Page 72 of Never Tear Us Apart
‘Of course.’ Stella thinks for a moment. ‘You stay with her. I will fetch him. Hold her hand. Talk to her as her mother would. Do not let her feel alone.’
She stands up, and I take her place, picking up the girl’s hand. It’s freezing cold, even though her body radiates heat.
‘I will return presently,’ Stella says as she closes the door, and I’m alone with Vittoria. She is not the first dying person I have sat with.
Mum was the first, and then . . . then Saria. The little girl I met that day far away from now. The little girl I took with me into the underground garage to escape the missiles. When the building collapsed, she was fatally crushed, but she didn’t die immediately. For a little while she cried asking for her mother. So even though I could not see her, I knew she was alive – and dying – her tiny body trapped somewhere beneath mine. I had sat with Saria, holding her hand until it went cold, pinned in the dark until aid workers came. Knowing for each long second that I had led her to her death.
With Mum, I talked her through her last morphine-fed fantasies. We marvelled together at the opening of the starry firmament of heaven she told me she could see right above her head.
With Saria, I sang nursery rhymes, long after she could hear them.
For Vittoria, I am lost. What have I to give this girl, who should have had so much more? In the end, all I have is the kindness of lies.
‘Mama?’ Vittoria whispers, breaking my train of thought. ‘Mama?’
‘I’m here,’ I say softly, wishing I could speak Maltese. ‘I’m with you.’
A wail sounds from outside the open window, soon joined by more sobs outside the door. A few seconds later, Stella ushers in a young priest, who crosses to the bed, his solemn gaze settling on Vittoria’s face. I start to get up, but Stella shakes her head.
‘Keep talking,’ she says. ‘Let her hear her mother’s love.’
In the minutes that follow, I hold her hand, murmuring gently under my breath, repeating all the words of comfort my own mother used to whisper to me when I lay awake, afraid of the dark. I listened to the prayers spoken over her, watching the priest anoint her forehead with oil. Finally, Stella lets the others in, and they take turns to kiss her goodbye.
We wait together until the air-raid sirens wail again, and we hear the sound of aircraft in the sky. No one leaves.
Outside in the open, the world explodes in a roar. The building vibrates; plaster showers down from the ceiling. Fires from the harbour cast their dancing shadows across the wall. As the hours pass, Stella comes to stand with me, her hand on my shoulder. The priest continues to pray, and her friends, the last family she will ever have, kneel at her bedside, keeping vigil. We all understand the danger of remaining here, and yet we stay. Perhaps the others feel as I do: that this room, in these hours, exists outside time and space, as if the universe has bowed its head just for Vittoria.
And then finally, just as the evening falls silent once again, Vittoria lets out a long rattling breath and the room becomes profoundly quiet.
Vittoria Palermo, seventeen years of age, has gone from this world, and perhaps from all the others, too.
Chapter Forty-Nine
‘Thank you for your help,’ Stella says sometime later. We are sitting on the steps of Christina’s house, waiting for her to come back from the shelter. The street is twilight-purple, still quiet after the raid. Stella is smoking. ‘You were steady and strong. Why did you come?’
‘Christina told me where you were,’ I say.
Stella doesn’t respond; she simply shrugs, as though accepting this as enough of an answer. And I know it’s because, for her, it is: she would have done exactly the same. When I look at her profile, I see my father, a little of Kathryn and quite a lot of myself: the long, narrow roman nose and dimpled chin; the strong jaw-line and thick dark hair. I inherited my mother’s pale complexion, but that’s all. The rest of me is my father, from the shape and colour of my eyes to my enduring ability to hold a grudge.
I never knew Stella. I barely even knowabouther. She died when my father was a child – that much I always understood, and it never mattered really, until now. I’ve never known her, not even through his memories, and she never seemed real. But now, I know that this brilliant, determined, compassionate woman will be killed just a few days from now, and behind her, she will leave a devastation that spans generations. There is no one else in the whole of existence who can change that but me. Fear and fury pulse in my veins.
‘It’s hard to say this after what we have both just been through, but it’s important, Stella. I need you to listen.’
Stella takes a deep drag on her cigarette, shoots me a querying look.
‘I’m angry with you,’ I tell her.
‘Everyone always is,’ she says, with a shrug. ‘They want me in a hundred places with all the medicine in the world. But I can only ever be in one, and whatever I bring, it is never enough.’
‘No, that’s not why.’ I drop my head. I know this isn’t the right time. After all, I just watched her do all she could for a young woman we both liked and cared for. That was the best of Stella. Who am I to find fault with her now? But there will never be a right time, and soon there will be no time at all, not for Stella.
‘I found David, alone and crying, at the other end of the island.’ I gesture in the vague direction of Mellieha. ‘You just left him. He’s five years old, and you left him all alone.’
Stella turns to look at me, her expression one of deep weariness. ‘Ah, I thought perhaps you were different,’ she says, dropping her cigarette stub and grinding it under her toe.
‘What do you mean?’ I ask.
‘I thought you British women were progressive. You do your bit, yes? Christina at the war room, you a journalist. I thought you understood my work is vital. Especially now.’
