Arcadia Burns

by Kai Meyer

  Rosa looked ahead—perhaps she’d been doing that the whole time, yet she knew what was going on behind her. All that mattered was reaching the carriage. Its front spokes suddenly collided with a rock, and the carriage fell apart into separate pieces. The screaming bundle was flung up, and then it bobbed through the turbulent water at a leisurely pace, so slowly that Rosa was able to catch it as she ran.

  She clutched the child to her. He was wrapped in a cloth spattered with paint and varnish. A pretty little boy. “My name is Nathaniel,” he said.

  “I know.”

  A cat’s paw shot out from under the cloth, and claws dug furrows in Rosa’s face.

  Nathaniel laughed in Tano’s voice.

  Tano in the taxi was yelling like a newborn baby.

  Rosa let go of the child, and watched as a current carried him away. There was a haze of blood before her eyes. She heard the taxi behind her coming closer and stormed forward again, half blind in a cocoon of red.

  Then, all of a sudden, she was moving upward. The ground rose more and more steeply. The tires of the taxi’s wheels stuck in the mud; the engine howled, so did Tano, and Valerie laughed louder than ever.

  Rosa’s head came up through the surface of the water, through leafless branches. She slipped through railings much too narrow for her, yet they couldn’t hold her back. Light surrounded her, yellow streetlamps, bright white cones from headlights.

  A taxi pulled up in front of her. She flung the door open and slipped in. There was a child’s hand dangling from the rearview mirror. Or perhaps it was only a twig.

  She gave an address, and then her head fell to one side.

  She dreamed, and everything was all right.

  GEMMA

  ROSA COULD FEEL EVERY pore in her body, every nerve, every single point of contact with the fibers of the sheets.

  She opened her eyes, and looked at the past. She was in her old room, in the building with the burn marks on its facade. She recognized her closet, her dresser with photos and Post-its stuck all over the mirror, her bookshelf of paperbacks, her old stereo surrounded by stacks of CDs that she’d burnt herself, a few posters, and another photo, a larger, framed one—a picture of Zoe.

  Her sister was dead now; she remembered that. Dead, like Tano Carnevare.

  The bedroom door was open. She heard dishes clattering outside it.

  Mattia’s face flitted through her mind. Had he escaped?

  A scream began to surface in her before she even realized why. Then she remembered it all: the boathouse, the flames, her scaly snake skin on fire.

  With a great effort, she flung off the quilt and looked down at her body. She was naked except for a pair of brightly colored Simpsons shorts. She’d left them behind when she fled to Sicily, and she hadn’t missed them.

  She was intact apart from some bruises on her knees and her shins. Her skin seemed to have an abnormal amount of blood flowing through it. It wasn’t as pale as usual, much pinker, like that of a newborn baby. When she cautiously ran her fingers over her flat stomach, her prominent hip bones, her thighs, it felt as if lotion had only just been rubbed in, all smooth and silky.

  That’s not my skin, she thought. This is new.

  “Oh, my God, Rosa!”

  Someone rushed through the doorway, fell on her knees beside her, and hugged her hard. The woman’s face was surrounded by fair, reddish hair drenched in the smells of cooking and cigarette smoke. Rosa knew that smell, and in spite of herself she found its familiarity comforting. Cautiously, she turned until she could put her own arms around her mother. It was just a reflex action, but at the moment it seemed right to her, if not perfectly honest.

  Her mother was crying, and couldn’t say a word. When she tried, it just came out as a sob.

  “I’m okay,” whispered Rosa. “Nothing—” She was going to say happened, but then she thought of Jessie and the ragged street kids. Michele’s leopard eyes, and the angry roar of the tiger at the window. Mattia and Valerie.

  Fire reducing her skin and muscles to black cinder.

  The only thing that didn’t come back to her was the pain. It was as if it had shrunk to a tiny dot, like a crumpled little ball of paper that would unfold again only slowly. Her mind couldn’t possibly suppress what she had felt forever.

