Free Earthquake I.D. by John Domini

it may, our clandestini brothers and sisters are lost children too.” Cesare moved with her, the kaleidoscopic glimmer shifting down his robe. He asked whether Barbara knew that some of these outcasts had started a hunger strike.
    â€œA hunger strike?”
    â€œMrs. Lulucita, what did you expect, coming to Naples? Better pizza? Kisses under the Moorish wall?”
    â€œMoorish? A Moorish—what?”
    But the old Jesuit appeared to think the conversation was over. Unfolding from the pew, he broke into an unexpected smile, wrinkle-lifting. He declared that she and her family too were “strangers at the door, don’t you know.” The culture might be different, he said, the skin color, “but Christ’s challenge remains the same.”
    She had to laugh, and hearing herself, was surprised at the pleasure in it. You would’ve thought they’d had a reassuring heart-to-heart. Then back outside in the siesta quiet, the odor of volcano, Barb reconsidered the man. The old curmudgeon. He’d been forged by the preaching of John XXIII, the liberation theology and new liturgy, and he’d been taking shots at the bourgeois since he’d first heard a call.
    Yet she was confused, no point denying, out under the maples blotched by a constant exposure to diesel exhaust. Estranged and confused, she stood dappled with shadow. Yet she’d found her Duomo, the place that afforded the shiver she needed. At Cesare’s she’d felt her spirit flex, a muscle tremor hard to place but easy to recognize, if you’re a believer. She couldn’t say whether she’d chosen her church and her priest or they’d chosen her, but either way she’d been out of parochial school long enough to know that the movements of faith didn’t always follow the syllabus—that confusion often played a part.
    A car shrieked to a stop behind her. Naples traffic, typical.
    It might be in keeping with her soul’s exercise, she told herself, it might help strengthen her for life outside marriage to end the moping around and instead try something like Cesare suggested.…
    Doors were slammed, above a couple of rough shouts, a man’s voice. Barbara didn’t give it a thought until one of the policemen took her arm. Carabinieri , this guy, not city police. He and the one with him wore braided hats and uniforms, like U.S. state troopers. They shuttled her into their sedan so expertly that at first Barbara had to marvel at it, Italian efficiency and a wide back seat. But then she recalled her kids. The thought branched at once down to the pit of her gut, spiky and cold. She couldn’t be bothered with a seatbelt; she started shouting.
    â€œSono sicuri . Safe, safe.” This was the officer in the passenger seat, shouting back. “Tutti sicuri.”
    Barbara got her first decent look at the policemen, a handsome young duo. The one riding shotgun had lips as fine as John Junior’s. Then by the time the mother could confirm that the problem had to do with her husband, not her children, she could see John Junior himself. The oldest, along with the other four, were in the precinct house. They were two minutes from the church, in a drab suite of offices that overlooked the funicular.
    The kids had been put in some sort of holding cell, fronted by a broad window. It seemed to take longer to unlock the door than to drive here from the church. Barb could see at once, anyway, that they didn’t share her anxiety. When she at last got into the cell, into the child-sweat, none of them made a fuss. The girls remained cross-legged on the linoleum floor, talking across a soccer ball. Paul and the two oldest had the three chairs in the room, and they’d set themselves in a row in front of the room’s big window. Only the willowy eleven-year-old turned from the glass as Mom walked in, and then only for a glance. Barbara wound up checking the window herself. From this side, it