Arcadia Burns

GEMMA


ROSA COULD FEEL EVERY pore in her body, every nerve, every single point of contact with the fibers of the sheets.

She opened her eyes, and looked at the past. She was in her old room, in the building with the burn marks on its facade. She recognized her closet, her dresser with photos and Post-its stuck all over the mirror, her bookshelf of paperbacks, her old stereo surrounded by stacks of CDs that she’d burnt herself, a few posters, and another photo, a larger, framed one—a picture of Zoe.

Her sister was dead now; she remembered that. Dead, like Tano Carnevare.

The bedroom door was open. She heard dishes clattering outside it.

Mattia’s face flitted through her mind. Had he escaped?

A scream began to surface in her before she even realized why. Then she remembered it all: the boathouse, the flames, her scaly snake skin on fire.

With a great effort, she flung off the quilt and looked down at her body. She was naked except for a pair of brightly colored Simpsons shorts. She’d left them behind when she fled to Sicily, and she hadn’t missed them.

She was intact apart from some bruises on her knees and her shins. Her skin seemed to have an abnormal amount of blood flowing through it. It wasn’t as pale as usual, much pinker, like that of a newborn baby. When she cautiously ran her fingers over her flat stomach, her prominent hip bones, her thighs, it felt as if lotion had only just been rubbed in, all smooth and silky.

That’s not my skin, she thought. This is new.

“Oh, my God, Rosa!”

Someone rushed through the doorway, fell on her knees beside her, and hugged her hard. The woman’s face was surrounded by fair, reddish hair drenched in the smells of cooking and cigarette smoke. Rosa knew that smell, and in spite of herself she found its familiarity comforting. Cautiously, she turned until she could put her own arms around her mother. It was just a reflex action, but at the moment it seemed right to her, if not perfectly honest.

Her mother was crying, and couldn’t say a word. When she tried, it just came out as a sob.

“I’m okay,” whispered Rosa. “Nothing—” She was going to say happened, but then she thought of Jessie and the ragged street kids. Michele’s leopard eyes, and the angry roar of the tiger at the window. Mattia and Valerie.

Fire reducing her skin and muscles to black cinder.

The only thing that didn’t come back to her was the pain. It was as if it had shrunk to a tiny dot, like a crumpled little ball of paper that would unfold again only slowly. Her mind couldn’t possibly suppress what she had felt forever.

But hadn’t she blotted everything out once already, everything bad and painful?

Tano. Michele. And in a way Valerie, too.

A shiver ran through her body, and suddenly she felt frail and vulnerable in her mother’s arms. Then she heard herself talking, but none of it made any sense, and Gemma replied without letting go of her: something about a cab driver who, complaining loudly, had dropped her off here stark naked, smelling of soot and smoke, saying she should count herself lucky he hadn’t either taken her to the police or flung her out of his taxi.

Only in this city could things like that happen. Rosa’s mind went to an old I Love New York T-shirt in her closet, and she thought she ought to wear it now and then, by way of saying sorry.

When a pause for breath started turning into a long silence, she asked, “You didn’t call the cops, did you?”

Her mother gave her a long, considering look. “No,” she said at last. No explanation. Just an unspoken question in her glance.

Rosa nodded. “Better not.”

That’s how it is in our family, she thought. My mother’s eighteen-year-old daughter is delivered naked to her door in the middle of the night, and she doesn’t call the police. Or even a doctor. And a part of Rosa wanted to ask: Why not? Wanted to revive her old resentments, because whenever she looked her mother in the eye, only one word occurred to her. Why? Why? Why?

Then she realized that she was the one who owed Gemma an answer. Even if the question hadn’t been asked.

“It wasn’t…what it looked like,” she said, avoiding Gemma’s eyes. “Not like that other time.”

Her mother put a hand to her mouth, and breathed in twice as if to keep herself from hyperventilating. She managed to stay calm. Her blue eyes blazed, but she stayed remarkably well under control. “They hurt you,” she said. She had fresh scabs on little bite marks on her lower lip, and her hands shook. Her fingernails were cut very short, and slightly discolored from nicotine.

