Chapter 6
NAOMI
Eight weeks after the beach club, Positano has started taking its summer costume off, and I’m still here to watch it happen.
The morning crowds have thinned to honeymooners and the serious kind of German hiker.
Alessia’s apartment sits above the hotel’s staff entrance, two rooms plus a balcony the size of a bath towel, and I’ve colonized her kitchen table with my laptop, the Lumière style guide, plus a feature about the coast’s award season that Clara extended my contract to write.
That’s the official reason I’m still in Italy.
The assignment ran long. I’ve said it so many times it’s developed a tan.
Alessia sets an espresso in front of me on her way to the balcony with her own. The smell climbs into my face, and my stomach performs its new trick, the one it’s been rehearsing for two weeks, a slow full rotation, a diver deciding against the dive.
I push the cup away with one finger. She tracks every move of it from the doorway.
“That’s the fourth one you’ve pushed away this week,” she says. “You, the woman who once called my espresso machine the only man she trusted.”
“It’s the heat.”
“It’s September.”
“It’s residual heat.” I nod at my screen. “Can we do the award-night schedule? Clara wants the run-through today, the fitting’s been moved again, and if I don’t confirm the photographer’s list she’ll call me at dawn wanting to align on it.”
Alessia comes in off the balcony, and the way she does it dries my mouth, no rush, no drama, a woman closing a distance she’s already paced out in her head.
She sits down across from me. She flattens my laptop screen with two fingers, a coffin lid closed on a mosquito, and says, “Naomi. Look at me. When?”
“When what?”
“Love. I run two hundred banquets a year. I know what it means when a woman goes green over espresso, sleeps at nine, cries at a dog food commercial, and starts doing calendar work on her fingers in the middle of dinner.” She doesn’t blink. “When was it supposed to come?”
Nobody in the kitchen says anything. Down the hill a church bell does its flat Positano clank, somebody’s laundry snaps on a line across the alley, and I hear myself say, from a long way off, “July. And then August.”
“Two.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“You’ve been pregnant,” she says, gently, terribly, “since approximately the night you came home barefoot with your shoes in your hand and told me nothing happened worth telling.”
We stare at each other across the table. My heart is going in a way I recognize from exactly one other night this summer.
“It’s not,” I start, and stop, because the sentence has nowhere to go. It’s not possible is a lie, we used what we used and the statistics are the statistics. It’s not happening is a wish. It’s not fair is sixteen years old.
Alessia stands, picks up her keys, and is back in twelve minutes with a pharmacy bag she unpacks onto the table like a field medic. Three boxes, three different brands.
“Three?”
“We’re not doing statistics with one sample.” She lines them up, reads the instructions on all three, Italian efficiency in a linen dress, then points at the bathroom door. “Water’s on the counter. You drink, you go, you do all three. I stay here.”
“Bee’s in Milan,” I say, apropos of nothing, my hands not moving. “She sent me a picture of a runway yesterday. She captioned it ‘your dry spell called, it wants a word.’”
“Bianca will be excellent at this from a distance and useless in this kitchen. Go.”
At the door I stop. My hand is on the frame, and I’m looking at three boxes of my own future on a stranger’s... no, on my best friend’s table, and what comes out of me is, “Stay there. Right there. Don’t come in, even if I’m quiet a long time.”
“I’m not moving,” Alessia says. “The door can be shut. I’m still here. Both things.”
The bathroom is small, blue, and smells like her fig soap.
I do what the boxes say. Then there’s the wait, which the instructions call three minutes and which is actually a geological era, me on the cold edge of the tub with three plastic sticks lined up on the sink like a tasting flight.
My own face watches from the mirror with an expression no hotel review has ever needed.
Two lines.
Two lines, two lines, and the third one, the fancy digital one, doesn’t even bother with lines. It writes the word out. Incinta. Pregnant, in Italian, in a font someone chose in a meeting.
The floor doesn’t drop the way it does in the movies.
It’s quieter than that. It’s every plan I own, the flight in one week, the feature, the next assignment after that, the whole clean itinerary of my life, all of it going silent at once, a hotel in a power cut, me standing in the corridor of myself waiting for a generator that doesn’t come.
I put my hand flat against my stomach, under my navel, over nothing you could see. There’s a person starting in there. Half mine. Half a stranger’s, a man made of gray eyes, quiet hands, a locked door, a man whose last name I made a condition of never learning.
No last names. No numbers. No morning.
I negotiated those terms like a professional.
I was so proud of them walking into the blue hour with my shoes in my hand.
I built a door with no handle on his side.
It turns out I bricked myself in with it, because somewhere on this coast or on any of six others there’s a man who’s half of this, and I couldn’t find him with a whole week plus a search engine.
Whether I’d even want to is a question I can’t hold yet, so I set it down.
I open the door.
Alessia is sitting on the floor of her own hallway, back against the wall, exactly where her voice was.
She looks up at me. I don’t say anything.
She reads it off my face the way she reads a banquet going sideways from across a ballroom, and then she’s up, I’m down, somehow, onto the hallway floor with her, my legs having voted without me, her arms going around me hard.
“Okay,” she says into my hair. “Okay. Both things, remember. Shut door, still here.”
I’m furious, which I will never say out loud.
Some part of me is furious that she knew before I let myself know, that I didn’t get to handle this alone in my own way in my own time, with a plan, a spreadsheet, a tidy announcement.
And the rest of me is holding onto her linen dress with both fists, so grateful I could be sick with it, if I weren’t already sick with something else.
Both things. Shut door, still here. I hate that I need this.
I’ve never needed it so little and wanted it so much.
We end up at the table. She makes me toast, dry, correctly, without asking. Then she pours her own espresso down the sink so I won’t have to smell it, an Italian woman wasting coffee, and I nearly start crying again.
