Chapter 10 The Real Como
The morning started with the call I’d spent all summer learning to dread. Brandon didn’t call on a schedule, and he didn’t call the way a person calls a person. He called the way you check a lock on a door you own, whenever it crossed his mind, to hear it hold.
“Katie. Hi.” The voice for clients he liked. “Listen. Haven’t you had enough of this? Playing maid over there. Come on, quit being silly. Pack Maddie’s things, I’ll cover the tickets, you come home and we forget the whole thing ever happened. You live the way you lived before.”
“We weren’t living,” I said. “You left with Julie.”
“Julie’s a separate matter, Katie. I’ve explained that to you a hundred times.” Not a stumble in it. And then, with nothing in between, the husband was gone and a stranger had the line.
“Let me be clear, since you want to make this difficult. If you keep acting up, you’ve got nobody to blame but yourself.
Do you understand how this looks from the outside?
A mother took a child out of the country and is hiding her from the father.
One word from me and you’re not a caring mom anymore.
You’re an abductor. International parental kidnapping is a federal crime.
My lawyer is drafting a Hague petition. A court is going to side with me.
They’ll put Maddie on a plane, and you won’t be on it.
And who’s going to believe you, Katie, after you kept her away this long? ”
He talked a while: come home, Katie, all of it forgiven; then the police, and what happens to me at passport control; then Katie again. He always could beckon with one hand and hit with the other.
Worse than any of it was one plain thought.
The road home was closed. I couldn’t buy two tickets and fly back, because the second I landed nobody would be waiting to forgive me.
There’d be a charge. Walk off a plane at O’Hare, and was I a mother or a defendant?
I had no lawyer to tell me otherwise. Every week I’d told myself I’d fly home next week.
Somewhere in those weeks the chance had gone by, and I hadn’t heard it go.
I ended the call and dropped the phone in my apron pocket before he could hear what my breathing was doing. Then the day’s requests. The first line wanted something for a room upstairs, and I read it four times.
Fifteen minutes later Alessandro caught me at the desk with the list still in my hands and the call still in my face. He put his palm flat over the paper.
“Give Marco the list. The villa’ll survive one day without you.”
Yesterday’s yard stood between us: his question, my answer that wasn’t one. The easiest thing in the room was work, so I pulled the list out from under his hand.
“There’s a check-in at two. The supplier’s coming at lunch.”
“Chiara takes the supplier. Marco takes the check-in.” He was already lifting a hand at Marco across the lobby, and Marco nodded.
Without the sour face. He turned back to me like a man who’d won a vote.
“See that? Even Marco’s for it. Go get your daughter, peperoncino. I’m stealing you both till evening.”
Maddie came around the corner at a run with Romeo under one arm, ready to go to the ends of the earth as long as the red car went too.
Against the two of them I couldn’t hold.
Honestly, I was tired of holding. For the first time all summer I was leaving the villa for nothing, and the nothing ached, like I hadn’t earned the day.
He drove one-handed, elbow on the door. Romeo had gotten as far as the gate before Chiara took him back. Como came along the road to meet us. In the back seat Maddie shrieked at the wind. I caught myself laughing out loud with her, for nothing.
At the market in the next town, everybody knew him.
A woman at a fruit stall put a peach in Maddie’s hand, her own hands brown and split at the knuckles, and wouldn’t take his money.
The greengrocer clapped him on the shoulder.
Someone shouted his name from the far end.
He bargained for the sport of it, clowned around, translated what an old woman was muttering over a wheel of cheese.
In that loud crush, shoulder to shoulder with people who sold things, he was more at home than in the glossy life I’d built for him in my head.
He bought Maddie a wooden flute. I’d spend half the day trying to get away from it. He bought me a bunch of basil, straight-faced.
“A manager ought to know her herbs.”
He bought nothing for himself. That stayed with me, and I couldn’t have said why.
From the dock he brought out a small old wooden boat, the varnish worn pale along the gunwale, the kind that comes with a villa when you inherit one.
He took the wheel himself. He drove us along the shore to a place no ferry reached and no road came near, into a side inlet under an old stone bridge, one humped span with ivy on the pillars, and beneath it a green pool that didn’t move.
The only sounds were the motor and Maddie’s flute.
