The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

by Juliet Grames

  “YOU KNEW.” FOR A PASSAGE OF TIME, Stella was blinded by shock. She had been ready for denial, for stupidity, for whining or for hysterics. She had not been ready for this. “You knew,” she said again. “You knew and you let him do it anyway?”

  Mickey shrugged sadly. “What can I do, though, Stella? It’s his house.”

  “You knew what he was doing to your daughters and you let him?” Rage was a patina over her vision, obscuring the kitchen and this witch of a mother. “You left them here with him? What, to make it easier? So you wouldn’t have to watch?”

  Mickey didn’t say anything now. Her wheels were turning, Stella knew, trying to find a way to make this conversation stop, to make Stella go away.

  “You’re a terrible person,” Stella said, “but your children are innocent. You better do something about this or I’ll do something myself, and you won’t like it.”

  “What do you want me to do, Stella?” Mickey said. She had opted for crying, her showy openmouth style. “I can’t make a fuss or he’ll kick us out. We don’t have any money to live somewhere else.”

  Stella stepped toward her sister-in-law, forcing her up against the wall, and she grabbed Mickey’s face in her right hand. Mickey was too surprised to squeal.

  “This isn’t about money, you stupid bitch.” Stella pinched harder—she would be only too satisfied to see purple circles like clown rouge on Mickey’s face tomorrow—and then released her. “You get your act together and find somewhere to live or I will call the cops and report you all.”

  “For what?” Mickey said between her sobs.

  “I’ll think of something.” Stella stepped away from her sister-in-law. “You go get your little girls at my house now. They need their mother, even if she is a stupid bitch.”

  That was all the invitation Mickey needed to flee the kitchen. Stella heard her let herself out the front door. She turned to gaze out the window at the vivid green lawn of the backyard, where there was no sign of the monster, her father.

  Now what?

  Instinctively, Stella felt her work wasn’t quite done. She took a carving knife out of the drawer by the sink and let herself out onto the back porch to wait for her father.

  MORE THAN TWO HOURS and no sign of Penny. Bernadette was hoarse but stubborn. She couldn’t call out anymore, so she clapped as she walked up and down the wetland paths. The heat had receded, leaving the damp air feeling falsely cool, and the diagonal light of the yellow-orange sun splattered among the knee-high reeds where the marsh water pooled.

  Bernie cried silently as she walked and clapped. It was too much time. If Penny had been here she would have come by now. She’d walked every footpath between the highway and the ocean for a stretch of two miles. She’d whistled and poked unwillingly with a stick among clumps of bushes, hoping she did not find a carcass. Not knowing would be better than knowing at that point, she thought. She could not know that Penny had been adopted by a loving beach family just as easily as she could not know that Penny had been dismantled by raccoons.

  She wiped the salty snot from her chin with the inside of her striped Gardener’s uniform sleeve and blinked away her tears. No mourning in front of her grandfather; only rage. She watched him from this distance as he stood twenty feet from the car, clapping halfheartedly every so often. Bernie had locked him out of the car so there was no way he could avoid the task she’d set him. The old goat was going to stick it out till it was over.

  Well. It was over. There was nothing more she could do here.

  The bastard. Bernadette wished, earnestly, that he would die.

  She was heading back to the car—more than halfway there, how close she came to missing—when she heard the rustling and stopped. Yes, rustling in the grasses, the length of a football field away, but she heard it.

  “Penny,” she croaked, embarrassed at her own hopefulness. She cleared her throat. “Penny!”

  The dog ran toward her, reeds parting as she barreled through, her coppery fur ratted and her little legs covered in mud.

  “Penny!” She knelt, and the dog leapt into her arms. Her legs were so weak and shaky that she missed and hit her chin on Bernie’s knee. Bernie scooped her up like an infant, cradling her and cupping her face and crying helplessly. It was too good to be true—Bernadette felt that God, whose existence she had been questioning all summer, had given her a miracle. The sweet little dog should have been dead—three days in this hostile wilderness with nothing to eat. But here she was.

