Page 18 of Mistletoe & Mayhem
Afterward, we lie together on the cool tile, looking up at the ceiling fan, the lazy stutter of mistletoe wobbling from its string. He says, “I think this is the first Christmas in my life I haven’t worn a suit. What a scandal.”
I say, “If you want, you can wear one to dinner.”
He pinches my thigh. “You want me to wear a suit here?”
"Just the tie.”
It becomes a game, the way all things are between us in this time outside time: he raids the closet for the single silk tie he brought, black, and nothing else, and I laugh so hard that my stomach hurts, the first real laugh I’ve known since childhood. We eat under the open sky, the tie still knotted, and by the time dessert comes—chocolate and cream, more ridiculous than necessary—the tie is on me, not him, and he is staring at me with something close to awe.
By dark, the tree glows in the window, dim and wary. I sit cross-legged on the floor, organizing my thoughts while Pierce steals kisses I would have given freely. We stay there until the tree lights burn out, until the ocean breeze has cooled the tiles. I think about the following Christmas, and the one after that, and how it will be to grow old in a place where my own name is not whispered in fear or spit in disgust.
Pierce falls asleep first, still holding my hand. I watch the horizon, the last light bruising the water, and listen to the palms applauding themselves. There is peace, real and thick and golden, stretching from this island all across the invisible world. There is no perimeter, not anymore, and I realize this: the only way to feel safe is to stop needing to be.
In the early morning hours, we walk the beach until sunrise, our shadows long and joined. The tide leaves us gifts—shells, coral, a message in a bottle with nothing inside but sand. We walk until the sun is too hot, and then we swim, and I teach him to float, and he teaches me to let go. I think of Frida, already plotting my next Christmas. I think of Serpico, and of Dominic, who will burn himself hollow trying to find a way to own me again.
But most of all, I think of the two of us. Of how the story ends: not with a bullet or a bargain, or even a truce, but with a new name carved into the sand, and two hands holding on, and the world bigger than either of us could ever imagine.
Chapter 13
Epilogue: Three Years Later
Laura
There are prisons colder than Attica—hospitals, childhood bedrooms—but for sheer economy of suffering, nothing matches this place at Christmas. Even the C-block guards, bred to hostility, carry a faint air of defeat as they shunt us cattle from metal detector to waiting room, like they know we are all in hell together and someone, somewhere, is getting exactly what they deserve.
I requested the earliest possible slot, 8:00 a.m., hoping the morning rounds would make him less inclined to dramatics. My father was never a performer before the conviction; Attica teaches old dogs new tricks. In the months after sentencing, his letters arrived via Frida in precise, clerical handwriting—half legalese, half liturgy—issuing directives on property, inheritance, old vendettas that must not be forgotten. Then, for a year, nothing. His signature vanished from the world; his silence joined the hundreds before it, each a small, chilling liberation.
Three years is enough. A term, a sentence, a gestation. Today, I grant him the only parole ever truly available to men like him: closure.
The visitation hall is a box of wet cinderblock and chipped Formica, its fluorescent lighting tuned to hum a frequency just above sanity.
I arrive before anyone else, my footsteps echoing through empty corridors like a funeral procession. There are already two guards in the room, keeping post at either end, bored and benignly hostile as they watch my body language for sudden intent. For a moment, I imagine sprinting past plexiglass, vaulting the partition like a gymnast, crushing my father’s throat between these hands as easily as popping the head off a rose. I savor the vision and let it pass.
Dominic Stasio enters five minutes late, as if savoring his microscopic power. He’s smaller than the man who dominated every room, but there’s a tightness in his shoulders I recognize, a paradox of vulnerability so feral it reads as threat. Time has aged every bone in his face, but his eyes are still black.
As he sits, he looks at me and sneers. There is the slow, symmetrical raising of the phones.
“You took your time,” I say, softly, as if it matters.
His first words are: “I thought you’d never come.” His voice is battered, rasping, but the edge is pure father. “I suppose you want something.”
I shake my head. “That was always your problem. You think everyone’s a beggar. I’m not here for you.”
He laughs, a noise with the texture of crushed ice. “No? Then why this parade?” He leans in, forehead close to the screen. “You want to see what’s left of me? You want forgiveness, Laura?”
I lay a hand on the metal table, fingers spread to steady it. “No. I’m here because the dead deserve a coffin, not a ghost. I want you to hear it: I’m done with you.” I let the sentence calcify between us. “This is goodbye.”
That gets him. I see it—a flicker under the scowl, a momentary human grief, quickly suppressed. He bares his teeth.“You haven’t changed,” he says. “Still a sentimental little shit. You read too much poetry as a child.”
“It was mother who read to me,” I say, watching the words strike him, “but you made sure to erase all traces of her. Except me.”
He ignores the bait. “You’ve been busy,” he says, almost admiring. “I hear things. Some say you’re working for Serpico’s Sicily.” He snorts. “You’ll always be a cheap imitation of me.”
It’s almost disappointing how quickly he tries to define me. And in typical fashion, he couldn’t be more wrong. “What I do with my life is none of your business.”
He looks at my hands, my clothes, as if searching for evidence of filth or failure. “You could have had everything. You could have been queen.”
“Of what? The prison yard? You taught me well how to survive it.” I tap the glass, a gentle, surgical gesture. “But you never learned how to let go. That’s why you’re here.”