  But hadn’t she blotted everything out once already, everything bad and painful?

  Tano. Michele. And in a way Valerie, too.

  A shiver ran through her body, and suddenly she felt frail and vulnerable in her mother’s arms. Then she heard herself talking, but none of it made any sense, and Gemma replied without letting go of her: something about a cab driver who, complaining loudly, had dropped her off here stark naked, smelling of soot and smoke, saying she should count herself lucky he hadn’t either taken her to the police or flung her out of his taxi.

  Only in this city could things like that happen. Rosa’s mind went to an old I Love New York T-shirt in her closet, and she thought she ought to wear it now and then, by way of saying sorry.

  When a pause for breath started turning into a long silence, she asked, “You didn’t call the cops, did you?”

  Her mother gave her a long, considering look. “No,” she said at last. No explanation. Just an unspoken question in her glance.

  Rosa nodded. “Better not.”

  That’s how it is in our family, she thought. My mother’s eighteen-year-old daughter is delivered naked to her door in the middle of the night, and she doesn’t call the police. Or even a doctor. And a part of Rosa wanted to ask: Why not? Wanted to revive her old resentments, because whenever she looked her mother in the eye, only one word occurred to her. Why? Why? Why?

  Then she realized that she was the one who owed Gemma an answer. Even if the question hadn’t been asked.

  “It wasn’t…what it looked like,” she said, avoiding Gemma’s eyes. “Not like that other time.”

  Her mother put a hand to her mouth, and breathed in twice as if to keep herself from hyperventilating. She managed to stay calm. Her blue eyes blazed, but she stayed remarkably well under control. “They hurt you,” she said. She had fresh scabs on little bite marks on her lower lip, and her hands shook. Her fingernails were cut very short, and slightly discolored from nicotine.

  “I’m all right now,” said Rosa. “Thanks for…for letting me come here.”

  “Did you ever doubt you could?” Gemma got up from the edge of the bed, moved a couple of steps away, and stood with her back to Rosa. “You still can’t quite trust me, can you?”

  Rosa sat up and drew her legs and the sheets closer to her body, put her arms around her knees, and laid her cheek on them. She watched her mother, the long pale hair with a touch of red in it, the slender body that not even constant night shifts, fast food, and too much wine could harm. Gemma would always be a good-looking woman, whatever fate had in store for her.

  Rosa let her eyes wander over the walls, the furniture, the photographs on the mirror. Difficult to imagine that this had once been her life. Everything here was strange to her now.

  “You never mentioned anything,” she said. “About the family. The dynasties. But you knew all along.”

  Gemma spun around, her face flushed. “I didn’t want you to find out from Florinda, least of all from her,” she said firmly. “But I couldn’t…” She interrupted herself, searching for words. “I’d already lost Zoe to her, and I knew it was wrong to keep your origin and…and all the rest of it secret from you. But I couldn’t help it. I tried to say something, and it was no good. Talking to you about it would have been like…”

  “Like Dad was still here. As if he hadn’t died.”

  Her mother stared at her. After a while, she asked quietly, “What do you think I should have told you? That one of these days you’d turn into a snake?”

  “Well, for example, yes.”

  Gemma leaned back against the chest of drawers, supporting herself on it with both hands. “And you think that would have one of those cozy mother-daughter
moments, like on the Gilmore Girls?”

  “It would have been honest.”

  “I had to stand by helplessly for years, watching you get dragged off to a police station for questioning again and again. You were still a child! But they didn’t leave you alone. Because you’re an Alcantara. Because you inherited that damn name.” She gesticulated energetically, but a moment later the strength went out of her. “Because someone thought a girl of thirteen or fourteen could tell them about the Mafia!” She laughed bitterly. “About crimes committed by people she’d never met, who lived on the other side of the world.”

  “I didn’t choose my family, Mom. You did that.”

  “I chose your father, that’s all.”

  “And then there were suddenly two daughters, and they were useless, too.”

  “That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

  “Yes, it went wrong. Obviously.”

