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Mariano

M y wife was with me, but she wasn’t.

She patted our dogs on their heads as they greeted her when we stepped out into the hot Grosseto sunshine, but it was absentmindedly.

They seemed to sense she wasn’t herself, and after Zeus brought her the ball, and she didn’t take it, both dogs whined a little.

Apollo looked at me as if to say, mamma isn’t okay .

No.

She wasn’t okay.

Neither was I.

Our moment in the hospital was life-changing.

The moments after were going to be too.

As if we were back in that space and time, I could feel her pulling away from me, and I refused to fucking allow it. Maybe I’d give her a day, a month, but sooner or later, we’d face the pain of this together, since it was our loss to bear.

She stopped halfway to our door, her eyes going in the direction of the stables. Her stare narrowed and she squinted against the glare. She didn’t bother to put her hand up, and after a minute or two, she shook her head and walked toward our front door.

She had been looking at the broken sign. It had been put to the side, but it was still not hung. I wondered if she was thinking back to when Nino and the traitorous Judas to fate had been fighting, and Nino had hit him over the head with a guitar.

I rolled my lip in, rolling my shoulders.

Nino should have fucking destroyed him then, killed him in the worst way possible. Made him die a thousand deaths. Stole his heart from his chest and fed it to a pig.

I had given him the order not to.

When I went to open the door, my wife cleared her throat. “Nino and Dr. Musa,” she whispered in a small voice. “They have been buried?”

“Yes,” I said, pulling her close, kissing her head.

She pulled away from me. It wasn’t a rip, but a small tear.

I thought back on the quilt Hannah always spoke about, the one she started creating when she and her Bear were first married.

After he died, she wrapped it around her shoulders, claiming she could never get warm unless it was around her body.

I wondered if there was ever a time when Hannah had pulled away from Bear.

I would have wondered about my mamma, but I knew.

When she had lost the first Matteo, she had.

That was why my father had taken her to Fiji.

He said the water had helped heal her. It had, but he’d told me she was never the same after.

He’d adjusted to fit her metamorphosis. Fall deeper for her.

However, he refused to allow the tear the loss had caused in their life to rip them apart.

They would heal together.

My back straightened and my shoulders stiffened.

He was fucking right.

I opened the door to our home, and after I entered behind my wife, setting her suitcases down, the dogs came rushing in behind us.

They danced around my wife, and I gave them an order in Italian to rest. My wife turned and looked at me before she sighed, taking in our home.

It was as if her eyes were seeing it for the first time, and after a minute or two, when she familiarized herself with it again, she cleared her throat.

“I am going to rest,” she whispered. Her hands were tightened into fists at her sides, and her knuckles were bone white.

I cleared my throat. “Sistine.”

She stopped walking, giving me her back.

“This will be the hardest loss we have to go through.” I cleared my throat. “But that’s the focus of that sentence. We . Not you. Not me. We. It’s us. Ours. Whether here or not, he’s always ours.”

“Leopoldo,” she whispered.

Her shoulders slumped a little, but she held her head up high as she walked toward our room, calling the dogs behind her.

So fucking small.

She looked so fucking small.

She had lost weight and was nothing but skin and bones, but it was more than that. Her spirit had always been fierce. Full of fire. And it had dimmed. Her light was dulled by the unimaginable pain.

Some consider water healing.

Maybe it was.

My wife.

My wife would need something different.

She would need the rays of the sun to bask in, to set her spirit on fire again.

She shut the door to our room, a quiet click that was as loud as a bass drum in a church.

She was locking me out.

I didn’t know what to do what the overwhelming feelings inside of me.

If it would have been a man on the fucking street, I would have slaughtered him.

If it would have been a man in my family, I would have challenged him.

A woman close to me, I would have taken Guerriero out for a ride to clear my fucking head, to have him remind me of who I was.

A ruthless outlaw.

A romantic knight.

I couldn’t be tamed.

My w ife.

My l ife.

The beat of my heart.

The air in my lungs.

I fell to my knees behind her.

A summer storm.

