“Fuck you!” she shouted. “Do you hear me? Fuck you, Tito!”
—
Time passed, and as the anger drained away, she became aware of the passersby who slowed to watch, including a cluster of teenage girls filming with their phones. She strode past them and into a side street, where she sagged against a wall, breathing through the hot tears.
She didn’t know how long she crouched like this in the dark, a creeping shame settling in where the rage had been.
Gradually, she became aware of her phone ringing.
She held it to her ear.
At first, all she heard was sobbing. Then her aunt Izzy’s voice.
“Oh, sweetheart…Nikki. It’s Preston. He’s fallen…. Oh, darling, I don’t know what to do. He’s hurt so badly.”
Fifteen
London was overcast; a plunge through grey clouds as the plane descended into Gatwick. Nikki navigated the crowded airport, took the train to Farringdon, and transferred to the Elizabeth line. She did this numbly, routinely, a muscle memory from the decade she’d spent in this city.
—
Emerging from the station, she walked along busy roads towards the hospital.
—
Whitechapel Market, alive with Saturday’s lunchtime rush, barraged her with the scents of cut fruit and burnt sugar, spices and bread, hot oil, cooked meat, car exhaust, and the sour tang of trash. Nikki stepped around a heap of wilting cardboard and past the parade of spindly stall poles draped in green-and-white-striped tarps. Men and women in winter coats and sandals haggled over rugs and electronics, tunics and trousers, and crates of cabbage, pineapples, onions, radishes—while vendors and fishmongers hawked home goods and haddock.
—
The London streets were just as frenetic as Naples—chaotic and graffiti-tagged, a scrabble to gain or maintain a foothold in the slippery social landscape.
But these similarities were strangely superficial, and as Nikki’s heart began to once again beat in time to the pulse of this city, she seemed to understand the way each environment nurtured and suppressed different things in you. London cultivated a peculiar stoic resilience: bracing against the dark chill of winter. Damp mornings andlong stretches of grey twilight. Transplanted here long ago, Nikki had been forever changed from the girl reared in the furious sun and loamy earth in the shadow of a volcano.
She had a sense of that other self—arriving on Aunt Izzy and Uncle Preston’s doorstep like a stray cat; feral, terrorized by loss.
They’d opened the door to her, and invited her into their hearts. An unbearable kindness.
—
At the hospital, she found Izzy standing next to Uncle Preston’s bed, moistening his lips with a sponge.
His face was pale, twitching as he slept. A bandage covered his forehead, a blackened swelling around his right eye, his left leg bolted into a metal frame. His cheeks were sunken and his mouth gaped, a rasping sound as he breathed.
Izzy’s white hair, usually meticulous, was mussed on one side. There was a shallow scrape on her cheek, and her clothes were rumpled. Worst of all was the look in those eyes. Nikki had seen the same expression in her mother’s face in the minutes and days after she learned of Adriano’s death.
For a moment, Nikki felt helpless as she looked on the scene, unsure of what to say, a desperate ache in her stomach, shuddering into her neck, her arms and hands. She wanted to run away. Instead, she willed her feet to move, and crossed to her aunt. They held each other. Nikki breathed in the familiar warm vanilla perfume and stale hospital odor, and Izzy cradled the back of her head in that way that reminded her of Easter visits and one time when Izzy had cared for her during a bad fever.
—
They sat in chairs by Preston’s bed. On the bedside table, propped open, was a dog-eared copy ofBeowulf.
“Bleeding in the brain,” Izzy whispered. “They won’t know the extent of the damage until he’s awake.”
“So he hasn’t…?”
Izzy caressed Preston’s cheek. “Not yet.”
“Do they know how long it will take?”
