Page 31 of The Unraveling of Julia

Anna Mattia frowned slightly. “You are young, you wan’ to ’ave family.”

Julia couldn’t imagine that without Mike.

“Mi scusi, aspete.” Anna Mattia popped out of the chair and left the dining room. Julia took a few more scoops ofpappa al pomodoroand finished the meal just as Anna Mattia returned with a ceramic bowl and a bottle of olive oil, which she set down.

“They jealous your villa, your money. They givemalocchio, evil eye. You ’ave.”

Whoa.“The evil eye? You think I have it?” Julia didn’t know if she believed in the evil eye. She could only imagine what Courtney would say.

“Iknow, I see. I come from Abruzzo.Weknowmalocchio. I fix.” Anna Mattia poured some olive oil into the bowl of water.

“Do I have to drink that?” Julia recoiled, and Anna Mattia motioned her into silence.

“No. Close eyes.” Anna Mattia started whispering in Italian, and Julia closed her eyes, then snuck a peek. Anna Mattia’s eyes were closed, too, but she was swaying and stirring the water with her knobby index finger. Her lined face had fallen into deep fissures, and she seemed to be putting herself into a trance.

Julia closed her eyes, giving herself over to whatever was going on. She listened to Anna Mattia’s words and began to sense their rhythms. They took on the cadence of a prayer, the intonations familiar from years of Masses. She put herself in Anna Mattia’s hands, even in her spell, and opened her mind to a different world, a place out of time and space.

Anna Mattia kept praying, and Julia felt herself enter a deep state of calm that allowed her breathing to slow, ending only when she felta gentle touch on her forehead. She realized Anna Mattia was blessing her with the Sign of the Cross.

“Signora,” Anna Mattia whispered. “Open eyes.”

Julia opened her eyes, and Anna Mattia was beaming down at her.

“Better now.”

“Thank you,” Julia said, meaning it.

18

The late-day sun filled Rossi’s bedroom with indirect light, and Julia began unpacking her suitcase and putting her clothes in the mahogany dresser. She was going to stay in Rossi’s bed tonight. She couldn’t let a nightmare rattle her.

She put her underwear in the top drawer of the dresser, then retrieved her T-shirts and sweaters, opened the second drawer, and put them inside. She was about to close the drawer when she noticed a white paper stuck in its joint.

She reached back and pulled it out, surprised to find it was a small, black-and-white photograph of a baby, about nine months old. She couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl, but it had brown hair and light eyes. The baby’s mouth was open, showing a few teeth, and the baby was lying on a white pad in a cloth diaper with old-school pins, its pudgy arms in mid-wriggle. One side of the photograph was a bright white, as if the light source had been nearby or the picture was overexposed.

My God.Julia didn’t know enough about Rossi to know if it was her as a baby, but it could have been. Or it could have been a baby of Rossi’s. She flipped the picture over. The back was blank. She examined thephoto itself. It looked old, taken with a real camera, and was unusually small, maybe three by three, including a white border with scalloped edges.

Julia hustled out the door, into the hallway, down the stairs, and into the kitchen, where Anna Mattia looked up from arranging pink and purple cosmos in a glazed green pitcher. “Anna Mattia, look what I found in Signora Rossi’s drawer.”

Anna Mattia’s lips parted in surprise when she looked at the photo. “A baby?”

“Yes, do you know who it is? Is it Signora when she was a baby?”

“Don’ know.” Anna Mattia shook her head, mystified.

“What do you think? Does it look like her?”

Anna Mattia squinted at the photo. “Could be, maybe no.”

“Did Signora have any friends who had a baby?”

“Don’ know.”

“What about a sister or a brother?”

“She say no.”

“Are yousureSignora didn’t have a child?”

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