It howled outside of our window. It wasn’t as strong as the storm that had caused so much loss and devastation, but it was strong enough to make one of the shutters beat against the villa.

Rain pelted. Lightning lit up the room, shocking the small form of my wife in the bed.

Thunder rumbled and, in my mind, I fucking could have sworn she trembled.

Her back was to me.

She refused to look at me.

She barely ate.

She barely got out of the bed.

She shivered from the cold. Always cold now.

Hannah had sent over the quilt from Wyoming. I had covered her with it, but she took one look at the blue pattern close to the center and set it beside her, trembling even harder.

It had been two weeks since we arrived home, and she was becoming a shell of the fiery woman she had once been.

She had grown an attachment to the dogs.

They slept around her, protecting her, and when they would go outside, she stirred, like she didn’t fucking feel comfortable unless they were beside her.

They did their business and ran back in.

They felt it, her weakness, and they had been bred to protect the weak.

I was with her nonstop, the same as the dogs. Unless I took the seat Marciano had left for me outside of our door. At times, the anger in me became so great, I had to take a breather, but I couldn’t be far from her either.

We were both stuck in hell, except it seemed as if we were stuck in two versions of it, a wall between us.

My hands curled around the handles of the chair in our room beside the bed, my knuckles burning from the strain.

Another shock of lightning lit up the room.

Thunder rattled the panes.

My wife made a whimpering noise.

I stood, and she turned to face me.

Slowly, I sat back down in the chair, keeping my eyes on hers.

It was the first time she’d met my eyes since she woke up in the hospital for longer than a few seconds.

It was the first time she stared at me. I exhaled, slowly, silently, the immense pressure in my chest lessening by a breath.

I kept anticipating that she would turn over and give me her back.

It seemed as if she wanted to say something, but she didn’t know how. Like she had forgotten all her words.

She was always full of them.

I was like my old man in that way. I didn’t have many to spare, even if, on the inside, I was flooded with emotions.

Maybe that was the fucking problem. I knew what love felt like—my mamma and sister made sure all of us men had known what it was our entire lives.

When it knocked on our door, we’d recognize it.

Still. No matter how much mamma loved me, or my sister thinned my skin a bit, there was no erasing or lessening the Fausti blood humming through my veins.

At the sound of battle, I was prepared in an instant.

At the sound of my wife whimpering, I was fucking lost, overwhelmed by emotions.

Maybe if my wife would’ve said, “I’m dying inside—I don’t know what to do with all this pain,” I would have repeated the words to her. I couldn’t. They were stuck in my chest, and I couldn’t dislodge them. Couldn’t share with her my weight if she was already feeling weighed down herself.

Neither of us knew what to say.

I wasn’t sure what she was dreaming of when she slept.

If she dreamed of anything at all after the doctor at the hospital had given her pills to ease her anxiety.

As for me, I had nightmares. That night.

It came back to me in vivid flashes, a shocking white light illuminating the hellish scene around me in reels.

I was always bogged down, not able to get to my heart.

I was always a breath away, my hand too slow to save her from the fall.

I couldn’t find peace.

My heart refused to quit racing.

My breaths refused to calm.

Sitting in the stillness, for me, was a hell I wasn’t even sure the devil himself could design.

The chair cracked and one of the handles broke off. I rubbed that hand against my leg, not sure what to fucking do with myself.

I couldn’t stay.

I couldn’t leave.

I refuse to leave.

If I tried to separate myself from her, it felt as if my heart was going to explode inside of my chest to get to hers. I had to know where she was. If she was eating. If she was still breathing.

Her eyes were still on mine until she fell asleep again.

The sun burned through the curtains, illuminating our entire room, making the woman in the bed glow.

Her hair fanned behind her, but in the back, I was willing to bet there was a knot.

I wanted to brush her hair. Take care of her.

She was so fucking small. Too fucking small. But she kept denying me.

I stood, my hands flexing, going to the window. The storm had left some damage behind. A couple of downed trees. I did my business in the bathroom, and as I was entering the bedroom, a knock came at the door.