In the waiting room of an Italian hospital, Camilla told Damiano and me that the numeric key was a lawyer’s license number, and years later, a young woman named Theresa Rubino told her cousin that her lover, Roman, was getting an important and secret thing engraved inside Violetta’s ring.
This whole drama… It was never about Damiano and Gia’s ‘mbasciata, her father’s debt, or the string of overlooked insults.
Gia didn’t resign herself to a forced wedding for the sake of peace or the security of a marriage. The bride was never confused or moody.
I shouldn’t be so surprised when she shoots me.
She always wanted to be free.
Time slows down into details without a story. Crystal-clear events shuffle like the wht-wht-wht of a deck of cards.
I stand at the pool and follow the sound of pounding fists up. I see Damiano holding her up against her window. Then—and only then—do I understand my mistake.
wht-wht-wht
Before the bullet, the error is the first ache in my chest. Then I see Gia, and the pain bursts through me. The heat. The pressure. The life pushed out of my lungs in a blast of air. I feel myself go flat and weightless.
wht-wht-wht
I am in a shroud of noise. It’s everywhere, like God. Thick as all my sins against Him. Loud as the crunch of a footstep to the insect it’s about to crush.
wht-wht-wht
Falling backward into the pool, the last thing I see is Violetta in the window with her mouth open. I can’t hear her, but I know she’s screaming from a different time, a distant place, tying the spaces between us with her voice. But then all I see is sky.
wht-wht-wht
When I see Gia pointing a gun at me in my own house, I understand their plan. In that moment between when I drop my gun and step back, it’s so clear I could write a book on it.
If I’m dead before Violetta collects her inheritance, Damiano can marry her, and he will have access to it.
wht-wht-wht
I go down with empty lungs. Face up. White foam closing off my route to Violetta.
Though I know what’s happened, who did it, and why, my body takes a breath before I shout to my wife.
Wait for me.
I’ll be there. I’ll come. I’ll swim. I’ll crawl. I’ll fly on wings of fire.
My lungs fill with water. It’s excruciating. My limbs jerk, but my mouth forgets and breathes and breathes. The water sucks me down into solid silence, and I breathe liquid because I have no choice. I will die unredeemed.
My last thought is that Violetta was right.
This all could have been avoided if I’d outlawed ‘mbasciata the moment I saw her cry.
It all flashes before me so fast, I have time to remember everything.
My mother is sad, then she is happy. Her hair is tied back, but half of it has escaped already. I follow her up a mountain. Vesuvius. She’s going to heal herself at the opening of a dead volcano. It’s been days uphill, grasping at rocks and scrub, and we’re barely a quarter of the way. I am hungry.
Paola visits me in a place with many children. She promises to take me home one day. Then she keeps that promise.
Mario sleeping on the couch. Fighting with his wife about how much I eat.
The street. Damiano. The oranges. Mario blames me for the mess.
I open my best friend’s face. Blood everywhere. I’m in trouble, but my uncle stops yelling. He pats my head.
Emilio pats my shoulder. He says I have a certain something, then he steals it for his own purposes. I will marry his daughter to protect his interests. Then I am at his funeral, and I have to keep the promise he made for me. I’ve been sold for it, and I know I’m worthless because Emilio is a stingy man.
Violetta in the hallway. Part of me shifts. I never understand what it means, because Rosetta is crying. The boy cries when I kill him. Rosetta cries in relief when I give her the ring. I’ve made someone happy and soon—dead.
I can’t stop thinking about what I stole from the girl in the hallway, then I marry her, and I fuck her, and I love her. I protect her. Shield her. I make her life about me and what I can do for her. She won’t understand. She fights and resists. But she loves me anyway.
And now there’s light everywhere, and I know I am forgiven.
I am clean. My God, I am clean.
This is what they mean when they say your sins are wiped away.
I wish Violetta could know this. I’m not a devil. I’ll never be good enough for her, but I have a chance to not be bad for her.
And God says I will tell her one day, but the devil laughs from far away and says, “Enjoy sainthood while she’s getting raped, coglione.”
The shock of the devil’s truth turns me away from heaven and back to Earth. I see my body from above, flat on my back at the edge of the pool, one leg dangling in the water. A man in wet clothes crouches nearby, pulling Emilio’s ring off my finger.
“I told you there wasn’t no blood,” he says nervously, his voice close to me even though I’m a mile overhead. He pulled me out for that fucking ring.
“So shoot him,” says the man standing a few feet away.
I know the voice. He’s Lucio. From Lasertopia. Cosimo’s man. The one who acted as if he didn’t speak English. This man is a threat to everything I love. From the moment I saw him, I could tell he’d committed murder more times than he could count on his fingers.
Emilio’s ring comes off. It is meaningless. It’s not what draws me back. The increasing need to save Violetta pulls me through the thick space, against a tide, like a fish on a hook.
The man holds the ring up to the sun—to me—as I speed back to earth. He is Calimero Tabona. This is where Damiano is getting his strength—from the few Tabonas left after they tried to take Violetta. They are based on the other side of the mountains, in Green Springs, and now they’re here. Calimero starts to put the crown ring in his pocket.
“That’s Dami’s.” Gia’s words come from somewhere out of my vision, which has folded like an envelope.
Calimero shrugs and tosses it in the direction of her voice.
