Andrea Canobbio - Three Light-Years

She does a search on the Internet, ends up on a site where she reads testimonials written by pregnant women subject to panic attacks: some say you can take Xanax, others say you can’t. She jumps up from her chair, paces the length of the room breathing heavily.

Stefania calls her back, tells her not to take Xanax, that maybe you’re not supposed to.

She lies down on the couch, gets up again. She slips a Japanese cartoon that the children gave her into the DVD player. It’s called My Neighbor Totoro , and it’s so slow that it’s relaxing. One deep inhalation; one deep exhalation. She tells an imaginary companion the story of Totoro . Once upon a time there were two sisters and a daddy; their mommy was sick.

She gets up, turns off the TV. She walks around the room, recites out loud the story about Xanax that Cecilia is always repeating: the woman who arrived in the ER claiming she’d taken “the axe.”

After half an hour Stefania arrives, but she’s more frightened than Silvia is. She grabs the pill that Silvia left on the table, breaks it in two, and swallows half of it with a glass of water. She has her tell her everything; then she starts to cry.

“Stefi, you can’t cry, I called you because I needed someone to talk to, you can’t start crying, too.”

“You have to talk to your sister about it, you have to call her right now. You have to let her help you.” Because keeping it, of course, would be crazy, but Stefania doesn’t have the courage to say so, and wants Silvia to be the one to say it first.

“I can’t,” Silvia says, shaking her head.

“I’m sure she’ll know what to do in a case like this.”

“What are you saying?”

“She’s a doctor! She knows !”

Then Silvia begins to cry.

“I can’t talk to her about it, I can’t. She has plenty to worry about, believe me. I just can’t.”

They sit on the couch, holding hands. “This is the first time something this big has happened to us, right?” Stefania says.

Silvia nods. “The first time.”

“Will you tell me what happened? Tell me who he is?”

* * *

At Michela’s First Communion, Luca had asked to speak to her, and the following day he’d come to her house and started telling her everything. But not right away, not all at once. It took four visits. The first time, he’d sprawled on the couch, drained, enervated, and at the end of an hour of stammering in a faint voice, he hadn’t said a thing. He wasn’t wearing his usual gray suit and tie, but all clothes looked good on him, even that blue sport jacket, even those beige chinos. He no longer seemed like a distant hologram but more fraternal; there was no longer any trace of frenzy and panic in him. Nor had he reverted to being the person he always was: present, solid, yet remote. He was a new and different Luca, one who collapsed on the couch and sprawled. He said he was sorry he’d gotten her involved, that Cecilia would never forgive him, that he didn’t want to put her in a tight spot and trouble her with their problems. Silvia looked at him in silence and thought back longingly to the frightened man she’d glimpsed the day before.

“I’ll make you some tea,” she said. He explained that he didn’t drink tea, it bothered his stomach, he’d never liked it. A pointless explanation, because Silvia started boiling water, poured two teaspoonfuls of Darjeeling into the infuser, set the cups on a tray. With her back to him, leaning against the kitchenette counter, she murmured that she could keep a secret, she wouldn’t say anything to anyone. She added that if he no longer felt like confiding in her, however, it was fine, too. If he’d changed his mind, if the prospect of talking made him uneasy and he no longer felt like unburdening himself, best to just drop it.

It was a trick she knew well, she’d used it dozens of times with her girlfriends, her girlfriends had used it dozens of times with her. Many years later she would use it on her son, so it wasn’t necessarily a malicious trick to extort confessions. When used with good intentions, it helped someone who wanted to talk, but who had lost his courage.

Luca shook his head, he was sure that talking would do him good, though until then he hadn’t felt like it, and he wondered why he’d felt the urge to tell her everything the day before, at Michela’s party. And his answer was that maybe he really wanted her to not keep the secret, maybe he wanted her to tell someone.

Silvia laughed. “Some trust you have.”

“You’re not understanding me.” He reddened. “I can’t explain it.” He slumped down a little more, hanging his head between his shoulders. He looked at his hands in silence. After an hour he left.

* * *

He came back the next day. And again Silvia offered him a cup of tea and again he said no thanks. Silvia smiled, began boiling water, poured it into the teapot, shut the lid. She crossed the room, turned on the stereo, turned the volume down low. She really couldn’t imagine what Luca wanted to tell her, she’d come up with any number of hypotheses, but the most credible still seemed to be trouble in the marriage. She couldn’t guess which of the two was the cause; it seemed so unlikely that either of them would have a lover, people as sensible and levelheaded as they were. Just the idea of it made her laugh, the way two people kissing make children laugh. Seeing Luca among the objects of her daily life reassured her. Nothing serious or irreparable could have happened.

“Yesterday, when I said … I meant to say…” He stopped, rubbed his forehead with one hand. “I was sure that what I wanted to say would have upset you and that you would tell the people you’re closest to. It’s normal, it’s natural, everyone does it, to try to understand. I can’t do it right now, I just can’t.”

Silvia poured the tea into the cups, set the tray on the table in front of the couch, picked up her cup; the other cup stayed where it was, steaming, gradually cooling, no longer steaming. “Okay,” Silvia said, sitting down. “Who was I supposed to tell whatever it is you want to tell me?”

“I don’t know. Your mother?”

“My mother?” Her eyes widened. “I barely talk to my mother. How could you think I’d go and tell her anything about you? And why?”

“I wanted someone to know who would tell Cecilia that she was wrong, that she’d done a terrible thing.”

“You wanted our mother to tell her?”

“You, your mother, I don’t know. I’m just trying to understand why I thought I should tell you. I feel so ashamed. I don’t want to tell anyone. I don’t want anyone to know about it. I wish it had never happened.”

“I’m not following you, I’m sorry.”

Luca pulled his phone out of his jacket pocket. He seemed to be searching for a number or a message; he sighed, put it back in his pocket. He shook his head a little, muttered something.

What if after having been the most normal guy in the world, he, too, had become one of those oddballs, what if he had become one of those people who sit on park benches, talking to themselves?

“Maybe you should tell me what it is Cecilia did, otherwise I don’t get it.”

“It’s not easy. I’ve never felt the way I’ve felt the last couple of months, this has never happened to me. This person isn’t me, this anger isn’t me. I think about it all day, I think about it all night, I never would have imagined having certain thoughts. Do you understand?”

“Not really.”

“I wanted someone to tell her that she shouldn’t have done what she did, I wanted a parent to yell at her. I wanted to share the anger with someone.”

“Well, I, in any case, can’t go and say anything to anyone, and I can’t reprimand Cecilia for what she did if I do understand, I think, what she did. So, if sharing it with me isn’t enough, better not to tell me anything.”