Her Sugar Mask

Chapter Two — Forty-Four

She woke when the sun was already high.

The rock was hot. Her face was against the stone, and there was a cut on her left cheek where the stone had opened it. She moved her tongue. Salt and iron.

She checked her body first. That was the second thing her father had taught her. The first was counting to twenty underwater.

Left arm: a hole on the outside of the forearm, entry and exit. The blood had stopped and set into a black shell. Her left thumb worked. Her index finger worked. The other three did not.

She tried to make a fist. Three fingers stayed where they were.

Right arm: it would take weight. There was a long cut across the palm where the blade had slipped while she was cutting rope.

Ribs: at least two broken. It hurt on the right when she breathed in.

She took off her jacket. The key was still in the pocket. She held it up.

The key was brass and very old, with letters cut into the bow. She squinted at it for a long time.

SAN VITALE.

Underneath, one number: 7.

She did not know the place. She went through every place she had been in her life and did not find the name. She put the key back in her pocket.

She stood up. It took her about a minute.

· · ·

The road was two kilometers away. It took her forty minutes.

Her shoes had come off in the sea. The soles of her feet were cut open by the stone. She drifted left when she walked, because the arm dragged.

At twenty past ten she reached the road.

A van was parked at the side, grey, facing south. Crates stacked in the back, fish scales stuck to the plastic.

She went around to the driver's side. The door was not locked.

She got in and reached under the steering column until she found the bundle of wires.

She had learned this at sixteen. Her father had one of the old drivers teach her, the year she passed her test. She had said, why would I ever need this.

You always have to be able to leave, her father said.

She touched two wires together. The engine turned, died, turned again, and caught.

She pulled onto the road. She drove slowly, because she had one working hand, and because she did not know where she was going.

She drove south. South was mountains, and there were no checkpoints in the mountains.

· · ·

At one in the afternoon she stopped beside a road.

A bar attached to a petrol station, three lorries outside. She needed water. She needed a toilet. She also wanted to hear what people were saying.

The television was on when she went in.

She had not meant to look. She walked to the counter and asked for a bottle of water, and then she heard her own name.

Her photograph was on the screen. Taken when she was twenty-three, at a party for the family lawyers. She was wearing a black suit and she was not smiling.

The caption read: THE VITALI FAMILY m******e · DAY TWO.

Her hand stopped in the air.

Two lorry drivers sat at the bar, one with a sandwich, one with a coffee.

"—they're saying it was family."

"Which family."

"Who else. The youngest daughter."

Giulia put the water on the counter.

The picture changed. The gates of a villa. She had lived there for twenty-six years. Microphones set up in front of it. A man in a black suit standing in front of the microphones.

Her uncle. Turi — his christened name was Salvatore, but inside the family only the police and the priests used it.

He was crying. He wiped his eyes three times.

"My brother's family. Five," he said. "Five. I only want one answer."

A journalist shouted, "Mr Vitali, do the police have a suspect?"

Turi looked up. He looked into the camera.

"I have something I want to say to my niece," he said.

Giulia did not move.

"Giulia," Turi said to the camera. "You were always the smartest one in this family. I know you're listening."

He paused.

"Come home. We are family. We can sort this out."

He wiped his eyes once more.

"Your father is watching you from up there."

· · ·

The woman behind the counter was looking at her.

"Are you all right?"

Giulia put her head down. She put the money on the counter. Her hand was shaking.

"I'm fine," she said. "I just —"

She could not finish.

She took the bottle and went into the toilet and locked the door.

· · ·

The toilet was small. One window, one basin, one mirror.

She put the water down and looked at herself.

Her face was grey. Her hair had dried into ropes. The cut on her left cheek had gone black. There was blood on her jacket — her father's blood, and her own.

She turned on the tap. The water was cold. She washed her face.

Then she took off the jacket and hung it on the hook behind the door. The jacket was heavy. It had drunk a lot of sea.

She reached for the inside pocket. She did not smoke. She only did it out of habit. Her fingers touched something.

An envelope. Plain white. Not sealed.