“I’m all right now,” said Rosa. “Thanks for…for letting me come here.”

“Did you ever doubt you could?” Gemma got up from the edge of the bed, moved a couple of steps away, and stood with her back to Rosa. “You still can’t quite trust me, can you?”

Rosa sat up and drew her legs and the sheets closer to her body, put her arms around her knees, and laid her cheek on them. She watched her mother, the long pale hair with a touch of red in it, the slender body that not even constant night shifts, fast food, and too much wine could harm. Gemma would always be a good-looking woman, whatever fate had in store for her.

Rosa let her eyes wander over the walls, the furniture, the photographs on the mirror. Difficult to imagine that this had once been her life. Everything here was strange to her now.

“You never mentioned anything,” she said. “About the family. The dynasties. But you knew all along.”

Gemma spun around, her face flushed. “I didn’t want you to find out from Florinda, least of all from her,” she said firmly. “But I couldn’t…” She interrupted herself, searching for words. “I’d already lost Zoe to her, and I knew it was wrong to keep your origin and…and all the rest of it secret from you. But I couldn’t help it. I tried to say something, and it was no good. Talking to you about it would have been like…”

“Like Dad was still here. As if he hadn’t died.”

Her mother stared at her. After a while, she asked quietly, “What do you think I should have told you? That one of these days you’d turn into a snake?”

“Well, for example, yes.”

Gemma leaned back against the chest of drawers, supporting herself on it with both hands. “And you think that would have one of those cozy mother-daughter moments, like on the Gilmore Girls?”

“It would have been honest.”

“I had to stand by helplessly for years, watching you get dragged off to a police station for questioning again and again. You were still a child! But they didn’t leave you alone. Because you’re an Alcantara. Because you inherited that damn name.” She gesticulated energetically, but a moment later the strength went out of her. “Because someone thought a girl of thirteen or fourteen could tell them about the Mafia!” She laughed bitterly. “About crimes committed by people she’d never met, who lived on the other side of the world.”

“I didn’t choose my family, Mom. You did that.”

“I chose your father, that’s all.”

“And then there were suddenly two daughters, and they were useless, too.”

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

“Yes, it went wrong. Obviously.”

Gemma pushed herself away from the chest of drawers, took a couple of hesitant steps, and stopped in the middle of the room. “You were never an easy child, Rosa, but you didn’t used to snipe at everything before you went to join them.”

“Well, at least they aren’t a problem to you anymore, right, Mom?” Rosa jumped up, then felt as if someone had hit her over the head, but she managed to stay on her feet, and went over to the closet, passing her mother. “Zoe and Florinda are both dead. Maybe you’d be able to remember them better if you’d turned up for their funeral.”

Gemma flinched. “I’m never setting foot on that island again.”

“So you said already. More than once.”

When she’d changed back into human form, Rosa had shed the snake’s burnt skin, but this new one didn’t seem to hold her together just yet.

She rummaged around in the closet with both hands. Everything was just as she had left it four months ago. Her mother hadn’t changed anything.

Gemma said quietly, “Would you have contacted me? I mean, being here in New York and all…no, you wouldn’t even have called me, would you?”

Rosa was looking at some old jeans and sweaters. Most of them were black and had once belonged to Zoe. “I came especially because of you, Mom. Maybe that was a mistake.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“Believe whatever you want.” She took out a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and a heavy wool sweater. There was no underwear, so she had to keep the Simpsons shorts on. As she went to pull on her jeans, and was wobbling on one leg, she felt dizzy. She lost her balance and tipped over, just like that.

Her mother was beside her in a split second, and caught her.

Rosa cursed in Italian.

“That was quick,” said Gemma.

Rosa tried to break away, but her mother wasn’t letting go. Gemma forced her daughter to look her in the face. “I couldn’t come to Zoe’s funeral,” she said forcefully. “I know you don’t want to understand that. But I swore never to enter that house again.”

“Swore to who?”

