Chapter Nine Cammie
Chapter Nine
Cammie
The bad news is it proceeds to rain for several days straight.
The first day, I don’t think much of the steady drizzle.
Mom and Dr. Danny accompany the film crew on excursions into Naples, where they do some filming with the bronze statues and other artifacts that are kept in permanent collections at the National Archaeological Museum.
West and I are left to our own devices, free to shut ourselves in the library and pore over everything in Mom’s journal that has to do with “PB.” West scans one of the Polaroids in which PB’s face is more clearly visible into his computer.
He does some weird age-up program-y thing on it, and then some reverse image search-y thing, and before I can say “Are you sure you don’t work for the CIA?
”—voilà!—he has located one Paolo Bianchi (Middle-Aged Version).
Potential Papa Paolo, conveniently for our purposes, is a boat captain, leading small group tours from the town of Sorrento to the island of Capri. I immediately book two spots on one for the following day.
That’s when the rain gets less cute.
I still try to hang in the library with West. When it’s obvious that I’m mostly just annoying him with my loud groans and whines about the weather while he ignores me and does his little computer-y thing, I return to my room.
I continue to study the journal, making a sort of profile of PB as I prepare to meet him.
It looks like he and my mom only went on a few dates, as he appears in just a few entries.
Maybe that makes him a more likely dad candidate?
If things between them weren’t that deep, and he didn’t feel very attached to Mom, it would make more sense he wouldn’t want to stick around and raise a kid together.
Other than that, I know she met him at a bar near the university in Naples; that he was also in the social sciences, though on the cultural anthropology side; that one of their dates was a sail on his dad’s boat, which Paolo borrowed without his dad’s permission; and that he was an “amaaazing” kisser, though I’d rather not think much about that.
Past Alex was discreet about the physical aspects of her relationships with these men, at least in writing.
While it would be more helpful for my search if she had made a list titled “People I’ve Slept With,” I appreciate, for the sake of ever being able to look at her the same, that she kept it vague.
Each day the rain persists, I get an email from Paolo Bianchi’s tour company, apologizing for the postponement of yet another tour and giving us a complimentary rebooking.
Each day, I rebook for the following morning.
Finally, three mornings later, the clouds part, the sun reemerges, and West and I get on a train to Sorrento.
This time, we don’t even have to lie to our parents about where we’re going.
I tell my mom that I’m excited to see the island of Capri—true enough—and that West has graciously agreed to go with me, easing her concerns over my safety before they can even develop.
She does make a raised-brow sort of comment about “all this time I’m spending with Weston,” looking at me expectantly.
But I feign obliviousness, explaining that I’m not exactly surrounded by potential travel buddies here.
On this train ride, West and I try something new for us—sitting across from each other. As I’m reminding him of the day’s itinerary, he makes a shushing noise, and I look up to find him peering around us.
“Do you want us to be followed or something?” he asks in a whispered rush.
“You never announce your specific travel plans loudly on public transit when you’re clearly a tourist speaking a different language.
You might as well be calling out, ‘Follow me! Pickpocket me! Kidnap me and hold me for ransom!’ ”
I groan. “Oh God, you’ve seen the Taken movies, too.”
“The what?” West asks.
“Never mind.”
“I don’t know what movies you’re talking about, but I do know basic travel safety,” he scolds. “I thought you did, too, growing up the way we did.”
“If ‘basic travel safety’ means engaging with the world like a paranoid weirdo, I think I’ll continue living on the edge, thanks.”
West rolls his eyes. Still, I end my verbal explanation of our day’s itinerary, and we continue on in relative silence until we reach our station in Sorrento.
While I’m distracted trying to follow street signs and the map preloaded onto my phone to get to the marina, cross-referencing with the email instructions from Paolo’s tour company, West seems to have jumped ahead to the next step.
“Cam, hang on,” he says, startling me when he grabs my elbow and pulls me to the edge of the sidewalk.
I look up from my phone in confusion. “What is it? We’re gonna be late.”
