Arcadia Awakens (2 page)

“Welcome to Italy,
signorina
,” he said in heavily accented English. He wore a cap that looked like a paper boat, and a red-and-white uniform. Why silly hats would make anyone want to buy more chocolate she couldn’t imagine, but someone or other must have told him it would be good for sales.

“
Ciao
. That one, please.” She picked out a chocolate bar, the last of its brand, and noticed that the black nail polish on her forefinger was flaking. She quickly put her middle finger over it, but that wasn’t much better. She’d obviously been scratching something in her sleep again.

The salesman had a nice face, and there was nothing pushy about his friendliness. He bent down to get another bar from behind the counter. She took her chance to stuff four more into her jacket pocket while no one was looking. Then she paid for the one he was holding out to her, smiled at him, and went back to her place among the crowded rows of seats.

One of the fat tourist children was sitting there now and grinned cheekily at her. She wished she had the stapler handy, but said nothing and looked for a free space on the floor under the window, where she lay down on her jacket with her knees drawn up, straightened her dress, pushed her black traveling bag under her head, and closed her eyes.

When she woke up it was light, and the chocolate had melted underneath her. She threw away all the bars unopened, the one she’d paid for and the four she’d stolen. The boy occupying her seat watched, baffled, as the candies went into the garbage can. The salesman waved to her as she passed him. “Nice hat,” she said.

At security a flight attendant spoke to her when she reached the gate. North Italian, judging by her accent.

“Rosa Alcantara?” The woman wore too much makeup and looked as if she’d be the first to get herself to safety after a crash landing so she could freshen up her deodorant.

Rosa nodded. “That’s the name on my boarding pass, right?”

The attendant looked at the ticket, typed something into a computer, and looked at Rosa with a frown.

“It wasn’t me,” said Rosa.

The woman’s frown deepened.

“The hand grenades in my suitcase. Someone else must have put them there.”

“Not funny.”

Rosa shrugged.

“We were calling over the loudspeaker.”

“I was asleep.”

The woman seemed to be wondering whether Rosa was a junkie. A child in line behind her was bawling. Someone was muttering impatiently. A second flight attendant shepherded the other passengers past Rosa. They all stared at her as if she’d been caught blowing up the plane.

“So?” asked Rosa.

“Your suitcase—”

“I already told you.”

“—has been accidentally damaged in transit. Badly damaged.”

Rosa smirked. “Can I take your airline to court over that?”

“No. It says so in the conditions.”

“So I’m going to land in Sicily without anything clean to wear?” Without music, either. With nothing but “My Death.”

“The airline regrets your loss—”

Yeah, right, thought Rosa. Sure looks like it.

“—and will of course replace your possessions.”

“I had some really expensive things in there.” She smoothed down her sister’s old minidress. She’d been wearing it for the last two years.

The flight attendant’s mouth twisted, her chin wrinkled up until it looked like a peach stone. “We have experts who can check up on that.” And almost with relish, she added, “From what’s left.” She handed Rosa a form. “Call that number and they’ll assist you. At the bottom of it you can give information about the contents of your baggage.”

“Can I board the plane now?”

“Of course.”

As the woman handed back her boarding pass, Rosa’s fingers rested lightly on her wrist. “Thanks.”

On the shuttle bus, jammed between other passengers, she opened her hand. A gold bracelet lay in it. Rosa slipped it into a Japanese woman’s jacket pocket and put her earphones back on.

They had been in the air for three-quarters of an hour when the man beside her pushed the button to call a flight attendant.

Surprise, surprise, thought Rosa when the woman who had stopped her at the gate came down the aisle.

“The
signorina
here won’t pull up the blind over the window,” he said. “I’d like to see the clouds.”

“And lean over to look down my cleavage,” remarked Rosa.

“That’s ridiculous.” The man didn’t even look at her.

The flight attendant’s glance passed doubtfully over Rosa’s black dress.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Rosa sweetly. “They’ll get here.”

“I just want to see the clouds,” the man repeated.

“My window seat, my blind.”

“Wrong. The window doesn’t belong to your seat.”

“And the clouds aren’t part of the entertainment program.”

The man was getting edgy, but the flight attendant smiled with all the charm of a department store mannequin. “There’s a window seat free two rows farther forward. I can offer you that, sir, and in a couple of minutes I’ll bring you a glass of champagne. Please excuse the inconvenience.”

The man brusquely undid his seat belt and pushed his way out into the aisle, muttering to himself.

“Us girls have to stick together,” said Rosa.

The flight attendant looked around, slipped into the vacated seat, and lowered her voice. “Listen, kid, I know your type. Give me my bracelet back.”

“What bracelet?”

“The one you stole from me. The woman in the back row saw you do it.”

Rosa half got to her feet and looked over her shoulder. “That woman with the diamond earrings?”

“Give it back and we’ll forget the whole thing.”

Rosa dropped back into her seat. “If that woman accused your daughter of stealing rocks like those diamonds of hers, would you believe her?”

“Don’t you try—”

“Then why accuse me?”

