I refused to answer but didn’t need to. She caught the look on my face in the mirror. This time it had strangulation as the cause of death. I’d cut off my own life supply first.
“Brando,” my name trembled out of her mouth. “You’re being eerily quiet.” She looked down at her arms and smoothed her hand down the goosebumps puckering her skin.
“Me,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “You. You have been, ever since the phone call.” Looking down at her vanity, she fiddled with this and that, moving one thing to another spot, then picking up another. “The way you’ve been watching me.”
“Am I scaring you, baby?”
“Yeah. I mean, not you,” she added hastily. “What you’re feeling. That’s scaring me. And.” She took a deep breath in and let it out slowly. “I’ve never been this afraid before. And before you give me your truth, that you’d never allow anyone to hurt me or Mia, I know that. That scares me too.”
I rose from the bed, coming to stand behind her, before I got down on one knee, looking up at her. I squeezed her knee. “Tell me.”
Turning the brush over and over, she refused to look me in the eye. “People offer advice about having children. What to do, what not to do. They joke about losing sleep, losing interest in sex, not being able to live a life of leisure anymore. But what they fail to tell you, or to a degree you can understand, is that that’s the least of it.
“I worry aboutusnow more than ever. Because…what would she do without us? No one can love her like we can, Brando. We’re her parents. We’ll love her regardless of her faults. I just—I think about leaving her, and…my heart hurts. It actually hurts. If something would ever happen to her—”
“Don’t even finish,” I whispered, but hard enough for her to stop. “It won’t.”
She sighed. “It’s better if I don’t think about it, I know. But how can I not? I love her so much, Brando, that…I’ll never sleep peacefully again. The worry for her is a real thing. Sometimes I can touch it if I reach out. Just like the love between us. It’s so strong that it’s tangible thing. Other parents can’t possibly tell you that because it’s near impossible to put into words.”
She sniffed, then started to cry, hiding her face in my neck, holding on to my shoulders.
“I want to watch you grow old with me. To see the years turn your hair grey, and to know that despite how we look, it doesn’t matter. It never did. Because we’ll always have to touch, to be close, because it goes much deeper than flesh. To watch Mia grow—how she looks at you, even now, to watch that grow. Her life, I want us to be there for it, until we’re too old to stand it anymore. Oh God, I just want us to be together.Moja ljubezen.”
It was rare that she spoke Slovenian to me, since I had very little of the language. I knew the term, though.Occasionally she said the same words to Mia.
Moja ljubezen.My love, it meant.
The harder she cried, the harder I needed to get rid of the threat.
Whoever the dead man was, he had awakened the sleeping monster, and more than I had ever been before, I was bloodthirsty and ready for the kill. Ready to lose a piece of my soul so that hers could stay intact.
I carried her to the bed, keeping her pressed close against me, shielding her body with mine, until I set her down.
She touched my cheek, using her thumb to stroke my jaw. “Brando, is what I feel for you and Mia…is that what heaven feels like, do you think? I’ve thought about it now and again. Sometimes I could swear that’s what it is. Just. Pure love. I feel it sometimes when I’m praying too.”
“Yeah,” I said, kissing her tears, taking her hand and putting it to the cross around her neck, urging her to hold tight. She kept it there but held me with the other. So tightly her nails dug into my flesh. “I do.”
She was the only heaven a sinner like me would ever get to touch.
“You’re wrong,” she said, reading my thoughts, or my feelings. “So wrong,mio angelo. If there’s a thin line between pleasure and pain, love and hate, there’s also one between hero and villain. There has to be.”
4
Brando
Somewhere around two a.m., I heard Scarlett go to Mia, who fussed in her bed, hungry and probably wet.
I heard her diaper being changed, but she was still fussing because she was hungry. The telltale sound of her sucking came with the cease of her irritation.
My wife’s voice floated in the haze of early morning, soft and light, murmuring sweet words to her in Slovenian.
Moja ljubezen.My love.
Scarlett was right. No one could have possibly prepared me for the birth of my child, and how much it changed me. It changed the color and shape of my soul.
The bed dipped not long after. Scarlett scooted closer to me, as close as she could, her feet ice cold. She conformed to fit my shape, melting into sleep and the warmth of my body once again. I drifted with her.
