He rushed past her to the hall and pushed open Antonia’s door. The shutters and windows were open in here, too, sea air and sunlight filling the room. She lay on her back, a bouquet of gray hair on the pillow behind her, mouth twisted slightly open, a bird’s hooked beak. The pillows were fluffed behind her head, the blanket pulled neatly to her shoulders and folded once, as if already prepared for the funeral. Her skin was waxy, as if it had been scrubbed.
The room smelled like soap.
Valeria was standing behind him. Had she discovered her sister dead . . . and then cleaned the room? It made no sense. Pasquale turned to his aunt. “Why didn’t you tell me this last night, when I got back?”
“It was time, Pasquale,” Valeria said. Tears slid through the scablands of her old face. “Now you can go marry the American.” Valeria’s chin fell to her chest, like an exhausted courier who has delivered some vital message. “It was what she wanted,” the old woman rasped.
Pasquale looked at the pillows behind his mother and at the empty cup on her bedside table. “Oh, Zia,” he said, “what have you done?”
He lifted her chin and in her eyes he could see the whole thing: The two women listening at the window while he talked to Dee Moray, understanding none of it; his mother insisting—as she had for months—that it was her time to die, that Pasquale needed to leave Porto Vergogna to find a wife; his Aunt Valeria making one last desperate attempt, when she’d tried to get the sick American woman to stay, with her witch’s story about how no one ever died young here; his mother asking Valeria over and over （“Help me, Sister”）， begging her, hectoring—
“No, you didn’t—”
Before he could finish, Valeria slumped to the ground. And Pasquale turned with disbelief toward his dead mother. “Oh, Mamma,” Pasquale said simply. It was all so pointless, so ignorant; how could they misconstrue so completely what was happening around them? He turned to his sobbing aunt, reached down, and took her face between his hands. He could barely see her dark, wrinkled skin through the blur of his own tears.
“What . . . did you do?”
Then Valeria told him everything: how Pasquale’s mother had been asking for release ever since Carlo died and had even tried to suffocate herself with a pillow. Valeria had talked her out of it, but Antonia persisted until Valeria promised her that, when her older sister could stand the pain no more, she would help. This week, she had called in this solemn promise. Again, Valeria said no, but Antonia said that she could never understand because she wasn’t a mother, that she wanted to die rather than burden Pasquale anymore, that he would never leave Porto Vergogna so long as she was alive. So Valeria did as she’d asked, baked some lye into a loaf of bread. Then Antonia had Valeria leave the hotel for an hour, so that she would have no part in her sin. Valeria tried once more to talk her out of it, but Antonia said she was at peace, knowing that if she went now, Pasquale could go off with the beautiful American—
“Listen to me,” Pasquale said. “The American girl? She loves the other man who was here, the British actor. She doesn’t care about me. This was for nothing!” Valeria sobbed again and fell against his leg, and Pasquale stared down at her bucking, thrashing shoulders, until pity overwhelmed him. Pity, and love for his mother, who would have wanted him to do what he did next: he patted Valeria’s wiry nest of hair and said, “I’m sorry, Zia.” He looked back at his mother, lying against the fluffed pillows, as if in solemn approval.
Valeria spent the day in her room, weeping, while Pasquale sat on the patio smoking and drinking wine. At dusk he went with Valeria and wrapped his mother tight in a sheet and a blanket, Pasquale giving one last gentle kiss to her cold forehead before covering her face. What man ever really knows his mother? She’d had an entire life before him, including two other sons, the brothers he’d never known. She’d survived losing them in the war, and losing her husband. Who was he to decide that she wasn’t ready, that she should linger here a bit longer? She was done. Perhaps it was even good that his mother believed he would run off with some beautiful American when she was gone.
The next morning, Tomasso the Communist helped Pasquale carry Antonia’s body to his boat. Pasquale hadn’t noticed how frail his mother had gotten until he had to carry her this way, his hands beneath her bony, birdlike shoulders. Valeria peeked out from her doorway and said a quiet good-bye to her sister. The other fishermen and their wives lined the piazza and gave Pasquale their condolences—“She’s with Carlo now,” and “Sweet Antonia,” and “God rest”—and Pasquale gave them a small nod from the boat as Tomasso once again pulled the boat motor to life and chugged them out of the cove.