New by R. A. SCOTTI

BASILICA
The Splendor and the Scandal
Building St. Peter's

&

SUDDEN SEA
The Great Hurricane of 1938

A Book-of-the-Month Club Selection.
"A medical mystery that will touch the heart of anyone who has ever known the love of a child."


This journal of my son's too-brief life is true as far as memory permits, but, in a further sense, it is a work of fiction because the story remains unreal and the ending unacceptable. Ciro was a beautiful baby boy, apparently perfect in every detail. Fifteen months later, he was dead, having spent nine months in a pediatric hospital fighting a mysterious disease that attacked his immune system and never let go. To this day, his illness remains a medical mystery.



Read an EXCERPT
I resent sunshine now. And I avoid babies, especially if they are dressed in blue or are wearing their first pair of shoes. Ciro never had his first pair. He never had many things because there wasn't time, and many of the things he did have remain brand new. Still, I haunt children's stores looking at the toys and books and clothes I should be choosing for him. I won't though. All choices for Ciro were taken out of my hands on the second day of April. Thirty-two days ago, and the sun hasn't shone. Refuses to shine. Which is right and just.

• • • • •
Once upon a time there was a baby who lived in New York
City with his father, his mother and his six-year-old sister. For his first June (he was five-and-a-half months), his parents brought him to the island of Jamestown in Narragansett Bay. A ferry used to link Jamestown to its flashier sister island, Newport. Now a two-mile bridge spans the bay water. It would be a summer idyll for the children, they thought. Fresh salt air and red sails in the sunset. After Labor Day when the seasons changed, they would come home, Francesca having sprouted like dune grass and CIro, sturdy and staunch like a toy soldier.

In the summer his baby skin browned and his silken hair bleached gold. Once in a while he sat on the beach, where the oceanic tide trickled in leaving a line of white froth on the sand, and ate stones. He loved stones and shells. Later, a lifetime later, Francesca would bring him a red cup full of shells she'd collected on a warm March day that teased us with a taste of spring. The shells were his last and favorite toy. He saw the end of summer and the first leaves change and fall before he was cut for the first time. No one knew then that his body, perfectly formed from the first sonogram picture in the womb, would be cut many times until so few inches were unscarred and unbandaged that his morning bath became no more than the washing of his hands and face and feet.

Fall turned to winter, and winter to spring. Instead of watching the seasons of his first year change, Ciro looked at the orange and green walls of the pediatric ward. And now every season changes without him.

An elegy is something gray written in a country churchyard. But the monsignor with the sagging joweled face of a faithful dog is looking down at the compact box covered in white cloth and talking about joy. Ciro's extravagant joy because he has returned home at last. He never did come home from October to April, except for seven harried days at Christmas. There are supposed to be twelve days of Christmas. Ciro never got passed the seven swans a swimming.