One Italian Summer(54)

There’s a double bed with a white linen bedspread. To the left of the room, curtains billow in the breeze. There is a small closet where a few dresses hang. Colorful, floral prints. One blue linen. I recognize a pair of purple sandals that lace at the ankles.

I move around the room and touch everything softly, gingerly. I don’t want to disturb the air molecules. It feels like being in a museum—that she just stepped out for coffee, tomatoes, to mail a letter thirty years ago and never came back. Perhaps that’s what this is. A snapshot.

A big gust of wind blows the window back up against the wall. It makes a snapping sound, and I go over, making sure it’s not broken. It isn’t. Outside it appears like a storm is brewing. The evening is overcast, now, and the wind riled.

I close the window, snap the safety guard in place. And just as I’m turning to head back into the kitchen, I spot a framed photograph. It’s on the nightstand, propped up on top of a book. I recognize the frame. It’s small, silver. It has sat in my parents’ house, on my mother’s nightstand, for thirty years.

I take it in my hands now. My heart beats wildly. It’s not possible, it couldn’t be…

The baby looks back at me. She wears a bright yellow dress and a bonnet stitched with lace. She’s laughing.

“Everything all right in there?” Carol calls.

But I do not answer. I can’t. Underneath the photograph, the frame is engraved. I run my pointer finger over the words, the ones I know so well, because they are my own.

Katy Silver.

The woman in the kitchen is already my mother. She is already my mother, and she has left me.





Chapter Twenty-Four


My hands feel numb, my throat itches like it’s on fire. Vaguely I hear Carol at the door.

“Hey,” she says. “I think it might rain. We can…”

I turn around and shove the photograph forward. Carol’s face changes. Her eyes dart down at my hands and back up again.

“What is this?” I ask her.

She exhales, crosses her arms. “I haven’t told you everything about my life.”

“Like that you have a fucking baby?”

She is taken aback. “Yes,” she says. “I have a baby. She has your name. Katy. She’s six months old.” She smiles, then a warm, familiar tenderness spreads over her face. I think I might be sick.

“You’re here,” I say.

Carol nods. “There are some things I have to figure out. I don’t…”

“You left?” I say. I’m practically screaming. “You left me?”

I feel hysterical now. My mother. My mother who tended every scrape and bruise and put cool compresses on my head when I was sick and made tea from lavender root and took photographs of absolutely everything. Who knew the right Band-Aids to buy that would stay on even elbows and ankles, and who always made toast with garlic and butter on it when I had a cold. Who gave me my first haircut in the backyard, and who bought me ballet shoes on my third birthday. Who knew exactly how to touch to make me feel loved and protected. Whose warmth I miss daily, acutely. The same woman who is standing here. The same woman who left me.

“You? Look, Katy, this really isn’t any of your business.”

“How can you say that?” I ask her. “Don’t you see me?”

I run to her. I toss the photo down on the bed and grab her by the shoulders. Her eyes go wide, but I don’t let go. “It’s me. Katy. I’m her. I came here to Italy because we were supposed to come together and then you died, you just died, and I’m so lost without you. I don’t even know who I am anymore. And then miraculously you showed up. You were just here! You always told me about this summer you spent in Italy, but it was supposed to be before I was born. Before you were married. You were supposed to…”

But I’m crying too hard now; my body convulses in sobs.

Carol wriggles out of my touch. “I don’t know what you’re saying, but I think you need to go.”

“How could you leave?” I ask. “She’s just a baby. She needs you. How could you come here and party and Remo?”

“I told you, we’re not together.”

I push past her into the living room. I find my bag on the small sofa.

Carol follows me. “You can’t judge someone’s life until you have lived it,” Carol says. “I love my baby and I love my husband. I’m not the one who’s cheating.”

I feel her words like a sucker punch to the soul. I turn around to look at her.

“I’m sorry,” Carol says. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

I look at her. My mother. My friend. I’ve been betrayed by them both.

“How could you do this?” I say. “Only a monster leaves her infant.”

I see the hurt flash through her eyes, like a gunshot. But I don’t care. She’s a stranger to me now, someone I do not know. The woman I thought I had recovered is gone.

Carol just stands there, stunned, as I leave. I close the door behind me, and then I’m running. Down flights of stairs. I feel something bite at my heel, a rock, the trickle of blood. I let it run.

I fall and right myself. My knee bleeds. Somewhere, behind, someone calls. Signora! Signora! I keep running.

And then the sky opens up and it begins to rain. Not a light mist, but a heavy downpour. Buckets and buckets of water. I keep moving.