The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

by Juliet Grames

  SHE COULDN’T HEAR BECAUSE of the crashing of deoxygenated blood in her ears. But as Stella knelt on the cold tiles of her kitchen floor, Tina was calling her. Tina had looked out across the lawn between their houses and seen that number 3 was completely dark; it had not seemed right. She still smarted from Stella’s comment about motherhood and thought about letting the malice stew all night so they could have a good picking-apart tomorrow. Stella’s three youngest sons, tuckered out from a hard summer’s afternoon, had fallen asleep on Tina’s carpet in front of the nightly news. Tina could have arranged some throw blankets over them, turned out the light, and spent the rest of this quiet Friday with Rocco in the kitchen, where he was playing solitaire. But instead she was overcome by a nagging desire to go next door, to see it through with Stella tonight.

  There was no answer when Tina called out for Stella at the front door. She caught the sound of Stella’s pounding over the murmur of the news and hastened to the dark kitchen. Tina didn’t know the Heimlich maneuver, but she did know how to whack with her fist and she had the strength of an ox, like her father. For once, she didn’t think twice or worry that she didn’t know what to do. She whacked. She whacked and whacked and the chicken wing slid free.

  Stella leaned against the sink cabinet, gasping. Her teeth were purple from grape sediment.

  “Tina,” she said finally. “Tina. I almost died.”

  “I know,” Tina said. “It’s been a while.”

  * * *

  OBVIOUSLY THIS NEXT PART OF THE STORY I’m about to suggest to you is just fiction, because I don’t believe in ghosts, I don’t think, and I certainly wouldn’t ask you to believe in them. But bear with me for a moment. Imagine that maybe it could be a possibility—that a little girl whose life was cut short might leave a residue of herself, literal or imaginary, that might haunt the loving mother from whom she’d been parted. Imagine that residue—let’s go ahead and call her a ghost—imagine that ghost stood by to watch her mother’s grief, suffered invisibly at her side, yearned for her soft touch and warm comforting bosom. Imagine how the ghost’s ectenic little heart might have broken to watch her mother replace her with another baby with the very same name, watch her pin her maternal hopes on this beautiful, perfect new daughter. Imagine what it must have felt like to have your life snatched away from you unrealized, and then to see all traces that you did live gradually erased by a more robust, more lovable, generally superior new version of yourself.

  I’m not asking you to believe in spirits or a soul that might be shut out of heaven by its own grief or envy; I wouldn’t ask you to believe anything I didn’t believe myself, and I don’t believe in anything. But what if we said that the power of human faith is in making things real even when they are not—that by giving imaginary entities our credence we allow them to assume power over us—to step into being? Because what is faith but a willingness to believe?

  And now the little ghost followed in lockstep as this girl, her replacement, blossomed into the life the ghost might have had if she had not been severed. Imagine she watched her replacement become beautiful, clever, beloved, wooed. Imagine the ghost’s hatred, her resentment, her implacable yearning for these things that her living sister took for granted or rejected outright. It might come to seem that she, the replacement, was the enemy. Imagine how the first Stella might have lashed out—imagine her violent impulses to teach that second Stella a lesson, teach her how precious and precarious life is, make her ask herself whether she deserved all the gifts she’d been given by fate. Imagine how it might have been those attacks themselves that shaped the living Stella’s personality, made her so stubborn, so self-protective, so shut off from the romance and companionship the little ghost craved. Imagine that now, after half a century of vengeance and diminishment, after one last good-faith effort to do her worst, finally, finally, she had her revelation.

  I understand why to the first Stella the second Stella might have looked like the enemy. I understand the jealousy and the loathing and the exquisite sorrow of watching your replacement take everything you were denied. But the Stellas should never have been enemies; they should have been the most faithful of allies against the monster they had in common, the man who had taken away each of their lives in different ways, who had never considered regretting what he had destroyed, who had tortured their sweet shared mother, the woman each of the Stellas had loved more than they’d loved the rest of the world. Half a century after he’d ended the first Stella’s life, bringing home his war flu and callously refusing to call the doctor; a quarter century after he’d taken away the second Stella’s life, beating her resistance away and forcing her to do the one thing she feared more than death itself; still, here and now, Antonio Fortuna was ruining the lives of other little girls.

