They Crossed My Name Out of the Family Bible Chapter 13
Chapter 13 – Three Hundred and Sixty-Five Marks in Pencil
She wouldn’t let go of my hand in the ambulance.
I let her hold it. I want that on the record, because I’d sworn to myself I wouldn’t.
At the hospital my father came down the corridor at a dead run and stopped six feet short of us like there was glass
in the air.
He looked at my mother. He looked at me.
“Go on,” I said. “She’s yours.”
He caught her, and held on, and over her shoulder he looked at me with an expression I have never seen on Rafael
Marchetti’s face in my life.
“Siena. Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. Sign the Table’s protection order and stop trying to manage my
life.”
“Understood, Commander.”
Commander. From my father. Something in my sternum tilted.
Gabriel was awake by then and Matteo was out of surgery, and by two in the morning I was standing in a hospital
room with five brothers, three on their feet and two full of morphine, and not one of us knowing how to begin.
Nico started it. Nico is the youngest of the boys and has never in his life been able to hold anything in.
“We made you a binder,” he blurted.
“What?”
He put his phone in my hand with fingers that were still shaking.
Photographs. Dozens of them.
A wall in Dominic’s office, floor to ceiling.
Fabric swatches, oxblood and midnight, pinned in rows with dates. A seating chart for two hundred. A sketch of a
stage in the west field. A menu composed entirely of things I like, half of them dishes I’d cooked for the house myself
– which meant somebody had been writing them down.
And in the center, a printed list, six feet long. A hundred and forty-one items. Almost all crossed off.
SIENA – 18.
At the top, in my mother’s handwriting from eighteen years ago, faded and taped over three times:
Item 1. She will never spend one day wondering whether she was wanted,
Item one. Not crossed off.
Then my father came in holding something wrapped in a linen napkin, and set it on the bed, and unwrapped the Bible
from Palermo.
“Page eleven,” he said. “You found page eleven.”
“I found page eleven.”
“Turn to the back.”
I didn’t want to. I did it anyway.
–
The last page the blank one, the one for the generations that haven’t happened yet.
Covered. Edge to edge. Faint, in pencil, in my father’s hand.
Siena Vittoria Marchetti. Siena Vittoria Marchetti. Siena Vittoria Marchetti.
Over and over and over.
“Three hundred and sixty-five,” my father said. His voice was in pieces. “One every morning, before anybody came
downstairs. On the eleventh of this month I was going to stand up in front of two hundred people and put you back in
the book in ink.”
I stood in a hospital room at two in the morning and counted the marks, because I can’t not count, and it was three
hundred and sixty-five, and I broke.
Not gracefully. Not like a Commander. Like an eighteen-year-old girl who has eaten breakfast alone two hundred
times.
Dominic caught me. Then Luca. Then all of them, even Gabriel reaching out of the bed, and I was in the middle of a
pile of enormous idiots who were all crying, and my mother came in and made it worse.
“I have every notebook,” she said into my hair. “Every color you ever said you liked. Every song. Eighteen years, Siena.
They’re in my desk and I couldn’t open that drawer all year because I was so frightened of what I was doing to you.”
“Then why didn’t you open it,” I said. “Once. Just once, Mama.”
“Because I thought I’d have you afterward,” she whispered. “I thought I was borrowing a year. And you were gone
eleven days before I noticed, and I’ll carry that until I die.”
We are not fixed. I want to be honest about that.
You don’t unmake a year in a hospital corridor. There are things I’ll flinch at for the rest of my life. Closed office doors.
The phrase not now. The sound of a family all typing at a dinner table.
But at about four a.m. my mother took my hand and said, “Sunday. Just us. Bad movies and the disgusting diner.”
And I said, “I’m deployed Sunday.”
And she said, “Then the Sunday after.”
And I said, “Yes.”
Twelve times I asked her. She’s asked me once, and I said yes, and I’m not sorry.
Dante Ricci drove me back to the Requiem at dawn.
Neither of us spoke for forty minutes. Then I said, “Photographs.”
His hands didn’t move on the wheel.
“Thirteen months ago your father hired one man outside his own house,” he said. “Somebody with no name in your
family’s ledgers. Somebody who could sit on a hillside for a year and not be seen.”
“You.”
“Me.”
“You watched me?”
“Every day,” he said. “I know you slept in the chapel. I know you ran four miles at 5 a.m. so you could use your own
shower without being caught. I know you ate alone two hundred and eleven times and I know exactly how long you sat
I
in the archive with that Bible in your lap.” His jaw flexed. “I sent your mother a photograph every Sunday so she could
see you were alive, because she couldn’t look at you with her own eyes without breaking the silence.”
I couldn’t breathe.
“The bag of food on the chapel step,” I said. “Every Thursday. I thought it was the groundskeeper.”
“It was not the groundskeeper.”
For a year, exactly one person on earth knew where I slept and what I ate and when I cried.
It wasn’t my family.
“Then you walked through that gate,” Dante said, “and I couldn’t tell you, and I have hated every single day of it. So.
Now you know. You can have me transferred by lunch and I’ll sign it myself.”
I looked at the road for a long time.
“There’s an oath,” I said.
“There’s an exception in the oath,” he said. “For a lawful marriage.”
“That’s a hell of a way to ask for a first date.”
“I’m a planner.” He kept his eyes forward, but his ears had gone red, which I found deeply satisfying.
He pulled over on an empty road at sunrise, and he kissed me, and I let him, and Nonna had the decency to be
extremely quiet for once.
We got back to campus at seven.
There was a black car parked in front of our wing that belonged to nobody at the Requiem.
And Ines was standing on the steps with a sealed envelope and a look on her face I did not like at all.
“Commander. Hand delivered. An hour ago.”
Black wax. A crest I’d only ever seen in a photograph from 1931.
