Chapter 73
ALL OF THE UNREST with the Mirfield caused the command to rethink its Fourth of July picnic.
Rather than celebrate at the compound, as they had the previous year, it was determined that the safest bet was to move the festivities to Budelli, a small uninhabited island about thirty minutes away from La Maddalena by boat.
There was no infrastructure on Budelli, so everything—from cans of soda to volleyball nets to charcoal grills—had to be transported down to the pier and then loaded onto the liberty boats. It was quite the operation, and when Paul and I arrived at the pier that morning, the place was chaos.
Paul wandered off to help, and I scanned the crowd for anyone I knew. By the time I’d found Laura, she was already making a beeline toward me. “Oh my God,” she said as she flung an arm around my shoulders, “isn’t this crazy?”
“It’s so much stuff,” I said.
“And so much work.”
Laura and I sat together on the ride out to Budelli. It was a perfect day—sunny and clear, with so little wind that the water looked like glass. At one point, we had a pod of dolphins following the boat, and all the parents tried to hoist their kids up so they could see.
As we approached Budelli, one of the crew members shouted for everyone to hold on.
This was because the island had no pier, no dock, not so much as a boat ramp.
We’d be coming ashore at Spiaggia Rosa in exactly the same manner these boats had landed at Normandy—plowing through the surf and onto the packed sand.
My stomach dropped as we crested the last wave, then I felt the spray of salt water on my face and a sharp shudder as the boat’s hull touched land.
When a crew member lowered the ramp, everyone cheered.
We’d been warned to wear clothes we didn’t mind getting wet, and this proved to be good advice. I waded ashore with my sandals and a case of Budweiser held high over my head, then headed back out to the boat to help a mother with three young kids disembark.
“Thank you,” she said as she handed me her infant.
The baby was wearing a floppy sun hat and a plastic cover over his diaper, and he eyed me suspiciously as I held him out in front of me. “You are having quite the childhood,” I said to him, and he didn’t disagree.
Once I had reunited mother and child, I took in the beach.
Spiaggia Rosa meant Pink Beach, and the sand truly was a perfect petal pink.
There’s a microorganism, Miniacina miniacea, that lives in the Posidonia seagrass off the island’s shore, and when it dies, the fragments of its exoskeleton get pushed up onto the beach, which gives the sand its distinct color, but I didn’t know that then.
The pink just felt like magic, and I walked to the end of the small beach for the sole purpose of seeing it push up between my toes.
By the time I returned to the landing site, the guys had unloaded all the supplies, and a few of them were lighting the grills.
Paul and Bobby had volunteered to install the volleyball net, and I helped them drive a couple of stakes into the sand before joining Laura on a blanket.
She was holding the same infant I’d recently returned to his mother.
I swiped at some drool on the baby’s chin and said, “Man, your mom must really want to get rid of you.”
Laura gestured at the young woman, who couldn’t have been much older than we were and was currently chasing her other two kids down the beach. “Lynette’s got her hands full.”
“Do you want me to take him?” I asked, but Laura said no.
She was beaming at this kid. “He’s just the cutest. Isn’t he?”
I looked at the baby. He was cute in the way that all babies are cute, but maybe not worth crooning about. “Yours will be cuter.”
Laura croaked out a laugh. “If I can ever manage to get pregnant.”
I stretched out on her blanket, which was big enough for both of us, and closed my eyes. “Still no luck?”
“None.”
I squinted up at Laura, then said, “I’m sorry.”
“I know,” she said, and because the conversation had gotten a little too heavy, she changed the subject. “Did you see what Angela’s wearing?”
I looked around for her. She was talking to the commodore and wearing a tailored jacket and pleated khaki midi skirt. “Is that a skirt suit?” I asked.
“It absolutely is.”
“Who wears a skirt suit to a Fourth of July picnic?”
“A member of the KGB.”
I laughed, then almost slipped up and told her I’d let Teo in on our joke.
I stopped myself when I realized I’d have to explain the lunch date.
Even if Laura agreed that sharing a meal with Teo was no big deal, there was too big a risk that the details would wend their way back to Paul.
So, I kept riffing: “She might as well be wearing a name tag that reads Hello, I Am a Spy.”