Bound to the Mafia King

I am at the window again.

I am at the window the way I have been, every evening of the eighteen years I have been alive, at the window. The lock is on the outside of the casement. It has been on the outside of the casement since I was old enough to remember it. Below the window, the garden.my garden, the garden I have not, in any year of my life, set foot in by daylight.runs out from the foot of the south terrace in a long careful descending design of stone-walled beds and pleached lime-trees and a fountain that works at intervals of someone else's choosing.

I am looking at the wisteria.

The blossoms are the color of the inside of a shell, and they hang in long wet ropes from the iron arch above the dovecote, and somewhere among the flowers a single grey moth comes out of the wood at the back of the arch and feeds at the throats of three or four of the lower racemes before going home. I have, in my eighteen years, named her Beatrice. I have named every living creature in the garden. They do not, of course, know I exist. Why should they.

The window is, by my father's standing instruction, locked.

The world is dangerous, my Aurora. Wait. Be patient. One day.

I have been patient. I have been patient for eighteen years.

The knock at the door is gentle.

It is Clara. I know it is Clara before she speaks, because Clara's knocks are the small unintrusive knocks of a woman who has been the maid of this household for as long as I have lived in it, and because nobody else, in this house, knocks.

"Miss Aurora. Your father is asking for you. The dining room."

I am off the window-seat before she has finished.

The dining room is, when I come down the great staircase in the dress my mother has laid out for me, set for three.

Tall white candles. A centerpiece of garden roses, cut from the climbing-Sombreuil my mother coaxes up the south wall of the house. The long mahogany has been polished. The silver has been polished. The doors to the morning room have been opened so that the air comes through in the small quiet honeyed way it does on the first warm nights of June.

My mother is at the foot of the table.

She is in pearl-grey silk. She has, on her cheek, the small bright spot of a woman who has been crying recently and has put her face on top of it. I do not, when I come in, ask. She rises. She comes to me with both hands out. She holds my face, briefly, between them. She kisses my forehead.

"Cara mia."

"Mama."

"Sit. Your father has news."

My father is at the head.

He is in the dark suit he wears for what he calls evenings of consequence. His hair, in the candlelight, has gone perhaps grayer in the last six months than I had registered. He sets down his glass of wine.

"My Aurora."

"Papa."

"Tomorrow, after breakfast, I am going to drive into the city and sign a number of papers I should have signed five years ago. We are leaving this house, cara. We are leaving this country. By July you will be eighteen and a half, and by August you will be in a small apartment in a small city in another part of the world, and by September."

He pauses. He looks at me.

"By September, cara, you will be in a real university. With real classmates. Real hallways. Real teachers. I have written to three. They have, all three of them, accepted you. You will choose."

The room.the candles, the silver, the long mahogany.goes silent in the way a room goes silent when something in it has been overheard.

I cannot, for a long second, speak.

"Papa."

"I have been wrong, Aurora. I have been wrong, my heart, for eighteen years. The world, I told you.and the world, I.we will discuss it. Tomorrow. In the car. Tonight, cara, you will eat. You will eat, and you will be glad."

He lifts his glass.

"To my daughter," he says, "who is, after eighteen years, going to be allowed to live."

I do not, in the small dazzled light of the room, taste the dinner.

I taste the small private inside-of-a-shell flavor of a thing that has, for the first time in my recorded life, been promised to me. I drink the wine my father pours for me, half a glass, the way a girl drinks a thing the doctors have, until tonight, told her she may not have. My mother watches me. My mother's hand, twice, finds mine across the table. My mother's eyes, twice, fill.

She is crying because she is happy.

I run, after the dessert plates, to the kitchen.

I run to fetch the small lemon ice my mother and Mrs. Carmela the cook have prepared in honor of the announcement. I run on legs that have, until tonight, never run anywhere on the assumption that they were going to be allowed to run anywhere again, and the small cold bowls are in my hands when I push, with my hip, the swing-door of the kitchen back into the dining-room corridor.and I stop.

My parents are by the morning-room door.

My father has my mother by both her shoulders. He is bent down to her. His face, in the half-light from the corridor sconce, is not the face I saw at the head of the table four minutes ago. It is the face of a man who is, with as low a voice as the closeness of the room will permit him, saying something hard. My mother is shaking her head. She.I see, in the moment before they hear me.is in tears.

She turns her head against my father's shoulder and brings up the back of her wrist and wipes her face, and steps back, and arranges her mouth.too quickly, for any practiced eye.into a smile.

"Cara. The ice. Come, come."

I do not, for the rest of the evening, quite recover.

There is, in my chest, a small grey shape that has not been in my chest before. I push the lemon ice around the bowl. I laugh when my father laughs. I kiss my mother good night at the foot of the staircase. I climb to my room. I let Clara turn down the bed. I let Clara close the door.

I wait until the house has gone, on its old hinges and its old floorboards, into the small settled silence it makes after midnight.

At two in the morning I open the window.

I open it the way I have opened it every night for nine years.the small slim screwdriver from my dressing-table, the casement-pin lifted, the sash slid two thumbs at a time so the iron does not sing. I climb onto the slate of the lower roof. I climb down.the way I have climbed down ten thousand times.by the iron of the trellis to the soft slate of the dovecote roof and from the dovecote roof to the wet grass of the upper bed.

I am, then, in my garden.

I stand on the wet grass in my bare feet and I look up at the wisteria, and at the moon over the south wall, and at the small careful gilt thread of the gravel walk going down to the fountain that has, tonight, been left running.

I let the air into me.

Next month. The car. The papers. A real university. A boy, perhaps. A laundry. A street with a market on Saturdays. I am going to live.

I close my eyes.

The night, behind my eyes, smells of wisteria and wet stone.

The blast comes from inside the house.

It comes from the direction of the morning-room window.

It is a short hollow concussive sound, the kind a heavy door makes when a heavy object on the inside meets it, and it is followed by the small clean tinkling of glass.and then, behind the glass, by the sound that I will know, until the day I die, was my mother.

The scream tears.

It tears the air. It tears the night. It tears, in some small absolute interior place inside of me, the eighteen-year-old girl who had, four hours ago, been told she was going to be allowed to live.

I stand, in my bare feet, on the wet grass of my own garden, and I do not, for a long second, breathe. There are men's voices, somewhere inside the house. There is.I hear it, between the heartbeat in my own ears and the heartbeat in my own ears.a single shot. There is a second shot. There is, after the shots, a silence so complete that I can hear, two miles to the south, the small distant whistle of the night train going west.

The house, when I go to it, does not look like the house I left.

The front door is open. The front door is off the hinge. The frame is splintered around the lock. There are, on the white flag of the lower step, three perfect overlapping prints of the front of a man's shoe.

The prints are red.

I climb the step.

I cross the threshold of my parents' house, and I look, with my own eighteen-year-old eyes, into the front hall.