Page 100 of Mafia Queen
We are together in our castle. What happened last night is like a dream—if a dream could transform me into who I was always meant to be. I look the same, but I feel different at a cellular level. My atoms are vibrating faster. The firing of my brain is hotter, but my blood runs colder.
Santino sleeps.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen him at rest before. I can’t help staring at his black eyelashes and the crease in the center of his lower lip. I want to touch it, but I don’t want to wake him. He’s earned a few hours of sleep.
When we got back, he threw a blanket over my naked legs and carried me into the house. Gennaro got right to business, reporting our losses as one bullet graze and an attack of pre-battle vomiting. The Tabonas, caught off guard and trapped by the guns on the ridge above, woke from their crown-induced haze and dropped their weapons.
I demanded they call Dr. Aselli to take care of Santino’s hand, and while we waited, I told Santino about Dario, who hasn’t been seen since a bolt of lightning struck by chance or heavenly design just as he was attempting to steal the crown. I told him about my plan to rescue him from Lasertopia and Loretta’s vengeance of Carlo Tabona for Elio’s death.
When the doctor came, I was still tending the first and second-degree burns on Santino’s torso as he caught me up on his story of his eternity behind the brick wall.
Now, with the late morning sun finding its way into our slit of sky, there is peace. The crown is out of its box, sitting on the dresser like a piece of costume jewelry.
Santino put it there with his bare hands.
Last night, before he started the Suburban, my husband picked up the crown from the dashboard. He’d never really seen it up close under anything as bright as the car’s dome light. He turned it around to the back, where the nail connected the diadem’s U-shape, and let out a long exhale.
“This is it?” he asked.
“Yes.” I tried to take it from him, but he wouldn’t let go.
“How did you get it?”
“It’s a long story with a crazy ending.” I let go, and he tossed it back on the dashboard to start the car. “Was it hot? The metal. Did it burn when you touched it?”
“It’s cold out. Why would it?” His brows knit as if he didn’t understand the question.
Why should he? It didn’t burn him because he didn’t expect it to, proving the crown is just a random antique, and its power is a crowdsourced effect.
This is what I believe, until I remember a thing I never understood.
* * *
Rosetta’s upstairs,stuffing Mamma’s old lipstick into her overnight bag so she can try it at Nonna’s. I packed my favorite pajamas with the roses and kittens.
When I come downstairs, my mother is still wearing the purple hat with a black ribbon. She looks good in hats, and she looks good now, but I remember the moment before I went upstairs. Her flat features. The waxy never-aliveness across her face for that split second before she shooed me away with “Sciò!”
She’s fine. Alive. Round with a new baby brother. Smiling at me.
“Is Papino still mad?” I ask.
They were fighting last night. Whenever Mamma is mad at Papà, I feel as if she’s mad at me, but when he’s mad, it feels as if the world is going to end…and he was very, very mad last night, barking into the phone about America. He seemed very serious.
“He is mad, my little chicken.” She tickles my belly. “But it’s our choice to care or not.”
How can anyone not care?
One day, I was hiding in one of the many little storerooms in the back of the grocery. It was a perfect place to hide from Fiori when we playednascondino, but only when the door was open. Once I was tucked between two boxes of canned olives though, the door closed. I could only see two men’s feet. One was Papà. I stayed frozen between those boxes because I wasn’t supposed to be there. So I never found out who the other man was. All I heard was his voice pleading with Papà not to be mad, and all I saw were his shoes, bent at the toe as he kneeled, begging.
“You don’t care?” I ask.
How can Mamma not care if Papà was mad when a grown man was reduced to weeping over the same thing? Aren’t women weaker?
“Violetta.” She crouches to my eye level and squeezes my arms. “When a man won’t let you be who you are, you stop caring.”
“About Papino?”
“About anyone.”
