Just outside the city proper, where the boundary of my world slopes upward, he drives up into the hills. Over the guardrails on the right, the town stretches below, innocuous and sweet, the older, sleepier arm to a newer college town that bustles and hums. I can see the center square that was designed like an Italian piazza to comfort the immigrants who moved in. The spires of the three Catholic churches built during three eras in the town’s history to accommodate the growth of the population and the intensity of the class divisions shoot upward. I can pick out the public elementary school, and the two parochial; the baseball field they all share, a soccer field financed by all the churches with an extra tray at mass, and yes—the Camorristi Society—because even criminals have children who want to play soccer, even if they call it calcio.
Santino cuts a right, and it feels like I’m being driven off a cliff, but I don’t gasp or panic, because somewhere in the depths of my lizard brain, I trust him.
My instincts are correct. The driveway slopes down, to a house built into the side of the hill. The entrance is hidden behind huge, fruiting trees, and from the front, I can’t discern much more than the front door, and a separate garage.
He pulls up next to a white BMW. The vanity plate is a combination of letters and numbers I don’t understand, like it’s some inside joke in Italian. I’m an outsider everywhere I go. Never fully fit in with the Americans. Never fully fit in with the Italians. A sudden longing for my sister blooms in my veins, intense and sharp.
I always fit in with Rosetta. Every time.
Santino turns to look at me. The compassion is gone. The king has returned.
“Stay quiet,” he commands, shutting the engine. “Don’t ask questions.”
With the car quiet, I can hear the birds singing. So many. Like a riot of normalcy intruding on the unknown dangers of the situation.
“Why?” I ask.
“That’s a question.”
God, this man is infuriating. Still, I keep silent. I don’t want to relive what happened only moments ago, or an hour ago. I have no idea how much time has passed.
Santino opens my door and laughs at the woman he sees there.
My cheeks flame hot. “What’s so funny?”
“Violetta. You are una viola sangue.”
I stare at him. “A blood violet?”
“The blood is your forza.”
Forzetta.
Funny. And by funny, I mean not funny at all, because if this much blood makes me a little powerful, I don’t want to know what’s going to happen before he calls me just plain forza.
He holds his arm out for me to join him by the front door. It’s Spanish style, with a red tile roof over the portico, stained glass panels next to the door, and painted tiles underfoot. It’s as fancy as the BMW suggested. Something better than the Zs’ narrow connected two-story, but not as fancy as Santino’s house. Of course, because the king lives in a castle.
Santino doesn’t ring or knock. Just stands with me about six feet from the door. I’m about to ask if maybe we should use the doorbell when a woman throws open the door. In a simple V-neck dress, the color of the sky, she’s tall, stunning, curvy in all the places men like, glowing like a statue of Venus carved into the shape of womanhood. She looks to be around Santino’s age, in her mid-thirties, and I have never in my life felt so much like a child.
“Santino!” She has a deep, throaty voice that oozes sexuality. She runs to him like he’s the only man in the world and I’m a part of the foliage—a bush not worth acknowledging.
Santino hugs her, but holds her back from the intimate embrace she seeks. My stomach flutters a bit. She is everything I’m not and Santino pushed her away without a word. The woman pulls back and sizes me up. I feel her eyes slide across my terrible dress, all the cuts and bruises and blood. I’ve still got pieces of someone’s head glued to me by dried blood and here she is, looking beautiful and fabulous.
I want to hide behind the fruit trees, but one look at him tells me that I have nothing to be ashamed of. I’m his wife, if not his queen. So I hold my head high, which makes me feel like a bad actor auditioning for a part I’ll never be talented enough to play, but I won’t be cowed by another woman—even one this intimidatingly beautiful. For the purpose of this meeting, I am Santino’s and he is mine—which is both terribly powerful and awfully precarious.
“My God.” She finally speaks—looking at my dress. I don’t like her inference.
“I need you to keep her here,” Santino says.
What?
“How long?” she answers.
“Wait,” I say, even though I don’t know what I’m asking them to wait for.
“Until I say so.”
I hold my breath. This is not what I expected.
Okay, I expected to be driven to a field and shot. And when that didn’t happen, I expected to go home. And after that? I expected Santino would bring me to an old aunt or Gia’s house or something…anything but this woman who looks at him like she wants to strip for him.
She waves me toward her.
“Come on, then.” She turns and walks to the house, as if she expects me to follow like a trained puppy.
