Nonna leaned forward, her eyes filled with emotion. “The village was so dominated by the mountains that roads were nearly impassable, so narrow that trucks jammed the sheer, glacial passages. It is a miracle we were able to leave at all. But we did leave: brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, friends and rivals—we all fled. We all came here to start over. And that is why we all forgave Giovanni. Despite his name, we forgave him. Forgiveness, however, is not the same as trust.”
I sat back in the recliner, trying to understand why so many people had fled Nevenero and what my grandfather had done to require forgiveness.
“Does Luca know about this?” I asked at last. “Or Bob?”
“We came here to start over,” she said. “We didn’t want the children to know.”
Nonna pushed her glasses up her nose and adjusted her wig. “I have photos somewhere around here,” she said. She pointed to a cabinet near her bed. “Look in there.”
I went to the cabinet, found an album in a drawer, and brought it to Nonna. She flipped through the pages, and I saw a series of black-and-white images of stone houses, miserable-looking children, goats knee-deep in snow. There was a family portrait of people whose features were a half rhyme to Luca’s—Nonna’s brothers and sisters, I guessed. Her parents. Her grandparents. Nonna pulled out a photo of a narrow valley carved between two snowcapped mountains. At the center of the valley, lifting like a sinister wedding cake, was a castle. It stood dark and solitary, surrounded by sharp peaks. All else was ice and shadow.
“That is Montebianco Castle,” she said, her expression filled with fear. “I never saw it up close. We were not allowed to go anywhere near it.”
I took the album and looked at the picture. “My grandfather lived there?” I asked, astonished.
“They didn’t mix with the villagers,” she said. “I didn’t meet your grandfather until we made the crossing.”
She turned the pages until she came to a yellowed newspaper clipping. “Here it is,” she said, pulling a photo from a page and giving it to me. A young man stood before a steamer, the words “S.S. Saturnia” painted on the side. The quality of the photo was degraded, so grainy that Giovanni seemed little more than a stain of sepia bleeding through the page, but I could see that he was packed for a voyage. There was a suitcase in his hand and a steamer trunk sat at his side. An expression of wonder colored his features, a reckless readiness, the kind of expression that accompanies an act of faith. I could see that Sophia had been right about our resemblance: my grandfather was tall and broad-shouldered, with a wide forehead, large hands, and a deep cleft in the chin. Like me.
“That was the ship that took us from Genoa to New York,” she said, running a yellow fingernail over the picture. “I didn’t have the same class berth as your grandfather—I was down below—but we played cards up on the deck. Look here.” She glided the magnifying glass over the photo, so that it hovered about the steamer trunk. There, in tiny gold letters stamped into the leather, was the name: montebianco. “It was July 1949,” she said, her voice sad suddenly. “We didn’t want to go, but we had no choice. After they took my younger brother, Gregor, all of us left.”
“Wait,” I said, thinking I had misheard her. “Who took your brother?”
Nonna closed the album. “The beast. It watched from the mountains and took the most vulnerable.” There was a tremor in her voice. “The smallest children. The ones left alone to play in the village. Gregor was playing in the trees near the mountains when it happened. That’s where they hid, where the trees grew thick. They killed our goats, ate them right there and left nothing but bones. We never found the bones of our children, though. The children just disappeared.”
“What was it?” I asked, trying to imagine what kind of wild animal would attack goats and children. “A wolf?”
“I encountered it only once, but it was enough to understand that it was not like anything I had ever seen before,” Nonna said. “I was fourteen years old when I saw it.” She rubbed her eyes, as if massaging away a headache. “The beast took Gregor a few years later. After that, we left. Our homes, our belongings, the graves of our ancestors, everything. We didn’t look back, ever. Even your grandfather Giovanni, who had so much more to lose, gave up everything. He knew what was happening in those mountains. He knew!”
Nonna’s eyes had become large and wild. I picked up the letter and shoved it back into the envelope.
“There’s no need to get upset, Nonna,” I said. “It happened a long time ago.”
“Yes, a long time ago,” she said, leaning back into the sofa, exhausted. “A very long time ago. But tell me, child, do we ever escape the evils of the past?”
A chill fell over me, and although I had no clear idea of the evils to which Nonna referred, I felt the same premonition I had felt earlier that day, a premonition of the past bleeding into the future, dark and deadly, a warning to leave it be and go on as if I had never heard the name Montebianco.
“Do not go to them,” she said, meeting my eyes. “Your family has had such trouble. Such tragedy and pain. Let the past die. Look ahead, to the future here with Luca.”
I stared at her, wondering what on earth she was talking about. Could she possibly know about the troubles Luca and I had had over the years? We hadn’t told anyone about our struggles to have a child. The pregnancies, the miscarriages, my infertility treatments, the specialists—we had tried to spare them disappointment.
“Everything is fine, Nonna,” I said. “Don’t worry. It will all be okay.”
“This is our fault,” she said, her voice anguished, her eyes enormous behind her glasses. “We didn’t tell our children what happened in Nevenero. We didn’t tell our grandchildren. We wanted to forget. We wanted you to be innocent. We thought we had escaped.”
Nonna trembled as she spoke. She didn’t look well. I felt for my phone. I would call Luca and ask him to come over and help.
“This is nothing to get worked up about, Nonna,” I said. “Please. Don’t worry. It’s just a letter.”
“Just a letter?” she said, her eyes growing large. “Don’t you understand? They want you back. The Montebianco family has come for you. They need you back. I am sure this is not the first time they’ve tried. Giovanni must have known they would come. He couldn’t bear the thought of it. That is why he killed himself.”
“My grandfather killed himself?” I asked, astonished. I leaned back into the recliner for support. “He committed suicide? Are you sure?”
“Don’t be fooled,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “Whatever that family gives you is nothing compared to what you will lose.”
It couldn’t be true that my grandfather had killed himself. I would have known. My parents would have told me. But suddenly, it struck me how little I knew about my grandparents. My parents had no photos of them, no family heirlooms, nothing at all of our Italian heritage. My parents had never spoken of the past. Could they have been hiding something?
Nonna tried to stand, but fell back into the sofa, wheezing and gasping. I was afraid she would collapse right there and die, on the floor of her living room.