“Are you a fucking doctor? Do you have a medical license?”
“I have a first-aid kit.”
“A first-aid kit,” Nova repeated manically. “I need so much more than a first-aid kit to fix this, sweetheart. He’s dying. Get out.”
The thing about Carina was, she didn’t take direction too well.
She was pretty much on her own agenda most of the time.
She also had balls the size of Texas.
Tino heard the bathroom door click open, as Nova cursed in Italian and then whispered again, almost desperately, “Please get out. Don’t see him like this.”
Tino turned his head on Nova’s thigh, blinking past the agony, and saw Carina kneeling there in her nightgown, as if she had fallen when she walked in. Her hands were over her mouth, and silent tears were rolling down her cheeks as she stared at them.
“I-I lost the pill,” Nova finally said to her. “I had it under his tongue, but he spit it out. I can’t find it. He needs another one. Can you get it off the counter?”
“Yeah, I can get it.” Carina got to her feet. “He needs water.” When she came back with a glass from the kitchen, she asked, “Should we turn on the shower? There’s so much blood. It’s so much. I’ve never seen this much.”
“I think that would be incredibly painful for him,” Nova choked out. “If he’s gonna die, I don’t want him to hurt any more. Give him the pill.”
Nova thought Carina wasn’t a real sister.
They weren’t raised with her, so she didn’t count.
But Tino was pretty fucking sure it took a real sister to shove a pill down his throat even though he was choking on the water.
It definitely took a real sister to pull his head onto her lap and help Nova hold Tino on his side when he puked his guts up into a dishpan.
Without fail, it took a real sister to go back to the castle across the pool, covered in Tino’s blood, and steal her mother’s stash of weed when Nova asked her if she had anything to help that wouldn’t make him sick.
Tino wasn’t a fan of smoking anything, but he would’ve shot up heroin if they told him it was going to help.
Nova was a fan of smoking, but he said he wanted a clear head. So Carina was the one who sat there in the shower stall with him, her fingers in his hair just like his ma used to do, with long strokes as she pushed the sticky strands back from his forehead.
It took a real sister to light a blunt and hold it to his lips.
But it took a cosmic twin to smoke it with him until the world finally softened around him a little, and he started to believe there was still some beauty out there somewhere.
“I have a talent,” Carina said into the darkness, because the light was bothering Tino. The tip of the blunt glowed bright, and her voice was raspy when she blew out the smoke. “You want me to show you?”
“Yeah,” Tino whispered and then took a long hit when she put it to his lips. He held it in longer than Carina, desperate for it to erase more of the pain. When he blew it out, he watched as it danced in the rays of moonlight from the bathroom window. “Show me.”
For the rest of his life, Tino would never hear a version of “Ave Maria” quite like that. With Carina’s voice echoing off the tiles, as if they’d been designed just to make it sound more angelic.
When she spoke Italian, it was broken.
When she sang, it was magnificent. Flawless. The way it was supposed to sound, a psalm of beauty, art, and love. It was so heartfelt it was haunting, and Tino might have thought later he imagined just how beautiful it was.
That the drugs rose-colored the magic.
But he watched Nova, who sat bathed in blood and moonlight with his back against the bathroom wall. His arms were folded over his knees as he listened to this girl, who looked so much like him but wasn’t his sister, sing a prayer to the Mother for the three of them who were worse than parentless. Then he bowed his head, as if he needed a moment to let it really sink in.
The thing about Nova was, he remembered everything. Most of it he really wanted to forget, but sometimes something would happen, and Tino would see him take the time to appreciate the gift.
When Carina was done, Nova kept his head bowed, but he whispered, “You do have a talent, Carina.”
No sarcasm.
No ego.
Just an honest observation that no one, not even Carina, could deny.
“You wanna hear another one?” she asked both of them.
Nova lifted his head and looked at her with tears rolling down his face. “Sì, grazie.”
When the first rays of early-morning light crept in through the bathroom window, Carina asked, “Why’s he so cold?”