Work Text:
It happens like this: Trish is lying on the hardwood floor, looking at an ad for Eres lingerie, and from the kitchen she hears Spice Girl say, “Hello.”
It’s October—the kind of windy, red October that would make other Octobers jealous. Outside, the sky is a dark and discontented gray, and it’s been raining for almost three days. Trish can hear that rain now, how it clatters heavy and ceaseless against the windowpanes, how it agitates the sea out past the cliffs. Tomorrow is Saturday.
Beneath the rain runs the fabric of life: the shower, and the banging of the heater, and the subtle simmering of whatever sauce Narancia’s got on the stove. Spice Girl’s greeting, which is shy and quiet to begin with, is almost buried by all of this, but it’s not like Trish wouldn’t notice. It comes from her, too, or some gentle corner of her, tucked away between heartbeats.
She turns her head to the side, toward the kitchen, and sees Spice Girl floating in a crouch by the table, staring attentively at a tiny pilot inside of Aerosmith’s open cockpit. Then she turns back to the magazine, realizes that there’s a tiny pilot inside of Aerosmith’s open cockpit, and sits up.
“Um,” she says when she’s come to a halt at the edge of the table. Aerosmith is parked on a trivet. “Um.”
“Do not be alarmed,” says Spice Girl.
Trish isn’t—not really. Not yet. She bends closer as unobtrusively as she can.
She’s never actually seen the inside of Aerosmith before—she hadn’t even realized that the canopy could open—there’s an array of perfectly detailed miniature flight instruments, tiny buttons and levers and dials, as complex as she’d expect from a real airplane. Facing all of it is a single seat, and in the seat is a person. Well, a Stand that’s shaped like a person.
It’s small. It gazes back at her with iridescent purple eyes, beetle-like. It has an oxygen mask on; the tube vanishes into a corner of the craft that Trish can’t quite discern. It’s wearing a helmet, too, with the goggles pushed up. If Trish squints, its body looks adjacent to a uniform, smooth as metal. There’s a familiar kind of kilt around its waist.
“That is Mr. Smith,” Spice Girl tells her. “He is very shy.”
“Oh.” Trish nods awkwardly in greeting. “Hi?”
Mr. Smith looks at her for a moment longer, not exactly evaluating her but taking stock, observing. When he’s satisfied, he touches two gloved fingers to his temple and flicks them out in a salute. And then the canopy slides shut.
Spice Girl gives a tiny wave to the windshield, through which Trish can almost make out Mr. Smith’s silhouette, and says, “He was glad to meet you.”
Trish lets that sink in. After a moment, Aerosmith’s propeller starts up again, and it launches off of the table, zipping down the hallway and out of sight.
Spice Girl drifts elsewhere, probably to watch the sauce on the stove bubble (one of her favorite activities). In the meantime, Trish stands there with her arms folded, staring at the now-vacant trivet, and listens to the rain. From the bathroom, she can hear Narancia singing, or trying to—he’s always, always sharp. He’s probably doing that thing where he holds her shampoo bottle like a microphone. Step from the road to the sea to the sky—
“Ah,” Spice Girl exclaims from the kitchen, with the level of wonder Trish would expect if she’d unearthed a lost civilization. “I found the bay leaf.”
A gesture of ease, Bucciarati called it, one side of his body rimmed in gold from the setting sun. In the absence of danger, we permit ourselves to exist in larger ways.
Trish looked down at the glass in her hands, at the half-melted ice cubes and the single lemon slice wedged among them. She was curled up on Bucciarati’s blue cabriole sofa, facing the French doors that opened onto the balcony where Bucciarati stood. It was a sultry afternoon in August, blue in all directions, and she had not yet grown accustomed to Naples in summer: the stubborn heat, the open windows. She had not yet grown accustomed, either, to Bucciarati’s voice, without its steel, or to Bucciarati’s face, without its pain; or to the taste of the iced tea that he would always make for her when she came, clean and unsweet.
At least, he went on, and turned gradually to face her, the wind blowing his hair to one side, that’s what I think.
In the handful of months that Trish had lived in Naples, it had gotten to be a habit for her to drop in on the house Bucciarati and Abbacchio shared, a stone’s throw from the Palace of Spirits. It took twenty minutes for her to walk there from her own house, which was a strange thing to own at sixteen, but it wasn’t the first strange thing that she’d come to own and she doubted it would be the last. On this particular day, she’d come with a question.
She figured that Bucciarati’s theory—about existing in larger ways—was as good an explanation as any for the somewhat recent phenomenon of Spice Girl emerging from her unbidden, not in response to danger or fear but for the sake of observing sunflowers, inspecting apples, tracking clouds. It wasn’t as though this behavior was exclusive to her, either; in fact when Trish had dropped in on Giorno the week before, she’d been bewildered to see Gold Experience folding the laundry; when she’d run into Narancia at the convenience store last night, she’d caught Aerosmith trying to monitor the Quadratini.
It was a far cry from wounds closing, from guns firing. It was just—
Living, Bucciarati said, and despite the thread of a smile on his face Trish had sensed a familiar disbelief. Full of surprises, isn’t it?