“Myself. And you can think that’s ridiculous or pigheaded, whatever you want. But things happened there that…anyway, I’d rather die than go up that mountain again and set foot through the palazzo doorway.”

“There’s no one there now, Mom. No one but me.” She could have mentioned Iole, but this was hardly the right time.

Gemma stared at her, and suddenly there were tears in her eyes. “I’m so afraid for you. I lie awake thinking what…what might become of you. That place, that island…they made Zoe into a different person. And the same thing will happen to you.”

“I’ll turn into a snake; that’s the only difference. And it has nothing to do with Sicily or the Palazzo Alcantara. Or even with Florinda.” She pushed Gemma’s hands aside and pulled the jeans up. She felt weak at the knees, and not just because of her new skin. “What would it have been like if it had happened here? In school? Or on the subway? F*ck, Mom, you should have warned me!”

“I suppressed it. Not always, not at the start, but the more I made up my mind to talk to you about it, the less I found I could.”

“Too bad for you, right?”

“Your father…Davide…he never said a word about it. Not after Costanza chased us out and we came here—”

“Grandmother threw you out?” She hadn’t known that.

“Grandmother!” repeated Gemma scornfully. “Sounds as if you knew her. God, how I wish I’d never met that witch myself.”

Rosa blinked at her, intrigued, and slowly shook her head. No one had ever told her anything about Costanza Alcantara, her father’s mother. Not when she was a child, not in the months she had spent in Sicily. She was no more than a name. Two words on a granite slab in the family vault. A face in an oil painting that Florinda had taken down from the wall and pushed behind a cupboard years ago.

Gemma went to the door and leaned against the jamb with her arms crossed. She was even paler than usual. “You don’t know anything about Costanza, do you?”

Rosa pulled the T-shirt and then the sweater over her head. To her surprise, they both smelled as fresh as if they’d just come out of the washing machine. “This has nothing to do with her.”

“It always has to do with her! No one ever mentioned her name in this house. She never called or sent news in any other way. But she was always around, all the same, every damn day.”

Rosa was going to make a snide remark, but a glance at her mother’s eyes kept her from doing so. Instead she said hesitantly, “So you didn’t have a good relationship with your mother-in-law?”

Gemma snorted. “Costanza was the head of the Alcantara clan for several decades. She was one of the most powerful Mafia bosses in Italy. Do you really think a woman like that would have been satisfied with the usual mother-in-law role?”

“What happened?”

“Would it make any difference if I told you?”

“Look, this is exactly our problem! You always think you know what’s good for me. And what I should know or not know. Would it have made any difference if I’d known about Arcadia? Yes, it would have. A lot of difference, actually. Would it have made any difference if I’d known what TABULA was? Maybe.”

“TABULA?” Gemma looked at her, baffled.

“You’ve never heard of it, of course.”

“I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. What is it? Something to do with the dynasties?”

“Dad never mentioned it?”

Her mother shook her head.

Rosa made a dismissive gesture and was immediately aware that she was acting just like her mother. In how many ways were they more alike than she wanted to think?

“Are you sure Dad never mentioned TABULA?” Now she had come to the real reason she had traveled to New York. Suddenly it didn’t seem half as important as before.

“I promise you I never heard that name before today,” said Gemma.

Rosa sighed and leaned against the windowsill. The pleasant smell of clean laundry reminded her of the past. “Tell me about Costanza first.”

Gemma was still standing in the doorway, rubbing her upper arms. With a shiver, she said, “Davide was always special to her. Most male Alcantara offspring don’t live very long; he was the great exception. And the men don’t have the same…abilities as the Alcantara women. It must have surprised his mother that Davide grew up at all, let alone that he had all the qualities that would have made him a good capo. If she was able to feel anything like love, presumably she loved him. She always preferred him to Florinda and didn’t bother to hide it. That was one of the reasons why your father and his sister never got along particularly well. When he turned up at the palazzo with me one day, Costanza didn’t like it one bit. An American with Irish roots instead of a native Sicilian girl…Costanza did all she could to nip it in the bud. She tried to talk him out of it, she was involved in schemes all the time, but it made no difference. Only when Zoe and then you were born did she give up for a while—most of the time she wasn’t at the palazzo anyway, but in Rome or Milan or Naples, or God knows where.”

