Chapter 84
OVER THE NEXT WEEK, Teo found reasons to come by the house.
Once to bring me cuttings from an aloe plant for my sunburn.
Another time to ask if I could use an old bicycle that he’d found in the basement storage unit of his parents’ apartment building.
That afternoon, we wound up biking to the cemetery and back.
“Shouldn’t you be working?” I asked him one morning when he stopped by with two cornetti in a paper bag.
“I’m Italian,” he said with a mischievous grin. “Everyone knows we don’t work in August.”
Miele must have smelled the food, because he leaped onto the porch and wrapped himself around Teo’s legs. “Nice cat,” he said as he bent down to stroke his head.
“I had to lure him out of hiding with a steak, but now we’re good friends.”
We sat on the porch steps and ate the pastries, which were delicious.
“This is a great place,” he said, nodding in the direction of the house, and I admitted that it was working out pretty well for us.
“I wish it were a little closer to town, but the garden is beautiful.”
“You’re practically next door to the Villa Webber.”
“I know. I want to see it at some point.”
“You haven’t yet?”
“I didn’t think I could,” I said, confused. “The gate’s always locked. And there’s that big No Trespassing sign.”
Teo laughed. “No kid on this island has ever let that stop him.”
“You just sneak in?”
“There’s a path from the Via Barrettini, but you can hop the wall just about anywhere.”
“Is it hard to find the house? Once you’re on the property?”
“Not if you’re with someone who knows where they’re going,” he said, then asked if I wanted to go.
Of course I wanted to go. So, we walked down the hill to a spot where the old stone wall surrounding the property had crumbled. “This is a good spot to get in,” said Teo.
“We won’t get in trouble?” I asked.
“Let’s go right now, while no one’s looking.” He laced his fingers together to give me a boost, and I scrambled up and over the wall.
The property was terribly overgrown. There were wild olive trees and juniper and big prickly pears with stickers the size of my thumb. Right away, I regretted not wearing pants. “The trick,” said Teo as he led us toward a small clearing, “is to look for the boar paths.”
I could feel my heart rate quicken. “As in wild boars?”
“They’re not all bad. In this case, they’re helpful.” He pointed to a shallow trench that ran between two overgrown grapevines. “They’re good diggers, and they’ve got these thick coats of fur, so they can bulldoze their way through the underbrush.”
“Do they ever attack people?”
“Sometimes, on the beach, they’ll try to steal your lunch. But for the most part, they want to be left alone.” He could tell I was nervous, so he added, “Also, they sleep during the day.”
“That’s very good to know,” I said, and he gave me one of his wide smiles.
By the time we arrived at the villa’s first outbuilding, my legs were covered in tiny scratch marks, and I think Teo worried that I was regretting my decision to come. “I promise it’s just a little farther,” he said.
“Famous last words,” I joked, but I could see a turret poking out above the trees. “Is that it?”
While we walked up to the house, I told him about stopping by Bruno’s makeshift lab. “It’s such slow going, processing all the nacchere. I couldn’t get over it.”
He agreed.
“And waiting for the results,” I added, “takes forever.”
“It’d be helpful if they had a lab on the island.”
“Even with a lab, it’d still be days or maybe even weeks before they knew there was a leak.”
He nodded. “The long-term goal is to have these continuous monitoring stations. They’re like microcomputers that sit in the water and spit out results in real time.”
“They’re expensive, I assume?”
“Prohibitively so,” he said. “There’s no way the regional government can afford them, so the money would have to come from the state. And the way things are going, I’m not sure the state can afford them, either.”
“It’s sort of overwhelming to think about.”
“I know,” he said. “That’s why, for now, Bruno’s just focused on getting the funding for that environmental survey I was telling you about.”
“You think he’ll get it?”
“Bruno’s optimistic.”
“What would the survey entail?”
“I don’t have all the specifics, but the idea is they’d study the archipelago to determine the best test sites going forward. They think some places are better than others, in terms of getting accurate readings.”
We had arrived in front of the Villa Webber, and I was stunned by how beautiful and how decrepit the building was.
It was a Moorish design, with an exterior that at one time had been clad in a pale pink stucco.
The stucco had begun to crumble, the windows were broken, and even the window frames had rotted away.
Since everything was open to the elements, it was easy to gain access to the house. As we wandered the rooms, I asked Teo how he had known he wanted to be a journalist, and he told me about the summer he had written and distributed a weekly newspaper to the entire apartment building. “I was eight.”
I laughed, picturing a tiny Teo at his parents’ typewriter, then said, “That’s lucky. To know yourself that well at such a young age.”
He glanced at me. “Did you work? Before you came to Italy?” I was pretty sure Before you came to Italy was code for Before you met Paul, but already, we had come to a silent understanding that we didn’t talk about Paul.
I told him about working in the men’s department at Condon’s and how I’d been in college before that.
“What did you study?” he asked.
“English, or at least that was the idea.”
“You didn’t finish?” he asked.
I shook my head, then started to tell him about Lenny. How he had died in Vietnam and what his death had done to my mother and father and me. “After he was gone, nothing made sense,” I said. “I’m still not sure it does.”
It surprised me, how easy it was to talk to Teo about Lenny.
Particularly because I didn’t always find it easy to talk to Paul about him.
Paul had a tendency to look at Lenny’s life through the lens of his military service, and this made me uncomfortable, because Lenny hadn’t chosen to join the army and it was the army that had gotten him killed.
I much preferred to talk about what it had been like to grow up with Lenny, and I found myself telling Teo about the time my mother found a wand of mascara in the washing machine.
I was twelve or thirteen and had shoplifted it from the drugstore because I wasn’t allowed to wear makeup yet, and like an idiot, I’d left it in the pocket of my jeans.
My mother was no dummy, and she figured the whole thing out, but when Lenny heard her starting to get worked up, he swooped in and claimed the mascara was his.
Something about how he was holding it for a friend.
The story made no sense, but the insinuation was that maybe he had a girlfriend, so my mother dropped it.
We had arrived back where we started, at the entrance to the villa.
“My parents lost a baby before I was born,” Teo said as we made our way toward the house’s stables. “A little girl. Isabella. She lived for three or four months, then died suddenly, in the night.”
“That’s so sad,” I said.
He acknowledged it was. “But the loss of your brother is very different. You knew him. Grew up with him. I tell you about Isabella only to say that I always felt my sister’s absence, even though my brothers and I came along after she was already gone.
My parents didn’t talk about her much, and the house was always busy and loud, but somehow, my brothers and I, we knew there was this hole we couldn’t fill, no matter how hard we tried. ”
Was this the moment I fell in love with Teo? It’s hard to pinpoint, exactly, but I do recall standing in the courtyard of the Villa Webber, after he’d said all those heartfelt things, and thinking that I had just managed to make my life infinitely more complicated.