Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
Rosaria didn’t appear the next morning.
I woke at six and checked the kitchen out of habit.
Her chair was empty. I made coffee. I stood at the kitchen window and watched the harbor come into its morning gray — the water flat and dull, the boats still, a herring gull picking its way along the dock with the businesslike focus of someone who had places to be.
At eight-forty, the kitchen changed.
Not dramatically. A shift in the air, a sense of attention settling back into the room, the quality of the light adjusting by half a degree in the way it did when the room was no longer empty. I didn’t look up from my book. I had learned not to make an event of her returns.
“Stella noticed,” Rosaria said.
I looked up.
She was in her chair. Same housecoat, same pinned hair, same posture of a woman carrying a complaint she intended to deliver. But there was something careful in her face beneath the complaint — something that had decided, I thought, to stop pretending to be careful.
“Stella,” I said.
“My sister-in-law. You don’t know her. She’s been dead for forty years. Large woman. Very strong opinions about how other people spend their time.” Rosaria smoothed her housecoat across her lap. “She has noticed that I am not — entirely as I was. She mentioned it. Twice. With that look she has.”
I set my book down.
“She said I was coming in clearer.” Rosaria said it the way you report a diagnosis you have had time to sit with.
“Those were her exact words. Coming in clearer. Said it the way she says everything — like she’s doing you a favor by telling you the bad news before it gets worse.
” She looked at the harbor. “Over there I am apparently becoming very easy to see. Stella says it’s like someone is turning up a dial.
” A pause. “She also said I look well. Which from Stella is not a compliment. It means I belong there more than I used to.”
The morning sat between us.
I understood what that meant. I wished I didn’t.
If Rosaria was becoming more solid over there — more present, more herself, more arrived — it was because the pull was winning.
The other side was claiming her. And the cost of that was what I could see on this side: the fine-grained thinness that had settled over her since the morning after the Merriwell, the quality of a photograph left too long in a window.
I wanted to say Stella doesn’t know what she’s talking about. I had been storing that sentence for two months, taking it out and polishing it, holding it ready. It had gotten me through a lot of mornings.
“Rosaria—”
“We are not pretending anymore, Gina.”
She said it without heat. That was the thing that stopped me — the absence of theater in it. Rosaria Ferraro without theater was Rosaria Ferraro meaning every word.
“I’m thinning.” She stated it like a fact she’d gotten used to.
“You know it. I know it. Stella knows it, which is its own problem, because now she’s telling everyone, and I do not need my sister Carmela hearing it second-hand at a card game.
” She turned from the harbor to look at me directly. “We are going to talk about it.”
I let out a breath.
“Tell me what you think happened,” I said. Because I knew what I thought. But this was her story.
Rosaria considered. She had her hands folded in her lap in the way she folded them when she was being precise about something.
“Lori said it,” she said. “Before the first attempt, under the Merriwell. She read Ada’s note. Do not attempt with the dead in place of the living. She said it clearly. I heard her say it.”
“Yes.”
“And then I stood up and did it anyway.”
“Yes.”
“Because we were out of time and we were short a body and the alternative was to watch Redmond’s crews tear the Merriwell Building down around those stones and lose any chance of finishing what Ada’s people started.
” She paused. “I said the circle answers what is given. I said if what’s given is me, let the circle decide. ”
“You said that.”
“I meant it.” She looked at her hands. “I still mean it. I walked into that circle knowing Ada’s warning and I stood there anyway, and the circle answered, and the price was real.
” Something settled in her expression, past the edge of performance and into something quieter.
“I’m not going to spend whatever time I have left regretting a thing I chose with open eyes. ”
The harbor was very still this morning. A boat engine started somewhere in the distance and then cut out.
“I’m not asking you to regret it,” I said.
“I know you’re not. But you’ve been not-asking me for two months, and it was going to start crushing both of us eventually.”
I almost laughed. I didn’t, but the shape of it moved through me.
“I don’t die-die,” Rosaria continued. “I should say that first. I am not going to end up — nothing. I’m already dead.
What happens is more like —” She gestured with one hand, a searching motion.
“You know how a photograph fades? In a window, in sunlight, over years? The image is still there. But it’s lighter.
And lighter. Until eventually it’s just a ghost of a ghost, and then you can’t see it at all.
” She paused. “That’s what’s happening here.
On this side. Over there it’s the reverse — I arrive more completely every time.
More solid. More present. As if I am being filled in.
” Something moved across her face that was not quite satisfaction and not quite grief.
