But it wasn’t a vision, an angel, or her mother.
It was an older woman, the same size as her mother. She had a similar headful of dark hair, but her eyes glittered oddly. She must have been crazy, because she came all the way into the alley, ignoring the execution in progress.
“Go away.” Bennie lowered her arm, hiding the gun. She tried to blink her tears back. “Go. Leave.”
“You don’t know me, but I know you,” the woman said, her voice firm and strong. “I saw you tonight, earlier, at the airport. I couldn’t go home and turn my back on you.”
“Go away!” Bennie kept shaking her head, bewildered.
“I saw you the other day, too. On the sidewalk, yelling. You need help, and I am here to help you. My name is Fiorella.”
Bennie didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t kill Alice, with the woman standing there. She shook her head. The tears wouldn’t go away. She was thinking of her mother. She was feeling her mother’s very presence.
“Benedetta, look at me. I see truth, and there is too much good in you to do this. Look at me.”
Bennie couldn’t look at her. She knew it was crazy. She was listening to a crazy woman having a crazy conversation, but she felt as if she were talking to her mother. She felt as if she were talking to herself. She was in a sort of dream, or spell, or maybe it was the pills, but none of it mattered any longer.
“Benedetta, look at me.”
“No.” Bennie was lost now, even to herself. She couldn’t come back. She had crossed the line. Tears slid down her cheeks. “I’m not good. Not anymore.”
“Yes, you are.” The woman took Bennie’s face in her hand and turned it toward her own. “I see you.”
Suddenly Bennie started to cry, hoarse, choking sobs. She felt like she was breaking down, out of control. All her emotions came flooding out, and she was unlocked, her soul set free. She was surrendering to something, and she didn’t know what, or who. The crazy woman. Her mother. Herself.
“I see you, Benedetta. See yourself, in my face. I look at you, like a mother. I see you, like a mother. Do you see the goodness here, and the love?”
And as impossible as it seemed, the woman was smiling at her, full of love, channeling her very mother, and in the next second Bennie felt herself collapse in the woman’s arms.
Police sirens blared near the alley, breaking the spell, and Bennie came to her senses.
Alice was climbing the wall and getting away.
“No!” Bennie shouted, raising a hand. But her gun was gone somehow, and Fiorella kept a firm grip on her arm.
“Let her go. She is dead already.”
Bennie heard the truth in her words, and it made her feel that she could come back, and that she already had, and she could become herself again. Because she had remembered who she really was inside, the little girl her mother had loved, all her life.
Benedetta Rosato.
And when she looked up, Alice was gone.