Arcadia Awakens Read Free Page A

She was here on family business as well, and it was complicated.
    Instead of putting the passport back in his jacket pocket, she dropped it on a vacant seat near the exit as she left the plane. The flight attendants could decide whether to give it back to him. It wasn’t Rosa’s problem.
    The eyes of the female flight attendant burned holes in Rosa’s back as she went down the gangway. She didn’t turn around.
    Family business.
    She wondered whether, for once in her life, Zoe would be there on time.
    The opaque glass doors hissed apart, revealing the people waiting beyond them. Behind the barrier stood generations of Sicilian families, with wrinkled grannies dressed in black—Me in eighty years’ time, thought Rosa gloomily—and bawling little kids holding balloons. Young women, all dressed up, were waiting for their husbands—or lovers. There were parents looking forward to the annual visit from their grown-up children living in the north. People in dark glasses holding handwritten signs and placards.
    But no Zoe anywhere in sight.
    Rosa was the first to enter the arrivals hall. She wondered, yet again, what they had done to her suitcase in Rome. Then she found that she’d lost the form with the number to call for compensation. It was a shame, because she’d whiled away the time during the flight by making up a highly imaginative list of expensive items of clothing.
    She stepped out into the open air, which was hot, even in early October. There was a concrete roof over the entrance area, with taxis parked by the sidewalk. On the other side of the road stood a low-roofed parking garage. She could see the Mediterranean through its latticework structure—white foam and the crests of blue waves. Falcone e Borsellino Airport, Palermo, named after two judges who had been murdered by the Mafia, lay on a promontory of land running out into the sea.
    No trace of Zoe here either.
    Rosa’s sister was three years older than she, and had been twenty for a month now. Two years ago she had moved to Sicily from the States. Zoe had been seven when their father, Davide, died, shortly after their parents had taken them to the United States against the wishes of the Alcantara clan. Unlike Rosa, Zoe could remember a good deal about Sicily. The old family property among gnarled olive trees and prickly pear cacti. Their aunt Florinda Alcantara, their father’s sister, who was now the head of the family.
    To Rosa, her aunt was only a blurred memory, even more unreal than her father, and nothing but emotions, hardly any clear images, linked her to him.
    All around her, people were streaming into the airport and out again. She stood there, lost, in the brooding heat, amid the exhaust fumes of taxis and buses, her carry-on bag dangling from both hands in front of her knees, and tried to dredge up from her mind some sense of coming home.
    Not a thing.
    Well, being a stranger would be nothing new; she’d had practice. She was only surprised to feel nothing at all.
    A military Jeep was parked on her left, behind the row of taxis, with a couple of armed soldiers in it looking bored. She had heard that in Italy the army was used to assist the police. But seeing them there with machine guns slung over their shoulders was something new to her. One of the young men saw her standing on her own in the sun and nudged his companion. The two soldiers grinned.
    “Don’t worry,” said a now-familiar voice behind her, “they only shoot at Mafiosi.”
    Alessandro Carnevare, pulling a wheeled suitcase along, had come up to her on the sidewalk. He must have gotten his passport back, or he wouldn’t have passed through customs so fast.
    “Alessandro,” he said, holding out a hand to her. His fingers were no longer cramped like they had been during the landing. They were smooth and strong.
    “Rosa.”
    “Anyone meeting you?”
    “My sister. If she hasn’t forgotten, that is.”
    “We can give you a lift.”
    “We?”
    He pointed to a black