Gabriel and the Swallows (The Volatile Duology #1) (19 page)

“I don’t condone violence,” he said as he watched me wash my face in the kitchen sink, “but I’m proud of you tonight, son. It’s always been my desire for you to have the farm after I was gone. I feared you did not want it until tonight.”

“So did I,” I concurred with some amazement.

“It’s yours.”

“Papa—“

“It’s yours from today on, with one condition.”

“What condition?”

“Volatile must not return here again. Her life has never been more endangered. I know this is her home, but you must convince her to leave this place, this region, and never come back. I’ve known Gallo since the days he used to taunt me at elementary school, and he’s not a man who easily discards his own threats. Talk to her. She’s always listened to you.”

But something sunk inside of me at his words. Something I could not name died a little, and its carcass swung inside my soul, already gathering flies.

“Do you promise me?” pressed my father gently.

“Yes, Papa,” I said. “I promise.”

A
t first, I refused to recognize her.

Since the demise of Gallo and the restoration of our winery, I had been impatiently waiting for Volatile to reappear. I assumed she would return to us rapidly, strutting about congratulating herself on a job well done, and gleefully lapping up our thanks and praise. The night Alfio Gallo stormed upon our house, I sat awake at the window and waited for her. I called out to her, but she did not come. Every night thereafter, I would grossly delay my hour of sleep, and still Volatile did not return. Perhaps she had heard the promise I made to my father. Perhaps she was already acting upon it. My heart sank.

My mother’s health grew worse. Speaking would often encourage a bout of violent coughing, so she refrained from most conversation. The doctor had been and gone, leaving a cabinet full of tonics and syrups behind, which Mamma took religiously. I suspected they were useless, except to lubricate her dry throat and reduce her to a numb, sluggish state. Papa tended to her as always, but this time with more care and consideration than I had witnessed before. Or so I thought. Perhaps I really was growing up.  

She called me over to her side at times, to sit with her in bed. “Not now,” I would say, not wanting to hear the infinite circles of her speech, not wanting to see the blood on her handkerchief. “Tomorrow, okay?” She would sigh and settle deeply into the blankets with resignation. We both knew the answer would not change then, or the next day.

Autumn was upon us now. I spent my days learning the business of the trade, and began drafting letters to wine and liquor emporiums in Rome and Milan, asking them to stock
Laurentis Dolce Fantasia
, which I kept a secret from my father for fear of raising his hopes. But I lived in a constant state of agitation without Volatile.

There was no moon that night she came. My room was flooded with a thick blackness, darkness so dense I could put it in my mouth and swallow it. I drifted in and out of sleep, caused by a fluttering anticipation I could not quell. I sensed a movement in the corner of my room; I could almost see it, like a pot of boiling castor oil being stirred.

“It’s me,” she said.

“Volatile?” I asked, and made to turn on the lamp.

“Don’t!” came her voice, and I noticed there was no bravado there, no cocky sense of self-assuredness that I had come to associate with her, and always will.

“What is it?”

“Don’t look at me,” she whispered. “Keep the light off.”

“What do you mean? What has happened to you?”

“Don’t look at me.”

I snapped on the light and there she was, standing over my bed, her arms held high, shielding her face, repelled by the radiance. “I couldn’t come back looking this way,” she whispered.

“Show me,” I said, but she would not budge.

“Please show me, Volatile. I am not going to hurt you.”

“I don’t want you to see me like this,” she said.

“Just show me.”

Slowly, she lowered her arms away from her face, and her wings unfurled from her back.

I recoiled in horror. Her wings were nothing but a frame of stark bones, grey and splotched, so worn in the joints that I could see softening red marrow peering through. With a shudder I realized how much they resembled two enormous, broken ribcages ascending from her back. Her eyes were desperately searching mine for acceptance, and I noticed the pallor of her skin, white and chalky like aspirin. Her neck seemed too long and bony for her body.

“I tried to come when you called, but I couldn’t fly.”

“What happened to you?”

“It was the price,” she said, “that I had to pay.”

“The price of what?”

“The price of meddling with nature.”

And she began to describe what she had done to save my family. How she convinced her flock to side with us, and they in turn visited the leaders of other species of birds to beg them to join the cause. How an alliance was proposed between the swallows and the insects, that the insects would not be harmed within the strict property lines of Gallo’s acres, how they would be protected and encouraged to glut themselves to their heart’s content. The insects took a great deal of convincing, as a deep distrust of the swallows had been long ingrained in them. They were rightly suspicious that the birds were offering them free reign of all the crops they could stomach, but had strictly forbidden them to eat or harm the nematodes, small worms and parasites that nibbled on grapevine roots, that they found so delicious. Begrudgingly, the insects agreed to the swallows’ terms, provided they assured protection from not only birds, but frogs and spiders as well.

The frog king was a dull sort; often blindly following whatever trend nature wished to turn to, and agreed heartily when he realized his people would not be harmed by the larger aviary species during this time. The spiders, however, were so skeptical of the swallow’s proposal that they narrowed their numerous eyes and rubbed their hairy legs together in contemplation. Tired of the birds’ begging and pleading, the spiders sent an envoy to the Laurentis farm to see what all the fuss was about. The envoy had returned, unharmed, and reported that the Laurentis heir was not such a bad fellow, as the bravest of the party had dared march right up his leg, and he had neither been squashed nor brushed away. The Laurentis heir, they divulged, had hair like fine arachnid silk, and the spiders, not being half as intelligent as they think they are, agreed that anything that resembled their silk must surely be a worthwhile cause after all.

