Read Online Where She Has Gone by Nino Ricci - Free Book Online Page A

with her mother now, she looks after the kid when Suzie’s at work. But it’s not as if her mother and I ever got along. I get it coming and going, from her family and mine. You just become this pariah or something.”
    His father, though he’d never approved of the marriage, had hardly spoken to him since the split. He was like that, Michael said. Twenty years before, he had disowned Michael’s oldest sister when she had got pregnant out of wedlock. She had eventually married, got a good job, had more children. But in all those years their father had never spoken to her again.
    “You have to understand what that’s like. What kind of a mind it takes to cut off one of your children like that. But here’s the thing: a couple of years ago Suzie and I went to Italy and I got talking to this old woman in the village who told me my mother was already pregnant with my sister when she got married. There was even some talk that my dad wasn’t thefather. It all made sense then, in a kind of crazy way. But to think we went all our lives without understanding that. Even my sister didn’t know.”
    I could picture Michael’s village, its stony houses and mountain solitude, and his father there a gloomy young man like my own, hemmed in by his limited possibilities.
    “To tell you the truth,” Michael said, “I think that’s why Suzie left me. She started to see my father in me. She could never forgive him for what he did to my sister. But the funny thing is, I could. Even after I found out, or maybe because of that. You’d think it would have the opposite effect, but all I could see then was the pain this guy had gone through. It’s like something that’s blinded him.”
    We were not so different, then, Michael and I, though I hadn’t known this, had the same family entanglements, the same receding into darkness and sin. Perhaps all families were like this, were hard exactly because of their failings, were then fated through that hardness to repeat the very things they sought to avert.
    “How are things with your sister?” Michael said.
    “Oh. All right.”
    “You’re still getting along?”
    “Off and on. It’s a bit complicated.”
    “It always is.”
    It grew late. Michael offered to drive me to the subway.
    “I have a car,” I said. “My father’s old car.”
    “A sort of hand-me-down?”
    I had never told him about my father’s death. It seemed ungenerous not to do so now, but it was too much to cram into a moment at the door.
    “Something like that.”
    We stood an instant on his front steps. There would be time, I thought, time to tell him things; and yet somehow I had the sense also that time was running out, that soon I’d be past the point of telling.
    “If you ever need anything,” I said.
    “Thanks.”
    I drove home. It was warm out, almost balmy, the air laden with smells that the winter had held in check. In the damp warmth, the lingering piles of dirty snow in parking lots and at the edges of driveways looked alien, anachronistic. As a child in Italy, at this time of year, I would wander sometimes above our village with my friend Fabrizio to search out the snowfields still nestled among the higher slopes, playing with him there as if in full winter while below us the valley lay stretched out already coloured over by the wheat- and olive-greens of spring. It had given me a peculiar sense of disorientation, the unnaturalness of that like some secret transgression, some line between absolutes that we had blurred.
    The lights were still on in Sid’s apartment when I arrived home. For a long time I stood across the street in the darkness of a burnt-out streetlight, watching. There was movement across the newsprint over his windows, vague shapes I couldn’t decipher. Then one by one the lights began to go out until only the small, flickering glow of what must have been a candle remained, casting a long shadow onto one of the windows before finally receding from view, as if someone had picked