Three Light-Years: A Novel (43 page)

She gets up, turns off the TV. She walks around the room, recites out loud the story about Xanax that Cecilia is always repeating: the woman who arrived in the ER claiming she’d taken “the axe.”

After half an hour Stefania arrives, but she’s more frightened than Silvia is. She grabs the pill that Silvia left on the table, breaks it in two, and swallows half of it with a glass of water. She has her tell her everything; then she starts to cry.

“Stefi, you can’t cry, I called you because I needed someone to talk to, you can’t start crying, too.”

“You have to talk to your sister about it, you have to call her right now. You have to let her help you.” Because keeping it, of course, would be crazy, but Stefania doesn’t have the courage to say so, and wants Silvia to be the one to say it first.

“I can’t,” Silvia says, shaking her head.

“I’m sure she’ll know what to do in a case like this.”

“What are you saying?”

“She’s a doctor! She
knows
!”

Then Silvia begins to cry.

“I can’t talk to her about it, I can’t. She has plenty to worry about, believe me. I just can’t.”

They sit on the couch, holding hands. “This is the first time something this big has happened to us, right?” Stefania says.

Silvia nods. “The first time.”

“Will you tell me what happened? Tell me who he is?”

*   *   *

At Michela’s First Communion, Luca had asked to speak to her, and the following day he’d come to her house and started telling her everything. But not right away, not all at once. It took four visits. The first time, he’d sprawled on the couch, drained, enervated, and at the end of an hour of stammering in a faint voice, he hadn’t said a thing. He wasn’t wearing his usual gray suit and tie, but all clothes looked good on him, even that blue sport jacket, even those beige chinos. He no longer seemed like a distant hologram but more fraternal; there was no longer any trace of frenzy and panic in him. Nor had he reverted to being the person he always was: present, solid, yet remote. He was a new and different Luca, one who collapsed on the couch and sprawled. He said he was sorry he’d gotten her involved, that Cecilia would never forgive him, that he didn’t want to put her in a tight spot and trouble her with their problems. Silvia looked at him in silence and thought back longingly to the frightened man she’d glimpsed the day before.

“I’ll make you some tea,” she said. He explained that he didn’t drink tea, it bothered his stomach, he’d never liked it. A pointless explanation, because Silvia started boiling water, poured two teaspoonfuls of Darjeeling into the infuser, set the cups on a tray. With her back to him, leaning against the kitchenette counter, she murmured that she could keep a secret, she wouldn’t say anything to anyone. She added that if he no longer felt like confiding in her, however, it was fine, too. If he’d changed his mind, if the prospect of talking made him uneasy and he no longer felt like unburdening himself, best to just drop it.

It was a trick she knew well, she’d used it dozens of times with her girlfriends, her girlfriends had used it dozens of times with her. Many years later she would use it on her son, so it wasn’t necessarily a malicious trick to extort confessions. When used with good intentions, it helped someone who wanted to talk, but who had lost his courage.

Luca shook his head, he was sure that talking would do him good, though until then he hadn’t felt like it, and he wondered why he’d felt the urge to tell her everything the day before, at Michela’s party. And his answer was that maybe he really wanted her to
not
keep the secret, maybe he wanted her to tell someone.

Silvia laughed. “Some trust you have.”

“You’re not understanding me.” He reddened. “I can’t explain it.” He slumped down a little more, hanging his head between his shoulders. He looked at his hands in silence. After an hour he left.

*   *   *

He came back the next day. And again Silvia offered him a cup of tea and again he said no thanks. Silvia smiled, began boiling water, poured it into the teapot, shut the lid. She crossed the room, turned on the stereo, turned the volume down low. She really couldn’t imagine what Luca wanted to tell her, she’d come up with any number of hypotheses, but the most credible still seemed to be trouble in the marriage. She couldn’t guess which of the two was the cause; it seemed so unlikely that either of them would have a lover, people as sensible and levelheaded as they were. Just the idea of it made her laugh, the way two people kissing make children laugh. Seeing Luca among the objects of her daily life reassured her. Nothing serious or irreparable could have happened.

