Her father broke the silence.
“So, how was it, over there?”
“Where?”
“At the farm.”
“It was okay.”
The father made a disparaging sound and scowled.
“What?” the girl asked. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
The father shook his head and kept chewing his food with his mouth open. The mother glanced at her, signaling she shouldn’t say more.
“They told us you left before it was time. They phoned here, asking if we knew where you had gone,” the mother said. “But we didn’t know where to find you.”
“I left because I was done with what I had to do. I was okay—I didn’t need to stay any longer.”
She stared at them defiantly.
“I’m fine now. There was no point in staying on.”
The father snorted, then pushed the plate away.
“Well, let’s hope you stay that way.”
The farm, way up north, was actually a rehab center, but her parents had always refused to call it that. It was run by a young priest, and the previous year she had been assigned to work in the stable. “Hippotherapy” it was called, from the Greek word for horse, someone told her, and it was part of the program. Every morning, along with a few other kids, she groomed the horses. She scrubbed their sides with a brush, feeling their muscles, combed their manes and tails, then washed their nostrils and mouths with a damp sponge. She kissed them on the neck and above their noses and pressed her forehead against theirs. She never got to ride them because they were too old, and most of them were injured, but she had dreams at night that she was riding Bandito, her favorite one, through a thick forest, feeling his back between her legs.
She worked at the stable full-time, and taking care of the horses helped her. She stayed focused and away from drugs. But it wasn’t just that—the horses had become like real people to her. Each morning, when she saw them, she felt her heart racing like mad.
The few times she spoke on the phone with her parents, they made no inquiries about her health and they never came to visit. It was too far, they said, and besides they couldn’t leave their own animals alone. To the neighbors they said she had found a job in a barn, up in the north, near Lucca, where she was making good money.
* * *
Her older sister, Teresa, was out, the mother said with an air of importance; she was with the seamstress up in the next village. There were last-minute alterations to be made to the wedding dress. The father scoffed, saying the dress had been expensive, that it was unreasonable to spend that much money on something you wear only once, all the while the mother kept her eyes on the plate and said nothing. But surely she was the one who had insisted on buying it. The girl knew what it would mean for her mother to have her older daughter show up in church in a tulle dress for everyone to see.
The minute she pulled out the bag of tobacco, her father snickered.
“Now you smoke drugs in my house?”
Her voice tightened.
“Don’t be ridiculous—it’s tobacco!”
He said nothing but he let out an angry huff of breath.
“Let’s not start,” she lashed out at him. “I can leave now if you prefer—it makes no difference to me.”
“Please, leave her alone,” the mother whispered to her husband. She had probably foreseen that they would clash—it was inevitable—and beforehand she must have pleaded with him to keep calm. It was just going to be a few days. No reason to pick a fight.
Later her mother came into her room—the room she had shared with her sister and which had now become her sister’s private kingdom.
“Did you buy a dress for the ceremony?” her mother asked. The crease on her forehead looked so deep, it was like a cut.
The girl pulled out something from her sack. It was a pink macramé dress. In view of the wedding, she had done some shoplifting.
The mother sighed.
“Not this one. It’s see-through. And it’s too short.”
“I like it. It’s going to be fine.”
The mother sat on the bed.
“I was hoping…for once…”
“What?”
The woman raised her shoulders and looked down at her feet.
“That for once you would try to be respectful. That you would make an effort, just this once. But no. It has to be your way. Always.”
“I’ve made an effort. I’m here, I’ve come all the way from Greece just to see you. I’ve traveled for days to make it on time. This is my effort. It’s you who doesn’t see it.”
She crumpled the dress and threw it angrily across the room.
It was no use. She couldn’t find a way to be with them, not even now that she was clean.
* * *
Soon the house went silent, both her parents having retired to their bedroom for a siesta, as they always did to get a break from the heat. The girl tried to doze off in her old bed, but a mix of anger and restlessness kept her awake. She got up and opened the closet, searching for something familiar, anything that might make the time she had spent in that house real again. Behind the stacks of her sister’s neatly folded clothes, she found a couple of dresses she used to wear when she was around fifteen, when she still longed to look like everyone else. Rummaging in the drawers of the cupboard, she found an envelope containing a few prints of the same photo. It showed her and her sister under the walnut tree on the day of their first communion. Despite the three years’ difference, the sisters took communion on the same day so that their parents wouldn’t have to pay for two receptions. There they were: two unhappy little girls holding hands, looking more like orphans, or penitent nuns, wrapped in the unshapely white tunics their mother had stitched over the course of one afternoon. She remembered the rest of the girls from the village who were taking the communion on that same day—how proudly they had followed their parents into the church, covered in lace, looking like angels or miniature brides. Staring at the photo, she could almost feel the coarseness of the cheap material on her skin again, the burning disappointment. No money had ever been worth spending on them. At least her sister was getting her reward at last. She was about to walk again through that same church, like the princess she had always wanted to be.
It was only going to be forty-eight hours, she thought. She could do it.
* * *
—
Her sister came back from the seamstress around five with the latest news on the alterations of the dress. They hugged, briefly, wary of each other.