The Garden of Letters by Alyson Richman Read Free Book Online

record player. Underneath there was a small stack of records. He reached for one and pulled a black disc from its sleeve.
    He placed down the needle and turned the dial to increase the volume.
    The chorus “Va, Pensiero” from Verdi’s
opera
Nabucco
began to play.
    “It’s too loud,” Orsina reprimanded him.
    “Which do you prefer?” replied Pietro. “This or the sound of the
Balilla
downstairs?”
    “You know the answer to that!” Elodie said confidently.
    Pietro smiled. Then he dialed up the music even louder.

    The next day, Pietro did not return home at his usual hour, and Orsina continually glanced at the clock near the dining room table.
    “Your father is never late,” she said to Elodie. “I’m becoming worried.”
    It was true. Her father was like clockwork. He had his coffee in the morning every day at the same time, left the house one hour later, and returned home each evening by six o’clock.
    “I made his favorite risotto, and it will be ruined if he doesn’t come home soon.” Orsina stood by the pot and added one more cup of stock. She lowered the flame.
    “I’m sure he’ll be home any minute,” Elodie said, trying not to share her mother’s alarm. “He probably got stuck talking to someone outside school.”
    Forty minutes later, Orsina was sure there was something wrong. She had turned the stove off minutes earlier and the risotto was now a sticky mass.
    “He shouldn’t have played the record player so loudly last night.” She sat down at the table and placed her head in her hands. “It was defiant. What if someone reported him?”
    “I don’t think someone would do that, Mother. It was only some opera music . . .”
    Elodie saw her mother’s back stiffen. Her face was so visibly strained with worry that she looked like a bridge of an instrument, with strings pulled to the point of breaking.
    “Elodie . . .” Orsina said in the faintest whisper. “People would report their neighbor for a few extra grams of butter.”
    Elodie looked down. She felt a wave of shame wash over her. Shame that she had been so naïve to dismiss her mother’s worry so quickly. Shame that she had not joined Lena in a group that was trying to eliminate the fear, which had now penetrated her own family. And shame that she was now helpless to find her father.
    She found herself walking around the apartment like a trapped animal that didn’t know how to make use of its nervous energy.
    “You need to stop moving around so much, Elodie.” Her mother’s voice strained to emerge politely from a web of fragile nerves.
    Elodie tried to bring a small measure of comfort to her mother by making some coffee. She heaped two spoonfuls of the chicory and added the water. But when they each sat at the table, their hands around the small porcelain cups, neither of them could manage a single sip. They sat there like two cats staring into the air, each taking up space in the same room without uttering a single word.
    She and her mother sat at the dining room table for what seemed like hours. They didn’t eat. They didn’t drink. The only movement between them was when they both turned their heads to watch the clock.
    They fell asleep where they sat with their heads on their arms, both waking at dawn with no sign of Pietro.
    “I’m calling the police,” Orsina said, shaking her head. She looked out the window to the piazza; the first light of the morning flooded through the room and Elodie squinted. “Something terrible has happened! I just know it.”
    Elodie didn’t know how to respond. She was just as weak and as worried as her mother.
    Orsina reached for the phone and dialed the exchange for the police. Elodie heard the excruciating sound of her mother’s plea for someone to listen to her, desperately begging for more information.
    “They told me nothing. They insulted me and told me to check the bars or the whorehouses,” she said in tears.
    Elodie reached to embrace her mother. “I just know