I spin through space with the ring. Vengeance unhooks me from Heaven, and when she catches it, I drop back to Earth like a stone, meeting my body on the pool’s edge. Breathing into motion, everything is everywhere. I’m facing every direction, seeing through closed eyes, and I know the backstabbing stronzetta leaves without another word.
She’s unfinished business. Her and others. Damiano. Marco. Maybe Loretta. Eventually Cosimo.
I can’t die until they pay for what they’ve done to Violetta, what they intend, and what they’re going to do. My soul takes back possession of my body as if blown into the fingertips and toes by the breath of vengeance—I’m going to kill all of them.
Animated by that sudden expansion, I take Calimero’s legs from under him, sweep up the gun he drops, and shoot in his direction. The pop of the gunshot is drowned out by the whooshing in my ears. I hit his thigh.
A shadow alerts me to Lucio’s movements. I point the gun at his chest, praying for a lucky bullet, and blow his face into a blackened hole of meat.
My vision is still swimming and my chest hurts. I expel two bullets in Gia’s direction before I bend and retch a lungful of pool water. It washes away a streak of blood on the tiles. Like a drunk committed to the inevitable, I heave again, coughing up the contents of my chest.
With a slam from the front door, Gia walks out of my range. For now.
A man sobs. It’s not me. Holding myself steady against the table, I look around. The green of the trees is shockingly vivid. The pool water is so transparent I can perceive the brushstrokes in the concrete’s turquoise paint. And the man dragging his bleeding leg as he crawls is cast in shadow as dark as the sun is bright.
I am here.
For whatever purpose God or the devil let me live, I have my own reasons for not letting death take me.
Wobbly for the first few steps, I intercept Calimero’s path to Lucio’s gun. He stops and looks up at me, his leg gushing on my patio. He won’t last long.
“Please,” he says.
“You need a tourniquet.” I crouch in front of him.
“I have a wife and a son.”
There was a time I wouldn’t have been moved by those words at all—except to extend his suffering for the insult of assuming I’d take on his personal problems. I’m surprised to find my understanding has expanded. I do care about wives and children.
“So do I.” I check his gun for bullets and snap it closed. “And you’re going to tell me where to find them.”
I press the gun to his forehead.
“I don’t know.”
This is a man who is either not getting the message or who’s been threatened with more than death.
“How old is your son?”
Calimero groans in pain, eyelids clamped shut. He’s losing consciousness. “Fourteen.”
“Ah, a nice age.” I drop into the nearest chair, where I can watch the path of blood behind the crawling man. I want a cigarette, but they’re soaked, and my lungs still feel half-filled with broken glass. “When I was fourteen, I swore an oath to the Cavallo family. My father was dead, and the man who took me in…wasn’t much of one. So. You get the family you get, no?”
“I can’t… I don’t…”
“Your wife though. Let’s make a deal.”
“Don’t.” Lucio’s gun is out of reach, but he grabs in that direction.
I lean my heel on his wrist. “If my wife is dead, I take yours.”
“I don’t know where she is.”
“You’d better tell me something, Cali. The hand of God pulled me out of death. What will you say when you meet Him? You didn’t tell me what I needed to know—what God Himself sent me back to Earth for—because you were loyal?”
In his weakened state, the superstitious logic gets through. He swallows hard. Blinks. Starts to answer, then stops.
“It’s Damiano,” Calimero says.
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“And Cosimo. His father. Bankrolling. Paid us all.”
No surprise. Cosimo’s lusted after the crown since the day it was pulled from the devil’s warehouse.
“What’s in it for you besides a paycheck?”
“A place. Under the crown.” His energy flags. The river of blood from his leg flows into the pool.
“Where is she now? This is your last chance.”
“Don’t know. Tomorrow morning…church.” His eyes close, and his body goes limp.
I slap his face until he’s half-conscious. I’m trying to stay calm and failing. “Then what?”
“Marry her. Claim crown…”
Dami’s intentions with the crown may be to rule himself or give it to his father to expand his territory here. He may want to jerk off on it. None of it will matter. He’ll kill Violetta after God and the devil used up a miracle to save me from death.
“Where is she now?” I ask again.
But the light goes out from his eyes, and I drop him to stand. The blood stops flowing from his leg. He didn’t know. She could be anywhere, suffering in a thousand different ways.
“Fuck!” I shoot him in the head.
Bone and blood and brain spray like paint. The bullet leaves a hole in the patio tile. No blood flows. He was already dead. Can’t turn back time and kill him. Can’t turn it forward.
Tomorrow morning.
I pace into my house, turn corners, sweep the pictures off the mantel, the garbage statues and clocks off the tables. There’s an entire house to waste time destroying because she’s out of my reach. I fall back onto the couch. My chest hurts.
How many hours to blow a hole through this town? Burn down every house she isn’t in until I find her? Leave them a place to run? To go deeper into hiding?
Out of habit, I reach for the pack of useless cigarettes, but they’re not there.
Not in one piece, at least. My pocket is full of soaked tobacco and paper sludge around a misshapen, dented Zippo, and I understand everything.
The bullet hit my chest hard enough to send me into the pool, but the lighter’s steel casing kept it from piercing me. When I laugh, my chest hurts, but I laugh anyway. Neither Heaven nor Hell saved me, but my purpose is both holy and damned.
Gia’s already telling them I’m dead.
Good. When I come for them, they won’t expect it.
Violetta and our child will live. Whether or not I die a second time is not up to any mortal.
God help them, and God help me.
I will kill them all.