Penelope rushed toward her, her heart suddenly full.
“We’ve come a long way,” she said.
“This isn’t the time,” the woman said. Her dark eyes had gone icy.
“It’s all right, Penny,” her mother said.
Penelope watched the woman walk back down the hall. Her mother put her hands on Penelope’s shoulders.
“It’s all right,” she said again softly.
BACK IN THE CAR, “Bridge over Troubled Water” played on the radio as Penelope watched Rhode Island pass by. She couldn’t explain why, but she felt a tenderness toward her mother. It felt like the night, like a sky overflowing with stars, like love.
In a few hours, she would be back at St. Lucy’s. She would sneak out with the other girls and run down the hill to the spot where the boys would be waiting. She would give herself over to one of them. She would put that sugar cube under her tongue and take her first trip on acid. At some point, maybe just as the sun was coming up, she would find herself back in Julie’s apartment and Julie would scold her for taking drugs. But she would lead Penelope into her bed and undress her and whisper to her. Your turn, she would say, as she began the journey down her body.
Even later, in a year or two, St. Lucy’s would close and merge with Maxwell Academy. By then, Penelope would have taken dozens of acid trips. She would have tried speed and cocaine and snorted heroin once. She would have slept with more boys than she could name, on beaches and in cars and in the narrow beds in the dorms of Maxwell Academy. She would keep making love with Julie until St. Lucy’s closed and Julie moved to San Francisco. That day, Penelope would go with her to Logan Airport to say good-bye. She would sit by the gate crying long after Julie looked over her shoulder one last time and blew her a kiss. By then her mother would have died, swiftly, from pancreatic cancer, not even knowing that Penelope had gotten into Brown.
“I don’t understand,” Penelope said.
“What, love?” her mother said. She didn’t take her eyes from the road.
“Anything,” Penelope said.
America
JOSEPHINE RIMALDI OPENED HER EYES, PULLING HERSELF from that place that is neither sleep nor wakefulness. That place was where she spent most of her time now. Voices swirled around her, but who they belonged to she could not say for sure. Faces appeared in front of her own, and she struggled to identify them. Was that blond girl her own lost Valentina? Why was her Elisabetta dressed like a soldier in army-green fatigues? Who was this young girl dressed like a gypsy who kept visiting and begging Josephine for stories? She studied each of these faces with great seriousness, wishing they would speak to her in Italian.
After all this time, Josephine still could not grasp the complexities of English. Words here and there made sense to her. Water. Hungry. Cold. Sometimes she even managed to ask the nurse who she liked, the young one with all the dark curls, if she’d had a gentleman caller. “Tommy Petrocelli?” Josephine asked politely. “He come to see me today?” She had to practice the words before she said them and still she managed to forget the “today” or to mix up her verbs. “He see me?” she might say. Or, “He come to me?” But she never had to practice the name. “Tommy Petrocelli?” she said, and nothing more. And always the nurse—the one she liked with the dark curls, or the stern overweight one with the haircut like a man’s, or the silly one with the blue eyes and wispy hair—always the nurse shook her head. “Sorry, Mrs. Rimaldi, Tommy didn’t come today.”
The blue-eyed one was staring at her now. “Mrs. Rimaldi?” she said in her little girl voice. “You awake?”
Josephine frowned. “Si,” she said, adding silently, you stupid girl. At least she hoped she said it to herself. Words slipped out of her sometimes like seeds from a watermelon: Pop! Pop! Other times she opened her mouth to send a torrent of words out into the world and nothing came at all.
The silly nurse wore a rose-colored uniform with pale-blue teddy bears all over it. Her hair, a froth of pale blond, was kept in a messy pile on top of her head with a fat silver barrette shaped like a butterfly. Once, when Josephine was staring at the thing, trying to figure out what it was sticking out of her hair like that, the girl had grinned at her and said, “Oh! You like my barrette, Mrs. Rimaldi?” She had taken it off, her hair falling around her like cotton candy, and opened and closed it right in Josephine’s face. “It’s a butterfly,” the girl said in that loud voice people used when they spoke to someone who didn’t understand English very well. “See?”