“Yesterday, when I said … I meant to say…” He stopped, rubbed his forehead with one hand. “I was sure that what I wanted to say would have upset you and that you would tell the people you’re closest to. It’s normal, it’s natural, everyone does it, to try to understand. I can’t do it right now, I just can’t.”

Silvia poured the tea into the cups, set the tray on the table in front of the couch, picked up her cup; the other cup stayed where it was, steaming, gradually cooling, no longer steaming. “Okay,” Silvia said, sitting down. “Who was I supposed to tell whatever it is you want to tell me?”

“I don’t know. Your mother?”

“My mother?” Her eyes widened. “I barely talk to my mother. How could you think I’d go and tell her anything about you? And why?”

“I wanted someone to know who would tell Cecilia that she was wrong, that she’d done a terrible thing.”

“You wanted our mother to tell her?”

“You, your mother, I don’t know. I’m just trying to understand why I thought I should tell you. I feel so ashamed. I don’t want to tell anyone. I don’t want anyone to know about it. I wish it had never happened.”

“I’m not following you, I’m sorry.”

Luca pulled his phone out of his jacket pocket. He seemed to be searching for a number or a message; he sighed, put it back in his pocket. He shook his head a little, muttered something.

What if after having been the most normal guy in the world, he, too, had become one of those oddballs, what if he had become one of those people who sit on park benches, talking to themselves?

“Maybe you should tell me what it is Cecilia did, otherwise I don’t get it.”

“It’s not easy. I’ve never felt the way I’ve felt the last couple of months, this has never happened to me. This person isn’t me, this anger isn’t me. I think about it all day, I think about it all night, I never would have imagined having certain thoughts. Do you understand?”

“Not really.”

“I wanted someone to tell her that she shouldn’t have done what she did, I wanted a parent to yell at her. I wanted to share the anger with someone.”

“Well, I, in any case, can’t go and say anything to anyone, and I can’t reprimand Cecilia for what she did if I do understand, I think, what she did. So, if sharing it with me isn’t enough, better not to tell me anything.”

This time it wasn’t the old trick to affectionately extort confessions. It was a new trick, in which you said exactly what you thought. In part because by this time it was clear that Cecilia had been the one to betray him, and Silvia wasn’t sure she wanted to know the details of the story.

“You don’t understand, you can’t,” said Luca.

He got up. He stood there a moment. He said goodbye, and then he was gone.

Cecilia had fallen in love with another man while her father was dying. Silvia placed her empty cup on the tray, beside the one that was still full.

*   *   *

Luca came back after a few days, very upset. “I would have been better off if I’d never met her, hadn’t married her, hadn’t had the two children we have. Can you imagine? Me thinking such a thing? The best moments of the past ten years, the most precious things I have, destroyed forever. Michela’s first day of school, remember how big she was already? We were more nervous than she was as she was getting ready the night before, and that morning I took her picture before we left the house; she was proud, excited. Every so often I look at the photo again and I laugh to myself, happy, you know? And the evening, at dinner, when Mattia began speaking, his first complex sentences with all the words in the right place, and Ceci and I looked at each other and almost started crying: he hadn’t gotten a single word wrong. He chatted about cars, he already knew all the models of all the manufacturers, and we pretended not to notice, not to interrupt him, to prolong the moment, but Michela couldn’t help herself, she shouted: ‘Mattia, you’re talking perfectly!’ We all burst out laughing. And once at the beach when he defended his sister from two older kids who threw sand at her, and Michela was beaming, and he wanted to continue fighting, furious at us for dragging him away. And that time, in the mountains, when some young people passed us, we were on the shore of a pond, and Michela, behind us, followed them all the way to the other side, she was three or four years old, and when I went to bring her back they were laughing like crazy, saying what a cute little girl she was, she wanted to know which ones were boyfriend and girlfriend, she’d only known them five minutes, and she was saying, ‘Don’t you like her? Why don’t you kiss each other?’ in that tiny voice of hers, remember?”

“Oh, I remember, I remember.” Silvia nodded. She nodded. And nodded. What else could she do? She could only nod. Until Luca went away, forgetting even to say goodbye this time.

