John Domini - Earthquake I.D.

“Mother of God!” she screamed. “Mother of God!”

Then: “No more. I can’t. No way.”

Meaning, no way things should have come to this, no way she could live with this — this had to be the end of everything. A shocking thought, far removed from the person she’d believed herself to be. Yet the idea took over even as Barb moved towards the shrinking male heap in its bright summer-weight clothes. The two of them could no longer share a life. They had to divorce.

She came close enough to glimpse the damage alongside Jay’s ear, the blood down one twitching cheek. But she couldn’t bring herself to touch him. She knelt as if protecting herself, bracing her hands on her legs, easing into the cobblestone grit. Every move gave shape to her cold new certainty: for years now she’d preferred the family over the marriage. For years she’d found it hard labor, harder every day, sorting out a household with this highhanded money-maker. In these recognitions, too, Barbara suffered a horror at what she needed to do next. A shame as bad as the scratching at her nipple, for this undeniable future set her apart from the good woman she’d been. A loving mother and a solid citizen, one of the faithful who put in hour after volunteer hour down at the Holy Name Samaritan Center — that person too was toppled and stripped.

On her knees, on the stones, Barbara sought her kids. She rediscovered her youngest first, the twins Dora and Sylvia. Before the attack she’d been warning the girls to stay close, and now in no time she had her fingers in their hair again. Wonderful, that elementary-school hair. As for Barb’s two oldest, to find those she needed only look over her shoulder. John Junior, seventeen, had started elbowing through the sudden knot of onlookers after the thugs (but the boy was kidding himself, the thieves were gone for good: the bandanna had kited off, the briefcase was gone, and this was the end), while behind JJ trailed Chris. Her second-born was fifteen, less of a force at moving people out of his way but determined nonetheless. Like his big brother, though, Chris hadn’t bothered to run.

So that was the youngest hugging her belly, the oldest not going far. Between these two pairs, Paul at first went overlooked. Didn’t he always? Paul was the middle child, in middle years, eleven. Barb and Jay had fallen into nervous joking about how they’d done with him. “Guess we got Worst Parents of The Year on that one.” “Worst Parents of the Millennium, I’d say.” Now while the family fell apart, the end of the world on the first day of their new lives, Paul was the only child who’d kept his place. He remained on the sidewalk, the raised step that passed for a sidewalk, a block of stone that had once allowed a plebe to stand out of the way of a passing chariot. Maybe Barb had missed Paul because he stood against one of those parish posters that ask prayers for the recent dead. The poster colors matched the slim boy’s perpetual outfit: white dress shirt, black permanent-press pants.

He was staring past Barb at his fallen father. Later the mother would ask herself if she’d noticed anything in Paul’s face. The best she could recall, he looked the way he always did — barely with it. But it was after checking on the middle child that Barb at last took a moment for the man laid out before her. She got her hands on him.

The first shudder through her was the same chill of conviction she’d suffered the moment Jay was hit. She had to be rid of him. She’d been kidding herself, and so had he; by the time they’d boarded the flight to Naples, yesterday, they’d been dead and finished as a family for months at least. But then a different kind of trembling came over her. Barbara discovered her husband, her soon-to-be-ex-husband, was twitching under her hands. For the first time she saw how badly he’d been hurt.

Beside one ear blood was seeping so thickly that it had flowed uphill, into that eye-socket, as well as down across Jay’s face and onto the hand-hacked stone. Barb might even have smelled the blood, through the pervading volcanic dust. Might’ve been the blood, might’ve been an unfamiliar sweat, dung-like, involuntary as the spasms that racked the man. Some serious head-bone had been broken, some connection in the motor control. At the center of the temple, where the muggers had hit first, a wedge of interior membrane bulged up, gray, blue-gray, not quite drowned in blood.

Jay twitched and Barbara too, another prickle through her unslung breast. Her husband’s mouth was working, puckering, but Barb hadn’t heard him make a sound since that first impossible, orgasmic cry.

“Mama?” asked one of the girls clinging to her. “Is Papa all right?”

“He doesn’t look like Papa,” said the other. “Mama, he isn’t like Papa.”

For Barb, simply bending over him took effort. Jay had always been the one looming over her. He was twitching so raggedly that she had to steady herself just to check his eyes. Rolling up into his head, these exposed an unblinking white too clean and sticky for the infected streets, and the corners of his mouth bubbled with foam. After that Barbara couldn’t suppress another shudder all her own, another freezing touch of estrangement. The wife sagged on her haunches, astonished at herself. She should at least have pulled her bra back into place. But instead she went for her rosary, rummaging in her purse. A purse of some size and heft, now that she thought about it: a trip purse. You had to wonder why the thieves hadn’t gone after her instead of the hunky Jaybird.

But she got her rosary and, crosscut by more contradictory impulses than she could name, lifted the beads to her lips. You never knew what a Hail Mary might accomplish. You never could predict when the Holy Ghost might rock her with one of Its untraceable tugs, welcome and clarifying, unlike any of her other shakes this morning.

But prayer, just now, only afforded her more of the same. She recalled that she was no doctor, and that for all she knew Jay would be up and filling out passport applications in no time. She recalled that strangers were looking on, and should the man come out of this, it might be hours before she found some quiet space in which to let him know the calamitous truth. Still Barbara ached for her husband, in the pit of her bruised chest — and still she was through with him. She could see the end of the marriage even in Jay’s bloody face. If the man wore anything you could call a look, it suggested that the muggers’ blow had brought home to him the same severe inevitability. The same change of life. He’d lost consciousness to a wake-up call.

“Jaybird,” she found herself saying, lowering her rosary. “The Jaybird.”

But she wasn’t left alone with the runny unhappiness of his look, like a broken egg in which blood had spoiled the yolk. She enjoyed nothing like the Anglo notion of “personal boundaries.” Over either shoulder Barb could make out handkerchiefs in the air, faces against cell phones, and already four or even five of the bystanders had butted into the hunched and quivering circle of Barb and Jay and the girls. Someone asked a question she didn’t catch, someone touched her shoulder. And while the mother nodded over her rosary, nodded and murmured, there might even have been a bearded man beside her, extending a hand to Jay’s thick neck.

It should never have come to this. “Jay, we should’ve known.”

The husband had a position here: co-site-leader with the United Nations Earthquake Relief The United Nations. But this morning was something else again, a cartoon, cannibals and missionaries. One young woman appeared to be getting the madness on video, an oblong black camcorder at her eye. Now Barb became aware of the cries for help: Aiuto! Pronto soccorso! She knew the language, sure, and the handkerchief trick. When Barbara was growing up, when her mom was still at home, the young mother had still spoken the slang of the Naples periphery. Torre del Greco, that’s where Barbara’s mother had come from. Whereas this oversized delusional case down on the cobblestones, the man who’d hauled the Lulucitas over here, he was only some fraction of an Italian. He was a saintly-come-lately.