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She blew a ring of smoke up into the sky. “You will get phone service up here.”
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and realized she was right. Text messages from Carla and Jack flooded in.
“There’s a cell tower on the top of city hall and it is a block away.” Giusy offered me a cigarette and I sank onto one of the lounges with it. I ignored my sister’s messages for a moment and checked the ones from Jack. They were clearly from Sophie. She’d been able to send text messages since she was three. These were mostly emojis and photos of her grandparents’ dog and her toes and half of her face that I assume was an attempt at a selfie. They made me woozy with longing for her. I dialed Jack’s number but it went straight to voicemail and I remembered that he had said he’d have bad service for most of their trip too. I dashed off a video message for Sophie in the hopes that it would eventually go through, before googling missing passport and Sicily to find an official-looking page from the Department of State that said to report the theft to the police and go to the nearest consulate armed with a photo ID and a copy of my passport or my birth certificate. My expired driver’s license was safe in my wallet. I definitely didn’t have a copy of my passport. My mom probably had a copy of my birth certificate but I doubted she had a clue where it was. She wasn’t the kind of mother who kept meticulous records of our lives. Jack used to keep track of all our personal documents, but I couldn’t tell him I lost my passport just twenty-four hours into my trip.
“Christ.” I exhaled as I thought about all the bureaucratic bullshit that lay ahead of me.
Giusy tossed her half-smoked cigarette onto the ground and stubbed it out with the toe of her pristine white sneaker. She leaned down to pet a cat eating out of a yellow ceramic bowl. More dishes dotted the roof. Giusy was feeding all the town strays. The tabby beneath our feet had a bit of egg hanging from its beard.
“That’s not cat food,” I said. “What are you feeding them?”
“Leftovers from breakfast. They deserve a nice feast,” she said as she walked over to the trapdoor, tripping a little on the bundle of sheets hanging from her arms. “I’m going to go down to check on the Germans. You want to stay up here for a while?”
“If it’s OK.”
“It is OK.”
She disappeared down the hatch. I waited for a few minutes and wondered if she was just behind the door listening for me to make a call. Why did that make me nervous, her eavesdropping on me? Instead of getting on my phone right away I stared at my sneakers. Black Chuck Taylors, old as hell. I found them in the guest room closet when I went to Scranton for Rosie’s funeral. Carla’s Chucks were there too. We had lots of matching clothes. At first it was our mom who liked to dress us like twins, despite the age difference, but we kept it up when we were teenagers because we thought it was weird and we liked being weird. One day we’d grabbed a bottle of Wite-Out and another of red nail polish and wrote song lyrics and the dirtiest words we could think of on the sides of our shoes. Mine read, Motherfucker ass clown. Most of the letters were faded now so ass clown was the only thing still legible. I couldn’t remember what we wrote on Carla’s shoes.
I opened the messages from my sister.
WHERE ARE YOU?
CALL ME
ARE YOU DEAD?
IF YOU’RE NOT DEAD AND YOU’RE IGNORING ME I AM GOING TO BE SO PISSED.
UNLESS YOU MET SOMEONE. YOU DESERVE A LITTLE FUN. IF YOU MET SOMEONE IGNORE MY LAST MESSAGE. I’M NOT PISSED.
I HOPE YOU’RE HAVING SEX.
CALL ME.
She answered right before voicemail picked up, but her voice was a low whisper.
“In a meeting with some real dildo IP attorneys. Can’t talk. Call you back in an hour. Love you. Miss your face.”
I missed my sister too. I missed my daughter. I missed my aunt.
I walked to the edge of the building to take in the view, letting my toes creep too far over the edge. It had to be a hundred-foot drop down a sheer cliff. I teetered back and forth, my muscles taut. I could do it. Just tumble off the edge and end all my misery. It wasn’t the first time I’d had such terrible thoughts. As my problems piled up, so did my anxiety, until the darkness threatened to overwhelm me entirely despite everything I knew I had to live for. Sometimes I imagined life would be easier for everyone if I was gone.
Power swelled in my chest. The wind picked up at my back.
I began to wobble just as I felt someone breathing right behind me, grasping my arms, shoving me forward. I was at the mercy of gravity. The decision to jump was no longer mine.
TEN
SERAFINA
1918–1920
The years passed easily without my husband. As my children grew, they needed me less and less and I had more time to devote to learning new skills.
One day the doctor from Sciacca simply stopped coming to the village for his weekly visits. There were rumors that he too had left for la Mérica. Because Rosalia did not want to come into town except for an emergency, I began doing small things that the doctor would have done. I applied salves to burns and bandaged wounds. I mixed tonics for stomach ailments and packed gums full of herbs for toothaches. When Accursio Romano’s prized and only mare fell to her knees in the piazza I felt around on her belly and found that her foal was sideways rather than head or ass first. I hesitated before reaching inside the groaning horse’s body to attempt to turn the animal. It was not my place, but we no longer had an animal doctor either and I could not let the beast and her child die, not while I watched. The foal was stuck and every movement caused its mother more pain. I called for the butcher, or rather I called for Saverina, who had been running her father’s butcher shop for more than a year since his hands had become shaky and her brothers had left. I asked her to bring me the sharpest, thinnest blade she had. I sliced the mare’s stomach right there in the square and plunged my hand into the hole to twist the tiny legs behind the foal. Once freed, it slid right out of the womb, diving headfirst into the dirt. I managed to stitch the mother’s flesh even as she licked the blood and dirt from her baby. Saverina, no stranger to the insides of animals, looked down at me in awe. Accursio Romano looked on in horror, or perhaps fear, but thanked me profusely when his mare stood and nudged her child to do the same. That was when the remaining men in town began whispering about me behind my back. Witch.
It wasn’t only Saverina and me. Many of the women worked now. We worked because someone had to with the men gone.