Trish glanced out at the balcony again, where Spice Girl and Sticky Fingers were hunched curiously over an urn with a lemon tree sapling, memorizing the leaves.
Tell me about it, she said.
On Sunday morning, Trish asks, “What do you two talk about?”
Narancia had left for work before the sun had come up. Trish had pretended to be asleep so he wouldn’t feel bad, but she always wakes up the moment he gets out of bed, attuned to the motions of departure. It’s nice, in its way, to listen to him move around the house in the dark, the hum of Aerosmith’s engine trailing in his wake. A gesture of ease.
It’s raining again today. She’s supposed to have an interview with Amica at 11:00, but she sort of feels like canceling. She hasn’t decided. She’s putting on mascara just in case, propped up on her elbows at the vanity.
Spice Girl is floating by the window with her knees tucked against her chin, watching the little brown birds that nest in the olive tree. Soon it will be winter, and they’ll be gone for the season, and Spice Girl will mope about it, Trish knows. She always mopes without birds to watch.
“Talk about?” she asks without looking away.
“You and Aerosmith,” Trish says, lifting the mascara wand to her right eye. She pauses. “Or… I guess Mr. Smith.”
Spice Girl is quiet for a while, and Trish can feel her thinking, stretched across the room. One of the birds flits out of sight, and Spice Girl sits up straighter to watch its departure. After it’s gone, she gets a faraway look on her face—as faraway as Trish can intuit.
“We do not speak as you understand it, Trish,” she finally says, “for two souls cannot converse with language. But I have come to understand the vastness of the sky in the summertime. I understand how to say hello to a seagull. I understand the anatomy of falling.” She turns her head, looks into Trish’s eyes. She isn’t smiling—she never does—but her voice sounds like it could be. “We have not flown through clouds, you and I. And yet I have experienced the sensation. Each of them feels different—cirrous, cumulonimbus. Each of them has a name. Did you know this?”
Trish turns away again and looks at herself in the mirror. The freckles on her nose are getting lighter.
“I didn’t,” she says.
Trish and Narancia had made a pact to paint the living room come autumn. It’s not that Trish minds the current color—an understated terra cotta, which Bucciarati says has been there since he’d bought it—but she wants something that reacts to light, and Narancia says that he doesn’t really know what that means but that it sounds fun. It had come down to two yellows: Forsythia and Chiffon. They’re going with Chiffon.
On Wednesday, the rainiest day yet, they wake up early to push all of the furniture to the center of the room, cover it with cotton canvas, and start with the south-facing wall. Narancia busies himself on top of the ladder with a small paintbrush between his teeth—for the details—and a roller in his left hand, and Trish stays below, holding it steady.
An hour or so in, given the space by a long and comfortable silence, Trish lets the question that’s been nagging her all week come to the surface.
“Do you know they talk to each other?” she asks.
“Huh?” Narancia grunts, a little distractedly, the words deprived of consonants by the paintbrush handle. “Who?”
“Our Stands,” Trish says.
Above her, Narancia goes still mid-swatch, dripping paint onto his jeans. He sticks his head down so that Trish can see his face in the space between his arm and body.
“Huh?” he says through his teeth.
Trish nods. “I saw them doing it the other night—you never told me Aerosmith had a…” Narancia takes the paintbrush out of his mouth, and for a moment she loses the word. “Pilot?”
“Oh, Mr. Smith?” Narancia beams. He sets his hands on the seat between his legs, leaning over until his hair dangles. “You saw him?! That’s awesome! Bastard doesn’t even come out for me half the time.”
“Just for a second,” Trish says. “He’s… tiny.”
Narancia snickers. “He’d get seriously pissed off if he heard you say that.”
“Sounds familiar,” Trish says with a smirk. “Keep painting.”
Narancia lovingly flips her off with one hand and picks up the roller with the other. Trish watches the yellow grow, expanding outwards inch by inch, coaxed out by Narancia’s steady hand.
“So what do they talk about?” Narancia asks after a while, tilting his head as he completes the edges along the ceiling. He’s got a smudge of Chiffon on his cheek, just under the eyelashes, but Trish doesn’t feel like telling him quite yet.
Trish looks up at him, at the planes of his familiar back, at the places where his hair grows long. “I don’t know,” she says, and breathes out the quietest laugh. “Flying.”
Trish remembers that spring, of course: one frail year before the seaside house, five years before Narancia had joined her in it. Her body remembers it, too—in the middle of the night, usually, or at the sound of a door slamming. Narancia’s the same, breathing next to her in the dark, altered by the smallest flinches. Aerosmith’s the same.
She carries the shrapnel of it with her everywhere, though each small wound had closed up in its own time: a hand, a boat, an airplane; a voice at the center, growing clearer, rage and grief transmuted into first one word, then many: Here. Here. I’ve always been here. The long journey to Sardinia, the hikes along deserted roads, the threat of danger and the smell of grass.