“So,” she says. “Do you want to find him?”
“I can’t.” I say it too fast. “That’s not, I mean the answer isn’t no. The answer is I can’t. First name. That’s what I have. A first name and a,” I gesture at the general wreckage of the memory, “a watch.”
“A watch.”
“An old watch. It’s not useful, Alessia, it’s not a clue, this isn’t a film.
He could be anywhere. He was passing through.
” Passing through, with a staff man in a gray suit, with a corner table he never left, with a look that emptied a promoter out of his own club.
I put that thought down carefully, like something that might go off.
“And even if I could. Even if he walked into your lobby tomorrow.”
“Then what?” She leans forward. “Finish that sentence. That’s the sentence that matters.”
And for once in my life I don’t manage what comes up next. I just say it.
“My father was a pilot,” I tell her. “Charming. Funny. The whole terminal loved him. He’d come home for four days like a national holiday, my mother would come alive, then the four days would end, and she’d pass three weeks pretending she wasn’t checking the flight boards.
Sometimes he’d call. Sometimes he wouldn’t, and the not-calling was never cruelty, that’s what took me years to understand.
It was just what he was. He loved us on no schedule, we built our whole lives around a man with no schedule, and I watched my mother do the household sums alone at that kitchen table every month, calling it a marriage.
“He died when I was twenty-three.” I turn my water glass one full turn.
“I cried for a week, and some of that crying, Alessia, some of it was relief, because I could finally stop waiting for him. What kind of daughter tells you that? So. The rule I made, twenty years old, watching my mother wait. Needing someone hands them the controls. Whoever needs less, wins. Nobody since has mattered enough to fly the plane.”
Alessia doesn’t do anything Italian. She doesn’t clutch me or cry or argue. She sits with her chin on her fist, and when I’m done she says, “And now there’s a passenger.”
“And now there’s a passenger.” My hand’s on my stomach again. It keeps going there, like it signed something without telling me.
“So you see the problem with finding him. It’s not that he’s a stranger.
Strangers are fine, strangers are safe, a stranger can’t leave you because he was never staying.
The problem is telling a man like that, a man I already couldn’t stop watching, here is the exact set of controls, my body, my future, this passenger, all yours if you want them.
On the strength of one night and a nice laugh?
I watched that lesson at that kitchen table for eighteen years. I know how it ends.”
“Not every man is a pilot, Naomi.”
“No. But I only have my mother’s instruments, and every needle I own is pointing at run.”
Alessia takes this in the way she takes in a collapsed seating chart, one long blink, then straight to logistics.
“Then we don’t fly the plane today. Today is small things.
There’s a doctor in Sorrento, a woman, private, discreet, she did my cousin’s whole first year.
You’ll want folic acid, which is aisle three at Brunella’s, and I’ll buy it, because you turning up for vitamins the week after buying nothing but wine all summer is how the whole coast finds out by church on the weekend. ”
“The coast is not watching my shopping.”
“The coast watches everything, it’s the regional sport.” She’s already writing the list on the back of a banquet order. “Who else knows? Think.”
“You. That’s it.”
“Then it stays exactly that size until you decide otherwise. Not Bianca, she loves you like a sister and gossips like a fountain. Not your mother, not yet, you’d say two words and she’d hear all of them.” She caps the pen. “And not Clara, obviously, or it’ll be in your contract renewal by lunch.”
The phone lights up between us. We both look at it.
Clara, of course, the little banner sliding down with its cheerful corporate patience.
Award night run-through at 4. Fitting reconfirmed, check your calendar.
And can we align on the photographer list?
Big one, N. Serafina’s expecting us at our best.
The world, not stopping. The award night, three hundred people, the biggest room of my season, in a fitted dress, in six days.
A laugh comes out of me, one syllable, entirely unhinged. Alessia’s mouth twitches, and then we’re both doing it, sitting at a kitchen table above a staff entrance, laughing at nothing, at everything, at Serafina’s expecting us at our best, until it turns damp at the edges, then stops.
Alessia sweeps the three boxes into the pharmacy bag, ties the handles, and puts the bag in her own tote, evidence leaving the scene.
“You’ll decide everything,” she says. “The passenger, the man, the job, your mother, everything, one at a time, in whatever order you want. Nobody decides anything today. Today you drink water, you eat the toast, and at four o’clock the photographer’s list is fine. ”
“The photographer’s list is not fine, she’s got the drone man who ruined the Ravello wedding.”
“There she is,” Alessia says, and squeezes my wrist once, hard, and goes to answer the hotel phone that never stops being her job.
My own phone buzzes again while she’s gone. Bianca this time, a photo of a fitting room mirror somewhere in Milan, gold dress, impossible legs.
They want me back next week for the menswear thing. Tell me Positano is boring without me.
Positano is boring without you, I type, one-handed, the other hand where it keeps going.
Liar. You have your writing face on, I can feel it from here. Eat something.
I scroll past Bianca to the M’s without deciding to.
Mom, the contact photo from her birthday two years ago, reading glasses pushed up into her hair.
My thumb hovers over the call button for a long time.
She’d answer on the second ring. She’d know by the third word.
She spent eighteen years reading a man who never announced anything, and it made her fluent in everybody.
And then she’d be carrying it too, alone, in that same kitchen, doing the same waiting she taught me.
I put the phone down and don’t look at it.
I sit at the table with my hand where it keeps going, and I make the only decision I’m equipped to make today. I make it the way I make all my best ones, the worst ones too, quietly, alone, in the space of one breath.
Not yet. Maybe not ever, but the ever is a problem for a stronger week. For now, until I know who he is, what he is, whether the instruments are wrong for once, this stays behind the shut door with me.
For now, he never finds out.