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The other night as I was getting ready for bed, I found the poor animal splayed out on my windowsill, sliced from throat to belly, blood and entrails dripping into my second-floor bedroom. Someone had bothered to climb up to my bedroom using a ladder while I slept. No doubt they watched me as I lay unconscious and vulnerable in my bed. Fear gnawed at my heart every night.
The obvious perpetrator was Carmine, Cettina’s brother, who glared at me every time we crossed paths in town but otherwise had not acknowledged what had passed between us on his farm years earlier. I worried that he had told the people he worked with about how that man, the one called the Black Hand, had died, how he believed I had murdered him. I worried the Black Hand’s bosses wanted revenge.
But Carmine was not the only one in town with a grudge against me. I had healed as many people as I could, but many didn’t survive and grief is never rational. The blame for an untimely end in our clinic almost always fell on me. The brother who bled out after a bad fall from a ladder, the daughter who passed in childbirth. The child who would be forever crippled by a virus. My heart ached for the losses, none of which were fair or expected, but my sympathy meant very little to those left behind.
Something crashed onto the kitchen tile. I heard a low grunt and a groan. It was a man for certain. Whoever was downstairs was unfamiliar with the layout of our home. I rose and gripped the machete I’d taken to keeping beneath my pillow these past months.
The door to the boys’ room was slightly open and I could see three pairs of feet sticking out from their quilts as I passed. I’d recognize my sons’ feet anywhere. You could give me a lineup of the feet of a dozen boys and I would know Cosi’s crooked big toe, Santo’s flat arches, Vincenzo’s extra-wide chubby baby feet that he still hadn’t outgrown, more rectangular than feet had any right to be, pudgy bricks anchoring his round body to the ground.
I shut their door, a small protection against whatever would happen next, and tiptoed barefoot down our stairs. The narrow passageway was dizzying at such a careful pace. Whoever was in my house was still in the kitchen, still puttering about and mumbling to themselves in a low and frustrated tone. I would not scream when I entered the room. I did not want to wake the boys and force them to run down to defend me. I would take care of this myself. Bile filled my mouth as I turned the corner and imagined the inevitable confrontation, hoping my nearly silent footsteps would at least give me the element of surprise.
The intruder wore a dark gray overcoat too heavy for the season. I took in the tall, thin body leaning against the stove. There was a patch of scalp visible beneath thinning hair that used to be coarse and strong beneath my fingers. How was it even possible for me to recognize this stranger? This man I’d spent less than a year with during our entire marriage? I knew that it was not him that I recognized. It was my sons. The slope of Cosi’s shoulders, the egg-shaped head of Santo. Hair the exact shade of Vin’s. I knew all these body parts like I knew my own skin.
“Gio?” I backed away from the kitchen doorframe for a second and stashed the knife in a drawer in the other room.
Relief should have flooded through me; no one was here to harm me. But instead I felt a different kind of dread. Gio had not written, at least not to me, and this felt ominous.
“Fina.” He sounded the same, his voice quiet, low, shy. When he turned, he did not look me in the eye, another bad sign, a sign he had heard things about me from across the ocean, things that displeased him.
I rushed over to the stove, not to hug him, that didn’t feel right, but to place the kettle on the burner.
“It has been a long journey,” he said.
“I did not know you were coming.”
“I wrote. I told you. A month ago. I sent you the name of the ship I would be arriving on.”
“I never received a letter. But it does not matter. You are here now.” I kissed both of his cheeks, finally feeling a small liberation from worry that this visit wasn’t unplanned after all, that he had tried to inform me. But the relief was short-lived. He had to be lying. I had never missed one of his letters, never missed one of his payments, not even through the war. Somehow the words and the money always made their way to me. It was the most reliable and most noble thing about this man. And now there were other ways to send news, telegrams, phone calls, though we still did not have a private line. And wouldn’t Gio have written his mother too? I had seen his mamma five days ago. Surely she would have been out of her mind with preparations for her boy’s return.
“You look good, husband. But why are you here so early in the morning?”
“The ship came in yesterday and I only just got a ride from the port.”
“You must be exhausted. Why don’t you go to the bedroom and lie down?”
“I would like to eat first.”
“Of course.” I pulled things from cupboards, olives, dried tomatoes, and sliced a day-old loaf of bread from the table. It was still soft enough that it gave easily under the knife. I smothered the bread in oil and placed it in the oven to toast. The kettle was ready. I would need a strong black coffee as much as Gio surely did.
“The boys will be pleased to see you,” I said with a smile as I started to serve him. I made sure to touch his shoulder. I put all the food on one large plate we could share, remembering Paola’s husband’s complaints that she would not share food with him, that she denied him the simple intimacies of a proper wife.
I sliced up a tomato and drizzled everything with lemon juice before sitting next to him to eat.
“Sorry we have nothing sweet. I usually walk to the bakery in the morning before the children wake.” I did not add that the offerings in the bakery were no longer worth buying with Paola gone. My husband shook his head to say it did not matter. He ate with both of his hands, ravenous and greedy.
“Food always tastes better here,” he said when he had licked every crumb from the plate. “Why is that?”
“I do not know. I have never been anywhere else,” I said honestly. “Would you like to sleep or wait for the children to wake up?”
Thankfully he yawned as his eyes began to droop. “I would like to sleep before I see them. I have much to tell you all this evening when we are together.”
I led Gio up the stairs and into our bedroom, wondering if he would want me to lie with him, if I needed to perform my duty as his wife before he could drift off to sleep, but he answered my question by merely removing his shoes, lying on top of my rumpled sheets, and falling right into a deep sleep. I could hear all three boys in their room, and I waited until they were in the kitchen before making my own way downstairs, trying to steady my nerves before facing them.
I had known that my world would fall apart sooner or later. I’d felt my reckoning coming since that morning Cettina and I locked eyes over Marco’s broken body. That morning I had eased myself out of his bed and beckoned her forward to tell her that her worst fear was true. Her husband was dying. She momentarily put aside what she’d seen, gripped my hand, and asked me what we should do. Not her, not I, but we. Hadn’t we always been a we, ever since our earliest days? I was more yoked to Cettina than I was to my husband, maybe even my children.
“We cannot let him die,” she insisted.
There was only one thing I could think of and even that felt like a false hope. “We need to get him to Palermo. There is more that can be done for him there than I can do here. There are real hospitals. There is new medicine. It may give him a chance.”