  Why did the first Stella keep trying to kill the second? It was their father she should have killed.

  So now imagine this: the little ghost watches her sister—this collapsed, aching woman—choke to death, pounding her fist on the clammy white tiles of her kitchen floor, and she has a change of heart. As the littlest sister, Tina, comes running to the rescue one more time—how lucky that she is always, always there—the ghost thinks about how the second Stella brandished that knife, how in that moment, if only they’d had the courage, together they might have cut off his right to ruin any more lives. She feels a swell of energy, an excited beating where her heart would have been. As Tina puts their mutual sister to bed, the first Stella separates herself from her constant companion and drifts across the street, bonelessly traverses the aluminum siding—since, after all, she doesn’t exist—and slides into the old man’s bedroom, where he is wheezing in his dirty dreams. Even on a night like tonight, she thinks, he loses no sleep.

  The first Stella sits there on his dresser, next to the gold-plated watch he puts on for card games with the boys, in front of the framed Fortuna family photo taken Christmas of 1940, which has stood on its felt feet in this very spot since Mamma put it there fifteen years earlier, and the first Stella watches him sleep, her anger and hatred inside her cramping together into a shining ball, collecting all her bad feelings in her gut, just like the second Stella would have—for the first Stella would have been just like the second Stella in many ways if she had been allowed to grow up. All night she sits and watches him, her fury coalescing, until the old-world miasma of her settles on his skin and clogs his nostrils and even he can’t sleep through this anymore—he wakes nervously, discomfited, he tugs at his blankets and cowers under his pillow but he knows something is very wrong, she can feel his diseased old heart hiccupping in his chest. She presses down on him—she’s not quite ready yet, she hasn’t decided what she is going to do, but she isn’t cowed by him the way her sister is. He has never been her master.

  As the first twilight of dawn glints in the swampy dew of his backyard, Antonio Fortuna hears the soft thufft of his back door closing against its rubber jamb. It is his daughter Tina, come over to fix him breakfast before she leaves for work. Crazed by insomnia, his chest seizes with anxiety. The first Stella feels the skipping slap of his heart against his rib cage and she presses down just a little harder. He attempts to shove her off, but he can’t see her, doesn’t know what she is. He forces himself up, puts his feet on the floor, his yellowed undershirt and underwear milky and rank with sweat, and the little ghost cringes away. As Tony pulls on his burgundy bathrobe, the first Stella swallows her disgust and leaps onto his back, clamping her invisible little arms around his neck. She feels him shudder under her oppression. Yes, she will have witnesses for this. A ghost must be witnessed whenever she can.

  As he opens his bedroom door, Tony rolls his shoulders. He doesn’t understand the first Stella but he suffers her weight—he tries to shrug her off. “Tina,” he says as he rounds the corner into his kitchen. “Tina, help me. I don’t feel right.”

  Tina has set a pot of rolled oats in water on the range and is turning on the burner. “What’s wrong, Papa? Sit down. I’ll make you
coffee.”

  “Tina,” Tony says again. His voice is a goat’s bleat, a goat like the beautiful white pet goat he killed. “Tina.” And finally Tina looks away from her cooking and at him, alarmed. “It’s your sister Mariastella,” he gasps. “She’s going to kill me.”

  At those strange last words, the little ghost takes her cue and she squeezes her arms around his neck with all of her shining hatred and fury.

  And just like that, she chokes the life out of him.

  OBVIOUSLY, THIS NOTION OF A GHOST is all fabrication and fantasy, and has no place in an otherwise meticulously researched family history. Tony most likely woke up from a nightmare about his second daughter Stella, who had threatened him at knifepoint only hours earlier; that was surely what his last words to terrified Tina meant.