  On the drive home, Bernadette blasted the radio and sang along euphorically to the Rolling Stones. She rode with Penny in her lap, stroking the dog’s heaving ribs whenever she didn’t have her hand on the stick shift. Grandpa Tony was quiet in the passenger seat. Bernie hoped he was swimming in shame.

  As the highway approached Hartford and she got ready to take their exit, Bernadette turned the radio all the way down. “Old man,” she said to him. “You ever touch this dog again—you ever touch any of our animals—I will kill you myself. Okay?” When she said it, she meant it. She was not a violent person, but rationally, if an act of violence was for the good of society, she could do it, she thought. And this would be a service. “I will kill you myself, with my own two hands.”

  He snorted, but he didn’t say anything. They pulled into the driveway at number 3 Alder Street and Bernadette leapt out of the car with Penny clutched to her chest, slamming the door behind her and leaving her grandfather to walk himself home.

  STELLA WAS SITTING ON THE BACK PORCH of 4 Alder Street at 5:15 P.M. when Tina came over to check on her father after work.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be at your job?” Tina asked. “What are you doing here?”

  “Waiting for the old man to get home,” Stella said. She showed Tina the carving knife she was hiding behind her leg. “I had to take today off work so I can tell him I’m going to kill him. He needs a little fear in his life.”

  “Stella!” Tina was alarmed.

  “Come here, Tina.” Stella patted the porch beside her. “I want to tell you why I want to kill him, but I have to whisper.”

  Tina listened to the whole story with wide eyes. “But what can you do, Stella?” she said at last.

  “I can tell him I’m going to kill him if he does it again.”

  “You can’t do that.” Tina was scandalized.

  “Why not?”

  “You can’t say that to your father!”

  “Can’t I?” Stella snapped.

  “You have to show him respect in his house.”

  “What has that man ever done to deserve any respect?” The pall of her loathing for her father expanded to engulf her sister. How could she be such a worshipful cow, even after all that had happened? “These are innocent little children, Tina—Mickey’s children, and mine! We must do anything we have to do to protect them.”

  “But you can’t kill Papa.” Tina’s voice was full of fear. “Not your own father.”

  Stella sneered at her sister in disgust. “After what he’s done to those babies, the old man can go straight to hell, and I don’t care if he’s my father.” A dark thought prickled in the back of Stella’s mind—Tina was over here at number 4 all the time. Could it have been possible she knew, too? Or had an inkling? Stella was so upset by this thought that she dismissed it quickly, but some suppressed resentment inside her bubbled up and before she could stop herself she said, “If you were a mother yourself, you’d understand. You owe your life to your children, not to your father.”

  Tina’s eyes fell to her lap as she tried to digest this—probably tried to pick through whether Stella was right or just being mean. The sting of childlessness hadn’t lessened in twenty years of knowing, in twenty years of pouring her heart and attentions into Stella’s children to make up for not having any of her own. Stella had no business attacking her. Tina wasn’t the enemy here. But she was an easy target, and in that moment Stella hated her for mouthing back the same platitudes that had allowed Tony to carry on his monstrositi
es for the last five decades.

  What was said was said, and Stella was done talking. They sat in silence on the porch, Stella gripping the knife, until Tina finally stood and brushed off her lap. “Well, Stella, you be careful,” she said sourly. Tina was probably thinking, Well, she’ll get whatever she has coming this time. Stella didn’t say anything as her sister walked away.

  YOU’RE WAITING TO HEAR the story of how Stella almost choked to death that July day in 1970, I know. We’re almost there now.

  * * *

  ASSUNTA USED TO SAY THAT sitting flat on granite or concrete was what caused hemorrhoids. Stella didn’t know if a doctor had told her mother that or if it was received folk wisdom, but she’d repeated it often. Stella kept hearing her mother’s voice as the house’s shadow stretched over the porch and the concrete under Stella’s bum grew cold.

