We hear bullets ping off the edge of the car as I turn the engine on, throw the SUV into gear, and peel around harder than I’ve ever taken this thing. Dirt gets kicked up as I do a half-circle around the unpaved space that passes for a driveway in front of the villa before I roar toward the exit.
Two of the sedans had parked in front of the entryway to keep me from doing just that, but I head for the outer edge of the left one and throw my brights on to let him know he has about five seconds to decide to move.
I can see a pair of widening white eyes in the driver’s seat as the man drops his gun and makes the wise choice to throw his car into reverse. I still scrape the front of his car as I tear out of there and onto the road, and I can already hear the engines roaring after us.
And I keep going past it, right off the road on the other side, into the brush.
“Oh my god what are you doing!” Serena gasps all in one breath, bracing herself with all four limbs in the passenger’s seat with equally wide eyes.
“Hang tight,” I say, checking the rear-view mirror as I change gears to get my vehicle really moving. “If these boys want us so badly, they can try to come after us.”
“It’s all rocks and trees out there though!”
“Exactly.”
I don’t have to look over to know Serena’s looking at me like I’m crazy. I just cock an eyebrow and dart my eyes in her direction for a half-second to add, “Buckle up.”
Serena scrambles to get the strap over her chest as I weave through a small grove of olive trees that have long since been abandoned and started to grow wild. Behind me, I see lights starting to come back into view.
I crack a smile. So they really do have a backbone.
“Why not just take the road?!” Serena asks as she steals a glance behind us. But the next moment, we can both hear the gunshots, so she ducks back down to where she was a moment ago.
“I counted five cars back there,” I say, taking a sharp turn around a large boulder jutting out of the ground, dust flying up behind us. The ground is getting drier as we get further out. This part of Italy isn’t that different from the landscape of the American West. “If we were on the open road with this monster of an SUV, it would be the easiest thing in the world for them to get us boxed in and pepper us with bullets.”
Serena winces as we hear another bullet hit the back of the car, so I start veering right through some rocky terrain that would be hell on the tires of any other car.
“I know this landscape,” I explain. “These boys that are after us? My bet is they’re kids from the Bronx. Hardened killers, maybe, but not even the best of the best from New York know how to handle off-road driving like this.”
Serena opens her mouth to speak again, but the loud sound of a car crashing against one of the trees behind us distracts her. I reach over and put my hand on her knee, giving it a gentle squeeze.
“Don’t you worry—I haven’t let myself forget the terrain out here.”
Serena gives me a nervous smile, and that’s enough for me.
I veer into some hills, and a quick glance behind me tells me there are still three of them. I heard one crash, and the other must have chickened out or lost a tire trying to come after us.
Barreling through the darkness, I wind through dried-out shrubs, twisted and dead trees, piles of rocks, and craggy, low cliffs. Turning around the corner of another ruined villa that’s in worse shape than the safehouse, another one of the sedans chasing us doesn’t clear the turn and tumbles over in a storm of dust.
That doesn’t give us a moment to rest, though.
“Shit,” I grunt as I look ahead of us. We’re headed for a wide-open field. Judging from the rows of dirt and overgrown weeds, this used to be someone’s homestead farm, long ago. And there’s no cover anywhere to be seen.
“There’s two more of them,” Serena says, an anxious edge in her voice.
“Don’t worry,” I assure her. “But do hang on. I mean it this time,” I add as I roll the window down.
“What?”
The next moment, I slam the brakes and turn the car sharply to face the oncoming cars, which veer to each side to try to avoid me. But my gun is already out, and I fire at the one on my left four times, right at the driver’s side.
Its car horn starts blaring as the driver’s body slumps forward and the car keeps spinning in a circle in the field.
I take advantage of the confusion—the other car tries to spin back around, but the car I shot at blocks its way while the passengers try to get the dead driver off the gas. It gives me all the time I need to rocket into the opposite direction, clearing the field.
“Holy shit, Bruno!” Serena breathes.
“Are you okay?” I ask, looking at her seriously for a moment. She gives me an incredulous look, and it takes her a moment to just nod. “Y-yeah, fine. Where did you learn how to drive like this?”
“Look, there’s not a lot to do out here,” I say with a smug grin on my face as I glance into the rear-view mirror and see the other cars just now managing to get back on my tail. “When you’re a boy with a bunch of friends and one of them has a beat-up car and some time to kill, well...it’s a better way to pass the time than bare-knuckle boxing, right?”
“I mean…”
“We did that too, though,” I admit before I veer off toward some dunes, and Serena yelps as the car takes a sudden dip.