“How are we, like, playing this? What do you want me to do when we get there? I feel like we haven’t really talked about the specifics of how we’re handling the meeting, what you’re trying to ask and get out of it, and I just…What am I supposed to do?”
I pull my arm gently away from where he’s still grasping my wrist, which, by the look on his face, he hadn’t realized he was doing. I put a hand out in reassurance.
“Hey, it’s fine. We’re just trying to meet Paolo, see what he’s like, suss out anything about his past with my mom or in general, if we can. I don’t know, just follow my lead.”
The truth I haven’t told him is that I’ve thought very little about what I’m going to say to Paolo Bianchi other than “Did you sleep with Alexandra Lovett twenty years ago and then dip out when you learned she was pregnant with your child?” It’s probably best that he doesn’t even realize who I am, in case he kicks us off the boat before we’ve gotten a chance to say so much as a “buongiorno.” I think the best way to increase my odds of acting natural during this encounter is to not overthink it or overplan it.
I’d somehow forgotten that overthinking and overplanning are beloved pastimes for my partner in subterfuge.
West was always the more careful of the two of us, and that’s one part of him that intensified sometime around our early teens.
He was less open to ideas I had on the fly, and I learned to give him at least a few hours’ notice before doing something that wasn’t on his mental agenda.
Or after a big group dinner with our parents’ field school students, he would need me to reassure him over and over that one throwaway comment he’d made was not an extreme embarrassment, nor did it make all the cool college students think he was an annoying, immature kid.
I was going through my own awkward adolescent phase and at the time thought that was just West’s version of the same.
I’m not so sure of that now, with a few years of hindsight and rediscovering this older, more self-aware West, hearing him allude to how bad his anxiety was “before.” The ways he changed back then had felt different, I can see in retrospect.
It hadn’t just been the stress of his dads’ struggling marriage taking a toll; I think he’d been in a whole other spiral of his own.
I feel the desire to pry open that box of things we don’t talk about, poking me to ask West about what he was going through back then, make him continue what he started to tell me in the library a few days ago. But this isn’t the time, so I set that impulse aside.
“Come on, we’ve got to get going,” I say to West. I reach out without really thinking to give him a pat on the shoulder.
He rears back like I punched him. Oooookay.
Physical touch, not a level we’re at just yet, I note with the smallest pang of disappointment, deep down in my heart’s hidden compartments.
Most of the town of Sorrento sits high atop steep cliffs that overlook the ocean and marina below.
After all the rain, we’ve been gifted the perfect day for outdoor adventures—sunny, but a little cooler than I’ve gotten used to here.
It’s even nicer as I start to feel the sea breeze coming off the crystalline waters, blowing through the couple of rogue curls that have already escaped from the bun atop my head.
The wind has its way with West’s hair, too. As he keeps a brisk pace ahead of me, the longer brown waves on top of his head get the Troll doll treatment, swept straight into the air in a gravity-defying pouf. He remains oblivious, but I can’t contain my smile.
In fact, as we meander down a steep, sloped walkway, turning back and forth on the many switchbacks where I should probably watch my step, I find it hard to watch anything but the guy before me.
Even if the new hairdo is giving just stuck his finger in a light socket, and he’s wearing swim trunks printed with a bunch of zeroes and ones that I refuse to ask the meaning of, there’s something so…
compelling about West. I don’t know if it’s his perfectly straight posture that’s also somehow totally natural, or his long legs with calves rock-solid enough to crack a walnut, or his hands that, for some bizarre reason, I keep picturing when I’m trying to fall asleep at night, the mesmerizing memory of them fluttering across his keyboard.
Okay, I do know, and it’s all of those things and more.
I’m thankfully pulled from the WestFest party my greedy eyes have been throwing when we reach sea level and enter the marina.
West steps aside to let me retake the lead, and we bypass row upon row of all sorts of watercraft, from Jet Skis to luxury yachts.
Finally, I see the Bianchi Voyages flag hanging from a post at the end of a dock, a boat that looks just like the one on the website tethered there and a few people milling around it.