The young craftswoman, with her button nose and sweet smile, reminded him of his mother’s Madonna. Emilia had kept the statuette, strung with rosary beads, on her bedroom dresser. Every night, she’d knelt in front of it before bed. His sister, Carmela, the only remaining church-goer in his family, had inherited the statuette. His mother would’ve described the young woman as angelic. It was disconcerting to think of her sitting at a work table, cutting up old stockings, shaping and stuffing them until they turned into old men, and then shoving them into a jar, the lid screwed on nice and tight.
Paolina’s cancer felt like a betrayal. Of course, he knew he was being silly and selfish and ridiculous. Childish, even. But Paolina was going to leave him, and without her his days would be long and empty; life would have no meaning.
He wasn’t good at friendship. When Paolina’s friends visited, he was polite — he could even be friendly — but he didn’t have any friends of his own. His brother Joe dropped in some afternoons, and they paced the garden or strolled down to the creek so that Joe’s German shepherd, now old and crippled with arthritis, could take a slow walk. Once a year, they made wine. Sometimes Antonello went rummaging in wrecker’s yards or trash-and-treasure markets, excursions instigated by his brother Vince, to buy materials for his many projects — a new shed for one of his children or a cubby house for a grandchild or something for his latest attempt at renovating a section of the house.
Recently, Antonello had overheard his daughter, Nicki, say to Paolina, ‘Don’t you dare die first and leave us with Dad.’ Alex and Nicki — Alexandro and Domenica, but their Italian names printed on their birth certificates were rarely used, mostly forgotten — considered him difficult. Soon he’d be a burden.
‘Mama is the most loving woman I know. I’m sure you love us, but you’re not good at showing it. You’re moody and hard to be around. What I learnt from you, Dad, is that love isn’t enough,’ Alex had said once, on the rare occasion when father and son talked, though the conversation had arisen after Antonello criticised Alex for spoiling the girls.
Alex and Nicki rarely talked to Antonello directly. They talked to their mother and she refashioned their requests, their announcements, for him. He overheard their comments and criticisms, not because they said things when they knew he’d overhear them, not because he purposely eavesdropped on them — he would’ve preferred not to hear — but because they didn’t notice him. He was a spectre lurking in the background, invisible and hardly relevant.
Nicki said Paolina should’ve divorced him. Had she ever considered it? Paolina loved him, he was certain of that, even though their marriage was more difficult than she’d anticipated — but no one ever imagines a difficult marriage.
Over the last decade, a number of Paolina’s friends had been widowed or divorced, and they had started new and different lives without their husbands. Did Paolina hope for a life in which she could plan her own destiny, perhaps discover another self? He wanted to die first.
When the depression hit, as it did on a regular basis, it left him depleted. It manifested first as rage — with it, a desire to scream, to tear things apart, to punch walls, to throw furniture. A dark mantle that swamped everything. But he was a volcano that never erupted. He didn’t vent his anger as his father had done. That was his only source of pride, as if by not expressing it he was protecting his family from it. The pity was it took so much energy to dam it up, to contain it, that he had nothing left for his children, and so he withdrew, was often absent, silent and alone, sometimes disappearing for hours, for whole days, walking miles across the city until his heart returned to its regular beat, until he stopped shaking, until he could unclench his fists. But even if he was in the house during those episodes, he wasn’t present. ‘Dad’s gone zombie again,’ Nicki would complain to Paolina.
Several times he’d considered leaving Paolina and the children, for their own good, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Leaving was impossible. Where would he have gone? What would that have done to his family? Anyway, without Paolina he didn’t exist at all. He’d contemplated suicide, but the thought of Paolina’s grief and the legacy he’d leave behind — a coward husband and father — stopped him.
Knowing his children resented him was painful, but he’d learnt to live with it. Compared to all the other aches and pains, it hardly registered. Paolina smoothed things. Made excuses for him. She told their children over and over that he loved them. She tried to convince him to do things differently, but she didn’t betray him.
‘She defends you all the time, even when you’re being an arsehole.’ Nicki didn’t understand her mother’s loyalty.
He stretched his body long in the bed and watched Paolina. He loved her more than he’d ever loved anyone else.
‘The phone, Nello,’ Paolina said, shaking him awake. ‘It’s the phone.’
Antonello looked at the clock. It was 6.00 am. He hauled himself out of bed and raced to the kitchen, where the phone hung on a wall bracket above the bench. The ringing was insistent and demanding. Then it stopped and the house fell silent, but before he could turn back, the ringing began again.
Later, he’d speculate about his reluctance to answer. Was it a premonition? Not that he believed in premonitions; they were Paolina’s domain. But there was a secret hope he harboured that not answering the phone might prevent whatever bad thing had happened from happening. As if bad things could be thwarted by his refusal to pay them attention. As if he didn’t know better. As if he didn’t know that tragedy could and would strike whether you were around to pick up the phone or not, that it would catch up with you and stop you in your tracks no matter how hard or how fast you ran, no matter how happy you were or how sad. No matter whether you’d had your share of tragedy or not.
‘Hello.’
‘Dad.’
‘Alex, what’s wrong?’ Antonello heard the quake in his son’s voice, the intake of breath.
‘Everything is wrong, Dad, everything.’ Alex paused and Antonello knew the panic was real. It wouldn’t pass.
‘There’s been an accident. It’s Ashleigh.’ Alex’s voice was cracking, broken.
‘How bad? Is she okay?’
‘No. She’s dead, Dad. My Ashleigh, my baby girl, she’s gone.’ Alex broke into thick, heavy sobs.
Antonello heard himself gasp, but after that he wasn’t sure what else they said, what he said, what Alex said, before they hung up. His body was limp. His arms dropped to his side. His legs buckled. Shaky, he leaned against the wall.
‘Nello?’ Paolina reached for his arm. He gazed at her. She was so old and frail that he thought for a second it wasn’t Paolina at all but the ghost of his mother-in-law, Giuseppina, who had been reduced to half her size, wrinkled skin loosely draped over brittle bones, when she died in her nineties.
‘Sit down.’ He couldn’t tell Paolina. He couldn’t say the words out loud.
‘No, tell me,’ Paolina demanded.
‘It’s Ashleigh,’ he said. ‘A car accident.’
‘Which hospital?’
‘No, è morta.’ Antonello shook his head, wrapped his arms around her, and pulled her close.
‘No, no, please no,’ Paolina wailed. She was trembling, a tiny tree in the wind. He stood, solid, and she leaned into him. They held each other. Since Paolina’s diagnosis, they’d become used to finding themselves without words. Closing his eyes, Antonello stroked her short grey hair, and remembered her hair long and thick, and the way she loved weaving it into a plait, the tail reaching the base of her spine. And the way he’d taken pleasure in unravelling it, running his fingers through it until the strands separated. And how when Ashleigh was little, she measured the length of her hair against her grandmother’s. The way they loved to brush each other’s hair. Ashleigh. The tears flowed — silent tears he couldn’t wipe away, because that would mean releasing his grip on Paolina.