Page 150 of Promised to the Don of Naples
I sat on the garden bench beside her.
"Lucia loved it here," the nonna said, cutting the rosemary. "More than Posillipo, more than Mondello. She usedto say Capri was the only place where she could forget who she'd married."
"Tell me something about her," I asked. "Something I don't know."
The nonna stopped the scissors and thought.
"She sang while she played," the nonna said. "Under her breath. Not the melody—something else, a Sicilian song her mother used to sing. She thought no one could hear, but I heard. I'd sit in that armchair and pretend to sleep, and I'd hear Lucia singing softly under the nocturne."
"I don't remember that."
"Do you sing?" the nonna asked.
"No."
"You will." She went back to the rosemary. "When this child is born, you'll sit at the piano with the baby in your lap, and you'll sing softly under the Chopin, and you won't even notice you're doing it." She looked at me, and her black eyes were wet, something I'd never seen. "That's how a mother comes back, signora. Through her daughter's mouth, without the daughter knowing."
I took her hand. The old hand, spotted, strong.
We stayed quiet in the garden, the two of us, while the sun went down over the sea of Capri.
The room was the same one from Luca as a boy.
A wrought-iron bed, a white sheet, a four-panel window open to the sea. The jasmine from the yard coming in through the thin curtain, the same as the other time I'd slept there—the night of the separation, when he crossed the sea to see me for one night, on the eve of everything going wrong.
But that night there was no eve of anything.
"Come here," I said.
He came.
He took off his shirt slowly. The body I knew by heart now, and that still took my breath away.
He laid me down on the iron bed with that new care—no longer exaggerated like in the first weeks of the pregnancy, but natural now, part of how he touched me.
The big hand under the nape of my neck, his weight held on his elbows.
"Bella mia. You're different."
"This again?"
"This again. But something else now." He moved his hand down my body, slowly, and stopped at my breasts, fuller, more sensitive these last weeks. I held my breath. "Here." The hand moved lower, opened on my belly, still flat but which we both knew wouldn't be for long. "And here."
"It's your child doing that."
"I know." He kissed my belly. Then he moved up, kissed my breasts, one and the other, with a new reverence. "Madonna, bella mia. You're getting even more beautiful."
I pulled his face to mine and kissed his mouth.
It was slow.
It was the slowest thing we'd ever done. No urgency of an attack, no hunger of a fight, no desperation of a goodbye, no frantic laughter of the day before.
It was something else—pure tenderness, mature, the tenderness of people who chose each other and know they have a whole life.
He explored me slowly, as if it were the first time, as if my changing body were a new body he had to learn again. His mouth on my neck, on my collarbone, moving down.
His hands everywhere, in no hurry at all, and I arched against them and sighed his name softly.
