“What does the German girl have to do with you fitting in?”
“Well, it was very bitter to my father that he’d been rejected, and he never stopped believing that if he’d spoken German, he would have been able to make a place for himself in Switzerland, and everything would have turned out differently. When I was born, he was determined that I would learn to speak as many languages as my brain would hold. He was willing to go without food to pay for tutors.”
I laughed. “The other boys must have made fun of you.”
“Yes. They called me professore. I told my father how I was suffering but he wasn’t sympathetic. He said, ‘Your friends are morons and I’m not going to raise you to be a moron just so a bunch of morons will accept you.’ He felt that if I knew languages and cultures, I could live anywhere and never be shut out as he was in Switzerland.”
“I guess he was right,” I offered.
“Right? Maybe. But it was him who loved the German, not me. Why must we always restore to our fathers whatever they missed in life? Why must we undo their mistakes when their mistakes have nothing to do with our mistakes?”
Feeling I had missed the point, I didn’t even try to answer. After a while, he whispered, “Darcy, are you asleep?”
“No. It’s too hot to sleep. Shall we change position? Has your arm fallen asleep under me?”
“No. Let’s stay like this.”
“All right.”
“In fact, let’s not sleep at all,” he suggested. “I don’t like to sleep. How can I know I’ll ever wake again?”
“I wouldn’t worry. Most people aren’t lucky enough to die in their sleep. Most die at length and in agony…like Jewel.” I felt his arm tighten around me.
“You miss her very much, don’t you?”
“Yes. But I’m angry too.”
“Why?”
“That she lived and died, and it didn’t mean a damn thing.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I don’t either. It just seems not right that she should have been so nice to everybody all her life and then die like that. It came to nothing in the end, and so her life didn’t count for anything.”
He patted my bare shoulder. “If you look at it like that, then no life counts for anything. We all come to nothing in the end.”
“I guess. I’m tired now.”
“Don’t fall asleep yet. Let me have one more cigarette.”
It was one of Luca’s unjustifiable peculiarities that he wanted for us to fall asleep and wake up exactly at the same moment. Together. Needless to say, this rarely, if ever happened and I know it disappointed him.
“Someday you’re liable to set the house on fire. Every bit of it’s wood. It’d go up easy enough.”
“I’ll not set it on fire,” he assured me. “Tell me what it was like for you growing up. I can’t imagine you as a child. I think of you as springing from your mother all grown up.”
“I don’t really remember being one,” I told him honestly.
“Nothing at all?”
“A bit here, a piece there.”
“What do you remember?” He was interested now.
“Being afraid.”
“What of? The things that children fear? Ghosts? Monsters?”
“I never feared the dead. I can tell you that,” I answered, thinking back to the night I had dragged Jesse’s body and buried it. No nightmare of him rising from his shallow grave had ever tormented me.
“Then what?” Luca persisted.
“The living. I fear the living.”
“But who exactly? Tell me.”
“Oh, go to sleep. You ask too many questions.”
“I ask because you’d never tell otherwise. Tell me the first time you can remember ever being afraid,” he said, trying a different tack.
“That’s not so hard,” I said. “There was only the one time really, and I never forgot it. There was this man once, who wore a uniform. I think he was a soldier, but I can’t be sure.”
“What did he look like?”
“I don’t remember. I only know he was big. Or else I must have been very small then, because in my memory, the man is very big, like a giant. It was night. Like this night. Hot. So hot that the sheets stuck to me. Just like now. I was sweating.”
“Go on,” he encouraged me. “It was night and you were just a little girl. Then what happened?”
“Sounds. Like crying coming from my mother’s room. I got up and went to the door and listened. She was crying and so I went in and there was this man. They didn’t notice me right away but when they did, the man stood up real quick and put on his uniform. My mother stayed on the bed huddled against the headboard. Her face was turned away from me. The man came toward me. He looked mad. I wanted to run back to my room, but I didn’t want to leave my mother. I wanted us both to get to my room and lock ourselves in. I knew about locks. I couldn’t quite reach the one on my bedroom door, but I knew how it worked. You slid the bolt across. The man was standing over me. I ran past him to the bed. Only when I got into bed with the woman and she turned around, it wasn’t Jewel at all. It was this horrible creature with paint all over her face. Her hair was like Jewel’s a little but that was all. Everything else about her was different. She had a mouth like a fish, and it was rouged red. She started to laugh, and I ran and ran until I was back in my room. The man was coming after me. I could hear him. I tried to reach the bolt, but I wasn’t tall enough. So I dragged over a chair, all the while
