“What’s wrong?” Ilaria said. “You look sad.”
Sandro immediately stood up.
“Sad? No, why? I’m not sad. I’m happy to be home, happy to see you.”
Ilaria stared at him for a couple of seconds as though she didn’t know him, as if he too had turned into a stranger who had agreed to live temporarily with her and Ottavia in the same house. Sandro felt alone for the first time since he had started hiding from his child and wife. We don’t have much time before it’s too late, he thought, and he wasn’t sure whether he meant too late as in ending his affair, or too late as in losing his family.
* * *
The therapist was a gentle woman in her sixties with a tangle of curly gray hair, chunky amber beads around her neck. Her top-floor studio behind Piazza Cavour was filled with orchids, all of them vigorously in bloom and clearly well cared for. A light breeze from the open window kept curling the edges of a stack of papers pressed under a crystal weight.
“Anorexia?” Ottavia repeated, stupefied. As if she didn’t know already. All the signs were there, had been for at least three months. The weight loss, the excuses Ilaria found each time she was offered any food.
The woman nodded.
“I think it will be necessary for you and your husband to come in with Ilaria.”
“You mean, like…family therapy?”
“Yes. Certain issues may be resolved faster if we are all together in one room. It’s the only way to explore and work through the overall ability of the family to function. Ilaria’s body is clearly reacting to something and she’s using her body to express the anger and the pain she feels.”
Ottavia stared at her, baffled.
“Yes, yes, of course, you’re right. I just don’t know if my husband is…”
She looked around the room, at all those flowers, at the stains of moist color that suddenly seemed too violent in the bright light.
“I mean, whether he will agree to…He doesn’t believe in therapy; he’s the type of man who…”
She paused.
“I haven’t even told him I took Ilaria to see you.”
“Why not?”
Ottavia felt herself blush.
“I thought maybe I was overreacting….I didn’t realize it was so serious. I thought maybe Ilaria was just stressed because of school. Maybe a little depressed, or—”
The therapist interrupted her.
“She is depressed. It’s obviously part of a much larger problem.”
She brushed the amber beads with her fingertips, and kept one rolling between her thumb and second finger. Ottavia stared at the necklace and wondered where it came from. Ethiopia? Tibet? Was this woman an adventurous traveler? She didn’t look like one.
“I’m sure your husband will agree to come in once he understands the situation. You were not overreacting. Anorexia is a very serious disorder, especially at such a young age. In the long run it can be life-threatening.”
Ottavia shifted uncomfortably on the chair.
“Yes. He will, certainly. I mean, he’s just very busy at work….He’s a senior partner in a big international law firm, so we’ll have to schedule around his—”
The therapist put on reading glasses with bright-red plastic frames.
“Oh, I’m sure he’ll find forty-five minutes for Ilaria,” she said, tapping a pen on a small calendar she had in front of her. “I’d first like to see just the two of you without her. Let’s see…how about Tuesday at ten past three?”
* * *
So there they were, both sitting across from the woman with amber beads, like two criminals in an interrogation room filled with orchids. Sandro had agreed to come in without putting up any resistance and Ottavia had a feeling they were both ready to confess; all they needed was the right question.
“Is there anything you think might have sparked Ilaria’s condition?”
They exchanged a quick glance.
“Not that we know of,” Ottavia said, then turned to her husband. “Right?”
“Any problems at home? Anything I need to know?” the therapist prodded them.
Ottavia was the first to collapse. She blurted it out in a flood of tears while the therapist kept handing her tissues. Sandro admitted everything. He felt a knot in his throat a couple of times, but somehow unburdening in front of this woman he’d never seen before was easier than he’d imagined. She wasn’t judgmental, her questions were neutral, she wasn’t trying to make him feel guilty. She suggested they also go see someone to sort out their situation as a couple, and referred them to a colleague. Ottavia stopped crying at last. She quieted down and became attentive. Suddenly Sandro felt her hand searching for his. He took it. In the space of forty-five minutes, what had seemed to him impossible to do was done. He was holding his wife’s hand, they were both ready to face whatever they had to for the sake of their daughter. They were a family and they were going to be a team. And that was that.
* * *
It was the end of September and there was a new crispness in the air. Short gusts of wind shook the trees in the garden.
D’Onofrio had vanished from their lives and, with his exit, Emilia had shrunken and paled. There had been crying behind doors, whispering on the phone, some pleading. Then silence. She became listless, irritable, at times abrupt. She made herself unavailable, uninterested in Anita and Sofia, in what was going on at school or with their friends. Often she forgot to change their bedsheets, run the washing machine. She canceled her morning classes at the yoga studio, listened to a lot of baleful music, slept during the day at odd hours, drank what was left of the bottle of Scotch.
The girls didn’t talk, didn’t comment on that sadness and its cause. By then they had learned to communicate with each other the way cats do, as though they had developed a sixth sense or a secret language. They could read the subtle mutations of Emilia’s grief based on the flow of air throughout the rooms, the sound of her breath, her movements, her smell. And, like cats, they moved around the apartment softly, their footfalls padded, so as not to intrude on her stillness.
The girls waited, patiently, for this mourning to subside, the mourning that their mother should’ve felt for Bruno but hadn’t. Despite the injustice of it, her despair was more bearable than the euphoria, the rapture, the silly laughter at the table, the blindness. They waited because even though she wasn’t present, now at least she was back—limp and sometimes slightly drunk, captive to the couch or the bedroom—and they knew she wasn’t going to leave them.