Vanni: A Prequel (Groupie Book 4) Read online

  Tears course down my face as I touch her cold skin. It feels like paper underneath my hands. “Prozia,” I repeat, hoping that she’d hear me, hoping she’s still near enough to find her way back. She has to come back if I’m being a good boy, right? Isn’t that how this works? The universe can’t be this cruel… it just can’t. “Ti amo. Per favore,” I say. I want to beg her to stay, and I think I remember what to say but I’m probably mangling every single syllable. My Italian has always been rudimentary at best, something that would make her whack me upside the head sometimes to correct. But I can’t stop. If she can hear me, if she can hear me…

  “Vanni,” Mrs. D’onofrio says as she places her hands on my shoulders. “Come on.”

  “I’m not leaving!” I scream. I never should have left her the night before. If she had called out in her sleep, I could have helped her.

  “Come on. Let me get you some tea.”

  “I don’t want any fucking tea!” I bellow at the generous woman who is just trying to be kind. And of course I know that. But I’m so angry. I’m so hollow. Instantly and completely. I just want to rage. My mouth opens and I release one long, angry wail as I clutch the blanket on her bed.

  Mrs. D’onofrio sinks to her knees beside me and cradles me as I sob into the blanket. Her hand gently caresses my hair, which is still damp from my shower.

  It had been only minutes, but my whole world had changed.

  I do not leave the room until the paramedics come, and even then I can only make it to the doorway. Mrs. D’onofrio tries to turn me away, so I can’t watch. The minute they roll her over onto her back, I see that her entire left side is dark purple. I collapse against the door.

  “Come on, hon,” Mrs. D’onofrio says. “There’s nothing more you can do here.”

  Finally I relent and allow her to guide me out into the living room, which has begun to fill with people. Any other Christmas Eve, those people would have been boisterous and jovial. But it has ceased to be a holiday celebration.

  Our time of mourning Susan Luisa Faustino has officially begun.

  I sit in her chair in the living room, positioned right next to the humble Christmas tree. The smell of pine races up my nose as mourner after mourner passes by, offering me words of comfort I can’t even hear. It all devolves into some indiscernible hum.

  I barely understand when the paramedics tell me that it was a massive coronary, and that she likely went quickly. I think that’s supposed to make me feel better, but it doesn’t. This isn’t the way it’s supposed to go. This isn’t the plan. This can’t be real. Maybe I’m having a weird nightmare. I pray each and every second that Aunt Susan will be nudging me awake, for the holiday we were supposed to have. The kind of holiday we always had.

  Instead the nightmare drags painfully on. She stays in that room until the coroner comes, which is mercifully within an hour. I stand on the stoop with other people I haven’t the presence of mind to identify. We all huddle together, fending off the cold and the sorrow as the EMT’s roll the gurney from the house. I hear weeping behind me as someone realizes she’s covered head to toe, as if it is some revelation that she is really gone.

  Father Genovese arrives to console me. We sit together in the living room. Someone has prepared hot buttered rum, which I cradle within my hands. I don’t speak much. I may shake my head or nod, but I hear nothing. Words jumble together like perfect nonsense.

  Nothing makes sense to me now. Just yesterday… just hours ago… I had a plan. I had a dream. I had a family. Now I am alone. More alone than I have ever been.

  As alone as I feel, it doesn’t take long for people to fill the tiny brownstone to overflowing. Everyone from the neighborhood stops to pay their respects. There’s more food than anyone wants to eat. There are stories, many stories, of Susan and her giant heart. I hear laughter mingle with the sobs as everyone reminisces on the amazing woman who had somehow just left the planet.

  Already the world seems smaller without her.

  I let the world spin on without me. I watch everyone bustle around the small house as if they are all in fast forward. The hands on the grandfather clock keep spinning, even though my heart stopped beating hours ago. I sit in that chair, staring into the Christmas tree that someone had finally turned on. “She loved Christmas,” I hear someone say.

  Their use of past tense punctures my heart.

