The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

by Juliet Grames

  “You hungry, Pammy?” she said in English. “You want me to make you sanguicci?”

  Pam shook her head.

  Stella tried not to be annoyed. “You want to say, ‘No, thank you, Auntie Stella’?”

  “No, thank you, Auntie Stella,” Pam repeated obediently.

  “All right,” said Stella, but that was when her mother-instinct kicked in, through the soft fuzzy pulsing of the wine. Something was funny here. Pammy was only six—why had her mother left her alone? Why was she sitting in the hallway? What a strange place for her to play with her doll. “Pammy, you here by yourself?”

  “No,” her niece answered. “There’s Barbie and Grandpa, but they’re playing.”

  “Where are they?” Stella asked. She hadn’t seen anyone in the backyard.

  Pammy used the doll’s arm to point silently to the closed door behind her. Tony’s bedroom.

  Stella felt her heart speed up before her mind did. “What are they playing with the door closed?” she was asking Pam out loud, even as she was already thinking, That can’t be why she’s not wearing any pants. How had she not registered that it was strange for Pam to be sitting on the bare floor in only her underwear?

  “They’re playing the game,” Pam said. “I have to wait for my turn.”

  He wouldn’t, Stella thought, but she knew he would—the pieces snuggled together in her mind, like a plug fitting into a socket. She had always known he would.

  She bent down and swooped Pam up in her arms, sitting the little girl on her left hip in the clamp of her elbow. She tried the doorknob, which was of course locked. Her skin roiled with the memory of her recurring nightmare, her father running his large hard hands over her body. Without thinking through whether it was the right thing to do, whether she might hurt the little girl, Stella threw herself against the door. She was lucky because the frame was made of cheap pine, and it splintered and gave. Pammy made a grunting noise in her ear and gripped Stella’s neck. Stella heaved herself a second time, and the door flew open.

  The curtains were drawn. Before Stella could think through whether she wanted to see what was happening in this dank bedroom she swatted the light switch. She already knew, she already knew, there was no surprise. Her eight-year-old niece Barbie crouched on the bed, her face bent over her grandfather’s crotch and her tiny bare bum pointing toward the door so that Stella had a clear view of where her father was putting his fingers.

  “No!” Stella shrieked. Her voice sounded inhuman to her, like the dying shrill of a pig being drained. It came again, the shriek: “No!” Hooking her naked little niece around the waist with her elbow, Stella snatched Barbie off the bed as Tony sheepishly pushed himself to a sitting position, pulling the blanket over his groin.

  “You.” Stella’s chest heaved with fury. “Monster.”

  “Stella,” he was saying, waving his hand, waving it away. “It’s no big deal. I didn’t ruin them.”

  “Monster!” She was fighting her way through a blur of emotions and impulses, to scream, to be sick, to tear him with her fingernails, but the little girls were there in her arms and the wine-blood beating against her temples made her slow and confused. Her own hatred and disgust for her father, the crusted dome encasing Stella’s life, built up layer by layer over fifty years of encounters and nightmares and grief, descended on her.

  The little girls. She had to get them out. “I’m coming back for you,” she spat at him, and she turned and rushed down the hallway, almost tripping into the clear glass front door in her flight across the street.

  Thank God none of the boys were in the living room when she got home to number 3—she hadn’t thought that through, what if they had been? She bundled Pammy and Barbie up the stairs, slipping on the too-thick pile carpeting and sliding backward a jarring single step, almost taking all three of them down to the bottom. Naked Barbie was silent and stiff, awkward against Stella’s side. Pammy was crying snottily into Stella’s blouse.

  She sat the girls on the bed, wrapping Barbie in a crocheted sham. “What’s wrong with you?” she shouted at them. “What were you thinking, letting him do that to you?”

  The girls were silent. Pammy had abruptly stopped crying, and they were staring at her with identical brown, sullen eyes—cow eyes, Stella thought, as she had thought many times of Tina at her most frustratingly obtuse.

  What was wrong with them? How stupid were they?

  “Well?”

