Her voice was cool and distrustful, and it hitched, as if she spoke through her own pane of broken glass.
I had to look at him. Dolore. That was the only word for it. Pain. In him, and in me, and between us. I didn’t know children. All I saw was a little man and missed opportunities. Misused lives. Broken promises. And maybe the hope that they could be fixed. Maybe some wrongs could be undone. Maybe even a man like me could get a second chance to do something right.
That must have been what my father felt when he saw me for the first time in eleven years. That was why he’d brought me into his world and tried to keep me from it at the same time. In that crack of realization, that I would do the same with my son as my father had done with me, Antonin let me know it wouldn’t be easy. He hit me. I deserved it.
“Antonin!” Valentina cried, taking the boy and looking at me. “I’m so sorry. He’s confused.”
The blow hurt my face but cracked that moment of hope that he needed me to fix him. Little Antonin was perfectly fine without me. I’d only undo the good work his mother had done.
“We’re all confused,” I replied. Andati in pallone. I could only feel this confusion in Italian. As soon as I put eyes on her, I knew what she was feeling.
“No,” she said defiantly, her Italian as cutting as it was musical. “No, we are not all confused.”
ten.
theresa
had to do something. I had to walk. Think. Speak. I had to see my brother. I had to plan the next few days.
I had to do a lot of things. But what I wouldn’t do was have the same complete mental breakdown I did when I found out Daniel was cheating on me. So I dedicated myself to shutting out the image of Antonio looking at his wife as if he’d finally come home. Blot out the way he touched her cheek. Erase the sound of them speaking to each other in a common language. I had to focus.
I sat in Daniel’s empty office with my hands in my lap and recited a litany of prime numbers, focusing my energy completely on three numbers ahead, imagining the shape of the digits, occupying the lowest parts of my mind on garbage so the higher parts of my mind could attend to the important things. I had returned alive. I was all right. He was all right. And maybe this crazy screwed-up situation was the best thing for him.
Daniel entered with a glass of water. “How are you doing?”
I took it and put it on the desk. “Thank you. I’m fine.”
19. 23. 29. 31.
He sat across from me in an old green chair. The leather squeaked from his weight when he shifted forward. “I’m kind of relieved. I thought he’d killed her. I thought your judgment had gone fully out the window.”
“And now you think I was being reasonable?”
“No. But at least I don’t think he’s in the habit of murdering his wives. Just his business partners.”
“He didn’t. I did.” I tried to swallow the admission back. It wasn’t necessary to confess just yet, but in my weakened state, the truth was a powerful balm.
“Yeah,” he said. “Sure. You did it.”
He didn’t believe me. Or he didn’t want to. I tried to care, but I was broken, split apart, an incomplete measure of a person.
I couldn’t come up with a reply, because all of my energy went into remembering Antonio’s reunion with his wife.
Focus.
Wife.
An unbreakable bond under God. I’d been bedded, repeatedly, by a married man. I was the other woman. The whore. The one left behind. Big words, explosive ideas, hurtful phrases pushed into my consciousness like a TV left on to a bad show I couldn’t stop watching.
37. 41. 43. 47.
“Theresa?”
“I’m fine. I think I should go to the hospital.”
“I can take you.”