Tessa
I was leaving the daycare, where I’d just dropped off Antonio and Lucas for the day.
I was heading to Venezia for prep before the lunch rush. I’d started helping out a few days a week; my brother-in-law was having some staffing problems and he needed the help. He had very high standards. His kitchen was like Hell’s Kitchen. He had fired three people last week for their laziness.
I’d gotten married and had the kids young but I’d had babies while going to cooking school. I was a trained chef and I needed the distraction of something outside my father’s house and my pain. Venezia was just the ticket.
Being at home all day long felt a bit smothering at times. Sarah meant well but she was always in my business and up in my space. And then things had gone weird with Lisa since the ‘big reveal’ so cooking in a busy kitchen allowed me to focus on something other than the thoughts twisting and turning in my brain and my broken heart.
I was still learning how to be a single mother, still healing from losing my father and my husband. Still helping my sons cope with life without their Daddy. And now I was also reeling from the latest…the bombshell Lisa dropped on me and my sister.
My relationship with my best friend was a lie. My father was worse than we thought and believe me, we already thought he was going to have a heckuva time getting past the pearly gates.
We knew more than we were given credit for but Lisa rocked our already precarious world in a bad way with the truth about her relationship with Tom Ferrano Sr.
Normally, Luciana and I would put our heads together and pick things apart for hours or even days after a drama, big or little.
However, the day Lisa told us, tears in her eyes, who she really was and how she’d really met our father, why she was enrolled in culinary school with me? We then listened to our new sister-in-law, Angel, tell us how she met Dare and what her story was, how she and Lisa had come from the same awful place.
The way our new sister-in-law was when we first met her? Timid and jittery? Lisa wasn’t like that at all. But I guess it made sense how Angel’s sudden appearance meant some sort of delayed reaction with Lisa. We first thought Pop’s death was hitting her late. There was Tommy’s wedding and all that we’d been through. Getting home and then having nothing going on gave us all too much time to reflect.
We knew the miscarriage had devastated her, beyond measure. But now, in hindsight, I could see that Angel’s appearance was the start of Lisa unraveling.
Lisa gave us a bunch more facts and then said that her counselor had helped, that Dare and Tommy arranged for her to go to some retreat and that put her on the road to healing. She said she knew she had a long road ahead but invited us to ask questions if we had any. She also said she never thought poorly of our father, that he rescued her and had treated her like absolute gold.
After a long and awkward silence, after her tale was told, after Angel spoke, she asked again,
“Do you want to ask me anything?”
I shrugged. Luc started to cry. Tia hugged Luc. Lisa started to cry. Angel hugged Lisa. I just sat there, numb. Not hugging anyone, not wanting to be hugged. Not crying. Lisa reached for me, but I gave her the hand and said, “I need a minute.”
My eyes were the only dry ones at the table. I’d already spent so much time crying in the previous few months that I guess tears were in short supply.
We wrapped the lunch up then. Eddy packed our food to-go because we’d barely touched our meals what with the drama being spilled after appetizers, Lisa telling us, through tears, how much we meant to her, telling us how much it meant being welcomed into our family. How sorry she was that she wasn’t able to tell us the truth before then, how keeping that secret was so ingrained that it took everything to even say it aloud.
I just kept nodding, I think. But I was feeling like I was about to have an anxiety attack so I needed air. I think I kept saying I just needed air and finally got up to go get some.
As I was putting my coat on, she told us that she’d understand if we didn’t want anything to do with her from now on. She also said that there were things we didn’t know, security-related issues, that meant that she had to play the part for a while, that we had to keep it secret or all of our lives would be in danger.
“As soon as it’s safe for me to go, if you want me gone, I’ll go. I don’t want to go. You guys are my family. But I will if you want me to.”
Luc and I stared, in shock. What we didn’t do was tell her whether we wanted her to go or stay.
“I just need some air,” was what I’d said and I’d gone outside. My brother Dare stopped me from getting in my car. He’d just shown to pick up Angel and took me and my sister in his SUV instead, saying he’d have someone bring my car home later. He went in to get Angel and Luc and I sat there. I didn’t say bye. I was too… I don’t know.
