The House at the Edge of Night by Catherine Banner Page B

“Here.”
    “You’d better shut up the bar at once and go to poor Pina.”
    The customers began an excited clamor. But Gesuina banged a steel pan against the counter, tipped the domino players off their chairs, and ejected them into the rainy piazza, closing the blinds firmly against their curious eyes.
    In the kitchen, Pina was standing in a pool of water, gripping her stomach with both hands.
“Amore?”
he said, taking hold of her, but she shook him free. She began to roam the house. All he could do was follow her. Up and down the stairs, through the kitchen, into the bar and then out again, leaving a trail of blood wherever she went. This he followed, desperately questioning: “When did the pains start,
amore
? And for how long? And how severe? And are they the same as with Tullio, and Flavio, and Aurelio, or different this time? Tell me,
amore.
You’re frightening me—you’re frightening the boys.”
    Indeed, the toddler Flavio had hauled himself up by the kitchen doorframe, watching with big eyes. Somewhere in a back room, Aurelio shrieked for attention, utterly forgotten.
    “It’s too soon,” Pina wept. “She’s coming too soon. I have to stop the labor pains or she’ll die. She’s supposed to come in February and it’s barely December now.”
    But Amedeo could see quite plainly that there was no stopping this baby. “Lie down,
amore,
” he said. “Try to push. There’s nothing to be done now but to deliver the child.”
    Gesuina nodded. “Breathe,” she exhorted. “Push. Breathe,
cara.
Push.”
    “No!” wailed Pina. “I won’t push! I mustn’t—I can’t!”
    “I’ll fetch the statue of Sant’Agata!” cried Gesuina, and went shuffling off into the hall.
    But before they could do anything more for her, Pina collapsed with a great heave under the domino table. Amedeo put out his hands and delivered the child.
    “She’s breathing!” he said. “Pina, she’s breathing.”
    “Look how small she is,” Pina wept. “How small. How weak. Amedeo, she won’t live and it will break my heart!”
    “She’ll live,” he said fiercely, as he rubbed the child dry. “She’ll live.”
    Still, something in him clenched in fear when he examined the baby properly. He saw how lightly veined her head was, how pink and translucent the barrel of her chest. He had delivered very few children this tiny, and nearly all of them had been stillborn. In the hospital in Siracusa, he admonished himself, they would have known what to do. It was no good now—how could this child make the sea crossing, in winter, in Pierino’s fishing boat? She would live or die here on the island; that was certain.
    “What about a name?” he said, as he opened his shirt and pressed the trembling child against his chest, the only warmth he could think of to offer her in that moment of confusion.
    “I can’t name her,” wept Pina. “I can’t look at her. Not yet; not if she isn’t going to live.”
    —
    NOTHING HAD PREPARED HIM for this fourth child. The baby was too weak to suck at Pina’s breast. She had to be fed instead from Aurelio’s silver christening spoon in tiny droplets. Pina could not stop crying, as though all the strength in her had broken. He closed the bar and took charge of the child himself, for now he found his world had narrowed, until the only thing in it was his daughter. He carried the baby about in the crook of his arm and at nights sat awake beside her cradle, under which he placed an old warming pan full of almost-extinguished coals—for the child had been born into the rain-blown island winter, and every draft seemed designed to kill her. The baby barely cried. Her head was still veined and her ears bruised from the shock of her delivery. On these nights when neither of them slept, he told the baby every story he knew.
    He told her the story of the girl who became an apple, became a tree, became a bird. He told her the story of the parrot who kept a young wife safe by spinning for her a