THREE
Lucia
August 1943
Lucia knelt on her rooftop terrace in the dark, staring at a square of oilskin cloth in her hands, folded tight. It was nearly midnight, and Rome spread around her like waves on a black sea. The lights were out again. In the weeks since Mussolini’s fall, Allied planes had sailed over the city more than once, tipping their wings in the sun. The people watched, ready to cower, and at night they again sealed their windows.
She glanced from the bundle in her hands to the stars wrapping overhead and the moon, which hung bright as a shell. The question everyone whispered, in every shop and kitchen, rebounded in her mind: What next? It was the question that had brought her up here, slinking onto the terrace while Matteo slept in his muggy bedroom two floors below.
She shook herself from her thoughts and picked up the wooden spoon she’d snatched from the kitchen drawer, pivoting to the terra-cotta planter. What if a neighbor heard and came up? She’d better hurry. A stunted lemon tree stretched from the soil, sun scorched but alive despite neglect. She’d once planted it herself, as a younger woman with a chest still full of hope.
An explosion brightened the distance. Lucia glanced up, scanning the horizon, studying the darkness for planes. Was it the start of another bombardment? She listened, but there was nothing more. She swallowed the ache in her throat and began to dig.
Italy was unstable. Her hand shook on the spoon as she worked it around the tree roots, seeking loose soil. Mussolini was gone, Badoglio claimed that the war would continue, the Germans seemed to be multiplying like rabbits, and the Allies were expected to invade. Today, walking through Rome, Lucia and Matteo had seen a crowd gather around a marble bust of Mussolini. The people were shouting, incensed, and Lucia had frozen, her hand tight on her son’s palm. Someone threw a rock at the statue, and the people cheered. More rocks sailed through the air, and she’d hurried off, avoiding the fevered eyes of men.
She wiped curls from her sweaty forehead, no doubt smearing dirt on her face. Seeing a mob defacing Il Duce’s relics had terrified her, but not for the reasons she would have expected. She’d run away from them, but also from herself. Because, for an instant, she’d had the urge to shed her upbringing and become someone different. She’d had the urge to throw a rock.
She thought of Matteo, his little chest rising in sleep, and she worked faster. Despite the joy in the streets, peace wasn’t on the horizon. The Fascists wouldn’t give up so easily. And the Germans? They wouldn’t give up at all. She knew this, in the curves of her soul.
“But how do you know?” Noemi Bruno had implored her earlier that day, shuffling to peer out the window, her brows tipped in worry. “The Germans will withdraw once we make peace with the Allies, cara. Everyone says so.”
Lucia closed her eyes now on the rooftop, shaking her head. If everyone was saying that, they were wrong. War would rake right through Rome before anyone gave up.
How did she know? She dug on, remembering.
On a bright, cold day eight years earlier, Lucia had walked through the door of her parents’ apartment building, grinning at the portiere.
“And how were your classes today?” he asked, holding the door wide.
“Lovely. And how is your wife?” The portiere was old, and his wife had been sick.
Lucia paused, placing a hand on his elbow. “Would you like me to fetch more cough suppressant for her? I have some upstairs.”
He waved a hand, the lines creasing around his eyes. “Grazie, but she’s much better, Signorina Colombo. We have a bit of medicine left over, in fact.”
“Well, let me know if you run out. Arrivederci.” She turned up the wide marble staircase, taking the steps two at a time despite her heels. Four apartment doors graced each floor, widely spaced, and she hurried to hers. She wanted to finish her reading as quickly as possible so she could entice her best friend, Lidia, to join her at the cinema. She stepped into her parents’ foyer, dropped her handbag and coat on a hook, and paused. The lights were off. Was nobody home?
“Mamma?” she called, striding toward the parlor. Her mother was there, sitting on the sofa, but she didn’t raise her head from where it rested in her propped hand. Her hair, usually pinned in careful, blond waves, fell in a disheveled heap around her face. Even stranger, Lucia’s father sat in the other corner of the sofa, home early from work. And across the room, her little brother, fifteen, glanced up from his chair. Marco shook his head. He wore his Avanguardisti uniform, as if he’d been about to trot off to the Fascist youth club when something stopped him.
“What’s going on?” she managed, glancing from person to person.
Her mother buried her face deeper in her hands, but her father looked up. His cheeks were wet with tears, and he wiped them quickly, as if they stung.
Fear gathered in Lucia’s chest. No. It couldn’t be. Nobody spoke, and Lucia looked from her father to the photos on the mantel. There, Piero’s face laughed out from a frame. The picture had been snapped a month ago, before he left for Ethiopia. He’d worn his Royal Air Force uniform but couldn’t muster solemnity in time for the flash. She’d teased him that day, saying the outfit didn’t suit him. He was too jolly to be a pilot, too gentle to be a fighter.
Lucia’s knees gave out, and she sank into a nearby chair. It was as if someone had hit her with something heavy. She couldn’t breathe. She met her father’s stare, and he nodded.
“Your brother’s plane came down in the desert. I’m—” He struggled with the words, dropping his eyes to his knees. “I’m sorry, Lucia.”