As he drove, he lectured us about the importance of keeping it all quiet.
Luc had started getting emotional, bordering on losing her shit, asking what he was gonna do about a place like that existing, a place that had fucked over his wife and Lisa, two members of the Ferrano family.
Dare had told her to shut up,
“Shut up, Luc. Listen to me. I told you after Pop died, Tommy and I would find a way to get us all clear of his shit and I wasn’t joking. It’s just takin’ a bit to finesse and we keep getting roadblocked.”
He went back to talking to us about keeping our mouths shut.
I couldn’t even talk to Bianca about it. As close as she was to our family, like another sister to us because her father was our father’s business partner for years, keeping our mouths shut meant keeping them shut completely.
We didn’t have to be told twice; we might’ve been called spoiled and oblivious mafia princesses by bitches who didn’t really know us, but we had Ferrano blood running through our veins.
As much as we busted Dare and Tommy’s chops at times, they were authority figures in our lives, had been since they were teenagers. Well, Tommy always. When we were small, he always had this dark and authoritative presence in our lives.
It took teenage hormones and for me to grow into my inner diva to stand up to my oldest brother. I joked all the time that he was a puppy dog under that angry demeanor but really, he wasn’t a puppy unless the puppy was rabid and a Pitbull.
I’d said it a few times hopefully, trying to crack his wall, but until he’d met Tia he rarely even cracked smiles around us. He was protective and he was smart and serious and we knew that our family was in the midst of some messy circumstances and we knew when our brothers, either of them, meant business. This was business time. Dare and Tommy were the law, just as Pop was when he was still here.
Luc wanted to be dropped with me at Pop’s house, where I now lived. I hadn’t been able to cope after Jim and Pop died so I’d moved back to my old room, my boys in the adjoining bedroom that used to be Luciana’s, and my house sat as it used to, before my husband died.
I’d just taken our clothes, the kids’ toys, and left. I was sure my houseplants were all dead. Mail piled up. I didn’t know if anyone stopped by the house and did anything with the grass or the pool. I hadn’t had the ability to even care.
After Lisa’s truth, I pondered going back, so I could be alone for a bit, but Dare drove us to our childhood home before I had a chance to say otherwise and Luciana followed me inside and we went right to my bedroom.
We sat on the bed and stared at one another. In near unison, we both threw ourselves back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. And then Luc reached onto my nightstand and said, “This color is fucking awesome.”
I watched her lift the metallic coral-colored nail polish. She passed it to me. I sat up and painted the color right over her French manicured nails. And then I stripped my pale purple polish off while hers dried and then she painted my nails. We were both uncharacteristically quiet. No, not just quiet, absolutely speechless.
Me and my sister were close. We always had all kinds to say but we knew each other well and could also sit in absolute quiet while being completely in sync with one another’s thoughts.
While I blew on my nails, she put on Netflix and we vegged out in there, not talking, under the blankets, watching a few minutes of show after show until Luc would lose patience and switch it, until finally as it got dark she said she had to go home. We hugged it out. She started trembling, but didn’t cry. Neither of us said another word other than, “Talk to you later”.
When she left, I got my kids from Sarah, who was also uncharacteristically quiet, obviously getting the scoop from someone. I bathed the boys and read bedtime stories and listened to my oldest pray to God to take care of Daddy and say Hello and then I climbed back into bed and immediately slept.
I dreamt about Jim, about my father, and saw horrible things that night with both Angel and Lisa being whipped bloody by my father in that red room of pain from the Fifty Shades movies.
***
Now, days later, I hadn’t seen Lisa. She’d stayed in her room and I’d mostly stayed in mine or the boys’.
I’d leaned on Sarah for help with the boys, even more than usual, but she didn’t seem to mind. She was like a mother to me, much more than my own mother, who was useless.
My mother had sent a card and flowers when she heard about my husband, my father. But she didn’t come. She called but we had nothing to say to one another. I knew her husband was dying, too. And she wouldn’t have helped me even if she had flown here for me and my siblings. She was practically a stranger.
