Stella poured a short glass of wine, downed it, and poured a second. She had spent the whole day sober, missed her work shift for that nasty old man. She needed something to eat; she’d had nothing since the cheese sandwiches. There was nothing in the refrigerator; whatever Carmelo had made for dinner had been polished off—a casualty of having so many teenage boys in the house, their friends cycling through like the place was Union Station, or Hartford county jail.
In the drawer at the bottom of the refrigerator was a supermarket packet of chicken parts: legs and thighs chopped so their blunted bones stood out against the plastic wrapping. Yes, Stella thought, this much I can do. Even Rocco Caramanico had been able to cook chicken. She put the package on the counter, found a pasta pot beneath the sink, filled it with water, and put it on the stove, turning the burner underit on high. One by one, she dropped the chicken parts into the pot of water. The peach-colored flesh was slimy between her fingers, and the water quickly clouded.
Stella looked at her creation, this food that she was cooking. She was making herself chicken. She was fifty years old, and she didn’t need anyone—she didn’t need her father, whose balls she had held a knife to; she didn’t need her husband, who had fed her the last twenty years. She was no one to the world—she wasn’t pretty, she was old, she wasn’t such a good mother—but she was everythingsheneeded. She could work, and she could fight. She had survived all of everything. She had survived.
She sat at the kitchen table and waited for the food to cook. She was hungry now. The bad feelings of the past had set in. She drank a third glass of wine, watching the shadows of the faucet and the sun-catcher in the window stretch across the stove. She had begun to live the old nightmare again, end to end. There was her father pinning her in the corner, his hands sliding over her buttocks, her ribs, her breasts. She fought her nausea with a fourth glass of wine. She waited for the vision to abate.
As the broth was coming to a boil, she thought to add salt and pepper. Was there something else you put in chicken? She didn’t know. She drank a fifth glass of wine, the comfort of fuzzy detachment sliding over the discomfort of her vivid memories. On the stove, the water in the pot bubbled, issuing a delightful steam that made her shy back when she held her face over the roiling liquid.
In the dark kitchen, she removed four pieces of chicken from the pot with Carmelo’s cooking tongs, put them in a bowl, and watched them steam into the heavy July air. As she waited, she drank another glass of wine. The steam rising from the chicken in this moment reminded her of the dew evaporating from the leaves of the ilex in Ievoli all those years ago. Everything was different, but this thing—this evaporated water rising into the air—this was the same.
She was grasping.
She had lost herself.
When the chicken was cool enough to eat, she picked up a piece with her bare hands and wolfed it down. The chicken was not delicious—it was gummy, almost stomach turning—but she was ravenous. She selected a second piece of meat from the bowl and began to chew and suck. Suddenly there was the stretch in her throat, the esophagus pulling taut around the aspirated bone. She was coughing but there was no air, so she wasn’t coughing. She was sputtering, and then she was clawing. Her airway was blocked, and she couldn’t get it out.
Could it be? It wasn’t this serious. Was it?
It was. There was no air, only a suggestion of air, a suggestion she couldn’t accept. The dog was barking, but the barking sounded far away.
Her vision of her dark kitchen sparkled around her. This was wrong—this was not the way she would die. Not after everything she had already survived—not a chicken bone. She would not die eating her own cooking.
Drool ran down her chin and splattered on her hands, on the counter. She tried to cough, fought for air. Nothing. Darkness, settling. Stella dropped to her knees, bracing herself against the floor and pounding her fist against her chest. She felt the bone move in her throat, but there was no mercy.
Stella thought of her mother, who had died young at sixty-nine—realized that she, Stella, would die even younger. Her mind fixed on the image of the dead baby, her sister Mariastella. This was the last haunting,she thought. That damn ghost was finally going to get her. In those last moments it wasn’t her husband or her children Stella thought of; it wasn’t her monstrous father, who’d ruined her life and now was ruining the lives of others. It was the haunting hollow eyes of the dead baby that filled her mind. Even through the seizing pain in her constricted throat, the fireworks of the bursting blood vessels, Stella was thinking, after all this time, after all your better efforts, I can’t believe this is how you’re going to make me die.
SHE COULDN’T HEAR BECAUSEof the crashing of deoxygenated blood in her ears. But as Stella knelt on the cold tiles of her kitchen floor, Tina was calling her. Tina had looked out across the lawn between their houses and seen that number 3 was completely dark; it had not seemed right. She still smarted from Stella’s comment about motherhood and thought about letting the malice stew all night so they could have a good picking-apart tomorrow. Stella’s three youngest sons, tuckered out from a hard summer’s afternoon, had fallen asleep on Tina’s carpet in front of the nightly news. Tina could have arranged some throw blankets over them, turned out the light, and spent the rest of this quiet Friday with Rocco in the kitchen, where he was playing solitaire. But instead she was overcome by a nagging desire to go next door, to see it through with Stella tonight.
There was no answer when Tina called out for Stella at the front door. She caught the sound of Stella’s pounding over the murmur of the news and hastened to the dark kitchen. Tina didn’t know the Heimlich maneuver, but she did know how to whack with her fist and she had the strength of an ox, like her father. For once, she didn’t think twice or worry that she didn’t know what to do. She whacked. She whacked and whacked and the chicken wing slid free.
Stella leaned against the sink cabinet, gasping. Her teeth were purple from grape sediment.
“Tina,” she said finally. “Tina. I almost died.”
“I know,” Tina said. “It’s been a while.”
***
OBVIOUSLY THIS NEXT PART OF THE STORYI’m about to suggest to you is just fiction, because I don’t believe in ghosts, I don’t think, and I certainly wouldn’t ask you to believe in them. But bear with me for a moment. Imagine that maybe it could be a possibility—that a little girl whose life was cut short might leave a residue of herself, literal or imaginary, that might haunt the loving mother from whom she’d been parted. Imagine that residue—let’s go ahead and call her a ghost—imagine that ghost stood by to watch her mother’s grief, suffered invisibly at her side, yearned for her soft touch and warm comforting bosom. Imagine how the ghost’s ectenic little heart might have broken to watch her mother replace her with another baby with the very same name, watch her pin her maternal hopes on this beautiful, perfect new daughter. Imagine what it must have felt like to have your life snatched away from you unrealized, and then to see all traces that you did live gradually erased by a more robust, more lovable, generally superior new version of yourself.
I’m not asking you to believe in spirits or a soul that might be shut out of heaven by its own grief or envy; I wouldn’t ask you to believe anything I didn’t believe myself, and I don’t believe in anything. But what if we said that the power of human faith is in making things real even when they are not—that by giving imaginary entities our credence we allow them to assume power over us—to step into being? Because what is faith but a willingness to believe?
And now the little ghost followed in lockstep as this girl, her replacement, blossomed into the life the ghost might have had if she had not been severed. Imagine she watched her replacement become beautiful, clever, beloved, wooed. Imagine the ghost’s hatred, her resentment, her implacable yearning for these things that her living sister took for granted or rejected outright. It might come to seem that she, the replacement, was the enemy. Imagine how the first Stella mighthave lashed out—imagine her violent impulses to teach that second Stella a lesson, teach her how precious and precarious life is, make her ask herself whether she deserved all the gifts she’d been given by fate. Imagine how it might have been those attacks themselves that shaped the living Stella’s personality, made her so stubborn, so self-protective, so shut off from the romance and companionship the little ghost craved. Imagine that now, after half a century of vengeance and diminishment, after one last good-faith effort to do her worst, finally, finally, she had her revelation.
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’dhad 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 softthufftof 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.”
