Death 7 Choking （Change of Life） #8
I understand why to the first Stella the second Stella might have looked like the enemy.
I understand the jealousy and the loathing and the exquisite sorrow of watching your replacement take everything you were denied.
But the Stellas should never have been enemies; they should have been the most faithful of allies against the monster they had in common, the man who had taken away each of their lives in different ways, who had never considered regretting what he had destroyed, who had tortured their sweet shared mother, the woman each of the Stellas had loved more than they’d loved the rest of the world.
Half a century after he’d ended the first Stella’s life, bringing home his war flu and callously refusing to call the doctor; a quarter century after he’d taken away the second Stella’s life, beating her resistance away and forcing her to do the one thing she feared more than death itself; still, here and now, Antonio Fortuna was ruining the lives of other little girls.
Why did the first Stella keep trying to kill the second? It was their father she should have killed.
So now imagine this: the little ghost watches her sister—this collapsed, aching woman—choke to death, pounding her fist on the clammy white tiles of her kitchen floor, and she has a change of heart.
As the littlest sister, Tina, comes running to the rescue one more time—how lucky that she is always, always there—the ghost thinks about how the second Stella brandished that knife, how in that moment, if only they’d had the courage, together they might have cut off his right to ruin any more lives.
She feels a swell of energy, an excited beating where her heart would have been.
As Tina puts their mutual sister to bed, the first Stella separates herself from her constant companion and drifts across the street, bonelessly traverses the aluminum siding—since, after all, she doesn’t exist—and slides into the old man’s bedroom, where he is wheezing in his dirty dreams. Even on a night like tonight, she thinks, he loses no sleep.
The first Stella sits there on his dresser, next to the gold-plated watch he puts on for card games with the boys, in front of the framed Fortuna family photo taken Christmas of 1940, which has stood on its felt feet in this very spot since Mamma put it there fifteen years earlier, and the first Stella watches him sleep, her anger and hatred inside her cramping together into a shining ball, collecting all her bad feelings in her gut, just like the second Stella would have—for the first Stella would have been just like the second Stella in many ways if she had been allowed to grow up.
All night she sits and watches him, her fury coalescing, until the old-world miasma of her settles on his skin and clogs his nostrils and even he can’t sleep through this anymore—he wakes nervously, discomfited, he tugs at his blankets and cowers under his pillow but he knows something is very wrong, she can feel his diseased old heart hiccupping in his chest. She presses down on him—she’s not quite ready yet, she hasn’t decided what she is going to do, but she isn’t cowed by him the way her sister is. He has never been her master.
As the first twilight of dawn glints in the swampy dew of his backyard, Antonio Fortuna hears the soft thufft of his back door closing against its rubber jamb.
It is his daughter Tina, come over to fix him breakfast before she leaves for work.
Crazed by insomnia, his chest seizes with anxiety.
The first Stella feels the skipping slap of his heart against his rib cage and she presses down just a little harder.
He attempts to shove her off, but he can’t see her, doesn’t know what she is.
He forces himself up, puts his feet on the floor, his yellowed undershirt and underwear milky and rank with sweat, and the little ghost cringes away.
As Tony pulls on his burgundy bathrobe, the first Stella swallows her disgust and leaps onto his back, clamping her invisible little arms around his neck.
She feels him shudder under her oppression.
Yes, she will have witnesses for this. A ghost must be witnessed whenever she can.
As he opens his bedroom door, Tony rolls his shoulders. He doesn’t understand the first Stella but he suffers her weight—he tries to shrug her off. “Tina,” he says as he rounds the corner into his kitchen. “Tina, help me. I don’t feel right.”
Tina has set a pot of rolled oats in water on the range and is turning on the burner. “What’s wrong, Papa? Sit down. I’ll make you coffee.”
“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 GHOST is 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.