“It’s too hot to play here anymore,” Stella said. She felt bored and itchy. The smell of cook-fire woodsmoke mingled with the sweat soaking her dress. “Let’s go into the schoolhouse,” she said. “It will be cool.”
The school was supposed to be closed up, because it was vacation. But everyone knew the back door wouldn’t lock, since the bolt connecting the top and bottom halves was broken. If you gave the bottom a good shove, it would swing in, and you could stoop in under it. Mothers told their children not to play inside the schoolhouse because older boys went into the deserted classrooms to do bad things. But the ceilings were so tall that the air inside was cold and moist even in August, and the village children often played there until Maestra Giuseppina scattered them.
Cettina, always the goody-goody, didn’t want to break the rules. “That’s naughty, Stella. What will Mamma say?”
“Nothing. Why would she say anything?” Stella now had a satisfying idea in her head of lying on the cool stone floor of the boys’ classroom, where she wasn’t allowed.
Cettina didn’t like it, but she followed Stella, the way she always followed Stella. Stella leaned hard against the thick wooden door and nudged it open. Giulietta stopped hopping and trailed them in. Giggling, they pushed the bottom half of the door closed behind them and padded on their dirty bare feet into the silence of the dark chambers.
They passed an hour in the schoolhouse, rooting through the boys’ facilities, trying to find what masculine secrets were hidden there. They lay on the classroom floor, just as Stella had imagined doing, feeling the cold stones absorb their body heat until they drifted off, napping in the dim afternoon light.
When Stella woke up, her skin was chilled, goose bumps standing on the side of her arms. Cettina was dozing beside her, Giulietta singing thinly to herself. The sun was descending into the olive valley, and as the grogginess cleared from Stella’s eyes her vision fixed on a dark splotch on the wall, a disconcerting blemish in the thin lemony light. She felt a cold tickle race up her arms, and she tried to figure out what about the splotch was wrong. Then it moved, and she shrieked—it was one of those thick-bodied long-legged brown spiders that hide in stacks of firewood.
Stella did not like spiders at all. She was on her feet, and gave hersister a kick in the ribs, although Stella’s scream had already woken Cettina.
“It’s just a spider, Stella,” Giulietta was saying, but she scrambled to her feet, too. They had all had enough of this adventure.
The three girls dashed out of the boys’ classroom and through the main hall. Stella fumbled for the door’s broken latch; the sun had sunk enough that no light fell along the doorframe.
She located the latch and gave it a tug, but the door didn’t move. Stella felt an irate frustration mounting, a weird discomfort in her stomach and that creeping cold along her arms. She pulled again, adding all her body weight. This door had swung open easily earlier. Why was it so stubborn with her now? There was a flash in Stella’s mind, an image that flared like a bonfire, of another hand on the other side of the door, its supernatural aura burning through the wood, holding it so that Stella couldn’t wrench it open. Stella, taken aback by the image, released the latch and stared at her hands. She realized, as she blinked, that it had been her own hand she’d seen, the way silvery spots appear when you rub your eyes too hard.
“What’s the matter, Stella?”
Stella looked at Cettina, who in the shadows was nothing but a pair of dark, accusing eyes.
“Nothing,” Stella snapped. What was wrong with her, she couldn’t even open a door? “The latch is just stuck,” she said.
She reached up again and seized the latch, pulling with all her body weight, but this time the door was unresisting. She stumbled backward as it swept open. But there was Cettina’s foot, under hers, and she slipped, overcompensating, throwing out her arms as she plunged toward the door.
THAT WAS IT,just a little conk on the head. But as unlikely as it seems, this may be the closest Stella came to death in all her eight near misses, because no one knew how to bring her back from the brink.
The schoolhouse door was made of heavy oak, and Stella wasexactly the right—or wrong—height. When she fell forward, her temple split against the sharp lower edge of the bolted top half of the door, and her head rebounded and she fell to the ground on her back, cracking her skull against the flagstones.
The screaming of the little girls brought Suora Letizia from the nearby priory. There was blood everywhere, as there always is with a head injury. The tiny nun wrapped her apron around Stella’s gushing wound, scooped her up in her arms, and carried her home to Assunta. Stella breathed, but she did not wake up, not even after they splashed her with water. Her body was floppy and unresponsive. Cettina was hysterical and Assunta was tearing out her hair in panic. This time it was eighty-year-old Suora Letizia who made the run down the mountain to Feroleto.
The doctor brought his surgery kit, and for the third time he stitched Stella Fortuna up like she was a sock for darning. The gash on her scalp was long, and the skin up there is thin and difficult to bring back together once it has been parted. Although he made the tiniest stitches he knew how, the doctor’s handiwork would leave a long silver crescent scar, faint but visible, and a hitch in her hairline.
Stella didn’t wake up. It was a very weird thing that happened this time, everyone said. Stella lay unconscious for four days. On the second day, when she still hadn’t woken up, Za Ros went down to Feroleto again to ask the doctor what to do. The doctor didn’t believe her at first, and said Stella was probably just healing and would wake up soon. On the third day, when Ros came back again, he made a second trip up to Ievoli. He was not able to hide his reaction from Assunta; his face was as gray as liver. She had not been pulling out her hair for nothing; Stella was going to die.
The doctor didn’t know what to do. He had never seen anything like it before. He tried every remedy he could think of to restore consciousness, but nothing worked.
FORSTELLA THE LONG TWILIGHTlasted only a moment. When she woke, her hunger was a fiery cramp in her gut. She sat up and wasnauseated by her dizziness, a combination of dehydration, starvation, and concussion.
“I want a tomato,” she croaked. The sun was yellow-bright on the walls, the open door, the flat surface of the table. Pain shot through her head as her unaccustomed eyes squinted defensively. There was her mother, and Cettina and Za Ros, all looking at her dumb with surprise. “A tomato,” she repeated.
“She wants a tomato,” Za Ros said, and swatted Cettina, who leapt to her feet and scurried out to the garden.
The dizziness—it was hard to fight. Stella put her hand against the wall, and the silver spots sliding across her vision reminded her of the ghostly hand she had seen on the other side of the school door. It was her most recent memory, the weirdly stuck door and the invisible hand.
“Stellamia,you’re awake, she’s awake.” The women were all ringing her bed now, blocking the bright sun. They were touching her and praying. She didn’t care what they were saying. She was ferocious with hunger.
Cettina came running back with her small hands full of tomatoes. Their dark red flesh was hot with the August sun. They were perfect, wet and smooth and the flavor of the earth.
“Bread,” Stella said, gasping, and they brought her bread, and water, and olives and beans. They fed her until she was finally satisfied.
Assunta couldn’t talk; she was weeping with relief. Ros said to Stella, “Tell me,amore,why are you so unlucky? No one else I ever heard of has accidents like your accidents.”
“I’m not unlucky,” Stella replied. The vision of her ghost was vivid in her mind; three years ago, she’d suspected she was haunted when she’d felt that hand close around hers in the pigpen, but she was certain this time. “It’s the ghost of the other Stella. She is trying to kill me.”