He cut the engine and nosed us into the shade, up to flat stones at the waterline that were warm to the hand.
Maddie squatted at the edge and threw pebbles in, the flute in her other fist. Alessandro and I sat on the warm stone, and the quiet between us was a different quiet from the one at the night desk, not something to hide behind but something you could sit inside.
I looked at the water and not at him.
“Fixing shutters. Running a hotel. That’s not what you were made for, to hear your grandmother tell it. Racing. Yachts. What happened?”
He didn’t answer with a joke, and I’d half expected one. He picked up a flat pebble and turned it in his fingers.
“Nothing happened. That’s the trouble.” He skipped the pebble.
It hopped four times and went under. “Racing. Monaco. Yachts, and the girls on the yachts. From the outside it looks like a dream. Inside it’s as empty as that flute.
” Maddie blew two notes on it. “Five years I collected days like that, waiting to finally taste whatever it was supposed to taste like. I never did.”
“So you quit.”
“I came for a week and stayed.” He smiled, and it was a tired one.
“Here’s the funny part. Nobody believed me.
My nonna’s still waiting for me to get bored and drive off.
Marco’s waiting. Everybody is. I’m the boy who spends money beautifully and leaves beautifully.
If I said out loud that I want to bring this place back, really bring it back, they’d laugh. ”
He said it lightly, and by then I’d learned to hear where the lightness was laid over something that hurt.
“It stings,” I said, “when all people see is the wrapper.”
He turned to look at me. “How would you know?”
“Same place you do. Four years I was the good wife who did everything right. Convenient. Empty inside, like that flute. The difference is I believed it myself.”
Alessandro
He looked at her, this American with another man’s child, one of his grandmother’s strays, and caught himself at it: next to her he didn’t have to perform anything, and he’d forgotten what that was like.
With everyone else he had always had to be Alessandro: the quick one, the light one, the one it all came easy to.
She had no use for the wrapper. She looked through all of it, straight at him, and, worst of all, found something there he’d stopped believing in himself.
He was scared that under the front there really was nothing, and she’d be the first to see it.
He was more scared that there was something.
That for the first time he’d want to stay somewhere not because there was nowhere else to go, but because he had found his own place.
He glanced at the girl at the water’s edge, then at her mother on the stone beside him. He couldn’t picture an evening without the two of them in it.
Kate
Maddie was worn out. She’d fallen asleep in the boat, curled on the soft bench under the gunwale.
Alessandro took the boat blanket and covered her against the chill that comes off the water, and tucked the edge under the small shoulder, careful and practiced, like he’d done it before.
I watched his hand do it. Whatever I had kept locked all day got out.
I’d let myself have this day: laughed, eaten a peach out of a stranger’s hand, sat by the water and thought about nothing behind me and nothing ahead.
I’d been open like this to a man once, and what I got back was an empty life, a mistress, and a bill at a hotel desk.
And this morning that same voice had threatened to take Maddie from me, a child he didn’t even want.
“Kate.”
The short one, not Katherine. He’d moved closer, and his voice had dropped almost to nothing, for the child’s sake.
“I’ve wanted to say one thing all day. And all day I’ve been a coward about it.”
“Don’t. Please.”
My hands had gone cold on the warm stone.
“I’m going to.” He took my hand, and his fingers closed over it, warm and sure. “I’m tired of being the one nobody believes in. Do you understand?”
I understood. That was the whole trouble.
He took his time leaning in, so I could pull away.
I didn’t, and everything in me said run.
His mouth was warm, and there was salt on it from the wind off the water.
His palm on my cheek. Then the back of my neck, then into my hair, careful, like he was afraid I’d startle.
And against myself I answered. I leaned in, my fingers closed on his shirt, and I kissed him the way I had never kissed anyone, not from habit and not from duty, because I couldn’t do anything else.
The villa was gone, and Brandon, and everything I owed anyone.
What was left was the warm stone under my palm, the child asleep under the blanket, and him.
Then the fear came up through all of it and I jerked back.
“I can’t.”
I took my hand out of his.
“Alex. I can’t. I trusted a man once. I can’t do it twice.”
He didn’t move back and he didn’t take offense. He only looked at me, close, serious, without one of his smirks.
“And what if I’m not that man?”