Isa

Lorenzo would have let me stay home from the funeral if I had asked him to.

I had spent nearly the entire two months since I had received the phone call from my mom telling me dad was dead in bed, doing nothing. It was more accurate to say that I was trying to do nothing. What I was doing instead was ruminating on the darkest thoughts that I could surrounding what had happened and how. Of course, that was what I was doing. I was so good at it after all.

I had completely refused to see the body or to hear more about the event than I absolutely needed to. My imagination was colorful enough to fill in the blanks that I didn’t want filled and to apply the horror that such an event obviously needed.

It was absolutely gruesome to imagine your parent dead. It was more gruesome to imagine them being murdered. What had my dad been thinking right before it had happened? Had he felt pain? It pained me to think that it had been slow and painful for him. It pained me even more to think about who could possibly have done it.

Lorenzo and his family crossed my mind because Lorenzo and his family always crossed my mind. It didn’t make sense that the Montorinis would have anything to do with it, but who knew? What the hell made sense anymore anyway? Nothing—because my father was dead. His life had been taken from him—and now he was gone. It made no sense—and it was not fair.

Maybe if I stayed still long enough, I would become part of the furniture.

It mattered and didn’t matter who it was that murdered my dad because at the end of the day he was still dead and I still didn’t know what the hell was going to happen with my marriage. Was that it then? Dad was dead... did that mean the marriage was off? Our marriage was legal and binding in every way despite the fact that it had been arranged and that we hadn’t known each other when we got together. I hated to think of it, but I couldn’t help the fact that I did. I was in such low spirits that dark thoughts came to me with far more ease than bright ones. Lorenzo was my husband, but one of the men for whose sake we had been married was dead. What did that mean for us? Were we still married? I wanted to still be married. My marriage had become a source of such gratification and happiness recently. The presence of Lorenzo was one of the few things that was keeping me going, both literally and figuratively.

Everything had excited me. I was excited about the baby, and now, we had another wedding to plan, our wedding, the way that we wanted to do it. I had been thrilled, delirious with happiness, and just as fast as I had gotten it, it was gone.

The only real indication I had that time had been passing by was Lorenzo’s comings and goings. I had turned our bed into a place of mourning, and it wasn’t fair to him. Every single night it surprised me when he would climb into bed with me. I felt like the grief and sorrow radiated off of me, and it was starting to get on the sheets and seep into the mattress. There was no lack of beds in the house, but he chose, night after night, to sleep at my side.

Every morning he would wake up earlier than usual and he would wrap his arms around me and ask how I was feeling. I was sleeping so much during the day that my nights were usually sleepless. He would ask me what I was going to do that day, and he would ask me to do something, too. It was always something really simple, like sending an email, or going to Central Park. Easy. The aim was literally just to get me out of bed and give me some sort of goal, however small, to work towards achieving that day.

Every night he would come home, and he would get me out of bed or wherever it was that I was vegetating to have a bath or shower with him. This was the part when I sometimes cried. He never told me to stop or became impatient and left me alone. He would just hold me and let me cry until I was done. When we were in bed, he would tell me everything that he had done that day. Everything. He would tell me whether he went to the store and saw a watch he wanted to purchase, or if a pigeon shit on his car that day, everything. He was taking it a lot better than I was. It was my father that had been murdered and not his, but still, it couldn’t have been easy being around me when I was like that. I was a complete sad-sack. He was being so sweet and kind to me, and all I could give him were tears and general sadness.

If he had used that time to seek out Elissa or any other woman to satisfy him sexually, I wasn’t even in a position to be mad about it. I wouldn’t be happy about it, but there was a difference between cheating on your wife and having a need that she was at the time unable to meet for you. I couldn’t even imagine how unappealing I probably was to him at the moment. I likely looked like one of those stray, mangy dogs off the streets whose coat was dry and dull and who nobody wanted to adopt and take home.

If I had to choose, I would want him to use his hand and basically tough it out, but it wasn’t fair for me to expect his libido to have taken the same dip that mine had. A few times I had rolled into his back at night and asked him to wake up. I just needed to feel something and wanted to give him something to know that I still wanted him in that way. I felt empty and broken and his body and having him inside me could take that away, even if only for a little while.

