1
ELENA
For four years, I have lived like a ghost.
I wear a name that isn’t mine and carry documents that insist I belong here, that I am legally and unquestionably American.
I’ve learned how to smile and offer bland explanations when asked where I’m from, how to keep my accent soft and unremarkable, and how to make myself completely forgettable.
That’s how you survive.
My world has shrunk down to a few city blocks in Brooklyn in a narrow apartment above a small, dusty bookstore with a landlord who hardly ever checks on me.
By day, I shelve books and ring up customers who don’t know me despite their best efforts. The owner pays me in cash and never asks questions about why I have no bank account for direct deposits.
At night, when the city changes and the sirens echo loudly outside the front facing windows, I find myself holding mybreath and listening to every set of footsteps that linger too long on the stairs outside my apartment door.
Every creak of the building makes my heart slam against my chest no matter how often I tell myself it’s just the structure settling.
I sleep lightly with my phone face up on the nightstand and the number pad already pulled up on the off-chance I might need it to dial 911 at a moment’s notice.
Unknown numbers always make my hands shake, and the Italian voices that sometimes filter in through my windows from the street below never fail to send ice shooting through my veins.
I tell myself I’m safe. That the worst is behind me.
My father’s disappearance, the money he tried to move to keep us safe but failed before he was forced to flee, the secrets he uncovered right before everything went to shit… that night is burned into my memory.
It has been for the past four years, slowly eating at me until all I feel is the rotted out wound left behind.
I try to tell myself that it was another life. One I buried along with the nameElena Vitale. But unfortunately, even ghosts can’t forget where they came from.
I jump when Luca stirs beside me.
His warm, solid form curls into a tighter ball against my side.
His small fingers flex around the fabric of my shirt and a soft sigh leaves him.
He’s three now.
It simultaneously feels like a lifetime since I gave birth to him and just yesterday.
He’s clever and too observant for his own good.
He has questions I don’t know how to answer yet about before I came to the States, about his father, about why we don’t have aunties and uncles like the kids next door do.
About why I have so many locks on the inside of our front door.
Every time the questions come, all I can do is kiss his hair and breathe him in because I have nothing I can say.
Not without confusing him even further than he already is by my silence.
He is the only reason I get up every morning and the only reason I’ve kept up this charade for as long as I have.
Whatever I was before this—fiancée, lover, daughter of a man who knew too much—I don’t let myself think about it.
I am just a mother now to a toddler who is growing up way too fast. I am a woman who will do anything to keep him safe, even if it means living the rest of my life as nothing.
Early evening brings rain and with it a cranky toddler.