Behind us, I can see the sun peaking up over the horizon, just starting to cast light over the landscape. We must have been driving out here for nearly an hour already.
My car can handle the small ditches and dunes the rough landscape has with ease that the shiny sedans behind us couldn’t hope to match. For once, having the sleekest and fastest cars isn’t an advantage. Still, I know it’s only a matter of time before they decide to try something else, so I need to get creative.
I drive us past the dunes toward what looks like a ruinous pile of rocks to the west of us.
“What is all that?” Serena asks, leaning forward and squinting.
“Many, many years ago, it was a village,” I say as we get closer. There are strange, round buildings with roofs that look like pointy pyramid cones and piles of stones all around them, along with scrap metal, broken-down cars, and even the odd rusty washing machine here and there. “Now, it’s a scrap yard for some other village nearby. Those buildings are called trulli.”
“Why are we driving toward them?”
“They’re sturdier than they look,” I say with a smile. Serena knows what that means by now, so she braces herself as I whip the car into the run-down ghost town and use the hand brake to help me around one of the little round buildings.
Before they even enter the village proper, the car whose driver I shot hits a ditch on the way in and gets stuck, pinned between a mound of dirt and someone’s broken washing machine, spinning wheels sending a cloud of dirt flying up around it.
The final car makes it a little further, barreling after us as someone leans out the passenger window with a gun in hand to try to take aim at us.
But trulli are a little unusual in their layout, and it takes them by surprise to try to drive around a clump of them, only to find the row of houses extending farther than one would expect. The car slams on the brakes, but it careens into the stone buildings, endless stones from the roof collapsing over the car while the vehicle crumples against the stone wall.
We drive off, zipping through an old hazelnut grove to the blissful sound of nobody roaring after us. All I can hear besides the hum of the engine is Serena breathing for a few minutes, looking into the rear-view mirrors every few seconds to make sure there aren’t any of them left.
When it’s safe enough not to tempt fate anymore, she says, “Are...are they gone?”
“If any of them can catch up to us after the ride I took them on,” I say, taking a deep breath and leaning back in my seat, “then they’ve earned a proper fight.”
Serena looks like she’s tense at that, and I chu
ckle, taking out my aviator sunglasses from the glove box and popping them on. “I’m kidding, dolcezza.”
“Fuck you,” she laughs, a nervous yet relieved laugh that lets her lean back in her seat too as we ride into the sunrise.
After a little ways further on the rocky off-road terrain, I bring us back onto the road. The highways out here are dirty and half-falling apart, but after the ride we’ve been on, even a rough road is a welcome feeling.
Ten minutes later, we’re heading southward on the road, and it’s taken us up onto a high hill that gives us a far and wide view of the area. With the sunrise peaking over the horizon, it’s a gorgeous view, and my heart swells with pride to see Serena looking out the window.
Golden rays of sunlight touch groves and farmland for miles, cypress trees swaying in the distance as a gentle breeze blesses the landscape. The smell of early springtime flowers is in the air that whips around us.
“It might not be upstate New York,” I say with a little fake humility, “but it’s something, isn’t it?”
“Yeah…” she says wistfully, a smile on her face. “I never knew all this was out here. It makes me…” She pauses, and her smile fades. “Nauseous.”
I blink. “What?”
“No, I mean I need to throw up. Can you pull over?” She puts a hand to her chest and bites her lip, and immediately, I bring us to the side of the road and stop the car so Serena can hurry out and retch. I get out of my side immediately, my heart pounding—had she been hit? Was the strain too much? Is it just motion sickness?
Oh, wait, shit—morning sickness.
I come around the side of the car to Serena and put my hand on her back. “Take your time,” I say, not sure how to comfort her but doing my best. “Nobody’s out here this early.”
“Oh god, don’t look at me like this!” she half-laughs before being sick again.
“You’ve seen me in worse ways,” I say with a grin, and when she finishes and turns to give me a weak smile, she sees me holding a towel, a bottle of water, and a little mouthwash for her.
“Wow, you came prepared, huh?”
“Traveling light doesn’t mean forgetting the essentials,” I say with a wink.
Serena cleans herself up while I help her, and after she spits the mouthwash out onto the ground, she takes a breath and gets back into the car.
As we pull off again, I’m quiet for a moment before I speak.
“I wish I could have been with you for more of this,” I say, nodding to her. “The sickness, I mean. It’s not easy to go through alone, let alone on the run like this.”
“Me too,” she says softly.
“How much longer do you have with that? Does it last the whole pregnancy?”