“It would almost be flattering if it didn’t mean what it means. ”
“And that’s what’s happening to you.”
“That’s what will happen to me, if nothing changes.
” She said it plainly. “The circle took something. A thread of me that belonged on this side. And every time I cross over, there is a little less traction when I come back. I can still come and go. I am still here right now. But the current knows where it wants me.”
The kitchen was very quiet.
“Is it painful?” I asked.
“No.” She said it without drama. “It’s not painful. It’s not frightening, particularly. It’s more like — a tide. Most of the time I don’t feel it. And then sometimes I do, and it’s stronger than the last time, and I know it has been working even when I couldn’t feel it.”
I looked at her in her chair by the window and felt something I hadn't expected.
I didn't want her to go. This was surprising, if I was being honest, because I had not particularly liked Rosaria Ferraro when she was alive.
She had been opinionated and exacting and had feelings about my housekeeping that she considered my business to know about.
But two years of being haunted by someone had a way of changing the terms. I had gotten to know her considerably better dead than I ever had alive, which probably said something about both of us, and the conclusion I had arrived at — quietly, without announcement, in the way you arrive at things you weren't looking for — was that I liked having her here.
Quite a lot, actually. I was not going to tell her that.
“I would like very much,” Rosaria said, “not to thin all the way out yet.”
Her voice had changed. Just slightly. The precision still there, but something underneath it that was not armor.
“Because I have things I still want to see.”
I waited.
She looked out at the harbor for a moment, and there was something in her profile that I recognized from thirty years of knowing this woman — first at arm’s length, then up close, then as the person who shared my kitchen and my quiet and my life in a way that neither of us had planned and both of us had, I thought, come to need.
“I want to see Josie and you reconcile,” she said. “The real way. Not telephone calls where you both say five careful sentences. The way where you’re actually in the same room and you stop managing each other.”
I did not speak.
“I want to see whether Tony Caruso has the good sense to ask you to marry him.” She said this with the air of someone who has already done the math. “Because he has the sense. I want to see whether he uses it.”
“Rosaria—”
“I’m not finished.” She turned from the harbor.
“I want to be in this kitchen the first time you have a grandchild. I want to see what that looks like — you with a grandchild. You’ll be ridiculous about it, and I want to see that.
” She paused. “After that, we’ll see. That’s not forever.
That’s not — I’m not asking for forever. I’m asking for enough.”
My eyes were burning. I pressed two fingers to the bridge of my nose and breathed.
I was not going to cry. Rosaria would be insufferable about it.
“After that, we’ll see,” she said again, quieter. “Maybe by then I’ll be ready. Maybe not. That part I can’t know yet.”
A long moment.
The lighthouse beam moved across the water, slow and steady, doing its job.
“I’ll miss you,” I said. Because it was true and I was done swallowing it.
Rosaria was quiet for longer than she usually allowed herself to be quiet.
“Well,” she said finally, with the precision of a woman working around an obstruction in her throat.
“Yes.” She smoothed her housecoat again, an unnecessary gesture, something to do with her hands.
“I expect I will also — that is to say —” She stopped.
She tried again. “You are not the worst person I have ever shared a kitchen with.”
Coming from Rosaria Ferraro, this was a declaration.
“That might be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” I said.
“Don’t make it strange.”
She went again an hour later — Stella had something she was insisting on, the details of which Rosaria conveyed in terms that suggested it was both urgent and ridiculous, and she was gone before I could ask more.
I stood in the kitchen after her chair had emptied and let the silence settle.
Patricia arrived at one o’clock, the way she always did — coat buttoned to the throat, handbag over one arm, the careful composure of a woman who had been holding herself together in public for so long it had become her resting expression.
Her daughter met her at the door the way she always did, already present, already waiting.
I sat between them and did my job. I relayed what needed to be relayed. I held the space.
By the time Patricia left at two, something in her face had loosened by one degree. That was the work. One degree at a time.
Carmen had been texting about Thanksgiving dates for a week. At some point I was going to have to give her an answer, and the answer depended on Josie, and I had told Josie I would call her later and it was now three days later and I had not called.
I typed: Thanksgiving at the cottage. All three of you if you can make it. Let me know.
I put the phone on the table. It did not buzz.
I thought about the coven meeting inn a few hours.
Someone would know something. That was what I was holding onto.
Five women who between them had more accumulated knowledge of this town’s history, its workings, its inherited obligations, than anyone alive — someone in that room would have read something, remembered something, know of something that could be done.
Enough, Rosaria had said.
I was going to make sure she got it.