  Gemma pushed herself away from the chest of drawers, took a couple of hesitant steps, and stopped in the middle of the room. “You were never an easy child, Rosa, but you didn’t used to snipe at everything before you went to join them.”

  “Well, at least they aren’t a problem to you anymore, right, Mom?” Rosa jumped up, then felt as if someone had hit her over the head, but she managed to stay on her feet, and went over to the closet, passing her mother. “Zoe and Florinda are both dead. Maybe you’d be able to remember them better if you’d turned up for their funeral.”

  Gemma flinched. “I’m never setting foot on that island again.”

  “So you said already. More than once.”

  When she’d changed back into human form, Rosa had shed the snake’s burnt skin, but this new one didn’t seem to hold her together just yet.

  She rummaged around in the closet with both hands. Everything was just as she had left it four months ago. Her mother hadn’t changed anything.

  Gemma said quietly, “Would you have contacted me? I mean, being here in New York and all…no, you wouldn’t even have called me, would you?”

  Rosa was looking at some old jeans and sweaters. Most of them were black and had once belonged to Zoe. “I came especially because of you, Mom. Maybe that was a mistake.”

  “You expect me to believe that?”

  “Believe whatever you want.” She took out a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and a heavy wool sweater. There was no underwear, so she had to keep the Simpsons shorts on. As she went to pull on her jeans, and was wobbling on one leg, she felt dizzy. She lost her balance and tipped over, just like that.

  Her mother was beside her in a split second, and caught her.

  Rosa cursed in Italian.

  “That was quick,” said Gemma.

  Rosa tried to break away, but her mother wasn’t letting go. Gemma forced her daughter to look her in the face. “I couldn’t come to Zoe’s funeral,” she said forcefully. “I know you don’t want to understand that. But I swore never to enter that house again.”

  “Swore to who?”

  “Myself. And you can think that’s ridiculous or pigheaded, whatever you want. But things happened there that…anyway, I’d rather die than go up that mountain again and set foot through the palazzo doorway.”

  “There’s no one there now, Mom. No one but me.” She could have mentioned Iole, but this was hardly the right time.

  Gemma stared at her, and suddenly there were tears in her eyes. “I’m so afraid for you. I lie awake thinking what…what might become of you. That place, that island…they made Zoe into a different person. And the same thing will happen to you.”

  “I’ll turn into a snake; that’s the only difference. And it has nothing to do with Sicily or the Palazzo Alcantara. Or even with Florinda.” She pushed Gemma’s hands aside and pulled the jeans up. She felt weak at the knees, and not just because of her new skin. “What would it have been like if it had happened here? In school? Or on the subway? Fuck, Mom, you should have warned me!”

  “I suppressed it. Not always, not at the start, but the more I made up my mind to talk to you about it, the less I found I could.”

  “Too bad for you, right?”

  “Your father…Davide…he never said a word about it. Not after Costanza chased us out and we came here—”

  “Grandmother threw you out?” She hadn’t known that.

  “Grandmother!” repeated Gemma scornfully. “Sounds as if you knew her. God, how I wish I’d never met that witch myself.”

  Rosa blinked at her, intrigued, and slowly shook her head. No one had ever told her anything about Costanza Alcantara, her father’s mother. Not when she was a child, not in the months she had spent in Sicily. She was no more than a name. Two words on a granite slab in the family vault. A face in an oil painting that Florinda had taken down from the wall and pushed behind a cupboard years ago.

  Gemma went to the door and leaned against the jamb with her arms crossed. She was even paler than usual. “You don’t know anything about Costanza, do you?”

  Rosa pulled the T-shirt and then the sweater over her head. To her surprise, they both smelled as fresh as if they’d just come out of the washing machine. “This has nothing to do with her.”

  “It always has to do with her! No one ever mentioned her name in this house. She never called or sent news in any other way. But she was always around, all the same, every damn day.”

  Rosa was going to make a snide remark, but a glance at her mother’s eyes kept her from doing so. Instead she said hesitantly, “So you didn’t have a good relationship with your mother-in-law?”

