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People on the balcony made room for us, allowing my parents to dance to the classical beat blaring through the outdoor speakers. We had a view of the parking lot, but that wasn’t what my mother had wanted us to see. The moon was full, so bright and big that it looked closer to Earth. We were on the outskirts of Philadelphia where we could see stars for once. I hadn’t seen stars in years until that night.
I leaned back and into Angelo’s chest, watching as my parents danced under the moonlight without a care in the world. Angelo wrapped his arms around me. Cradled in his warmth, I looked up at the sky and relaxed. The event had turned out to be better than I’d thought.
After another song ended, my mother peeled herself from my father’s arms. She sifted through the clutch in her hand and produced an empty pack of cigarettes. Annoyed, she stuffed them back in her bag.
“Can I have the keys, Lorenzo?” My mother opened up her palm. “I left a pack of smokes in the glove box.”
He made a disgusted face and gave her the keys. Mom pinched his cheek, and he smiled. I leaned back to look up at Angelo, my expression mirroring my dad’s. It was peaceful outside, with no one bothering us.
Dad moved next to us and looked out at the parking lot in the direction of where my mother was headed. “I haven’t seen her like this in a long time,” he admitted.
“Me either. It’s nice. She almost seems like herself again.”
“I think it had to do with what happened last week.”
He was referring to the kidnapping. My mother was
shaken to the core after we came back from New Jersey. The fear of losing my father was enough to snap her out of the alcohol-induced coma she’d been under since I was in high school.
The beep from a car alarm was so unusually loud it caught my attention. Almost as soon as I’d heard the noise, a loud boom penetrated my eardrums. I turned and stared in horror, my body numb from the shock of the flames, which rose up from the parking lot. Pushing off from Angelo’s warm body, I stood at the edge of the balcony, with my eyes as wide as my mouth.
I screamed so loud my ears hurt from the sound of my own voice. “Mooommm…”
I attempted to jump over the balcony to get to her. My father’s BMW was blown to bits along with the cars around it, pieces of fiberglass and random parts were strewn about everywhere.
“I got you, G,” Angelo whispered in my ear and hugged me so tight I couldn’t move. “It’s okay, baby. It’s okay. I got you.” He kept repeating himself as if saying the words would somehow help me deal with the fact that my mother was gone.
My dad dropped to his knees on the ground next to me, sobbing into his hands. I touched my fingers to his shoulder, tears of anger and sadness streaming down my face.
Someone killed my mother.
Someone stole her from us.
A chill ran through my body when I wondered if that someone was the man holding me. The man I loved unconditionally.
And then I cried all over again.
For my mother.
For my father.
For all the memories we would no longer share as a family. The sad part was that the worst had yet to come. This was only the beginning.
Part Two
“Sin from thy lips? O trespass sweetly urged! Give me my sin again.”
-William Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet
Chapter Fourteen
Gia
I hated white orchids. They were my mother’s favorite flower, and now all they did was remind me of death. My mother was dead. She was killed by a car bomb, her body blown to pieces. Nothing was left of her to bury, and I still couldn’t wrap my head around it.
I stared at the motherfucking bouquets of orchids that surrounded my mother’s closed casket and wanted to scream. Why couldn’t she have liked Calla Lilies or something other than white orchids? Whatever flower she liked I was sure I would have hated them on the principle they were everywhere.
