. “You’ll be okay without me?”
“Will you be okay without me?” She waggles her brows, and I smile.
We’re talking about two completely different things, and we’re both going to be just fine.
The exam that evening is less a breeze and more a light wind, but I finish early and get on the bus home over the river to Secondo Vasto—Second Vasto, after the part of Naples we’re all from—where I have lived since being brought to America when I was five.
My friends roll their eyes at my poor study habits, so I was good and double-checked my work on the test even though I knew I’d gotten them all right. Some things are serious enough to stick the first time you hear them. The difference between life and death isn’t something you should forget.
I love Scarlett and all my friends, but they don’t know the real me. Not really. They accept I’m reserved about my family and life across the river and leave it at that. They stopped asking a long time ago why I don’t date or hit all the parties, because they couldn’t understand why—in this day and age—I’m so invested in keeping my virginity indefinitely for a man I don’t even know yet.
Americans just don’t get the old world. Napoli. How different things are there. Zio and Zia—Italian for aunt and uncle—have high expectations for me, and I can’t let them down. Families don’t work that way where I’m from. My sister died of pneumonia in a southern Italian backwater because the hospitals are too far away. I’m all my Zs have left. Disappointing them isn’t an option. Besides, they pay for my schooling and are sending me off on the most amazing summer vacation.
So even though I feel more American than Italian, I keep the customs of my forefathers. If I didn’t have to please my Zs, I’m pretty sure I’d have become a boy-crazy, party-loving Miss Apple Pie faster than a bald eagle dives for prey.
It’s perfect today. Mild weather, clear skies, a cool breeze. Sounds just like my summer plans in Greece, except maybe hotter and with more tanning oil. A place where I can find a beautiful man, one real man, to whisk me away from here. Not like these slobs on the bus, but someone romantic and cultured and rough all the same. Impassioned and intelligent. A man who can’t take his eyes off me.
If such a man exists in Europe, I’m going to find him. It’s my summer of summers, where I’ll be swept off my feet by a beautiful stranger. And then we’ll part ways, tragically, in the heat of August. He’ll beg me to marry him and I’ll tearfully put him off to finish school, and one day, he’ll show up in Secondo Vasto because he couldn’t live without me another minute. I’ll get my nursing degree while he works, then we’ll get married in a traditional Italian wedding with all the trimmings and have babies.
It’s not so much a fantasy as a plan. Now all I need is the man to help me pull it off.
Sometimes I think living on campus would be worth it just to not have to switch buses three times and walk a mile and a half twice, every single day. But Zio and Zia are paying for tuition already. Adding a dorm room would be too much to ask, even if it does feel as if I’m stepping through a time portal every time the last bus crosses the river. Secondo Vasto is frozen in time, something clean out of Italy in the 1940s.
Every piece of timber and every slab of brick pulses in the rhythms of home. The house I grew up in with my sister is more a part of me than the country I was born in. The concrete stoop has my handprint at ten embossed into it, next to the choppy printing of my name.
Violetta Moretti. The letters are worn down but ever present.
And next to it, forever immortalized by the size of a fifteen-year-old’s hand and the name, Rosetta Moretti, is my sister.
She was always the romantic dreamer, Rosetta. She said I’d understand one day, when I was a woman. She was four years older. Now she’s over five years deader, and I’m still no closer to understanding how pneumonia could steal her so completely.
I step on my handprint, leaving Rosetta’s exposed and beautiful. I don’t think I’m the only one who gets out of the way to avoid covering her name. One tiny piece of my sister still standing in this world.
“I’m home!” I drop my bag on the old worn couch and kick off my shoes. Normally, my aunt and uncle are bustling around, cooking or reading, waiting to grill me about my day. Especially on test days. “Zia? Zio?”
In the kitchen, a bottle of wine sits open next to a simmering pot of sauce. I turn down the temperature on the stove and keep moving. Eventually, my ears pick up sounds of life and I follow them to Zio’s office.
He’s crying. My zio, who started building houses with his bare hands and now runs a contracting company with a hundred employees, isn’t just crying. He’s sobbing.
I knock gently on the door as I open it, almost afraid to see. “Zio?”
I do not see my uncle. Instead, I see a ghost of my past. Someone I never thought I’d see again. Someone who haunted my dreams for years until I purged them from my veins and my eyes and my memories.
Santino.
He’s standing over my collapsed, sobbing uncle with a frightening amount of dominance. Thick eyebrows shade onyx eyes. Brown hair sweeps back across his intense forehead, so not even the fullness of his lips can soften the brutal angles of his cheeks and powerful jaw. He’s angular, sharp, powerful. And etched into every line is something intensely unforgiving.
“Zio?” I say softly, because it’s the only thing my brain can snap together, and speaking more loudly could break some fine membrane between him and sanity.
“Go,” Santino says, his hand up between us as if he can’t bear to look in my direction.
I’m transported back to the day I was twelve and he walked into my life. The same terrifying power. The same dark shroud covering daylight. The same black hole sucking the life out of the room until the only thing standing is him. Santino.
I feel my heart in my throat. Every emotion I thought I’d erased comes roaring back. He’s better-looking than I remember him; time has been exceptionally kind.
