Chapter 21 #2
When the sun warmed the sea and stretched its yellow fingers to the rocks and sand on the shoreline, Zaneta swam.
Whenever she could, she left Mira with Luccio and lingered in the cove of Pinna nobilis, letting the water carry her weight and absorb her tears until she could no longer tell the difference between the salt water that held her and that which leaked from her eyes.
Often, she swam and harvested with ghosts.
Her memory conjured the songs and chatter of their lively group, bantering and laughing away an afternoon.
Underwater, her eye would catch the shadow of a cloud passing above, and she’d turn swiftly, thinking her sister had appeared at her elbow, offering to hold the basket.
She hummed to herself as she walked back home along the sand, but it was her mother’s voice that echoed in the melody.
Alone, Zaneta felt the pull of the byssus more than ever.
Luccio, a child of the island himself, understood the heritage and her passion for it, but he could never feel it the way she did, bound to the line of those who’d gone before.
“I’m so happy your harvest is going well, Zeta,” he said to her. “You should have enough to make bracelets for every bride and baby in the area soon!”
She nodded. “There’s lots to do. It’ll take me a while to prepare all the dyes by myself.
” People had begun to visit the house again.
Word of the weaver had spread. Now that they knew one of the water women had returned, they were eager for blessings from the byssus, hungry for any sort of salve for their hearts and good fortune for a happier future.
No one spoke of what might have become of the once vibrant group of the byssus artists.
“Maybe the three of us can take some time for a walk? Maybe something different, like a picnic on the plains?”
Zaneta stiffened. “You can take the baby if you want. I probably won’t have time.”
“Surely the byssus can rest for a day?” Luccio nudged. “It’s survived pretty well, wouldn’t you say?”
She regarded her husband. “Yes, I suppose it has, despite everything. But now that I’m here, instead of leaving it for a vacation, I’d rather do what I can to protect it. It’s hardly enough.”
“To honor them, you mean.”
Zaneta bowed her head and kept rinsing the tangled strands she’d harvested that morning. Luccio pulled the wicker picnic basket from the cabinet by the back door. “We’ll miss you, then,” he said.
At the window above the sink, she watched them go, Luccio bouncing Mira in his arms with each step.
He was probably singing to her or telling her a story.
The child patted her father’s whiskers and gazed up at him.
Some part of Zaneta wished she could join them, a happy family on a sunny day, but the cloak of sadness she wore was too heavy to throw off.
She watched until they disappeared around the corner and, with a sigh, bent her head to continue her work alone.
Theirs wasn’t a marriage of overt physical passion, though there were moments when they turned to one another.
Two more children joined their family—both boys, Johann and Isaac, to Luccio’s delight.
The youngest was a difficult delivery; there had been a close call and a flurry of decisions before a last-minute surgery that meant no more children.
No more daughters. Zaneta’s penance, it would seem, continued.
She girded her loins to teach Mira the craft.
For the most part, she had to admit, the child was bright and applied herself well, eager to please.
Zaneta was as exacting and as careful as possible with her lessons.
They were beginning again, braiding the tenuous thread of water women in the hope that it would strengthen enough to continue.
Mira had to know the importance of this task; she couldn’t be allowed to take it lightly.
So, of course, Zaneta showed little leniency, gave little praise.
Mira needed to learn to work the byssus right. Everything depended on it.
Life wasn’t always sunshine and roses; Mira had to understand that so that she could prepare for hardship and be able to persevere, although the girl seemed oblivious much of the time.
Zaneta worked through the days despite—or perhaps because of—the grief that sometimes descended upon her like a thick flock of black crows, cawing and beating their wings so loudly that it drowned out all else.
As the years passed, she and Luccio never stopped trying to find her sister Dahlia.
New data banks and organizations helped families trace individuals they’d lost in the war.
After years of corresponding with such places, Zaneta finally received the news she’d dreaded.
There was proof, an eyewitness statement of Dahlia Renda being part of a group execution in a forest in Poland.
