Page 80 of The Mad Don
Fabiano kicks the body. “That’s your brother. Courtesy of the Don.”
I crawl to it. My hands are slipping in the mud. I get to it, and I push the wet shirt open at the chest because there’s one thing, there’s one thing I have, the only thing I kept of him, the birthmark below his collarbone, the small dark shape. It’s there. I look at his body. He’s grown. He’s a man now. He has shoulders, hands, a man’s chest, and somewhere under all the years, he is still small to me; he is still the boy whose hand slipped out of mine in the dark, and I waited. I waited fifteen years. I waited and looked and never stopped, and this is what was at the end of it. This is what they gave me — a body without a face.
I gather him up against me. He’s heavy and limp, and I pull his weight up into my lap and hold his head against my chest.
“I’m here,” I say. “I’m here. I’ve got you. I’m here.”
“An eye for an eye,” Fabiano says.
He lowers himself down on his good leg, so his face is closer to mine.
“Giovanni is quite heartless, isn’t he?”
He sets a gun down on the wet ground beside me. “Surely, you won’t let him go?”
“I’ll give you some time with the corpse.”
He laughs, straightens up, and he and his men get back into the car. The doors close; I hold my brother tighter.
“Don’t be scared,” I tell him. “I’m here. I’ve got you. Come on. Come on, come here, I’ve got you.”
I try to stand with him. I get my arms under him, and I push up through my knees, his weight dragging at me, and I get halfway up before my strength gives, and he slides out of my arms and hits the ground. The thunder breaks open above us. I go down after him, and my body breaks down into sobs.
* * *
I drag my brother’s body into the side of the road, to a place under bare trees where the ground isn’t flooded. My arms can’t really do it. I pull him by the shoulders, a foot at a time, and my feet skid, and I fall on one knee and get up and pull again.He’s so heavy. He was never heavy. He was a small thing with a small hand, and now, he’s this weight I can’t move, and I keep stopping. The rain runs into the open place where his face was. I keep wiping it away with my hand. It’s wrong to let it land there. I don’t know why it matters so much.
I don’t know where to put him. There’s nowhere. There’s no shovel, there’s no box, there’s nothing; I have nothing, and that’s the thing that takes my legs out from under me. Not that he’s dead. That I can’t even do the last thing. Fifteen years and I can’t even put my brother in the ground. I press my face into his wet shirt.
I don’t remember picking up the gun. It’s in my hand. It was in the mud where Fabiano left it, and now it’s in my hand, and I’m looking at it like I don’t know what it is.
I look at my brother, and I look at the gun, then I tuck it inside my clothes.
I tell him I’ll come back. I say it out loud to a body in the dark. I’ll come back; I’ll come back for you, I promise. I turn and walk away from my brother because if I stay there beside him, I will lie down and not get up.
I begin my walk back home. I don’t have a direction. There’s a road, and I follow it. My feet stop feeling like mine somewhere in the first hour. The night comes down heavy, and the rain comes down even heavier, and I keep walking. Cars slow down beside me, people look out, then speed up again and leave.
When the day breaks, I am still walking, and by mid-morning, I return to Giovanni’s house.
The gates are open. I walk through them. There’s nothing in me that’s careful anymore. I walk, leaving wet prints up the drive.
“Hey — who are you? You can’t be here —” Someone steps into my path. “There’s no one home; the Lady’s burial is today; everyone’s at the cemetery?—”
I push past him. He pulls my arm, and I don’t feel it; I shove harder. I go up the steps into the house up the stairs.
Giovanni is in his room. He turns when he hears me. He’s in black, dressed for a burial. His face is blank. The same emptied face he had standing over Lucia’s bed. Then he sees me, his face breaks open.
“Lupa—”
He comes toward me, and I raise the gun.
He stops.
“I didn’t kill her.” It comes apart in my mouth. “I didn’t. I didn’t kill her, Giovanni. I didn’t —”
“Calm down. Breathe. Breathe with me,Lupa.”
“Christov was all I had.” The gun is shaking, and I can’t make it stop, and I don’t try. “He was the only one. He was the only person who ever —Why would you do that? Why —”
