Before I Forget His Name novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Room You Keep
Adriano asks Livia about her suitor in the study and tells her she will always have a room, and she hides her tumor and her flight to Zurich; from the landing she hears him order Bruno to dig into Philip.
Adriano came home for the first time in three weeks, and the first thing he asked about was my suitor.
He stood at the study fireplace with his black sleeves rolled to the elbow.
He was turning an unlit cigar in his fingers.
He had never smoked in front of me.
In six months he had taken every other kindness away, but he had kept that one.
"How is Philip?" he asked the fire. "How many times have you seen him?"
"Four."
"Has he talked about proposing?"
I almost laughed.
Philip Whitcombe was my friend and nothing more.
He had never once held my hand.
"He's getting close," I said.
The cigar stopped turning.
Six months ago my psychology professor told us to text "I love you" to the family member we were closest to.
We were supposed to write down the first reaction.
My parents had been dead seven years, so I had one person to text.
At two in the morning Adriano answered.
"Livia, you are leaning on me and calling it love. There is no version of us. Do not write to me like that again."
It was still pinned at the top of my phone.
I didn't want to waste the first real conversation we'd had since then.
So I told him the wedding I used to let myself imagine.
"I'd get married at the end of Pier Seven with the cranes lit up. A plain gold band with a green stone."
I kept going. "Nobody would drive us anywhere. We'd walk home along the water."
His face got darker with every sentence.
"Enough," he said. "All I need is for you to have a life that's yours."
He put the cigar back in its case and shut the lid with both hands.
"Your father trusted me with you. That doesn't end because you're grown."
He still wouldn't look at me. "There will always be a room for you in this house."
Two crates stood in the hall behind him, marked for the church charity drive.
A courier was coming for them tomorrow, and they were going to a clinic in Zurich.
My clothes were in them, and my books, and the photographs my parents left me.
"You don't need to keep a room," I said. "I don't think I'll live in New York again."
I did not mean "think."
I meant that whether the surgeons got me through it or not, I wasn't coming back.
The neuro-oncology center in Zurich had given me a bed for an awake brain surgery on Sunday.
My flight left Saturday morning at seven-ten.
Adriano was marrying Giulia Donati at noon the same day.
He looked up, and a question started in his eyes.
I spoke over it. "What flowers does Giulia like?"
"Dark red ranunculus." He answered at once.
My chest tightened, and I kept smiling.
"Does she like antiques? Jewelry?"
"She doesn't need anything from you. Don't send a gift, and don't go near her."
He thought I would come to the wedding to ruin it.
That was fair.
Six months ago I had followed him through this house, shouting.
I had asked how he could sit by my bed all night with a fever and then act like losing me would cost him nothing.
Now I could hardly remember the words we'd thrown at each other.
That was the tumor.
It was taking words first, then names, then roads I had driven a hundred times.
Yesterday I stood in the kitchen for ten minutes because I couldn't find the name of the coffee maker.
But I still knew how Adriano looked when he cared about someone.
He remembered flowers and dress sizes and flight numbers, and anything a person said only once.
Giulia had all of that.
She didn't need anything from me.
I only wanted to settle what I owed this family before I left.
In my cardigan pocket was the index card my neurologist told me to start.
It listed the names I could not afford to forget: my mother, my father, Philip, Bruno, the street I grew up on.
Adriano's name wasn't on it.
It had never crossed my mind to write it down.
Then I smelled burning wood.
There was no fire.
The neurologist had warned me about this smell.
It came from my temporal lobe, usually a few seconds before a seizure.
I gripped the back of a chair and waited for the black spots in my vision to fade.
Adriano crossed the room in two steps. "What is it?"
"Low blood sugar."
He lifted a hand toward my forehead and stopped with it in the air between us.
He looked at it.
Then he put it in his pocket.
"Go to bed," he said.
So I went upstairs to finish leaving.
I was halfway up when I heard the study door close and his voice go low and hard.
"Bruno. Philip Whitcombe. Everything about him, tonight."
I stopped on the dark landing.
"Who he owes, who he's seen," Adriano said. "And why a man from Boston has four dinners with her and never touches her."
I stood there with the card crushed in my fist.
Philip's secret was my secret, and it would not last until Saturday.
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