One Italian Summer(15)

I miss her I miss her I miss her.

I miss her warmth and her guidance and the sound of her voice. I miss her telling me it was really all going to be okay and believing it, because she was at the wheel. I miss her hugs and her laughter and her lipstick, Clinique Black Honey. I miss the way she could plan a party in under an hour. I miss having the answers, because I had her.

I look out over the horizon, the sun high overhead. The wide expanse of sea. It seems impossible she is nowhere. It seems impossible, but it’s true.

I swallow down an unsteady breath and stand. I cannot be here for two weeks. I cannot even be here for two days. I hadn’t considered the fact that I’ve never been alone in my life, not really. I didn’t think about how I went from my parents’ house to a dorm room to an apartment with Eric. I do not know how to do this.

I’ll go home. I’ll tell Eric I made a mistake, that this is hard and I’m sorry. I’ll make amends, and life will go on.

I climb the stairs back up to the church. I take the road back up to the hotel, past the shops. A woman calls out: “Buongiorno, signora!” I do not turn. I am already gone.

Outside the hotel, a young man arrives for his shift. He parks his Vespa out front as he chats with a woman across the street, the one who must own the small grocery. They speak quickly, and I do not understand them.

I take the four stairs up to the lobby, and when I step inside, there she is. She is talking to a man behind the desk. She is wearing a dress from one of the shops in town—green with yellow lemons, revealing her slim and tan shoulders. Her sunglasses are perched high atop her head, holding her long auburn hair in place. She waves her arms around. A small package sits on the welcome desk in front of her.

“No, no, the hotel always mails for me. I have done it before. Many times. I promise.”

“To post?”

“To post, yes.” She looks relieved. I have not exhaled. “Yes, to post! And here, for payment.” She slides a bill across the table.

“Perfetto, grazie,” the man at the desk says.

I am trying to get a good look at her, to confirm what it is I already know to be true, when she turns. And when she does, the wind is knocked out of me. Because I’d know her anywhere. I’d know her in Brentwood and I’d know her in Positano. I’d know her at sixty and sixteen and thirty, as she stands in front of me today.

Impossibly, the woman at the desk is my mother.

“Mom,” I whisper, and then the world goes black.





Chapter Seven


When I come to, I am lying on the cold marble of the lobby floor, and my mother—or the thirty-year-old version of her—is holding me.

I open my eyes and quickly close them again because I’m right, she’s here, and this feels so good, being in her arms, I don’t want to lose a single second of it. She smells like her and sounds like her, and I want to live here, in this moment, forever.

But I can’t, because in an instant she’s gently shaking me, and I force my eyes open again.

“Hey, are you okay? You just fainted,” she says. She peers at me. I have a flash of her ten years from now—bent over me with a thermometer during a particularly bad bout of the flu.

The man from the desk is crouched next to us, too. “Is hot, is hot,” he says. He fans himself as if demonstrating, then me.

“Water,” my mother commands, and he scurries off. “We’ll get you something to drink, just a second.”

She studies me, and I study her back.

Her skin is smooth, young, and tan—subjected to a sun that has not done its damage yet. She looks exactly as she did in the old photos, the ones dotting the shelves of my parents’ television room. Her hair is down—long and straight, nothing like my curly mane. Her eyes are liquid green.

“You’re here,” I say.

Her eyebrows knit together. “You’re going to be all right,” she says. “I think Joseph is right—you just had some heatstroke.” She looks over her shoulder, toward the direction he disappeared in. “Do you know your name? Where you are?”

I laugh, because it’s absurd. My mother asking me for my name. It’s me, I want to say. It’s me, your daughter. But I can tell from the way she’s looking at me that she’s never seen me before in her life. Of course she hasn’t.

“Katy,” I say.

She smiles; it’s almost sympathetic. “That’s a very nice name. I’m Carol.”

I scramble to my feet, and she stands up, too. “Easy, now,” she says as Joseph appears with the water.

“Thank you.” She takes the bottle from Joseph and twists the top off before handing it to me. She looks on encouragingly. “Go on,” she says. “You’re probably dehydrated.”

I drink. I take four large gulps and then replace the cap.

She looks satisfied. “There you go. Do you feel better now?”

How can I possibly answer that? My dead mother is standing in front of me at a seaside hotel on the coast of Italy. Do I feel better? I feel insane. I feel ecstatic. I feel like something might be seriously wrong with me.

“What are you doing here?” I ask her.

She laughs. “Right place, right time, I suppose,” she says. “Joseph was helping me with a package. I rent a little pensione not far up the road. It’s just a room, really.”