John Domini - Earthquake I.D.

They hit the man with such force that dried blood flaked off his face and spattered their tender hair.

“Hey,” Jay said. “Easy there. Looks like Papa might be bleeding.”

The crowd was noisy again, recharged. The family too was a different animal. Barb wobbled back onto her haunches, back until she would’ve fallen if her two oldest hadn’t sunk down behind her, Chris and John Junior coming into the huddle with faces slack and wowed while the twins went on cuddling Pop. Only Paul didn’t fit the pattern, Paul again, finding a place apart along the wall. Barb sank into the heavy smell of two teens who’d been up the block and back, of her own 360-degree whirling, while before them Jay fell into a scab-flicking match with two eight-year-olds. The impossible coagulation dotted the mother’s kneecaps and skirt.

But Paul kept separate, rather prim on his knees. His shirt remained white except for street dust and his look was weary but serene. Told you so .

Barbara would’ve fallen if not for her two teenagers, and she couldn’t seem to get a decent look at her husband’s injury. Hadn’t the thieves cracked his skull open? She had no trouble remembering the welling blood, the bulging viscera. Could a touch and a whisper really have fixed it? A touch and a dream? Certainly her Jaybird appeared, against the clean white mortar of the repaired lower wall, as handsome as ever. Jay’s looks had if anything improved since he’d hit forty, his hair richly Mediterranean and his face flexibly Irish. At times his head suggested one of those noble and tragic officer’s portraits from the Civil War.

But before Barbara could finish her examination, a local got in the way. The interloper might’ve been the same as before, he had the goatee. This time the mother could peg him as a professional type, and more than likely a doctor. With those glasses, those wattles beneath his beard, he looked to be pushing seventy. As he once more reached for Jay without asking, an old man with a task, his stare metallic, Barb had no choice but to acknowledge it had all taken place the way she remembered. The head-wound had been real, and divorce was the only solution. The blow could easily have killed her husband, or it could’ve left him strapped in a wheelchair and brain-damaged — all threats to which the Lulucitas should never have been exposed in the first place — all of it no less of an actual alternative life than her own twenty years as a good wife and mother.

Under the old man’s spectacled stare, the twins broke off the scab fight. When he reached the father’s neck, Jay tucked his chin. “Hey!”

He tucked his chin and hiked his shoulders. An owl, Barb thought blackly. You have the nerve to call me an owl.

“A moment please.” The man’s accent had a touch of the British. “A moment only, signore . I need the pulse.”

“The pulse?” Jay got one arm around the girls. “What, like I’m dying?”

“Papa, don’t joke.” Sounded like Sylvia. “We were worried.”

Jay let the man do as he wished, while what felt like everyone within walking distance leaned in for a closer look. Someone in the crowd said “Miracolo,” or perhaps four or five of them did, as the doctor probed the formerly broken temple and the woman with the video-camera bent in for a close-up. The girls in Jay’s lap couldn’t help but turn towards the whirring, and Barbara too, blinking back at the mechanical blink of the red recording light. A bloody electronic pulse as unrelenting as the anger that remained the closest thing to clarity she’d found.

Meanwhile however her husband had other worries. Jay had begun to run his hands over the stones nearby. In another half a minute, in spite of the doctor’s ministrations, Jay was searching the area in earnest.

“Where’s the bag?” he asked.

He shook off both the old man and the children and hopped up into a squat, agile enough to make the crowd shuffle back.

“The bag? The credit cards, all our ID? The passports —hey, Barb!”

Cocked as far from him as her knees would allow, she braced herself against his look. He wasn’t an owl now, not up on all fours like this, his eyes rimmed in browned blood. Barb instead saw some earthbound nocturnal scavenger, a coon over garbage. And she was nothing but tooth and claw in return. Jay might still be confused but not her, no longer; she’d torn through to the end of everything. This morning she’d at last found the guts to admit how bad things had gotten back in Bridgeport.

If he’d asked her something, Barbara had forgotten the question. She’d lost the feeling below her knees.

“Barb?” he called. “Hey, where is it? What happened, anyway? Why is everyone staring at me?”

Wrong, Jay. Barb granted that she was staring at him, and the kids too. But otherwise he was woefully wrong, this man she needed to speak with in private, just as soon as possible. Everyone else in that close-packed block, both the gang down on the stones that smelled of manure and the stay-at-homes up in the windows flung open amid the morning laundry — everyone else, including the lucky one with the camera and the now-empty-handed doctor and a tall woman in too much jewelry who may have been Barbara’s whispery love-angel (the mother caught glimpses of them all, in her antsy paralysis) — everyone else was looking at Paul.

Whenever Barbara had imagined the end of her marriage — and today she was coming to realize how often she’d done it — she’d pictured it happening anywhere but Italy. Americans in Italy, that was a different story. A story with a happy ending, in which some tightly-wound Anglo arrives in this sultry country, more than halfway to Africa, and rediscovers the joy of sultry, of a steaming meal and an eventful bedtime. Barb had seen the movie a hundred times. The refinement of the French horns as the branches of the fig tree ripple before the Renaissance tower…the rekindling of an Iowan’s kisses as the setting sun winks between the Roman brickwork…Often the romance blossomed in some high-collared era a few earthquakes previous, Henry James, whatever. Or the chilly figure in need of a snuggler’s renewal might be British, made no difference. Once they undid that first button, Italy was the opposite of divorce. It was a country, Barbara came to think, for someone like Jay’s mother.

For Grandma Aurora, the love-tomato never lost its juice. The old bohemian had gone so far as to promise, as the family prepared for the journey, that she would “jet over soon.” She wanted “a taste of that dolce vita.”

Today as Barb cooled her heels in some sort of downtown health clinic, repeatedly failing to wangle so little as five minutes alone with her husband-for-now, she had time to understand his mother. Should Aurora Lulucita sashay into the examination rooms this very minute, she wouldn’t even need to touch up her eyeliner and lipstick in order to vamp for someone like Dottore DiPio, here. DiPio was the one who’d put Jay though those hurried examinations out on the dusty cobblestone, and after that the old medico had taken over. He’d overridden any suggestions from the police who’d arrived on the scene, and cowed the ambulance drivers as well, showing such an eagerness for the case that Barb recalled her mother-in-law. Aurora too was seventy-something, yet still fired by a craving that blew past any notion of embarrassment.

The grandmother however was all about man-chasing; this doctor on the other hand wanted to track down a miracle. He’d had the Lulucitas brought to this — what would you call it? A palazzo put up a good two hundred years ago, converted now to slapdash cubicles and unexpected staircases. Here DiPio had proprietary rights. He made sure to get the family’s local phone and address, by hand rather than on computer, using the long, whip-crack L of formal European penmanship. He asked again and again about the head wound, the exposed cerebral membrane. At times it seemed like the questions arose directly from the doctor’s goatee, if not from a cluster of neckwear beneath that unruly salted bush. DiPio wore not only a crucifix, but also a medallion of the former saint Christopher. Whenever he wasn’t touching somebody else the old man was fingering this bric-a-brac, though in time he impressed Barbara with a formality of bearing at odds with his free-handedness. After a couple of hours in the man’s clinic, she had to conclude he had little in common with her sensualist in-law. He might be Neapolitan but he was no teeming Sophia Loren, nor any hot-lipped stud, aglow before a pizza oven. Rather, the family’s new caregiver was so God-minded, he’d fingered his Mr. Christopher until it was flat and dark.