Page 87 of Captive Rival: Armani
Frankie snorts out a laugh and then claps her hand over her mouth, looking over at Lili to see if she’s been disturbed. The baby makes a little fussing sound and then goes quiet again.
Sorry, I mouth silently.
You’re fine, she mouths back.
Smiling, Frankie riffles through the photos some more until she has a stack, then splits the stack and hands me half.
“Let’s cut mats for the photos with the fancy scissors. You do yellow and I’ll do cream, that way we’ll have a double mat for each picture.”
Silence falls between us again as we focus on making the mats. I do my best to cut perfectly straight, finding a kind of zen in the repetitive labor. When I find myself finished before Frankie, I pick through the plastic box full of fun bits and pieces.
“These are cute,” I tell Frankie, holding up a sheet of tiny white satin roses with sticky backs.
“Those are precious! We need to use them. Maybe with one of the pictures of her in the gown.”
Nodding, I sort through the pile until I find the perfect photo of Lili dressed in her christening gown, fists clenched at her chest, her mouth pulled up in a toothless grin. The roses match her gown perfectly. Frankie takes the photo from me and looks at it lovingly.
“I asked Dante if he had a baby book, but he has no idea. I looked through that entire house more than once trying to find mementos of when he and his brothers were small, but there’s hardly anything. Their mother had the christening gown tucked away in a cedar chest, luckily. She had it professionally preserved, bless her. It was wrapped in archival tissue paper and everything.”
She gives the photo of Lili back to me.
“I’m sure their mom had photos of them, at the very least,” I say. “They must be somewhere.”
“They got robbed of their childhoods. I agree, she had to have kept some sentimental things, but…I can’t help but think their dad just got rid of everything after she died.”
Frankie is probably right. How tragic. I’m glad I never had the chance to meet Enzo Bellanti.
We set the mats to the side and start pulling together the next batch of photos.
“Speaking of the little Bellanti boys, look what Ididmanage to dig up,” Frankie boasts.
There’s a small wooden box near her left hand that I hadn’t noticed before. It’s tied with a faded blue satin ribbon. The knot looks like it had to be pried apart, leaving the edges of the ribbon curled and sightly frayed. She pulls the ribbon apart easily and I wonder if she’s the one who’d gone through the effort to open it in the first place.
Taking off the top, she pulls out a stack of snapshots and faded Polaroids.
The first photo shows two small boys standing in front of a Christmas tree in matching red sweaters. The taller one is holding a baby who looks like he’s two seconds away from screaming.
“That’s baby Marco. Dante is the tall one, and of course, Armani is scowling in the background.”
I can’t hold back a small laugh. Sure enough, he is. His chubby cheeks look too cute to hug a frown like that. The next two pictures are the same, but with the boys in different order near the tree.
Another shows a woman with her back to the camera. She’s wearing a deep pink dress. Or maybe it’s red; it’s hard to tell from the faded colors. Her hair is styled in an elegant French twist. Most of her is hidden behind the tree. My heart flips.
“Is this their mother?” I ask.
“I think so. There aren’t any more photos of her. I wish there were. I’m sure she was lovely.”
“Maybe Dante has some?”
“I thought about that, but I decided not to ask him,” she says. “He…doesn’t exactly know that I found these. I’m not going to cut them up or anything, I’ll just have copies made so I can use them in the scrapbook.”
Too bad. I’d really like to see what Armani’s mother looked like. Frankie hands me the entire stack of musty old photos to go through and I flip through them very slowly, taking time to study each one. I see so many nuances of Armani’s childhood. The way he’s dressed and how his hair is combed to the side with a perfect part. The same serious look he wears in each photo…except for one.
His arm is around a small girl. Older than Marco but shorter than Armani and Dante. She’s staring straight into the camera. Big eyes, thick dark hair. The corners of her mouth are lifted ever so slightly. Just enough to make her appear as if she’s up to something a tiny bit naughty.
Goosebumps rise on my forearms. My breath catches in my throat.
I know those eyes. That heart-shaped face. Even the smirk is exactly the same, despite the years of a life well-lived that separate the girl in the photo from the woman I know.