  It was perhaps six o’clock when Antonio trudged up the cement sidewalk he had laid along the driveway. Stella pulled herself awkwardly to her feet so that she could intercept the old man at the back door. Her legs balked and then rejoiced at restored blood flow. She realized she was still wearing the powder-blue slippers.

  As she moved, the carving knife she’d had hidden in her skirt was exposed and must have flashed in the sun. Antonio’s eye was caught by the glint. “What’s that, Stella?” He seemed weary as he trudged up the stairs.

  She was shaking—why was she shaking? There was nothing she wanted more in her life than to have this man no longer be part of it.

  Stella raised the knife so that he could look it in the eye. “You want to know what this is?” she said. “I will show you everything you need to know about it in a minute.”

  His laugh sounded tired. There he was, so old but still so big, looking grimy in his grease-stained Red Sox cap.

  “Are you gonna kill me, too, Stella?”

  She didn’t know what he meant by “too,” but she didn’t want him thinking she was arbitrarily dramatic. “If you don’t stay away from those girls,” she said. The vision came back, the skinny bare legs. She fought off the nausea. “Yes. Yes, I will kill you myself if you don’t stay away from them.”

  He was coming toward her. Her heart sped up, pounding—what if he attacked her? Would she actually be able to use the knife on her own father?

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Stella.” He was stepping around her and pushing open the door. “It’s none of your business.”

  How could it be she had no power over this man? He was old and broken, but he still walked past her like she wasn’t even there. Her heart was already defeated, had retreated into itself as if he had made all the decisions for her, again. She wanted to go home and lick her wounds—had to remind herself that the confrontation wasn’t over, she hadn’t lost yet.

  She didn’t have the passion for it, or the energy, but in the end it’s only about the action itself, not what’s behind it. She made her hand move forward and pressed until she felt the tip of the knife bury in the crotch of his pants. She had no way of knowing if the sharp tip met with scrotum or was halted by the prophylactic thickly stitched seam.

  “Whoa!” her father shouted.

  “Go ahead,” Stella said. “Give me an excuse to cut off your balls.” She pushed a little harder and he yelped just like their little dog Penny. “Any excuse, old man. You can’t learn to mind your own balls, I don’t know that you need them. That would solve your problem and mine, wouldn’t it?”

  “You crazy bitch!” Antonio swung at her and tried to move away, but the doorframe stopped him. “Mother Mary, save me from this crazy bitch!”

  His voice cracked, and Stella took a step back, suddenly paralyzed by misgiving. He was her father, after all. Her awful, filthy father. An animal who wasn’t fit for a barn, who had stolen from her, piece by piece, her home, her country, her dignity, her teeth, her mother, her freedom, who had made her into this wretched rag of a middle-aged woman.

  She couldn’t do it.

  “Never again,” Stella said. Her weakness sat like a stone in the bottom of her heart. “You hear me? Never again.”

  “Go to hell,” he told her, ducking into his kitchen and shutting the door. She watched him through the glass as he watched her back, wary. Then he shuffled off in the direction of his room.

  Her chest aching, Stella headed back across Alder Street, toward the pink-orange sun that was settling into the treetops behind her house.

  THE TELEVISION WAS ON, but all the other lights in the house were off. No one was home but the little dog, Penny, who leapt off the doormat, where she was curled, and wagged maniacally, licking at Stella’s calves as she tried to enter the house. The boys’ dirty dinner bowls were piled in and around the sink. They never could learn to rinse out their own bowl. How many hours would that one little thing have saved her over her life?

  None of her sons—or her daughter, for that matter—were anywhere to be found. A Friday evening, suppertime—where could they be? Bernie was most likely at her friend Patty’s. The little boys, Artie, Richie, and Mingo, were surely at Tina’s. Mingo was Tina’s favorite and he practically lived over there; he often didn’t even come home to sleep. The teenagers were probably racing their buddies’ dirt bikes in the empty strip of road behind the high school.

  Stella poured a short glass of wine, downed it, and poured a second. She had spent the whole day sober, missed her work shift for that nasty old man. She needed something to eat; she’d had nothing since the cheese sandwiches. There was nothing in the refrigerator; whatever Carmelo had made for dinner had been polished off—a casualty of having so many teenage boys in the house, their friends cycling through like the place was Union Station, or Hartford county jail.

