Chapter 111
I SHOWED UP AT FRANCESCA’S the following Tuesday, figuring we’d spend much of the lesson talking about the birthday ball.
She liked using events from my life—and sometimes hers—as fodder for our conversations.
She’d ask me to describe the food, the music, what the guests wore, and in this way, she forced me to stretch my vocabulary, to reach for new words.
But when I arrived at her apartment, it was she who wanted to talk. A friend of Bianca’s—someone she’d come up through school with—had gone into labor with her first child over the weekend, and while the delivery had gone smoothly, the baby had died.
“Like a stillbirth?” I asked.
“No, no,” she said as she banged around the kitchen, presumably looking for the moka pot. “Much worse.”
I wasn’t sure how it got much worse than a stillbirth.
“It’s the same problem as that other baby. I told you about it, yes?”
“The one with the skull?”
Francesca was nodding in that emphatic way of hers. “It had no skull at all. Just missing.”
I cringed.
“He was born Saturday night, and there was panic because Father Guglielmo was at your party.”
I thought of the benediction the priest had given and how, at the precise moment I’d been praying he would stop talking and sit down, this doomed child might have been entering the world.
“This friend of Bianca’s, Carmela. Her husband, Antonio, and his brother are tour boat operators, so the brother went to Porto Cervo and begged Father Guglielmo to get in the boat.”
“Did he make it in time?”
“He did. He performed the Last Rites, and still the baby held on.”
“When did he die?”
She frowned. “This morning.”
I wasn’t like Laura, who couldn’t pass a fat baby in a stroller without cooing. I wasn’t even sure I liked babies. But the story of this baby made me want to weep.
“Teo went to the hospital a few hours ago, and he said it was awful.”
“I suppose he knew her?”
“Yes, of course. But that’s not why he went.” She was holding a bag of ground coffee in her hand, but I was beginning to think our espressos weren’t happening. “Antonio requested he come.”
She said this last part like I was meant to know what she was talking about, but I had no idea why a grieving father would summon a journalist to his wife’s bedside.
“This problem with the skull, it’s very rare. So the fact that there have now been two cases on one tiny island? It can’t be a coincidence.”
“What else would it be,” I said, “if not a coincidence?”
Francesca gave me a pitying expression. “Isn’t it obvious?”
I shook my head, still not getting it.
“It’s your subs.”