Chapter 67 Gayle
G AYLE
Gayle finds herself standing in front of yet another Venice Rising art installation.
Each exhibit at this art festival is more depressing than the last, and across the city, the main streets and piazzas are now covered in wooden planks to walk on because of the incessant rain. She hates the plastic shoe coverings with their elastic that digs into her calves, and she’s worried that she or Mike will slip in the wet and break a hip. She missed Christmas at home to be here, and all this miserable place has done is give her things to worry about.
Whether it’s because of Elena and Signora Bianchi and their complicated secrets, or whether it’s because of the dystopian exhibition, or the fact that they can now see the city literally sinking before their very eyes, San Marco feels nothing but sinister. Her prayers at the church did nothing at all to help the unrelenting headaches, either.
All she wants to do is leave and never come back.
She holds on to Mike’s arm. ‘Hon, I want to go home.’
‘Okay.’
‘I don’t mean back to the hotel.’ Her voice wobbles and she knows she’s about to cry. ‘I want go home , home. Back to Little Rock.’
He scratches his beard. ‘We’re going home on Tuesday.’
‘I can’t wait until Tuesday. I’m just so unhappy here.’
‘Let’s go back to the hotel and talk about it.’ He takes her hand and leads her on the planks and footbridges to Il Cuore . They ignore Chiara at the front desk and walk straight up to their room.
‘What about the big festival coming up?’ Mike says. ‘With the regatta race and all. You don’t want to miss that, do you?’
‘I don’t care if I miss it. I hate it here. We only came to Venice in the first place to eat dinner at this hotel, but we’re not even doing that any more.’
‘Look, if it means that much to you, we can have dinner at the restaurant again.’ He sits next to her. ‘I don’t want to encourage that woman and her philandering ways, not one little bit. But I’ll do it for you.’
‘I still want to go home.’
He blows through his nostrils. ‘Is it so you can go to Noah faster? Because we won’t get out of this cheaply. The airline will make us pay a small fortune to change our flights, and that’s a fact.’
‘I promise that’s not it. Please, hon. Please take me home.’
He sighs. ‘I don’t know what’s gotten into you lately.’ He rings Andrea, their travel agent back in Arkansas, who says she’ll look into their options and call them back.
They sit and wait, with the TV on. Gayle’s stomach is clenched while on Fox News, Tucker Carlson froths at the mouth about communism again.
Andrea rings twenty minutes later to say there are no vacant seats on flights back to Arkansas before Tuesday unless they take an extra connecting flight and pay twice the amount.
They don’t have the budget for that.
‘Well, we tried,’ Mike says.
Gayle’s trapped in Venice, just like the woman trapped in the tank of water. She isn’t usually one for superstition, but her sense of foreboding is deep; something bad is headed to Hotel Il Cuore.