But as she turned to go, Nina was seized by an overwhelming surge of anger. The old lady in her floral dress, her soft, doughy face and whiny voice, was especially annoying as she begged the boy to hold out his arm one minute, then positioned herself between the boy and the orderly the next minute so he couldn’t get close to Luca. “Don’t leave,” said the old woman, now begging Nina.
The indecisiveness infuriated Nina, and for reasons she didn’t understand at the time and would likely never fully understand, she took the old woman’s pleading as a challenge. “Fine,” she said. “Step away, signora.”
When the old woman didn’t move, Nina shoved her aside. “Let’s go, kid.” She grabbed the boy by the wrist. “I don’t have all day.”
“Nina,” Carla gasped, “what are you—”
“I’m getting blood from this patient, isn’t that what you wanted?” she snapped. Her head was pounding, the right side of her face turned a deep maroon. Rage welled up inside, toward anyone who stood in her way: the waffling old lady, the obdurate boy, Matteo Crespi—especially Matteo Crespi—the entire world. “We’re doing this now, you understand? Whether you want to or not,” she said from a cold distance.
“No!” screamed Luca, trying to free his hand. When he realized that Nina wasn’t going to let go, he spat in her face.
“Brat,” hissed Nina. “Get over here, Carla. Take his arms—sit on them if you have to. And you,” she directed the orderly, who looked like he was about to run for the hills, “grab hold of his legs.”
Luca squirmed and screamed, then bared his teeth and began to lunge at the nurse, but Nina stuffed a wad of gauze in his mouth just in time. “You’re not going to bite anyone else on my watch, kid,” she fumed. “Hold tight, everyone.” And with the boy subdued, she tied a rubber band below his shoulder, slapped the vein in the crease of his arm, and plunged the needle into his skin as if she meant to punish him. After filling one tube of blood, she reached for another. When the job was finished, she released the rubber tourniquet. “Done,” she said, scowling at him. “And you’re still breathing.”
The room went silent. Nina had completely obliterated every ounce of fight left in Luca. Shaking, he ran to his grandmother and burst into tears. The old lady was equally distraught. Wrapping her arms around the boy, she, too, looked like she might cry.
Only then, as Nina surveyed the mess of gloves and gauze strewn around the bed and the shocked expression on the faces of Carla and the others, did she realize what had transpired. The room was suddenly stifling. Without a word, she threw open the curtain and rushed out of the ward, down the stairs, and through the front doors of Santa Cristina.
Her hands shook as she removed a cigarette from the pack in her front pocket. My God, what had she done? She’d been a nurse for almost twenty years, known for her compassion and patience when everyone thought the sky was falling. And yet just a few minutes ago, the sky fell. She had become completely unhinged, ruthless, like her father in the kitchen on that terrible day. Pulling back the curtains around bed 6, she hadn’t seen a frightened child that needed calming, but a wild animal to be tamed. Somehow, she, too, had become a wild animal, pouring out her frustration and rage on him. She inhaled so deeply on the cigarette that her throat burned. Shame on you, she told herself. How would she be able to face her colleagues after this? How would she be able to face the boy or the old woman? She closed her eyes and shook her head and wished she could take it all back.
5
Giovanni Taviano had always been quiet. As a child, he had a slight lisp and was the last in his class to read. He met Letizia Moretti in high school. Gregarious as he was shy, Letizia couldn’t stop talking and making jokes. Maybe that was why they got along so well; they balanced each other out.
When Luca was admitted to Santa Cristina, Giovanni became even more withdrawn. He couldn’t sleep, ate little, and began to neglect work on the farm. The one thing running normally—running overtime, in fact—was his mind, playing and replaying events in the past and present until he grew dizzy and sick to his stomach.
Walking was the only thing that distracted him, so he walked. He walked in the morning, up one side of the wheat field and back along the other, around and around the cattle pen. He walked at night, from one end of town to the other. He passed through the main square; the church with its cemetery, where Paolo was buried; Ruggiero’s tilted house; the crumbling, ancient stone wall that Luca and his friends called the Castle. He talked to no one, and no one talked to him.
Giovanni returned to the house just before 8:00 a.m., the time they’d arranged for Letizia to call from the hospital. He waited in the empty kitchen, trying to stop the thoughts flooding through his mind, until the phone rang. “No news yet,” his wife announced. “But come, Giovan. Luca wants to see you.”
There was no way he could go, not after what had happened yesterday. Thankfully he’d missed Luca’s first day at Santa Cristina, which Letizia recounted in only the broadest strokes, afraid at how he might react if he heard what happened with the nurse. But Giovanni was present on the second day. He’d watched in horror as the doctor produced the biggest needle he’d ever seen and plunged it straight into Luca’s spine. He stood helplessly by, listening to his grandson scream while the doctor withdrew a vial of spinal fluid. It felt like the needle was being plunged into his spine, and he wished it were. No, he would not go back today.
I’m sorry, he wanted to tell Letizia on the phone, but all that came out of his mouth was a grunt.
Besides, he already knew what would happen. The tests were bound to come back bad.
He knew this as surely as he’d known it ten years ago, when he was standing in the very same kitchen—the one they’d lived in for half a century, with its washed-out wooden countertops and white-tiled floors, the stained pots and pans hanging on hooks above the sink, a picture of the Virgin Mary above the table—standing and holding the same phone in his hand, through which the news had come then and would come again today, bringing disaster anew to their home.
He’d known even before the doctor from the emergency room uttered a word that night ten years ago. Something had happened to their son, Paolo, and his wife on their way back to Milan. Something bad. Giovanni and Letizia had gone to bed a few hours after Paolo and his wife visited with their new baby, Luca. He was their first grandchild, and Letizia had made osso buco, Paolo’s favorite, to celebrate the occasion. The couple lived in an apartment near the University of Milan, where Paolo taught economics. They seemed happy, full of hope with their newborn son.
Giovanni’s legs were burning. He collapsed onto one of the chairs at the kitchen table. The phone, still pressed against his ear, the line long dead, slipped out of his hand and hit the ground with a thud. He didn’t bother to pick it up.
No, the truth was he’d known even before the call ten years ago that disaster would strike their family. As far back as the war, that night in 1943, the last days of December, bitterly cold even for that time of year, when the man in the tattered coat came out of the forest with his bundle to meet him. He spoke in a language Giovanni didn’t understand, German maybe or Polish. Still, Giovanni understood what was being asked of him when he accepted the bundle and the folded piece of paper the man pressed into his hand before running back into the forest. It wasn’t long after that the shots came, echoing in the frigid air—pop, pop, pop. He’d hurried away, pulling his hat down over his ears to muffle the sound. Giovanni had known then, even if only dimly, that someday every ounce of hope and joy rising from the swaddled infant he held in his hands would be destroyed.