“Loretta,” Santino calls. She stops on a dime.
Okay, her name is Loretta. Thanks for the introduction, asshole.
“Let my wife call her zia,” he says.
What is going on here?
“Okay,” Loretta says, motioning me inside. I don’t go. I don’t take orders from her.
Santino puts his hand on my shoulder and I look over to him.
“Are you coming in?” I ask him, even though I know he’s not.
“I’ll be back.”
“When?”
“You’re safe here.”
Turning away from his intensity, I look up the driveway, and between the trees, where the high fence is visible. Behind me, same thing. Dense trees and if you look closely in the pores of the foliage, a fence with barbed wire on top. One entrance with a driveway, and on the other side…a steep hill.
Loretta’s also protected, but by whom? Santino? And if so, why?
“Look,” he said, pointing up the hill, where another house overlooked the town from a higher vantage point. “That’s Antonio Cavallo’s house.”
“Antonio Cavallo’s dead twenty years already.”
“But his family isn’t, and I run that family here. So…” He takes one of my hands in two of his, and I let him. “You’re watched. Day and night.”
“You’re watching me?” I ask, pulling my hand away to point up the hill.
“My men are.”
“So I can’t run, right? That’s why?”
He scoffs with a little laugh.
“Loretta won’t stop you from running.”
Every time I think I get a handle on the man I was forced to marry, I’m met with new surprises. Who is this woman? For him to place me, his wife, with her, she must be trustworthy. Or at least safe enough, since we’ll never be safe again, so sayeth the king.
Judging from her initial reaction, the embrace when they met, and the way she’s looking at him right now, she’s clearly someone who’s used to touching him the way she wants. A black snake of jealousy slithers up my spine and I don’t know why.
I don’t have any real reason to be jealous, right?
I don’t have the reason or the right, nor would any such feelings come from a place of self-respect, because he’s a kidnapper, murderer, and overall scumbag who doesn’t deserve to make me jealous.
It must be a weakness I opened up when I failed to get away, then saw a man shot. It’s just fake intensity during a too-intense experience.
Stuffing the jealousy down deep, I take everything that happened today and jam it along with it. I’m going to act cold and heartless. It’s a total fake act, but it’s the best I can do. I cannot examine anything too closely right now or I’ll unravel.
“You’re going to kill whoever sent those guys?” I ask as if I don’t care one way or the other.
He doesn’t answer with words, but he does something so shocking, it’s over before I can stop it.
He kisses the top of my head. Just like that, he anoints me, and I let him.
When he walks back to the car, he pulls a part of me with him, and I don’t know which part. It’s not the part that loves, and the part that desires has no string.
Maybe it’s the part that will always be from Napoli. Or the part that can understand Italian but not speak it. It’s the part that—on my first plane ride—looked out the window at takeoff with my nose and hands pressed to the glass, wondering if somehow my dead parents would be at our destination, or if I was being taken from the possibility of their return.
He nods at me before getting in the car, and suddenly, I’m a five-year-old who doesn’t understand the permanence of death.
I. Will. Not. Cry. Around. Santino.
The engine roars and Santino backs out of the sloped driveway. I can only see the top of his car as he straightens to the direction of the road, and drives away.
The birds chirp and squeak. The breeze is harder up here, but not quite a wind, as if I’m in some temperate heaven.
Turning to face the house and the woman waiting inside it, I add Loretta to the list of people I won’t cry around.
Loretta shows me around. Her house is similar to Santino’s in that it feels overtly Italian, but she’s more Versace than old world, with plants in every corner and columns of vines hanging from painted pots. It’s bigger than it looks at the head of the driveway since three stories drape down the far side of the hill. The leaded windows are enormous, and the outside is terraced. There seem to be stairs with terra-cotta tiles and wrought-iron railings everywhere.
The bathroom is massive and marble and I feel too small to be here, but I need hot water and soap.
“Anything you need is in the shower,” she says. “I’ll bring you some clothes.”
“Thank you.” It comes out as awkward as I feel, but I still keep my chin high and my gaze tight. I don’t want her to think I can’t handle this.
In the shower, I run the water as hot as it can go, letting it scald my skin clean, holding my hands over my face so I don’t see what’s spinning down the drain. When the rinse has done all it can do, I focus on the bubbles. Shampoo. Body wash. The smell of jasmine. I scrub scrapes that bleed anew and places the blood couldn’t have touched. Under my arms. The back of my neck. The insides of my thighs. Between my toes.
