Brando was hesitant at first to let me go, but I gave him space, walking to Maggie Beautiful and taking her hand. Her eyes bounced back and forth between Romeo and Brando. Their eyes had locked.
Romeo hovered on our doorstep, eyes red rimmed, swollen from either unshed or shed tears.
“Tu sei mio fratello,” Brando said, pounding his heart with his fist. “Tu sei il mio sangue. Ti amo, fratellino.”
Maggie Beautiful squeezed my hand, tears slipping down her cheeks. If I would have started, I was afraid I’d never be able to stop.
Romeo swallowed hard. He took the couple of steps over the threshold and then flung himself into Brando’s arms.
Rocco and Dario huddled in with their two brothers, the men pulling one another in by the head.
Juliette came over to me, hugging me so tight that I thought my lungs would stop taking in air. Unlike the Italians, she had spent most of her childhood in this town, growing up with the same crowd. There was a particular comfort in that. A loss for one was a loss for all. We held hands, as tightly as we could.
The moment came to an end and we had to look to the next. Moment by moment. Beat by beat. My heart froze in mid-pump at the thought of eight, and the one that I would never feel again.
Guido cleared his throat, but it was Maggie Beautiful who spoke.
“Brando,” she whispered. “It’s time.”
I wondered if she had said those same words to him before—before he had to leave for Elliott. I had a deep sense of déjà vu then, as if I had been in the room with them when she had.
Brando had been watching me. With his hand in mine, we faced the next moment.
* * *
We buried Micah “Mick” Lewis on a Thursday, after a church service filled with family and friends. It was a bitter cold day, even though the sun peeked through the rustling of parched leaves overhead—a gold and emerald patchwork heaven, drifts of white clouds against a cold blue sky.
Mick’s tomb wasn’t far from Elliott’s in the cemetery. It was above ground, big enough to fit a family, and located in a shady area filled with bowing oak trees and Spanish moss so thick that in some spots it caressed the stones of the departed.
Come spring, the grass would be lush green, giving vibrancy and an air of the living to such a silent place.
Some of the tombs were extremely old; instead of clean slate, all of the letters defined and legible, moss had turned marble and stone into a shade of pale green, blotting out the inscriptions, names and dates, and the almighty dash that separates the date of birth and the date of death.
It was the infinitesimal line that spans the space of time between our first breath and our last.
Violet made a stoic figure with her children surrounding her, head held high, and a veil of black lace shielding her face—the face of a woman desperate to retreat inside of herself, to surrender to the pain and let it have at her. She was still in denial, though, and had been since that night.
A few times during the preparations she would pick up the phone to call Mick and then say something about him not being home or at the garage in New York.
“I’ll just have to call him back in a bit.” And she would, just to listen to his voicemail message over and over.
There were some days I still went to run to Elliott, to share with him some piece of news I was excited about, or to complain about something Charlotte had done. I’d lift my hand to sign but then realize that no one was there to see.
The heartbreak would destroy me all over again.
I even wanted to tell Mick about what happened, to ask him if he could believe it and what we should do.
Perhaps we were all still in denial.
If Violet stole my breath, Peter, Paul, and Mary broke my heart. The two babies would only hear stories…
Brando handed me the extra handkerchief that he kept for me in his pocket. My father squeezed my shoulder, and my mother’s attention stayed glued ahead, her eyes remembering and reliving.
Mitch stood far from the crowd, creeping in the shadows of the surrounding trees, a vision of a ghost himself.
Brando kept a watchful eye on him, his hand jingling mine, the only outward show of emotion he had shown the entire day. An angel upon one of the tombs seemed to have more emotion than he did.
Inside, I knew a part of him had died with Mick. Brando had considered Mitch his brother all of his life, and Mick was the little brother he never knew he had. It had pained him to see them on the outs so much, and he had tried to keep the peace between the brothers for as long as he could.
