Page 36 of Captured Fantasy

The world slowed as I stared at him, wondering what the words coming out of his mouth could possibly mean. That didn’t make any sense. Carolina was so young, so full of life, like a piece of pure light. She couldn’t be dying, she did everything right, she didn’t drink, she didn’t smoke. God, she barely even swore, as if that mattered.

“What?” I whispered.

Amadeo broke, his chest heaving and body shaking with sobs. The sound was haunting. Like a lonely, wounded animal in a trap. The house shuddered as he fell against the door, sliding down to a crumpled heap. I dropped to my knees, gathering him against my chest, not caring that he drenched my thin slip. He was icy cold.

“Oh, Amadeo,” I whispered. “My God, that’s not fucking fair.”

“This is my fucking fault, somehow I missed the signs,” he heaved. “It’s already advanced. She doesn’t want treatment, she doesn’t see the fucking point in it. I see the fucking point, I’m so fucking selfish—I want her for just a few more months. I’d do anything for a goddamn year, but they gave her six months.”

My head spun and my stomach roiled with nausea. I wanted to scramble to the bathroom and heave everything into the toilet, but I couldn’t. I had to hold it together for Amadeo. Carolina was his wife and his grief was more important than mine. I slid against the wall with him, my heart beating hot beneath my cold, wet chest. He sank into my arms and I held him like a child.

I felt oceans of grief pour from him as he wept. Pouring out into my arms, shaking my body. My whole body was empty, like a shock of white light, and there was a faint whirring sound in the back of my head. My eyes wanted to cry, but the tears felt sticky and the heat burning behind them was dry.

It wasn’t my place to weep, not now while Amadeo’s pain was so raw in my arms.

“You have to go home,” I whispered.

“I know,” he gasped. “I just needed a minute…I needed someone to tell.”

I got to my knees, pulling him into a seated position. “Come to the couch,” I coaxed. “Let’s get you a drink.”

He stumbled as I urged him to his feet and guided him into the living room. His shoes left little wet patches on the floor, staining my clean rug, but I didn’t care. This was devastation, right here in my living room. And there would be shrapnel after the explosion died down.

There would be shards of grief to step through for months, years, decades, to come.

I retrieved him a glass of whiskey and he bolted it, his head hanging, the glass crushed in his fist. Feeling awkward, I sank down on the couch beside him and he turned to face me, his dark eyes raw, like an open wound.

“I can’t do this, Enza,” he whispered. “I can’t watch her fall apart. She’s going to suffer and I can’t do a fucking thing about it. How do…how do I fix this for her?”

I swallowed. “You can’t.”

“Jesus Christ, I want to die with her.”

Into my mind flashed the image of Amadeo in the car, his carefree smile bright and the wind ruffling his hair. No, to snuff out all of that life would be a crime. In that moment, my role in the world made sense, as if a divine hand had reached down and pointed me to it. Perhaps he couldn’t save Carolina, but I could save him. I owed it to her, to sweet, innocent Carolina. At the very least, I owed her peace of mind.

“Amadeo, I want you to listen to me right now,” I whispered.

His mouth parted at the urgency in my voice.

“You will pull it together and go back to Carolina tonight,” I said. “You will be there for her, you will hold it together. You’ll support her and give her peace, she deserves that. And when you need to break down, you come here because I can take it. You give me the worst parts, because I can fucking take it, Amadeo, but you don’t show those parts to her.”

We were both crying by the end of my speech. Amadeo pulled me against his chest, his face buried in my hair. Our bodies shook, hollowed out, broken and afraid. The stormed lashed outside. Howling to be let in.

I patched him together, letting him use the shower and dress in some of Gino’s old clothes while I threw his shirt and pants in the dryer. I made sure he was fed and sobered up and I stood in the doorway while he drove down the road into the darkness.

Everything I’d tamped down came boiling to the surface. I stepped out into the rain, the warm droplets soaking my hair and the thin, silky slip I still wore. Turning my head up to the sky, I let the rain stream down over me in a desperate attempt to wash away everything that had just happened. Hot tears slipped from my eyes and mingled with the wetness already pouring over my face.

I wasn’t sure where I was going, but something pushed me to walk barefoot and dressed in my soaked slip down my walkway to the gutter where the water rushed like a flood. A drowned grasshopper surged by my feet and swirled down the grate.

My lungs collapsed like a heavy weight had fallen and crushed my body. Except it hadn’t just fallen, it had always been there. Since my mother walked out the door when I was still a child, since I stood at the edge of my father’s grave. Since Gino’s last rattling breath had left me sitting with nothing but the gentle puff of his oxygen tank, fruitlessly breathing air into his quiet lungs.

I started running down the street in the dark, water and debris spraying up with every step. Every house on my street was quiet, oblivious to the pain raging through me. My lungs seared as I ran down the hill, cutting through the yard of the last house. The woods were a dark tangle around me as I pushed toward the spark of light in the distance.

The light at the gate of the cemetery glittered in streaks of yellow through my wet lashes. I walked slowly across the gravel drive, pain shooting up my legs with every step. Why was I suddenly so cold? It was sweltering outside and the rain was warm, but my body shivered uncontrollably.

I pushed the gate ajar and slipped around the chain. The cemetery was quiet, puddles of water forming around the stones. The graves rose up like silvery ghosts, but I wasn’t afraid as I picked my way through them.

After my father’s death and my marriage, I had come out to this cemetery every night for a moment of respite. An opportunity to speak my mind to what was left of the man who had loved me despite not having sired me.

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