I glanced at Teo. Without speaking, he took the robes from me and looked away as I stripped down to my underclothes, and then he gathered up the hems and helped me slip the robes over my head.
I smoothed them down, marveling at the feel of them. They were heavy, unfamiliar, but when I looked at Teo to see his reaction, he was transfixed, his lips parted, his eyes almost black in the slant of light from the window.
He stepped around the table, knelt down in front of me, and took my hands in his. “Aidan, I want to protect you tomorrow.”
I wanted that too, but I wanted Teo to take off the weight of his guilt even more. “As I said last night,” I began gently.
“I’ll tell you about my father. If—if you’ll take my confession.”
“I can’t.”
His eyes dropped and he nodded, and let my hands go.
“I mean,” I told him, agony in every word I forced out, “I’m not an ordained priest…yet. I can’t take your confession or give you penance. But Icanlisten.”
He looked up, more hopeful now. “That’s all I want.”
* * *
We went backto the bedroom to talk. It was my suggestion; both of us were comfortable there, and anyway, the attic entrance was open and I didn’t want Teo to feel someone might overhear. I wore my robes still as we sat on the bed together, but only because I hadn’t thought to take them off.
I took his hand as he began to tell me his story, with the sense that something was coming to a close. Teo seemed to feel it as well. It gave a haze of melancholy to our conversation.
“My father was an abusive sack of shit,” was the first thing he told me, and looked me straight in the face to see how I would take his opening.
I nodded. “Go on.”
And so he did. He told me how his father had beat them all, but how Teo had tried, the older he got and the bigger the family grew, to draw his father’s ire away from the youngest children. “I didn’t want him touching them. And there wasn’t anyone else around to stop it, you get me? Our father ran them all off, even Snapper. Because my father was a Giuliano, and Snapper was a Morelli, they weren’t even supposed to talk to each other. The Giulianos were…dangerous. It was just a shitty situation all round. Cops didn’t care. Mom couldn’t protect us. But one day Snapper was waiting for me at the school gate and…” Teo stopped.
“And?” I asked, my heart in my mouth.
“He gave me a gun.”
Teo said it without any inflection, but I could hear the dread underlying his words. I could picture it, that cold method of death lying in his hands. “How old were you?”
“I was fourteen.” Teo’s eyes moved over my face, worried about how I was taking it.
“Come here.” I opened my arms and he went into them, hugging me hard.
“I don’t think I should tell you any more,” he said, voice muffled in my shoulder. “You’ve had a rough few days. I don’t want to upset you, baby.” The endearment tripped off his tongue and it took me a moment to register even that he’d said it, because it felt so right.
“You’ve had a roughlife.” I pulled back, putting my hands on either side of his face so I could look at him, really look at him. That expression in his eyes that I’d always wondered about, I could see more clearly now. Weariness. Wariness. Desperation. Resignation. He had been carrying this weight since the age of fourteen. The least I could do was bear it with him. I leaned in and pressed a soft kiss to his mouth. “Please, tell me,” I said afterwards. “I think it’s important that you do.”
He looked down, eyebrows squeezing together in pain, but he nodded. “I held onto that gun for a while. Waited for a day the kids were all out. Mom, too. The day before, he’d spent half an hour grinding out cigarettes on my arm. He always tried shit out on me first before he started in on the kids. So…that was it. I’d had enough. Soon as everyone was out, I went into the living room—he was asleep on the couch in front of the TV—and I put the gun against his head…” He shrugged. “Afterwards, I called Snapper and told him it was done. The cops showed up, but so did Snapper, with a lawyer. And in the end, I walked. Self-defense, they called it.”
“And it was,” I insisted.
“I shot him in cold blood while he was asleep.”
“That doesn’t make it any less a matter of self-defense.”
“And I haven’t paid with a single minute of my life for it,” he went on, as though I’d said nothing at all. He got up off the bed and began to pace the room.
“I don’t think that’s true at all. You seem to have spent most of your life since then paying for it.”
He shot me a look. “Feelingguiltyabout it ain’t paying for it, A.”
“Isn’t it? Haven’t you been punishing yourself all this time? Distancing yourself from others? From God?”
