Page 13 of Broken Trust

“Gia’s always wanted kids. When we found out that she had premature ovarian insufficiency, it broke her heart.” I remember that painful day in the hospital, after years of telling Gia that it wasn’t the right time to have a family. I wanted to be the provider, the one who could support our family. Then when we were ready, we found out she could never get pregnant. She cried so much, it broke my heart seeing her that way.

“Please! If you want to keep lying to yourself then fine, but you married the wrong sister to get her family's money. I'm the only person who has ever told you the truth.”

Did fame and fortune turn me into this lowlife?

“Go on. Go to her.” She steps back and smooths both hands down over the belly, slow, almost fond, and it turns my stomach to watch. “Do your groveling. Get it out of you. Play the heartbroken husband as long as it takes.” The smile comes back, serene, certain, a woman who has already watched how this ends and is content to wait for me to arrive there too. “She is finished with you, and once the dust settles, the baby and I will be exactly where you left us. We were always going to be your family, Dante. Take all the time you need. We're not going anywhere.”

Behind us my suocera’s voice carries bright and ruined across the lawn, seeing the last stragglers off at the gate, laughing at something, holding the photograph together to the bitter end, even now, even with her daughter gone and her garden in pieces.

The final lantern comes off the wire. The light goes with it.

And so does my soul. Gia didn't deserve to be treated like this. I took an oath to love her in sickness and in health, and I did her wrong. I feel sick to my stomach as I think about the way she looked at me. As if I'd put a knife straight through her heart.

9

GIA

The car takes the last turn off the main road and the tarmac gives out beneath the tires, dropping into gravel and then into two deep ruts with a spine of grass running down the middle. The trees lean close over the track until the headlights are the only thing left in the world. When the cabin shows at the end of it, low and dark against the treeline, something in my chest loosens for the first time since the garden. Nonna's house, where she was born and raised.

The driver eases to a stop and cuts the engine, and the quiet drops over us, wide and old. Nella and I sit side by side in the back seat, and neither of us moves. The glow off the dash barely reaches us; back here we are almost in shadow. I turn and look at my sister properly for the first time all day.

“Let's go inside,” she says as she opens her door.

I agree. Nella is ahead of me and works the stiff old lock with her shoulder the way you have to, then reaches into the dark and throws the breaker. A single bulb stutters awake above the sink and lays long shadows across the room.

I loved coming here as a child during the holidays. Nothing has changed, from the scrubbed pine table to the two soft chairs gone saggy beside the cold stove. The air is cold enough to see, and it smells of old ash and dust and, beneath that, faint and impossible, of her.

Nella fills the kettle and sets it on the ring, because she can never stay still even for a second. I watch her move around the little kitchen and I have to press my mouth shut so I don't cry.

“You'll be all right up here.”

“You're not staying?” I already know the answer to my own question.

“I'm on at seven tomorrow. Right now, I need to go home and sleep.” She glances at the black window as though she can see the road back through it. “Full ward, a girl off sick, and they're short as it is. I can't be up a mountain with a dead phone while somebody's coding on my floor.”

Nella's a nurse. She rents a small flat across town and works nights. The black sheep of the family, Mamma loves to call her. The Rizzo family doesn't do poor, according to Mamma. When Nella went to college and told Mamma that she wanted to be a nurse, Mamma had her do a DNA test. She claimed that there must be gypsy blood in her, and it can't be from her side of the family.

Nella found it amusing and agreed to it. I think deep down inside she was hoping that Mamma wasn't her mother. That there was a woman out there who had maternal instincts and would be the mother that Carmela had been to us.

Papa explained vaguely, as he did whenever he spoke of the past, that Mamma's own mother, nothing like our sweet Nonna, treated her very badly as a kid, and this is why she never talks about the past and has issues. His way of justifying the coldness of Mamma. I don't get it. If Grandma was horrible to her, then why did she pass on the same traits to us?

Shouldn't she have loved us more?

Questions that have circled my mind so many times, and the answer is always the same.

It doesn't matter. It is all in the past.

She crosses the floor and takes my face in both hands, the way she used to when we were small and I'd come home crying over something Mia had taken and made hers.

“You need to be alone,” she says. “Not me fussing. You've had people in your ear your whole life telling you who to be. Now there's no one. Use the time just to breathe and take it all in.” Her thumbs sweep under my eyes, catching what I hadn't felt fall. “Whenever you need me, whatever hour it is, you call, and I can drop everything, then I'll come running.”

My throat closes and nothing will come past it, so I nod against her hands.

“Go home to rest,” I manage at last. “The hospital needs you more than I do tonight. And honestly…” I try to straighten things in my mind, “being away from our house will do me good. Help me think properly.”

She holds my gaze a moment longer, searching, the way she reads a chart when the numbers won't quite add up. Whatever she's checking for, she finds it, because she lets go and steps back toward the door.

“There's wood by the stove and soup in the cupboard that's probably older than you. Eat something. Sleep.” A beat. “And Gia. You did good, girl.”