It wasn’t possible to sit in Dante’s Lamborghini as we easily navigated the harrowing turnings on the cliffside roads of the coast on our way to Sorrento and not remember the relationship that had poisoned me against sex and love, against Giselle, and against myself.
“No one loves you,” he said in English, the words staccato compared to the way my own Neapolitan dialect tended to meld each sentence into one long ribbon of sound. “Do you understand me?”
I shook my head, because I didn’t really. English was the one subject in school I struggled with despite my best efforts. I didn’t understand the strange, pattern-less rules of grammar, and my mouth seemed incapable of biting off the consonants properly.
But that was okay, because Christopher had offered to give me private lessons. My own father was a native English speaker, but he was rarely home and even when he was, he seldom took an interest in his bookish eldest daughter.
Christopher took a keen interest. He knew Seamus from Papa’s few years working at the local university, and they’d stayed friends.
I liked him. He was quintessentially foreign in every way, from his round, faded denim blue eyes and pale face inclined to burn in the hot Napoli sun, to the way he drank tea instead of our strong Italian coffee. He was exotic. To a preteen girl with a head stuffed full of escapist dreams, he was utterly tantalizing.
And he knew it.
“No one loves you,” he repeated again, this time in Italian. His words were as soft and tender as the hand he passed over my head, down the back of my hair. “Not really. No one except me. You know that, don’t you, Elena?”
I blinked up at him, remembering how much bigger he seemed than me as a thirteen-year-old girl. The descending sun backlit his hair, burnishing it so that is shone almost as copper toned as my own. I wanted to touch it and his words of love gave me the uncharacteristic confidence to do so. He smiled encouragingly as my fingers rubbed a strand of light brown hair.
“Capisci?” he asked again. “This is why you are always so alone. This is why I come to play with you.”
It was true. I was often alone in our little house on the outskirts of the city. Seamus owed too much money for Mama to stay home all the time, so she worked at a trattoria in town. Even Sebastian had a job at eight years old, helping at the docks, and Cosima had already begun to model locally.
Only Giselle and I didn’t work, though I could and did argue that I worked as the house wife my mother should have been, the one Seamus still expected when he eventually turned up back at home.
I cooked, I cleaned, I did the budget and the shopping, sometimes with Mama, but sometimes alone.
Alone.
Yes, I could admit to Christopher that I was often alone.
“I hate the sound of silence,” I confessed to him then and watched as my words seemed to turn some mysterious key in the lock of a door he’d previously kept shut up tight.
His expression grew radiant as he pulled me from my chair over to his, up into his lap so he could wrap me in his arms. He smelled papery, the perfume of a learned man whose office was a library. Eager to learn as I was, the scent was almost heady.
“We will make music together to banish the quiet, si?” he murmured in my air as he fondly held me close.
I hummed in response as I wrapped my arms around him, surprised and awed by how whole I’d felt, how long it had been since my own father had hugged me or treated me with any kind of warmth.
My mother loved me, but her love was worn through at the edges with stress and responsibilities. I was her daughter and her co-parent, her dependant whom she utterly depended on. It had been a long time since she had handled me like a child, and a secret part of me, deep in my heart, missed that.
My sister, Cosima, loved me too. When she was home, she would sit on my lap while I read a book and have me read it to her. She would touch my hair, in awe of its colour, and wax poetic about how beautiful I was to her. She did not resent me, as Sebastian did, for being the eldest and therefore the most in control. She did not rebel when I demanded she help around the house or finish her homework. She was happy to please me, happy only to love me in whatever way she could even though I could be terse and unhappy.
She was special, my Cosima.
Giselle might have loved me too, but it was hard to tell. She walked through life with her head in the clouds, completely unaware of the way the rest of the family bent themselves out of shape to protect her from harm or anything that might upset her delicate sensibilities.
Once, when Seamus returned home with four Made Men armed to the teeth, their guns brandished in broad daylight so the acrid yellow sun glinted off them like dangerous jewels, Giselle hadn’t hidden like I’d asked her to. She was too engrossed in the chalk art she was sketching into the broken concrete path leading up to our doorway.
One of the goons, I still remembered him for the missing front tooth that punctured his leering grin, had noticed her and moved quickly, with too much interest, up the walkway to crouch before her.
I snatched her under the arms and dragged her back into the shadows of the hot, dark house before he could utter a single word. She’d cried out at my rough handling, at the way I’d broken her precious stick of white chalk, but I ignored her protests and shoved her in the cabinet under the sink in the kitchen before the man could follow us inside to find her.
When he rounded the corner into our little kitchen, followed closely by the others, including a wild-eyed Seamus, he’d asked for me.
I shrugged.
I shrugged knowing that Made Men did not take no for an answer and they did not suffer impudence, especially not from women, especially not one they barely considered Italian because my father wasn’t of the blood.
It didn’t surprise me when he back handed me so hard across the face I saw constellations of stars swirling before my eyes. I fell to the ground hard on my hip, agony singing through my bones, my eyes smarting.
Chipped-Tooth shoved me down when I tried to rise with the toe of his leather shoe, a cruel chuckle spitting from his thick lips.
They’d left me there, the local crew and my father, bleeding from a split lip on the cracked linoleum.
When I retrieved the twins and Giselle after they’d gone, Giselle cried to Mama about how I’d broken her chalk.
So, yes, I had family, though a small one by any Italian standard, but I did not have much attention.
And silly, twelve-year-old Elena made the life altering mistake of equating love and attention as one and the same.
So, when Christopher tugged my head with his hand in my hair to land a soft kiss on my mouth as I sat on his lap that fateful late summer afternoon, I was ready to do what I could to please him so that he would never leave me alone again.
“You’re quiet,” Dante noticed, reaching over to grab my hand, thread our fingers together and place both back on the gearstick. “Are you unhappy Cosima and Alexander are coming to visit?”
“No,” I murmured, staring at our twined fingers, Dante’s so thick and rough tipped.
Christopher’s had been long and pale, the knuckles knobby beneath the skin. I’d thought them elegant when I was younger, until they started to do cruel things to my body.
“Elena.” Dante hadn’t spoken to me in that tone before, sharp, almost alarmed. I looked over at him to find his eyes dark as pits. “What aren’t you telling me?”