Dispiace

“You came back.” she looked different, older and weary, but she was the same. She smiled but the rest of her betrayed it and she was very scared and afraid, and she didn't know how to pretend not to be. “I told you I would.” She stared at me, as calm as she could be. And I knew that nothing had changed in thirty years and she was waiting for me to tell her I loved her. That's all she ever wanted to hear, and she didn't care if it meant anything. She just needed the words. “I love you.” I finally said. “I know you do.” “Ella, what have you done?” “What do you mean?” “Why in God's name are you in here?” “You.” “Don't say that.” “It's true, though. You know that.” And the image of her, the last time I saw her, when she was twenty seven years old, young, beautiful, and dangerous, ready to destroy herself and anything that got in her way, just waiting for someone to stop her with loving words that held no meaning. “So you tried to kill yourself and failed.” “Yes.” “And then, what, they locked you up? What did you do, Ella?” “I hated you very much because I loved you very much and I knew you didn't love me. So I accidentally made a child with someone I didn't love at all instead of with you.” “You have a kid? You never wanted a kid.” “No, I didn't. That's the point.” “But...” I was sputtering. I was lost and scared, and she was placid, and the tables had turned, and she was getting the revenge she wanted. “So if you really want to know why I'm in here, I'll tell you. I killed the father. He didn't love me, didn't even pretend, and I didn't love him either, so it was easy to do it. I had a lot of time to spare in here, so I wasted time by writing these letters here, to tell him why I had to do it.” she held up a pile of yellow lined paper, with her inanely perfect, typewriter esque handwriting scrawled across every inch. “Anthony,” they all began. And on every page was the story of me and her, of the paintings, and the germs I never saw, and the strawberries she didn't trust me to eat, ending with the night I left, and he came. Her face was quiet behind the glass that separated us. She held her hand against the window, waiting for me to do the same, but I could not touch her, not even through three inches of glass. “And I've been waiting for you.” She said. “Because he wasn't the one I wanted dead, even if he made no real difference dead or alive to me at all.” “And now you'll kill me?” I asked, defeated, sarcastic, done with her. I wanted to go home, just like I did for the ten years when glass didn't divide us and we could touch with fear, but less of it. “No. I love you too much.” She held out her palm. A handful of pills. “There are people watching us, Ella, people all over the place here. They'll stop you.” But she'd already swallowed. She smiled at me, and guards grabbed at her, and phones rang, and people screamed, and sirens blared. And she never stopped staring at me. And I watched as those eyes I'd studied my entire life without ever understanding went from their usual pained anxiousness to pure terror, to a flaming rage that I would never comprehend where I could imagine her mind exploding and closing in on itself as every fear she'd been tormented with her entire life came to her in full force in that moment and more, and it suffocated her until the flames cooled, and in the last moments, a peace came to them, and I saw for the first time that behind the pain and torrents of reckless complexity, they were green. A calm, and a beautiful, a very lovely green. And then it was over. And I watched them carry her away, and they questioned me with spotlights and video cameras, until sure that I was innocent. Though I know I was not. And I never was. And then someone brought the kid in, hours later. A foster parent, I found out. And the girl had Ella's hair. And her eyes. But they were okay, her eyes. They were safe, and so was she. They were green, they were not burning. “Hello,” I told her. What's your name?” it was very clear that she did not know what had happened. “Maria.” She said, grinning a very easy grin, that hid nothing. And that is how I knew she was safe. I stayed in Italy for a year before finally going back to America. I visited Maria at her rotating cast of foster homes every day, and I grew to love her in a way that I cannot explain, and I knew she cared for me, too, the little girl. “I have to go now.” I told her, on the day my plane was leaving. “why?!” She cried. “I'll come back,” “Do you promise?” “Yes. Yes, I promise.” But in my heart I knew that I could not promise that. Because Italy was not beautiful to me anymore, it was nothing but Ella, and I did not love Ella, and I did not need her, and I knew now that I was not the kind of man to come back when I promised that I would, and it was time I accepted that. “Okay.” She said, and hugged me tightly. On the plane, I stared down at Italy. “Dispiace.” I whispered to Ella, and to Maria, and to Anthony, and to everyone. “I'm sorry I did this to you.” But like so many things in my life, I thought as I stared at my hands stained forever with red paint, I knew it was not enough.