The Language of Sparrows (18 page)

The words only seemed to draw more hurt into his eyes. He slid his hand behind her neck, as if he would pull her to him again, but then he sighed and dropped his hands to his sides. “Okay. Good night, April.”

As she walked away, the sound of knife shaving wood started again—a low, mournful sound.

She sat in her car with the window open far too long before she switched on the ignition.

Chapter Twenty-Four

April threw herself into work over the next few days, but no amount of arranging sculptures or designing sales flyers could keep her thoughts free from him—the sound of her name in Nick’s deep baritone, the feel of Nick’s hand on her shoulder, his kiss. She looked forward to seeing Luca on Monday, and not only for his sake. Somehow being close to Luca made her feel close to his son. Adolescent thinking perhaps, but there it was.

When she walked into Luca’s home, she felt confident. The first bit of his story had gone well. There were no traumatic revelations. Luca himself even seemed to enjoy the memories. One point of anxiety needled at her confidence though. Eventually the story must turn toward prison.

Late February had brought in a hint of spring and lifted her spirits. Luca led her outside to the backyard where they sat next to his garden. Cool sunlight filtered through the pine trees, lending a soft edge to the day. Hummingbirds flew madly around a feeding glass.

As she settled into a patio chair, she searched for features of Nick hidden in Luca’s face. Nick had similar eyes, but Luca didn’t turn them on her like a force. Something about their faces was alike, but Luca had decidedly European mannerisms. The most striking similarity was difficult to define. The way they looked straight out, as if life were coming at them head-on and they’d need to be ready for the impact. Only, Nick appeared ready to charge into the fray, whereas Luca inched away as if he could miss the onslaught.

He glanced at the hummingbirds and closed his eyes. His lids were blue. His hands lay heavily on his knees. When he didn’t start the story, April began to doubt herself.

“It’s a more difficult part today?” she asked softly.

“My years with Tatia and Nicu were the happiest of my life. But it is these years I have questioned the most. If …” He inhaled deeply. “
If.
It is a useless word, no? You cannot make different decisions than the ones you made. You cannot make other people be other than what they were.”

He leaned back in his chair. His eyes grew dim as he went into his memories.

“Nicolae was born just one month after our first wedding anniversary, and Tatia and I were both filled with such joy. I held our son to my chest, and he liked it there. Tatia said he liked the rumble of my voice when I spoke to him.

“When I held him—so fragile, so small—I knew I must commit him to the care of God. But like my parents before me, I said my prayers over him in secret.

“I soon obtained a position teaching secondary students. We were happy, and I put my worries aside.”

April thought of the little boy in the picture at Nick’s home. “How old was Nick when you went to prison?”

“Four. I believe the only memories he had of me are the ones Tatia remembered for him. I do not think he recalls trailing at my heels like a small shadow. Tatia scolded us for laughing and running through the apartment, but of course, she was really glad to see us bound together as we were.”

“Have you ever told him that?” April asked.

He shook his head.

“What happened?”

“One of my students made an elaborate algebra equation in class, but it was quite wrong. I said to the student, ‘In mathematics, you do not invent the answer. If you add two apples and two apples, you discover you have four apples, but you do not invent the apples. An algebra equation is more complex than a sum, but you are still only searching for what is already a fact. It may seem that one method is as good as another one. But the truth cannot be invented or created. To find the solution, you need the correct method.’

“This must have impressed the boy, for he went home and told his father, who worked for the Securitate, the Romanian secret police. I cannot say why my lesson upset the authorities so, except that in Romania we were used to someone trying to tell us in some fashion that two plus two equals fifteen. Encouraging neighbors to spy on each other was meant to equal freedom, and uneducated fools were meant to be great scholars.

“At any rate, they took me to a room, a narrow concrete room with one bright light, and questioned me.

“‘Why do you spew capitalist propaganda on our youth?’ one man screamed at me. Another one spit on me and slapped me. They wanted me to say I was a foreign spy. Finally, they left me alone and another man came in. He was a great warrior of a man with a scar along his cheek. He sighed and stared at me until I trembled.

“‘You can go home, but only teach maths from now on.’ He did not lay a finger on me. He gave me only a mocking smile, and I thought then I might have liked him in different circumstances.

“The man drove me home. Tatia ran outside our apartment block to meet me. Her tears wet my face as she helped me inside.

“She put plasters on my cuts while Nicu asked, ‘Why is Daddy hurt?’ I could not answer my son. He was too young to understand which things must be whispered and which things might be spoken aloud.

“Tatia kissed me over and over. ‘I am married to a hero. Your students know now that truth is real. It cannot be invented at the government’s whim.’”

“So you did it again?” April leaned forward.

He shook his head. “Not for a long time. It was almost the end of the school year, but one day I mentioned Galileo and Copernicus and how they were threatened because they saw the equations no one else did. I was taken by the Securitate again.

“‘Do you think you are like Galileo?’ one said as he slapped me in the face. ‘You are nothing!’

“They beat me severely. The man with the scar once again drove me home, but this time I returned with a broken arm and cracked ribs.”

