All I Believe (Firsts and Forever, #10)(4)
Chapter Two
The overnight flight from L.A. to Rome was capped off with a second flight from Rome to Catania, on the east coast of Sicily. Jessie’s suitcase and all nine of Nana’s bags made it. Mine did not. I sighed quietly as the gate agent assured me they’d put a trace on it and deliver it to my hotel when it was found.
A town car and driver were waiting for us in Catania. It took another forty-five minutes to drive down the coast to Viladembursa. I’d never been able to sleep on planes, so by the time we arrived at our destination, I was pretty much ready for a cameo on The Walking Dead.
Our hotel was the same one my family had stayed in when we visited over ten years ago, and it had changed very little. The lobby was opulent with a tasteful undersea theme, and decorated in rich shades of gold and royal blue. Big sculptures that looked like coral and lavish floral arrangements punctuated the huge space. I noticed the flowers only because I almost knocked over a vase as I leaned on a side table and waited for Nana to complete check-in.
We had a spacious suite on the top floor. Three bedrooms surrounded a light, airy living room with high ceilings. I got a vague impression of pale blue walls and blue-and-white pin-striped furniture as I said goodnight to Nana and Jessie and made a beeline for my bedroom. I had no idea what the local time was, and I didn’t care. I dropped my backpack on the floor and collapsed face-down on top of the fluffy, white duvet.
*****
I awoke with a start sometime later. The room was dark and stuffy. The clock read five-thirteen, and my jetlagged brain eventually worked out that it was early morning. I swung out of bed and crossed the room to a set of double doors, which opened to a narrow balcony overlooking the town’s piazza. The suite was on the top floor of the six-story hotel, and since it was the tallest building around, the view was terrific. Viladembursa had begun as a quiet fishing village in the sixteen-hundreds, but it had expanded over the centuries to a city of nearly thirty-thousand people. You’d never know that from my vantage point, though.
The large hotel made up one side of the historic town square. Directly across from it was a row of businesses, including a bakery, a couple shops and restaurants, and a café, all of which I remembered from my last visit. The sea was directly behind us, and beyond the piazza, the original part of the city blanketed the hillside. To my left was an ornate building that had been divided into apartments at some point, and to my right was a farmer’s market which probably hadn’t changed at all since the town’s inception. I took all of that in before turning my attention to the large fountain.
It wasn’t dead-center in the square, though it had been when the piazza was built. The fountain now stood quite close to the café and bakery across from the hotel, since that row of businesses had been added in the eighteen-hundreds and encroached into the public space. Viladembursa was the type of place where people still complained about the ‘new’ buildings on the piazza centuries later. The rest of the town might have grown exponentially, stretching its arms along the shoreline in either direction, but here at its heart, change wasn’t welcome.
I leaned on the balcony’s iron railing and stared at the fountain for a while. Then on impulse, I checked my pocket for my room key and left the suite. The hotel was perfectly still. Downstairs, the lone clerk behind the front desk glanced at me before turning his attention back to a computer screen. I cut through the lobby, pushed open the heavy door and crossed the worn cobblestones to the fountain.
It had seemed huge when I was younger, and it really was quite large. Disproportionately so, actually, for that not particularly grand piazza. The round base was easily twenty-five feet in diameter. In its center, three bigger-than-life horses bucked and reared up on their hind legs, ridden by angels with outstretched wings. I sat on the wide edge of the fountain and ran my hand over it. The stone was smooth and cool to the touch.
All of it was familiar: the smell of the sea and of the baking bread in the shop just a few feet away, the light breeze on my skin, the sound of the water splashing in the fountain. It was exactly as it had been on another August night, years ago.
I’d been fourteen. My parents had talked about bringing my brother and sister and me to Viladembursa for years, since we had a lot of relatives there and a family history that went back to the town’s founding. There was always some reason the trip got postponed. Often it was because of my dad’s job, which didn’t give him much time off. But that summer, we’d finally made it. I didn’t know it would be our last vacation as a family at the time.
My fourteenth summer was when everything changed. That was when Dad stopped living with us. It was when I heard my mom cry for the first time, and my brother started getting in trouble at school and eventually was sent to live with relatives in New York. It was when my sister started caring about her friends far more than her family and turned into someone I barely recognized. But our trip to Sicily happened just before all of that, and had come to symbolize the end of my childhood. It also encompassed my most precious memory.
I’d gotten up far too early on the last day of our family vacation, the day we were going to fly home to Marin County. Dawn was just beginning to color the horizon as I slipped out of my family’s suite and went down to the fountain. I wanted to say goodbye to the stone horses. I had gotten attached to them during my two weeks in Viladembursa. I was weird like that.