The Witch of Little Italy Read Online Free PDF Page B

secret herself, she may have been able to avoid the last three and a half years. The secret? Damage. Cooper smelled damage a mile away. He knew she’d never run. She’d never tell.
    “Oh God,” she said into the air as a wave of nausea washed over her. The thick black of sticky memories sloshed up like oil. The memory of those months. Especially the first night she’d had sex with him. The night she lost her virginity. The night he hit her and put his hand over her mouth so she couldn’t scream. When she didn’t leave him, or report him the next morning, they both knew she belonged to him. And try as she might, Eleanor couldn’t figure out why she stayed. That week, when Carmen called, Eleanor told her mother what was happening. There was a silence on the line and then the question: “What did you do?”
    What did she do?
    “Why didn’t you tell me to get away from him? Why?” Eleanor asked the walls. Her chest hurt. A familiar void opening up. The rush of breath leaving her as her peripheral vision went fuzzy. She sat down in the middle of the floor and wrapped her arms around herself willing it all to go away. She searched the room for answers.
    On the back of the door a nightgown hung from a metal hook. A permanent hook. Not the plastic ones you find in the newer stores, the ones that go over the doorframes and make life more difficult. Just a simple metal hook and a pretty nightgown hanging from it. White with yellow flowers.
    Carmen’s, of course. Eleanor got up fast and grabbed for the nightgown hungrily. She yanked it off the hook and pressed it against her face while she did the math. Carmen left the Bronx in 1961 when she was sixteen years old. Eleanor wasn’t born until Carmen was thirty-nine, on the cusp of forty. That meant the nightgown had been hanging there for over forty years. And still, the fabric smelled like her mother. Spicy and warm.
    Relaxing, Eleanor slipped on the light nightgown. It must have been summer when Carmen left because it was sleeveless with lace eyelet edging and tiny buttons down the front.
    The nightgown worked better than any drug. All the terrible memories took flight. She stood in the middle of her mother’s room wearing her mother’s nightgown, listening to her mother’s Connie Francis record. Calmed, her hands went to her stomach.
    “I’m here for you. I don’t know who you are, or what’s in store for us, but I’m here for you. And I swear—I swear to God that if anyone ever hurts you, I’ll kill them.”
    She turned down the bedcovers like she’d lived in the place her whole life and got into the bed. It felt like a dream she’d had a million times. The comfort. Better than any five-star hotel. The city sounds hummed a soft lullaby, muted by the thick glass window and falling snow outside. Eleanor didn’t feel like being that snow anymore. She felt like being Eleanor Amore of the Bronx. Whoever that might be.
    Refuge is a subjective thing. It can be found in the most unlikely places. Cardboard boxes, underpasses, subway stations. It can be found in drug addiction, under thick layers of skin, and in churches, too. Eleanor Amore found her refuge in an old brick building throbbing with loss and possibly frequented by an invisible crying child. And as the darkness fell soft all around, each resident of 1313 170th Street went to bed with the knowledge that nothing would ever be the same.
    In apartment 1A, next to the room that would now belong to Eleanor, Mimi knelt by her bed and cried soft tears of gratitude into hands folded in prayer. She prayed to the God of her father’s family and the Goddess of her mother’s. Once Mimi’d felt that a new life was growing inside Eleanor she’d taken out her mother’s spell book and cast the Lost Witch spell. She’d done it alone, without her sisters, knowing that a new life opens all the channels of the mind. And her granddaughter had listened to her yearning and heeded the call. Mimi climbed into bed with more