At three in the morning, listening to the rain and counting, in some small way, each breath Narancia takes beneath her arm, she remembers an afternoon between Sassari and Olbia, waiting inside the turtle while the others split off for supplies. Mista had stayed behind to guard her that time, but had kept to himself above, among the trees, whistling a song she didn’t know. It had been warm and beautiful out, all the way beyond the turtle’s rooftop. A nice day for a picnic. A nice day for eating strawberries.
Their Stands are very powerful, Spice Girl had said without preamble from somewhere behind her lungs. Trish permitted her to emerge, watching her glint into view on the couch beside her. “I have introduced myself,” she elaborated.
“Oh,” Trish said. She had a headache, the same formless one she always did, spreading through her like a haze. “You can… do that.”
“Of course we can.” Spice Girl paused then, as if waiting for a thought to spool. “Would you like me to tell you about them?”
Trish pulled her knees up to her chest. She longed for the smell of spring. She leaned over until her head was on her Stand’s shoulder, and once it was settled there she nodded.
Spice Girl shifted a little closer, such that Trish wondered for a moment if she was about to put her arm around her, but she didn’t.
“Gold Experience is noble,” she said, brisk and analytical. “Sticky Fingers is protective. Moody Blues is sentimental. Sex Pistols are sincere.”
“And Aerosmith?” Trish asked.
Spice Girl’s silence rearranged itself. She set her cheek on the crown of Trish’s head—the small weight of stars given body.
“Aerosmith,” she said at last, “is brave.”
And maybe that had been a transmutation, too: mourning, alchemized into love. Maybe that had settled in the chambers of Trish’s heart, admiring and inarguable, and hadn’t left since.
“I would like to discuss,” Spice Girl announces on Thursday morning, “love.”
Trish chokes on her cereal, spewing it back into the bowl held at her chest. It’s the first sunny day in a week, with only the thinnest clouds weaving across the pale October sky, and she’s in the living room with nothing to do, wearing Narancia’s sweatpants.
“What?” she splutters, milk dribbling down her chin. She twists around to stare at her Stand over the back of the couch. “Spice, what?”
Spice Girl looks up from the sketches Trish has strewn over the kitchen table.
“I like these sleeves,” she says, pointing with one pink finger to the concept for an evening gown that Trish has been trying for days not to hate. “The design is pleasing. Like petals.” Then, after some thought, lifting her head, she asks, “What is the basis of love, Trish?”
Trish chokes again, but there’s no cereal to blame it on this time.
“What’s gotten into you?” she asks instead of answering, frowning at Spice Girl as she floats over to take a seat, sort of, across from her, on the yellow loveseat. “Do… I mean,” she bows her head over the soggy cereal in her bowl, “does that… happen? To Stands?”
“I am not certain,” Spice Girl replies, wrapping her arms around her knees, “hence I am asking.”
Trish wrinkles up her face and tips it back to look at the ceiling, letting out a bewildered noise.
“I don’t know,” she says, shaking her head. “I don’t really know how that would feel for… you know. You.”
Spice Girl sets her chin on her knees. “But you are in love, aren’t you?”
Trish has been dating Narancia for almost two years and has been in love with him for even longer, and she still feels a flush crawl up her neck, still feels one startled beat of wings in her chest. She looks away and sets one hand on her pants.
“Yes,” she mumbles.
“Then that is useful data,” Spice Girl says. “Aside from which, one can naturally assume that the phenomenon extends to me. I simply do not recognize it.”
Trish wonders what kind of thing it says for your soul to be in love with the same thing as your heart, and your brain, and every other strange thing you own. She sets her cereal bowl down on the coffee table next to the remote.
“Does it feel like flying?” Spice Girl asks, and even though Trish knows that Stands don’t breathe there’s something faint about her voice right then. “Does it feel like coming home?”
Trish bites her lip and sinks back on the cushions, fingers tangling together over her stomach so that she can pin each joint against her thumb.
“Yeah,” she says eventually. “I guess so. Sort of.” She shakes her head. “Not… coming home, exactly. Just sort of… being at home. All the time.” She sinks further into the cushions, going redder. Quieter—quietest—she murmurs, “Wanting to… protect something.”
“Protect,” Spice Girl repeats, and slowly lifts her head off of her knees. Her eyes remain on Trish, awakened, comprehending. “I see. Yes. That makes sense.”
She’s quiet for a long time, and Trish is, too. At the end of that quiet, its shape familiar and forgiving in the bright, bright room, she turns her head toward the window and says to the sky, “I would like to protect Aerosmith.”
“Narancia,” Trish whispers into the folds of Narancia’s sleeve, “you awake?”
“So awake,” Narancia says sleepily.
Trish smiles, pressed into his shoulder. He rolls over on his back so that she can set her cheek against his chest. His eyes are closed.
“What’s up,” he mumbles.
Trish thinks about the word protect, listening to the easy rhythm of Narancia’s heartbeat beneath her ear. She thinks about the yellow walls, the leaves on the lemon tree—the figure of the pilot at the controls, with no bulletproof glass to protect its small, fragile body from attack. She thinks about what it means to be brave.
“I love you,” she says. Spice Girl echoes it behind her heart, like a whale song.
Narancia breathes in, exhales, asleep. Trish closes her eyes slowly, at peace with the dark, and listens to the language inside.