“So that’s what took so long,” I said after hearing this wild tale, “persuading all those creatures.”

“Actually,” murmured Volatile, “it was the swallows that took the most convincing.” She looked down at her bare dirty feet that seemed more like claws than ever. “Because if they couldn’t eat the insects, the frogs, or the spiders, what could they feed on?”

Waves of horror enveloped me and I began to shudder. My mouth filled with a sickeningly sweet taste – bile mixed with wine from my empty stomach.

“I had to protect my people,” she whispered. “I had to repay them, I could not let them starve.”

“So you fed them.”

“I let them take what they wanted from my body.”

“Volatile!”

“They didn’t take much, they ate so sparingly from me, not wanting to hurt me, to disfigure me.”

“You’re a skeleton,” I realized, as my eyes grazed over her body, which I had not noticed, stupefied by her spectral wings. The bones of her knees threatened to burst from the thin skin surrounding it. Her arms were like the limbs of long-dead winter trees. And her face was all cheekbones and sunken eyes. With a fresh wave of terror, I realized that her eyes were no longer green. The swallows had sucked the color out of them. They were now opaque and milky.

“And your wings?” I was afraid to ask.

“The larger birds took them. They stripped them and consumed them. The falcons, the hawks, all they value is power. So they took what was most powerful away from me.”

“Are you dying?” I demanded, almost abruptly.

But Volatile smiled at me, and I knew then that no force of nature could take away that sweetness. “Something like this can’t kill me. I will recover and replenish myself again, but I don’t know how long it will take.”

“Where have you been? Where do you sleep? Mamma told me you hardly stayed here while I was away.”

“It had become too…distracting.”

“Have you been staying under Orvieto? With the others?”

“How did you know there were others?” she demanded. “Never mind. I cannot go back there,” she finished eerily.

“The dark one?” I dared to ask.

Volatile looked up at me quizzically. “Is that what you call him? How very strange. If anything he is -- but you know I cannot speak of that, Gabriel.”

“Then where have you been staying?”

“With Orlando Khan, of course.”

“I thought all that was over,” I said bitterly.

“He is my truest friend,” said Volatile, “and without him, your farm could not have been saved.”

“Then I owe him my thanks.”

“You owe him much, much more. He has saved your dignity and your hide since you were a little boy.”

“And that’s why you sent a group of swallows to him.”

Volatile nodded solemnly. “To protect him as long as he lives. I sent him that gift only because you could not.”

“What are you?” I breathed, and suddenly I understood what I had been living with all of these years. A phenomenon. She was not of this world. She was not like us. And I was overcome with the amazement I should have experienced a lifetime ago, when I was so full of my own self to have room for anything else. I was so overwhelmed by my own sense of self-pity and fixation upon Mariko Marino that I was numb to the miracle of Volatile. And that wasn’t all. I took my only friend for granted, ignoring his letters and entertaining unkind thoughts about him. I neglected my father and took him for a fool. And I never realized, until this moment, that my mother was dying.

“You know what I am,” she said, and I felt a looming recognition about to dawn on me -- bird’s nests, the insides of old eggs, Lulu,
One Thousand and One Nights
, a mask --but it escaped again in the rush of my tangled thoughts.

“Volatile,” I began, and hesitated, not wanting to broach the subject.

“What is it?”

“I have to tell you, to ask you, something.”

“Just say it.”

“You…you must not come back here again.”

Her grey face seemed to collapse in front of my eyes. “But this is my home,” she said.

“I know,” I said, “and you have fought so hard to save it.”

“But not for myself,” confirmed Volatile, “it was for you.”

It was then that I, Gabriel Laurentis, who had eighty-seven Roman women desiring to sleep with me, the owner of an expensive leather jacket and now a whole vineyard, realized I had tears in my eyes.

“I can’t do it,” Volatile finally said, “won’t you say goodbye for me? I wish I could give them a gift, in thanks.”

“I think you’ve given my parents enough.”

“Won’t you turn the light off?” Volatile asked gently. “I am going to leave through the window, and I don’t want you to see me go. I can’t fly the way I used to, you see.”

“Let me go with you,” I said, “I want to help you.”

“There is nothing you can do for me, Gabriel, except turn off the light.”

“Then of course I will,” I said, and I switched off the lamp. I settled back on the pillows and in the darkness, I could barely discern the outline of the open window, and the olive branches that lay beyond it. Everything seemed shades of black and midnight blue.

I felt her slight weight on the bed beside me and her hand, so sub-temperature it was alarming, on my temple. It was shaking. There was an overwhelming fatigue descending on me, like a grim reaper claiming me for eternal sleep. And what I said next changed my whole life.

These days, I often wonder what would have happened had I not said those words. I speculate over the minor details that modulated the movement of the world. I meditate on the major outcomes that transformed the lives of so many of us in Orvieto.

“Don’t be ashamed, Volatile,” I said sleepily. “You’re still beautiful to me.”

Abruptly, she leaned down and kissed me. And she tasted so bitter, like heartbreak. She was not a skeleton of a creature to me. She was beautiful. And the seeds that dropped within me when I was a little boy, that had begun to flourish and grow during my teenage years, I now realized had become as large as an oak, smashing through my subconscious and denial.

As she broke away, I sensed the air around us unsettling as her wings of bone unfurled. A familiar scent filled the air and I suddenly recalled the night of
Donne Notte
, the dark hair, the green eyes, the spray-painted silver wings that did not come off with her clothes. “It was you,” I breathed, sitting up abruptly. And I understood without a doubt that all this time, I had known it.

“Yes,” she said.

“Why did you come?” I asked forcefully.

“You told me to.”