Page 17 of The Mad Don
I look at her hand in mine. The knuckles are fine-boned; the skin papery in a way it shouldn’t be at twenty-six. I think about what these hands looked like when she was seven, when she was ten, the small, dimpled knuckles of a child who used to bring me things — drawings, interesting rocks, once a dead bird she wanted to bury properly — as offerings or apologies or both.
“Five operations,” she says. “Six years of this. Every time they say maybe, every time they say we’ll try, and I wake up, and it’s the same, and it’s —” She stops. Breathes. “It hurts.”
“I know. I’m going to fix it. There’s a specialist in Zurich, Fabiano has been —”
“Let me go.”
The words arrive in the room and sit there. My hands tighten around hers.
“Angel —”
“Let me go,” she says again. Her voice breaks on the second word. “I’m so tired of hurting. I’m tired of watching you tear the world apart trying to fix something that —”
She stops, and suddenly, her eyes change. She pulls herself back and looks at me like I am a stranger. “Where is he? Where is my brother?”
What is happening?
“Lucia —”
“Where is he?!”
“Where is my brother? He is this —” she pulls her hand from mine and holds it at the height of a child “— he is this big. Please, please, sir, where is he?”
“Lucia. It’s me. It’s Giovanni. Look at me.”
My voice is shaking.
She grabs my collar with both hands, and the strength in her grip. “Sir, please, please — my brother, he was right here, he was right here, and they —” Her voice is rising, climbing toward the place it goes. “Give me my brother. Give him back. Giovanni!” she screams.
Tears fall from my eyes. I am here; I am right here.
“It’s me. Lucia. I’m here; I’m right —”
Her nails find my jaw, my cheek, dragging, and I don’t move away from it, hold completely still, and I say her name as she is screaming. “Give him back to me! Giovanni! Giovanni!”
My head is spinning as I look at her wild eyes.
Her hands are at my throat, the grip stronger than her wrists should allow, and the door crashes open. Fabiano comes in.
“Stand down.” My voice comes out from somewhere outside the rest of me, aimed at Fabiano and the two men behind him. “Do not touch her. Stand down!”
Fabiano stops, and he looks at her hands on my throat and at me, and they stay where they are.
The hands at my throat go slack suddenly, and she looks at me.
She looks at me for a long moment, and she starts crying. She leans forward, her forehead comes down against my shoulder, and she cries with the whole small weight of herself. I put my arms around her, and I do not make any sound at all.
I am back to seven years old. The apartment on Via Carmelo, the third floor, the way the radiator knocked in winter. The smell of cigarettes and something sour, later learned to be my own fear, baked into the walls over the years, absorbed into everything I owned.
My father is a large man in this memory. He is always large in this memory, which is the particular distortion of a child’s eye, the way the threat magnifies, the way the body of the person hurting you seems to expand to fill everything available. He is shouting about something, which is to say nothing specific, which is to say he has been drinking since noon and has found something wrong with the way I breathe.
Lucia is in the corner. She is always trying to make herself small. She learned this before I did, or maybe she was always better at it. She has her knees pulled up, her arms around them, watching him the way you watch something about to explode, calculating the direction of the blast.
He hits me twice. The second one puts me down.
Lucia screams. “Stop it.”
She forgot for one moment to be invisible. She jumps and covers me with her body, and he begins to hit us both.