  At the hospital, where Tony Fortuna was pronounced DOA, they said it was a massive heart attack that had killed him. It’s not uncommon for heart attack victims to feel like they are choking, which explains why Tony had spent his last moments clawing at his throat. He died with his own skin under his fingernails and red gashes in his neck.

  Part IV

  Old Age

  A vecchiaja è na carogna.

  Old age is a bitch.

  —CALABRESE PROVERB

  Death 8

  Cerebral Hemorrhage

  (Dementia)

  THIS IS THE LAST TIME Stella Fortuna almost died. This is the Accident.

  IT WAS DECEMBER 8, 1988, but December 9 was coming. Stella, sitting in her spot on the couch, happened to notice the time at 11:52 P.M., and after that she couldn’t take her eyes off the clock above the television. She watched the minute hand tick up, and up, up, up. At midnight it would be the twenty-year anniversary of her mother’s death. Assunta had been sixty-nine years old; tonight, Stella was just shy of sixty-nine herself.

  There was nothing that marked midnight, the passing of an ordinary day into an oppressive milestone. The CBS news broadcast paused for a liquid detergent commercial. Stella tried to make herself feel any different than she had before. “Mamma?” she said into the open air of her living room, and then she felt foolish because her mother wasn’t there. Stella poured herself a glass of wine from the bottle she kept between her feet. Her hands were shaking, but that was because she had made herself jittery, so much wine and only some cold pasta for dinner a few hours ago.

  You pray to God for the dead, for the souls in purgatory, so that God will show them mercy through your faith. Assunta had taught Stella that when Stella was just a tiny girl, from the first time she had taken her to the cemetery to clean her dead sister’s grave. Assunta would have wanted Stella to say prayers for her soul. “Hail Mary full of grace,” Stella said guiltily into the flashing dark of the television-lit living room, but in this moment she couldn’t remember the words. She hadn’t prayed in years. It was so hard to focus her mind or heart on God these days—hard not to feel silly talking into the dark.

  Twelve twenty-three. Stella poured herself another glass of wine, then replaced the bottle, which listed slightly in the cushioning of blue carpet. The carpet was lumpy with age, the plush matted into pills, dark on top from years of shoe grime the vacuum couldn’t remove. Stella had been treading this carpet now for thirty-five years, as had her nine wild sons and her one straitlaced daughter and their hordes of friends and opportunistic acquaintances. Now the house was empty; even her baby, Artie, had married and moved away.

  Thirty-five years—it was more than half her life. She was more this person, this wife and mother, than she had ever had the chance to be any other person.

  How Assunta had loved this house—how proud she had been of her son-in-law Carmelo for buying it. How many hours she had spent sitting on this couch and dandling one grandchild or the next, singing old songs and shelling beans and laughing with her daughters. But Stella had spent many more hours there without her mother. Twenty empty years of hours.

  Assunta had suffered so many hardships—famine and illness and loss, an overbearing and neglectful husband, physical toil and pain and heartbreak. And yet she had loved her life so much. Here was Stella, now, the unwilling replacement matriarch, her body so broken and yet unbreakable, with none of her mother’s joy or effortless affection. She took a few swallows of wine, and also swallowed back her sheepishness and shame. “Mamma,” she said into the air, trying to sound like she thought she was talking to someone. She closed her hand around the bone cornetto Assunta had given her half a century ago. “Mamma, are you happy with me? Did I do it right? Did I do what you wanted?”

  There was no answer, of course. But it wasn’t a question Stella wanted to know the answer to anyway.

  IT WAS TWELVE FORTY, and the cold had crept in. Her arms in particular felt chilled to their bones, and Stella wrapped her shaking hands in the skirt of her cotton housedress. With age, her arms were becoming doughy and bloated, and the scars from her burns had rippled, obscured in loose liver-spotted wrinkles. Sometimes Stella ran her fingers over this textured surface that was now part of her body, thinking of the sandbar at Rocky Neck when the tide had just gone out.

