“There’s some good stuff about the Tolfretano, the Maremmano, and the Haflinger horses. There’s even a section on the cowboys of Lazio. Hey, you know what?” she said, leaning forward to inspect his face. “You could pass for one of those cowboys yourself.”
He quickly slid back under the covers. It must be a trick. The minute he relaxed his guard, she would pounce on him, maybe even kill him. No way would he give her the chance.
“I see you’d rather rest now. That’s fine. I’ll leave the book by your bed. Maybe later we could take a look at it together.”
Never, he thought, remaining as still as he could.
The next day, he found a bag of gummy bears by his bed. He thanked Nonna, but she explained that it was the nurse who brought them, not her. “She feels bad for what happened,” Nonna said, “and wants to make it up to you.”
“She’s a witch.”
“No, Luca, she just lost her composure. It happens, even to me and Nonno sometimes.”
Luca didn’t believe her. Whenever he saw the nurse coming, he turned the other way. When she tried to talk to him, he ignored her. On his fourth day at the hospital, however, she surprised him while he was leafing through the book on horses.
“How about a truce?” she asked.
He didn’t answer.
“There must be something I can do to make amends. Anything. Please.”
Not lifting his eyes from the book, he twisted his mouth as if he were chewing on something. He chewed like this for a while, then finally stopped and pointed to the horse on the front cover. “This one with the thick, long neck,” he said. “That’s a Maremmano.”
“It’s beautiful.”
Luca thought so too. “And very strong. The best horse for herding cattle. Nonno promised he’d get me one when I turn ten. I’m going to be a cowboy when I grow up.”
“Wow, I had no idea.”
Nina wasn’t telling the truth. She had had a long talk with the boy’s grandmother before she left the hospital the day of the now-infamous blood-drawing incident. After calming down, she sought out Letizia Taviano, desperate to apologize, having learned who the old woman was, and promised to do everything she could to make her and her grandson’s lives easier in the coming days.
“Yes, I remember her,” Nina had admitted to the charge nurse after being reprimanded for the incident. “I was here at the hospital that night ten years ago when they brought in the bodies,” she said. The old woman’s son and his wife had been so mangled after the accident on the highway they were practically unrecognizable. A head-on collision with a truck, the police told her. It flattened the entire front half of the car, but somehow the baby, secured in a car seat in the back, managed to survive. She still had nightmares about it.
Yet instead of comforting Letizia when she showed up at Santa Cristina again, the baby having grown to become nine-year-old Luca, Nina had behaved despicably. She wanted to kick herself, a lot harder than the charge nurse had just done.
“All you need now,” Nina said to Luca, “is a cowboy hat. Maybe that’s what I could get for you.”
He shook his head. “I already have three.”
Tentatively, Luca raised his eyes from the book. He noticed that the witch was sitting with her head turned to the right. That way, he could only see the left side of her face, where the skin was smooth and normal looking. He craned his neck for a glimpse of the other side.
“You’re looking for my beauty mark. Hah, now there’s a silly name for a port-wine stain,” she said, laughing. “A beauty mark. But if you want,” she said, shifting around in the chair, “be my guest. Pretty ugly, don’t you think?”
Yesterday, perhaps even a few minutes ago, he would have said yes and made a mean face, to hurt her like she’d hurt him. Then he remembered what Nonna had told him, about the nurse feeling bad about what had happened. “Well.” He hesitated. “No . . . not really. It’s not so bad.”
“It’s okay, I’m used to it. They used to call me melanzana in school. Lots of other names too. Like faccia bruta and rossa.”
“Hey, they call me rosso at school, too, because of my red hair.”
“No kidding. Then I guess we have something in common. I don’t know about you, but the names don’t bother me anymore.”
Luca was unable to take his eyes off the strange mark on the nurse’s face. The only other person he could think of with a mark like that was the young knight in the comic book series he and his friends followed. But Teobaldo’s mark was small and barely noticeable compared to the nurse’s.
“You want to touch it?” asked Nina. “It won’t bite.”
She moved closer and placed his hand on the right side of her face.
“It feels warm,” said Luca, “and wait . . . is there something moving around under there?”
“That’s a vessel close to the surface where you can feel the blood flowing by.”
“Cool!” Luca didn’t want to withdraw his hand. “Did you ever try to remove it?”
She shook her head. “Nowadays they have a special laser, but it only works when you’re a kid. They didn’t have it when I was young—at least not in Naples.”
Luca suddenly had a thought. “Hey, I have a friend who might be able to help.”
“Is your friend a doctor?” The last thing she needed, Nina thought, was help from a doctor.
“Oh no, he’s a lot better than a doctor. His name is Orlando.”
“Is that so? What does he do, this Orlando?” Nina cringed when she saw the bruises on Luca’s arms. She knew she’d manhandled the poor boy, but she never expected the bruises to be so extensive—his entire left arm was black and blue. The charge nurse was right to make her stay home the next day. She would have been right to suspend her for a week. People were fired for lesser things.
“He’s a cowboy with special powers who likes to help people. Like my friend Mario when he rode his bicycle into the ditch and nobody knew where he was. He would have stayed there all night in the cold and rain if Orlando hadn’t been watching out for him.”
“I see.”
“He told me where to look, led me to the exact spot where Mario crashed. And it’s a good thing, too, because Mario had broken his leg and was in a lot of pain. They had to take him to the hospital and put on a cast.”
“Poor Mario. But it sounds like Orlando is a good person to know. Come, I’m going down to the cafeteria for a coffee. I’ll get you a hot chocolate if you’d like, and you can tell me more about this cowboy with special powers.”
“Sure,” he said, jumping out of bed to join her.
7
Nina saw them talking in low voices at the nursing station, Carla and Giulia. Six days had passed since she received the letter, five days since the blood-drawing incident, and four since her twenty-four-hour suspension. She knew they were talking about her, because they stopped as soon as they spotted her. “What?” she asked Carla when Giulia left.
“Bad news,” she answered. “Crespi is being called in on the Taviano case.”
Nina winced. She’d been seesawing from one emotion to the other these past few days: the shock of Matteo suddenly ditching her; anger at the cowardly way he avoided her; and, lately, a terrifying despair that she had been waiting around all this time for nothing and now her life was ruined. But forgetting her own problems for the moment, she didn’t understand why Matteo would be called in to see Luca Taviano. He was a cancer specialist.