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Connie Corleone was never afraid of anything. Connie Rizzi was afraid to get out of bed in the morning.
But it wasn’t morning: blinking didn’t clear away the darkness, and all was quiet and still. No birds, no cars, no voices below. So there was no reason to move.
She knew where she was. The glow of the floodlights on the mall gave the room a blue-gray gloom. Connie was in her girlhood bedroom, in the centre of her girlhood twin bed, with the heavy fabric of her full-skirted mourning dress riding up around her knees and the petticoat itching her thigh. She dug her fingers into her hair and felt her brain throb inside her skull, like she’d eaten ice cream too fast. Her throat was dry, her mouth gummy from sleep, and the stickiness of her eyes and the heaviness of their lids brought the unremitting grief of the previous day roiling back to the surface. Tears stung her eyes.
Memories flooded in, both welcome and unwelcome.
The flutter of a floodlit curtain evoked a salty breeze gusting through the open window. She focussed on that memory, a welcome August breeze lifting the gauzy layers of her bridal finery as her mother and friends dressed her for her wedding day. Her last morning as a girl had begun in this room; it was fitting that her first as a widow should do so too.
She had slept here between, of course, several times. Never with—
Only alone, of course, on the occasions where she had sought the comfort and protection of her family. Her mother’s chatter and cooking, Sonny’s voice raised as he came in and out, the occasional murmurs of her father, Fredo’s quiet laughter. The house on the mall with her husband had come later, after Sonny—
Her house had never had the same warmth as her father’s big house on the corner plot, but she hoped it would one day, when her children were grown and spun around her as she and her siblings had to their parents.
She jumped; there was a figure in the darkness. Her heart lurched, sprinted, and she pressed a hand to her chest to feel it race, until she recognised the voice saying her name.
“Connie.”
That was all; Tom had always been a man of few words. Connie turned her face away from the silhouette of her almost-brother as he shifted forward in his seat, a gray shape set against the glazed glare of floodlights behind gauzy curtains. He didn’t ask how she was; Connie was glad because she had no answer for him.
He was sat on the spindly chair usually tucked under her dressing table. He pulled it closer to the bed and spoke again, still so quietly, but there was no noise to compete. “You're okay. You were hysterical. We called a doctor. He sedated you.” Connie felt the warm, dry grip of Tom’s hand on hers. She tried to pull away; it was a feeble attempt but he let her go. “I’m sorry for Carlo.”
“No, you’re not.”
Connie turned back to read his expression but it was lost in the gloom.
“I’m sorry for you,” he continued, squeezing her hand. “And your children. I know what it is to lose a father.”
So did Connie. If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t be a widow now. She had lost her husband; her children were without a father. If this world, as she had heard often enough, was tough enough that a man needed two fathers, how could her children’s uncle—
Rage crept up her throat, caustic like bile. Connie dug her fingernails into her palms. Her children may have no father, so she would have to do.
“Where are—” She coughed, cleared her throat. “Where is—”
“Your mother sat with you for a while, and Kay, but I’ve been here since midnight.”
That wasn’t what she meant.
”The baby?”
“With your mother. Theresa has the boys, they’re sleeping over with Frank.”
Not with Michael. A vicious relief lanced through her. Good.
A hand reached out of the darkness, light glinting off pale skin and gold wristwatch, in the direction of the bedside lamp. Connie’s own hand came up to stop him; they did not touch, but just the movement stilled Tom’s movement. He settled back in his seat.
An owl hooted in the darkness. Connie returned to her thoughts.
“If I could have done more for you, I would have,” Tom said, eventually.
No, he wouldn’t. Even her own mother, her father, had refused to interfere.
He reached for her hand again, and persevered even as Connie tried to pull away this time. “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but you should know.”
Connie pulled harder; she didn’t want to hear this. Tom rose out of his chair and settled on his knees by the bed and finally she could see his face. He was so pale, deep shadows under his eyes, but his hands and lips and gaze were steady.
“About Carlo. About what happened, then.”
Then.
The grief was like a blow, blunt and echoing, and followed with a flash of intuition that momentarily blinded her. Her world spun, dizzy, and her thoughts ricocheted harder, unfolding before her in the blink of an eye.
She thought back to that awful year, where she lost her father and all her brothers in succession – all except this one.
