“I’ve spent the past two days thinking about you, and about Penny, and about Bella…” He looks sideways at me, still struggling to speak. “My daughter. For fuck’s sake, Iris. She should never have been caught up in this shit.”
There isn’t anything I can say to make it okay. I feel empty of any words anyway.
“Just go home,” he says, weary. “I can’t sleep unless I know you’re safe. Go home and get some proper rest.”
He picks my bags up and waits while I put my coat on and turn everything off, then we catch the elevator down onto the sidewalk, too exhausted to speak to each other. There’s a cab, just as he said, and he puts my stuff in and then turns to me, his expression bleak.
“If this thing between us is over, then we say goodbye properly.” He swallows hard and looks away down the deserted, cold street. “Take a few days. Look after yourself better than this.” He gestures toward the storage building and sighs. “I need some time to get my head straight, okay? I’ll come to your apartment on New Year’s Eve, and we’ll treat each other kindly, because I care about you too damn much for it to end on a sidewalk like this.”
I nod and get into the car, because I don’t know how to say goodbye properly to Gio Belotti. Not on this sidewalk today, in my apartment on New Year’s Eve, or ever.
36.
I DO AS HE’S ASKED. I let myself back into my apartment and drop my bags by the front door, and I stand in the quiet cold space I didn’t think I’d see again. I don’t know if it feels like failure or reprieve. I make tea and put the heating on, and I let the cat in when he appears on the fire escape. I go through the motions until I strip off and stand under the hot shower, and then it finally gets me. All of it. My mother’s death. Adam. The Belottis. Gio. I sit on the floor and wrap my arms around my knees, and the last three years swirl around me as if I’m surrounded by IMAX screens. Words and memories. Black dresses at funerals, kisses on rooftops, painted glass doors, Moonstruck Monday nights, vacuuming the same room three times, terrified I’d missed something, singing in the park, Maria’s perfume, Sophia’s curls, Bella’s fragile hands on piano keys, streets full of houses covered in Christmas lights, my mother looking into my eyes as she laughs down the lens. They all slide and clash against each other, jumbled and discordant, and I close my eyes and lay my forehead on my knees, battle weary.
* * *
—
I’M SITTING AT THE table with a cold cup of coffee in front of me. I slept deeply as soon as my head touched the pillow last night, yet I still feel as if I’ve been hit by a bus this morning. I jolt inside my dressing gown when the buzzer goes. I sit still, hoping it’s a mailman who’ll decide he’s out of luck, but it goes again, insistent, and I sigh when I look outside and see bouncing black curls.
I open my door as Sophia runs up the stairs with grocery bags in her hands, and she steps inside and puts them on the kitchen surface.
“I brought you some things,” she says quietly, putting milk and ham in the fridge, bread beside the kettle. “Why don’t you go and put some clothes on while I make us some fresh coffee?”
I do it, because it’s almost a relief to have someone tell me what to do.
“I saw your letter,” she says, passing me a mug when I walk back to the kitchen. “He didn’t want to show me, I made him.”
I sit down at the kitchen table and try to raise a half smile out of my boots, because it’s kind of Sophia to come here and I can well imagine her not taking no for an answer. She sits down in the chair next to mine and shuffles it until she’s as close to me as the table allows.
“You could have told me about him,” she says, covering my hands with hers. “I’d have listened.”
“I didn’t have the words,” I say, pushing my hair out of my face as I lift my eyes to hers. “Is Gio okay?”
“He will be. I promise.” She unwinds a hairband from around her wrist. “Will you?”
I shrug, because I have no idea how I’m going to be, or where. She gets up and stands behind me, gently finger combing my hair back into a ponytail. She puts her hands on my shoulders and squeezes, warm and reassuring, and I reach up and hold them. We stay like that for a while, connected, and I think about how, actual brother and sister or not, Gio and Sophia Belotti share the same big beautiful heart.
“Don’t leave New York,” she says. “I don’t want you to go.”
“I can’t stay here,” I say. “It’s too much. I need to be somewhere else, find myself a fresh start, somewhere without baggage.”
“Baggage,” she says, almost scathing. “Jesus, Iris, everyone has baggage. You do. Gio does. You guys have enough baggage between you to fill a goddamn carousel at JFK, but isn’t that kind of the point of love, that you help each other carry the bags? Fresh starts are for Hallmark movies, not real life.”
She slides back into the chair next to mine and looks me in the eyes.
“You’ve done the worst part. Gio knows the truth now, he’ll make his peace with it, I’m sure he will. Stay here. Stay for him. Stay for me.”
She makes it sound so easy, so seductive, this life she’s laid out before me. I wish with all my heart that it could be so easy, but she only knows what she sees. She doesn’t know her father has asked me to leave New York in order to protect the secret he’s kept for decades.
“I can’t, Sophia. Please don’t ask me again, because I honestly can’t.”
She sits with her knees touching mine and rests her forehead against my head.
“Who am I going to talk gelato flavors with when you’re gone?”
I close my eyes. “Vanilla forever.”
“You know it.”
She laughs softly, and a tear falls from her cheek onto our clutched hands.
* * *
—
IT’S NEW YEAR’S EVE tomorrow, which makes today my last full day here. This time there will be no moonlight flits or sleeping in storage units. I’ll welcome Bobby and Robin home, and I’ll wait for Gio to come, and then I’ve booked myself a ticket out to Toronto in the small hours of January first.
New year, new country, yet another new start. I’m not sure I have it in me to reinvent myself all over again, but I looked up where Schitt’s Creek was filmed and let that be my guide. It’s about one percent more targeted than throwing a dart at a map, but it’s going to have to do.
So this is it. Officially my last full day in New York, and there’s something I have to do before I leave. I pull on my snow boots and my winter coat, then hook my backpack carefully over my shoulders and head out into the cold, clear morning.
I’m not going far. Just to the park across the street, in fact. I’ve walked there countless times over my year as a temporary New Yorker, and today I’m going there to scatter my mother’s ashes. I may be leaving the city tomorrow, but leaving her here feels like the right thing to do. I’m glad when I hear the familiar tones of the busker, serenading passersby with Christmas favorites. I hope they’re giving generously, she deserves it. She sees me and raises her hand, and I make my way across and stand to the side as she finishes the final minute or two of “White Christmas.” And it really has been. There’s still quite a lot of standing snow around, I’m so glad I got to see New York like this.