  They are right. She loved Christmas. She loved the hope of it. “Every day of your life should feel like Christmas morning,” she would say.

  Tears keep pooling in my eyes. I have no shame as I let them fall. Nothing matters anymore.

  It is after six o’clock in the evening before I find the presence of mind to call Lori. But I figure she deserves to have a nice holiday with her family. I can’t just call her and drop this kind of bombshell. Susan would never forgive me.

  In the blink of an eye it is nine o’clock, when everyone begins their migration to the church. They need the comfort of those four walls now more than ever. Mrs. D’onofrio sits on the sofa next to me. “You should go. It will make you feel better. Perhaps you could sing in her honor,” she offers but I shake my head.

  I’m not sure I can ever sing again. And I know I’ll never sing that song again. I can’t, not without her to hear me.

  “Then I can stay,” she says. Again I shake my head.

  As nice as everyone has been, I need to be alone. I’m exhausted from their constant attention, as well-meaning as it is. I need to rip off every scab by myself, in private.

  Mrs. D’onofrio is not convinced. She purses her lips as she stares at me. I notice how her eyes are bloodshot and her nose is red. This has been a hard day for her too. I struggle to smile as I touch her hand. “Thank you for everything,” I tell her. I will never forget that she was there for me on my most difficult day.

  She leans forward and cups my face with her hand. It reminds me so much of Aunt Susan that it rips fresh tears from my eyes. “I’m always here. Right next door if you need me. For anything.”

  I nod and she bends forward to kiss my forehead. She stands and gathers her things, bringing up the rear of all the departing mourners. I can’t even rise to lock the door behind them. What difference does it make anyway? What is there left to steal? Every good thing is gone, including my heart.

  A deafening silence falls over the house the instant the door closes behind them. It’s quieter than it has ever been, so quiet that I can distinctly hear the quiet tick-tock of the grandfather clock, the steady heartbeat of my lonely home. How time keeps marching forward, I have no idea. Doesn’t it know? Doesn’t it care? One of the most amazing women on the planet is gone, and yet she left with no fanfare, no applause or standing ovation for her final curtain call. Just one final breath in the darkness of night and it was over.

  I stare at the tree. There are several boxes under it; all cheerfully wrapped, waiting for the intended recipient to rip them open on Christmas morning. It breaks my heart all over again that her boxes will never be opened. She’ll never gasp with glee when she opens up the box with the colorful scarf I had purchased way back in August, when life was still normal. There is a small box with a gold pendent, an eighth note, which I bought with my Christmas bonus. She had never been one for jewelry, but the simple design and the emotional significance inspired me to buy it.

  My eyes travel to the upright piano in the corner of the room. I stare at it for a long time as I remember every muggy summer afternoon that I spent there, learning how to play piano because it gave my hands “something productive to do,” after I’d been picked up for tagging an ugly, old abandoned building in the neighborhood.

  I could almost picture myself sitting there years ago, all legs and swagger, and not one iota of common sense. I could see her standing over me, patient and unmoving as she guided me through those reluctant lessons. I would get so frustrated that I was ready to tip over the bench and say to hell with all of it. She’d wind up her metronome and let it sway back and forth, telling me t
o concentrate. To breathe. To count out the beats and everything would be okay.

  I took a deep breath as I counted each second on the clock, subconsciously willing it to go backwards. Take me back to those humid afternoons, take me back to the first day I stepped foot in this house, when I first understood the concept of “family.” Up until then it had been just me and Mama against the world.

  What a revelation it had been that we weren’t alone anymore.

  Now I am alone. Irrefutably and heartbreakingly alone.

  The clock strikes midnight before I move from that chair. I haven’t eaten. I haven’t spoken. And, for about three hours at least, I haven’t cried. The fire someone started in the fireplace has burned out its last ember, allowing a chill from the cold night air outside to filter into the room.

  I don’t bother with anything. I leave all the lights on, including those twinkling on the Christmas tree. I don’t worry about putting away the grief buffet in the kitchen. I can’t do anything more than lumber up the steps towards my room, simply because I need to sleep. I need to close my eyes and forget.

