As soon as my red Ferrari hit the open highway headed south of San Francisco, I let her loose. I firmly pressed my Giuseppe Zanotti stiletto-heeled sandal to the floor as I watched my speedometer soar. I cranked the Gorillaz and zipped around slower cars, only easing up when the speedometer hit 100 mph on the curves.
My hair was whipping in the wind and would end up a tangled knot before I slowed down, but I could care less. Driving this way sent a rush of adrenaline through me. The freedom of the open road was one of the few things that soothed my soul. A little bit south of San Francisco I turned down the radio. “Dial Dante.”
I heard him fumbling as he answered the phone. “Ciao bella, mi amore.”
“I miss you.”
“Me too,” he said. “You on your way?”
Dante ran a little restaurant in Calistoga. We’d been best friends since high school — two misfits in the clique-y WASPish Carmel world where Italian-American kids were looked down on and even a little bit feared.
“No. I’ve been summoned to the peninsula. By Vito. Had to miss my session at the dojo.”
He was quiet for a second before he spoke. “What about?”
“I don’t know.”
I could tell he heard the worry in my voice I had tried to hide. “Do you think his health has taken a bad turn?”
Dante always said what I was afraid to say out loud.
My silence was his answer.
He cleared his throat.
“I should probably concentrate on the road,” I said. “I just needed to hear a friendly voice.”
I knew I sounded pathetic.
“Come up tomorrow, then.”
“Okay.”
I clicked off without saying goodbye.
I rolled into the Monterey Peninsula fog at around one. For most of the drive, I’d thought about my parent’s house. I had to face my fear. It had been two years. It was time I looked inside.
My “appointment” with my godfather wasn’t until two so I had time. At the last minute, I swerved and headed toward the gated community of Pebble Beach before I could change my mind.
At the entry to Pebble Beach at 17-Mile-Drive, I stopped at the guard post and rummaged around in my glove box for a few minutes before I unearthed my pass. When I finally triumphantly held it up to the guard he said, “Good day, Miss Santella” without even looking at it. I was a little miffed. If he knew who I was, why didn’t he just wave me through?
My stomach was in knots by the time I pulled up to the gate at my old house, I punched in the old code I had as a child. When the gate opened, I wasn’t sure if I was more disappointed than relieved it had worked.
I parked behind the large detached four-car garage, next to the once well-trod path through the trees to Dante’s home. The trail was now overgrown with thick prickly bushes. As children, Dante and I’d spent many a summer day playing bandits in the wooded area between our two homes.
Later, when we were teenagers, we’d sneak Bacardi 151 and cigarettes to a clearing in the middle of the woods. We’d drink and smoke and talk about our dreams as we lay on the mossy ground and looked at the stars. It was on one of those stargazing nights I’d leaned over to kiss Dante and he’d confessed his dark secret — he was in love with my brother Christopher. I ran out of the woods and wouldn’t talk to Dante for a week. I was crushed. Just like my mother had, Dante had chosen my sociopath brother over me.
I couldn’t live without Dante, however, and quickly forgave him. I needn’t have worried, though. Over Christmas break, something happened between them — I’ll probably never know what —that ensured Dante would hate Christopher for eternity and be mine — if only as a friend — forever.
I cast one last glance at the overgrown path and felt a tug of nostalgia for my childhood. When I was little, it seemed like being surrounded by a family who loved me was my destiny. I had no idea it could all disappear and leave me alone in the world. Tough luck, kid, I said to myself, heading toward the house.
My Budo karate training had trained me not to wallow in self-pity.
We are but a small part of the whole and we must remember that our own fears and hurts and tragedies are crucial to make us who we are as we strive to become selfless. While our hurt is real, we must rise above them to reach warrior status. We take the pain and use it to grow stronger. We conquer our fears by facing them straight forward and render them powerless before us. We know that our ultimate purpose is not to serve selfishly, but to use our fears and struggles to become stronger so that we may help others less fortunate than us.
Time to Budo on up.
I held my key out before me at the front door. I was counting on it still working and it did. The large door swung open and I stepped inside, quickly closing it behind me before I changed my mind. I leaned back against the door, closed my eyes and inhaled. The house smelled like home. And then, suddenly, more than anything in the world, I wanted to bury my face in the smell of my mother. I dropped my keys and bag onto the floor and ran up the staircase. I didn’t stop until I was in my mother’s walk-in closet.
