It’s not so much a fantasy as a plan. Now all I need is the man to help me pull it off.
Sometimes I think living on campus would be worth it just to not have to switch buses three times and walk a mile and a half twice, every single day. But Zio and Zia are paying for tuition already. Adding a dorm room would be too much to ask, even if it does feel like I’m stepping through a time portal every time the last bus crosses the river. Secondo Vasto is frozen in time, into something clean out of Italy in the 1940s.
Every piece of timber and every slab of brick pulses in the rhythms of home. The house I grew up in with my sister is more a part of me than the country I was born in. The concrete stoop has my handprint at ten embossed into it next to the choppy printing of my name.
Violetta Moretti. The letters are worn down but ever present.
And next to it, forever immortalized by the size of a fifteen-year-old’s hand and the name, Rosetta Moretti, is my sister.
She was always the romantic dreamer, Rosetta. She said I’d understand one day, when I was a woman. She was almost five years older—now she’s over five years deader, and I’m still no closer to understanding how pneumonia could steal her so completely.
I step on my handprint, leaving Rosetta’s exposed and beautiful. Her name still stands brightly in the sun. I don’t think I’m the only one who gets out of the way so as not to cover her name. One tiny piece of my sister still standing in this cruel world.
“I’m home!” I drop my bag on the old worn couch and kick off my shoes. Normally, my aunt and uncle are bustling around, cooking or reading, waiting to grill me about my day. Especially on test days. “Zia? Zio?”
In the kitchen, a bottle of wine sits open next to a simmering pot of sauce. I turn down the temperature on the stove and keep moving. Eventually, my ears pick up sounds of life and I follow them to Zio’s office.
He’s crying. My zio, who started building houses with his bare hands, and now runs a contracting company with a hundred employees, isn’t just crying. He’s sobbing.
I knock gently on the door as I open it, almost afraid to see. “Zio?”
I do not see my uncle. Instead, I see a ghost of my past. Someone I never thought I’d see again. Someone who haunted my dreams for years until I purged them from my veins and my eyes and my memories.
Santino.
He’s standing over my collapsed, sobbing uncle with a frightening amount of dominance. Thick eyebrows shade onyx black eyes. Brown hair sweeps back across his intense forehead, so not even the fullness of his lips can soften the brutal angles of his cheeks and powerful jaw. He’s angular, sharp, powerful. And etched into every line is something intensely unforgiving.
“Zio?” I say softly, because it’s the only thing my brain can snap together, and speaking more loudly could break some fine membrane between him and sanity.
“Go,” Santino says, his hand up between us as if he can’t bear to look in my direction.
I’m transported back to the day I was 12 and he walked into my life. The same terrifying power. The same dark shroud covering daylight. The same black hole sucking the life out of the room until the only thing standing is him. Santino.
I can feel my heart in my throat. Every emotion I thought I’d erased comes roaring back. He’s better looking than I remember him; time has been exceptionally kind.
But he’s standing over my zio, the strongest man I know, who’s sobbing on the floor underneath the heat of this man who’s put his hand up to block me. I’m too terrified to walk into the room, and too angry to keep my mouth shut.
“What are you—?”
Santino closes the door with the flick of his powerful wrist. The lock snaps shut from the inside.
This is not okay. Zia Madeline has to know this is going on. Where the hell is she?
Not in the kitchen. Not in the bedroom. A dark cloud hovers over my heart and fear pricks at my skin.
This doesn’t feel right.
I find her in the basement, sorting piles of laundry. She hums an old song, one that she says her mother used to sing to her back home.
“You said you were going to be late,” Zia snaps like an accusation, crow’s feet tugging on her eyes that somehow make her more beautiful than the old photos of her around the living room. Or the one of her sunbathing in Zio’s office. “How was your test?”
“Fine.” I join her at the big farm table, the one Zio made for her years ago, with his own hands. “What’s going on with Zio and that man?”
I don’t utter his name aloud for fear of invoking the devil.
“Nothing you need to worry about.” She cups my face gently, smelling of basil and bleach.
Her gentle words warm the iciest places inside me and temporarily extinguish all the other budding questions. She obviously doesn’t want to talk about it. Prying would be the worst thing to do. Even if I wanted to.
The dryer sounds and I grab a basket to unload it. We fall into our usual routine of laundry, dancing around the basement.
“What did Scarlett say about going to Malta with you?”
“She said, ‘next year,’ but I’m not going next year, and she was just being nice anyway.”
“If I were younger, I’d grab my passport and tour with you, patatina. But your uncle needs me.” Zia sighs at the incapacities of men and piles the clothes in a wicker basket.
My life often feels like it’s split into two pieces: one in the modern world, at school with my friends and cell phones and technology everything, and one in the old world, where we wear full skirts and dance in circles until we’re dizzy to songs from hundreds of years ago. Where the women do the laundry and the men smoke pipes and everyone is offended if you eat out at a restaurant because…don’t you know Zia’s osso buco is better than anything you can find in some half-rate commercial kitchen?
So I do chores with her, getting lost in the routines that define our lives into the orderly and disorderly. I don’t forget about Santino upstairs. I feel his presence when the floor above creaks and the office door opens and shuts, but I fold as if I’m hell-bent on controlling what’s in my grasp, and no more.
Upstairs, the front door closes.
We can pretend we have control, but something far outside our power is about to shatter the illusion. Every thought in my brain turns away from distraction and toward the inevitable unknown.
“Was that…” I find I can’t say the name. “Who was in the office with Zio? Was it the one they call the king.”
She frowns slightly. “How would you know that, patatina?”
“I’ve seen him before.”
“You’ve seen lots of people, Violetta.” Zia waves me off and picks up an empty basket. “Would you mind getting the clothes from the dryer?”
I swallow the lump of relentless questions and snap open the dryer. That’s twice she’s changed the subject. Third time’s a charm, but I have to be careful about when I ask. The Moretti family thrives on secrecy and respecting boundaries.
We sort through colors and towels. Zia hums a tune from the old country. She does it when she wants to get her mind off things. I join in with the parts I remember. It’s funny the things the brain remembers. Songs I haven’t heard since I was a child come rushing back in earnest, notes and melodies rolling off my tongue like my own name.