Nothing more. No explanation of how she’d arrived, why she’d been separated from the rest of the family, nothing.
It was in that moment, when Zaneta had just learned her sister’s fate through a few sparse sentences on a single thin page, that young, school-aged Mira had burst into the kitchen, blathering about a dance.
A dance. How could the world go on dancing when Dahlia lay in an unmarked forest grave?
An image of the soldier’s face swam before Zaneta’s eyes.
She imagined him laughing, mocking her, calling her Fr?ulein.
His face blurred into Mira’s, the daughter who stood before her in her own kitchen, and Zaneta had lashed out.
Luccio, she knew, tried to keep the peace and mend the rifts between them, but what could he do?
He couldn’t pass on the craft or teach the thousands of things Mira needed to learn.
She would have to make the best of it and hope the girl would toughen up.
Someday, when Mira took the water oath, the yoke that had pinched and bruised Zaneta’s neck for years would ease a little.
Still, just the two of them remained in the line of water women.
Zaneta had stopped believing any of the other families might return.
Mira was capable of weaving beautiful pieces, she could complete the process in her sleep, and she was probably one of the strongest swimmers on Sant’Antioco.
Some of the weavings that hung in Signor Sanna’s dry goods window had come from Mira’s trained hands, the designs all her own.
Zaneta dared hope that when Mira grew old enough to marry and have children of her own, what she’d worked for all along would come to pass: the line would continue despite everything.
She had tried her best to ensure Mira knew this responsibility and would step into the role as she herself had.
Zaneta had made a silk purse from a sow’s ear.
In Zaneta’s later years, some afternoons, when the honeyed light fell through the studio’s windows just so and the sound of the clacking loom and their humming in unison made a sweet rhythm, Zaneta almost—fleetingly—let herself forget.
She could almost imagine she was back in her childhood home, surrounded by the songs of her sisters and mother.
Then, a part of Zaneta mourned the missed opportunities with Mira, her sole daughter, the connection she’d shared with her own mother that she might have shared in turn.
Back then, she couldn’t allow herself the indulgence.
“When will you stop punishing yourself, Zeta?” Luccio asked her once. “It wasn’t a crime to survive the war.”
“Am I punishing myself?” she’d asked.
“Yourself and Mira,” he’d said. And then, “All of us a little, I think.”
“You’re a good man, Luccio,” Zaneta said, the corners of her mouth drawn into a sad, resigned smile.
“I still see my vibrant Zaneta Renda in there from before the war. Only glimpses, though. It makes me sad you keep her locked inside.” He poked a gentle finger at her heart and stroked her graying hair, his fingers firm and strong. Zaneta blinked back tears.
“I can’t forget.”
“Of course not,” he replied. “But we can make better things to remember.” A row of white teeth shone bright as the ends of his mustache curved in a smile. “We can do things differently.”
“You mean I can,” she said.
“Maybe I carried things okay, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t heavy.”
Zaneta laid her head on Luccio’s chest, and he tucked his chin over the top of it.
She remembered the day she’d come back to this house, when she’d stumbled in and fallen asleep in her sister’s bed, exhausted and sick.
Luccio had been there then, and he was here still.
A weariness had settled deep into Zaneta’s bones, weighing down her heart like an undertow, much like how she’d felt that day she’d ventured back from the well.
Maybe Luccio was right. She didn’t know if she could keep dragging the past and its load through the wet sand anymore.
“Zeta.” It was a question. Would she let him help her learn how to live?
She tilted her chin up at Luccio, where a wellspring of hope shone in his eyes.
“You only drown if you stay in the water. I’m giving you my hand.
Take it.” She laid her head back against his chest, and his heartbeat, steady and even, thudded against her cheek.
She thought of Mira. She thought of Dahlia, alone at the end, and knew her sister would be furious with her for following her to that same end.
And Luccio, still here despite everything, still pleading with her to look up and see him. She owed him that much.
Zaneta nodded her head ever so slightly beneath Luccio’s beard. She was ready to try. She was ready to open the prison door.