Page 50 of Mafia Queen
I don’t know how long I sob in the shower, but I cry until my lungs hurt. I’m blind with it. My eyes are swollen. My jaw aches. My throat is sore. I’m thirsty. I’m wrapped in a towel and Loretta is on the toilet, bending at my feet with a pair of pad-lined underwear between her hands. She wants me to step in. She’s asked me to do this already, and I heard her, but the words skipped off the surface of my consciousness like flat rocks on a placid lake.
I step in, and she pulls the underpants up under the towel.
“Thank you,” I say. “I think…” I have to stop for a last hitching breath. “I think I can finish.”
She stands. I forgot how tall she is. How much a full woman. I feel short and girlish next to her.
“There are clothes here.” She puts her hand on a pile.
“I’ll do it, just…if you could give me a minute.”
“We’re downstairs in the kitchen.” She leaves, softly clicking the door closed behind her.
I stand still for a moment, waiting for the sobs to attack again. They don’t, but I haven’t beaten them or resisted their advance. My heart just ran out of tears. It is wrung out, swollen, drained, and broken.
Bringing the pile of clothes to the bedroom, I look out the window, over the lawn, and up into the scrub and rock of a mountainside. The sky is not visible without craning my neck.
I sit on the bed with my shoulders hunched and my hands between my knees, then I drop to my side. Exhausted. Trapped again and again. Freedom is a lie. It’s a promise without substance. A light that only casts shadows.
He put me on this side of the house because it’s safe from the world, but my heart has an IV drip of sadness and anger. When it is full again, the world will not be safe from me.
14
VIOLETTA
The dark hours of the morning are so dead quiet, I hear murmurs of conversation from the patio on the side of the house. The scrape of chairs. A laugh cut off before it’s finished.
At some point, I got under the covers naked. Now I’m wide awake. Most importantly, I am alone. Santino did not come.
I’m pretty sure the proverb “Love rules without rules” doesn’t mean he can break them like this.
After I dress and brush my teeth, I try the bedroom door, half expecting it to be locked. It isn’t.
Santino could be anywhere right now. All I know is he wasn’t next to me when I woke up.
I told him I didn’t want to be an afterthought—that he’d win the world and lose me.
But will he ever lose me?
No. He won’t.
I follow muffled voices to my right and wind up in the grand dining room.
The last time I saw the dining room, it was empty. Now the room has been opened into a large patio on the side of the house, and both have rows of tables and chairs. A scattering of men grab food from a long buffet and sit in small groups.
The kitchen was never homey, even when the lack of utensils and pots had been addressed. Now it has been transformed into a place to cook for an army, with a stock pot as big as a wine barrel. Celia isn’t here, but the door to the basement is open. I smell a hint of sulfur from the coal furnace and hear clanging from thecucinabelow.
Outside, the crickets are still grinding away. I step into the view from my window—the grassy field between the house and the buildings against the mountain wall, with the slash of blackened blue sky above. The windows in the buildings on the mountain end of the lawn are all dark except for one. A dim beam pulses from one side of the window to the other. I walk toward it. Maybe I’m looking for my husband. Maybe I just want something to do before the day begins, and I have to fight tooth and nail for what I deserve.
The building is one of the smallest on this side of the lawn. More of a one-car garage surrounded by narrow, weedy walkways between buildings. Voices reach me, but they’re muffled and unintelligible. Gripping the window’s edge on tiptoe, I avoid stepping on a tomato plant to look through the frosted glass.
The movement of the pulsing light has slowed. It’s a lamp swinging on the end of a chain like a pendulum running out of energy. Someone is weeping. There’s no energy behind it. It is a sob of resignation.
In the window, I discover the crack leading to a corner of the pane, and in that corner, a tiny rhombus of glass is missing. I bend a little to look through it and have to hold my breath against the stench coming from that little hole.
The weeping man has a ring of long, graying hair at the base of a bald head and sits on a metal folding chair, leaning to the right with so much weight, the yellow nylon rope that ties his hands behind the chair’s back and an ankle to each chair leg is the only thing holding him up. His white tank top is hitched halfway up his big belly, and the shoulder strap doesn’t lean with his body, revealing a delicate pink nipple.
It’s the tender vulnerability of the nipple that focuses me. The ring of hair is not long on both sides. Only the right side has been grown out so that it can be combed over the scalp.