  Stella embraced the warm thought of the beach. Assunta had loved the beach when the children were small. She wouldn’t go in the water or wear a bathing suit, but she packed her three-gallon yellow Tupperware bowl with cold pasta, another with an oil-drenched salad, and she made the kids eat all day long whenever they came in from the water—the ocean makes you hungry, she’d say. Pasta at the beach—everyone will think we’re guidos, the boys would tease, but they’d eat it, sandy or not.

  It had been at least ten years since Stella had been to the beach. Bernadette had invited her to come stay with her girls in a summer cabin for a week on the Cape last August. Stella had declined, but maybe next year she should say yes. What was she worried about missing here?

  Pouring herself another quivering glass, Stella focused on the cold, trying to let it seep into her chest and wrap around her heart. They said you felt cold in the presence of a ghost, but surely there must also be some other signs. It was December in Connecticut, after all, twenty-something degrees outside in the buffeting wind. She would need other evidence if she wanted to persuade herself she was haunted.

  “Mamma,” she said again into the dark, but this time it was just to hear the sound of her own voice.

  Now it was one thirty, and the local access programming had come on. The newly grainy sound and picture brought Stella back to herself. She was drunk and blurred and didn’t know what had happened to the last hour, but at the same time the core of her mind was lucid, a bell-clear fugue of mourning. She had never gotten a grip of herself, but a milestone was no time to get a grip.

  The wine bottle was empty. A sign that she should go upstairs and let herself fall back asleep. But she didn’t want to. She wanted to be haunted, and if she couldn’t reach her mother’s spirit, she would just have to haunt herself.

  Stella lurched out of the soft cave of the couch, sobered momentarily by the jingle of pain in her stiff knees. She left the bottle and the glass on the floor in front of the television—later, they would be forensic evidence for her children—and stumbled into the kitchen.

  It took her all the distance to the cellar door to get her bearings. Her heart was pounding, all that settled blood circulating once again. Her head spun as she braced herself against the doorframe. But the swirl ended quickly—she was not as drunk as she’d thought. What did it mean, this light-headedness? Was her heart about to give out, as her mother’s had, and her mother’s father before her? Sixty-eight was not a bad age to die.

  Nevertheless. She crossed the kitchen and drank two short glasses of tap water out of the glass that had been upended in the dish drainer. Should she eat something? She felt the water sloshing against the wine-pickled lining of her stomach. But if she ate, that would keep her up even later. Should she just go to bed?

  No. A piece of bread, a slice of American cheese from the frosted plastic deli bag. She collected her crum
bs in a cupped hand and dropped them in the sink. That was better. Her head felt soft and liquid, but the spinning sensation was gone. Now she would go get her next bottle.

  The uneven cement steps to the basement were narrow, like all the stairs in the house, not long enough to support the whole of Stella’s short, wide foot. It was not the first time Stella had wished for a light fixture at the top of the stairs, instead of the lone bare bulb whose chain she could only pull when she got to the bottom.

  The stumble happened when she was already two-thirds of the way to the bottom. This time there was no invisible ghostly hand trying to shove her toward her fate; this time, there was no one to blame for the Accident but Stella herself, grief-drunk, alcoholic, pathetic old Stella. She put her foot down poorly, too far forward, so that the front half of her bunion curled unsupported over the edge. She should have been able to reclaim her balance—there was the rail, the walls—but her hands flew out in vain, and she was careening down the stairs. Her head made first contact, her forehead smashing open against the corner of the wooden shelf at the bottom of the stairs, blinding her with pain stars. Staggering once, she fell again, backward this time. Too stunned to manage her own limbs, she hit the ground, her cranium bouncing once against the cement floor. Her ear registered the sound of the crack even as inside her head a roar of pain was swelling, deafening.

  She had made this journey ten thousand times—what had gone wrong this time? Her last splatter of consciousness was to turn her head to see who had pushed her. But there was no one there on the steps, only the dim blue flicker of the television reflected on the gray wall.

  STELLA’S EYES OPENED TO DARKNESS. Her head was pulsing with a wave like a very loud sound, but without any sound at all. She knew where she was—she was in the basement, she had tripped on the stairs, or something like that—something had happened and she . . .