For a minute, nobody spoke. When Lucia found her voice, it came out in a croak.
“His plane came down? He could still be alive, then. Missing in action?”
Nobody looked at her, but her father shook his head, and her mother choked on a sob. Lucia pressed both hands over her eyes, breathing hard. She heard Piero’s laugh in her mind, full and loud, as if he were in the next room. She saw him, with his face that mirrored her own. He was older than she, but her whole life they’d been mistaken for twins. It was as if in making Lucia, God had used the mold of her big brother, and they’d come out the same.
“I don’t believe you,” she said, struggling to force out words. “He only just left.”
“Oh, Lucia.” Her mother sniffed. “Don’t make this more difficult than it already is.”
Lucia shook her head. Could Piero be gone? She felt for him in her soul, like a person looking for shapes in the dark. Surely, he was out there, somewhere. But as she searched, she found nothing. Her pulse beat faster, pumping out grief and something else, small and hot. Anger.
She stood, casting about. “It was supposed to be simple. An invasion. Barely a war.” She looked from parent to parent as if they were responsible. “He wasn’t supposed to die there. How could Piero die a meaningless death? It can’t be true.”
Her father heaved himself up from the sofa. “A meaningless death?” His stricken face transformed. “How dare you suggest such a thing!”
She crossed her arms, meeting his stare. Like him, she burned too hot at the center. Like him, she found anger easier than grief.
He shook his fist, gaining momentum. “Piero died for his country.”
“For his country? He wasn’t even in his country. They sent him off where he had no business—he should be here, right now—”
She didn’t see the slap coming. Her father took one step across the room, and with an open palm he hit her, hard, across the cheek. She stumbled backward, lifting her hand to her jaw while he strode from the room, boots clicking the marble floor.
Her mother rose, speaking in barely more than a whisper. “How dare you say such things, Lucia?” Her irises were shockingly blue against the bloodshot whites of her eyes. “You don’t even know what you’re talking about. Il Duce is restoring Italy to glory. Recapturing an empire, making something . . .” She choked on the words. “Something great. Your brother died a noble death. Don’t you question it.”
Her mother stumbled from the room, treading in her husband’s wake, and Marco released a sob from his chair. He sat hunched over his knees, shoulders shaking. Lucia stared at her little brother for a long moment, her hand on her stinging cheek. He wore his black shirt and blue scarf and fez pinned with Fascist emblems, like all of Mussolini’s boys. He’d just graduated from the Balilla to the Avanguardisti, the next step on the stairs to the military. She sucked in a breath, sickened, and staggered to him.
“Marco,” she murmured, nudging him over so she could sit. She wrapped an arm around his thin shoulders, and he sank into her, sobbing. The knobs of his spine poked through his shirt, and pain swelled in her throat. Could Piero really be dead? She closed her eyes, shuddering. She’d drown from the pain.
“The war in Ethiopia won’t last long,” she said, squeezing her little brother. For the first time, it struck her: how terrifying it was to be a boy in Mussolini’s world.
“Marco.” Her voice thickened with tears. “You won’t have to fight. Please don’t be afraid.”
Marco stilled. He stared at her, eyes hot and mucus dripping from his nose. Then he shrank away, shaking her arm from his shoulders. “You think that’s what I want? To be a coward?” His voice cracked, and he looked like he was seeing her for the first time. “Better a day as a lion than a hundred as a sheep,” he said, staggering up to stand.
“Marco, that’s just a saying . . .”
He straightened before her, tapping his heels together. And even though mucus dripped from his nose and his Adam’s apple bobbed in his neck, he spoke with conviction. “Papà’s right—you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ll fight for Italy, and for Il Duce, and for the new empire. Like Piero.”
When he marched down the hall, Lucia was left alone, adrift. She perched on the chair in the center of the room, like an island, and wept.
Now Lucia set down the spoon, gritty with dirt, and picked up the oilcloth bundle. Without thinking, she opened it, fold by fold, to reveal the handful of jewels within. Her grandmother’s diamond earrings glittered in the moonlight, a pearl necklace coiled like a snake, and a ring, the humblest object in the bundle, weighted a crease.
Lucia plucked out the ring and held it up. The band caught the moonlight, and her breath hitched. Carlo’s face flashed in her memory: clove-colored eyes and a laughing smile. He was the opposite of the man her parents expected her to marry, with his radical, barely concealed beliefs. So why had she chosen him? It was a question she’d circled for years, and the closest she’d come to an answer was that she couldn’t resist. She’d risen to him, again and again, like the ocean toward the moon.
She sighed, fingering the ring. But, perhaps, there was another layer to her reckless love, to the way he’d compelled her. Perhaps he’d seemed like a way out.
She shook her head, and her feelings scattered like fish. She dropped the ring in the cloth and refolded it quickly, stuffing the entire thing in the hole she’d carved around the lemon tree’s roots. With the spoon, she scraped the dirt back over her most precious possessions, concealing them where nobody would ever look.
She might need them someday.