Through that reconciliation, incomplete but still significant, instigated by the acquisition of her condo, Irene started coming back to Rome three or four times a year, for work, and she’d go and visit our parents. Her hair was still sparse, but after this gift of the house she was showing it more, though not always, alternating with a startling wig display, maybe, when I think about it, to punish my parents. At times she dressed in a caricatural style, tailleur tone-on-tone, or like a lady right out of the fifties, with a wig done up in curlers. By then, she’d gotten a real job in fashion, and we considered her an artist. Luca and I still lived with our parents—we couldn’t seem to move on, also because we couldn’t make up our minds and go out and get any sort of job while still nurturing our abstract passions for politics and culture. At times, coming home for Sunday dinner, we’d find Irene in the living room, decked out like a respectable girl from the last decade, night-blue capri leggings, white tennis shoes, a bright green polo shirt, and a wig pulled back in a ponytail. Other times, she looked more feminine, in a tight-fitting dress and a black pageboy wig, while the sister we drove by truck to the start of her life in Milan was masculine, and seemed younger than us, with her basketball shoes, her hoody, and her deep-set eyes and natural makeup (we found these products lined up on a glass shelf in her bathroom in Bologna and had tossed them into a shoe box).

Irene’s place in Milan struck me like little else in that phase of my life. I boasted to my friends that my father had pardoned his daughter. Her new home struck me for reasons I couldn’t figure out, and it’s because of that home, I think, that I went to Turin to do an internship, three years after graduation: to experience the feeling again of arriving that night with the truck.

While in Turin I didn’t visit her nearby Milan home that had itself turned to memory over time—the road that went on for kilometers, empty, the large, damaged gate, the garden walkway and the three metal lattice steps, a structure that seemed built of Legos, two stories and a basement level … [Is it a coincidence that the condo I lived in with Barbara was like my sister’s, with a ground floor, and then a basement and an upper level? I’ve only noticed the resemblance now that I’m rereading what I’ve written about both of them.] Again, though, even if my parents had pardoned her, Irene disappeared, so in those last years when I was working in Milan two days a week, I still only saw her three times, at various bars. She was always out with a girlfriend and wearing a wig.