Page 34 of The Sicilian Inheritance

As always, I was drawn to the waves and the rocky sand. I carefully removed my shoes and left them where the road met the beach. The sight of the ocean never ceased to bring me delight, the vastness of it, the possibilities if one was lucky enough to cross it and go somewhere new. I pictured myself heading across the horizon on my own, leaving everything behind, letting the currents carry me wherever they may. I must have closed my eyes because suddenly there was a hand on the small of my back and I startled with a small yelp.

“It is only me. I am so sorry. I did not mean to frighten you. I saw you here as I was leaving the house. The sisters were generous. They had many donations to share with the families,” Marco said, quickly moving his palm away from my skin. I missed it the second it was gone. I was suddenly aware that my wet smock clung to my curves like a second skin, the white linen slightly opaque even with the sun starting to slip below the horizon. I blushed at what Marco might be able to see. He was ever the gentleman and never took his patient green eyes from my face.

“Shall we return home? It is getting late.” My shoes dangled from his fingers. “I know I promised you a meal but we need to get back.”

I nodded even though I was starving.

We settled into the car. “I still do not entirely understand what was wrong with those children,” Marco said. “And can whatever it was infect us? Will we be taking it home?”

“Probably not. We were not there long and we took precautions. It is not a sickness. It is a tiny bug. Think of a nasty ant, but smaller. It spreads in close quarters, like ships, but also in homes with many people. It is tiny. The eye cannot see it.”

“Then how did you know it was there?”

“It moves under the skin, creating little trails between the rashes. I saw the lines.”

“But how did you know to look for them?”

“Rosalia has books written by doctors from Palermo and from the mainland, from all over Europe. She brought them with her when she returned, and she gets more from Cettina, and Maestro Falleti fetches them when we ask. They have drawings of things you couldn’t even imagine.”

“So you read all of these things?”

“I do.”

“You are a doctor.” He said it matter-of-factly.

I remembered saying these very words to Rosalia and her response. I echoed what she had told me. “I am just a woman.”

“Those children are healed because of you.”

His admiration was like a balm for my exhausted and weary soul. I loved the work of healing, though I often took in the pain of my patients.

Marco did not take his eyes from the road when he said his next kind words. “I think about you before, from years ago. Your mother taking you out of school. All that wasted ambition. Are you happy now that you can do this work?”

What a complicated question. I was not unhappy in those years before I worked with Rosalia and healed the villagers. I was too busy with the work of being a new mother to be unhappy. Instead, I felt like I did not exist. I lived and moved only to keep my babies alive. Children, chores, and church. Church, chores, and children. The days passed without my noticing them and with no one noticing me. Some of this came out of my mouth. “I don’t know. It was as if no one saw me.”

“I saw you.”

He smiled over at me, removing his eyes from the road for a second too long.

Suddenly my head slammed into the panel in front of me and I saw nothing but a flash of white light. There was the screech of tires and shattering glass. I could have been out for seconds or for an hour. Marco’s hands were on me, feeling my arms and my legs. “Fina, Fina, are you OK?”

I grunted some kind of affirmation. My head ached, but nothing else. I could move my fingers, my wrists, my legs. My voice returned to me. “What did we hit?”

Marco slowly emerged from the car, and I tried to follow him despite a wave of dizziness. The front was dented; a rusted bicycle was crushed beneath the front tire. I groaned as I imagined the rider beneath the car, but then I heard a sound behind me in the brush.

It was a man, practically a boy. He’d been thrown clear of the car and into the ditch on the side of the road. By the time we reached him he was starting to stand.

“It is a miracle,” he declared as he looked down at his own two legs supporting him. “I was flying through the air, certain I was a dead man, but look at me. I can walk. Nothing hurts.”

Something must have hurt because blood was dripping down his temple and I worried that he was delirious and damaged in the brain. “Please sit. Let me check you,” I said.

“She is a doctor,” Marco insisted. I gave him a sharp look.

The blood came from a cut that must have split open when the man landed, but wherever he landed had to have been soft mud, because the wound didn’t look very deep, and he did not appear to have any other injuries. “It does seem like a miracle. But why did you ride in front of the car?” I asked.

A sheepish grimace crossed his youthful face. “I was not watching out for cars. I did not even see you coming. I was looking behind me, checking if... No, it is stupid of me...”

“Checking if?”

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