Page 61 of The Sicilian Inheritance

“Hi,” I whispered.

“Hello.”

He lay down on the sand. I straddled his hips and slowly lowered myself onto his body, leaning forward to place my mouth on top of his as he entered me. I could feel every inch of him pushing into every inch of me and I couldn’t think of anything but falling deeper onto him. He clamped his teeth onto my earlobe.

“I’m close. I cannot help it.”

I began to grind my hips faster and harder. I was close too, though I wanted to wait until the last possible second. He moaned and everything inside of me exploded in a hot, blinding pleasure I hadn’t allowed myself to feel in way too long. I always thought sex on a beach seemed like a bit much, a romance-novel fantasy that in reality was all sand in unfortunate places. But this experience revised all my former objections.

I collapsed on top of his chest, both of us sweaty and sandy and spent.

He was still inside me when he glanced at his complicated waterproof diving watch. “I wish we could stay here, but I’m afraid the tides are about to come in and this entire cave will be full in a half an hour. Do you think you can swim back?”

“My legs are a little wobbly, but I should be OK.”

Going out was harder than coming in. My body was limp from the rush of the endorphins and the current pushing into the cavern had picked up. But I managed to follow Luca into the sunshine and when we got back to the beach it was as we’d left it. No one was at all the wiser about our tryst behind the cliffs. Luca insisted on feeding me again before we got back on the road. He poured two plastic cups full of wine as we finished the bread, the olives, and the cheese. Few things in life are as fundamentally satisfying as good, quick sex followed by a meal of mostly salty cheese. We kept smiling dopily at one another like a couple of teenagers who’d just evaded curfew. The smell of sex still clung to our bodies despite the swim.

We ended up being the last ones on the beach and I could tell the cabana boys were eager for us to leave. Walking down the narrow path to the parking lot Luca’s hand found mine. When was the last time I held hands with a man? With anyone besides my daughter? I liked his rough palms, his calluses and scar tissue from kitchen cuts and burns. His hands felt like my own, which had never been pretty or feminine, but had always gotten my job done and served me well.

The parking lot was empty and a part of me wanted him to push his car seats back as far as they could go, so I could climb on top of him again before we headed to the city. I wondered if he was thinking the same thing, because he stopped short about ten feet from the car.

That was when I noticed that both the driver’s- and passenger’s-side windows had been smashed in. Shattered glass glittered pink and orange on the ground, sparkling in the sunset. A hammer was thrown on the driver’s seat, clearly the instrument of destruction, a simple construction tool with a bright red handle and the price tag still attached to the metal head.

“Do you think it was those kids? From the beach?” They had left about forty-five minutes before us, laughing, sun drunk, and silly.

Luca shook his head as he pushed me behind him and then approached the car with the trepidation of someone who thought it might explode right then and there. His entire body had gone rigid, on high alert, as his eyes scanned the concrete lot and the shrubs beyond it.

“It wasn’t the kids. Stay here.” He walked closer and grimaced when he stroked the side of the car.

“Should we call the police?”

“They won’t be much help.”

“What about Fina? Let’s call her.” A part of me felt the same rush and tingling of pleasure I’d felt when we were having sex in that cave, a chemical reaction to the danger and excitement of it all.

“I will. Just wait a second, OK?” Luca ran his hand through his hair and then leaned into the car to grab something from the driver’s seat.

“It could have been an accident. A prank that got out of control.” I babbled to fill the silence. Luca pulled a piece of paper from the car, cutting his hand on a piece of broken glass in the process. Blood rushed down his forearm. I could tell he wanted to read the note before I could see it, but I wasn’t going to let him do that. It was only ten words hastily scrawled in English. A warning for both of us.

Does your wife know about you and the American whore?

EIGHTEEN

SERAFINA

I knew nothing about running a clinic, but time moved too quickly to think about how to do it properly. A new flu took the place of the old one and friends and neighbors fell ill faster than I could help them. The polio virus made its way to us, and then malaria. At first, I felt entirely helpless. I begged Rosalia to come to the clinic to help me, but she no longer had the energy to leave the mountaintop.

I tried new treatments and old treatments. Many things failed, but inch by inch I managed to do some good and we ultimately became successful. What did it matter if the walls of the old abbey were crumbling down around us, and the beds were mere mattresses on the floor? It offered a much-needed space for our villagers to heal and to quarantine away from their families.

There were the usual whispers about Marco giving me the land, but mostly there was relief that we had a place to take the sick and indigent, a place that had been so sorely needed for years. I was joined by two nurses, girls from Palermo Rosalia knew of through an old friend who worked in a hospital there, girls who needed to leave the city. They kept their secrets and I kept mine. I believed the two of them were in love with one another, but they were discreet. I caught only the smallest of intimacies, a hand placed tenderly on a shoulder or hip, a stare that lingered. I never asked them questions and in return they taught me things I could not possibly learn from books.

When I first began caring for patients, I rarely talked of my work in my letters to Gio. I did not think it would interest him, but I also did not truly want his opinion. If I never properly told him, then he could not tell me to stop. Or so went my hopeful logic. He knew about it of course, mostly from his mamma and his sisters, who didn’t approve of what I did at first. And then I removed a large goiter from Gio’s mamma’s neck. For an entire year before that she could not speak and could communicate only through hand gestures and grunts. After she regained her voice, I was in her good graces for the first time since I had stolen her son.

I do not know what she told my husband about my work, but suddenly he started to take an interest in what I did. His letters were never very long. Writing remained hard for him and sometimes his script was barely legible. But one question, the one he repeated often, was easy to make out: “How much is the land worth?” I knew he meant the land with the clinic, not the land with our small house in the village. I did not have an answer because I honestly had no idea, and even though Marco put my name on the deed, the idea of selling it seemed preposterous. But Gio’s notes grew more persistent.

“If we sold that land we could buy a home here. You and the boys could come now.”

When he first left for New York, all those years ago, Gio said he would work until he made enough money to buy us a real home in Caltabellessa. The plan was for him to return to that home with his pockets full of American coins. But the further Sicily’s fortunes fell, the less practical it became to stay, and the dream morphed into all of us eventually meeting him in the States at some uncertain date in the future. He wanted the boys with him. He wanted to put our children in American schools despite the fact that none of them spoke or wrote any English. The last time Gio visited, five years ago, he showed off his English any chance he got, along with his shiny store-bought suits and shoes. He was a new man, more confident than I had ever known him to be, and it could have been alluring if I had any desire left for him. But no matter how hard I tried, I could not conjure longing for my husband.

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