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Months later, right before I started to show, I wrote to Gio to tell him that he and I were blessed with a child and he was delighted, even though it would mean another mouth to feed. He wrote me back saying that he hoped the baby would be a girl and that I should wait to make the voyage across the ocean until after she was born. He said that he planned to travel to the city of Scranton to settle himself before we all arrived.
Marco also wrote to me every week, despite the obvious dangers of doing so. The letters came to the clinic, where I still worked every day. In them he begged me to return to Palermo, stating in no uncertain terms that he was desperate to find a way for us to be together. If one of those letters fell into the wrong hands, what would happen to us? I did not dare respond.
There were already those in town who gave my growing stomach strange glances, including Gio’s own mother. When I passed Cettina in the street she averted her eyes from me. I wrote her long letters of apology and slipped them under her door, but I never received a response. In mass I sat in the row behind her and Liuni, now a strong and beautiful boy, no trace of his earlier illness in him. Cettina did not turn around. Eventually, I was so desperate to connect with her that I grasped her arm on the street and spun her body toward me. She was hardly surprised. It was as if she’d been waiting for me to do something for all these months. The look she gave me was friendly but unfamiliar. It lacked all the intimacy we had spent a lifetime sharing.
“I wish you all the blessings for this new child, Serafina,” she said to me. “And I have been wanting to thank you for all that you did to save Marco’s life. I expect that he will be home soon from Palermo and it is all due to you.” I wanted to shake her, to slap her. Where was the girl who had kissed my forehead before I walked into Rosalia’s house for the first time so many years ago? The girl who had promised to take care of me, no matter what? My questions were selfish, of course. I was the cruel one, the culprit, and I deserved much worse than her coldness.
“Thank you, Cettina,” I murmured, and let go of her arm.
—
I was as large as a barn when someone set my clinic on fire. They threw a bottle filled with gasoline through the window.
There was only one woman and her tiny infant in there when the fire broke out. The baby was fresh from the womb and I had been having trouble coaxing the afterbirth from the woman’s body. I feared an infection. I’d been massaging her belly for hours and finally took a rest after applying a poultice of mugwort and marigold to her navel while she slept. I was lying on the mattress next to them when it happened, but I was so very lucky that I was still awake when the window shattered and the flaming bottle hit the floor. I moved as quickly as my clumsy body would allow me to smother the flames with a blanket to slow them down enough to get the new mother and her baby out of the structure, but all of us watched helplessly as everything inside burned.
I had no doubt about who did it. Cettina’s brother Carmine had continued to make his irritation at our proximity clear. He’d recently invited a group of men, some low-level mafiusi deputies from the western coast, to live in his farmhouse. From the way they stared at me I knew Carmine had told them that I was the reason the other man died on the farm years ago, that he had blamed me for what happened in order to absolve himself.
I saw the flames when I closed my eyes at night. In my dreams they devoured not just the hospital, but my home, my children, my entire life.
In my daily life I felt attitudes toward me shift due to the rumors I knew Carmine had started about me. He exaggerated the number of patients who had lost their lives in my care, told anyone who would listen that I was casting spells on the pregnant women and the children I delivered. All the goodwill I had built up over my many years of service was slowly eroding.
As I got closer to the day my baby would enter the world, I grew more anxious. In addition to being terrified about the bad actors around me, I feared that the second Gio held our child in his arms he would know that she did not belong to him, that even if he didn’t know for sure he would question me and see the lie in my eyes. Could I really keep up the farce for the rest of our lives? It was true that women had lived with bigger secrets, but I worried this one could not be contained.
One night I woke to bedsheets completely soaked through with blood. My boys Santo and Vin were at my bedside.
“You were shouting in your sleep, Mamma. We have to get you help. Cosi has already gone for the nurse.”
I remembered Cosimo’s birth, how I blacked out and came to with Rosalia breathing into my mouth, giving me air, bringing me back from the brink of death. There was no Rosalia to save me now. I knew my nurses would do their best. I hoped they would save the baby. I couldn’t help but think how much easier everything would be if I were gone.
When I reached my hand between my legs, I was certain my fingers would graze the top of an infant’s head, but I felt only more blood. Vin screamed; the sound echoed off the walls of the house. I surrendered to the dark.
—
When I woke I heard the nurses chattering about me outside of the door, worried that I might not make it. I felt no pain and realized from the cloudiness in my head that I must have been given many doses of opium. I could just make out a blurry shape across the room, a woman holding a child.
Cettina.
No. That was impossible. I was in a dream.
A ray of sunshine caught my best friend clutching my child next to the window, but nothing about it was warm. The light was cold and white, and I shivered despite the heavy wool blanket covering me up to my breasts.
Noticing I was awake, she walked to me, tracing her fingertips along the child’s tiny skull, following the curve of her clamshell ears.
“You should name her Rosalia, after our beloved witch,” Cettina murmured.
“Why are you here?” I wasn’t certain that I even said the words out loud until she answered.
“They told me you were dead. For a moment it was true. You were gone, but then the nurses brought you back to life.”
“Were you pleased to hear that I was dead?”
“I love you, Serafina. I have always loved you. But our love has grown complicated. You know that. I came here to say goodbye and I was grateful when I did not have to do that, when the women saved you.”
She sat down beside me, and I finally glimpsed my little girl in her arms. Small, but not too small. A month early. Of course early was better than late according to the math I had done in my head. When Gio was in Caltabellessa I had lain with him twice and then my blood came. He had fallen ill and we didn’t lay together again. Then I left for Palermo to see Marco. I thought I was visiting a dying man so I took no precautions against pregnancy. When I returned, I did not have relations with my husband again. I thanked the Virgin Mary for making my daughter come to me early. I thanked my new daughter. I couldn’t help but think she was trying to protect me. But then the girl opened her eyes, and I knew that nothing could protect the two of us.
Babies’ eyes can be many colors when they are born. In our village they are often dark, but sometimes they are blue or gray before turning to a muddy brown like my own, like all three of my boys’, like my husband’s. This child had clear green irises, as light as a blade of new grass in the morning sun. This child had Marco’s eyes, a fact that we would never be able to disguise, a fact that cursed us both.
When we were younger women, it often felt like Cettina and I could slip into one another’s thoughts and try on the other’s pain during our most difficult moments. Over the years that power had left us. I had no idea what Cettina was thinking when she placed the child into my arms and kissed me on the forehead. She whispered into my ear, the moment marked by a single ragged breath.