Gemma turned her head, so Rosa could see her only in profile. Zoe had looked remarkably like her. “Then, one day, she came to me and offered me money to go away. I was to leave you two with her—with her and Davide. First it was a few hundred thousand dollars, then a million, after a while two million. One million for you, another for Zoe. I told her I’d never in my life sell my daughters or my husband. It was the only time I ever saw her lose her self-control.”

“She changed?”

All the color drained out of Gemma’s face. “I saw it only that once with my own eyes. Davide couldn’t shift shape. Like all the Alcantara men, he was just an ordinary human being. But Costanza…she turned into a gigantic black cobra. I think she’d have killed me if Davide hadn’t shown up right then.”

Rosa frowned, feeling the wintry cold seep into her back through the windowpane.

“A few hours later we were on a flight to New York. I never saw her again. And she ceased to exist for Davide, too. But to me, she was still there, like a smell that we’d brought back from Sicily. And even when we were talking about something entirely different, her presence still seemed to linger. Sounds silly, I know…but if you’d seen her that day, and heard what she said to get rid of me…” Furiously, Gemma rubbed her eyes. “She left us in peace for a while. Until fourteen years ago, and that phone call.”

“That’s the year he died, isn’t it?”

Gemma laughed—a bitter laugh that made Rosa feel colder than ever. “Obviously Costanza had been very sick for years, and finally she was bedridden. Florinda had been running the clan’s business for a while already—circumstances more or less forced her to do it. I don’t think Costanza had planned for that to happen, and it was something else she couldn’t forgive your father for.” She took a deep breath, as if gathering all her powers for the final stretch of her story. “Fourteen years ago Costanza died. Soon after her death, Davide got a phone call, I don’t know from who. Probably Florinda or one of the consiglieri. He was a different man after that. He changed completely.”

“I guess they were offering him the inheritance.”

“That’s what I thought. Even if Costanza’s death had affected him so much…well, I could have understood that. I don’t mean I could have forgiven it, but for God’s sake, she was his mother.” Gemma slowly shook her head. “But it wasn’t any of that. For two or three hours after he put down the phone, he didn’t say a word. He just stared out the window—and then he stood up and told me he was leaving us, you two girls and me. That he was going away and wouldn’t be back. Just like that.”

Rosa’s hands pressed firmly down on the edge of the wooden windowsill. A splinter ran into one thumb, but she didn’t feel it. “So he left you?”

“Us, Rosa. Not only me: all three of us.” Gemma’s tone of voice demonstrated to Rosa, for the first time, the self-discipline it must have taken for her to keep that secret all these years. She and Zoe had always been told that Davide was dead; he had been traveling in Europe and died there of heart failure. His body had been laid to rest in the family vault in Sicily. Rosa had been four at the time, Zoe seven. Gemma had told them it was impossible to fly to Italy for the funeral. Rosa didn’t remember what reason she had given—probably that they couldn’t afford it.

But no one had ever told her that her father had left his family before he died. Oddly enough, she felt more shocked than upset. It was so long ago, and he hadn’t been around anyway, for whatever reason. Yet it affected her in a way that surprised and shook her.

“Did Zoe know?” she asked quietly.

“Not from me. I never told either of you.” Gemma raised her hands defensively. “And before you blame me for keeping quiet about that, too, put yourself in my position. I was deeply hurt when he told me he was leaving. We had our problems, sure, but who doesn’t? With two small children, and no money, but the knowledge that there was so much wealth almost within reach, but only almost…he’d have had to take you girls and go back to Costanza to get the money. Instead he cut himself off from her, never said a word about her, and accepted all the deprivations of life in a shabby apartment in this run-down neighborhood. I’d be lying if I said we were always happy. And I’m sure he missed Sicily, the countryside, the loneliness of the hills, the Mediterranean…but I don’t think any of that was the reason for his final decision. Longing, or discontent, or simply disappointment—I could have explained any of that to you. But when he said nothing at all, gave no reason…how could I make that clear to two little girls?” Gemma let herself drop to the floor in the doorway, drew up her knees, and stared at them. “So I thought I’d wait until I heard from him, until we could discuss it all again.”

