Chapter 3 - The First Footstep in the Dark
The wooden duck had no wheels on its left side.
It was an old German toy that Elena had found in an antiques bin behind the church in Union City—carved from a single block of beech, painted with yellow lacquer that had crazed into a network of fine brown lines like dried mud. The axle was a bent iron nail. When Sophia dragged it across the wool runner in Alina’s bedroom, it did not roll; it flopped on its side with a rhythmic, irritating *thwack-scrape*.
“He’s tired,” Sophia announced.
Alina was lying on the therapy mat that had replaced the antique daybed in the corner of her room. Her physical therapist, a twenty-six-year-old woman named Rachel whose ponytail was always too tight, had spent the morning working on passive range of motion. Alina’s legs were arranged like two bolster pillows—straight, parallel, covered in gray fleece pants that Rachel had praised for being “functional.”
Alina hated that word more than she hated the smell of the disinfectant.
“Ducks don’t get tired,” Alina said, staring at the coffered ceiling where sixteen carved rosettes looked down on her with identical wooden indifference. “They’re birds. They fly until they drop.”
“This one has no feet,” Sophia said, lifting the duck by its frayed yellow pull-string. She dropped it onto Alina’s stomach.
The wood hit hard enough to knock the air out of Alina’s lungs.
“Get that off me!”
“He wants to sleep on the bed,” Sophia said. She scrambled onto the edge of the mat, her knees sinking into the high-density foam. She smelled of cinnamon toast and damp corduroy. “Like the big dog.”
Alina didn’t shove the toy away. Her fingers, which had grown long and thin like her mother’s, closed around the duck’s neck. The wood was cold, smooth from sixty years of other children’s grease.
“You’re making him up,” Alina said, her voice dropping into the low, defensive register she used whenever her father asked about her pain levels. “The dog. There’s no dog in the yard. My father has cameras on every tree. If a squirrel sneezes on the south wall, three men in black jackets go out with flashlights.”
Sophia didn’t answer. She was busily occupied with trying to unfasten the Velcro strap on Alina’s right therapeutic brace. Her small, fat fingers lacked the torque to separate the hook-and-loop material, so she used her teeth, growling like a terrier until the black nylon peeled apart with a loud, tearing *shhh-wip*.
“Don’t do that,” Alina said. “Rachel spent twenty minutes getting that straight.”
“Your foot is purple,” Sophia said, peering into the open cuff.
“It’s not purple. It’s white.”
“It’s like the turnip Mama cuts for the soup.” Sophia poked the skin above Alina’s lateral malleolus.
Alina didn’t feel the finger.
She knew the finger was there because she could see the pale indentation it made in the flesh—a small white circle that took four seconds to turn pink again. She watched it with the detached curiosity of an observer looking at an exhibit behind glass in the Museum of Natural History.
“See?” Alina muttered. “Nothing.”
Sophia leaned down.
Before Alina could yank her knee back—not that she could yank her knee back, which made the sudden wave of humiliation twice as bitter—the toddler pressed her warm, open mouth directly against the arch of Alina’s right foot.
She didn’t bite. She blew a loud, wet, vibrating raspberry.
The sound was obscene in the vast, high-ceilinged room. It bounced off the gilded cornices and the oil painting of the harbor at Palermo that Marco had hung opposite his daughter’s bed so she would “remember where she came from.”
“Sophia!”
The toddler sat back, her mouth wet, her bangs stuck to her forehead, grinning with four front teeth that had a distinct gap between them. “It tickles.”
“It doesn’t tickle!” Alina hissed, her face burning. “I can’t feel you! You could cut it off with a bread knife and I wouldn’t feel it! Stop being stupid!”
Sophia’s smile didn’t disappear. It merely settled into that stubborn, opaque solidity that children share with stone walls. She reached out, took Alina’s big toe between her thumb and forefinger, and gave it a sharp, deliberate twist.
A needle of white-hot fire shot up Alina’s calf.
It wasn’t movement. It wasn’t sensation as the textbooks described it—no “tingling,” no “warmth,” no “gradual re-establishment of afferent pathways.”