  Gemma snorted. “Costanza was the head of the Alcantara clan for several decades. She was one of the most powerful Mafia bosses in Italy. Do you really think a woman like that would have been satisfied with the usual mother-in-law role?”

  “What happened?”

  “Would it make any difference if I told you?”

  “Look, this is exactly our problem! You always think you know what’s good for me. And what I should know or not know. Would it have made any difference if I’d known about Arcadia? Yes, it would have. A lot of difference, actually. Would it have made any difference if I’d known what TABULA was? Maybe.”

  “TABULA?” Gemma looked at her, baffled.

  “You’ve never heard of it, of course.”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. What is it? Something to do with the dynasties?”

  “Dad never mentioned it?”

  Her mother shook her head.

  Rosa made a dismissive gesture and was immediately aware that she was acting just like her mother. In how many ways were they more alike than she wanted to think?

  “Are you sure Dad never mentioned TABULA?” Now she had come to the real reason she had traveled to New York. Suddenly it didn’t seem half as important as before.

  “I promise you I never heard that name before today,” said Gemma.

  Rosa sighed and leaned against the windowsill. The pleasant smell of clean laundry reminded her of the past. “Tell me about Costanza first.”

  Gemma was still standing in the doorway, rubbing her upper arms. With a shiver, she said, “Davide was always special to her. Most male Alcantara offspring don’t live very long; he was the great exception. And the men don’t have the same…abilities as the Alcantara women. It must have surprised his mother that Davide grew up at all, let alone that he had all the qualities that would have made him a good capo. If she was able to feel anything like love, presumably she loved him. She always preferred him to Florinda and didn’t bother to hide it. That was one of the reasons why your father and his sister never got along particularly well. When he turned up at the palazzo with me one day, Costanza didn’t like it one bit. An American with Irish roots instead of a native Sicilian girl…Costanza did all she could to nip it in the bud. She tried to talk him out of it, she was involved in schemes all the time, but it made no difference. Only when Zoe and then you were born did she give up for a while—most of the time she wasn’t at the palazzo anyway,
but in Rome or Milan or Naples, or God knows where.”

  Gemma turned her head, so Rosa could see her only in profile. Zoe had looked remarkably like her. “Then, one day, she came to me and offered me money to go away. I was to leave you two with her—with her and Davide. First it was a few hundred thousand dollars, then a million, after a while two million. One million for you, another for Zoe. I told her I’d never in my life sell my daughters or my husband. It was the only time I ever saw her lose her self-control.”

  “She changed?”

  All the color drained out of Gemma’s face. “I saw it only that once with my own eyes. Davide couldn’t shift shape. Like all the Alcantara men, he was just an ordinary human being. But Costanza…she turned into a gigantic black cobra. I think she’d have killed me if Davide hadn’t shown up right then.”

  Rosa frowned, feeling the wintry cold seep into her back through the windowpane.

  “A few hours later we were on a flight to New York. I never saw her again. And she ceased to exist for Davide, too. But to me, she was still there, like a smell that we’d brought back from Sicily. And even when we were talking about something entirely different, her presence still seemed to linger. Sounds silly, I know…but if you’d seen her that day, and heard what she said to get rid of me…” Furiously, Gemma rubbed her eyes. “She left us in peace for a while. Until fourteen years ago, and that phone call.”

  “That’s the year he died, isn’t it?”

  Gemma laughed—a bitter laugh that made Rosa feel colder than ever. “Obviously Costanza had been very sick for years, and finally she was bedridden. Florinda had been running the clan’s business for a while already—circumstances more or less forced her to do it. I don’t think Costanza had planned for that to happen, and it was something else she couldn’t forgive your father for.” She took a deep breath, as if gathering all her powers for the final stretch of her story. “Fourteen years ago Costanza died. Soon after her death, Davide got a phone call, I don’t know from who. Probably Florinda or one of the consiglieri. He was a different man after that. He changed completely.”