“Yes,” she said. “I am!”
The bite in her voice clamped down on my heart.
“I’d never leave for good,” I said. “Not if I could help it.”
“You would,” she said, her voice seething. “You were going to leave us! When mamma…” She closed her eyes. “I felt it.”
From the look on her face, acid rose in my throat, and it burned when I forced it down.
Two fat tears ran down her cheeks, one from each eye, and I went to wipe them, but she slapped my hand away. I did it anyway.
Going down on one knee, I came face to face with her, so she could really see my eyes. “I can apologize for that now,” I whispered, holding her shoulders tight enough that she felt the regret to her bone. “I am sorry, Mia, but I refuse to apologize for the truth. Without mamma…life would break me beyond repair. I can’t live with broken.”
“I hate…this! Whateveritis! Thesefeelings.”
“I know.”
“I don’t want it! Why me?”
“I don’t know, my heart. Maybe you’ll grow out of it.”
She kept shaking her head, and I felt close to losing the situation—losing another piece of my sanity.
“Listen to me, Mia,” I ordered, and she stopped shaking her head but refused to open her eyes. “You have to understand, my baby, don’t you? If you can feel me, you do. I know you do. I couldn’t live without any of you. I’ve fallen too hard for my wife and my children. You’re all I have in this world.”
“I do understand! But I don’t want to! Daddy…I’m still so afraid. So afraid to lose mamma. To lose you. To lose one of my brothers. Even lose that…stubborn guard! I can’t forget. Thefeelings. Ilostmy best friend. Thenyouleft us…again!”
I pulled her to me, like the baby she’d always be in my eyes, kissing her hair and murmuring things to her that bled me dry.
Again, I called mercy, looking to heaven for relief. This life had its perks, but it also had its daggers—my baby had started to realize the cost of her name. The name I had given her.
“I’m sorry for the fear,” I said. “But I’ll never be sorry for you. Do you hear me? Never. You belong here, in this world, to light up the darkness of it. Mamma, she is my light. You, Matteo, Mariano, and Marciano, you were all born from it. I could see my heart, my children, because of her. If I can help it, I’ll never leave you again. Without you, I’m blind. Too deep in the darkness to see without it.”
“You promise, Daddy?” She sniffed.
“My word is my blood.”
“Mamma?” she barely got out.
“She’s safe. Safe with me. I refused to let her go then, ah? I’ll never let her go. She goes nowhere without me. I go nowhere without her. We’re all together now, my heart. I had to go to Italy. But I’m not leaving my family again.”
I kept my daughter in my arms until a hand came down on my shoulder, and one on Mia’s head, almost in benediction.
My wife looked down on us, eyes understanding too much of went on in this world and beyond it. “I call mercy,” she said softly. “For all of us. We move forward from here, ah?”
Rain started to pelt the windows and the lake beyond the glass; lightning and thunder following a moment after.
We spent the rest of the day in bed, kids piled up around us, watching old movies and eating junk food.
Mercy comes in many forms.
34
Scarlett
What the world tells us is true rarely is.
For example, my husband. What the world believed of him had never been the truth. I knew the truth. I knew him.