It was an electric shock, sudden and dirty, like licking the terminal of a nine-volt battery.
Alina gasped. Her back arched three inches off the foam. Her shoulder blades dug into the mat, her breath catching in her throat with a wet, clicking rattle that made the toddler tilt her head.
“Alina?”
Alina didn’t answer. She couldn't.
Her heart was hammering against her ribs like a crow caught in a chimney. Her right foot had not moved—it still lay on the blue foam, tilted slightly outward at the unnatural, dead angle it had held since the November rain—but inside the muscle, deep beneath the skin where the peroneal nerve wrapped around the head of the fibula, something had snapped like a dry twig in a silent forest.
“Do it again,” Alina whispered.
Sophia looked at the toe. Then she looked at the duck. “Duck wants bread.”
“Sophia. Look at me.” Alina reached out, her fingers catching the toddler’s wrist—not gently, but with the desperate, clawing grip of a drowning sailor seizing an oar. “Look at me. Do that again. With your teeth. Or your fingers. Do it.”
Sophia pulled her arm back. Her small face tightened. For the first time, she looked uncertain, her lower lip pushing out slightly as she sensed the sudden, violent change in the room’s air.
“No,” Sophia said.
“Please.”
The word was small. Alina had not said *please* to anyone since the night of the crash—not to the surgeons who had told her to count backward from one hundred, not to her father when he had begged her to drink the bone broth Elena made, not to the priest who had come to the house with a silver vial of oil to say words over her shins that smelled like dying flowers.
“Please, Sophia.”
The toddler looked at her for a long time.
Outside, the first sleet of December began to tick against the upper windowpanes, a dry, rhythmic clatter that sounded like salt being scattered across parchment.
Sophia leaned forward.
She didn't use her teeth. She didn't use the sharp pinch that had sparked the wire.
She merely placed her two small, flat palms against the soles of Alina’s feet—one on the left, one on the right—and leaned the entire forty-pound weight of her body forward, pushing against the lifeless ankles with her shoulders braced and her face turned up toward Alina’s.
“Stand up,” the toddler commanded.
“I can’t.”
“You’re lazy,” Sophia said, her eyebrows drawing down into a line of ferocious, infantile disgust. “Mama says Matteo is in the garden because he was tired, but you’re not in the garden. You’re just in the bed.”
The name Matteo went through Alina like an iron rod.
“Don’t you talk about him,” Alina snarled. Her fingers caught the fleece at the thighs of her own pants, bunching the fabric until her knuckles cracked. “You don’t know him. You weren’t even here. You were in some dirt village eating tortillas while he was buying me my first skates!”
“He’s by the gate,” Sophia said, completely unbothered by the venom. She continued to push against the soles of the shoes, her yellow rainboot digging into the foam for leverage. “He was wearing the jacket with the shiny buttons. The one that smelled like the iron.”
Alina stopped breathing.
Matteo’s leather jacket—the heavy horsehide Schott with the nickel snaps on the lapels—had been burned. Her father had ordered it burned behind the incinerator three days after the accident because it had smelled of the high-octane racing fuel that had leaked from the Audi’s ruptured tank.
No one had spoken of that jacket.
Not Marco. Not Dario. Not Rachel.
“What did you say?” Alina whispered.
Sophia let go of her feet. She sat back on her heels, wiped her nose with the back of her purple sleeve, and pointed toward the corner of the room where the shadow of the armoire met the corner molding.
“He said to tell you the skates are in the boiler room behind the salt bags,” Sophia said, her voice dropping back into its normal, singsong prattle. “And that you’re a big crybaby.”
Then she grabbed her duck by the string, slid off the edge of the mat, and marched toward the door, her broken shoe flopping against the parquet like a wounded crow.
Alina lay on the mat.
The sleet hit the window.
May you like
In the dark behind her eyes, the electric wire in her right calf began to thrum—not with pain, but with the steady, sickening, impossible heat of an engine that had refused to die.
***
