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1.
The first time Michael witnesses death up close, it’s an explosion.
He’s killed before, of course. Being a soldier means giving orders to kill, sometimes pulling the trigger himself, but usually from a distance.
This time it’s one of his men who steps on the landmine. Michael doesn’t even have the chance to scream.
He is invalided out of the army due to his injuries. He gets an award for bravery, and eventually he can’t even remember his fallen comrade’s name without trying.
He can’t admit that Sonny was right. Signing up to the war was a mistake. A part of him is gone forever.
…
2.
His car blows up, taking Apollonia with it, his trusted bodyguard fleeing the scene. It’s the end of his life on the run. It’s not so much Apollonia he mourns as the loss of his sense of innocence, the fantasy that he could live like a Sicilian, marry a young girl who would be subservient to him and live out his days as nothing more than a husband and a father.
He goes back to America. Back to his family’s new way of life. He’s finally ready to live the American dream.
He believes in America.
…
3.
Kay asks why the drapes are open, and before he can contemplate the question, the shooting begins. All he can think of as he crawls across the floor is getting his wife to safety. He pulls her out of the bed and underneath him, shielding her body with his own. He doesn’t even think consciously about the baby she is carrying, about his army training or about how he failed to save Apollonia when she was the one in the way of his attempted assassination. All he can think of is Kay and was she hit? Was she hit?
Only afterwards, when it’s all over and he can think rationally, does he know that he would have died to protect her in that moment. Nothing else meant anything to him as he shielded her. But he sees the way she looks away from him, the way she cradles their children to her chest without meeting his eyes, and he knows deep down that he’s already lost her.
…
4.
Diabetes, of all things, is what almost succeeds in killing him.
He wakes up in a hospital bed, feeling like an old man. He knows he must look terrible. Kay is there in front of him, a vision before his eyes. He thinks he must be dreaming at first.
Kay seems genuinely concerned for him as she summons their children to see him. She watches as Michael hugs their son and daughter, the way he always wanted his father to hug him. She even kisses him on the temple before she leaves. He thinks that maybe she has forgiven him, that seeing him so weak and vulnerable will make her not dread him anymore.
Perhaps this near-death experience was worth it.
…
5.
He’s an old man now, sitting outside in sunglasses. Memories flicker through his mind, of dancing with Apollonia, with Kay, with Mary. Of playing with his siblings outside his father’s office. He and Connie are the only ones left. Soon it will just be Connie.
The orange rolls from his hand as he slumps to the ground. So this is it, this is what his life amounts to. An old man, dying alone. It’s what he deserves.
It’s almost a disappointment when he wakes up again.
…
1.
The first bullet hits him in the shoulder. The second one hits his daughter in the chest.
Time freezes as Mary looks at him, says Dad? before slumping to the ground. He watches Kay cradle her, tries to stop the bleeding, but it’s too late. He can see that she’s gone.
In that moment nothing else matters, not Kay’s grief and rage, not Connie’s sorrow or his son’s devastation. The world has already ended.
His life ends there, and all he can do is scream.