I think about the last target, a shipping executive's son held for ransom in a warehouse in Sao Paolo, and I can't picture his face. I remember the extraction, the route, the two men I put down on my way to the room where they kept him. I don't remember what he looked like when I got him out, whether he cried, whether he thanked me. It didn't matter then. It doesn't matter now. That's what twenty years of this does to a man. It sands the faces smooth until all that's left is the job.
I already know her face won’t ever sand smooth. I know it the way I know weather is coming, a pressure change against my skin before the first drop falls. I know it and I hate it and I dothe only thing I know how to do with something I hate; I push it down. Set it aside firmly, and go back to the parts of this I can control.
I run through the timeline again. Tonight, if the patrol holds its pattern, there's a window between the three a.m. and four-fifteen rotation when the east wall goes quietest. Seventy-five minutes, maybe less. Enough time to move through the vineyard rows, find the gap along the camera line, get inside, and reach whatever passage leads to that room, if I've read the roofline correctly.
I check the pistol one more time even though I already know it's clean. My hands need the motion and my mind needs the excuse to stop circling back to a laugh I've never actually heard.
Outside, the night darkens. The silence is complete.
It’s time.
Iris
Morning creeps around slowly. Filling the little window and creating a stripe over the mattress where I’m lying. My ribs are bruised from the fall. My forearms are screaming from unaccustomed use, and my brain won’t stop circling.
I don’t know how many days I’ve been here. I don’t know if my brothers know where I am. A few times in the night, I wondered if any of my nieces and nephews would remember me if I never returned home. And when I realized that they probably wouldn’t, I cried quietly, biting my hand to stop myself from screaming.
Moustache comes in with the usual plate of food and a bottle of water. He can tell I’m not quite myself because he pauses for a little longer, asking “Tutto bene?” but I don’t answer. It’s not like we understand each other. A little later he brings a bowl of warm water, soap, and a toothbrush already smeared with paste. For the first time since I got here, I wash myself, and it goes some way to making me feel human again.
When he returns an hour later with my clothes, washed and dried, I thank him, quietly in Italian and then asking, in English, what country this is.
“Please tell me—” I add, but he just shakes his head and hands, like even if he understood me, he wouldn’t be able to tell me.Then he scoops up the bowl and other hygiene bits, and takes them away. Locking the door to the cell behind him.
The door to the corridor is still broken from where he burst through it to get to me when I screamed. They don’t bother closing it at all now. Whether it’s to make sure Ken doesn’t try anything again or because they know there’s no risk of me getting out of here, I don’t know.
I push my hands through my matted hair and growl with frustration. If I start giving up now, I don’t stand a chance. I need to focus on the stuff I know. It could be that if I could squeeze through the window I could run towards the sea. Maybe there would be a boat or something I could hide in…
I make two more vows to myself for when I get out of here, because I am getting out of here if it’s the last thing I ever do.
Firstly, I’m going to actually use the gym at home and build up some real muscle. Secondly, I’m going to study a world map and memorize every country and their defining features…
After I’ve changed into my clothes which I presume have been washed by Moustache’s daughter, I lie back down on the mattress.
I don’t bother eating the bread. I tried to. I picked it up and took a bite, and somewhere between my hand and my stomach the whole idea of eating turns into something my body doesn't want to do anymore. Mustache notices. He says the hungry word at me,fame, mangia, low and almost gentle, and points at the plate before he gives up and just leaves it there, untouched, like maybe he already knows I'm not going to eat it and he's checking a box for someone else's benefit.
Having come to terms with the fact that I’m further from home than I thoughtby an entire fucking ocean, I accept that perhaps even my brothers can’t find me.
The guard rotation shifts sometime around what I've started calling morning-thirty and evening-thirty, based on the light and based on the fact that Ken and Vinny disappear and two new, older men take their place They’re quieter, more bored, less interested in looking at me like I'm a menu item. I learn that somebody smokes on the other side of the wall, above the window, at intervals so regular I could set a watch by it, if I had a watch, if I had anything at all besides the clothes I was taken in and a growing, humming certainty that I might never get out of this room.
I do yoga, badly, from memory, mostly because Nadia dragged me to a class once and I spent the whole hour complaining but apparently absorbed more than I thought. Downward dog on cold stone is not glamorous but it gives my body something to do besides waiting.
I sing, because it turns out grief and fear sound almost the same coming out of your mouth, and singing them is easier than screaming them. I hum it until I know it doesn't just belong to Ma anymore. It belongs to me too, now.
I think about my brothers so often it starts to feel like company, and their wives. The women I’ve come to love as sisters and my gorgeous nieces and nephews with their pudgy arms and toothless grins. God, I miss them all so much.
I think about Ma, and I let myself cry, just a little, because I've decided that avoiding the thought entirely takes more strength than I have left to spare. I think about her hands on Mila's strawberry-sticky face. I think about her asking me to fetch the lace. I think, absurdly, guiltily, that the lace is probably still lying on that sidewalk, unclaimed, and some small ridiculous part of me is furious about that. Mila's dress won’t be complete without it.
I make the same promise every night now, and every night it gets a little sharper, a little more real, less like a wish and more like a plan.
If I get out of this, I stop being the version of myself that fits neatly into other people's spaces. I stop being fine because fine is convenient. I stop scrolling for a life instead of building one myself.
I don't know yet what that looks like on the other side of this. I only know that the woman who walked into Antonelli's for a piece of lace isn't the same woman sitting on this mattress now, counting smoke breaks and memorizing Italian words.
Evening-thirty comes round, the shifts change.Day Smokerleaves to be relieved byNight Smoker.
I feel it before I understand it, my internal organs a barometer measuring the slightest change in the air. The voices in the hallway pick up a different rhythm, faster, clipped, less bored than usual. Someone raises their voice and gets shushed hard, urgently, and I catch one word repeated twice through the stone before it goes quiet again.
Straniero.
