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,