"Resta con me! Resta con me! Per favore, papà, resta con me!"
(Stay with me! Stay with me! Please, Papa, stay with me!)
Papa. The word I haven't said in fourteen years. The word that belonged to a dead man on a marble floor. The word that belongs now to the man in my arms, whose blood is soaking through my jeans, whose hand is still on my face, whose thumb moves once across my cheekbone in the gesture I learned from him, the gesture Niccolo learned from me, the thread that connects three people across a chain of love and violence and lies.
I pull him onto my lap. His head against my thighs. His eyes are losing focus. The brown going glassy. The pupils fixed. I can see it happening. System by system. The lights going out.
"Hold on," I scream. "Please! Please hold on! I didn't know! I didn't know…I wouldn't have…I would have listened. Please, Papa, hold on!"
He can't. The blood loss. The cardiac damage. The blade in his heart is completing it’s job and no prayer, no ritual, no God, real or invented, will undo the physics of steel in muscle. I know this. I have watched thirty-four men die. I know the timeline. I know the signs. I know the exact moment when hope becomes biology and biology becomes arithmetic and the arithmetic says zero.
His mouth moves. One more word. Forming on blood-soaked lips, pushed out by the last air in lungs that are filling with fluid.
"Please forgive me."
Those are his last words before his body goes limp. The weight shifts in my lap. His hand slides from my face, down my neck, comes to rest on my shoulder. His eyes are open. Looking at the crucifix above us. The bronze Christ in the candlelight. The agonized face that has watched everything and said nothing.
I hold my father on the floor of the church where he taught me to kill. His blood on my hands. His blood on my jeans.His rosary beads scattered across the marble in a constellation of wood and wire. The knife in his chest, the handle pointing at the ceiling, at the vaulted stone, at the God he claimed to speak for.
The key is in my left fist. I can feel the brass teeth pressing into my palm. The shape of it. Small. Ordinary. The key to a drawer in a desk in a small office behind a sacristy door, where a journal holds the answers to questions I will now spend the rest of my life carrying.
I cry.
Not the controlled tears from Niccolo's penthouse. Not the single drop that tracked down my cheek when he told me he loved me. This is the crying of a child. The wailing I didn't do in the closet when I was ten, when I bit my tongue and counted heartbeats and held my breath while my parents died on the other side of the door.
Fourteen years of held tears, released, flooding through me in sounds I don't recognize as mine. Animalistic. Guttural. The sounds a body makes when it has exceeded its capacity to contain what is inside it.
I rock him back and forth. My arms around his shoulders. His head against my chest. The way you rock a child, excepthe is the parent and I’m the child and neither of us will ever be anything again because he is dead and I killed him and the last word he said was to forgive him.
The key bites into my palm. I hold it tighter. The pain’s small, specific. A point of focus in the flood.
All the answers are in there.
I don't go to the drawer tonight. I can't. I can't let go of him. I can't stand. I can't walk to the sacristy and open the office door and sit at his desk and read the story of how I came to be holding my dead father on the floor of a church. Not yet. Not while his body is still warm. Not while the blood is still wet on my jeans.
Later. Tomorrow. Whenever I can let go of his hand.
The answers will wait. They've been waiting in a locked drawer for years. They can wait one more night.
No prayer. No ritual. No candles lit before a crucifix. No knife drawn across my thigh. No release of blood, no atonement, no sacred act to transform what I've done into something holy.
There is no ritual for this.
There is only a daughter holding her dead father on the floor of a church, a brass key in her fist, surrounded by votive candles lit by his hand, beneath a crucifix that has seen everything and absolved nothing.
I hold him until the candles burn down to nothing.
I hold him in the dark and cry until there’s no more tears left.
Chapter 35
Aftermath
Valentina
I'm still on the floor when he arrives.
I hear him come in through the side door, the door I've used a thousand times. I hear the way he stops when he sees me. I don't look up. I'm holding my father's body, the key biting into my left palm, the blood on my jeans gone cold. The marble is freezing through my knees. The crucifix above me says nothing. The votive candles have burned to stubs, the last of them guttering in pools of liquid wax.
