Page 7 of The Don

He’s married. My brain reminds me of that terrible fact I’ve been avoiding like the plague since we met.

I saw his ring when he sat down at my table. It glinted in the sun when he refilled my wine glass. It was warm against my pulse when he wrapped his fist around my neck. I’d gotten off on knowing that we’d wanted one another enough to betray our relationships together, that I wasn’t in it alone. I’d imagined that he was as unhappy as I was, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask, because I didn’t care. And at the end of the day, I’d been oddly proud of myself for doing something risky for the first time in my life, for finally putting myself first.

I’m sure it wasn’t supposed to be anything more than that. And I know I’m in the wrong for coming back like this — pathetically mooning over his memory and pregnant to boot. But ever since our chance encounter, that meeting has reverberated across my life, leveling everything I thought I knew about myself in its wake.

It’s so painfully naïve to hope that he felt the same, and I’m running out of time to change my mind and leave him in peace.

I see Zoe rush ahead of me into the restaurant, but I can’t move to follow her. I feel rooted to these ancient cobblestones, staring at that restaurant where my life somehow changed but didn’t all those months ago. I hear Auntie Caroline’s voice in my head.“Whatever’s going on, I think it’s ‘bout time you pray.”And so, I do, but not the prayer the aunties would probably want from me. I don’t pray to God to take away this burden. I don’t ask Him to save me from my own sin and foolishness. I pray to God to send Salvatore to me.

I maybe should have been a little more specific.

4SALVATORE

I usedto love the days when nothing went the way I planned; when I was young and brave — or foolish — and thought nothing could kill me but the bullet meant for me. So long as I didn’t end up dead by nightfall, I counted that as a successful day at work. But prosperity has changed me. I’ve become more calm than dangerous, more predictable than erratic. I’ve let myself become complacent.

My hair is more gray than black, the crow’s feet at the corner of my eyes are deep grooves now, and my eyesight has begun to give way. Even the glasses I wear as props are necessary to read the newspaper these days. Somehow, I’ve become the sort of old man I used to see as an obstacle in my rise to infamy and power, the kind of man I killed with relish.

Aging in my line of work is a delicate dance between amassing enough power and influence to bind my foot soldiers to me and standing in the way of some other young man’s ambitions. But I like to think that I’m more dexterous than other men who’ve stood in my shoes, even now.

Sure, I’ve grown soft in some ways, but so much harder in others.

I’ve often ruminated on the limitations of the life I live and tried to guess when, and maybe even how, it will end. This is a comfortable train of thought now, if only because my brain can wander effortlessly and unimpeded to Shae.

I’m looking at the woman in the doorway, dismissing my immediate belief that she looks like Shae, recognizing it for the same desperation that makes me see bits of her in Zahra. The woman turns and leaves, and I’m just about to turn to catch Alfonso’s eye when I hear it. At first, I think I’ve imagined the woman calling her name, but I can’t have. When I fantasize about Shae’s name, I hear it in my voice. I say it with my accent and full of my lust. I don’t know Shae or her name any other way. But this woman calls Shae’s name in an American accent inflected with annoyance and a sense of familiarity I cannot imagine or affect. That sound makes the blood still in my veins just before it boils over, and I’m rushing from my chair.

“Non può essere,” I whisper. My knee clips the table leg, upending the cup of espresso on its plate, splashing across my newspaper and my hand. I feel the hot liquid on my skin and the sting in my knee, but I don’t care. Nothing can hurt more than watching her walk away.

“Shae, what the hell?” the woman calls before the door closes behind her.

It could be another Shae. I could be mishearing her, my hearing going right along with my eyesight. There are so many things that could be happening right now, but somehow, I know that it’s her, that this ismyShae.

I can hear Alfonso calling after me, but I don’t stop. There’s a moment — just before my hand touches the wood of the door, just before the sun gets into my eyes, just before I see Shae for the first time in too many months — when two things become crystal clear. First, I love her. I don’t care that I met her once, months ago. It doesn’t matter that we only spent a few hours together. As I step outside, I finally accept what has been painfully obvious: Shae — a woman whose surname I don’t know — is the only woman I’ve ever loved. Second, I’ll kill anyone who tries to harm a hair on her head.

And then I see her again, and all I feel is an aching relief that blossoms in my chest. When it blooms, it fills all the empty spaces inside me. There wereso many empty spaces before I met her.

Her beautiful lips part. Even across the distance between us, I can hear her gasp as if there’s no one else in this square but us, or even better yet, as if we’re back in my office and the taste of her cunt is still fresh on my tongue, her body quivering in my arms, my name a filthy prayer on her lips. I hear Shae’s gasp over the sound of tourists in the piazza, the church bells tolling, and Alfonso screaming my name.

I hear that gasp because it’s not a gasp at all. It’s my name on Shae’s lips. “Salvatore.”

I’m running now. We’ve been separated too long to waste another minute. Not even the sound of a gunshot can stop me. In fact, I move faster, needing to get to her and make sure that she’s safe.

A former lover once told me that I didn’t have a heart. To be fair, she said that just after I murdered her husband, once she realized I’d been seducing her to get to him. But rage can be clarifying, allowing you to see the world from a great height. And as it happens, many women have echoed that woman’s assertion, including my wife. I used to believe them. It did make sense. But now I know that we were all wrong. When I hear the explosion of that gun tearing through this quiet afternoon, I know for a fact that I have a heart because her name is Shae.

As soon as we touch, her eyes fill with tears. She whispers my name again. And I vow to never let her go.

“Va bene, bella. Sei a casa ora,” I whisper softly.

5SHAE

If someone had askedme if I wanted this baby twelve hours ago, I would have descended into a fit of confusion, unprepared to examine how I felt, what I wanted, what I needed. I was too consumed by despair and confusion to examine the tangle of my feelings.

I used to dream about marrying Steve and having his babies. To be fair, in my fantasies, he was a different man; better, kinder, more considerate. But somehow, over the past few months, I’ve moved decidedly on from that phase in my life. I can’t even recognize who that version of me was, which is well and good because who I am now is pregnant with Salvatore’s baby, and all the things that shaped my life with Steve no longer apply.

I have so often wondered, how can I miss something — someone — I barely got to hold? But the moment his hands grasp mine, I know that all this confusion and indecision is my brain trying to understand what my body already knew.

Salvatore might be older, Italian, married, and decidedly not mine. We might have only had that one afternoon — just a few short hours, really — but we changed each other, even the tiniest bit, and it was real.

Funny how the sound of a gun firing into a quiet piazza can put everything into perspective.