Page 47 of The Mad Don
“All right.” She lets me lift her. Her arms are around my neck. She is as light as paper. As I stand with her, she lifts her head toward Yana again. “Will you come visit me? Will you come with him next time?”
Yana glances at me.
“Yes,” she answers.
“And take me around the house. He keeps me in that room. I told him I am rotting in that room. He won’t listen.”
She has turned her face up to mine again, accusing.
“I won’t listen?”
“You won’t. Tell him.” She looks back at Yana, who looks like she has just been handed a grenade. “You were right; inside is making me worse.”
“Bed,” I say to Lucia. I lift her.
I carry her back through the corridors. She is half asleep against my shoulder by the time we reach her room. The nursemaids have remade the bed. They lower the lights for me. I sit on the edge of the mattress, lay her down carefully on her good side, and pull the blanket up to her shoulder.
“Giovanni.”
“Yes, Angel.”
“I will see you tomorrow. Yes? You promised.”
“I promised.”
“Take me out for air. Even just to the garden.”
“Every day. From now on. I swear.”
“You’re busy.”
“I am not too busy for you.”
“You are. You always are. It’s fine.” She closes her eyes. “Your fiancée can take me out on the days you cannot. She seems strong. She can take me.”
“Lucia —”
“I like her.”
I look at her face.
She is smiling with her eyes closed. The smile that she only does when she is sleepy and pleased, and the pain has stepped back for a few minutes.
“You don’t even know her, Angel.”
“I know enough. She is kind. She is gentle. I can see it.”
I think of Yana.
The pin in her hair was sharp enough to open a throat. The muscle along her shoulder where I gripped her in the study. The way she put my sister out with two fingers against the side of her neck. The way she shot four men in three seconds in a Marchetti bathroom and dragged my paralyzed body out across the marble.
Kind.
Gentle.
There is nothing anyone with eyes should be able to mistake for kind or gentle about her.
And yet my sister, who can no longer reliably tell what year she is in, has met Yana for the second time in her life and is calling her gentle with the smile of a woman who has just decided something.
