There was nothing that could be saved afterward.
Not Nero, Maya’s black-and-white cat, who slept every single night sprawled around her neck with a paw on her cheek, like a baby who needs physical contact in order to fall asleep. He sat for three days refusing to eat or move from the crumpled shirt and jeans Maya had left on her bed that very same day. Then he vanished and nobody had the energy to go looking for him. It was understood that he no longer wished to live with them and that he’d carried his own grief elsewhere.
Not the house on the beach in Connecticut, where they’d spent every summer as a family. Too much happiness, too much blaring light, too much white and blue and breeze, bare feet stomping on the wooden porch, laughter at the breakfast table. The blond fuzz on Maya’s arms, her red bikini, the shape of her body against the waves. The house was sold to a family of rich Lebanese who offered to buy it with the furniture. Take it all—it’s free! they were told. Let us get rid of it in one go! his mother said. Who could have lived with it anyway?
Not the marriage, even though his parents remained together, inexplicably, even after they left Rome and went back to the States (a chaotic move, packing their belongings in a mix of tears and fury, like fugitives running from a war). Maybe they simply had no energy left to split up since they were so broken already and their apartment on the Upper West Side offered enough space for each of them to forget the existence of the other. He in one room or at the UN office, she in another room, often in bed. He coming home late, she drinking Scotch. It was immediately obvious to Julian and his younger brother, Sam, that their parents had fallen into a void from which they were not planning to come back. There were no more meals together, no fire going in the living room, no fresh air in the apartment. Just irredeemable sadness and silence. It didn’t matter that there were two more children to be told what to do or what to wear once the summer turned into fall, because they were still alive (which seemed almost unfair). Couldn’t they just walk to the supermarket across the street or call the takeout numbers stuck on the refrigerator?
* * *
Julian suddenly felt exhausted.
Nothing this woman could tell him would help to soothe what he felt every time he thought of his sister: the hole Maya had carved inside him by her loss would always be there; all he had to do was pronounce her name. There was no closure. He loathed that word. He was just about to say something so that he and Valeria could part, when she spoke again.
“The only one who had the guts to say that it was my fault to my face was your mother.”
“My mother?”
“Yes. She came to see me one night, I guess a few days or weeks after the accident. I was alone in the apartment, and when I opened the door I saw this towering figure in a long raincoat. I think it was raining because her hair was damp. I’d never seen her before, but I immediately knew who she was.”
“She never told me she had gone to see you,” Julian said.
“She stepped in before I could say anything. I offered her a chair in the kitchen but she ignored me. I remember she walked around, taking everything in, checking out this crummy place, messy and unkempt, and then she said, ‘So, is this where you live? In this shithole?’ Then she turned to me and said, ‘Soon you won’t be living here anymore. I will call the police and I’ll have you evicted. You have killed my daughter and you mustn’t live here anymore.’ Which of course didn’t have any logic to it, but it still terrified me.”
Valeria stopped for a moment to catch her breath.
“And then she said, ‘You will have to pay for this—I’ll have you arrested.’ Nothing she said made any sense, but you know…she had just lost her daughter, she was”—Valeria wiped the sweat from her eyebrows— “delirious with pain, or maybe she was under the effect of some medication…but I let her speak, not just because she was so commanding but also because I could tell she needed to unleash her anger. I just sat on a chair, paralyzed, while she stood up, staring at me with those wide eyes. She’s very beautiful, your mother. Very intimidating. And I said nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
Valeria stopped. Something inside her suddenly gave in, as if her sternum had splintered like a rotten plank.
“And now that I’m here talking to you it just seems incredible—absurd, actually—that I hadn’t gone to her first, right after the accident, to tell her how sorry I was. Instead I’d been hiding like a criminal. Wanting to be punished, but also exonerated. Whereas she had the guts to come find me, to hunt me down.”
Julian sprang up from the sofa as if his seat were burning and disappeared into the next room. Valeria remained seated. It was okay if he needed to move away from her. She waited a few minutes until she felt a bit lighter, a bit more peaceful. Someone had told her that three deep, long breaths were enough to quiet the body. She tried to take them, and once she felt a reasonable amount of time had passed without Julian returning to the room, she decided he wanted her to leave. She picked up her coat and knocked gently on the bedroom door, which he had left slightly ajar.
He was sitting on the side of the bed, elbows on knees, holding his head between his hands. She wasn’t sure whether he was crying.
She waited, but Julian didn’t move.
She knew she hadn’t been helpful, but she couldn’t think of anything to say, or a better way to end their meeting.
“It’s late. I’m going to go now.”
Julian lifted his head.
“Wait.”
“What?”
“Come here.”
He placed his hand on the side of the bed.
Valeria sat next to him. They were very close now, their shoulders touching.
“I thought of you often,” he said. “How it must’ve been for you. Afterward. You too were so young.”
Suddenly Julian put his arm around her back and pulled her to his chest in a headlock. She felt his hand press on the nape of her head and inhaled the foreign smell of his skin. She tried to look at him, but all she could see was his neck, and part of his jaw. She wrapped her arms around him too.
They held each other, tighter now, without speaking. Valeria perceived that Julian’s body was shaking lightly—that vibration again, of too much blood rushing under the skin.
“Is this okay?” Julian asked.
Valeria nodded, then she felt something lift. It was light, like a whoosh, an opening. Her eyes welled up.
“Yes,” she said.
* * *
The phone rang.
The early-morning light was seeping through the curtains, illuminating the room with a whitish glow.
Julian opened his eyes. He had slept very deeply.