Sometimes it worked.

Sometimes I had it in me to please him. The hard part wasn’t being there physically, I loved to feel his hands on me and his cock inside of me. It felt incredible, physically. He filled me so tight; it felt amazing, and he knew exactly what to do with his mouth and hands to make me go wild. It was being there emotionally and psychologically that was difficult. It killed me that I couldn’t be there for him all the times that he needed me to be because, dammit, I wanted to be. I wanted to be there for him so badly; he deserved so much more than a woman who was practically dead inside with him in his bed when he was doing his best every day to carry both of us.

Lorenzo had hired a nurse to watch me during the day and make sure I was getting enough food, and she also made me stand up and walk up and down the street a couple times for exercise if nothing else. I was still pregnant. I had to make sure the baby didn’t suffer, no matter how much I was. There was no way I would be able to come back from my father’s death and losing the baby all in one jump. No way. That would kill me.

The first trimester was over and that was generally the danger zone. We had made it through unscathed, and the pregnancy seemed to be progressing as planned. I had started showing as well, which was sort of exciting. There was nothing there one minute, and it was suddenly there when I had woken up the next day, physical proof that the little life inside of me hadn’t been poisoned by my grief and that—even though my father was dead—there was something, someone, who I needed to keep my chin up for. I was just thirteen or fourteen weeks along, but my lower abdomen curved gently outwards whereas my stomach previously had been flat.

The change was fairly new, so it wasn’t one of the factors that got in the way of dressing for my dad’s funeral. My mother and I were expected to stand together as family, but I wouldn’t do it without Lorenzo there with me, too. He was my rock. If he wasn’t there, they would have had to take me away on a gurney because I would not have been able to hold myself up.

One good thing about being pregnant was that nobody made you stand up when you were tired. I held Lorenzo’s hand in both of mine, definitely hard enough to hurt him, but he didn’t complain. Not once.

How could one of the brightest, happiest points of my life be followed by this?

Thoughts about what this would change plagued me and made me feel even worse about the whole situation than I already did. Our initial marriage hadn’t been our own, but we had established our own partnership, and we were in love. I prayed that that was what Lorenzo felt as well. I didn’t want us to break up, especially not then. I wanted him to continue being my husband, and I wanted to believe that the intense and beautiful happiness that I had felt, however fleeting, was real, and that it was possible that we could find it again.

Time was supposed to heal all wounds, and I was counting on that adage proving true now more than ever. If that was the case, then that meant the pain was going to subside and that I was going to start to feel like a whole person again at some point.

***

IT WAS A SUNDAY.

The only reason I remember it was a Sunday was because Carlotta wasn’t home and I had to crawl out of bed and come down the stairs to answer the door when someone rang the bell. It was not Lorenzo because it was his house, he had a key. If he had forgotten it or something, he would have rang me on the phone to tell me that he had done that. This was someone else. Whoever it was, I hoped they liked my no-makeup face because that was what they were getting.

I unlocked the door and opened it, squinting at the outdoor light that streamed through the door. Whoever it was pushed past me into the house before I saw who they were. Her high-heeled shoes clicked on the floor, and she looked flawless and polished in a short dress; her hair was perfectly styled like she was going out; and her makeup looked like it had been professionally applied. I was—on the other hand—in a tank top and a pair of comfortable shorts.

Elissa Lazzerini.

Not even my general state of reduced arousal was enough to kill the resentment and hatred I felt for her when she looked at me like I was wasting her time.

“Elissa? Are you lost?” I asked.

She scowled at me.

“Why did you take so long to open the door?” she snapped. “Where is Lorenzo?”

I wanted to scream at her, or at least call her every kind of bitch that I thought she was, but strangely, I felt a calm come over me that stopped me in my tracks. This was the woman, the pathetic, desperate woman who tried to break my marriage up by sending me three or four-year-old nudes of herself and Lorenzo. This was the woman who had been throwing herself at my husband, long before he became my husband and still was now that we were together. This was the woman who had stormed into my home on a Sunday afternoon like she really had some business here. Elissa Lazzerini had nothing on me. She was nothing to Lorenzo, and she was upset about it. She was behaving like a toddler who had had her favorite toy taken from her, and she was having a tantrum.

