I shook my head, blinking. Her face split into two before it came back to one.
“Your children need to see you. You must go to them. Give them strength.”
“I can’t. I refuse to leave her. She’s still running from me.”
“You will. You need to bathe. To shave. To become a man again. To share your strength with your children. I will take your place for a time. She will know the difference but also the truth. Your wife feels.”
After pulling a chair next to me, he removed my hand from hers, taking it in his own. Then he began to sing to her, real low. An Italian love song.
During a pause, he turned his face, his chin jutting toward the door.“Go,” he demanded. “See your children. All parts of their mamma.”
Our children.
My body seemed to move toward them without conscious permission from my mind. My heart needed them—the part of her that could touch me, speak to me; the part of her that could absorb the strength I had left to give.
I won’t kiss you goodbye,I thought, overriding the thoughts that told me to stay, not to leave.I won’t do it. You’ll have to wait until I get back.
Rocco drove me to the house where my children were. He spoke to me, and I said something back, but by the time we arrived, I had no idea where the time went, or what was said. Pnina met me at the door. She leaned against the wall, all strength fading, assuming I had come to give her the news. Another one of her children had been killed in a car accident.
Romeo held her up, consoling her, telling her that Scarlett was still alive.
Rocco put a hand on my shoulder, directing me down a hallway.
My children were sitting around the kitchen table. Quiet. When they saw me, a tense pause went through the air before I opened my arms, and they ran to me. I fell to my knees, taking them all with me, while Mia, Mariano, and Marciano cried.
“Mamma…is she…?”
Mia, asking the questions. Feeling what I never could but unable to make sense of it. Her mamma’s peculiar gift—and those eyes. Full of knowledge, of feeling, of confusion.
Dammit, Scarlett! She needs you!
“You understand me, better than I understand myself.” She had once told me. “When I feel and the world is a whirl of confusion, you make sense.”
“Like you understand me,” I’d said. Knowing it was not one-sided. Like two halves to a whole, one without the other lacked all it needed to be complete.
“We were meant to be,” she had whispered. “Created for each other.”
I cursed under my breath.
If you go,who is going to understand our daughter? Who is going to understandme?
Where did that leave us?
Without her…the enormity of the situation fell on me, a rush of bricks and mortar, and the foundation collapsed beneath my feet.
Marciano made a strangled noise, and I realized that I was holding them too tightly.
Letting go some, I took each of them by the face, kissing their salty cheeks, looking them in the eye. “No,” I kept repeating. “She’s not gone. I won’t let her go. I won’t allow her to go.”
“See my mamma,” Marciano cried. “Me want her.”
“That man,” Mia whispered. “He—he came to school. Livia knew him. And I didn’t feel right. Mamma left, she knew the man was going to follow. It’s my fault,Papà.”
I pulled her even closer, kissing her head. “No, my heart, it’s not. It’s his fault. Mamma would have left anyway. She would have done anything to protect you.”
And me.
“Fratello.” Rocco came to stand in the doorway. He lifted his phone. I could tell he didn’t want to speak in front of the children. His green eyes were red rimmed, and he kept sniffing. “We should go.”