  She wanted to shake them, but then—No, Stella. What’s wrong with you? They were just little girls. Little girls at the mercy of a monster with a heart as cold as a rock.

  “Girls, you never let someone close you up in their bedroom. Never. You understand me?”

  They nodded, and Barbie’s eyes slid to the door. Maybe it was the wine that made Stella stumble over that thought—was it confusing that she had just closed them up in her bedroom? But they must already understand there were differences between women and men.

  “Your body,” she tried again. “It’s the only thing you have. You never let anyone touch it. Never.”

  “I’m sorry, Auntie Stella,” Barbie said, and Pammy echoed her, “I’m sorry, Auntie Stella.” Pammy’s voice was snuffly; Barbie’s was clear. Stella wondered at the girl’s hard little soul, how long she had been playing her grandfather’s “game.”

  “Don’t apologize to me,” she snapped, and heard how she sounded. What are you doing, Stella? She put a hand on each of their heads. “You don’t apologize, you hear me?” It still sounded harsh, like she was asking them to apologize for apologizing. “I love you,” she made herself say. It wasn’t easy, because she wasn’t a great liar, but she couldn’t think of what other thing to say to comfort them. “I just want you to protect yourselves when no one else is there to protect you. The world is full of bad people. Your grandfather is a bad, bad person, and you need to protect yourself from him.”

  The girls stared at her with their sister-matching faces.

  “Okay?” she said.

  They nodded.

  Her head was pounding now. What should she do? Clothes. She dug through her drawers for something little girls could wear, finally thought to take short pants and T-shirts from Richie and Artie’s drawer in the hallway. They were about the right sizes for Barbie; everything was too big for Pam but would have to do.

  What now?

  Oh, if Mamma were here—but she wasn’t.

  Stella led the girls downstairs, sat them at the kitchen table. Mickey’s car still wasn’t back. Stella made the girls sandwiches, mayonnaise and slices of American cheese. She made one for herself, too, and they ate in silence. Stella’s mouth was so dry, she struggled to swallow. She wanted to pour herself a glass of wine but not before she figured out what to do about her father.

  “I have to go back across the street now, just for a minute,” she told the two little girls. “You stay here at my house, okay?” They nodded. “You can watch television, or you can play in the backyard”—play—she shuddered—“or whatever you want, but you stay at my house. All right?”

  They nodded again.

  Not sure if she was doing the right thing—leaving the girls all alone, or letting her father escape his bad deed, they both seemed equally wrong—Stella stormed back across Alder Street to number 4. Waves of guilt washed through her, so distracting they folded the world around her into an unknowable haze. Stella could have left Pammy in the hallway, she didn’t have to bring the poor little thing with her into Tony’s bedroom when she went barreling in—could have spared her that much at least. She hadn’t had to turn on the light, seal Barbie and Pammy both in the burn of that image. How bad was Stella, running them across the street with bare bottoms for all the world to see. They were tiny, but they had feelings and shame. Her mind began to tick through the long list of shames she had never been able to shake off in her fifty years, and suddenly, for the first time in a long time, she had an urge to pray to God, pray that she hadn’t given them a shame they would never shake o
ff.

  Stella banged her way through the house, slamming doors open and closed again, barging into the bathroom. Her father was nowhere; there was no one there at all. The television buzzed in the living room, the sickly fake cheerful thing in this miserable house. There was no one in the basement, or the backyard or even the shed. Where had he gone, the ugly bastard? It wasn’t like he could drive away.

  Stella went back to her house to sit nervously with the little Fortuna girls. They watched television and Stella stared out the window at the house across the street, waiting for either Mickey or Tony to come home.

  JANICE WAS TEN MINUTES LATE for her shift. As soon as she had punched in, Bernie ran for the parking lot. Gardener’s was only a few blocks away from Alder Street, but she had a car—Nino’s old Chevy, which he’d given to her to use until he was back from Vietnam—and when you’re seventeen and you have a car you drive it everywhere. She raced home, to the extent that one can race without disrespecting any traffic regulations, and pulled the car directly into her grandfather’s driveway.

