My godfather, Vittorio Domenic Guidi, lived across the street from Carmel Beach in a sprawling stone rambler with Bougainvillea plants spilling onto the sidewalk out front. I parked around the corner and knocked on the heavy oak door. His nurse opened it and smiled. “Gia, your godfather will be so happy to see you.”
The nurse was a stunning redhead in her twenties who wore her hair back in a tight bun, a pencil skirt, and high-heeled pumps. She looked like a 50s pinup. She had a gentle but firm manner. I’m pretty sure she sweet-talked my godfather into doing everything she needed him to do. He couldn’t resist a pretty face.
Today, she tugged on my arm to pull me into the house and then leaned over to whisper, “He had a rough night last night. I haven’t given him a bath yet.”
I was grateful my godfather was filthy rich so he could pay some sweet young nurse to bathe him now that he was ill.
Every time I visited Vito, he looked frailer. His MS was progressing faster than any of us had anticipated. It hurt so much to see my virile godfather—who, when I was a child, used to lift me up onto his shoulders in one fluid motion—as a weak elderly man. It was difficult to see him withering away. His brain was still sharp, which made the deterioration of his body even harder.
I found him in his wheelchair in the sunroom, doing a crossword puzzle with all the windows and French doors open to the lush garden of flowers that crept up the small hillside in his backyard. A large sunbeam streamed into the window and illuminated his face as he turned to smile at me.
“Gia!”
“Vito!” I rushed over, struck with dismay at how fragile he appeared. I leaned over and kissed his grizzly cheek, hiding my face for a few seconds. He was the only person left in the world who loved me and he was disappearing before my very eyes.
“Thank you for coming, Gia. I need your help.”
My help? My godfather was the most powerful man I knew. Even in a wheelchair, he was all business. He didn’t waste time getting to the point. His face was stern as he turned to me. “It’s about your brother, Christopher.”
An icy chill trickled through me.
Of course, I’d never remembered a time when my brother hadn’t frightened me. The hatred in his eyes when my mother praised me. The vehemence that overcame him skinning the squirrels he shot in the woods behind our house. How he somehow got our live-in nanny fired after she told on him for watching her undress.
When Christopher was fourteen, he was sent away to boarding school in Germany. Within two years he was back home. It was all very hushed up, but I heard my parents talking. I overhead my father say that the headmaster was found dead, with his pants around his ankles and an ice pick through his eye. My mother was hysterical, crying that there was no way Christopher had anything to do with it. My father remained quiet.
Shortly after he returned home from Germany, Christopher was sent away again: this time to live with a family friend in Argentina. He was supposed to be working on a ranch. For whatever reason, he wrote me every week.
I never wrote back.
His letters were long rambling confessionals about his life in Germany and the girl he had fallen in love with there: Bridget.
She lived in the nearby village. But she would never let him see her house. They had met at the ice cream store one Saturday. Soon, they were sneaking out at night and meeting in a tiny fisherman’s shack on a nearby lake.
But Bridget was damaged. Her mother turned a blind eye to ongoing sexual abuse by Bridget’s stepfather. When she confessed this to Christopher one night, he promised to save her from her stepfather. He said he would go home with her right then and confront her stepfather, make him stop. But Bridget made him promise not to follow her home. It would destroy her mother, she said.
The more Christopher begged her to let him help, the more she drew away. She started hanging out with the rough kids in town and soon was injecting heroin into her veins. Still, Christopher thought he could save her. But he couldn’t compete with Bridget’s past and the pain it had caused her. He couldn’t compete with her longing to forever escape from this world.
Christopher was the one who found her body one night, curled up in a ball in a corner of the shack by the lake. Her wrists slit.
It was only after her death that Christopher learned that Bridget’s stepfather was the headmaster at his school. When he found out, nothing could stop Christopher in his fury and grief. It wasn’t long after that the headmaster’s body was found.
When I received these confessional letters in the mail, my blood would rush to my face and I would hide in my bedroom to read them. I wanted to scream and throw the letters at my mother, saying “Your precious son is a murderer!” But I loved her too much to destroy her. Plus, I couldn’t help but wonder whether she might already know.
Soon, Christopher’s letters to me grew nasty. He would address them to me as “Daddy’s Little Girl.” Soon, they stopped altogether.
I hadn’t seen or spoken to Christopher since my parent’s funeral.
Hearing my godfather bring him up sent a wave of apprehension racing through me. I knew Vito had no love for Christopher.
“What about Christopher?” I braced myself for what he would say next.
“He is an embarrassment to your family name.”
“I know.” I clamped my lips together. Even though we were adults, when my parents died, my godfather had taken on the role of our guardian in some ways. He was the executor of our parent’s estate and was really the closest thing left to a family member.
Even though he’d never liked Christopher, I think he wanted to honor my mother’s wishes to watch out for her beloved son. I waited for him to go on.
“He thinks now that he is a vampire or some other nonsense,” Vito flapped his gnarled hand in disgust.
“What? Where is he?”
“Santa Cruz. Living with some street urchins or something, I don’t know. I try not to pay attention, but when people come to me and say he is doing shameful things to young women, what can I do?”
I remembered that when I was growing up people who were obsessed with the movie The Lost Boys moved to Santa Cruz and pretended to be vampires. It was more of a cult than anything else. Sort of like cosplay, but more intense. I was surprised it was still going on, but not surprised my brother was involved. But it still creeped me out.
“What kind of things?” I realized I was holding my breath waiting for his answer. I thought about the headmaster with the ice pick in his eye.
“Things that in the old country would mean this.” My godfather slowly drew one long finger across his neck. The gesture sent a tremor down my spine.
“You want me to talk to him?”
Vito stared at me. “I’m giving him one chance, for your mother’s sake,” he said. “If this doesn’t work, I will have no choice.”
The thought of seeing him again made my skin crawl. But he was my blood. In my world, you put famiglia first. My mother and father had raised me to respect and honor family above all others. Although Vito was as close as family, he still wasn’t blood. Il sangue non è acqua—blood is thicker than water. My duty to Christopher was to warn him about Vito’s threat. When he drew his finger across his neck, I knew it wasn’t an idle gesture.
Vito stared out the window, his fingers fiddling with the newspaper on his lap and then he turned, his eyes somber. “Tell him that if I don’t hear that he has stopped his depraved ways on his own, I will make him stop. He should have been locked up years ago, but your mother forbade it.”
I vaguely remember my mother and Vito arguing once late at night about Christopher. But until now I hadn’t realized that Vito wanted Christopher institutionalized and that my mother had prevented him. I wondered why my father hadn’t been part of that conversation.
The last thing I wanted to do was see my brother. But I would. I would find him and talk to him for my mother’s sake and for Vito.
“Vito,” I said, taking his hand in both of mine. “I’ll talk to him. I’ll have him call you, okay?”
“Good girl, Gia. I know you are a woman of your word, like your dear mother, God bless her.” He made the sign of the cross and then twisted the newspaper until it was a cylinder. I knew my parents’ death still hurt him. Every time I went to visit my parents’ graves, there were signs that my godfather had been there right before me—fresh yellow roses, my mother’s favorite.
“Let’s go eat some lunch. Concetta fixed ravioli and pork roast.” Before he would let me wheel him into the dining room, he reached down and scribbled something on a corner of his newspaper, ripped it off and put it in my palm, patting my hand with both of his.
Christopher’s address.