Chapter 30
One Sunday evening in November, Mira and Dante shared a light supper since Mira hadn’t felt much like eating.
She stood over the crib in the small nursery, running her fingers over the soft blankets and imagining the life the three of them would have, how they would cherish this unexpected gift.
Dante had fashioned an enchanting mobile from driftwood and fishing line.
Suspended from it hung pieces of oyster shell, the mother-of-pearl changing colors in the early evening light shining through the window.
He’d mixed in other things, too: sand dollars, colorful blue and gold glass fish from one of the shops at the port, and white stones polished smooth by the ocean.
When the mobile began to sway, the stones and glass clinking, Mira turned to shut the window.
She didn’t remember having opened it, especially not when the evenings had begun to carry a chill.
But it wasn’t open at all, and as she reached out a hand to steady the mobile—the glass fishes weren’t meant to knock about so roughly—Dante rushed into the nursery behind her.
“Mira!” He grabbed her from behind and staggered as he pulled her into the doorway.
Still, she was confused—it wasn’t like Dante to hurt her like that—and why were the books jumping on the shelves, the baby’s rattles, lying in the crib, sounding as if they were being shaken by an invisible hand?
He held her arms so tightly she thought she might find marks in the morning.
When she heard plates shatter against the floor in the kitchen, the fact of the earthquake finally dawned on her, and she crouched low, shielding the swell of her belly with her arms. Though it seemed endless, the worst of the shaking couldn’t have gone on more than a few minutes, and when it was over, only a few broken plates and a crack in one window were the result.
Dante rose to his feet, and his gaze swept around the main room. “More than a little rumble,” he said, “but not too bad. I’ll get a broom.”
But Mira remained on the floor, braced against the doorframe.
It wasn’t over, not yet. Somehow, an equal tectonic shift was occurring inside her, threatening to shatter everything.
A vise tightened around her middle until the pain became so sharp it took her breath.
Mira moaned, her eyes wide and frightened.
This wasn’t how they’d planned it. She’d imagined a warm bed, soft lights, and Dante soothing her through the process.
The room’s edges darkened, and flashes of silver danced in Mira’s vision.
Strangely, they reminded her of the phosphorescent plankton that sometimes floated in with the ocean on the night tide.
Miles away on the mainland, fires broke out in Naples from broken gas mains, and authorities scrambled to rescue hundreds in the rubble of collapsed churches and apartments.
But Mira was oblivious, gripping the dashboard of their Fiat as Dante raced to the hospital in Cagliari.
Later, they learned that while the quake struck hardest in Potenza, damage had occurred all along the coast and the Bay of Naples as far south as Sicily.
Reports filled the news: the worst to hit Italy in over fifty years, hundreds dead or missing, hospitals filled to capacity.
Mira was moved twice to different rooms to accommodate injured people ferried from Sicily to Sardegna.
After the birth, both quicker and involving much more pain and blood than Mira had anticipated, the three of them huddled together in a knot of exhaustion and gratitude as hospital staff dashed back and forth down the corridor outside their room with more urgent concerns than the arrival of a healthy baby girl.
Mira wept. It was as if a faucet had unleashed an endless flow of all the sorrow and quenched hope she’d had for over ten years and mixed them with a tidal wave of happiness and love so great she couldn’t contain the rush of it.
“Should I call someone?” Poor Dante, his system wrecked by adrenaline, stared at her with a helpless expression. “Are you in pain?”
No, no. Mira shook her head, covering the baby with the thin blanket the nurses had wrapped her in.
The edge of it was already soaked with her blubbering.
Carmina had warned her about the exodus of emotions that might occur when the hormones readjusted, but Mira knew this was something else.
She patted Dante’s hand and lay back, letting the tears leak out of her eyes onto the pillows. She tried to reassure him.
“It’s simply—everything: joy at holding her, grief—again, does it ever go away?
—for those we lost, both happiness and terror at being a mother and wanting more than anything to do it right, to do it well.
If I’m honest, and”—she laughed, aware of the spectacle she made—“I might as well be, it’s also because my own mother fell so woefully short at making me feel loved.
What if I—oh, Dante, what if I ever make our daughter feel anything close to that? ” The tears gushed faster.
Dante squeezed her hand in his and spoke to her in the professor voice he likely used with his unruly students.
“Mira. Listen to me. You will be, no question, the best mother there is. No one has wanted this more, planned for this more, and been more grateful for this gift than you. Even if you tried your hardest, you couldn’t mess it up.
Look, she already looks at you like you hung the moon. ”
Mira gazed at the infant in the crook of her arm.
One of her tiny fists waved in the air, and the other opened and closed like an anemone in the current.
A small finger caught on Mira’s byssus bracelet, and the baby’s hand impulsively closed on it, grasping by reflex.
When she caught Mira’s eyes, she stared, blinking against the light.
“See?” said Dante. “She’s already drawn to the sea silk.”
Mira didn’t even hear him, so mesmerized was she by Daniella, her flat button nose, her impossibly long lashes and sandy hair like her father’s, and the tip of her pink tongue that poked in and out of her bow mouth.
Safe in her cozy nest of motherhood, she forgot all about the earthquake’s portent.
Such augury was for old-world witches and had no place in Mira’s heart.