“Tatiana was right. You were a hero,” April said softly.

“Pah! I wanted nothing more than to run away.” Luca looked down. “We went into the forest and looked over the hills into Yugoslavia. Others had escaped before us, but we would have to get through the border unseen and then across another communist border to Austria or Switzerland. Nicu was small. He might be taken from us. Or killed.”

The wind shuffled leaves around their feet, and April cringed at the hollowness in his expression.

“I returned to work after the summer, and Tatia came often to meet me after school, her hand clutching Nicolae’s so tight. Life was very hard for the families of political prisoners. I determined I would never make trouble for her again. I taught only math formulas. I held my tongue. And our life was so quiet.

“But still there was something wrong.

“One day, many months after my last interrogation, I spoke to Tatia, but she looked just beyond me instead of meeting my eyes. Many times she would start to talk to me, but then she would shake her head and say nothing.

“Nicu grew fretful, and Tatia would hold him as if it were her last moment with him. He would pat her hand. One could not tell whether she was comforting him, or he was comforting her.

“She woke sometimes in the middle of the night and did not come back to bed. I would find her on her knees, praying. It seemed to me all of her passion had turned inward into a fire burning at her from the inside. I could not fathom what caused her distress. But sometimes it seemed a joy crossed her face. I could not make sense of it.

“‘What is wrong, Tatia?’ I would say.

“‘Oh, you must not worry, Luca. I am so tired sometimes. That is all,’ she would answer, and she would smile with such sweetness, I would think truly that was all.

“But one night, after Nicu was asleep, she stood at the window, alone in the dark, looking at nothing. I came from behind and put my arms about hers. She screamed as she pulled away, clutching her sides, and crumpled to the ground.

“She looked at me with eyes wide and horrified. ‘Oh, Luca, what have I done?’ she wailed.

“I went to her on my knees, but she covered her face with her hands and refused to look at me. ‘Don’t ask me, don’t ask me,’ she said. ‘Don’t ask me, Luca.’”

Luca’s color washed away as he whispered Tatia’s refrain. “‘Don’t ask me.’ That is what she said to me.”

“Luca?”

He looked up at her as if only now remembering that he wasn’t alone with his story.

“Can I get you some water?”

“No,” he said in a thin voice. Slowly, a pained smile came to his face, but the attempt did nothing to ease April’s mind.

“Why don’t we stop for today? You need to rest.”

He waved a feeble hand at her. “It was you who wished to hear my story, Mrs. Wright.”

April laced her fingers through his. “You’re not well. I could hardly continue the story now, could I? I’ll come back when you’ve rested.”

Luca gave a wheezy laugh. “Am I so weak as that? Very well, next week then.”

April stood to go. What had happened to Tatiana? What had happened to her to reduce her husband to pale angst even decades later?

Luca’s eyes were closed. He seemed so impossibly old for a sixty-year-old man.

The next morning, Nick came to April’s door. It was Tuesday. He should be teaching. They looked at each other without speaking. Memories of the moonlit kiss came flooding back, but she could tell by his military posture and unwavering gaze that that wasn’t why he’d come.

She opened the door with a smile, but his earnestness put her on guard.

He threw a quick glance into the living room but didn’t come inside. He shifted his feet. “My father is sick, April. He’s in bed, too weak to get out.”

“What’s wrong?” She dreaded the answer.

Nick took a step back and folded his hands behind him. “April, you know my father is very frail.”

“Do you think talking about his past caused him to get sick?”

“Look, his health has never been what it should be, not since prison. I don’t know.”

April looked at her feet, remembering how white and disturbed Luca had been as he talked about his wife. Maybe it was her own questions she needed to ask, not his. There was no maybe about it. It was so much easier to unravel someone else’s hurt than your own.

“Can I see him?”

He gave her a curt nod. “Sure. But April, let his story die. He doesn’t need this stress.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

Later, Nick led her to Luca’s bedroom. It was furnished in the same naked style as the front of his house. A bed, a chest of drawers, a bedside table in a square formation—that was it. There were no pictures, no luxuries.

He sat up halfway in bed with pillows behind him, looking tired, but at least he had some color in his face.

Nick shot her a silent plea to be brief and went to the kitchen. She heard the sound of running water and soon smelled brewing coffee.

April sat down on the bed. “I’m sorry, Luca. I would never have done anything to make you sick.”

In a reedy voice, he said, “Open the drawer.” He nodded to the bedside table.

She pulled open the drawer. A neat stack of photos in frames lay to one side. She pulled them out, along with some papers underneath. On the top lay the same photo of his family that graced Nick’s living room. The second showed young Luca in a swimsuit on the beach with Nick on his shoulders.

Below this, she found one of an older Tatiana and Luca, obviously taken after she had become sick. She wore a silk scarf, covering, April was sure, a head bald from chemotherapy. Though gaunt and wasted, she looked into the camera’s face as if she had the last joke on life and not the other way around.

April touched Tatiana’s face, a sudden sorrow cutting through her. She didn’t even know the woman, yet she felt her loss.

