Chapter 49
Ava
I’m more nervous than I was for my fourth grade solo when I had to dress as Pumba and sing “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” in a gym filled with parents and peers. I’m about to meet my mother’s lover—a man she hid from me for my entire life, never bothering to mention that during her beloved study abroad experience she had a torrid affair with her handsome professor.
Is this why she went back to America? Did he break her heart and send her packing back to the States? Or was it worse? Oh my God! Was she pregnant with his love child? Am I an Italian love child!?
I do some quick math and debunk that theory, and James squeezes my hand tighter.
“You alright?” he asks.
I nod but keep my eyes on the giant wooden door before me.
“Are you going to ring the bell or would you like me to?”
Good question. My arms seem to be frozen by my sides.
“Can you do it, please?”
He reaches out and presses the buzzer. The longest minute of my life passes before a raspy male voice comes on and says, “Pronto.”
Then James takes over in Italian, and the only thing I understand is my mother’s name and the sound of us being buzzed into the building immediately after.
“Ready?” James asks, pushing the heavy medieval door inward.
“No,” I say brushing past him.
I’m not too nervous to notice the way he stiffens when my hip touches his thigh as I pass. Nor to feel the flood of warmth that pools when he puts his hand on my lower back to guide me up the marble steps. Those hands—the things they can—
“Ava, if you keep looking at me like that, we’re gonna need to go back to the apartment. Stat.”
Ooops.
“Sorry not sorry,” I tell him with a smile and then focus on getting up these steps without jumping him.
“Fourth floor,” he tells me, and all I can do is breathe because there’s no oxygen in the stairwell and I’m only hitting the second floor landing.
By the time we hit the final flight, I’m sucking in air like a Dyson and the shower I took (that was happily interrupted by James) is null and void. The man standing at the open door when we arrive on the landing takes away whatever breath I have left in my lungs. Salt-and-pepper waves brush against his broad shoulders, and his jaw is chiseled from the same marble this godforsaken staircase was built with. This man makes Clooney look like the boy next door.
Well played, Mom.
I accidently let out a whoosh of air that sounds like a whistle, and James clears his throat beside me.
“Mio Dio,” the man says, stepping forward. “You look just like her. Ava …”
He trails off and wraps his arms around me, and I’m unsure how he knows my name or if this hug is for me or my mother, but it feels nice—like I’m somehow being touched by a piece of her. A secret hidden piece of her, but I’ll take it.
“I’m Alessandro,” he says into my hair. Then lets me go slowly and gestures toward the open door. “Come in. Come in.” He holds his hand out to James to introduce himself while I step over the threshold and into a dream.
The walls are filled with art. And I mean filled. Oil paintings. Watercolors. Photographs. Canvases leaning against walls, hanging from hooks, and at least a quarter of them are the familiar strokes of the reason that I’m here.
“Are you okay?” James asks from behind me, somehow sensing that my head is spinning.
I nod absently and step toward an unfinished oil painting of St. Mark’s Square at night. It radiates light, pulls me forward into the piazza. I can hear the melodies of the piano floating around me.
It’s beautiful. And it’s my mother’s work.
“She stood in San Marco’s every night for five weeks, trying to perfect that,” Professor Genaro says from beside me. “The man who used to own the bar at the east corner would bring her food and drinks like she was a stray dog. He adored her. I used to joke that he might destroy the painting to keep her there in that spot.”
I look away from the candles and up to find him staring down at me, his eyes filled with so much grief that the walls of my chest start to cave in.
“Mi dispiace, it’s just—the resemblance is unreal,” he whispers. “Why don’t you sit? Would you like a drink? Something to eat?”
I must have responded because he hurries off into the kitchen. James puts both hands on my shoulders and squeezes, letting me know he’s here as he guides me to the deep leather sofa at the center of the room.
“We can leave,” he whispers, but I shake my head.
We can’t leave. I need answers. It was obvious that my mother was on fire while she was here—the sheer volume of work she produced just in this room alone is staggering. Then why leave? What could possibly tear you away from the man you love and the place that inspires you enough to paint like this?
“I wish I had known you were in town, Ava. I would have prepared a real meal for you,” Alessandro says, laying a tray of meats and cheeses that Uvaldi would approve of on the coffee table in front of us. “Per favore, mangia. I will get the drinks.” He disappears and reappears, handing James and me each a glass of sparkling something before finally settling into the armchair across from us. But settling is the wrong word. There’s nothing settled about him right now, and it suddenly occurs to me that Professor Genaro might be as nervous to meet me as I am to meet him.
“She painted all of this here?” I ask, gesturing to the work around me.
He nods as he takes a sip.
“She loved Venice almost as much as she loved Urbino. She said the water made it easy to paint. The colors and the reflections …”
He looks out the window toward the Grand Canal, giving me a chance to study his well-formed profile. James’s hand reaches out and covers mine.
“Then why did she leave?”
The question comes out in a burst, and the silence that follows it fills me with something like regret. Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe I wasn’t meant to know these things. Maybe the past should stay in the past.
Alessandro turns back to me, and I can see his age in his eyes—not in the physical way, but in the haunted way of those who have experienced great loss or pain. Do my eyes look like that?
“I’m sorry,” I say. “We don’t have to—I know it must have been very painful for you—watching your lover leave.” I choke a little on the words, suddenly thinking of James.
“My lover?” Alessandro asks. He narrows his cool blue eyes on me just as the door to the apartment flies open behind me and in storms a very handsome, very pissed-off blonde man with a basket of fresh fish.
“Sei venti minuti in ritardo, Alesso. Pensi che—”
His eyes fall on James and me, and the anger fades into a warm smile.
“David, this is Ava and James. Ava is—”
“Anna’s daughter,” David finishes, and his eyes immediately light up, then fill with tears as he places the fish basket on the counter and makes his way around the couch and folds me in his arms.
“I’m sorry if I smell of fish,” he whispers into my hair. “It is so nice to meet you, Ava.”
Fish or no fish, I melt into the hug.
“Let me put the fish away and get cleaned up,” David says, releasing me and straightening, then pointing at Alessandro. “You are still on my shit list so don’t think you aren’t.” He tosses me a smile then grabs the basket of fish and disappears into the kitchen, murmuring something about waiting for twenty minutes.
“David is my husband,” Alessandro says to me, though I’ve already pieced that together from their rings and the photos I’d missed while distracted by my mother’s art. “Your mother introduced us.”
I lean into James as he puts his arm around my shoulder, somehow sensing that I need steadying.
“What you asked earlier—about why she left—” Alessandro looks down into his drink, then back up at me and lets out a breath. “Your mother left Italy because she had just found out she had cancer, Ava.”
Impossible. I shake my head. My mother found out she had cancer five weeks before my twenty-first birthday. Not when she was young and carefree with her whole life ahead of her.
“That can’t be,” I say softly, but I can tell by the look on Alessandro’s face that it can be. That it is.
“It started with a simple pain in her lower back. She blamed painting. But then she could no longer ignore it, and I took her to my physician. Fortunamente, it was early,” he says. “She left for home two days after she received the news.”
My eyes return to her unfinished painting of St. Mark’s Square as my heart falls into my stomach.
Just like that, the buoyant pieces of wood that keep my memories afloat crack down the center, dumping the mirage of my childhood into the deep, murky water that lies beneath.