saltwater

Angelica keeps a light hand on Nadia’s braids, breathing in salt air and the incongruous scent of rose water. The truth ripples through her: My husband’s left me. My father’s dead. My womb is empty. Nothing will ever be the same again. 

Her old rival shudders against her ribs, weeping for her murdered lover, and Angelica envies the shape of her grief. Aureliano loved Nadia, and everyone knew it. He never would’ve run. 

The waves are lapping gently against the shoreline, a steady beat beneath the sound of their tears. They ought to be choppy at a time like this, Angelica thinks bitterly. She feels Fabio’s eyes at her back, and resents them, too, because they’re soft and full of pity. He’ll help Nadia, to honor Aureliano. But what does he owe me, a Sale and Anacleti? Nothing. His pity’s useless. Angelica rests her head against her friend’s. Nadia won’t pity me. She understands.

Nadia’s sobs are quieting, and she hiccups once, like a child, before they finally stop. Then she narrows her eyes into the hard expression Angelica had wanted to crack, the moment they met. “Fuck this,” she says, clutching Angelica’s hand; her voice wavers, despite the sudden straightness of her spine. “Fuck the whole fucking world.” She pulls the taller woman toward the black van. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Where to, Angelica?” asks Flavio, as they settle into the backseat.

“My father’s,” she replies, because there’s nowhere else for her to go. Not yet, anyway, she thinks, determined to change that.

He drops her off at the gate of her old home, and Nadia squeezes her hand three times before she steps out, assuring her, “We’ll see each other later.”

For a wild moment, Angelica is tempted to scream, “Don’t leave!” But she has a little pride left, and she doesn’t want to burden Nadia with her own pain. So she only nods, watching the car drive away until it’s a speck against the setting sun, and she is alone.

Like a dog Manfredi would have used for bait, Angelica slinks into her father’s house. The clan doesn’t pay her too much attention at first; they are distracted by their own grief and fear: grief for her father and fear that the family will lose power. Angelica is an afterthought.

Unlike the affection they show each other, their greetings to her are half-hearted, and their condolences are stilted. If I had brought the next generation of bosses into the world, she thinks, they would treat me with respect. But is it worth it, when they’d hardly care if I died giving birth, as long as my son survived? There’s nothing noble in a trade like that.

Angelica wonders if they ever thought of her as more than a gift between heads of state. I guess I can’t blame them, she acknowledges. After all, she grew up thinking of them as her court and her cannon fodder, the way her father and then her husband taught her to. 

But the Sales are no longer her court. They don’t even feel like her family. So Angelica ignores their whispers and their keening. Instead, she spends days walking the straight line between the kitchen, the bathroom, and her childhood bed, sticking to the wall and the dark corners. She eats dry toast and jam like a sick little girl, choking on hard crumbs. She takes long showers, hot enough to sting, running her hands through her hair to watch it web around her fingers. Under the pink bed covers, she squeezes her eyes shut until she sees more vivid and violent colors. She tries to forget all those nights she dreamed of white weddings to handsome princes. 

Eventually, her ghostwalks attract notice. Lorenzo is the first to catch her at the door, asking how she’s holding up. Before she can answer, he continues with a run-down of all that she missed, telling her about her fathers double cross. According to Lorenzo, her family blames Spadino for the shootout, and, to a lesser extent, for the loss of her baby. Would they have felt differently, she wonders cynically, if I carried a Cesare? 

Lorenzo offers to retrieve her belongings from the Anacleti house while they are still distracted by their own dead. “It’s the least they owe us,” he says, insisting that he can con his way inside as easily as he did in the early days after her wedding, when her father sent him to spy. 

He’s cozying up to me so I’ll give up Spadino’s location, she realizes. A secret to keep in his back pocket. Angelica is almost offended by his lack of cunning. He wants to use me? I might as well use him instead.

So she gives him the list, her voice imperious for the first time in weeks. She orders him to bring her leather purse, black leather boots, and her black wool coat. She doesn’t want the other clothes, because without Alberto (ROYALTY jacket, gold laurel crown, “It’s you and me. The king and queen. We’re the future.”) and her father (steady eyes, steady hand on her shoulder, “You’ll be a good wife, my little princess”) she feels like the “garish Sinti trash“ so many strangers have called her. She thinks of Nadia, reaching out to touch those extravagant earrings, puts her fist on her chest, and breathes in.

She asks Lorenzo for the diamonds, the gold, and the rubies in her mother’s filigree jewelry box, though she half-expects him to steal some pieces. When she tells him to pack the embroidered silk and lace christening gown, she is relieved that her voice doesn’t shake. 

“Being me the mother-of-pearl hand mirror,” she says, “and the vendetta knife.” They are the gifts from Spadino that she cannot bear to abandon. She remembers admiring the roses adorning the knife handle, running her fingers carefully along the edge. Her husband monologued about the vicious, strong old Corsicans, who engraved the blade with “Death to Our Enemies,” and she knew the tales were invented, but didn’t have the heart to correct him. He was so cocky when he said they could be vicious and strong, too. 

Maybe partnership is worth more than love, she muses. He respected me, truly. Even more than Aureliano respected Nadia. The Adami used to chide Spadino for being so loose-lipped with his woman; he told Nadia his plans after he’d already discussed them with his men.

Then Angelica presses her fingertips between her eyebrows, ashamed of her pettiness and her loneliness. Whether it was love or partnership, it wasn’t enough to make her husband stay.

By the time Lorenzo returns, dropping bags at her doorstep and rushing off to tell the others about the Anacletis’ weak spots, Angelica has pocketed all the loose cash she can find in the house. She feels like she’s robbing the girl she used to be.

Putting on her coat, she calls a cab, eschewing anyone’s help, though she expects a Sale cousin to follow her anyway. How long has it been, she wonders, since I went anywhere by myself, without a guard? ”