The Widowed Don Hired a Doctor for His Son, and She Brought Two Boys Who Wore His Face novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Phone
At two in the morning at Teo Vasari's bedside, Ines tells his father the truth about the boy, and when the twins' photo lights her phone she turns it face up on the quilt and tells the Don whose sons they are.
The boy's heart was fine.
I listened to it a third time anyway, because it gave me something to do with my face.
He was six years old and lay perfectly still, watching the ceiling fan.
It was two in the morning in a mafia family's house on the Gulf.
I had been its night-shift pediatrician for eleven days.
His father had called me in at midnight and said only, "He doesn't sleep."
Nobody had told me the boy hadn't slept through a night in fourteen months.
The housekeeper told me that in the hall, in a whisper, with her hand on her cross.
I took the stethoscope out of my ears and sat on the edge of the bed.
"Your lungs are good, and your heart is good," I told the boy.
"I think you already know that."
He didn't look at me.
On the nightstand sat a stuffed seahorse with one eye missing and a glass of water he hadn't touched.
"I'm going to tell your dad some things now," I said.
"You can listen or not.
"None of it is a secret from you."
His eyes moved to the door.
A man was standing in it.
He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, and he looked like he had been there a while.
The whole island called him the Captain of the Strand.
I had been warned that he was courteous and exact and that no one had ever heard him raise his voice.
He was thirty-eight, tall and lean, with black hair going gray at the temples and a cleft in his chin.
I had spent eleven days not looking at that cleft.
"Dr. Marchetti," he said.
"Is he going to be all right?"
He asked it politely.
His hand on the doorframe was white across the knuckles.
I could have given him the soft answer.
I had given soft answers to a hundred frightened parents, and I was good at it.
"Physically he's fine," I said.
"He's been taught not to cry."
Nico said nothing.
"Somebody told him in the first week that his father couldn't stand it," I said.
"Or he decided that himself, because he's six and everyone around him was coming apart."
"I never told him that."
"I believe you," I said.
"You didn't have to."
"Then what happened?"
"He's holding it in so hard he can't sleep," I said.
"If he sleeps, it might come out."
Something moved in Nico's jaw.
He didn't argue, and he didn't thank me.
He crossed the room and sat down on the far side of the bed, on top of the quilt, still in his good shoes.
The mattress dipped between us.
Teo's eyes went to his father's face and stayed there.
Then the boy turned, a small clumsy turn, and put his head against Nico's ribs.
His father went rigid.
He looked down at the black hair against his shirt as if he had never seen it before.
Slowly, he laid his hand on his son's back.
Teo's shoulders came down.
It was a very small thing, and I had to look at the window.
When I looked back, Nico was watching me over the boy's head.
His other hand lay on the quilt an inch from mine, and neither of us moved it.
I knew two things at once.
I wanted him, with a plain animal want that had no business in that room.
And I couldn't afford to, because I hadn't come to this house for that.
I had come for something else, and I had carried it for fourteen months.
"Thank you," Nico said at last.
The courtesy had gone out of his voice, and what was left was low and rough.
"Nobody in this house has told me the truth since my wife died.
"They told me he was getting better."
"He isn't getting better," I said.
"He's getting quieter, and those aren't the same."
"No."
The hand on the quilt didn't move.
I could feel the heat of it all the way up my arm.
My phone buzzed on the nightstand wood.
It lay face down beside the seahorse, and it buzzed twice, and light crept out from under its edges.
I reached for it and I was too slow.
A message slid across the lock screen from my babysitter: the twins are up and asking when Mama is coming home.
Behind the message, filling the whole screen, was the photograph I had never changed.
Two four-year-old boys in matching yellow rain boots, standing on a Port Arthur curb.
Black hair, heavy brows, a cleft in each small chin.
The boy on the left lifted one corner of his mouth at the camera, a crooked half-smile that did not belong to a child.
In eleven days Nico Vasari had never once looked at my phone.
He looked at it now.
I watched the color leave his face.
I watched his hand come off the quilt.
"Who are they?" he said.
He said it quietly, so as not to wake his son.
I had planned this moment for fourteen months.
I had rehearsed it in a Corolla on the Gulf Freeway and in the shower and over a stove at midnight.
I had forty different answers.
I had a gentle one, and a cold one, and one that began with the word please.
I said none of them.
I picked up the phone and turned it face up on the quilt between us.
Two small faces looked up at the man who had made them without knowing.
"Yours, I think," I said.
"Or your brother's.
"That's what I came to ask."
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