She had been looking at the broken sign. It had been put to the side, but it was still not hung. I wondered if she was thinking back to when Nino and the traitorous Judas to fate had been fighting, and Nino had hit him over the head with a guitar.
I rolled my lip in, rolling my shoulders.
Nino should have fucking destroyed him then, killed him in the worst way possible. Made him die a thousand deaths. Stole his heart from his chest and fed it to a pig.
I had given him the order not to.
When I went to open the door, my wife cleared her throat. “Nino and Dr. Musa,” she whispered in a small voice. “They have been buried?”
“Yes,” I said, pulling her close, kissing her head.
She pulled away from me. It wasn’t a rip, but a small tear. I thought back on the quilt Hannah always spoke about, the one she started creating when she and her Bear were first married. After he died, she wrapped it around her shoulders, claiming she could never get warm unless it was around her body.
I wondered if there was ever a time when Hannah had pulled away from Bear. I would have wondered about my mamma, but I knew. When she had lost the first Matteo, she had. That was why my father had taken her to Fiji. He said the water had helped heal her. It had, but he’d told me she was never the same after. He’d adjusted to fit her metamorphosis. Fall deeper for her.
However, he refused to allow the tear the loss had caused in their life to rip them apart.
They would heal together.
My back straightened and my shoulders stiffened.
He was fucking right.
I opened the door to our home, and after I entered behind my wife, setting her suitcases down, the dogs came rushing in behind us. They danced around my wife, and I gave them an order in Italian to rest. My wife turned and looked at me beforeshe sighed, taking in our home. It was as if her eyes were seeing it for the first time, and after a minute or two, when she familiarized herself with it again, she cleared her throat.
“I am going to rest,” she whispered. Her hands were tightened into fists at her sides, and her knuckles were bone white.
I cleared my throat. “Sistine.”
She stopped walking, giving me her back.
“This will be the hardest loss we have to go through.” I cleared my throat. “But that’s the focus of that sentence.We. Not you. Not me.We.It’s us.Ours.Whether here or not, he’s always ours.”
“Leopoldo,” she whispered.
Her shoulders slumped a little, but she held her head up high as she walked toward our room, calling the dogs behind her.
So fucking small.
She looked so fucking small.
She had lost weight and was nothing but skin and bones, but it was more than that. Her spirit had always been fierce. Full of fire. And it had dimmed. Her light was dulled by the unimaginable pain.
Some consider water healing.
Maybe it was.
My wife.
My wife would need something different.
She would need the rays of the sun to bask in, to set her spirit on fire again.
She shut the door to our room, a quietclickthat was as loud as a bass drum in a church.
She was locking me out.
I didn’t know what to do what the overwhelming feelings inside of me. If it would have been a man on the fucking street, I would have slaughtered him. If it would have been a man inmy family, I would have challenged him. A woman close to me, I would have takenGuerriero out for a ride to clear my fucking head, to have him remind me of who I was.
