That was family.
It wasn’t hard to get their DNA. They weren’t exactly hiding. So, when I tested it and saw they were half-siblings, I remembered what Calliope had said years ago to me. “My family is fucking messy.” Her family was messier than mine.
Calliope had dropped puzzle pieces for me throughout our time together. But she also lied a lot, adding false pieces to the puzzle to throw me off. But her lies were often mixed in with the truth. I learned them last year after the death of my aunt when she told me everything.
Why had she lied right after she’d given birth to Gigi? She had told me she wasn’t a real Orsini, and back then, the way her voice and tone changed was off to me. I thought then that it might have been because it was a painful story. However, she explained she wanted to give birth to Gigi in Chicago; she had wanted me to be there.
And the only way she could convince them to allow her to do that was if she made a record of her time at her most fragile moment. They were listening to that conversation, so she’d had to lie. Fiorello didn’t have gray eyes. His mother, however, did, and so did his grandmother. It came from a condition that affected the women in their family. It even affected Gigi. Everything she said added up with what I already knew. All the pieces I had complied with, the Orsini and Affini families finally made a complete puzzle and revealed how big and messy Calliope’s family really was.
The more I dug into her life, her story, the more I found myself in awe at how she had managed it. How had she not gone insane?
She’d been forced to deny who she was. Never allowed to speak about how her stepfather was actually her half-brother. How Fiorello was a disgrace to humankind and fathered kids he didn’t care about unless he could use them as toys. How his wife, Siena, was a snake indulging his worst self for her own personal revenge.
All her life, Calliope had denied who she was, while knowing who she was. Keeping calm and not losing herself even as every last person connected to her abused her, used her, or nearly killed her.
All the lies and secrets finally came together and made sense.
It also exposed how she was even unlucky when it came to having me as a husband. Though I loved her, I hurt and used her, too. She knew it. We were both telling each other half-truths in the beginning. Our own issues and plans muddled our feelings, but we still had those feelings. And no matter what I did, she still remembered to make cupcakes as well as sang horribly for my birthday. Even when I had other women on my arm to distract myself from her and Gigi, she never failed to wait for me each and every year and celebrate.
As Gigi grew old enough to remember faces, Calliope made and forced me to wear disguises so we could celebrate. She didn’t care if I rarely had the chance to celebrate with her then.
That was frustrating—it made me nervous. It made me wonder if it really was what she wanted to do or if she was just acting with me, too? Was I being played by her affections? That crossed my mind until she became pissed at me. And when Calliope was pissed, she shut down and pushed me away, going completely cold, and that terrified me more than the thought of it all being a game. I could take silence from everyone but her and Gigi.
Slowly, piece by piece, over the years, I began to understand parts of her. She was naturally a fun-loving person, that wasn’t fake. She didn’t care about many people because she’d never been taught to. Family was meaningless to her because, well, her family was worthless. She’d use whoever and whatever she could to get ahead or win. But deep down, despite it all, she had hope that one day, she’d have someone. She kept giving herself goals, and those goals gave her hope. That one day, she’d just be Calliope, with all the glitz and glamour of a good life, the life she saw in my mother as a child. It was the childish part of her that almost made me forget she was a cold-blooded killer. The fact that she truly believed one day she’d free and happy.
“I take my broken pieces and make a beautiful mosaic,” she had said to me once, and it fascinated me. She and that world view fascinated me.
I wanted to understand how everyone could be a disappointment to her, how she was never free to speak the full truth, and yet still managed to hold on to it. She did not sink into utter despair. The whole world could hate her, could misunderstand her, and doubt her, and the woman would make a dessert like she didn’t even notice. She was more broken than me, and yet she was so much better at living. She was weird, but I wanted to be that type of weird, too.
I wanted her beside me. I wanted her free of her ol
d family. I wanted her to only belong to me and me alone. Her past and her lies, I didn’t care about. Hurt and abused people had to protect themselves. I understood that. One day I wanted to be the person who made her hopes real. There were just so many obstacles to getting there.
“Papa!”
I had only just entered the hallway toward her room. It was already four in the morning. I stopped to bandage my hand and change my clothes so Gigi didn’t see the blood on me. She ran as fast as she could toward me, but she didn’t hang on to my legs like she normally did. Red faced, cranky, and confused, she grabbed me. “Where is Mommy? I can’t find Mommy!”
Bending down, I did my best to keep calm and smile for her. “Mommy is a little sick right now—”
“The people downstairs said Mommy’s gone!” she yelled, looking around as my grandmother came over. “That’s what they said, Nana, right? You heard, right? Then the TV—” Her face turned red, and she had tears in her eyes. “You were on TV. You were screaming, Papa, I saw! My mommy was hurt! I saw Mommy and…and….”
“Sweetheart, breathe. Gigi, breathe!” I said, quickly grabbing her, but she kept pushing me.
“I want to see Mommy,” she screamed, shoving against me as hard as her little hands could go. “Mommy is hurt!”
“Gigi!” I yelled, wrapping my arms around her and pulling her into my chest. I hugged her as tightly as I could as she hit me and screamed over and over again. Each time it felt as if she were stabbing me, and I couldn’t do anything. She didn’t want to hear anything. She wanted to see her mother, to see for herself.
“Papa…please,” she cried on my shoulder. “Can I go see Mommy?”
“Tesoro,” treasure, “You have to be calm to see her.”
Because she was tired, because she was in my arms and unable to break free, she relaxed a bit. She sniffled as I walked past my grandmother back into Gigi’s room as she held me for dear life. Glancing around, I noticed all the things she’d thrown across the room. The pillows she’d tossed onto the floor, the shoe she’d most likely thrown that had broken her mirror. If Calliope saw this, she’d pull her by the ears, for acting as such. But I understood, sometimes it felt like people couldn’t hear you until you broke things…or people.
Taking a seat on her bed, I tapped her back. “Will you listen to me now?”
“When can we see Mommy?” she muttered, sitting on my lap.
I brushed her hair from her face. “Once you sleep and wake up.”