  I stumble to my bed, where I fall on the mattress without shedding one article of clothing. I realize then that I had left my cell phone on my nightstand all day long. More out of habit than anything, I grab it to check if I had any missed calls. I have more than a dozen, with five of those belonging to Lori.

  I sigh as I put my phone back on the nightstand. I’ll call her tomorrow, at a decent hour. There’s no reason that the both of us should fight through that first shitty night on Planet Earth without Susan, trying to cope with the knowledge my beloved prozia would never smile, or laugh, or joke, or console, or correct, or hug… or love… ever again.

  Fresh tears spring into my eyes as I reach for the lamp by my bed. I need that light. I need to see what’s coming from now on. That bastard death stole my aunt in the middle of a dark night like the cowardly shit that it is. When it comes for me, I want to see its hateful face.

  As my hand pulls away from the chain, I see the scrap of paper with my meager songwriting scrawled across it like chicken scratch. Grief closes my heart in a vice as I realize that Aunt Susan would never be able to help me finish the song like I had hoped. She’ll never even hear it.

  For that reason alone, it was no longer worth singing.

  I pull the covers up to my ears, close my eyes, and pray for morning.

  CHAPTER FOUR:

  I let Christmas 2004 come and go without me. I don’t answer the phone. I don’t rise from the bed unless I have to go to the bathroom, the one pressing physical need that cannot be denied. Each minimal task is done with effort, including a return call to Lori at last, sometime around two-thirty in the afternoon, Christmas Day. I might not have called her at all, but I figure she needs to know what is going on, and it’s better to hear it from me.

  Her sobs reduce me once again to tears, as I relive the moment where I found my aunt, cold and dead in her bed.

  “I can be there in a few hours,” she promises. I shake my head, though she cannot see. There’s no one to see. No one. My throat closes over the painful lump I just can’t swallow.

  “Stay with your family, Lori. It’s Christmas.”

  “You shouldn’t be alone,” she says. Little does she know that’s all I want.

  “I’ll be okay,” I promise, though it’s complete and utter bullshit.

  Bullshit. That’s a word I can use now. Gone is the threat of foul-tasting homemade soap. It seems a hollow victory, but he minute I get off the phone with Lori, I try the words out, speaking them to the cold empty room. It is as each word can summon Susan to return, if only to beat me with her yardstick for being such a naughty boy.

  “Fuck this shit,” I say, slowly, annunciating every word. “You cock-sucking, motherfucking, ass-munching son of a bitch.” My voice rises with my anger. I don’t know who I’m attacking. Death, maybe. God, probably. The capricious hand of fate. Either way, “You fucking suck!”

  Finally I bring out the big guns. “Goddamn you, motherfucker. Is this some kind of fucking game? Are we just your goddamn pawns to push around? You can suck my big, fat cock!”

  Just saying the words fuels me, like pumping gas into a car running on fumes. I hop out of the bed, buzzing with newfound adrenaline. I grab a baseball bat from my closet. I string together any curse words I can think of as I swing at my computer, my desk, my dresser drawers, my bed. Every crack and boom is strangely rewarding.

  Debris flies everywhere as I dismantle my room. It was the first real room I had ever had, but it’s meaningless now. Now that Aunt Susan is dead, I probably won’t get to stay here in her house anyway. I’m used to things being taken right out from under me, something that started when I was two years old. Why should my home, the last thing I have in this world, be any different?

  Let them sell it now, I think to myself as I start bashing big holes in the walls. At some point I start crying again, though I’m not sure when.

  Finally I end up on my knees amidst the carnage. Feathers float around the room like snow, released from my down pillow and comforter with repeated blows from my baseball bat.

  I look around the room. It’s wrecked every bit as wrecked as I am.

  Yet the door doesn’t open. Aunt Susan doesn’t charge in, her trusty yard stick in one hand and a big chuck of soap in the other.

  I realize with a start that there’s no one there to stop me from self-destructing anymore. There’s no one to put me in check. There’s no one left who gives that much of a damn.

