I pick up the knife and fold it closed and put it in my pocket instead of on my belt. It feels different there. Less like a weapon. More like something I'm keeping because I want to.
Through the wall, Grace laughs. Short, quiet, surprised. The same laugh from the restaurant, the one I kept, the one I put somewhere inside myself where I keep very few things.
Renzo's voice, answering her, then silence. Then her laugh again, a little longer this time.
I sit in the kitchen and listen and don't move and don't clean my nails and don't plan.
For the first time since I came to Philadelphia, I have nothing to do except be here.
So I'm here.
Chapter Eighteen: Grace
Myfather'shandsarelarger than mine but smaller than Carmelo's.
I notice this while he's holding my left hand in both of his, turning it over, studying my fingers, my knuckles, the shape of my nails. He's been doing this for ten minutes. Not talking. Just holding my hand and looking at it, and I'm letting him because I understand what he's doing. He's looking for the girl he lost. He's looking for Graziella in the bones of Grace's hands.
We took a break and I showered and changed while he made us coffee and sandwiches. Then we came back into the room and sat on the couch in the corner because the living room feels too big. Everything feels too big and I just want the comfort of being close to him for the first time in almost two decades.
"Your mother's hands," he says. "Anna. You have her hands. Small, narrow. She played piano. Not well, mind you, but sheplayed. Every Sunday after church, she'd sit at the piano in the living room and play the same three songs and I'd pretend to read the paper and listen."
"What songs?"
"Debussy. Clair de Lune, always. She loved that piece. And two Italian folk songs I can't remember the names of because she never played them from sheet music. She played them from memory, from her grandmother, who played them from her grandmother."
My mother played piano. Anna. She played Debussy on Sundays after church and my father pretended to read the paper and listened.
These are facts about people I don't remember. Facts about a life that was mine before it was taken, a house and a family and a Sunday routine that existed in a world I was part of for eight years and can't access no matter how hard I try. The good memories, the safe memories, the piano and the garden and the carrying, those were taken differently. Those were overwritten by five years of rooms with no windows. The pills didn't need to suppress them. The trafficking did.
"Tell me about the house," I say.
Renzo's eyes go somewhere far. "Stone. Old stone, built in the twenties. In the hills above the city. There was a garden in the back, your mother's garden. Tomatoes, basil, peppers. A lemon tree she nursed through three winters even though everyone toldher lemons don't grow in this climate. It grew. She was stubborn about things she loved."
"Was I?"
He smiles. The smile breaks his face open the way Javi's grin used to break his, full and uncontrolled and painful to witness because the joy in it is sitting right next to the grief.
"You were stubborn about everything. You wanted to eat in the garden. Not at the table, not inside. In the garden, on the ground, sitting in the dirt between the tomato plants. Your mother would bring your plate out and you'd sit there with your legs crossed and eat with your hands and the tomatoes would get in your hair. You'd laugh." He stops. His grip on my hand tightens. "You had the best laugh. Loud. Your whole body shook."
I don't remember the garden. I don't remember the tomatoes or the dirt or the eating with my hands. But my body remembers something, because my chest aches in a way that isn't grief and isn't the memories from the rooms. It's older than that. It's the ache of a thing that was taken so completely that even the shape of its absence is gone, and all that's left is the feeling that something should be here and isn't.
"The night I was taken," I say.
Renzo's hands go still around mine. He looks at the wall behind my head, at the window, at anything that isn't my face, and I can see him building the guts to think the words before he says them.
"You were in bed. It was late, after ten. Anna was downstairs cleaning the kitchen. I was at a meeting." He pauses. "A meeting with Marco Castillo. Business. I was gone. I should have been home and I was gone."
"It wasn't your fault."
"I know. I've been told. By therapists, by priests, by everyone. It wasn't my fault. The men who came, they waited until I was gone. They knew my schedule. They knew the house. They came through the back, through the garden, through your mother's garden, and they took you from your bed. Anna heard you scream. By the time she got upstairs, you were gone. The window was open. The garden gate was open. You were gone."
His voice is monotone, devoid of all emotion. He's told this story before, to detectives, to investigators, to Castillo soldiers who searched for months. He's told it enough times that the words have lost their edges, worn smooth by repetition, and what's left is just the sequence of events delivered by a man who has lived inside them for sixteen years.
"Anna died three years later," he says. "Heart. They said it was a defect, something congenital, but I know what killed her. She stopped sleeping after you were taken. She stopped eating. She sat at the piano and played the same three songs and waited for you to come home and her heart gave out because it was carrying too much for too long."
My mother died waiting for me. My mother who played piano and grew lemons and ate in the garden with me… died because her heart couldn't carry the weight of my absence.
I don't cry. I've been crying for two days, and my body has run out of the physical capacity for tears. What happens instead is a stillness that starts in my chest and spreads outward until my whole body is quiet.