The flight attendant’s eyes flashed furiously. She said nothing for a moment and then rose. “I’m reporting this to the captain. The carabinieri will be waiting for you when we land in Palermo.”

Rosa was about to reply, but a voice from the row in front of her spoke first. “I don’t think so.”

A boy Rosa’s own age looked over the back of his seat and stared gravely at them. “I saw a bracelet on the floor at the gate, right where you were standing.”

Rosa smiled at the flight attendant. “Told you so.”

“Come on, this is—”

“One person’s word against another’s.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “As for the police, it’s not that easy. The captain will tell you so. Anyway, that gentleman in front of me is waiting for his champagne.”

The flight attendant opened and closed her mouth like a fish, stood up abruptly, and walked away.

The boy seemed to forget the woman immediately and looked curiously at Rosa, sizing her up.

“Why don’t you worry about your own shit?” she inquired.

H
E LOOKED GOOD
, no doubt about it.

However, the law of probability told her the precise opposite should be true. No one who really helped you out of trouble was ever good-looking. It was never a Norwegian pop star. Or even the acne-scarred quarterback of the high school team. It was guaranteed to be some geek with greasy hair and bad breath.

But this guy was different.

Rosa scrutinized him for two or three seconds, then stood up. “Just a minute.”

She slipped out into the aisle and walked slowly to the back row of seats. The woman with the diamond earrings looked up from her magazine.

“If this plane crashes on landing,” said Rosa in dulcet tones, “then the chances are ninety-two to eight that all passengers sitting in the back of the plane will burn alive.”

“I don’t know what you—”

“The rest of us farther forward will probably survive. Particularly the bad guys. Life is unfair and death’s a real bummer. But enjoy the rest of your flight.”

Before the woman could say anything in reply, Rosa was on her way back to her seat.

The boy had folded his forearms over his headrest and was watching her as she sat down. “What did you say to her?”

“Told her we’d be landing soon.”

His eyes were an unusual shade of green. Her own were glacier blue, very light. If he mentioned them, she was going to ignore him. Simply act as if he weren’t there.

“I’m sorry about your suitcase,” he said, without sounding particularly sympathetic. “I heard what she said. I was standing behind you.”

“Did
you
wreck it?”

“Not as far as I know.”

“No need for you to be sorry, then.”

She examined him at length, since he left her no other choice. And he showed no signs of sitting down again.

He didn’t look very Sicilian, even though she could tell from his voice that he’d grown up on the island. Now she remembered seeing him at the airport in New York. Going on vacation to see relatives, maybe. Or back home after a semester abroad. Though he wasn’t much older than her, so he couldn’t be studying at some Italian university yet. Maybe it was the other way around: He went to college in the States, and was on his way home to visit his family in Italy.

She thought his face looked familiar, though she couldn’t have said whether she had ever met him before the airport. Straight, narrow nose; thick, dark eyebrows. A touch of cynicism in his eyes and around the corners of his mouth. He had tiny dimples even when he wasn’t smiling. His skin was pale gold, unlike her own. Rosa never got a tan, in spite of her Italian father. She had inherited her mother’s Irish-American complexion. And that, she fervently hoped, was all she’d inherited from her.

His dark brown hair looked as if he’d just been running his hands through it. The tousled strands surrounded a face that, now that she let her brain study it more closely, seemed to have something aristocratic about it. Not that she knew any aristocrats except from TV. But she instinctively knew that the word fit him. A touch more symmetry, a little more regularity and perfection, and he’d have been almost
too
good-looking, although his features still had to develop. Over the next two or three years they’d become harsher, more rugged.

“Am I keeping you from reading?” He pointed to the rolled-up magazine she had jammed between her armrest and the side of the cabin. She didn’t even know which one it was. She’d simply picked one up from the stacks of them on the way into the plane, just because they were there. Her usual impulse.

“No,” she said, but she took the magazine out and put it on her lap.

“Interesting?”

The amused glint in his eyes drew her glance to the cover. A self-help manual for men.
Ten Tips to Make HER Happy
said the caption above a photo of a couple who looked like waxworks. And in smaller print:
She’ll never get enough of it
.

Rosa looked up at him. “I write for them. Tips, firsthand personal stories. Tough job, but somebody has to do it.”

“You want me to leave you alone, right?”

“If I did, I’d just say mind your own business.”

His eyes darkened. Turning around, he started to sit down.

“Hey,” she said.

He looked over his shoulder.

“Why are you flying to Sicily?”

“Family business.”

With that he disappeared from view. She heard him settling into his seat. The back of it vibrated slightly against her knee, making her legs tingle gently and giving her goose bumps.

She opened the magazine and studied the ten tips.

They didn’t make her any happier.

As they were coming in to land in Palermo, Rosa peered through the small gap between the seats in front of her and saw the veins and sinews standing out on the back of his hand. His fingers were clutching the arm of the seat tightly. He had slender, suntanned hands with neat fingernails. On the other side of his seat, beside the cabin wall, she could see part of his leather jacket. It was no trouble at all for Rosa to reach into the side pocket.