“Did you hope he’d come back?”

Gemma shook her head. “I looked him in the eye when he said he was leaving. And he seemed so determined…Perhaps it was also fear that—”

“Fear?”

“It was a look I’d never seen on his face before. Almost panic.”

“What could have scared him so badly? Something he’d heard about Costanza?” She used the name deliberately this time, because Gemma was right about one thing: Rosa had never known the old woman, and the word grandmother sounded as if they’d had a close relationship, which they hadn’t.

“He didn’t tell me who had called or what it was about,” her mother said. “And he hardly said a word himself during the phone conversation.”

“Did you ever hear anything from him again once he left?”

“No, nothing. Soon after that, Florinda called and said he was dead. The doctors discovered that he’d had a weak heart—in fact it was a miracle that he lived as long as he did, they said. Maybe there’s something to the story of the curse on the male Alcantara descendants after all.”

“Nathaniel didn’t die because of any curse. That would have been nice and neat, wouldn’t it have? But it wasn’t like that.”

“You can’t blame me for that all your life. I knew exactly how tough it is, bringing up children as a single mother, holding down several jobs—and I wasn’t seventeen! How could you have—”

“You were just afraid of being saddled with another kid.”

“And you blame me for that?” Both Gemma’s hands had clenched into fists on the floor, but the gesture was helpless, not aggressive. “Take a look around! Is this what you’d want for your child? Crown Heights, a dump of an apartment?” Resigned, she leaned her head back against the door frame, took a deep breath, and said more quietly, “There’s something else I didn’t tell you.”

Surprise, surprise, thought Rosa.

“A day after you called Zoe and told her you were pregnant, Florinda called me. She made me the same offer as Costanza all those years ago, if I’d send you to her with your child.”

“She offered you money?”

“Florinda wasn’t as obvious about it as her mother. She promised me that you and the baby would never want for anything. And that as soon as you were eighteen, you would also be free to provide for me.” Her laugh was a little too shrill. “‘Provide’ for me. That’s how she put it.”

Rosa remembered Florinda’s expression when she first arrived in Sicily, the smile on her aunt’s face. Maybe it hadn’t been friendliness. Only triumph, because she had won at last.

In fact Rosa had been used more often than she’d thought. By Tano and Michele; by Salvatore Pantaleone, the capo dei capi; by Florinda; even by Zoe, who had gone along with her aunt.

The only one who hadn’t been using her was her mother. The person she’d blamed most for everything.

“Did it ever occur to you,” she asked, “that Florinda might be responsible for Dad’s death?”

Gemma laughed quietly. “I was sure of it for a long time. They never liked each other, and Florinda was in charge of the Alcantara businesses after Costanza got sick. In a way she earned her claim to the inheritance, and in the end she enjoyed managing things after all. Maybe she was afraid that Davide would come back after Costanza’s death and take it all for himself, the way their mother had originally planned. Florinda would have had good reasons to get rid of him.”

“But now you don’t think she did?”

“No. Because I know Florinda…or knew her. And because she came to New York to see me a few months after Davide died.”

That was news to Rosa, too.

“We talked for a long time, she and I, and she assured me that she had nothing to do with his death.”

“She was a good liar,” Rosa pointed out.

“But not a hypocrite. There wouldn’t have been any need for her to show up here and pour out her heart to me. However, that’s what she did. She told me how Costanza had made her suffer, even as a child. Part of that was because Costanza always preferred Davide. And Florinda made no secret of the fact that she was glad at first when Davide left Italy with me. Until she realized what it meant to be head of the clan with her mother breathing down her neck. If Florinda ever killed anyone, it was Costanza herself—I could have understood that. I don’t know if she did, and I never asked. But she swore to me that she was in no way to blame for Davide’s death. I mean, she was head of a Cosa Nostra family! Why would she bother to come and talk to me about it? Never in her wildest dreams could I have harmed her. And whatever can be said about her, I had the feeling back then that she was honest with me.”