The man she’d glimpsed a few days ago wanted to talk, he needed help, he was seeking advice. This one didn’t need someone to talk
with
, he needed an audience, he just had to recite his monologue, he already knew all the answers. Besides, wasn’t this whole scene a little too much, if it was just an affair?

*   *   *

Then finally, on his fourth visit, Luca blurted out what he wanted to say, with no second thoughts.

He showed up carrying an umbrella, even though it wasn’t raining and wasn’t threatening to rain. He sank onto the couch. He sat up straight. His voice went up two octaves, took on a ragged, high-pitched timbre, and ended in a sob through clenched teeth: “We were expecting a baby, Cecilia aborted it, she said she couldn’t keep it.”

Silvia held up her hands to stop him. “Wait, I don’t understand! She was expecting a baby? She lost it?”

“She went and had an abortion, she went alone, without telling me.”

“She had a miscarriage…”

“NO! NO!” he shouted. “WILL YOU LISTEN TO ME? SHE HAD AN ABORTION! SHE DIDN’T WANT IT!”

“She said she couldn’t keep it…”

“She meant she didn’t want it.”

“She told you: I can’t keep it. That’s all she said.”

“She told me she didn’t want another child, that Mattia was still having problems, that she didn’t have the strength to start all over again. That’s what she said. I wanted us to talk about it, I asked her to wait. No use. Ten days later, she’d done it.”

“I don’t believe it.”

The disclosure was so unexpected, the shock so great. Silvia shook her head. When had it happened? A day when they’d seen each other? A day before, a day after? Without telling anyone. She’d made an appointment. By phone? At the hospital? She’d gone by herself. When? What was the weather like? Was it sunny or raining? What had she been doing at that moment? Where were the children? In the morning she’d taken them to school. In the afternoon she’d gone to pick them up. She was calm; she was frightened. Did her mother know? She didn’t know. But how could she not have noticed anything? How could her sister have been able to hide it all so well?

She didn’t want to hurt Luca, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to console him. She had a knot in the pit of her stomach, her old friendly knot, and at the same time she felt lighter, relieved, maybe only of uncertainty. Above all, she was sure she didn’t share Luca’s anger. She would have been willing to share his grief or pain or sorrow, but anger? Actually, it seemed unthinkable to her that in the face of such an act he would feel only anger, or mainly anger, that he didn’t have anything to say about Cecilia.

“Is Cecilia all right?”

“Cecilia is just fine, she doesn’t realize what she’s done; you’d think she’d gone to the dentist.”

“Are you
sure
?”

He nodded.

Silvia started stammering. “It doesn’t seem possible that she … if she made that decision … I’m not against it … I’m not opposed in general, but … it’s a big decision, the way you tell it, it seems like she made a snap decision, just like that … without giving it any thought … it’s not like her, I can’t believe it … I don’t like you saying that … that thing about the dentist … I don’t like it, I don’t like it
one bit
!”

She was a little short of breath. But she knew why she felt relieved. Cecilia was no longer the perfect woman, she was no longer infallible, and it was only right that her mother know it. In the end, she did share a little of Luca’s anger, though for different reasons: Cecilia never told her anything, she didn’t expose herself, she didn’t reveal her weaknesses, she wasn’t a true friend, and that’s why she had no girlfriends—girlfriends bare all to one another. To go and do a thing like that alone. She felt relieved, but it was a fragile relief; her anxiety was stronger. She put a hand to her throat to gauge her heart rate, she tried to think rationally.

“Maybe none of us realized how much Cecilia suffered over the death of our father, for not having been able to save him. I, too, sometimes felt angry with her, because she always seemed so cold when she spoke about Papa’s condition, about his prospects—when she told me and Mama what could still be done, as if she were talking about a to-do list, without ever saying there was nothing more that could be done. But those are defense mechanisms, you know? If she did—if she felt the need to do that thing, she must have had her reasons, she certainly has reasons that you have to find out. I understand you’re upset, but angry, no, you can’t give in to it, you have to be there for her. And don’t ever say that thing about the dentist again.”