Then she remembered. Yesterday afternoon, in the kitchen. Her mother had called her in, put an envelope into her hand, and said: keep this for yourself, don't let your father see it.

Giulia had been looking at her phone. What is it, she had asked. Nothing, her mother said.

So she had put the envelope in her inside pocket and not opened it.

Her hands were shaking. She tore it open with her right hand.

Money inside. Fifty notes of one hundred euro, held with a steel clip.

A note was pinned to the clip. Her mother's handwriting, written in a hurry, the last letter dragged out long.

One line.

Don't come home.

Giulia looked at the three words.

Her mother had known.

Yesterday afternoon, when she pressed the envelope into her daughter's hand, she had already known something was going to happen. She had not said anything. She had not run. She had not taken her own daughter with her.

She had given her five thousand euro and one line of writing.

The line was meant for someone her mother believed would come home alive. She wrote it because she thought Giulia would go out that day, would come back, would see the chalk circles at the gate, and would turn around and walk away.

She had not counted on Giulia never leaving the house that afternoon.

Giulia turned the note over. The back was blank.

She held it in her fist for a long time. Her eyes were dry, like two stones.

Then she took the silver knife out of her pocket.

She began to cut her hair.

She cut it short and uneven, because she had one working hand, and because she could not see the back. Hair fell into the basin in handfuls. She fished it out and put it into a plastic bag.

When she finished, the face in the mirror was one she did not recognize.

Good.

She put the knife down. She looked at the mirror.

Then she began to practice smiling.

This was not something she had thought of on the spot. She had thought of it in the water. If she wanted to stay alive, she had to become a person nobody looked at twice. In Italy, a woman who does not smile is a woman everybody remembers. Her mother had taught her that.

She pulled the corners of her mouth up.

First time: too wide. Like she was selling something.

Second time: the eyes did not follow.

Third, fourth, fifth —

She counted.

At seventeen her hand began to shake. Not from the pain. From what she was doing.

She was going to turn herself into somebody else. She was going to rub Giulia Vitali off this face. Giulia did not smile. The town knew it, the city knew it, the whole country knew it. The papers had been writing it for four years.

She was going to become the woman who smiles.

Twenty-six. Thirty.

At thirty-nine her face had set. Her jaw was shaking.

Forty.

She stopped.

The woman in the mirror was smiling. The smile had one line in it, from the mouth to the corner of the eye, light and crooked.

It was her mother's smile.

Giulia raised her hand. She wanted to wipe the mirror, because she thought the mirror was dirty. The mirror was clean.

That was her mother's face. On her own face. Her mother had died that morning, three steps behind her, and the whole country said Giulia had done it.

Her hand stopped in the air.

After a long time she let the muscles in her face go, and she started again.

Forty-one.

Forty-four.

This time there was no mother in the smile. This time the smile was only a coat. She put it on and it fit her.

She looked at the woman in the mirror.

"My name is Rosa Amato."

She said it out loud. The window of the toilet was shut. Nobody heard.

"I came from the sea."

"I'm twenty-five."

"I'm not good at this," she said. "But I can learn."

· · ·

She threw the plastic bag into the bin. She walked back to the stolen van, moved the seat forward two fingers, and started it.

Half a kilometer down the road she pulled over.

She needed to know what happened next. She opened the phone — she had bought it in Cefalù with cash, two days earlier, from a shop that had not asked her name. It had no passcode.

First notification: the Vitali family m******e.

She opened the video.

It was her courtyard. The four long tables were still there. The cloths were still there, stones on the corners. Six circles chalked on the ground.

She counted. Six.

Five family, and her.

A journalist stood in front of the camera. The house was behind him.

"We spoke to a longtime friend of Mrs Vitali."

The picture changed. A woman in her fifties, eyes swollen.

The reporter asked, "What kind of person was Giulia?"

The woman thought about it.

"She never smiles," she said. "I have never once seen her smile."

Giulia sat in the van.

Muscles moved in her face. She had not told them to.

In the rear-view mirror, that woman was smiling.

It was the single second in her whole life when Giulia Vitali came closest to being Rosa.