Page 81 of Deadly Confessions
We argue about it for twenty minutes, which is better than thinking about what Monday morning brings.
I leave at ten. On the stairs down I think: the trail is warmer than it's been in nineteen months. The name at the end of it is getting closer.
I'm ready.
Chapter 24
Alone
Domenico
The church is different at night.
During the day, Santa Maria della Sanità belongs to the parish. The elderly women who come for morning Mass and stay to gossip in the vestibule. The young mothers who light candles for sick children. The tourists who wander in looking for Baroque architecture and leave disappointed because the Sanità is not the postcard Naples they paid for. During the day, the church is a public space. Shared. Functional. Mine in the way a schoolteacher's classroom is his. By assignment, not by possession.
At night, it is mine.
I lock the main doors at 9 PM. The sacristy door bolts from the inside. The side entrance, the one Valentina uses, has a secondary lock that only she and I have keys for. I engage both locks. The church seals around me the way a body seals around a heart. Walls, roof, stone. The noise of Naples cut to nothing.
I walk the nave in my cassock, my shoes on the marble making the only sound. The clerestory windows hold the last grey of twilight, fading as I watch, the glass darkening from charcoal to black. The pews cast long shadows under the security lamp near the confessional. The bronze Christ above the altar catches none of it. At night, He hangs in darkness. Invisible. Present without being seen.
I understand the feeling.
I go to the side altar. The votive rack. Thirty small candles in glass holders, most of them spent, the wax pooled at the bottom, the wicks drowned. Three are still burning from the afternoon. I take a fresh taper. Light it from one of the survivors. Set it in the holder at the far left of the top row. The spot I always use. Tomasso's spot.
The flame catches. Steadies. A single point of light in the dim chapel, no bigger than a fingernail, no brighter than a match held at arm's length.
"Buonasera, fratello."(Good evening, brother.)
I say this every night. The same words. The same spot. The same hour, give or take. The routine is important. Routines are the architecture of grief. They don't lessen the weight. They give it a place to sit so the rest of the body can continue to function.
I miss him.
Not the way I missed him in the first year, when the grief was a wound. Open, raw, impossible to dress because every time I thought it was scabbing over, something would tear it fresh. A song he liked on the radio. A phrase in Neapolitan dialect that only he used. The shape of Valentina's chin, which is his chin, which is our mother's chin, the genetic echo of a family reduced to a priest and a girl who doesn't know how alone she truly is.
Now the missing is different. Quieter. It has settled into my bones the way the damp settles into the church walls in winter. Not painful in any single location. Just present. An ache distributed so evenly across the body that it feels like the body itself, indistinguishable from the act of living.
He would be fifty-three this year. I try to imagine him at fifty-three. Silver at the temples, like Valentina's Sorrentino.Heavy around the middle, because Tomasso loved food the way I love scripture, with an appetite that bordered on devotion. He would have laugh lines. Deep ones. The kind carved by decades of the broad, careless smile he inherited from our mother, the smile that made people trust him, that made women lean toward him, that lit rooms he barely noticed he was standing in.
He lit every room he stood in.
I sit in the front pew. The one reserved for the priest, though I rarely use it during services. I prefer to stand, to move, to be among the parishioners rather than above them. But at night, alone, I sit where the proximity to the altar feels closest to prayer. Where the crucifix is directly above me. Where I can speak to God or to my brother without the distance that daylight imposes between the sacred and the personal.
"Mi manca la tua risata,"I say to the flame. (I miss your laugh.)
The flame moves. Not in response. A draft from the old ventilation ducts that run beneath the marble. The church breathes at night, expanding and contracting with temperature changes, the stone shifting in increments too small to measure but large enough to move air through passages built three centuries ago.
Valentina.
She came to the church yesterday. The first time in nine days. Nine days without training in the bell tower. Nine days without sitting in the pew near the sacristy door with her book. Nine days of silence, broken only by brief texts.Sto bene, Father.(I'm fine, Uncle.)Sono occupata con il lavoro.(Busy with work.)
She is not busy with work. She is busy with him.
When she arrived yesterday, she looked different. Not physically different. The glasses, the hair pulled back, the quiet composure that has been hers since childhood. The difference was in the way she occupied space. She moved through the church with a lightness I haven't seen before. A looseness in her shoulders. A softness at the corners of her mouth. The residue of happiness sitting on her the way morning dew sits on stone. Temporary, visible, easily mistaken for something permanent.
She trained. She was competent. Her strikes were accurate, her reflexes sharp. Fourteen years don't evaporate.
But she didn't stay after.
