The Light in the Ruins by Chris Bohjalian Read Free Book Online

they really thought about it, a guilt that was rare in the cafés on that side of the river.
    In truth, Serafina had no idea whether her family would have been disappointed in her because they believed she was sleepingwith a man out of wedlock or disgusted at the idea that her closest friend was a homosexual. Her family had all been slaughtered before she was old enough to have a definitive sense of which was worse in their opinion, premarital sex or living with a gay man.
    The night after she had seen Francesca Rosati’s heart sitting black and still in an ashtray and then had espresso with Cristina, she got home well before Milton. She poured herself a glass of wine, got a pack of matches, and thought about the Rosati family—as well as her own. Their families were demographically identical. Or at least close to identical. Both she and Cristina came from families of five and they both had a pair of older brothers; in other words, the two of them had been the babies in their families, the youngest child and the only daughter. Cristina, of course, still had a mother and a brother; Serafina had no one and had had no one for nearly twelve years. Cristina, the two of them had determined, was nine months older than she was.
    Now she sat in her high-collared blouse and skirt in an ornate wrought iron chair on her and Milton’s terrace, her bare feet on the balustrade over the river, and watched the sky grow dark and the lights emerge across the river. She had most of her weight on her left side, as she did always when she reclined, careful to keep the back of the chair from pressing against the thick pink scars that spiraled like ornamental filigree from where her neck met her skull to her waist. It wasn’t painful when anything pressed against them; instead she would experience a tingling around their edges and then a disconcerting numbness in their center—it was as if her back was hollow—which could all too quickly take her back to those long days of agony when she awoke and there was little that anyone could do for the burns. They’d told her they had thought she would die; among her first words in response, they said, was that she wished she had. Apparently she had begged them to shoot her. Today she hid both disfigurment and disability. Only Paolo knew that she was unable to raise her right arm over her head. But he wasn’t worried; he’d told her one evening, shrugging, that henever expected her life would depend on her ability to shoot a bird from the sky.
    Now she lit a match and let it burn for a moment before blowing it out. Then she pressed the still-smoking tip against the skin on the inside of her thigh. She did this three times, tossing the three burned matches into the ashtray, and felt a little better when she was done.
    She recalled what Cristina had said as they were talking on the street outside that depressing little café near Francesca’s apartment: At least they’re all together now . Meaning Francesca and her husband and their two children. This wasn’t a clue, in Serafina’s opinion, because it was evident that whoever had killed Francesca hadn’t been trying to effect a heavenly reconciliation. Rather, it spoke to how unkind life had been to the woman—and how far the Rosati family had fallen since they had lived in that villa in Monte Volta.
    In the end Serafina had pressed Cristina for the names of any men Francesca had recently mentioned, and Cristina had come up with three: Giovanni, Aldo, and an American who was named either Richard or Russell. The American was married and lived in New York, but he worked in a museum there and came to Florence periodically on business. Cristina had no idea what either Giovanni or Aldo did for a living. Francesca hadn’t brought up any of these men in the past six months. Perhaps longer. Cristina couldn’t say whether her sister-in-law had a lover right now, but she guessed that she did because sex was how Francesca had smothered her sadness and