  She found him sitting on the weird cement back porch he’d poured that year he was going through his cement phase. His legs dangled off the side like a kid about to jump into a swimming pool.

  “Where is my dog?” Bernie put her hands on her hips. “You tell me right now.”

  “How shoo’ I know?” The set of the old man’s mouth was defensive through his pepper-gray three-day stubble.

  “Where. Is. My dog.”

  He made a heavy-handed flapping gesture. Her concern was misplaced, inconsequential.

  “Where.”

  “I take care of her,” Antonio said.

  A stone formed in Bernie’s stomach. “What do you mean, you took care of her?”

  “You don’t have to worry about her no more.”

  “What did you do.”

  The heavy wave again. His face was unhappy, though. “I take her far away, leave her where she can’t come back. Maybe someone else find her.”

  Bernie was so angry she shouted. “Where?”

  “Far away. Too far you find.”

  She took a step toward him and, almost of its own accord, her hand shot out and pinched at a flap of flesh on the side of his neck, under his ear. She felt his thyroid contract under her thumb as he groaned in surprise. “You’re going to show me,” she said. As he reached out with his big hands to overpower her, she pinched harder and he gasped in pain. “Now. You get in my car right now.”

  Bernie had no idea why he listened to her—she was strong for a seventeen-year-old girl, but her Grandpa Tony was an ox of a man, even into his seventies, and could have made her regret her attempt at coercion. But he stood and walked obediently to the driveway, pressed himself into the passenger seat.

  The drive was more than an hour of highway and then winding streets toward the southeast Connecticut shore. They drove in silence punctuated only by Bernadette’s hatred and her grandfather’s blustery driving directions. The old man had never learned to drive a car, but he never forgot a street. They turned off the hedged lanes of hilly beachside neighborhoods, Bernie slowing to a crawl in the small-town traffic of summer tourists heading toward the beach or home for lunch. In the end, Tony pulled them off onto a dirt path running through the wetland reeds toward Long Island Sound.

  “Here?” Bernie said.

  “Around here.”

  “Why the heck would you leave her here?” For Bernie, “heck” was swearing.

  He’d been out this way with his friend Sandro, who owned a construction company and sometimes had Antonio do day jobs. Sandro had picked Tony up on Tuesday morning—it must have been just after Bernadette left for work—and in a fit of inspiration Antonio had grabbed that damn dog and brought her on the ride to the construction site. Sandro had pulled over here, in this marsh, and Antonio had left the dog on the side of the road.

  “What were you thinking,” Bernie said.

  “I don’t want no more puppies.” He shrugged. “She have more puppies, more puppies every six month.”

  “They’re not even your puppies to worry about,” Bernadette said, her eyes smarting with furious tears.

  Penny had been out here three, almost four days, if she hadn’t starved or drowned, if she hadn’t been eaten by a fox or a hawk—she was just a little thing.

  “We’re not going home until we find her,” Bernadette said.

  “She gone,” Antonio shouted. His verve was returning. “You never find her.”

  “Well, then it’s your fault if we’re here all night,” Bernie said, and she started off down the path toward the Sound, calling, “Penny! Penny! Here, girl!”

  STELLA WAS SOBER BY THE TIME Joey’s Oldsmobile pulled into the driveway and Mickey emerged from the driver’s side, one brown platform shoe at a time—how did she walk in those things, and why would she at her age? The car also emitted the three older girls, listless Betty, Janet, still so runty for eleven years old, and bony, mean Mary, who was fourteen, all sternum and scowls. The Fortuna females congregated around the trunk for a long minute, then paraded up the driveway with whatever parcel they had bought during whatever shopping trip they had just taken using whatever money they did not spend on the rent they should have been paying to live in their own house.

  Stella watched from the armchair by the window, only realizing how cronishly she was craning forward and squinting when her neck started to ache. Her heart was already pounding with anticipation of her confrontation with Mickey. How could she have left her babies alone? Didn’t she have any common sense? Stella wanted to take the woman and shake until her little brain rattled in her skull.