When I get out, I wrap myself in a towel, finding a tan dress on the counter with packaged underwear, a new toothbrush and comb. A pair of simple sandals is set on the floor.
When I pull the towel away, it’s bloody, and for a moment I think I missed a spot, but it’s not someone else’s blood. The broken glass left me covered in cuts that are clean now, but reopened. I find a first aid kit under the sink and treat my wounds, pretending I’m a student again. My arm isn’t my arm, but my classmate’s and I’m about to pass my first-year trauma final. Compress, clean, sanitize, dress.
Just another day at the office.
The shift Loretta leaves me is the prettiest thing I’ve worn outside a dressing room in weeks. The maxi skirt hits the tops of my feet, hiding the bandages on my legs. The jersey is sleek and golden, with a crossover front that drops low enough to show off the cleavage of a woman shaped like Loretta. But on me, the bottom of the V lands below my sternum with barely a tease visible.
“You get what you get,” I say to the clean-scrubbed face in the mirror, then brush my teeth because my mouth still tastes like fear.
The sandals are way too big, so I’m careful on the stairs as I numbly walk through the house.
Loretta’s on the back patio, shoving something inside a brick oven. I get past the screen just in time to see the lavender floral dress I arrived in as it melts into noxious gas.
“That’s better,” Loretta says when she sees me standing there.
“Thanks for the loaner.”
“Eat,” she says, nodding to an adjacent seating area with wrought-iron table and chairs under thick cushions. The glass-topped table is covered in meats, cheese, breads, and wine. “There’s a phone there, too.”
I spot the black cordless next to a bowl of fruit. A landline. How quaint.
“Thank you.”
Having made my dress into a smear of viscous toxicity, she sits at the head of the table and flicks her hand at the house.
“You can close the doors if you need privacy.”
My desire to talk to my zia outweighs any questions I have. Because what I want, more than anything in this moment, is my mother, who protected me. She taught me how to cook and how to live. She’s gone. But I have my zia.
Avoiding the food that calls to me so urgently, I take the phone, and walk in the house, to the kitchen, and slide the glass door closed. I don’t want Loretta to hear the weakness I’m bound to exhibit.
As I dial, I wonder if the guys at the top of the hill are listening in, then decide I don’t care.
“Zia?” I whisper.
“Violetta!” Zia’s voice instantly soothes me. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“We heard there was a…” She stops herself the way we all do when talking about something camorra related, out of habit. It always seemed like a dumb superstition, but now light shone on the other side of the custom. The demons we fear invoking are real.
“Yes,” I say. “It’s been a stressful day.”
I won’t cry in front of Santino or Loretta, but Zia? Can I not cry in front of my zia?
I’m alive, but others aren’t. My life caused someone else’s death. A father? A brother? A son. A human who could have changed, and now never will.
Squeezing my face and pushing my fist against my mouth doesn’t stop it from coming. I sniff with a hitch in my breath.
“Oh, my baby,” Zia whispers. “I’m so sorry this happened. We love you so much.”
“I love you, too.” Tears prick at my eyes, and I walk deeper into the house where Loretta can’t see my tears. “It was terrible, Zia. Terrible.”
“Were you hurt?”
“No.” My bandages catch the flowing skirt, but they don’t cover the hurt she fears.
“I knew you would be able to take care of yourself.”
“I wish I didn’t have to.” It comes out as a whisper.
“I know, my patatina. I know. That has been our wish for years. We tried so hard. Know we tried.”
I want to stay mad, but I can’t, because I believe her, and that quiets the surge of tears. I sniff and wipe my eyes.
“I should go,” I say.
“Thank you for calling us,” she says even though Zio’s not on the call. “We love you, Violetta. Patatina.”
She’s ready to get off the phone without asking where I am or the number I’m calling from. She just accepts it all without question, and for the first time, I understand how easily your will to know and do things for yourself can be taken away.
“I love you, too.”
“Trust Santino,” she says. “He’ll keep you safe.”
I hang up before I can tell her that down in my bones, I know he’ll try the same as they did.
Outside, Loretta lounges in the shade, talking on a cell phone. She’s not laughing and her expression isn’t casual and chatty.
She’s inside Santino’s world, and it’s time for her to answer some questions.