“Anything.”
I realized when I heard the sincerity in his voice that the rush of white noise in my ears was gone. I didn’t know if it was the fall or if hearing Antonio’s voice was God’s last gift to me for something I couldn’t give words. Not yet. Not until he promised.
“No revenge,” I said. “Do not avenge me.”
“Theresa—”
“Say it.”
“I can’t.”
“You have to see past all that.”
He moved my hair from my face. “I can’t see in front of me. You are my life. I have nothing to hope for without you.”
“Promise me.”
He didn’t answer. My lungs weren’t holding air, and he was holding himself together with thread. Even in my state, I could see it. I could catch him now. I could get him to promise, then I could remember the thing and I could rest and— “Promise.” I barely breathed it.
He waited forever to answer, as if he couldn’t lie to a dead woman so he had to make sure he’d only speak the truth. I kept mouthing the word, waiting for a response, but it got harder with every repetition. Because. The thing.
Promise promise promise
“Yes,” he said. “I promise.”
“No vengeance?”
“Come vuoi tu.”
The thing was the flood of memories of my years on earth. The adult years between the boy and his fingers and the man with the espresso eyes. All those years I was good. All those years I’d chosen happiness. I remembered my sisters and school, and pretty dresses and stupid kindnesses. Katrina. My brother. Rachel. The assistants I’d trained and the good, honest, ethical years of work I gave. None of it made up for what I’d become, but my life hadn’t been a waste. Hadn’t been a lie.
“Thank you.”
I started falling before I even pronounced the first syllable, the gratitude catching my fall into a blackness that grew into the darkness of a truck that smelled like gunpowder and pine, rumbling from Tijuana to Los Angeles. I remembered olive orchards and a life not lived. The wheels under us hup-shh hup like a heartbeat. Antonio above me, stroking my eyelids closed and whispering, This is the day they went to live in the olive orchards. When you close your eyes for the last time, this will be this day you remember as the first day of the long happiness of your life. You will smile your whole journey to heaven.
fifty-two.
daniel
here’s an old Italian saying. I can’t pronounce it, and I’m probably misquoting it entirely, but it goes, “When the snake is dead, the venom is dead.”
I don’t think that’s true. Not in every case. For me, the venom died when I thought Theresa was dead after the wedding. For Antonio, when he was leaning over Theresa on Donna Maria Carloni’s compound, I knew his venom was dead. He was broken. Utterly broken.
It was a fucking mess, the whole thing. I’d rushed to the compound as soon as I realized the sheriff’s office wasn’t going to call the feds and no one gave a shit because the snake had paid all of them to leave her alone on her land.
I knew that because I’d gotten my share.
I’d seen Valentina chewing her nails on the side of the road. She stood near a silver Mercedes that had been having a make-out session with a chain-link fence and barbed wire. She couldn’t explain a word in English, so I put her in the car and took her into the compound, following the divots she’d made with the gate.