Cristiano is sitting in front of us, handsome and fresh-faced at seventeen, though with hints of darkness showing in his eyes that are beginning to turn cold. It will be several more years before he’s sent away to Italy and Mom dies. Before Mom is murdered, I think with a painful wrench.
Dad is hovering at the back as though he’s been pushed to one side, or he doesn’t want to be there and he’s about to step out of the frame. He’s not smiling. It’s easy to focus on everyone else’s radiant faces and pretend he, with his glower, isn’t there at all.
It’s my most beloved family photo, and my most precious belonging, because there’s only one copy. Dad threw away or burned most of Mom’s things when she died. This photograph and a handful of others is all I have left of her.
As though in a trance, Vincenzo reaches for the frame with both hands. There’s a desolate expression in his eyes, a hollowness that makes him look haunted. It’s causing him physical pain to look upon my happy family portrait, so soon after he’s lost his.
“Vincenzo?” I touch his arm.
He doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t even seem to notice I’m there.
Vincenzo’s breathing changes, becoming shallow and rapid. His pupils dilate. He’s staring at the photo like it’s the only thing in the world that exists for him.
His picks up the frame. The movement is mechanical, disconnected. Like he’s sleepwalking.
“Vincenzo, don’t—”
He rips the back off with violent force, but his face is blank. Empty. He pulls the photograph free and flings the rest to one side. The frame hits my bedroom wall with a crash. Glass shatters into a thousand glittering pieces.
For a moment, I think he just wants a closer look at the photograph.
Then he rips it in two, right through Mom’s smiling face.
I scream. Try to grab it from him, but his hands keep moving, ripping, destroying, while his face remains eerily expressionless.
“Stop!” I grab his wrists. “Please stop!”
His hands, killer’s hands, destructive hands, obliterate the paper rectangle in a matter of moments.
When the pieces are too small to go on ripping them, he opens his fingers and lets them go. The fragments flutter down like ash.
I drop to my knees, straining to catch the shreds as they fall, but there are too many, and they’re too small. They slip through my fingers no matter how desperately I try to catch them.
I collapse in a heap on the carpet, sobbing as I gather up all the pieces and try to put them back together. A glimpse of Mom’s smile. A shred of Nonna’s arm. A scarlet flash of my Christmas dress. Or is it Nonna’s skirt? I can’t tell. Everything is jumbled and confused. The photograph is utterly destroyed.
My head slumps forward and I sob brokenly. She’s gone. Mom is gone all over again.
“Doe?” Vincenzo asks over my head. His voice sounds distant. Uncertain.
Like he’s just woken up from a trance.
The shattering glass and my screaming has brought Dad’s soldiers to my door. It flies open with a bang, and their eyes widen as they see me in a heap on the floor with Vincenzo standing over me. They hover at the threshold, guns drawn and aimed, shouting for Dad.
This is how Dad finds us a minute later when he storms into my room dressed only in striped pajama pants, an assassin standing over me, and my supposed bodyguards standing timidly at the threshold.
Dad stares from Vincenzo to me, something calculating flashing across his face. Then he whirls around and faces his soldiers.
“Useless fucking idiots! You’re supposed to keep intruders out of my house. Get out of my sight.”
They all slink away, heads down, leaving the three of us alone together.
Dad closes my door behind him and stares accusingly at Vincenzo, his hairy chest rising and falling with every furious breath he takes. “You have come here in the night to defile my daughter. An insult I will not stand for. You have ruined her, and no other man will want her now. You will marry her, or I will put your head on a goddamn spike.”
Dad’s threatening Vincenzo to force him to marry me when that’s precisely what Vincenzo demanded from Dad nine days ago. But this doesn’t surprise me. When Dad’s not in control of a situation, he has to twist things to seem like he is. Make it sound like his idea. His decision.
I stare at the carpet and my torn heap of happy memories, no longer caring what happens to me. Marry Vincenzo, don’t marry him. Live or die. The outcome will be the same. More misery, only under a different man’s roof.
There was a time before I lost my innocence when I believed in happy endings, but I’m no longer that naïve, stupid child. That girl died in a golden ballroom, covered in other people’s blood.
