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Armed with an opportunity to save her husband, a chance she never had with the first man she married, Cettina sprung into action. “I will figure it out. Stay with him. Keep him comfortable. Do whatever you need to do to make sure he knows he is cared for.”
Whatever you need to do. That phrase lingered long after she left the house. I stripped his body of his sweat-stained clothes, bathed him with a sponge, and gave him enough morphine to take away his pain. I found clothes and prepared him for his journey, all the while kissing his face, his hands, his bare chest, telling him that I loved him, that I would always love him.
Cettina quickly found Gaetana, who had inherited her dead husband’s car but who did not know how to drive it. Gaetana called on Leda, who could drive but had no car. The two women arrived within the hour, ready to be put into service.
“No one can know how sick he is,” Cettina insisted to all of us. “If the wrong people found out that our mayor was this ill, you know it would not be good.” We knew. We swore. Cettina stayed back with the children after helping us lay Marco down in the back seat, his head in my lap. I was careful how I touched him in front of the other women. He never once opened his eyes.
I knew only one doctor in Palermo, knew of him was more accurate. I had read his articles about experiments with mercury, copper, and sulfur to fight off infections of the organs. Once we arrived in the city we managed to ask around and find the hospital where he worked and the nurses there directed me to an office in his private home. Driving through Palermo’s confusing grid of streets took many hours and many misunderstandings. Leda nearly drove the car into a livery station after making a wrong turn, but eventually we found the house. How did I look to this doctor when I arrived on his doorstep, a bedraggled peasant with stains on her dress? I gave him no time to react. I sputtered out the situation—that I came from a small village, that the mayor of the town was desperately ill, that the doctor in our town thought he had an infection of the liver that had progressed quite far. The man’s eyes flickered with interest when I described Marco’s symptoms. He was eager to try new things and even though I cringed at the idea of Marco being an experiment, I also knew I could not let him simply waste away back at home. The doctor accepted Marco as a patient and kept him at the house for treatment. That was many months ago and I had not been back to Palermo since, though Leda had visited with Cettina and reported that Marco was making slow and steady progress. Cetti had not spoken a word to me since then. She didn’t meet my eyes in the market or at mass, where she was often accompanied by her brother Carmine. I was terrified to approach her, but I forced myself to behave as I normally would in the hopes that we could come to terms. When I went to her home her children answered the door and said she was not available. She no longer looked after my boys for me while I worked, and sometimes I brought Vin to the clinic with me.
So yes, I had been waiting for some kind of reckoning, the air around me feeling thick with the possibility for weeks. I just never imagined it would come in the form of my husband.
The boys were already eating at our round kitchen table once I made it downstairs, picking at the scraps Gio and I had left behind.
“Your father has returned,” I told them as simply as possible. I always wondered what the word father meant to them. I imagined he was like the character in a story they had heard over and over again. But did Gio’s absence make them resent him or revere him? We never spoke of him. I read them his letters. I told them he was working hard to make sure all of us could have a better life, and they never asked questions. I kept the one photograph I had of him above the mantel. Vin had barely any memories of Gio. Cosi had the most, but they were so fleeting. Of course once I told them he had arrived they wanted to see him. I told them he was asleep, that they should go to school and do their afternoon chores, that we would all meet for a meal later.
Before they left, Cosi pulled me aside. “Does this mean we will be going to la Mérica, Mamma?”
“I do not know what it means, Cosimo.” He frowned a little. For as long as I had dreamed of escaping this village, I could hardly imagine uprooting my family now. Even though times were hard for our village, my children always had enough and what they did not have they did not know about. Cosi’s nervous stutter echoed my apprehension. He kissed me on the cheek and whispered, “I love you, Mamma. We will be good no matter what happens or where we go. Good as bread.” He dutifully walked his two younger brothers to school. My stomach was in shreds when they were out of my eyesight.
I spent the next few hours rushing around town, gathering supplies and ingredients for a feast worthy of my husband’s homecoming. I had no doubt I would be hosting my mother-in-law and Gio’s sisters. I knew without being told that I would be relegated to my kitchen for the next week, and I tried not to let resentment overtake me.
When I returned home, arms heavy with food and wine, Gio was awake and riffling around the bedroom, opening drawers. My drawers. I stood in the doorway and cleared my throat in a manner I hoped was not accusatory. “Can I help you find something?”
He looked properly chagrined that I had caught him going through my things.
“I was looking for a comb,” he told me, and used his hand to sheepishly flatten pieces of hair that had curled away from his scalp in his sleep. Maybe he hadn’t been trying to invade my privacy at all. I found my hairbrush for him and indicated he should sit on the bed. I climbed around the mattress behind him and began to brush what was left of his once lovely hair. He let out a deep, contented sigh as the bristles passed over his skull and I thought he would reach for me, but instead he simply let me continue until his hair was neat and orderly.
“I should start the meal. Will your mamma be coming?” I had not yet told anyone in town about my husband’s arrival.
“She does not know that I am here. I wrote only to you.”
“I never got the letter.”
“I do not know why.”
It was strange that he hadn’t informed his mother. He usually told her everything. He wrote to her more often than he wrote to me, or at least I assumed that was the case given how much more she knew about the daily happenings in his life than I did.
“I will walk to her house tomorrow,” he said. “And surprise her. Today it can be just us, you and me and the boys?”
“Of course.”
“When will they be home?”
I had been out doing the shopping for the entire morning and lost track of time. “An hour, maybe more.”
“Could we go for a walk before they return?”
“Aren’t you afraid of running into your mamma?”
“We can walk up the mountain, away from town. I want to be able to glimpse the sea.”
I tied a veil around my hair to protect it from the harsh, sandy scirocco winds that had been blowing in from the coast for weeks. When we fell into step next to one another it felt like a stroll with an old friend. But there was also an undercurrent to our silence, the discussion we would have when we stopped walking. Gio seemed as nervous to begin as I was. Every time I thought we would pause at a pleasant overlook, he kept going, until we were at the very top of the mountain, the place where the trail peeled off to Rosalia’s home, mostly empty since her passing a few months earlier. I stored many of my medical supplies in her old house to keep them away from my children. I often imagined living alone in the stone hovel, the peace and the loneliness. She left me the house and everything in it, not that she owned this land or that the old medical journals and surgery tools were worth anything to anyone but me. I had been the one to hold her hand as she passed out of this world and into the next and I would always remember how peaceful, almost joyous she appeared as she was going. It was ultimately a disease of the heart that took her, something we could never fix. She’d been coughing up blood for months, but I gave her all the morphine at my disposal, not even worrying if I had anything left. When she was able, she wanted to talk and I wanted to listen. She told me she never regretted not having children until she met me. She never wanted them and she was lucky enough to avoid the unchosen fate of many of the women in our village. But when we met, she understood what it meant to pass knowledge and learning down to someone. That was what gave her peace in the end.
“You will do more than I ever could,” she insisted with one of her final breaths.
I thought about her words as I waited for my husband to tell me my fate. He sat and rolled a cigarette from a pouch of tobacco hidden in his jacket pocket. After smoking half of it he finally said what he had come home to say.
“It is time for you to join me. For you and the boys to join me in America.”
