Death 3 Bludgeoning （Education） #3
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 was exactly 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.
FOR STELLA THE LONG TWILIGHT lasted only a moment. When she woke, her hunger was a fiery cramp in her gut. She sat up and was nauseated 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.
“Stella mia, 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.”
Ros clucked her disapproval of this idea, but Cettina said, “She’s cursed.”
Now Ros laughed. “Cursed, or haunted? Is it a ghost or a hex?”
Stella shook her head, which pulsed with pain. “I don’t know,” she said. Her voice was like a goat’s bleat.
“Maybe both,” said Cettina.
AFTER THE DOOR BLUDGEONING INCIDENT, Stella never went back to the schoolhouse.
Neither did Cettina. At the end of their formal educations, at ages nine and seven, respectively, they’d learned how to make the letters of the alphabet.
They’d learned some basic Italian. They could perform a Roman salute.
They could add and subtract numbers, which their mother had already taught them at home, and they could sing Maestra Fiorella’s favorite songs.
They’d learned that it was important to segregate boys and girls, and that when resources were limited, the boys should get them first. They had learned by their teacher’s example how to force charity, manipulate favors, and not feel guilty about taking advantage of any situation.
Some of the lessons would have more impact than others.
* * *
THE WEEK AFTER STELLA’S third almost-death, Antonio Fortuna showed up in Ievoli unannounced. His wife hadn’t heard from him in seven years. Assunta tried to hide her dismay, but she couldn’t fool Stella.
It was the first time Stella was old enough to remember her father’s visit.
In general he created a very strong impression on her that life was better without a capo famiglia, a man of the house.
His voice and smells were too big for their one-room home.
He did not talk to his children much, but when he did have something to say it was always at the top of his voice.
The girls endured rump-smackings for unladylike offenses, like running in the house and speaking at the dinner table.
These had not been punishable before, and Stella’s pride smarted and temper soured under Antonio’s new regime.
Stella had been told she loved her father and that her father loved her, but now that they’d met they were two differently sized strangers with nothing in common except Assunta.
Stella wasn’t sure Antonio even knew her name, for the number of times she’d heard him say it.
Most of all she disliked the change he effected in her mother.
Assunta’s face was pinched and her eyes drooped; she seemed simultaneously annoyed and exhausted.
She cleaned up his extra messes and bowed her head when he shouted at her.
She must have been lonely, because Za Ros and Nonna Maria no longer stopped by to visit.
In general, the house was a dour, joyless place.
Stella was exactly old enough to wonder what the point of having a husband or father was, when he seemed to be a source of arbitrary disorder and suffering.
I fear that the timing of Antonio’s visit was very bad indeed.
I wonder how Stella’s life might have turned out differently if she had had a father earlier, when she would have been too young to be critical of his dominion; whether she might have grown into a teenage girl with more predictable desires who would have seen romance and marriage as a prize to be won and not a sentence to be endured.
The most disgusting thing about her father was watching him use her mother’s body.
It happened almost every night, in or near the second bed Antonio had built against the northern wall of the house on the first day he came back to the village.
Stella was used to nestling into Assunta’s fleshy bosom to be petted and caressed to sleep, but now her mother slept in the new bed on the other side of the room, and Stella would be dragged out of sleep by the whisper of her mother’s voice: Tonight, again?
Aren’t you tired? or Be quieter, the children will hear you.
These susurrations would blend into other noises, slap-slapping and suppressed grunting that Stella could hear even over her brother’s and sister’s heavy sleep-breathing.
And Stella would watch whatever she could see, because it made no sense to her why her parents did this same meaningless thing over and over again, her father’s yellow buttocks bobbing in the light of the summer moon and her mother’s thighs jiggling in the wrinkles of her gathered nightdress.
When she caught a glimpse of her mother’s face in the dark, it always wore what looked like an expression of worry.
The week before the annual Ievoli fhesta of Santa Maria Addolorata, the Blessed Lady of Sorrows, was when the Thing happened.
Somehow it had not happened before, in all the nights Stella had sucked on her cheeks and watched her father do the job to her mother—but that night, he looked up mid-exertion and he caught his daughter’s eye.
Stella’s gut seized and she pressed her face into the mattress and pulled her arm over her head, but it was too late.
When he finished with Assunta, Antonio came over to the children’s bed.
“Tonnon,” Stella heard her mother whisper from her bed.
“One minute.”
“Let them sleep.”