—
Lina Russo is not a ghost. She is still a woman. She feels herself living inside skin that, when she looks in the mirror, looks like her skin.
But she is a woman frozen in time. Her life ended on the morning Carlo disappeared. She had spent her entire life up to that point fearing that Carlo would disappear, or, when she was a child, fearing that someone like Carlo would do something like disappear.
Lina has always sensed that if she built a world around herself, it could be taken away.
There is nothing to be done, she knows, after the worst has happened.
But it has been seven years. And Lina has a secret too. It is that in the last months, when Antonia sneaks away—to church, Lina knows, the smell of the incense as familiar as the smell of her own skin—Lina pulls a shawl over her head and floats as quickly as she can down the block to the very smallest and shabbiest building in the neighborhood. She knocks three times and feels her heart pounding in her chest and in the tips of her fingers and behind her eyes. She enters the home of the neighborhood maga.
She first went to answer a question: where is my husband. She did not know where that question appeared from again, years after Carlo’s disappearance, with such vehemence. But of course, the maga is not there to answer questions as they are asked: she is there to help her clients find the questions they are not asking. Are you looking for a love potion? she had asked. Americans like love potions. They are the maga’s bread and butter, so to speak. Lina was unsatisfied, and went away frustrated. Mamma was right, she thought. It is an ancient nonsense.
The next week, though, Lina found herself on the same doorstep. And she has gone every week since.
There, Lina’s fears are pored over by the warm eyes of an old woman who speaks almost no English. The fears are laid out against the drawn cards from the tarocchi and discussed quietly over tea with flowers blooming in it. Lina learns the rhythm of the full moon and carries rustling bodies of fava beans nestled in her pockets. She learns to feel out the four directions by the height of the sun, the length of the shadows, the tilt of the wind. She situates herself on the earth. Seven years after her husband’s death, Lina Russo, not a ghost, finds herself resting on the breast of La Vecchia. An older and wilder thing, whose stories and rhythms carry her into a place that feels timelessly, strangely, uncannily like home.
It is the first time in her life Lina has done something because she wanted to, and not because someone told her she should. It is the first time she is choosing something and does not care what anyone thinks. If La Vecchia is a street to be crossed, Lina is striding forward without looking left or right.
And without even realizing, like she did when she was a child, Antonia begins to take heed of Lina’s mood, and take up space in their home accordingly. In their apartment a silence descends: the witch and the Catholic girl, eating lasagna.
* * *
—
During their first year in high school Antonia and Sofia spend more time apart than together. It happens slowly and simply, and so by the time they do not walk to school together each morning it feels almost natural.
Antonia takes on hours of studying with the enthusiasm of a thirsty man who finds a clear stream. She is never totally comfortable in the hallway rush, but learns to take solace in the library, in the pages of her textbooks. Antonia studies French and Latin. She reads voraciously. She graphs parabolas and puzzles through the dates of famous battles for American independence. On her way home each day, Antonia quizzes herself. She whispers the quadratic equation. She recites the opening of the Inferno.
In the afternoons she washes Lina’s dishes, the old teacups with the amber stains and the plates with desiccated toast crusts dangling off the edges. She boils pasta or reheats leftovers or brings home containers of soup from the deli and tries to get Lina to sit at the table, to eat something, to ask Antonia how her day was. She leaves each dinner table for her books, and imagines being Antigone, buried with her principles and her god and her unimaginable loss. Or she feels like she is living on the earth, and scooping shovelfuls of black soil down on top of Lina in her tomb. Antonia is Penelope, abandoned by more courageous adventurers. She is Circe, with only the ghosts of things she has missed out on for company. In this way, Antonia manages to inhabit every bitter and angry and passionate thing she has denied herself in her real life, where she is too busy trying to survive to think about how it feels.
At night, when she is close to sleep, Antonia shuts her books, closes her eyes, and misses Carlo. She does this carefully, for a few minutes at a time. Good night, Papa, she whispers.
Sofia finds a group of red-lipped, coiffed-haired older girls who slip notes to one another when the teacher turns around and linger leaning against their lockers between classes. If they know who her family is, they say nothing. It is possible that they do not care. From her new friends, Sofia learns the power of a jutted hip, a manicured nail. She begins to take a different sort of care when she dresses. She dares show up at the dinner table with her proud straight spine and her lips lined and glossy. She begins to notice the eyes of other students at school following her as she walks down the hall, and most of these encounters make her feel taller, more full of red blood and moxie.
And Sofia, armed in bulletproof popularity, moves again, and again, into every new friendship and obsession she can find. And while it is true that people find Sofia Colicchio a little unpredictable (this from her layered and coiffed hallway best friends; this from boys she deigned to go out with, from teachers in whose classes she didn’t live up to her potential), it is also true that she possesses the same addictive magic her father does, so that people cannot help but want to be around her. And while she is not exactly conscious of the fact, it is true that her rotating cast of friends becomes the stuff of clockwork and legend—a regular shuffling, a rhythmic cycle of heartbreak and infatuation. She picks up and falls in love with girl after girl, and drops each of them down just as suddenly. And they line up to be friends with her anyway, because to spend two weeks, or four, or nine, as the object of Sofia’s attention is worth it: to exchange sideways smiles with her, to bask in the laser focus of her sharp dark eyes. Despite the pervasive rumors about her family. Despite the danger that snaps like static in the air around her. Despite the cruelty of Sofia’s wandering affections, the quick way she moves on, the sunlight of her attention slipping under the horizon. To be friends with her is worth it. Oh, it’s worth it.
Of course, it’s worth considering whether it is love or love and the truth is that this has never occurred to Sofia: that for some particularly consuming friendships between teenage girls the line is blurred anyway. And it is fair to say that Sofia in particular falls in and out of love and love with these girls, but she does not name it.
And so Sofia moves again and again, and each time she leaves someone behind she feels a little more like herself. I’m not like that, I’m not like that, I’m not that either. I am made of something else. Always possessed of an inimitable electricity, Sofia begins to wield her power. To test its limits.