“He’s not in. You couldn’t call him?”

The frown on her face told me that she had tried calling him, but he had just ignored her, forcing her to take more drastic measures.

“I know he’s here, why is he avoiding me?” she demanded. She walked towards the stairs and started calling for him like the house was burning down. I pressed a few fingers softly to my temples. She was shrieking.

“Elissa, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that this is a private property, and if you refuse to remove yourself from the premises, I am going to get the NYPD to remove you for me,” I said. She swung around and looked at me with pure venom. She was vexed, and I wasn’t going to lie. I sort of liked it. She smiled sardonically.

“Oh, little Isa. I’m surprised that you’re still here. Really, a lot of us thought Lorenzo would have gotten rid of you by now and started competing in his own weight class,” she said. She made a show of looking me up and down, but her face dropped when she got about halfway. I looked down and saw what she did. My stomach. She blanched, and I realized she didn’t know that we were expecting. Her eyes slowly traveled back up to mine.

“My, my Isa. Letting yourself go in your married bliss?” she chirped. I smiled and placed a hand on my stomach.

“No, Elissa, this is called fourteen weeks of pregnancy. You’ve never had this happen to you, have you? You usually have them terminated before six weeks? Am I right?”

She was speechless. How fucked up was it that I derived so much pleasure goading her.

“No... no. You aren’t pregnant. It can't be.”

“Yes, Elissa. It can be and it is. That’s what happens when two people are married; they usually have kids after.”

“Lorenzo didn’t tell me!” she yelled.

“That’s because it was none of your business, Elissa. You aren’t the pregnant one, I am.”

She suddenly charged for the door and left, without another word.

Crazy bitch.

I closed the door, locking it before I made my way back upstairs. Was that all she had come here to do? Yell at me? No. She was looking for Lorenzo and had yelled at me because she had been unable to find him. They weren’t still in contact. I knew this because she had had to make the trip here in order to try and see him. The question was then, what did she have to say to him that was so important she had to come here?

From her track record, it was probably nothing. She probably just wanted to show up and be hysterical for the hell of being hysterical. She was no longer the girl that Lorenzo needed to suck his dick, and she was having a hard time accepting that.

Still, if she was here trying to cause trouble, then I wanted to warn Lorenzo. I sat on the bed and called him. He picked up quickly.

“Babe?” he sounded surprised to get a call from me.

“Lorenzo?”

“How are you, Isa. Is everything okay?”

“You won’t guess who just came to visit.”

“I’m not going to like the answer am I?”

“It was Bachelorette number one, Elissa.”

“Don’t call her that. What did she want?”

“She was asking for you, screaming that you weren’t getting back to her and she was mad about it. But then she saw my stomach, and she suddenly ran away. She didn’t know?”

“Nope. Why would she? She isn’t a friend or family,” he said. I smiled.

“Could you come back home?” I asked.

“Are you scared?”

Was I scared? Elissa was intimidating, but that was mostly because of the way that she looked and dressed. There was the little thing that she was a little crazy, but so were all women when you pushed us too much. I wasn’t threatened by her... well, maybe I was a little threatened by her. She wasn’t a nice woman, and she had shown that she was willing and capable of playing dirty to try and get Lorenzo’s attention with the pictures that she had sent me.

I didn’t trust her. I had no real reason to trust her. She was out of control. She had stormed into my house asking for my husband. She hadn’t even mentioned the pictures when she had come inside. It wasn’t so much that I wanted or expected an apology from her, but that brazen disrespect was just shocking. It was disgusting, and she was disgusting. If she had done that, what else could she or would she do?

Where was she going anyway? Would she just go back to her house and be mad about it, or was she going to find Lorenzo where he was and harass him? I wasn’t worried about what would happen if she did, but who knew with the woman honestly. She was a loose cannon, and she had proven that she would do something crazy if it made me want to leave Lorenzo. Something about it all was making my scalp itch. I wasn’t so much scared; I was cautious. What if she did come back? It wasn’t just me I had to worry about, it was the baby, too.

“I don’t know... not really. I just don’t want to be alone right now.”

“I’ll be right there,” he said to me before he hung up.

“Hurry home,” I said down the dead line.