A voice over a loudspeaker announced that her flight was now boarding.
“I’ll probably dream of you every night,” he said. “And when I wake up, I’ll know that the best part of the day is already over.”
“You read that somewhere.”
“Did not.”
She kissed him again, a long kiss, and very tender. He still tasted of another world. The snake began to stir once more as he put his arms around her.
“Hey!” she said, laughing. “My flight. The gate. I have to—”
“What we have won’t ever end,” he whispered.
She ran her fingers through his unruly hair. “Never.”
Then she freed herself from his embrace, picked up her bag, and hurried to the exit.
NEW YORK
WHAT ROSA FOUND THAT evening was not her own New York, but the New York of tourists and theatergoers, the glittering madhouse of Broadway.
It was almost thirty degrees colder than in Sicily. Her jacket was too thin, her nose was running, and she’d packed only one of a pair of gloves in her suitcase. Home, sweet home.
Wearily, she left the lobby of the Millennium Broadway Hotel, trudged through the snow around the candy-colored corner facade of Toys “R” Us, and was in Times Square surrounded by milling crowds of people, bright billboards, and walls of video ads.
She had spent almost her whole life in New York, although admittedly on the other side of the East River. She knew what went on between Wall Street and the Bronx more from TV than from her own experience.
Rosa had grown up in Brooklyn, in one of those down-at-the-heel neighborhoods that didn’t have views of the Manhattan skyline. Home had been a dump of a building with too many tenants in apartments too cramped for them. With graffiti in the stairwell, busted central heating, drafty windows, clattering fire escapes that drove you crazy with the noise they made during storms. Cats had their kittens next to dead rats on the ledges outside the basement windows, and Rosa could remember more than one cockroach plague of biblical proportions.
All around there were endless rows of apartment buildings like hers, basketball courts surrounded by high fences, grubby playgrounds where young mothers stared vacantly at sandboxes during the day and speakers played at full volume in the evenings. Traffic lights dangled from cables above the streets. Photocopied faces of missing children, dogs, and cats looked out from tree trunks. Faded American flags hung under windowsills. And sometimes, at night, an empty baby carriage rolled across an intersection, on fire, a declaration of war by a gang fighting off boredom.
That had been Rosa’s New York. Today, only a few months after leaving it all behind, she was staying in a luxury hotel booked by her secretary in Piazza Armerina. She was paying with a platinum credit card, and the doorman addressed her as Ms. Alcantara. Six months ago he’d have thrown her out on her ear. She didn’t just feel like a stranger in this city; she felt like a stranger in her own body. Taking over some other girl’s identity.
She walked around for almost an hour, let herself drift with the flow of the crowd, and finally decided that what she needed was a grubby backyard, a snow-covered blind alley, some kind of still eye in the hurricane of the metropolis. She found an alley wider than she had hoped for, but dilapidated enough to remind her of the New York she knew. She felt the worn asphalt through the snow, listened to the roar of traffic in the streets, smelled the stale air coming up through a subway grate.
Why did her longing for him have to hit her here, right at this very moment? Well, nothing she could do about it. One moment she was thinking, So here I am again, and the next, It would be better if he were here. If she wasn’t careful, she’d soon be dreaming of ironing his shirts.
Almost reluctantly, she started rummaging around for her iPhone, began to think someone must have stolen it in the crush of people, but finally she felt it among the other stuff in her bag: paper tissues, eyedrops, a notebook. She wasn’t sure why she even carted the notebook around with her.
But what she’d thought was her cell phone turned out to be another book. Smaller, fatter, in a disintegrating binding. The leather on the spine bore the words Aesop’s Fables in tiny lettering. She held it under her nose and breathed in deeply. The smell took her straight back to a sun-drenched graveyard deep