He Gave Our Baby to His Stepmother

My husband is Damiano Marchetti. He runs the family that runs this city.

As of this morning, I'm not allowed through my own front door.

The plaque went up while I was at the hospital overnight. Bronze, bolted to the wall by the front gate.

SERVANTS' ENTRANCE — BY ORDER OF THE FAMILY.

The front door of the Marchetti house, my husband had decided sometime in the last twelve hours, was for blood.

And whatever I was now, I wasn't that.

My son was asleep against my shoulder. The two men at the gate didn't say anything. One of them tilted his chin toward the gravel path that wrapped around the west wing.

That was the whole conversation.

I went around.

It started four years ago.

I came up out of the anesthesia alone. The room was too quiet. I turned my head toward the bassinet by the bed.

There was no baby in it.

There was a baptismal blanket folded inside, the way you'd fold one under a baby. Underneath, a stack of cash. On top of the cash, a card embossed in gold leaf.

Marco Antonio Marchetti. Baptized at Saint Lucia. Godmother: Bianca De Luca.

Pinned to the corner of the card was a ring. I had seen it on Bianca's finger the night I told her I was pregnant.

The door opened.

Damiano walked in. Behind him came his stepmother. Cream dress, fresh lipstick, like she'd come from a christening.

Because she had.

"Where is he," I said.

Damiano wouldn't look at me.

Bianca answered for him.

She walked past me, picked the ring off the card, slid it back onto her own finger.

"He's safe, sweetheart. The doctors said you did beautifully."

"Where is my son."

"My son," she corrected. Soft. Almost kind. She turned to Damiano. "I told you he would be beautiful. Didn't I tell you."

Damiano said nothing.

"Damiano gave him to me, sweetheart. We talked about it for months. You know I can't have one of my own." She smiled. "Don't make this harder than it has to be."

I picked up the stack of cash and threw it in my husband's face.

That was four years ago.

The four years since, I won't get into. He hid the boy. I took him back. He hid him again. There were months I had a stranger's child more often than my own.

Last night Marco's fever hit a hundred and four.

I broke into Bianca's wing at one in the morning and pulled him out of her bed in a sheet. On my way out my elbow caught the candle on her bedside table. The blanket I'd dropped on the rug went up behind me.

I didn't stop.

I drove him to the hospital with one hand. The other one wouldn't close around the wheel.

He woke up in the hallway after the IV went in. He looked at me like I was someone he'd been warned about.

"You're not supposed to take me," he whispered. "Auntie says you're sick in the head."

I sat on the edge of the bed for a long time.

"Marco. Baby. Listen to me."

He listened.

"Just say it once," I said. "Say 'mom.' One time. And I won't come for you again. I promise."

He thought about it the way a four-year-old thinks about a trade.

"...Mom?"

I smiled at him. The blister on the back of my hand was the size of a quarter. I covered it with my palm.

"Good boy. That's all I needed."

That was last night.

This morning I walked around the side of a house I had spent six years building into something worth living in, carrying a sleeping son who already wasn't mine.

The side door opened straight into the kitchen corridor.

Bianca was waiting in the foyer. Half the household was waiting with her. Two of Damiano's aunts. The housekeeper. Three of his cousins' wives. Two older men from the family's offices.

Damiano stood at the back, near the stairs. He saw me. His face did nothing.

I set Marco down.

I shouldn't have.

He pulled away from my legs the second his feet hit the ground. He didn't run to me.

He ran past me.

"Mommy!"

Bianca scooped him up in front of everyone. Kissed his forehead. Turned his small arm over to check for damage. Her acrylic dragged a thin red line across the inside of his wrist while she did. He didn't flinch.

He was used to it.

I started to reach for him.

I remembered what I'd promised him last night.

I put my hand back down.

"My poor angel." Bianca pressed her cheek to the top of his head. "Did she tell you she set your bed on fire, sweetie? With you in it?"

Marco shook his head against her shoulder.

"Of course she didn't."

One of the aunts stepped forward. She was a woman I'd invited to my own wedding. She gathered a fistful of my collar.

"You almost burned this house to the ground," she said. "You are not fit to be in the same room as that child."

Nobody told her to let go.

"She's mine to handle," Damiano said.

The hand left my collar.

Upstairs, in the bedroom that used to be ours, he shut the door behind us. He didn't ask about my hand.

"Do you have any idea what you almost did to her tonight?"

To her.

"Marco's fever was a hundred and four," I said.

"He could have died because his mother wasn't—"

He stopped.

He took a cigarette out of his jacket.

"Because Bianca wasn't there in time."

I looked at him.

I had known this man since I was nine years old. When he was nineteen he had done a terrible thing for me, and I had loved him for it ever since.

Standing in that room now, looking at the man across from me, I couldn't find a single thing in his face I recognized.

"Dami."

He lit the cigarette. "What."

"I want a divorce."

The hand holding the cigarette stopped halfway to his mouth.

A flake of ash fell onto his pant leg.

He didn't brush it off.