  I toss my bat aside and leave the room I can no longer face. There’s no one there to pick up the pieces anymore, either.

  I grab my jacket and my keys, but leave my phone. It, like the house phone, has been ringing non-stop, but I can’t face any of it. I’ll have to think about things like funerals and work and life soon, but I’m not ready. Instead I head down to the liquor store down the street and around the block. Three hundred and fifty-two steps. I know, because I count each one. Since I can’t even stomach the thought of food, I decide to pour vast amounts of whiskey on the hurt. I buy at least two bottles.

  Both Mama and Aunt Susan had an aversion to hard liquor. We usually always had wine in the house, or maybe some rum or liqueurs for baking. (Aunt Susan’s rum balls were the envy of the entire neighborhood this time of year.) But they drew the line when it came to anything else, and I knew this had everything to do with my dad. My old man would win very few prizes, but drunk of the year was right at the top of that list.

  The lucky sonofabitch. He got to miss all the heartache and the struggle just by crawling into a bottle. Suddenly that’s all I want to do, too.

  When I get back home, Mrs. D’onofrio waits for me on the stoop. She has yet another casserole dish, but just seeing that white dish with blue flowers makes me want to puke. Nothing will ever be as good again as Aunt Susan’s cooking. This realization chases away any appetite.

  I want my Christmas breakfast. I want my cranberry streusel cake.

  I want my aunt back.

  Mrs. D’onofrio offers to come inside to help me take care of things. It’s all I can do to refuse. She tells me that I shouldn’t eat alone, that food is meant to be shared. I stop short of asking her if she plans to come over every meal for the rest of her life, because eating alone is no longer an option for me. Finally she gets the hint and leaves, but only after I take her casserole.

  Italian women, I think to myself with a half-smile. They’ll never let you go hungry, no matter what’s going on. Sick? Here’s a bowl of minestrone. Funeral? Here’s some ziti. Zombie apocalypse? Here. Have a cannoli.

  I take the dish into the kitchen, which I realize has been cleaned by all the mourners who had stopped by the day before. I am a part of their community, so I know they won’t leave me hanging, any more than Aunt Susan would have left any other neighbor hanging in their time of need.

  Her good deeds are finally being rewarded, but to the wrong person. I figure I’ll hav
e to craft a “Do Not Disturb” sign for the window if I want any real privacy.

  I shove the dish into the overfilled refrigerator before grabbing a tumbler from the cupboard, along with a pad of paper and a pencil from the drawer next to the fridge.

  It still has her half-crafted grocery list on top. My gut lurches to see her recognizable handwriting. It had never changed, in all the years I had known her. Where mine was barely readable, her beautiful cursive had graceful lines and loops, picture perfect like it was lifted from all those grade school wall decorations to teach proper handwriting.

  If my aunt did it, she made sure it was done right. Likewise I take care as I write my door sign in big bold letters. “IN MOURNING. PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB.”

  I place it in the window just to the side of the door, next to the doorbell. I know if I hear this sound, I will shatter into a gazillion pieces.

  Only the silence, and my lonely little cocoon, holds me together.

  The lights from the Christmas tree still twinkle as I sink to the floor next to it. I could turn on the television for some noise, but I don’t think I could make it through some schmaltzy holiday cheer-fest surely playing nonstop all Christmas Day.

  Instead I fill the glass. It burns going down but somehow that feels right. It gives me something else to think about than the dead weight in my chest. I fill the glass again. It burns going down again. But my brain mercifully starts to cloud as I force myself to chug each glassful at a time.

  After I kill the first bottle, I feel removed enough from my grief to introduce noise into my surroundings. I begin at the piano, because where else would I begin? I drag myself from the floor, staggering just a tad as I amble over to the piano.

  I settle onto the hard wooden bench and lift the fall board. I have always loved the promise of the keys, sitting uniformly side by side, just waiting for the touch of a human hand to make some of the most beautiful music on earth. Every Christmas for the last eleven years, I listened to my Aunt Susan play every single Christmas carol I could think of to request.