Chapter Seventeen: Carmelo
RenzoFerraraarrivesatsix AM.
I hear the car from the apartment window. A black sedan, rental, pulling to the curb outside Grace's building. He sits behind the wheel for four minutes before he opens the door. I know because I count. Four minutes of a man sitting in a car on a Philadelphia street, trying to figure out how to walk into a building and meet the daughter he lost sixteen years ago.
I go downstairs. Grace is asleep in my bed. She fell asleep around three, her hand still in mine, her finger circling my knuckle in her sleep. I eased my hand free at five and sat at the window and watched the street and waited for the car I knew was coming.
Renzo is standing on the sidewalk when I come through the front door. He's older than the last time I saw him. His face is drawn, his eyes red. The kind of aging that happens from theinside when a man carries trauma for too long and it reshapes his face. He's tall, lean, gray at the temples.
"Carmelo, where is she?" His voice is rough. He hasn't slept either.
"She's upstairs."
"How is she?"
"She remembers everything. The rooms, the men, the pills. All of it. And a friend of hers was killed last night by the network's verification team. She hasn't started grieving that yet. She's running on nothing."
Renzo's jaw tightens. His hands are at his sides, fists opening and closing, and I recognize the gesture because I do it too. A man who needs to hit something and doesn't have a target.
"The men who killed her friend," he says.
"Being handled."
"By who?"
"My brothers."
He nods. "Can I see her?"
"Yes.”
We walk upstairs. The apartment is small and bright in the early light. Grace is on the bed, curled on her side, her dark hair spread across the pillow. She's wearing my shirt and it comes to her knees. She's swimming in it and somehow she’s never looked better.
Renzo stops in the doorway. He makes a sound. Not a word, not a cry. A sound from somewhere below language, the sound of a man seeing his daughter for the first time in sixteen years and recognizing her face because it's his wife's face, or his mother's face, or the face of the girl he carried on his shoulders through a garden he's never stopped seeing in his sleep.
"Papa."
Grace is awake. She's looking at Renzo from the bed. Her gray-blue eyes on his gray-blue eyes. Her face is pale and exhausted and swollen from the crying that finally came around two AM, silent and long, soaking the pillow while I held her hand and said nothing.
"Papa." She says it again. The word she spoke in fragments weeks ago, in a flash of being carried, arms around a neck, the smell of tobacco and warmth. She knows who it belongs to now.
Renzo crosses the room in three steps. He drops to his knees beside the bed. His hands reach for her and stop, hovering, because he doesn't know if he's allowed to touch her. Sixteenyears of searching and he doesn't know if his daughter will let him hold her.
She reaches for him. Her hands find his face, small palms on his jaw, the same way she holds my face, the same way she holds anything she needs to know is real. Her thumbs press below his eyes. His tears run over her fingers.
"Graziella," he says. "Figlia mia."
She doesn't flinch at the Italian. Her body receives it the way a body receives its own name, with recognition, not fear. The language that made her skin crawl for eleven years is coming out of her father's mouth and her body knows the difference between the men in the rooms and the man on his knees.
I step back. I move to the kitchen and stand at the counter and give them the room. I can hear them through the thin wall. Renzo's voice, low, broken, speaking Italian and English in alternating sentences. Grace's voice, quieter, asking questions.When was I born. Where did we live. What was Mama's name. Did she look for me too.
I pull my knife and clean my nails and listen to a father and daughter find each other through a wall and think about Aurelio. About the knife I buried with him. About the night he told me I was his, not by blood, by choice, and how I didn't know what that meant until I heard Renzo say figlia mia and understood that some men spend their entire lives trying to say two words to the right person.
My phone buzzes. Leone.
Motel. 30 minutes.
I text back:On my way.