Jack shrugged. “Maybe. He might be able to tell us himself, once he starts to believe that he’s safe.”
Just after dinner Anna had gone to check on the children where they slept in a single broad bed, Tonino tucked in between his sisters. Rosa’s breath hitched a little, a serious child even in sleep, no doubt making plans that would put everything right. She dreamed of a world in which little brothers were whole and unscarred and full of stories that came tumbling out like a stream over rocks. Time is a river.
“If he had come to us with broken bones I would know what to do for him. As it is I feel helpless, but I can’t let the girls see that.”
“Or Tonino,” Jack added.
“He’ll come back to us when he’s ready,” she said, mostly to herself, and kept back the logical next thought: if that day ever comes. She could be sure of Sophie coming home one day, but Tonino was another matter.
“We’ll do our best for him,” Jack said. And that had to be comfort enough, because it was true.
Anna said, “This has always been my favorite and least favorite time of year. On the cusp between the light and dark. Dusk always strikes me as the wrong word.”
Jack rubbed his cheek against her temple. “It’s funny that you should say that. When I was young I couldn’t understand how it could be that light and color flooded the world even after the sun disappeared. Later when I understood the geometry of it, that the sun drops below the horizon by a few degrees—and still, it doesn’t seem like enough of an explanation. It’s more than light and color, and it lasts for such a short time. And here it is now, do you feel it?”
They sat in the trembling light, Anna cradled against Jack to feel the beat of his heart against her spine, separated by nothing more than a few inches of muscle and bone. Caught in the gloaming, suspended in the gilded hour, she saw herself in a landscape of years stretching into a horizon she had never dared imagine for herself.
When the light was gone and the first fireflies rose in the fields she said, “Thank you, Jack. Thank you for bringing me here to see this.”
The night came in gently, but even so the gooseflesh rose on her arms and she shivered in his arms.
“Time to go in,” he said.
Anna meant to agree, but instead she produced a great yawn.
With a laugh Jack lifted her to her feet, and then up into his arms. She relaxed against him, content to be carried in this time and place, watching his face as he brought her home, to the house where he had been raised and their family waited.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As ever, I am very thankful for the friends and colleagues who took the time to read drafts of this novel and provide feedback. They include my super-agent, Jill Grinberg; my original, home-again editor, Wendy McCurdy; Cheryl Pientka and Katelyn Detweiler at Grinberg Literary Management; and Penny Chambers, Jason Kovaks, Frances Howard-Snyder, Patricia Rosenmeyer, and Audrey Fraggalosch. Penny listened to me read the whole novel out loud, word by word, some parts more than once. Don’t know what I’d do without her.
Readers and friends active on Facebook and on my blog were instrumental in putting together a list of phrases in a whole army of Italian dialects. Thanks to every one of you.
Jason Kovaks rescued me from the quicksand of nineteenth-century legal documents, while Drs. Carl Heine, Janet Gilsdorf, and Margaret Jacobsen answered a lot of questions about medical matters in general.
Any mistakes or misinterpretations are mine alone.
Finally, I am thankful to my husband for his support and patience in difficult times, and to my daughter Elisabeth. Who is.
AUTHOR’S NOTES
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, 1849, The Wasps
(or in other words)
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
William Faulkner, 1950, Requiem for a Nun
TWO THINGS:
The idea for this novel originated with my paternal grandmother, Rosina Russo Lippi, born in 1882, the first daughter and eldest of four children of immigrant Italians employed in the silk factories in Paterson, New Jersey. When she was about eight, her parents died or disappeared; there is some inconclusive indication that they were living in Brooklyn twenty years later with an additional six children. How the first set of children were separated from their parents is one of many mysteries.