The curtain landed on the guaritrice with the little hiss the burner made when I turned on the gas. The fabric covered her head, her shoulders, all the way to her waist, then shrunk into her, fitted to her form, like batter sears to a hot pan.
She screeched. The sound shot to the star-painted ceiling and ricocheted from every corner. The curtain sparked, the air grew tingly, and the stenches of singed hair, burnt rubber, automobile exhaust, and vomit knitted into a miasma. A choking, impossible miasma.
The guaritrice shrank to the floor. She got smaller, melted, like Dorothy’s witch in the Oz book.
I wanted to run. Wanted to hold the baby close and just . . . run. I got as far as the beaded doorway.
The guaritrice whimpered.
I stopped. The old man knew where the curtain was. He knew what the curtain was doing. He knew the exchange had been made. And he knew I had a choice.
I handed the baby to Tizi. Benedetta’s baby. “Hold her. Keep her safe.”
“No. Don’t help her. Let the curtain destroy her.” Tizi transfixed on the guaritrice, her expression impassive. “Don’t you understand? She’s not human.”
I didn’t. Still, even then. All I saw was a struggling bundle of misery, alive, and suffering.
I scuttled in close, held my nose, held my breath, got hold of the curtain’s edge, and yanked.
The guaritrice was gone, replaced by a spindly creature with a bulbous center. Horrible, misshapen, making grunty little huffing noises. It glared up at me, then skittered into the shadows, moving like a spider. Slime trailed in its wake.
I dropped the curtain.
From behind me came a creak, like that of new shoe leather. Another creaked to my left, more like a lugnut loosening around a rusty screw. A third followed, and a fourth, the sounds growing staccato and stressed.
The walls shook. The floor shimmied. The flower-wrapped bower swayed. A fake tree pillar, then another, toppled onto the carpet’s scarlet poppies. Thunder clapped across the painted sky. I looked up. The ceiling cracked.
Tizi grabbed hold of my arm, she dragged me back, all the way to the strings of beads covering the doorway behind the guaritrice’s counter. She hefted Benedetta’s baby, and shoved me into the darkening passage. “Fiora. Stop daydreaming. Let’s go.”
Go. Of course.
Plaster fell from the edges in great strips, raising dust thick enough to bury us. The guaritrice’s world was crumbling by chunks and my one defense against the darkness splayed across a poppy-woven carpet in a room held together with malfeasance and bad intentions. The curtain was my way back, my trail of yarn, the map that could negotiate the guaritrice’s web of passages leading back to the alley behind the pharmacy. “Tizi, stop. We need that curtain.”
“We can’t go back.” Tizi’s panic, raw and real, reached out to slap me. “What’s done is done.”
Everything collapses, every petty thought laid bare. Every well-meaning act is tested.
And every good thing I needed in order to be what I was to become was already provided, alive, within me. Forever, for always. All I had to do was find it.
The curtain formed in my mind, the velvet fresh, the spare areas patched, the embroidery chain-stitching a path through the chaos. The passage behind us fell to ruin; the floor beneath gave way. The ceiling shifted; the supports wobbled.
I stopped Tizi, took Benedetta’s baby from her, and turned us down the path the curtain intended, a short walk down a hall, then out an everyday exit into an alley filled with smoke and the fire brigade.
The white-masked men arced around us, a half dozen in all. One pulled down his mask, talked to somebody I couldn’t see who it was. “Are these the people you were talking about?” Then he turned to me. “Are you all right, miss?”
Equipment crowded the alley, buckets and hoses. A crowd gathered in the street at the end.
The druggist broke through, relief rising over the edges of his white mask. “I’m so glad you’re safe. I was in my workroom when the fire broke out. I couldn’t find the don’s prescription. I didn’t know if you were safe, didn’t know if you were still back there.” He gazed at Tizi, young and beautiful in the light of a half dozen lanterns. He pulled off his mask, revealing a man still in his prime, serious and reserved. “Ah. You must be Don Sebastiano’s daughter. He told me to expect you.”
One of the fire brigade approached the druggist. “The damage in the back room is bad, but repairable. It looks like an electrical switch sparked. We found this.” He held up Mamma’s curtain.
Whatever I believed had happened, a cover story had already been conveyed. I put out my hand. “That’s mine.”
Tizi scooted in front of me. “No. I believe that is mine.”
Only one person could decide this dilemma. And whatever he decided, the curtain would make it come out all right. I turned to Tizi. “Let’s go see your father.”
We found the don in Benedetta’s apartment, seated beside the cradle. Milk already warmed on the stove; fresh diapers waited on the bed. He stood when we entered, his calm neutrality gone. “Tizi?”
He stepped toward her. “Tizi.”
She closed the space between them. “Poppa. I’m here.”
The old man picked a packet off the table. His pills. He slipped the packet into his shirt pocket, close to his heart. From then on they’d always be there, because from then on, the old man had a reason to live.