“Tina,” Tony says again. His voice is a goat’s bleat, a goat like the beautiful white pet goat he killed. “Tina.” And finally Tina looks away from her cooking and at him, alarmed. “It’s your sister Mariastella,” he gasps. “She’s going to kill me.”
At those strange last words, the little ghost takes her cue and she squeezes her arms around his neck with all of her shining hatred and fury.
And just like that, she chokes the life out of him.
OBVIOUSLY, THIS NOTION OF A GHOSTis all fabrication and fantasy, and has no place in an otherwise meticulously researched family history. Tony most likely woke up from a nightmare about his second daughter Stella, who had threatened him at knifepoint only hours earlier; that was surely what his last words to terrified Tina meant.
At the hospital, where Tony Fortuna was pronounced DOA, they said it was a massive heart attack that had killed him. It’s not uncommon for heart attack victims to feel like they are choking, which explains why Tony had spent his last moments clawing at his throat. He died with his own skin under his fingernails and red gashes in his neck.
Part IV
Old Age
A vecchiaja è na carogna.
Old age is a bitch.
—CALABRESE PROVERB
Death 8
Cerebral Hemorrhage
(Dementia)
THIS IS THE LAST TIMEStella Fortuna almost died. This is the Accident.
IT WASDECEMBER 8, 1988,but December 9 was coming. Stella, sitting in her spot on the couch, happened to notice the time at 11:52P.M., and after that she couldn’t take her eyes off the clock above the television. She watched the minute hand tick up, and up, up, up. At midnight it would be the twenty-year anniversary of her mother’s death. Assunta had been sixty-nine years old; tonight, Stella was just shy of sixty-nine herself.
There was nothing that marked midnight, the passing of an ordinary day into an oppressive milestone. The CBS news broadcast paused for a liquid detergent commercial. Stella tried to make herself feel any different than she had before. “Mamma?” she said into the open air of her living room, and then she felt foolish because her mother wasn’t there. Stella poured herself a glass of wine from the bottle she kept between her feet. Her hands were shaking, but that was because she had made herself jittery, so much wine and only some cold pasta for dinner a few hours ago.
You pray to God for the dead, for the souls in purgatory, so that God will show them mercy through your faith. Assunta had taught Stella that when Stella was just a tiny girl, from the first time she had taken her to the cemetery to clean her dead sister’s grave. Assunta would have wanted Stella to say prayers for her soul. “Hail Mary full of grace,” Stella said guiltily into the flashing dark of the television-lit living room, but in this moment she couldn’t remember the words. She hadn’t prayed in years. It was so hard to focus her mind or heart on God these days—hard not to feel silly talking into the dark.
Twelve twenty-three. Stella poured herself another glass of wine, then replaced the bottle, which listed slightly in the cushioning of blue carpet. The carpet was lumpy with age, the plush matted into pills,dark on top from years of shoe grime the vacuum couldn’t remove. Stella had been treading this carpet now for thirty-five years, as had her nine wild sons and her one straitlaced daughter and their hordes of friends and opportunistic acquaintances. Now the house was empty; even her baby, Artie, had married and moved away.
Thirty-five years—it was more than half her life. She was more this person, this wife and mother, than she had ever had the chance to be any other person.
How Assunta had loved this house—how proud she had been of her son-in-law Carmelo for buying it. How many hours she had spent sitting on this couch and dandling one grandchild or the next, singing old songs and shelling beans and laughing with her daughters. But Stella had spent many more hours there without her mother. Twenty empty years of hours.
Assunta had suffered so many hardships—famine and illness and loss, an overbearing and neglectful husband, physical toil and pain and heartbreak. And yet she had loved her life so much. Here was Stella, now, the unwilling replacement matriarch, her body so broken and yet unbreakable, with none of her mother’s joy or effortless affection. She took a few swallows of wine, and also swallowed back her sheepishness and shame. “Mamma,” she said into the air, trying to sound like she thought she was talking to someone. She closed her hand around the bonecornettoAssunta had given her half a century ago. “Mamma, are you happy with me? Did I do it right? Did I do what you wanted?”
There was no answer, of course. But it wasn’t a question Stella wanted to know the answer to anyway.
IT WAS TWELVE FORTY,and the cold had crept in. Her arms in particular felt chilled to their bones, and Stella wrapped her shaking hands in the skirt of her cotton housedress. With age, her arms were becoming doughy and bloated, and the scars from her burns had rippled, obscured in loose liver-spotted wrinkles. Sometimes Stellaran her fingers over this textured surface that was now part of her body, thinking of the sandbar at Rocky Neck when the tide had just gone out.
Stella embraced the warm thought of the beach. Assunta had loved the beach when the children were small. She wouldn’t go in the water or wear a bathing suit, but she packed her three-gallon yellow Tupperware bowl with cold pasta, another with an oil-drenched salad, and she made the kids eat all day long whenever they came in from the water—the ocean makes you hungry,she’d say. Pasta at the beach—everyone will think we’re guidos, the boys would tease, but they’d eat it, sandy or not.
It had been at least ten years since Stella had been to the beach. Bernadette had invited her to come stay with her girls in a summer cabin for a week on the Cape last August. Stella had declined, but maybe next year she should say yes. What was she worried about missing here?
Pouring herself another quivering glass, Stella focused on the cold, trying to let it seep into her chest and wrap around her heart. They said you felt cold in the presence of a ghost, but surely there must also be some other signs. It was December in Connecticut, after all, twenty-something degrees outside in the buffeting wind. She would need other evidence if she wanted to persuade herself she was haunted.
“Mamma,” she said again into the dark, but this time it was just to hear the sound of her own voice.
Now it was one thirty, and the local access programming had come on. The newly grainy sound and picture brought Stella back to herself. She was drunk and blurred and didn’t know what had happened to the last hour, but at the same time the core of her mind was lucid, a bell-clear fugue of mourning. She had never gotten a grip of herself, but a milestone was no time to get a grip.
The wine bottle was empty. A sign that she should go upstairs and let herself fall back asleep. But she didn’t want to. She wanted to be haunted, and if she couldn’t reach her mother’s spirit, she would just have to haunt herself.
Stella lurched out of the soft cave of the couch, sobered momentarily by the jingle of pain in her stiff knees. She left the bottle and the glass on the floor in front of the television—later, they would be forensic evidence for her children—and stumbled into the kitchen.