But he’s standing over my zio, the strongest man I know, who’s sobbing on the floor underneath the heat of this man who’s put his hand up to block me. I’m too terrified to walk into the room and too angry to keep my mouth shut.
“What are you—?”
Santino closes the door with the flick of his powerful wrist. The lock snaps shut from the inside.
This is not okay. Zia Madeline has to know this is going on. Where the hell is she?
Not in the kitchen. Not in the bedroom. A dark cloud hovers over my heart and fear pricks at my skin.
This doesn’t feel right.
I find her in the basement, sorting piles of laundry. She hums an old song, one that she says her mother used to sing to her back home.
“You said you were going to be late,” Zia snaps like an accusation. The crow’s feet tugging on her eyes somehow make her more beautiful than the old photos of her around the living room. Or the one in Zio’s office of her sunbathing. “How was your test?”
“Fine.” I join her at the big farm table Zio made for her years ago, with his own hands. “What’s going on with Zio and that man?”
I don’t utter his name aloud for fear of invoking the devil.
“Nothing you need to worry about.” She cups my face gently, smelling of basil and bleach.
Her gentle words warm the iciest places inside me and temporarily extinguish all the other budding questions. She obviously doesn’t want to talk about it. Prying would be the worst thing to do. Even if I wanted to.
The dryer sounds and I grab a basket to unload it. We fall into our usual routine of laundry, dancing around the basement.
“What did Scarlett say about going to Malta with you?”
“She said, ‘next year,’ but I’m not going next year, and she was just being nice anyway.”
“If I were younger, I’d grab my passport and tour with you, patatina. But your uncle needs me.” Zia sighs at the incapacities of men and piles the clothes in a wicker basket.
My life often feels as if it’s split into two pieces: one in the modern world, at school with my friends and cell phones and technology everything, and one in the old world, where we wear full skirts and dance in circles until we’re dizzy to songs from hundreds of years ago. Where the women do the laundry and the men smoke pipes and everyone is offended if you eat out at a restaurant because…don’t you know Zia’s osso buco is better than anything you can find in some half-rate commercial kitchen?
So I do chores with her, getting lost in the routines that define our lives into the orderly and disorderly. I don’t forget about Santino upstairs. I feel his presence when the floor above creaks and the office door opens and shuts, but I fold as if I’m hell-bent on controlling what’s in my grasp and no more.
Upstairs, the front door closes.
We can pretend we have control, but something far outside our power is about to shatter the illusion. Every thought in my brain turns away from distraction and toward the inevitable unknown.
“Was that…” I find I can’t say the name. “Who was in the office with Zio? Was it the one they call the king?”
She frowns slightly. “How would you know that, patatina?”
“I’ve seen him before.”
“You’ve seen lots of people, Violetta.” Zia waves me off and picks up an empty basket. “Would you mind getting the clothes from the dryer?”
I swallow the lump of relentless questions and snap open the dryer. That’s twice she’s changed the subject. Third time’s a charm, but I have to be careful about when I ask. The Moretti family thrives on secrecy and respecting boundaries.
We sort through colors and towels. Zia hums an Italian folk song. She does it when she wants to get her mind off things. I join in with the parts I remember. It’s funny the things the brain remembers. Songs I haven’t heard since I was a child come rushing back in earnest, notes and melodies rolling off my tongue like my own name.
But a dark spot is filling me up, one fueled by terror and anxiety. Here we are, folding laundry and singing old songs, when Zio—a man so allergic to showing weakness he didn’t shed a single tear when he almost cut off his thumb—was sobbing on the floor upstairs with a terrifyingly powerful man towering over him.
I clear my throat carefully. “Zia, I’m worried about Zio.”
Zia stops humming and lets out a slow, heavy sigh. She folds another towel into a neat rectangle with sharp corners. “He’s taking care of men’s business.”
“What does that mean?”
“There’re two sides to this world, and if you’re lucky, you’ll have a man to deal with the cruel one.”
“Cruel? Do you mean—”
“Mammà?” Zio’s voice trips down the basement stairs. He sounds strong. As if whatever happened in his office was a figment of my imagination. “Are we ready to eat?”
He sounds so calm. So normal. As though this is any other day and he wasn’t just kneeling on the carpet at the king’s feet. My stomach turns to stone, and I don’t know if it’s fear or relief that weighs it down.
“Come, patatina.” Zia pats my hand with a warm smile. “Let’s feed your poor zio.”
I grab the basket of folded clothes and follow her upstairs. Zio sits at the head of the table with a newspaper covering his face. While Zia tends to lunch, I take a quick peek in the office. It’s empty. Like a shadow without a light, he’s gone.
Zio flips the pages as if he wasn’t just a cowering mess.
Zia makes lunch as if she wasn’t playing blind and dumb to the cruelties in her own house.
Santino’s shadow is still in the dark corners. He was never just a man. He was always more. Re Santino. Re means king—though of what? What has he done to earn the awe of the neighborhood? There are whispers, sure, but what human man can be as powerful as they say he is? He’s accused of—and admired for—crimes that happened before he was born, given credit for universal mysteries, and assumed mythological status whenever the younger women among us talk. A man can be strong and powerful, but those claims are always prefaced by, “He’s Re Santino, so…”
I know one thing for sure.
I never want to see him again.