Chapter 9: Gray-Green Eyes
Three weeks later, on a Saturday morning, I drove Elena and Sofia to Westchester.
Sofia spent the first twenty minutes of the drive with her face pressed to the window, narrating everything she saw.
A truck.
A bridge.
A dog in the back of a pickup.
She provided commentary on all of it with the seriousness of someone filing a report.
Elena sat in the passenger seat.
She looked better.
The treatment was working — the doctor had used the word *responding* in a way that meant something good.
The shadows under her eyes were lighter.
She'd laughed twice the week before, once at something Sofia said and once at something I said, and both times it had caught me off guard.
"Are you nervous?" I asked her quietly.
"About meeting your father?"
"Yes."
"A little." She watched the road.
"Is he frightening?"
"He can be."
"That's not reassuring."
"He's been practicing being patient," I said.
She looked at me.
"What does that mean?"
"You'll see."
Sofia leaned forward between the seats.
"Are we almost there?"
"Almost," I said.
"Does the man have a dog?"
"My father?
No."
She considered this.
"That's okay.
I like old men even without dogs."
Elena pressed her lips together to keep from smiling.
My father was waiting on the front steps when we pulled in.
He had dressed carefully — not formally, but carefully.
He stood with his hands clasped in front of him, and when the car stopped he didn't move forward immediately.
He waited.
I got out first.
Opened Elena's door.
Opened Sofia's.
Sofia stepped out and looked at the house with wide eyes.
"It's very big," she said.
"It is," I agreed.
She looked at my father on the steps.
He looked back at her.
She walked toward him with the directness of someone who has decided to get something over with.
She stopped at the bottom of the steps and looked up at him.
"Are you Luca's father?" she asked.
"I am," he said.
"He looks like you a little bit."
My father's expression shifted.
Something behind his eyes that he didn't try to hide.
"Does he?"
"Around the eyes." She tilted her head.
"My eyes are that color too.
Mommy says they're gray-green."
My father looked at her for a long moment.
"They are," he said.
His voice was steady.
Just barely.
"What's your name?" Sofia asked.
"Enzo," he said.
She tried it.
"Enzo." She seemed to find it acceptable.
"I'm Sofia."
"I know," he said.
"I've been looking forward to meeting you."
She nodded seriously.
"Luca told me you have a big house.
Can I see it?"
My father looked up at me.
Then at Elena, who had come to stand beside me.
He descended the steps.
He stopped in front of Elena.
He was quiet for a moment.
"I owe you an apology," he said.
"For what was done in the shadow of my name.
I didn't know.
That doesn't make it right.
But I want you to know that I didn't know."
Elena looked at him.
"I believe you," she said.
He nodded.
Something in his shoulders released.
"You raised a remarkable child," he said.
"She raised herself, mostly," Elena said.
"I just tried to keep up."
My father almost smiled.
"Come inside.
Both of you."
Sofia had already started up the steps.
She paused at the top and looked back at us.
"Are you coming?" she asked.
"I want to see all of it."
My father climbed the steps to join her.
She immediately began asking him questions — how many rooms, was there a garden, did he have any pets, why not — and he answered each one with the patience of a man who had been waiting a long time to be asked.
Elena watched them.
"He's not frightening at all," she said quietly.
"He's trying very hard," I said.
"I can tell." She was quiet for a moment.
"She's going to have him completely managed within the hour."
"Twenty minutes," I said.
Elena laughed.
The real kind.
The kind that surprised her.
We went inside.
My father showed Sofia every room she asked about, which was all of them.
She had opinions about each one.
The library was good because of the books.
The kitchen was very large.
The garden was the best part.
She stood at the garden window for a long time and pressed her hand flat against the glass.
"We could plant things," she said.
Not to anyone in particular.
Just the thought, released into the room.
My father looked at me over her head.
"We could," he said.
Sofia turned around.
"Do you know how to plant things?"
"I used to," he said.
"I've forgotten most of it."
"I don't know how either," she said.
"But we could learn."
My father looked at her.
He looked at her the way men look at things they didn't know they needed until they were standing directly in front of them.
"Yes," he said.
"We could."
Later, while Sofia was in the garden with my father — she had found a stick and was using it to draw in the dirt, explaining her plan for what should be planted where, and he was listening with complete attention — Elena and I stood in the doorway.
"She's going to want to come back," Elena said.
"Is that alright?"
"Yes." She watched Sofia gesture with the stick.
My father crouched down to look at something she was pointing to in the soil.
"Yes, it's alright."
I looked at Elena.
"There are things we still need to talk about," I said.
"About what comes next.
For all three of us."
"I know."
"Not today.
When you're ready."
She looked at me.
"I'm getting there."
"I know you are."
She looked back at the garden.
Sofia had handed my father the stick.
He was drawing something in the dirt under her supervision, and from the way he held the stick — carefully, deferentially — it was clear she had already established who was in charge of the planning.
"She really does have your hands," Elena said softly.
I looked at Sofia's hands — the long fingers, the precise way she pointed, the way she held things like they mattered.
"She has yours too," I said.
"The way she holds herself.
The way she doesn't look away."
Elena was quiet.
"She's going to be extraordinary," I said.
"She already is," Elena said.
We stood there in the doorway while the afternoon light moved across the garden, and my father learned how to take instructions from a six-year-old, and Sofia drew her plans in the dirt with the complete confidence of someone who has never doubted that the people around her will show up.
She hadn't doubted it on the sidewalk either.
She'd just looked at the adults standing there and understood, with the clear-eyed certainty of a child who has learned to rely on herself, that if help was coming, she would have to call it herself.
May you like
And she had.
And here we were.