I ripped her neatly hung clothes off the teak hangers in a frenzy, pressing them to my nose and then throwing them on the ground if they didn’t exude her Chanel perfume smell. It had been too long. They smelled like nothing. Finally, when nearly every item had been thrown on the floor, I collapsed, exhausted onto the heap of silk and wool clothing. I lay with my face buried in a pile of clothes sobbing until the stabbing pain in my gut turned into a dull feeling of emptiness. Finally, I rolled onto my back and looked around. That’s when I saw it.
A notebook-sized panel in the wall. It was usually hidden by rows of hanging clothes. I ruined my manicure prying it open. Inside was a round vintage hat box papered in gold and silver foil. Nothing else.
I carefully pulled the hat box out, kicking aside the pile of clothes to clear a spot on the floor. I plopped down with the box and stared at the lid. Maybe my missing birth certificate was in there.
Over the years, whenever I’d needed a birth certificate, my godfather had stepped in and done something that prevented me from actually ever having to produce the document. I had never actually seen my birth certificate.
When I went to get my driver’s license at the Monterey office of the Department of Motor Vehicles, Vito had come with me. Instead of waiting in line like I did once with Dante, we were taken to a back office where they processed everything and sent us on our merry way. I never even had to take a driver’s test. At the time, I figured it was because I had passed three racing courses at Laguna Seca before I turned fifteen, but now I wondered.
I stared at the box for a few seconds, finally said, fuck it, and lifted the lid.
I was right. And wrong.
There weren’t any snips of baby hair tied with a ribbon. The box only contained papers, letters and documents. Some were love letters, written in hard to read cursive. I picked up the first stack—saw they were signed by my father—and threw them back in the box. I knew someday I’d be ready to read more details about my parents’ legendary love. Just not today.
I flipped through the other papers. Looks like some land deeds, titles or something for some property in Italy. I wasn’t surprised to see my mother owned large swaths of land in Italy. My parents, together, had owned houses and property around the world, including a large villa on the Cinque Terre coast. Their favorite place to visit, however, had been their Lake Geneva mansion in Switzerland. The one that burned to the ground with their bodies inside.
The only thing surprising about that was that the land was solely in my mother’s name. Some dude had given her all this land. It wasn’t my grandfather, either. Some guy named Mateo Antonio Turricci. I wondered if he was the trustee for my grandparents’ estate. But these deeds showed my mother as the sole property owner. All the land was in Sicily so it probably was her inheritance from her parents. It looked like some type of structure and acres of land.
I kept flipping through the papers. Then when I saw a seal on a document that I knew was a birth certificate, I got excited. But it was for my mother. I stared at her vital statistics and the cute little ink prints of her feet and it brought a thick sob to my throat. Beneath that was my brother, Christopher’s birth certificate. I kept flipping through the papers. My dad’s birth certificate wasn’t in my mother’s stash of precious papers. And neither was mine.
I swallowed. Just another small detail that made me feel unworthy and unloved. I knew my mother had loved me, but also knew she’d always loved Christopher more. It was a wound that would never heal.
I put the lid back on the box, disappointed. It was just normal official paperwork and sentimental shit anyone would save. I’d still keep the box, though. If it had been important enough to her to stash away in a secret location, then I’d keep it for her.
On the floor near the front door, I grabbed my bag and my keys. An envelope lay beside them that I hadn’t noticed when I first came in. It was cream colored and had my mother’s full name printed on it: Lucia-Grazia Bonadonna Santella.
It was odd to see her maiden name. In Italy, most women didn’t take their husband’s surname, but my mother had tried to be as American as she could. The letter didn’t have any postage mark so someone must have slipped it through the mail slot in the door. Someone who didn’t know she was dead.
The letter couldn’t have been there long. My godfather said that Josie, the housecleaner who had worked for my mother for twenty years, still came to clean every Monday, so it had only been here a day. I tucked it into my purse and took one last look around. The house was spotless.
I slipped five hundred dollars out of my wallet and put it under a paper weight on a small table near the door with a small scribbled note that said, “For Josie.”
I’ll never forget meeting Josie’s eyes at the graveside service. She was sobbing, wiping her face with the sleeve of her wool coat.