in the Sicilian countryside.
Silly. Totally childish. She quickly put the book away, found her phone, and discovered that it had been on during the entire flight. Obviously God wanted her to live and suffer.
No text message. No email. Out of sight, out of mind.
She tapped in: arrived. new york in the snow. v. romantic. Then she hesitated, and added: getting a bladder infection. bad climate for snakes. stupid weather. stupid city.
SEND. And her sensitive love letter was winging its way to the other side of the Atlantic. Where it would be two in the morning. She bit her lower lip, feeling guilty. Alessandro’s cell phone always lay beside his pillow, switched on.
It was only a minute before the answer came back.
can’t sleep. thinking of you too much.
Her heart beating faster, she typed: did you shift shape?
deprivation = no transformation, he replied.
This must be International Bad Equations Week.
new york minus alessandro = even colder, she wrote back.
He replied: cold + rosa = snake (better not).
only when cold + sex.
sex + city, like on TV?
must buy manolos. hope you sleep better now.
His reaction was a little while coming. rosa?
alessandro?
steer clear of the new york carnevares. meant to say so at the airport, but your tongue got in the way.
idiot.
i mean it. my ny relations don’t like the alcantaras.
OK.
I really do mean it.
I get the idea.
have fun buying shoes.
That’s not likely, she thought. will be in touch soon.
wow, HAIR everywhere…ewww!
She was grinning at the screen like a lunatic. She waited a moment to see if there’d be anything else, then put the cell phone back in her bag.
She stood there in the alley, undecided, rubbing her hands to warm them and staring at the snow around her shoes.
Well, why not?
The next morning she took a taxi to Gothic Renaissance on Fourth Avenue and bought black steel-toed boots with a diagonal seam and eight lace-up holes, the only winter-weight tights in the store, and a heavy-duty stapler at a shop around the corner.
Now she had really arrived.
The stapler felt good in her hand and contained a hundred steel staples that could be driven into practically anything by compressed air at intervals of a second. After the rape she’d made it a habit to have a stapler like that always ready. Why make do with pepper spray when you could buy one of these in any hardware store?
Of course she had enough money now to hire bodyguards to protect her full-time, but the mere thought of it made her feel unlike herself. She hadn’t come to New York to ask for trouble; she’d come to talk to her mother. But the weight of the stapler in her hand made her feel safer.
It was sixteen months since she’d been drugged at a party and then raped by a stranger or strangers. Afterward, they’d left Rosa unconscious in the street. To this day she knew nothing more about what had happened that night, and after endless sessions of counseling and therapy she had come to the conclusion that she didn’t really want to remember. She had given up searching for suppressed images and scraps of thoughts, emotions blocked out by her unconscious mind. If there was one thing to be grateful for, it was the blackout that kept her from knowing the details, the memory of faces or voices. Not even physical pain remained. Only her fears. Her neuroses. Her bitten fingernails, her kleptomania, and for a long time the feeling that she couldn’t trust anyone—until she met Alessandro. Sometimes you had to see through another person’s eyes to understand yourself better.
But the rape had left other traces behind. Nathaniel. The baby she’d aborted. She knew it would have been a son; she just sensed it. She had waited a long time, until the third month, before caving to pressure from her mother and the advice of all the doctors. The operation had been under total anesthesia—just routine, the doctor had said. Routine for the doctor, maybe.
Slush sprayed up on the sidewalk. There was a white bicycle chained to a lamppost on the other side of the street, one of many ghost bikes in New York, placed around in memory of cyclists who had been run over. Rosa stood outside the hardware store, weak at the knees now, staring at her stapler as if it held the answers she’d been avoiding for months. Maybe it had been a bad idea to come back; she hadn’t put enough distance between herself and the rape yet. Confronting her mother