23
Mia
“You made me do this.” Antonio’s voice came crashing through the door, his words rolling out with no context for me to grasp.
“If you want to talk,” I respond, rattling the door handle, “you have to open the door.”
“They think I don’t notice. That I’m oblivious to the way they look at me. Yeah, they may act as if their loyalties lie with me, but I can tell—see, they’re waiting for me to fuck up. Counting on it so that they can make their move. Yeah, I see those motherfuckers. Vultures, the lot of them!”
“Antonio?” I hear him continue to talk to himself, about his father and something about the scale of power tipping, though the majority of his words are incomprehensible. Then, a flick of a lighter as he lights a smoke. I take notice of the sound of his deep breaths, the smell of cigarettes and booze creeping in from under the door. My brain is struggling to picture an Antonio that’s incapable of holding himself up, one who’s lost control to intoxication. If you had asked me before, I would have never thought that he was the type of man to let himself go like that. I guess the image I saw was that of a man who always maintained that powerful stance of his, where you thought even a truck couldn’t knock him down.
“Mia? Mia, are you— you there?”
I lean against the door, looking out onto the room. It’s strange—on our walk out to the garden, I noticed other rooms on the lower floors. Hell, this house must have a basement, so why did Antonio choose this room to be my prison? Yeah, it’s a room with antiques and a double bed, but it is still a prison cell nonetheless. Then I remind myself that this, me being here, was never part of his plan. That’s not why they came to our house that night. What a thing to realize now, after everything, after I already gave him my body, that the few seconds it took me to get out of the shower that night, he may well have been deciding whether to end my life or not.
He decided not to, though, didn’t he?
He moans loudly as my thoughts fizzle out and my confusion toward him grows. The one thing I do know for sure is that there’s a certain kind of pain he carries with him—an uncertainty that I can relate to.
“I’m here,” I say.
He laughs. “What do you think it is?”
“What do I think?” I think, Antonio, that you’ve been hitting the bottle too hard. “You’re not making sense, you’re drunk.”
I tuck my hair behind my ears, sit on the carpet, and feel his presence on the other side of the door.
“What do you think this connection between us is?”
I stay silent, my heart filling with sorrow, my head with anger. How he has the ability to make more than one emotion erupt within me simultaneously is beyond me. I hate him and yearn for him at the same time.
“I don’t know.”
“I do. I know sweetheart. You want to hear it?” Another laugh. “It’s because we’re both cursed by our father’s sins. You realize that don’t you?”
“My father?” I ask cautiously.
“You see, I was trying to think of a reason why it is that I don’t remember you from the neighborhood. I’ve always been pretty good at that, remembering people.”
I lift my head up.
“Then it hit me. Mia, Mia’s pizzeria. Do you remember? Because it all came rushing back for me. You used to sit in front of me in kindergarten. Can you believe that shit?”
I want to tell him that I know what he’s talking about, but I don’t.
“I hardly remember anything from then,” I admit. “Just go to bed, Antonio. Come back once you’ve slept.”
“Mia, Mia’s pizzeria, giving everyone diarrhea.” He sings to me in the tune of Tarantella Napoletana. “And you know how I remembered? Guess, I bet you can’t guess.”
With a sigh, I get up and walk to the bed and lay down. He’s drunk and in a mood to test my patience—there’s no point trying to talk to him, he’s in his own world. His conversation may as well be with himself.
“From the picture in your room.”
I lift my body with my arms. “What picture?”
“The one from the purple nightstand.” His breathing slows down, his voice drifting off as if falling asleep.
I run back to the door. “You were at my house?”