Her Sugar Mask

Chapter Twelve — The Festival

She reached Nunzia's house at half past five and washed the blood off her arm in the kitchen sink.

The cut on her forearm had closed into a thin red line, the same line Nello Sciacca had opened on her before she put the stone through his head, which was a symmetry she did not intend to dwell on. She wrapped it in a clean cloth and pinned it, the way her mother had taught her, with the pin on the inside so it would not catch on a door, because a woman who moves through a village with one good hand learns to keep the bad one quiet.

Then she sat in the chair and let her eyes close, and the chair was the one Nunzia had told her to try, and it was better than the bed, which was thirty years old and had belonged to a dead woman, and she understood for the first time why Nunzia had said to try the chair, because the bed was for sleeping and the chair was for not, and a woman who has killed a man at midnight does not sleep in a dead woman's bed, she sits in a chair and waits for the sun, which is what Nunzia had been doing for thirty years, and Giulia had not asked why until now, and she did not ask, because some questions answer themselves if you live long enough.

She opened her eyes and the sun was on the wall and Nunzia was in the doorway with two cups and a jar.

"The festival is at ten," Nunzia said. "You slept through the bell. Dona Mimmo rang it twice for you, which means the whole village knows you slept through the bell, which means the whole village will ask you about it, so have an answer ready."

Giulia took the cup. "I was up late."

"So was the whole village. The storm took the banner off the church and the banner is older than I am, so that's a thing we'll talk about for a year, which is how a village measures time, in banners and the men who took them down." Nunzia set the jar on the table. "This is yours. A man brought it down at seven. Said you left it on his step in the rain and he doesn't eat lemons, which is the most ridiculous thing a Sicilian has ever said to me, and I told him so, in those words, and he laughed, which is the second most ridiculous thing, because that man does not laugh, I have watched him for a year and he does not laugh, and today he laughed at a jar of lemons."

Giulia looked at the jar. The lid was wiped clean. The date on top, in Nunzia's biro, had not been changed. Four lemons, quartered, salted, the way Nunzia had shown her, the way nobody under seventy did any more, the way her own mother had, in a kitchen in September, when Giulia was small and the smell had meant safety and not memory.

"He said what else," she said.

"Nothing. He said you'd know." Nunzia sat down with some difficulty, the way she did everything, as if the chair owed her an argument and she was winning it slowly. "The man from Palermo didn't come back, by the way. Peppe was at the bar at six and said the grey jacket was gone from the hook where he'd left it. Men like that don't come back. They go somewhere else and send a letter, or they send a younger man, which is worse, because the younger man has not learned that the village watches him back."

Giulia's hand closed on the cup.

"Which man from Palermo."

"The one who asked about you on Monday. The one with the cigarette he never lit. Peppe said he asked the barmaid if there was a woman alone in the town, young, dark hair, keeps to herself. Then he asked if she had anything wrong with her hands." Nunzia looked at Giulia's left hand, resting on the table, the three fingers that did not close. "You can see why Peppe remembered it. A stranger asks about a woman's hands in a village where every hand is known, and the village remembers, the way it remembers a banner and the man who took it."

Giulia drank. The coffee was black and very hot and it held her in one place, the way the chair held her, the way the jar held the lemons, the way the village held its secrets, which was to say badly and loudly and all at once, and she understood that Nello Sciacca had not needed to come back, because he had already sent word, and the word was a description, and the description was her, and the village that watched everything had watched her watch it, and that was the trap, that the only place she could hide was the place that saw her best.

"I have to go to the square," she said.

"At ten. Not before. The procession is at ten and if you're early they'll put you to work and you'll be carrying a saint all the way to the lemon grove, which is four hundred metres and you have one good hand, and the saint weighs more than the boar that came into the bar, which is to say a great deal, and you will drop him, and they will love you for it, which is worse than them fearing you, because love makes them look closer."

Giulia went at quarter to ten. The square was full. A wooden cart had been pulled into the middle of it, piled with lemons the size of fists, and Chiara was on top of the cart with her ring light and her phone, filming the whole square at once, the way she filmed everything, the way the village had learned to be filmed, the way Giulia had learned to stay out of the frame, which Chiara would not allow.

"Buongiorno, San Vitale," Chiara said to the phone. "It's the sagra, it's not raining, and Nonna Rosa is here, which means the festival is officially blessed, because the woman who put up the first lemons since 2016 is now a grandmother by default, which the internet loves, and the internet is why we are not a ghost town, which is a sentence my nonna would never say and I say every day."

Giulia stopped.

"Nonna Rosa," she said.

"That's you now. You're the one who put up lemons. In a village with no lemons since 2016, that makes you a grandmother by default." Chiara turned the phone. "Say the blessing."

"I don't bless things."

"Say anything. The internet loves a mystery woman. Three hundred people watched the storm last night and forty of them asked who the woman with the scarred hand was, which means you are already famous, Nonna, and famous is dangerous, so smile, because a smiling grandmother is not a threat, and a threat gets reported, and reported gets found."

Giulia turned away. She walked to the well and stood with her back to the wall, and she watched the square fill with people she had met in nine days, and she thought about the fact that a man who had asked about her hands was gone, and that he had not needed to come back, because he had sent a description, and the description was on the internet, and the internet found people faster than the police lost them, which Chiara had just said, which Chiara knew, which meant Chiara was smarter than she looked, which meant Giulia had to be smarter than both.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket.

She took it out. The screen showed a notification from an account she did not follow, tagged on Chiara's video, the same video Chiara was filming now, the same square, the same woman with the scarred hand.

Who is the woman with the scarred hand? She looks like someone.

Giulia read it three times. Then she looked up at Chiara, who was still filming, and she smiled, because Rosa smiled, and she walked across the square and took the phone out of Chiara's hand and ended the stream, and Chiara looked at her with her mouth open, which was a first, and Giulia said the one thing that would keep the phone in her hand and not in Turi's.

"Not today. Delete that comment. And the next one like it. And turn off the tags on this square until I say otherwise."

Chiara looked at her for a long moment, and then she did the thing Giulia had not expected, which was to do it without argument, because Chiara was nineteen and sharp and she had seen the scarred hand and the smile that did not reach it, and she knew a woman who had something to hide when she filmed one, and she did not want to be the reason it got found.

"Okay," Chiara said. "But you should know. The internet finds people faster than the police lose them. If someone's looking for you, they're already watching this square, and they don't need my tags to do it. They need one photo. And there are four hundred phones here."

Giulia gave her the phone back.

"I know," she said.