Antonio opened one of two doors on the third-floor landing with a long silver key and let them into the drafty apartment that would be their home. He hit a switch on the wall, and electric light illuminated a shabby sitting room. No woman had been here to take care of the things that made life more worth living.
Stella and Tina followed their father down the hallway. “This is your bedroom,” he said. “You’ll have privacy. Isn’t that much better than back home?” Neither of his daughters responded. He pointed out the bathroom, showed them how to use the toilet. “We don’t have to share it with nobody. Our own toilet. Just you be careful not to get it clogged up, all right? The plumber is a fortune.”
Stella and Tina looked at each other, not knowing what a plumber was, or how to clog a toilet. Stella hoped it was something they could figure out in the morning.
When they were alone in their new bedroom, Stella toed off her shoes and sat on the mattress of the single bed, rubbing one sore foot and then the other. Tina opened her trunk and stared inside, until Stella said, “I’m too tired, little bug. We’ll do that in the morning.”
“Yes.” Tina closed the trunk again, then noticed the curtain. “Oh, Stella! We have a window!” She drew back the curtain and fell so dumbly silent, Stella came to look.
There, three stories below them, leaning up against a chain-link fence with spiked wire on top, were rows—or maybe more like piles—of shanty houses. Lit by a bonfire in the middle of the garbage-filled lot, roofs of rusty scrap metal shone dully among beams ofbroken wood. Around the fire were dirty people wearing what looked like rags in the bitter cold. Stella thought of the Gypsies in Nicastro, of their bright colors and watchful eyes. She felt sick in her stomach.
“This,” Tina said, her breath leaving a fog on the glass. Her voice had caught in her throat. “This is where we live now?”
Death 5
Rape
(Marriage)
THE FIFTH DEATH BEGAN IN A DREAM.
One July morning in 1941, in the hanging lavender of predawn, Stella Fortuna rose from the bed she shared with Tina, leaving her sister to her last minutes of wet late-sleep snoring before their grueling day in the tobacco fields.
Stella took their ceramic washbasin to the kitchen, filled it with warm water, and brought it back to their nightstand. This was the girls’ beauty area, safe from the hectic imperialism of the boys’ barging and odors. This morning in her dream—for this was a dream—Stella watched her own face in the scuffed blue mirror nailed to the wall above the basin as she guided her washcloth over the areas that needed the most attention. She didn’t recognize herself, but that didn’t seem strange.
She only realized the man had entered her room when she heard the door tick closed. At first she was annoyed; she wrapped one arm across her breasts and cupped the washcloth between her legs, waiting for the man to apologize and depart. He did not—he stood solidly, his outstretched arms creating a cage between Stella and the door. In that moment, she understood he was not in her room by accident.
Stella called out, “Tina!” The tenement walls, so permeable when her brothers were shouting, seemed to absorb her voice. “Tina!” But Tina was not there—something that would only ever happen in a dream.
The man lifted a finger to his lips. He was a gray shadow in the stingy light, but his black irises were shiny. Stella felt a cool ripple under the skin of her buttocks, where his gaze had fixed. She was helplessly exposed.
Racked by trembles of revulsion, her naked dream body buckled uncontrollably. (In the real world, her sleeping self spasmed, kicking Tina hard in the thigh.) The man crossed the floorboards that separated them, his calloused palms encasing her. The touch was sickeningbut sensual; Stella felt a tingle of response in her flesh. At the same time, her stomach began to throb, low and tight behind the suture scars. No man with a calloused hand had ever touched her skin like that. How did her dream self know what that touch felt like?
He gripped her shoulder, turning her toward him. She tried to resist, but her limbs were sleep-paralyzed, disobedient. She mashed her concealing arm so tightly against her chest that one of her breasts was forced out from under it. In sickened dismay she saw her areola spring free, her frightened nipple curling inward.
Her fear rallied her. Not bothering to hide her nudity anymore, she shoved him away with all her might. There was nowhere else to go, so she climbed into the window frame. She parted her legs for the shortest possible interval, then quickly crouched into herself, enduring the unfamiliar sensation of air sweeping over her most private skin. The man was shaking his head, stepping toward her again. Everything was wrong, so wrong, perversely wrong. His hands closed around her arm.
Her vision was whited out by panic. She struck out and lost her balance, felt herself tumble sideways. Her chin hit the floor and her jaw jammed up into her skull, teeth singing with the reverberation. The hands tightened, and she screamed. The world was invisible; she could only feel—hands on her arms, then her leg, the beads of blood rising, the bruises beginning to form. The dream shattered. She was awake.
The dim early morning in the bedroom was the exact same lavender it had been in her dream; Stella’s senses stuttered.“Tina!”Her father’s bellow.“What the hell are you doing?”Above her, curling rags ringing her sister’s swollen face. The fallen rod on the floor by her legs; one blue cotton curtain threaded through the two sisters’ arms.
Stella felt her shoulder muscles constrict around the pain in her socket. She realized the hands clenching her arm were not the dream-rapist’s but her sister’s, gripping so fiercely she left white ovals in the shiny pink of Stella’s burn scar. Stella reached up to touch her jaw, and the skin leapt with fiery tenderness.
Her father’s silhouette crossed the shadowy room. “You littlebitch.” He hooked his elbow around Tina’s neck and Tina went careening toward the wall, catching herself against the bed just in time to receive the back of his hand across her face. “Little whore. What the hell were you thinking?”
Tina sobbed, incoherent. Stella lay dazed on the floor by the window, her body surveying its various pains: the bruises on her arm, her tailbone, her cheek; the bleeding open skin in her gums; the torn feeling in her shoulder. Their father loomed, enraged as ever, waiting, exhaling wet, irregular breaths into his mustache. Long seconds passed as Tina gasped and coughed into her nightgown. She was not going to answer.
Antonio turned on Stella. “What the hell is going on?”
Stella pushed herself up to feel the flat safety of the wall against her back. She tasted blood, and located with her tongue the fissures where teeth had been.
“She tried to push you out the window?”
Tina’s head popped up, and she lifted an arm to protect her teary face. “No, Papa, she was trying to jump out the window. She was going to kill herself. I was just—”
“You shut up!” Antonio was leonine, roaring, his curling hair wild in shadowy silhouette. “Stella, I asked you did she try to push you out the window? You were fighting?”
Stella’s stomach rippled, a residue of the trapped feeling from her dream. “No.” Speaking was difficult; her mouth was swelling fast. “No, Papa, it was a dream.”
