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This was before I had taken up with Marco and I had fulfilled my wifely duties when I needed to during that visit from Gio. He seemed pleased by me. “Maybe we’ll finally have a daughter,” he said. “I would love to have a little girl.” I simply smiled at him as if it were possible, when I knew that I had already taken precautions to prevent it.
I responded to his letters and the queries about the land with stories about the good that my clinic was able to do, about how it had improved outcomes for women in childbirth and made it possible to ease some of the pain of the dying elders. He eventually stopped asking about it but said we would discuss it in person when he returned, though he made no solid plans to cross the ocean. I fell asleep every night worrying that my husband would return the next morning and destroy the life I had come to love.
But years passed and Gio did not return again. Sometimes I fantasized that he had taken another wife like Paola’s husband had. I began to conjure entire alternate lives for myself if Gio were to abandon me. He would take my boys for certain, and I would no longer be able to live in the village, but I began to envision a future for myself in another town, or in Palermo. I did not make much money from my work. Poor peasants traded eggs and hens, fish and tomatoes for my services but when I treated the rich I charged them what I was worth and I hid this money away, for what I did not know.
Some days I imagined I would welcome the excuse to abandon my wifely duties, to become someone new no matter the consequences for a woman alone in the world. That world was finally starting to change. I heard stories about female activists on the front lines of the independence movements in Palermo. I’d even read a paper by a woman doctor at a university there.
Of course, there would be no Marco living in Palermo, but in my fantasies of living on my own he somehow made a regular appearance. Sometimes I imagined having the tiniest of apartments where he could visit, and we could spend entire nights together and mornings entwined in a bed all our own.
I was having one of these exact fantasies when Cettina walked into the clinic. Her face was as white as a ghost, her entire body shaking.
“Marco needs you.” I tried to hide my concern as I rushed to her and asked what she meant.
“He is ill. He has not been able to get out of bed this week.” She managed the words through short, clipped breaths. Her hands fluttered in the air as they always did when she was nervous. “He cannot eat. He is hot with fever; the bedsheets are soaking wet. I told him I would get you and he asked me not to. He said it was nothing, but I know it is not nothing. I need you to come right away.”
Cettina’s shape, as familiar to me as my own, blurred around the edges as I tried to will the tears from my eyes. I wrapped my arms around her, squeezing her so hard she let out a small cry. I had to steady my nerves before we went to see him. “Let me get you something to drink, my love. You are flushed and clearly exhausted. I will come back up the mountain with you, but I am sure what he has is nothing too terrible.” I did my best to try to hide my concern. I had to appear every inch the rational caregiver and not a lover ready to rush to a bedside. I called out to a nurse to bring clean water and a cold towel for Cettina’s neck and led her to a bench among the lemon trees outside. I held her tight and rocked her back and forth the way I had done with my babies, pressed my lips into her soft hair. When she was able, I made her drink an entire glass while she gazed out at the land to the south, in the direction of her family’s farm. I promised we would go to Marco as soon as the glass was empty. Her breathing slowed slightly, and she tried to focus on something else to regain her strength.
“My brother Carmine is back,” she said. “He returned last Sunday. He came to my mamma’s house for dinner.”
“Did he say where he has been?” I asked, placing my hands beneath my thighs so Cettina could not see them tremble as I remembered his boot shattering my ribs.
“Mostly Palermo. Also, Naples. He is different now. Even harder, meaner, if that is possible. He asked about you.”
“About me?”
“About this, the clinic. All the people here. He says it is bad for him to have so many people poking around down here on this side of the mountain. He does not like anyone being able to watch him. I wish you had this clinic anywhere but here. Marco was stupid to give you this land.”
It was the first time I had ever heard her question any of her husband’s decisions and I could tell she immediately regretted it, given the circumstances. “We must go back up the hill. I need you to see him. You will know how to help him.”
Their large beautiful house smelled of illness. It was a smell I had come to know well and one that did not bother me much, but in this case it was coupled with Marco’s scent and I finally let myself worry. I tried to channel my emotions into concern for Cettina and squeezed her hands between mine. “I am sure he’s fine. Why don’t you put some food in your stomach and let me go in to examine him?”
I made my way to their bedroom, their personal space, a room I never saw. It consisted of two beds, close enough to one another that a person could reach across and squeeze the other’s hand good night, a friendly distance.
My lover looked even worse than Cettina had described. His skin, typically ruddy and tanned, had gone yellow. His hair lay slick at his brow with sweat, and he shook beneath the thick quilt on the bed. I knocked on the doorframe as I entered but he did not stir or register my arrival. My heart banged against my rib cage, so loud in my ears I feared Cettina could hear it down the stairs.
I had seen patients like this. It began with the new kind of the flu and then infected something else, maybe the liver or the kidneys, allowing bile and poison to build up in the blood until the patient was poisoned from within. Cettina had every reason to be worried. This man who we each loved in entirely separate ways was dying. As I walked to his bedside, I struggled to maintain a facade of control, digging my nails into my palms until they bled so that the physical pain would outweigh my emotions. When I was close enough to touch him, I stroked his scalding forehead.
“I did not want you to come.” He croaked the words so quietly I had to kneel beside him to hear. My hand found his beneath the sheets.
“Why wouldn’t you want me to come?”
“I did not want you to see me like this. But I also did not think I could let you leave again if I saw you. I believe I am dying, Fina, and I don’t want anyone but you in this room with me when I leave this world. I do not want to spend another minute pretending I don’t love you.”
Years of good judgment drained out of me. I removed my filthy hospital shoes and climbed into the bed next to him, pulled him to me as tightly as possible. I buried my face in his wet curls. “You are not dying, my love. I can heal you.”
“Fina...” he began.
“Don’t. Save your energy. There is nothing you can tell me that I don’t already hold in my heart. We will not say goodbye, not like this. I won’t let it happen, my love. I won’t.”
For a second, in his bed, my arms around his body, I had the thing I had been craving, the makings of a normal morning, the two of us in a small bed, lingering as long as we wished. I gripped him harder, the texture of his clothes and skin beneath my fingers the only thing keeping the moment from slipping away.
It wasn’t until I heard Cettina’s ragged breath in the doorway that the fantasy died inside me.
I could sense her staring at the two of us, watching us silently. How much of her carefully constructed world slipped away just then? I took too long to turn around, but I eventually had to face her. We locked eyes, saying everything and nothing in a single glance.
NINETEEN
SARA