She was probably relieved Pop was gone. He was a monster to her, her worst nightmare. She didn’t talk about it, not ever, but you saw it in her eyes whenever their paths had to cross after their split.
She’d tried to be a mother right after their split, but saw us once a year until we were sixteen and seventeen. And then it was every other year for the next few years. I hadn’t seen her since the day Luc married Ed. She’d come to both of our weddings but hadn’t met any of her grandkids. She missed Dare’s wedding.
What I needed was Sarah right now, anyways, because my boys who were usually angels had both been out of sorts, likely picking up on my mood, so they were both cranky and bickering over toys, skipping naps, napping at the wrong time so not going to bed on time, and thus making my currently complicated life more complicated.
After dropping them at daycare, which was good because it was routine for them, I was stopped at a light, lost in thought about Leese, thinking about what she must have endured, and thinking that if Jim were here, he’d tell me to talk to her, tell her I loved her. Because I did.
Lisa was my best friend and yeah, I’d been shocked, but she’d be there for me no matter what. And she’d only done what she had to do all this time. And I had left her to wonder if she had a place in my life for too many days.
I was missing Jim a lot today, thinking I definitely needed to stop by my house after I helped at the restaurant, just to walk through, go into the master bedroom closet and bury my nose in a row of his suits, see if I could catch a whiff of his scent.
I missed the way he smelled so much. I missed his lips. His hands, which would hold me and touch me. I missed the way he made the boys giggle. How he’d bite my ass cheek to get me out of bed in the morning so playfully.
I was having that thought, stopped at a pedestrian crosswalk that had a little old lady ambling across the road with a buggy of groceries, when a teenage girl started hammering her fists on my front passenger window of my SUV screaming, “HELP!” at me with a frantic look on her face.
She should win an Oscar for that performance; it was that convincing that I hit the button to make the window roll down.
“Let me in! Please, please! He’s after me!”
I was about to hit the unlock button to let her in but she reached inside the window and grabbed the button and pulled it up and then opened the door. She did this lightning fast. And then a man squeezed by her and jumped into my passenger seat. He put the barrel of a gun in my ribs and ordered me to drive down the side street after the intersection, pointing the direction he wanted me to take. The girl had already backed away. He must’ve paid her to do that.
Shit.
I’d never seen him before. He was about in his late thirties, dark complexion, some sort of European, and the look he gave me told me he meant business.
My father may have tried to shelter me and Luc, for the most part, but we weren’t stupid. And things were said, at times, designed to give us the skills to survive in this world. Little lessons, little tests. And if we failed, he’d lecture us and tell us how we should have behaved. I still, to this day, heard his voice when I fucked up and it told me the way whatever I’d fucked up should’ve been done.
“Contessa, how should you have handled that, my precious?”
We always knew we were in the midst of some dangerous people, people who would take a bullet for us because they were paid to protect us. We also knew that when they had a job, they frequently carried that job out with a gun at the ready and they didn’t hesitate to use it.
I’d been to more than a few funerals in my life for employees of my father who’d died in the line of duty carrying out orders by Pop or one of my brothers. Heck, I was a widow because my husband died in that line of duty.
“Pull over. There.” He gestured with his gun towards the curb.
I wasn’t about to test this guy’s level of seriousness about his job. My phone started to ring from my console and I saw it was Nino.
My captor took my phone and threw it out the window and then when I stopped the car, on his orders, he leaned over and hit the button to unlock all the locks. I heard the back door of my SUV open and then close as someone got in. The guy in front undid my seatbelt and not-very-gently tossed me into my own back seat where another guy, in a balaclava, caught me and then put a balaclava over my head backwards so that I couldn’t use the eye holes. And then my hands and feet were taped.
And all I could think about wasn’t regarding my safety or where they’d take me or what they’d do to me. My brain was frozen, mid-thought, on my smashed cell phone, out in the street, and the fact that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d unloaded the pictures on my cell. How many pictures of my husband, the boys’ father, were on there that I hadn’t saved, that they’d never get to see?