  In the drawer at the bottom of the refrigerator was a supermarket packet of chicken parts: legs and thighs chopped so their blunted bones stood out against the plastic wrapping. Yes, Stella thought, this much I can do. Even Rocco Caramanico had been able to cook chicken. She put the package on the counter, found a pasta pot beneath the sink, filled it with water, and put it on the stove, turning the burner under it on high. One by one, she dropped the chicken parts into the pot of water. The peach-colored flesh was slimy between her fingers, and the water quickly clouded.

  Stella looked at her creation, this food that she was cooking. She was making herself chicken. She was fifty years old, and she didn’t need anyone—she didn’t need her father, whose balls she had held a knife to; she didn’t need her husband, who had fed her the last twenty years. She was no one to the world—she wasn’t pretty, she was old, she wasn’t such a good mother—but she was everything she needed. She could work, and she could fight. She had survived all of everything. She had survived.

  She sat at the kitchen table and waited for the food to cook. She was hungry now. The bad feelings of the past had set in. She drank a third glass of wine, watching the shadows of the faucet and the sun-catcher in the window stretch across the stove. She had begun to live the old nightmare again, end to end. There was her father pinning her in the corner, his hands sliding over her buttocks, her ribs, her breasts. She fought her nausea with a fourth glass of wine. She waited for the vision to abate.

  As the broth was coming to a boil, she thought to add salt and pepper. Was there something else you put in chicken? She didn’t know. She drank a fifth glass of wine, the comfort of fuzzy detachment sliding over the discomfort of her vivid memories. On the stove, the water in the pot bubbled, issuing a delightful steam that made her shy back when she held her face over the roiling liquid.

  In the dark kitchen, she removed four pieces of chicken from the pot with Carmelo’s cooking tongs, put them in a bowl, and watched them steam into the heavy July air. As she waited, she drank another glass of wine. The steam rising from the chicken in this moment reminded her of the dew evaporating from the leaves of the ilex in Ievoli all those years ago, that morning she had gone to say good-bye to the chestnut groves and the cemetery. Everything was different, but this thing—this
evaporated water rising into the air—this was the same.

  She was grasping.

  She had lost herself.

  When the chicken was cool enough to eat, she picked up a piece with her bare hands and wolfed it down. The chicken was not delicious—it was gummy, almost stomach turning—but she was ravenous. She selected a second piece of meat from the bowl and began to chew and suck. Suddenly there was the stretch in her throat, the esophagus pulling taut around the aspirated bone. She was coughing but there was no air, so she wasn’t coughing. She was sputtering, and then she was clawing. Her airway was blocked, and she couldn’t get it out.

  Could it be? It wasn’t this serious. Was it?

  It was. There was no air, only a suggestion of air, a suggestion she couldn’t accept. The dog was barking, but the barking sounded far away.

  Her vision of her dark kitchen sparkled around her. This was wrong—this was not the way she would die. Not after everything she had already survived—not a chicken bone. She would not die eating her own cooking.

  Drool ran down her chin and splattered on her hands, on the counter. She tried to cough, fought for air. Nothing. Darkness, settling. Stella dropped to her knees, bracing herself against the floor and pounding her fist against her chest. She felt the bone move in her throat, but there was no mercy.

  Stella thought of her mother, who had died young at sixty-nine—realized that she, Stella, would die even younger. Her mind fixed on the image of the dead baby, her sister Mariastella. This was the last haunting, she thought. That damn ghost was finally going to get her. In those last moments it wasn’t her husband or her children Stella thought of; it wasn’t her monstrous father, who’d ruined her life and now was ruining the lives of others. It was the haunting hollow eyes of the dead baby that filled her mind. Even through the seizing pain in her constricted throat, the fireworks of the bursting blood vessels, Stella was thinking, after all this time, after all your better efforts, I can’t believe this is how you’re going to make me die.