Connie’s life had been golden until then. She had never lost anyone important to her. Her father was as close to immortal as a man could be, at least in his daughter’s eyes. He’d been shot once before but she was mostly too young to understand. She had never known her grandparents to lose them, still had both her parents, four brothers, and a handsome fiancé. No tragedies had afflicted her friends. Her nieces and nephews were healthy. All was golden in her father’s world, for his golden child.
And then she was married, and her father was shot, and everything fell apart.
It had been her father first, gunned down in the street; this, horrific as it was, she could bear. She visited her father, supported her mother, all made easier by living in the city. Between her parents and Carlo, it filled her days and she knew her value. Then Michael vanished within a week or two, without a word. Connie wasn’t stupid; she knew why. Then Fredo, recuperating in Las Vegas. Finally, when she thought everything was going to be okay: Sonny. She still couldn’t think of that;
She had known, even back then, about the extent of Sonny’s temper. It was playing out in the newspapers, in the lives and deaths of men she’d known since she had been old enough to sit at her family’s table. And she had known that she did not want to be a widow; she could not bear to tell Sonny about any of it, because she knew what would happen.
What had she wanted? She’d wanted Tom to help her. He was so smart, she thought, and not a Sicilian. He didn’t have to live by their rules. He wouldn’t believe in that old country crap. He'd known a different family once, a different way to be. If anyone could help her, he would.
But he hadn’t.
She knew now that he would never have gone against her father, and her father was so rigid, so traditional. For all his power, he would not help his youngest child, his only daughter, when her husband—
That had changed. Carlo hadn’t hit her for years, not since Sonny died. He had a temper; he blazed, he shouted, he threw things. But he’d never laid a hand on her again. He’d been kind to her, after. Carlo held her hand as Tom broke the news to her that Sonny had been the latest victim of his own temper. And suddenly she was back in that day, and she read new meaning into looks that had been exchanged, in the set of Carlo’s shoulders.
She had the same lightning clap of intuition as any of her siblings; these thoughts occurred all at once and she had time to interrupt Tom befor he could continue.
“Don’t say it, Tom.”
They don’t say things like that in this family.
The knowledge of how to be one of them isn’t only in the blood. It is not the sole preserve of Sicilian men. She learned it and he did, both at their father’s table.
“I have to.”
“You don’t. You know you don’t.”
How old had she been when Sonny brought Tom home? She couldn’t remember her family without him. Now he was almost the only one she still recognised.
Sonny had been constant, until God and the other families had put the immovable object of death in the way of his unstoppable force. Fredo was a different man, a ladies’ man, smooth and slick as silk and no more a part of this hardened world. Michael had turned cold, icy as the grave. Connie didn’t know how Kay could stand to touch him; perhaps she wouldn’t, now she knew.
And her father was gone, and with it his protection of them all—not least, Carlo.
Vito Corleone hadn’t known how to choose between his son and his daughter; Michael Corleone had no such conscience.
“I know, Tom. Of course I do.”
They had told her, then, that it wasn’t her fault, and at the time she had wanted to believe them. She hadn’t had capacity to feel any more. She felt so much. So she’d put her guilt away in a little box, out of sight and out of mind, but now the box had exploded. Shards of grief and rage prickled in her skin like splinters.
“Get up,” she said, taking her hand away.
Her eyes followed Tom as he rose to his feet, face lost again in the gloom. “Okay?” he asked.
“Okay.”
She saw him hear what she’d left unsaid: she was, she would be. After a long look, Tom wished her goodnight and slipped away.
Connie Rizzi was going to make herself think of the things she didn’t want to remember. She would make herself look these men and their deeds in the face. She would be as one of the Roman Furies, if she must, hounding them, a constant reminder of their crimes. She would not allow them to rewrite who they were in the face of their family. She would hold a mirror to their deeds.
She would find Connie Corleone’s fearlessness again.
Perhaps Connie Rizzi didn’t need to be afraid either. She was a Corleone, with the heart of a lioness, full of fury and grief and bewilderment. Anguish rippled beneath her skin until she could not remain still for a moment longer. She put her feet on the floor, heart pounding, head spinning. She was not afraid. Her brother—brothers—all these men: they would hear her roar.