The Sun and Other Stars Read Online Free Page B

my mouth. I lean forward, looking over the edge of the next terrace into the darkness, and I can feel all the gravity of the earth pulling at me, as if at any moment I could drop into the abyss. And I don’t believe in supernatural stuff—really, I don’t—but all of a sudden I feel a shot of cold air hit me from behind, as cold as the air from the walk-in at the shop. I jerk my head around and look up at the shadow of Signora Malaspina’s massive villa rising several terraces above. It was built in the sixties by her ex-husband, a Hollywood movie director, and every third tile on the roof is actually a little mirror. During the day, it sparkles like a piercing set into the brow of the hill—discreet, but enough to change the whole face of it. Now, it’s dark except for one light in one window.
    I take another drink and keep staring at it. After about a minute, the light in the window blinks out, and the next window lights up. And the next, and the next. Seven of them, like a band of lights on a spaceship. The last one holds steady for a minute or more before there’s another flash of light, this time on the rooftop veranda, hovering over the whole villa. It stays on longer than the others, maybe five minutes, and there’s something about it that makes the hairs on my neck stand up. I start thinking about the possibility of aliens landing on top of Signora Malaspina’s villa, and my mind drifts to the comic Casella and I started the summer we were twelve. That one was called Manna. Pieces of bread mysteriously dropped from the sky, and when people ate it, it turned out to contain alien life-forms, which expanded in their stomachs like those seahorse sponges, eventually taking over their bodies and then their thoughts. Trust me, if we’d been able to finish it, it would have been bigger than E.T. Two sequels, kids’ carnival costumes, alien-shaped breakfast cereal, the works.
    The entire villa goes dark again, and there’s a great boom of fireworks from the pier. I turn toward the sea in time to see the red and blue flashes of man-made lightning, the embers like stars sinking toward the horizon, the cheers fading in the distance as I stand up and start back down the hill.

E very morning I hear a sound in my subconscious just before the alarm goes off. It can be anything—a gunshot, an old-fashioned phone ringing, someone laughing, a door slamming. Maybe it’s just a coincidence, or maybe it’s my mind trying to distract me and delay the moment that always comes—the moment when I realize they’re both gone.
    On Tuesday morning, I wake up to a great crash of thunder, but when I listen for the rain, there are only the voices of my neighbors floating up from the vico, and Jimmy’s truck idling in the alley. I go to the top of the stairs that separate my bedroom from the rest of our apartment like the crow’s nest on a pirate ship.
    “Papà?” I call down.
    Nothing.
    I pull on a pair of Luca’s jeans and go downstairs. Right after Mamma died, Martina came in and helped Papà clear out all her things, and Nicola Nicolini offered to redecorate our entire apartment for free. Restart from the top and all that. I think Papà must have planted him upright in the middle of the living room and said, “Make it look like no family ever lived here.” There are no photos and no clutter. Only clean surfaces, squared corners, tasteful shades of tan and brown, and a few carefully chosen, perfectly quirky accessories, none of which have anything to do with us.
    I get the rubber envelope of small bills and coins from the top drawer of the credenza and go down to the alley. Jimmy is sitting on the bumper, having a smoke.
    “Ciao, Jimmy.”
    “Ciao.”
    I’ve known Jimmy since he was a kid in the passenger seat keeping his papà company on deliveries, but I don’t really know that much about him. I know their farm is somewhere north of Turin and that he plays a lot of video games, but that’s about it. I’m not even