Page 90 of Mafia Bride
Those words, with their partner,but I’m not, fog my vision. I don’t look at Santino. I can’t. It’s just me and the concrete between my sandals, where a star of darkness has appeared from a drop of water that fell from his body, or a teardrop that fell from mine.
“I thought,” I continue, but the lump in my throat stops me for a moment. “I thought I didn’t fit in here. I thought you came and dragged me to a place I didn’t belong. Backwards. I thought—” I had to swallow hard again, and another two dark stars joined the first between my feet. “I thought I was better than this life and better than you. I’m sorry if that hurts your feelings but not really.”
He gathers my hands in his as if he is gathering risen dough; gently, but with conviction.
“My feelings aren’t hurt.”
“I never had a chance,” I say. “This is who I was from the start. Everything else was fake. I was acting and I didn’t even know it.”
“Forzetta.” He takes my chin and turns my face up to him, but I can’t look into his eyes right now. I’ve somehow gone from a little violet toForzetta, but I feel neither delicate and beautiful nor powerful for my size.
“You know what this means?” I ask, still turned away, facing a fichus in a pot that I have no interest in.
“No.” I can tell he has some ideas what I mean, but none of them are correct, because he had me dead to rights from the beginning.
“This means I can’t fight it.”
He lets his hand drop, but the rest of him is still. In the pause I hear his thoughts in my head and snap my attention back to him.
“You want to say I shouldn’t have ever fought it,” I snarl.
“No.”
“Then you want to say it’s Zia’s fault for raising me this way. Or America. Or you want to say it doesn’t matter as long as I accept it, right?”
“What I want to say”—he stands, and my eyes follow his as if they’re on a leash—“is that I’ll miss the fight.”
Sure he would. Resistance keeps it exciting. I thought I was better than my situation, and he knew it. He used it to control me, without letting on where the control was coming from. What’s more entertaining than a puppet that thinks it’s a real girl?
But he doesn’t seem self-satisfied. He seems ashamed, and that isn’t as rewarding as I assumed it would be.
“Do you think he would have told me?” I ask. “My father?
“Told you what?”
“That he’d promised me to you?”
“È complicato.”
Of course he says it’s complicated, because he thinks I can’t handle it.
“Ciò che non è, Santino?”
What isn’t, Santino?
He huffs a little laugh that’s more frustration than delight.
“Italian language isn’t,” he says. “Cosa non lo è, Violetta. The ‘what’ is an idea. Not a thing. You saycosa non lo è.”
“Is the ‘what’ in ‘whatever’ a thing or an idea?”
He drops into a chair, leans back, and lays an ankle on a knee, because after all my tears and questions, he’s made a decision, and that’s what counts.
“You will learn to speak.”
Of course I could talk just fine, but when someone from the old country says speak at the end of a sentence, they mean speak Italian, as if they were dropping an unnecessary word. If one speaks, they speak our language. Otherwise, they’re just talking.
And despite the realization that I am now—and always have been—steeped in his world, I still feel as if I’m being dragged into it.