Rosa tried to reconcile all this with her own picture of her aunt. She had certainly hated Florinda’s methods—but at the same time she had to admit that her aunt had been a woman who lived by principles of her own. If Florinda had done away with her brother, she wouldn’t have made any secret of it. She had been cold as ice, and must have walked over corpses more than once to get where she wanted—but she would never have flown halfway around the world just to put on an act for the benefit of Davide’s widow.

Rosa leaned against the cold glass of the window. “How did he die?”

“A heart attack. It was very quick. In business class, on a Boeing 737 as it took off. There was an autopsy, and Florinda had him laid to rest in the vault in the chapel of the palazzo.”

“I’ve seen his slab on the tomb.”

What connection had there been between her father and TABULA? Had he really died a natural death? And if not, could it maybe have been the work not of a Mafioso or Arcadian, but of TABULA?

“Why are you telling me all this now?” Rosa asked.

“Because you blame me for keeping secrets from you and Zoe. And I want you to understand why. Should I have made everything even worse for you both after Davide’s death by telling you the truth? That I didn’t lose him because he died, but because it was his own decision to walk out that door and never come back? Exactly how would that have made anything better?” She shook her head. “Think whatever you like about me, Rosa—but I still believe I did the right thing. I wanted you and Zoe to have a chance to grow up as normal girls, and it was bad enough with all that Mafia garbage, all the times you were summoned by the police for interrogation.” She looked tired now, drained by her memories. “And as for the transformations: I’m not an Arcadian, and Davide never had the ability to be anything but himself. I hoped that as the children of ordinary parents, you’d be like your father and me—not like Costanza. Just what should I have told you? That the two of you might turn into snakes someday when you grew up? Don’t you think that I’d have lost you much earlier that way?”

Outside, an ambulance raced down the street, its siren howling. The little dog that Rosa had seen on her first visit ran around the building and barked at the noise.

“If you think I’ve let you down, then I can’t change it now,” said Gemma. “It’s too late for so much—certainly too late for that.”

“Maybe you did lose Zoe to Florinda,” said Rosa. “But not me. I almost shot Florinda once.”

Gemma smiled sadly. “Sounds like my girl.”

“You can always come back to Sicily with me. They could show up here looking for me.”

“Arcadians?”

“Carnevares.”

“What about the concordat?”

“That was broken months ago, by both sides. I guess it’s not valid anymore.”

“I thought that was for the tribunal to decide.”

“You still remember a lot about it.”

“I lived with the Alcantaras long enough.”

“Come back with me,” Rosa said again.

Her mother shook her head. “That’s nice of you. But no thanks.”

“You’re not safe here.”

“I wouldn’t be safe in Sicily either. No one who has anything to do with the dynasties is safe there.”

Rosa’s eyes wandered over to the photos on her mirror—and there he was, half covered by a picture from a magazine. “You really did love Dad, didn’t you?”

“Very much.”

“And he loved you?”

“I think so.”

“But he left anyway.”

“Yes.”

This time she didn’t ask why.

Her mother gave her the answer, anyway. Or an answer.

“I think he had no choice.” Gemma stood up, but stayed there in the doorway. “You know, it’s a lie when people say there’s nothing as strong as love. It’s one of the biggest, worst lies of all. Love isn’t strong. It’s incredibly vulnerable. And if we don’t take care of it, it shatters like glass.”

“But you still love him. Even now.”

“Does that help me? Does it make me any stronger?” She shook her head. “It just hurts, that’s all. It hurts like hell, every day and every night. And it’s not true about time healing all wounds, either. It makes them worse. Time just makes everything even worse.”

Outside the window, the little dog turned its head, saw Rosa on the other side of the windowpane, and howled as if it were howling at the moon.