The parking lot is full, and people talk quietly as they climb the stairs and pass the heavy, wooden door to each other. Organ music plays a melancholy, gothic tune. Music for a funeral.
I breathe in the smell of incense already heavy in the air and it takes me back to when I was younger. To when we would attend mass as a family.
We weren’t welcome in the small church then. I felt it even as a little boy.
And neither Gabriela nor I are welcome here now.
I see it in the faces that turn in our direction as I walk her up the aisle and into an empty pew.
A glance at her tells me she sees it too.
“Are you okay?” I ask her. I don’t know why.
She shrugs away from me. “You should go. You don’t belong here.”
“Do you?” I ask, gesturing to the family who are openly talking about us from the front pews.
“I used to,” she says, sitting down and picking up the memory card.
I glance at it, see Alex smiling back. See her lightly touch his hair in the picture and I’m pissed. I’m pissed that this happened. That we’re here for this. The kid shouldn’t have died.
“Haven’t you done enough?” asks a man.
Gabriela tilts her face up, and what I see in her eyes, it brings out something dark inside me. Dark and fiercely protective.
I turn to face the man. He’s in his forties I’d guess. Not the father, I know he’s dead. Maybe an uncle?
“You are?” I ask politely because we’re at a fucking memorial service.
“Alex’s uncle, not that it’s any of your business, Sabbioni.” Ah, he knows me. Saves me the trouble of introducing myself.
But he looks past me to Gabriela who’s stood up.
“I didn’t…Alex was…” Gabriela stammers.
I shift my posture, blocking Gabriela from the uncle as I step out into the aisle. He’s a big guy, but so am I, and if he thinks he’s going to somehow make us leave, he’s got another thing coming.
“She has as much right to be here as you. Gabriela and Alex were good friends.”
“And look where that got Alex.” He gives me a once-over, then peers around me. “Is your father coming too?” he spits the words.
I put a hand on his shoulder, squeeze. “Watch yourself. We’re in a fucking church. I advise you to go back to your pew and sit down. We’re staying.”
The man leans against my hand as he gets his face in mine. “Leave.”
“Stefan,” Gabriela starts, her hand on my arm.
“Sit down, Gabriela,” I tell her without turning away.
“Maybe we should—”
“You’re making a scene,” I tell the man.
He looks around, notes all the eyes on us, backs up a step. “You leave your men outside, Sabbioni.”
“Do you see my men inside?”
His eyes narrow.
“You lost your nephew,” I say. “My fiancée’s lost her friend. She grieves as you do. Now go back to your seat and let her be.”
He grits his teeth, looks at Gabriela once more before scanning the dead silent church, all eyes on us, all ears on us. He then returns to his pew at the front.
Gabriela is still standing, her face white, a rosary in one hand, the memorial card in the other and all I can think is how different she is to who she was when I first met her two years ago. When I first started this.
And I think how little I like this change.
Because she is being buried. And if not buried, then at the very least, she’s breaking.
The music changes, the boom of the organ commanding our attention. The procession of altar boys begins to make their way up the aisle, followed by a priest swinging the smoking censer, all of it so familiar and yet so far out of reach, as if the past never was at all.
That’s the thing with time. I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to forget. To set fire to all the photographs. To somehow burn all the memories.
“Thank you,” Gabriela whispers, drawing me to the present.
I nod and take my place beside her in our pew.
7
Gabriela
I think Stefan is bipolar. At the very least he has multiple personalities.
Throughout the service, as I pass my fingers over the rosary beads Miss Millie lent me, he sits quietly attentive, giving the impression he’s listening to the mass when I know he’s just watching me and everyone else.
I don’t know Alex’s uncle. I’ve seen him once, but I don’t even know his name. Alex and his father were the only ones out of his family to work for my father. But if I’d been on my own and he came to tell me to leave, I’d have left. I wouldn’t know how to say no, to stand up to him the way Stefan did.
It’s so confusing being with him. One minute he’s a fierce protector. The next, he’s the predator and I’m the prey. And I feel like I don’t know when either will take over.
The service lasts two hours and afterwards, as we walk out of the church, I feel drained. Weepy.
“We’ll get lunch before we go back,” Stefan says as he helps me into the SUV.
I know we’re close to his uncle’s house and I really don’t want to go there. Or anywhere, really.
“Can we just go home?” Why do I keep referring to it as home? It’s not my home. “I don’t feel like company.”
“It’s just us. You don’t have to be anything with me.”
“Oh. I assumed you’d want to see your uncle.”
He shakes his head. “I didn’t think you’d feel very social after this.”
Well, that was considerate. I bite the inside of my cheek and we don’t speak again until we’re seated at a quiet restaurant in a part of the city I’ve never been to. We’re the only customers and a bartender, a waiter and two other men are nearby to wait only on us.
“Thank you for bringing me to the service,” I say. I know he didn’t have to do that.
“You’re welcome.”
He picks up my menu and hands it to me.
I take it, open it and scan the page, just picking the first item I see, then close it again and set it down. I don’t care what I eat.
Stefan takes his time, though. Is this what it will be like with us? Will we sit quietly, awkwardly like this? Or will he ship me off somewhere once we’re married? Resume his life?
Resume.
That makes the assumption he’s stopped living the life he’s always lived.
My hands in my lap, I finger the diamond on my left hand, feel the weight of it.
My new life. This is it. And I have no more control over it than I did my old one.
But I’m going to do what Stefan told me last night. I’m taking his advice. I’d tell him if I didn’t think he’d get cocky but I’m going to stop feeling sorry for myself. I’ve become weak since this began. And since the kidnapping, I feel like I don’t know who I am anymore.
As if Stefan feels this shift in my mood, he closes his menu and looks at me with those strange, hazel eyes.
I think of his eyes on me last night. Think of how I looked to him when he touched me.
Heat flushes through me, settling at my core.
What he did to me last night, I want it again. And I’m determined to learn this game fast and learn it well, because I have to beat him at it. Let him underestimate me. Let him think I’m laughable. A child. I know what I felt when I touched him. He wants me. And that is a weakness.