She flipped through the stack of photos of Nick from childhood but found none of him as an adult. There was a pile of yellowing newspaper clippings underneath the frames. She smoothed them on her lap.

A neighborhood paper reported on the men returning from Desert Storm. April’s hand stilled on a fifteen-year-old wedding announcement about Nick and a beautiful brunette. Stapled behind it was another clipping from not even two years later telling of a fatal car accident in which one Caroline Foster drove into a telephone pole. The article reported that she’d ingested a toxic amount of alcohol. April swallowed a lump in her throat.
Oh, Nick.

She took a breath and flipped through newer clippings in the back that told of Nick’s passion for his career. He had been named Teacher of the Year by his school district recently, and last summer he’d won a grant to take low-income kids on a tour of historic sites in New England.

April traced the headline of the last article, letting her index finger move down the column to quotes by Nick. She raised her head. “You must be very proud.”

Luca gave a small nod.

“Does Nick know you’ve kept these?”

Luca shook his head.

A Bible lay on the bottom of the drawer, and beneath it, an image, painted on wood, of Jesus holding a jewel-encrusted book. Why were these things not decorating Luca’s walls and shelves? The whole house cried out for color.

She looked up.

His eyes grew watery, and he knotted his hands together. “Even here in America, I cannot bear to bring out my Bible. Or my pride in my son. I speak in whispers as if the secret police will still find me.”

“It was too much for you.” April should have known. Of all people, she should have known how painful speaking about the past could be.

Luca covered April’s hand. Even the small movement seemed to sap his energy. “If I had been the hero Tatiana believed, I would have told my son of what happened long ago.”

April shook her head. Had she really counseled Luca on his relationship with Nick? What nerve! What arrogant-headed nerve!

“Come back in a few days,” he said, leaning forward. “I will tell you why I went to prison. For Nicu. But I shall need your help.”

As if even the plan of telling his story cost too much, he sank back on his pillows and closed his eyes.

April folded the top of the blanket over Luca’s chest. As much as she longed to hear Tatiana’s story, she doubted his plan. “Are you sure, Luca? Your health.”

“I am sure.” He didn’t open his eyes.

April closed the blinds to dim the room. She glanced back from the doorway. His chest rose and fell as if he’d already fallen sleep.

She found Nick in the kitchen nursing a cup of coffee at one end of the counter.

“Your dad’s sleeping now.”

He nodded and took a sip.

April circled the kitchen, then rested her hands on the end of the scarred counter across from Nick. Afraid she was interfering again, she hesitated. “Nick, if you don’t mind my asking, what’s wrong with your father exactly?”

“What does he have? I don’t know. He has asthma and chronic respiratory infections. Occasional pain no one can explain. Gastrointestinal issues. You name it. He never recovered from prison. When I came to see him last night, he was too weak to answer the door. I don’t know what it is this time. Maybe just fatigue.”

“He wants to continue telling me his story in a few days.”

Nick gave her a hard stare, and she knew she’d earned that look.

“I was wrong,” she admitted. “I shouldn’t have pushed him to tell me about something so traumatic. But if he wants to tell what happened to him, don’t you think I owe it to him to listen?”

Nick turned away from her. A bowl of something sat on the counter, some recipe Luca had started and hadn’t finished. It looked crusty now, and April ran water in the bowl to clean it out. It was too hard to see Nick turning away from her, blaming her.

“I won’t do it if you think it’s best not to.”

Nick heaved a sigh. “He has the right to do what he wants. Just keep a close eye on him.”

She turned. “I’ll look after him as if he were my own father.”

“April …” He leaned back against the counter but didn’t continue.

She waited. The few feet between them felt too close. Or too far. Memories of the night on his deck drifted between them like a soft mist. She was thinking of it. He was thinking of it. But what could they say?

“About the other night, I wouldn’t … I don’t …” He stopped.

“It’s okay.” She searched for something to say, something to ease the moment. How was it that she, voted the sunniest girl in her senior class, could bring so little light to anyone in her life?

She took his hand. “The other night is forgotten as far as I’m concerned. You’re so dear to me, Nick. As close as family.”

Liar, liar, liar,
a little voice inside cried. She had relived that night so many times it wasn’t funny. She felt many things for Nick, but brotherly love didn’t exactly top the list. She wasn’t about to tell him the truth, though, because as soon as they both admitted how they felt, there would be no turning back.

She had courage enough for anything, but not that—not putting her heart into another man’s hands. Especially not Nick’s. She already felt too much for him.

He turned her hand, inspecting it, as if he couldn’t understand how it had come to be linked in his.

“Family? A brother, April?” He gave her a dark smile and took his cup to the sink, emptying the dregs and rinsing it out. Turning back to her, he said, “What I wanted to say is I hope I didn’t upset you the other night. I’m sorry if I did.”

His face was strained, his shoulders taut, and April wished she could reach out to him and, with a touch, soothe away the losses that ate at him. It would be so easy, so natural.

“You didn’t upset me, Nick,” she said in a barely audible voice.