  For the last two hours, Barbie and Pam had stayed in the Maglieris’ living room, watching whatever came on the television next. Richie, Mingo, and Artie had trickled in during the early afternoon, exhausted by their morning war games in the woods, and now the five cousins were all sitting on the red couch or the blue carpet, watching The Guiding Light. Stella had always let her children run around as they chose with little supervision, as long as they didn’t burn anything down, but now, thinking about what had happened to these girls made her feel guilty for leaving them. Nevertheless, she did. Mickey was their mother and it was the mother’s job to control this situation. As she crossed the street for the fifth time that day, Stella fought her way through the same ring of thoughts that had tormented her since she had broken down her father’s door: Was it only Mickey’s children, the ratty, uncivilized little scamps? Or had he preyed on others? Had he ever, ever been left alone with Bernie? The thought—again—made Stella want to vomit. Not her Bernie, it was impossible. Her heart rejected the idea before she could test it further. What about the boys? Were they safe? And, or—were they dangerous? Did these monstrous tendencies bleed down into yet another generation? Stella remembered hints her mother had dropped about the Fortunas in Tracci, how Assunta had described their one-bed house as a pigsty of disease and animal behavior. Finally Stella understood what she must have meant by animal behavior. Was the whole family poisoned?

  Mickey was putting away groceries when Stella let herself in through the back door. Janet was sitting at the kitchen table and eating directly from a bag of Ruffles. Stella studied the skinny little girl, who didn’t acknowledge her aunt’s scrutiny. It was impossible to tell by looking, Stella thought.

  “Is Papa here?” Stella asked.

  “I haven’t seen him, honey,” Mickey said. Even when she spoke Calabrese to Stella, she still said “honey” in English. “Maybe he took Pam and Barbie for a walk.”

  “Pam and Barbie are over at my house,” Stella said. She was not going to make a scene in front of another unhappy little girl today. In English, she said, “Janet, I gotta talk with your mother. Go sit in the living room, okay?”

  Janet made no verbal acknowledgment she’d heard Stella, but after a moment she slid out of her seat and disappeared down the hallway, leaving the open bag of potato chips. For all Stella knew she hadn’t been being
obedient, had just whimsically lost interest. An enigma, that one, like her older sister Betty.

  “What is it, Stella?” Mickey said. “Is something wrong?”

  “Yes,” Stella said. “Yes, Michelina.” Now that the time had come, after all her preparation, it was too hard to say. “You have to move away from here,” she said finally.

  “Oh, Stella, you know we can’t do that.” Mickey had taken an English muffin out of a new bag and was breaking it open with a fork. “We haven’t got the money right now. You know how business is for Joey. We can barely feed the girls.”

  Stella wanted to argue with that, to remind the nincompoop of the department store bags she had seen her lift out of the trunk of her car just moments earlier. She fought down her impulses and brought the conversation back to the most important point. “Michelina, you have to move out of this house. I don’t care what you have to do, you have to figure out a way.” She cringed against the words, lowered her voice in case the girls in the living room were listening. “Your daughters aren’t safe here. Do you understand me?”

  Mickey looked up from the butter dish and the crumbs on the counter. Her dark eyes were sharp on Stella’s. “What do you mean?”

  “They’re not . . . they’re not safe with my father.” Just say it, Stella. “Mickey, I came over here today and I found him . . . I found him touching them.”

  Mickey returned her attention to the English muffin. “Oh, it’s nothing. He just likes to play with them.”

  Stella had often wanted to do this woman violence but never more than in this moment. “Mickey,” she said. She was struggling so hard to restrain herself that perhaps her urgency wasn’t coming through clearly. “Mickey, he’s not playing with them. He’s . . . he’s touching them. He’s . . . using them like puttane.”

  Mickey was quiet. She was spreading the butter, soft from being left on the summer-warm counter, thickly in the muffin’s spongy interior. Stella waited. Finally, Mickey said, “Well, it’s not like he’s raping them, is he?”