Page 88 of Mafia Bride
“What did he ask?”
Who could ask the king for something this massive and be indulged?
“He was my boss,Forzetta.”
All the fear hardens into something rigid and brittle, because I believe him, and with that, my world shatters.
24
VIOLETTA
This room, again. It brackets everything in my new life. It’s where I go when things end and begin. To be alone. To hide. To be found.
Four walls. Three opaque, broken by a door to the bathroom, a door to the closet, and a door out—all closed. The fourth wall is glass from corner to corner, so clear I feel as if I could walk right off the edge of the floor. This room is one of many in Santino’s dollhouse, with its laughable ornate furniture and walls painted in the stark, white perfection of reproach.
I crouch in the same corner as the night he took me, trying to sink into the same helplessness so I can dig up the same strength, but it doesn’t come. I’m not a hapless victim anymore. I know who he is now, and I know who I am.
He’s the man who carried me up here without a word, and I’m a citizen of a country I hate.
Mostly, I know why I’m here, and this keeps me from protesting my own innocence, because I’m not some bystander in someone else’s war. I’m a player in it, and I have been since the beginning—since the moment I looked at the photo of my parents in the street and decided the Italian of the article was too much trouble to read. Or the moment I decided to believe a grocer and his wife—who’d never been involved with thecamorra—were hit outside his store because someone else was targeted.
The minute I believed the apparatus to get my sister and me to America just appeared out of nowhere—or when I believed my uncle could keep his hands clean, and yet receive a visit from Re Santino as I approached womanhood, I willfully denied the truth that flowed through my veins.
When Elettra talked about daughters being bartered and I shrugged because I thought I was safe from it, I stopped being an innocent bystander with the credibility to pooh-pooh the backwards traditions of my ancestors.
There’s a release to admitting what I’ve avoided calling by its name.
I am a capo’s daughter. I always have been, and I’ve always known it. The admission gives me enough relief to fall asleep, but self-rebuke keeps the dreams away.
Days go by in that three-walled room. I cut a path between the corner and the bathroom. I’m in there for hours sometimes, soaking in a tub of clear, warm water until I’m shivering.
Am I this prune-fingered body? These blue lips?
Am I the sagging shoulders and cold-hardened nipples?
Where is my father? Where is the mafia? Is it in my body? Passed through DNA, in the tiny cells sloughed off my skin and reborn in my marrow, shit out and made new?
Is it in the habits of my mind? Are my neurons patterned for the routines of a criminal life? To see around hard work. To look for the shortcut. Was my academic laziness—the acceptance of excellent grades with no effort—a kind of fakery? A choice? Or a sin in the genetics of my soul?
It’s dark, then light, then dark, then light in a pattern that’s the same as always, and the same for everyone, no matter what their father thought they were worth.
A splash in the pool wakes me.
Santino’s down there, swimming. Same as always, but now it causes a pit of nausea in my guts.
A plate with a half-eaten sandwich sits on the tray by the door. It must be mine, but I don’t remember eating it.
I recognize the symptoms of mental shock.
I feel everything, and nothing.
I’m numb and in excruciating emotional pain.
I’m confused with crystal clarity in every thought.
When I stand, my knees ache and my back jolts with pain, but I shake it off and go to the window.
The midnight moon reflects the water’s ripples in a funnel of glitter. It’s sliced apart by the Santino-shaped blade as he laps across the pool, swimming like a shark trapped in a too-small aquarium. Like me, in a glass-walled dollhouse with nowhere to go, because I’ve always lived here. I’ve never truly been in the wild.
