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Nicky settles back against Joe’s legs and looks around at his family. The fire crackles merrily and halyards clang against the sailboat mast that the people at the far end of the island have just put back into the water. Though he still carries his city’s name as his own, very little reminds him of the earliest years of his life in Genoa any more. But family and hearth and harbor do. Right now feels close to those long ago sense memories.
Nile is the last to settle down, next to Booker, as is slowly becoming her habit.
From the instant Nile proposed it, Nicky knew which story he would tell. He had felt no choice but to hold it within him, a small, sorrowful, satisfaction, for so many years. He says, “I would like to go first,” feels the four sets of eyes snap to him and knows that now is the time.
“My story is about a mitzvah from 1860.”
Nicky’s gaze falls on Booker as he says this. The man startles but then meets his eyes steadily. In the silence afterwards, Booker gives him a tight nod.
He feels Joe’s gentle hand resting on his shoulder. He summons the strength to go forth.
The telegram simply read Jean-Pierre dying. Send location.
Nicolo looked at it and handed it to Yusuf without a word. After a moment, he felt Yusuf’s eyes on him.
“I’m going,” he said.
“And Garibaldi? The red-shirts?” Nicolo had urged them to join this fight, for the everyman, for Italian unification after too many years of suffering under rich men’s petty quarrels. He felt a small pang of guilt as he met Yusuf’s eyes.
“We’re all he’s got left.”
Nicolo was on a ship to Marseille the next morning.
When he disembarked, he bought an oyster from a man in the fish market. As he was slurping it down, he asked for directions to the nicest private hospital in the city. The man gave him a curious look from underneath the hat shoved low over his brow, but complied.
Nicolo’s guess proved to be correct. Just two hours after squatting with his rucksack against the building across the street from the hospital, Sebastien emerged, dressed in the crisp shirt and ironed waistcoat of a man who could afford the best hospital in Marseille. He walked hurriedly away, as if fleeing. Nicolo caught emotion on his face. He worried he had arrived too late.
Nicolo was never a priest. He might’ve, if time had allowed, if he hadn’t been pushed to join the forces crusading to the Holy Land, become a monk.
In the 19th Century, those distinctions hardly matter anymore. He knows the scripture and the Latin and the rites. He kept a black shirt and a Roman collar folded in the bottom of his bag, for sometimes the right clothes mean the same words can bring more comfort to the distraught and the suffering.
When he entered the hospital, the nuns did not question him. When he sat at Jean-Pierre’s bedside, the man looked at him quizzically but accepted his presence. When Nicolo stayed through dinner, through the nuns seeking to make Jean-Pierre more comfortable from the pain, through the bells ringing in the nearby parish church for Vespers, Jean-Pierre leveled him with a long look and said, “What do you want?”
“To keep you company,” Nicolo replied. “To give you comfort and succor. To ease your suffering, as much as I can.”
“What do you know of my suffering?” the young man, the young, painfully gaunt man, spit back.
“I know nothing of your suffering,” he said, for it was more true than Jean-Pierre could ever know.
But Nicolo’s honesty seemed to convince the man of something, his trustworthiness, perhaps. He laid back and gestured with a bony hand to the table next to the bed.
“Read to me, then.”
It was a demand, the sort Nicolo imagined a child making to their father before bed-time. His heart clenched for the anguish on Sebastien’s face as he left the hospital, for how hard this must be for both of them.
Nicolo read. First, Madame Bovary. Then, The Count of Monte-Cristo.
Nicolo stayed by Jean-Pierre’s bedside for four days. In that time, his father did not return.
Towards the end, Jean-Pierre’s pain became intense. The nuns gave him laudanum, which made him babble in semi-consciousness, about mama et papa, about mes freres. Nicolo took Jean-Pierre’s hand in his own. He said the words for anointing the sick, knowing that they were not Sebastien’s and Jean-Pierre’s words, but hoping they were enough.
He continued to read till the boy’s dreams departed for the final time. And then he brushed the dark curly hair off to the side, pressed a kiss to the boy’s forehead, and left without saying a word to anyone.
Nicky’s throat is tight as he finishes his tale. There are tears pricking behind his eyes for the brother he has loved and despaired, for the boy they both mourned.
He stares at his hands, as he has throughout his telling. He feels Joe’s gentle touch on his shoulder and it gives him the courage to glance across the fire, to finally meet Booker’s gaze.
Nicky finds tears tracking down Booker’s cheeks, his hands clutched between Nile’s.
“I’m sorry it could not be the Kaddish,” Nicky says.
Booker shakes his head. “He told me he hated me, the last time I saw him. Resented me for bringing him into the world when I couldn’t share my gift -- as if I asked for this.” He pauses, ducks his head. “To know that, in spite of it all, he was not alone, was not abandoned… I--” His voice cracks and he sobs and through watery eyes and a broken voice he murmurs, “Merci, mon frere.”
Nicky rises and opens his arms. Booker glances up at him, reluctant. But then Nile nudges his shoulder and he looks to her and she nudges him again. He stands. Nicky wraps his arms around his brother’s broad shoulders. He feels Booker’s arms wind around his waist, feels him sink into the embrace. Booker hiccoughs and Nicky tucks his brother’s head into his neck and feels the dampness on his cheeks.
They stay like that cradled against each other, breathing together as moments stretch into minutes. In spite of the years of irrational grief, in spite of the years of alcoholism and self-medication, in spite of the dumb decisions and dangerous impulses, in spite of his betrayal, Booker is family, and Nicky loves him.