just a man, and he could be killed. He could be broken.
He looked like that now.
“Lia,” he said, his voice rough and weary. “What are you doing down here, gattina? It’s no place for you.”
Lia didn’t answer. Her heart clanging, she came all the way into the room, let the doors swing shut behind her, and went to stand beside her father and her sister.
She’d been to several funerals and their vigils; most had had open caskets. People said the dead seemed like they were sleeping, but Lia had always wondered why they said that. To her, a body in a casket, made up just so, dressed in the living person’s best clothes, looked not like a person at all, but like their waxwork facsimile.
Elisa, however, looked exactly like she was sleeping. Except for her too-pale complexion, she seemed peaceful and well. The makeup she’d hogged their bathroom to do earlier in the evening was still almost perfect, with only a little smudging at her eyes, as if she’d forgotten and rubbed her fingers over them.
She looked like Lia’s big sister, asleep after Christmas Eve Mass.
Somehow, that was even more painful—Elisa’s soul was still so close her body hadn’t given up the memory of it. It made a kind of thwarted hope rise up, a sense that if they’d only reached out far enough, fast enough, they might have caught her and put her back where she belonged.
Suddenly, Lia’s life with her sister came up in a rush. All the elaborate games they’d invented when they were little, the squabbles and frustrations when they didn’t want the same thing, the way they’d left all that aside and begun to ignore each other, how they’d drifted apart even while they were in the same classes.
Lia felt, like a phantom pain, her resentment of Elisa, so beautiful and fragile, taking so much of Mamma and Papa’s time, always breaking down over something—some small personal panic or some massive existential anxiety, without any sense of proportion.
She remembered the breakdown Elisa had had out of the blue on a college visit, when Mamma thought Elisa was having a heart attack, how she’d ended up in an ER in North Carolina and they’d had to cancel their visit to Duke, which was one of Lia’s top three picks and a school Elisa wasn’t interested in at all. Lia had been furious with her sister that weekend and had even harbored a suspicion she’d been faking.
Lia didn’t make fusses, so she’d kept her disappointment, anger, and resentment to herself and let it feed on her own insides. She’d also felt painfully guilty when the ER doctor had kept Elisa overnight to help her get her anxiety under control. While she’d sat in the hotel room alone, while Mamma stayed with Elisa at the hospital, the resentment had simmered, and the guilt had burnt it to a hard crust. The poison of it all had made her physically ill, but she’d suffered alone.
So many resentments she’d buried, letting them build up between them, unexpressed and unresolved. And now they would remain so forever.
Carefully, Lia set her fingers on her sister’s shoulder. Her skin was cool and firm. Like waxwork.
Realizing she’d been holding her breath, she tried to let it out, but something gave way inside her just then, and the sound that came from her mouth was a sob, not a sigh.
Her father stood at once and pulled her into his arms. Lia turned and buried her face between the rumpled lapels of his suitcoat. Bundled so tightly in his embrace, in the strength and warmth of him, the scent of him, the thud of his heart, Lia let truth take hold and wept for Elisa.
Until her tears were spent, her father rested his cheek on her head and held her, without making a sound. Once she quieted, Lia leaned back and looked up at his exhausted face. That ghostly image of his weakest self still seemed to hover over his expression, a double exposure, and Lia saw a great clamor of thoughts and feelings in his eyes. So much regret and grief, so much more than he thought he could say to her.
He blamed himself. It was reasonable that he would; Elisa would not have been shot on their front lawn if their father were an insurance salesman.
But their father was who he was, who he’d always been. His children had been born into his world.