world, he’d apparently left his son to learn about it from movies and television. He went around the island to sit beside Ren and put his arm over his shoulders. “What most people think about us are stories, not truths, figlio. The truth is that things are as I want them to be. And I want you to have what you want.”
Suddenly, Ren’s eyes clouded with tears, and he leaned over, into Nick’s embrace. When Nick put his other arm around him and held him close, Ren began to cry.
The last time his son had cried in his arms, Nick had picked him up and set him on his lap. For the past several years, it had been Beverly Ren had turned to for comfort. Even in his grief for Elisa.
Nick’s failures and regrets were mounting. But he meant to fix every one that he could.
~ 21 ~
On a cold afternoon in February, Lia was in her room, curled in her armchair, snugged deep in a knitted blanket, a big slouchy sweater, leggings and socks. Snuggles slept on the floor next to the heating vent. The grey sky had been full of snow all day, but the kind that blew rather than stuck. Carina and Ren had been really unhappy that morning when there wasn’t enough snow to cancel school.
Downstairs, Emilia was running the vacuum. Mamma was around somewhere, probably in her room reading or napping. She’d spent a lot of time alone since Christmas. She was better, definitely, and getting better all the time, acting more like Mamma, like a mother, but she was different. Papa said she’d dimmed, and Lia understood what he meant.
Papa was at work, and Alex was, too. Lia was practically alone in the house, without anyone expecting anything of her.
In the time before, this would have been a pretty great day. But this was the time after, and it was hard to feel like anything was great. Every good feeling dragged a load of guilt behind it.
She flipped to the back of her notebook and wrote Every good feeling drags a load of guilt behind it. Then she contemplated the line, wondering if it was as good as it had seemed when she’d thought it. Not sure, she left it and went back to the page she’d been writing on.
In the fall, when her father made her come home, Lia had decided to try to write a play—something she could do from home that would feel like she hadn’t lost absolutely everything. For the first several weeks—months, really—she hadn’t accomplished much more than a series of bad starts. She understood scripts, especially stage plays, but seeing it from the other side had proved harder than she’d expected.
Also, she couldn’t figure out what she wanted to say. All her ideas were derivative or just plain dumb. By Christmas, she’d just about given up and decided she wasn’t much more than a marionette, with a talent for bringing other people’s ideas to life, but nothing that could really be called her own.
Then Elisa had been killed.
Lia had started keeping a journal, using it as a place to put on paper feelings too big or complicated or scary to say out loud. Then, a week or so in, she’d written about a conversation she’d overheard between Papa and Uncle Donnie, when they were in his office, talking about something they’d done, or were planning to do, in vengeance.
She hadn’t been eavesdropping exactly. She’d been in her room, where sometimes, when the conditions were just right, she could hear voices in her father’s office through the vent. On that evening, the furnace had cycled off and she’d heard her father’s deep, beloved voice say, “I will have his heart. And I will squeeze my fist until it’s dry.”
He could have been speaking metaphorically, but Lia had been certain he wasn’t. She didn’t think she’d ever heard her father say something so baldly violent before, and it shook her, even knowing that was who he was, who he’d always been.
Something inside her felt energized by his anger. He was talking about the man who’d killed Elisa; she was sure of that, too, though she hadn’t heard anything to confirm it. Lia wanted that man to die the kind of violent death her father envisioned.
It wasn’t often she wished other people ill, and she didn’t think she’d ever wished that kind of ill on anyone, but in this case, she almost thought she’d want to watch it happen. And that