“I’m not sure—but no, they say it ends after about two and a half months,” she says, furrowing her eyebrows. “But if I’m doing math in my head right, it shouldn’t be too much longer? I’m not sure.”
“Well, let’s not worry about it right this second,” I say, taking a turn onto a long road into a residential area. “We’ll have time for that later.”
We drive past a few modest houses and back onto a strip of mostly uninhabited road that takes us past some wild trees and rocks before a short bend. Past that, up on a small hill that looks so much smaller now than when I first left it, I see the sight that I’ve been waiting years to lay eyes on again.
Serena leans forward in her seat to look at it as I pull the SUV to a stop. It’s a modest villa, large enough for a single family, mostly made of white stone with a little terraced garden out the side by a porch with laundry strung up to dry. There are a few palm trees swaying in the breeze outside it, and there’s a single car out front.
“Um…” Serena says as I turn the engine off and step out of the car, gesturing for her to follow with a smile. She does, but she looks up at the villa with confusion on her face before I come to slip my arm around her and hug her to my side.
“Why are we stopping here? What is this place, Bruno?” she asks, smiling as I give her a gentle squeeze. When I reply, I can feel a lump in my throat.
“Home.”
10
Serena
As we walk up the steps to the clean white villa, my stomach turns again and again. I will my body to chill the hell out, let me have a calm moment for once. But between the pregnancy hormones, the car chase, and of course the rush of being reunited with Bruno, I’m not feeling very well at all. Bruno takes my hand, giving me a look of reassurance before knocking on the door. The porch lamp flickers on above our heads, washing us in pale golden light. I look sideways at Bruno, still in shock that he’s alive. I can’t believe it. He’s really here. With me.
I still keep expecting to wake up and realize with a pit in my stomach that it was all just a happy dream, another fantasy to confuse my brain and make me wish for things that aren’t true. But he squeezes my hand and smiles and I tell myself that this is real. This is really happening.
Bruno said this place was home, but I’m not entirely sure what he means by that.
Until the door opens to reveal a teenage girl, probably about seventeen, sitting in a wheelchair looking very sleepy. It is early in the morning, after all. Then her big green eyes light up and a look of revelation appears on her face. The color drains from her cheeks and her mouth falls open, gaping at us—but more specifically, at Bruno. She mutters something to herself, shaking her head slowly as she stares at him. Bruno, meanwhile, is beaming brilliantly. There might even be just the slightest sheen of tears in his eyes.
The teenage girl murmurs, “B-Bruno? Sei tu?”
He nods. “Si. Ciao, Domenica.”
She shouts over her shoulder, down the hallway behind her, “Papa! Mama! Vieni!”
She quickly waves for us to come in, rolling her wheelchair back out of the way so we can close the door behind us. The girl reaches up to take Bruno’s hand, tugging him down to give him a tight hug. There’s a big grin on her pretty face, and it looks very much like Bruno’s smile.
He kisses her on the forehead and mutters, “La mia bella sorella.”
Just then, a middle-aged couple comes trudging down the hallway. There’s a tall, broad-shouldered man with a proud, handsome face and thick salt-and-pepper hair, and at his side is a much shorter woman with chin-length, smooth black hair, luminous green eyes, and frown lines etched into her face. But at the sight of Bruno, both of them stop in place. They stare at him with the same wide-eyed, slack-jawed surprise the teenage girl did.
“Bruno, è possibile?” asks the woman, raising a hand to her cheek in awe.
Beside me, Bruno nods. The older man steps forward, shaking his head. He reaches out to touch Bruno’s chin, then his jaw and cheek, almost like he can’t believe his own eyes. Like Bruno might just disappear into thin air at any moment. I know the feeling. It’s the same way I feel when I look at him, touch him. That’s just the effect he has on people. Once you meet him and really get to know him, you’re constantly worried that you might lose him.
“Papa, sono io,” he says, nodding. “Veramente.”
“Mio figlio!” the older man exclaims, throwing his arms around Bruno in a hug. The woman comes shuffling over to hug them both, her beautiful face crumpling into happy tears.
So this is Bruno’s family, the ones I’ve heard bits and pieces about, the ones who sent him away to America in hopes of giving him a better life, a chance at escaping the temptation of joining a criminal gang here in Apulia.
I stand aside, overwhelmed but content to watch the heartwarming scene unfold. The time will come to introduce me, but I’m not about to intrude on this golden moment.
The teenage girl looks at me suddenly, an expression of surprise on her face, like she’s just noticing me for the very first time. She cocks her head to one side and says, “Chi sei?”
I answer her in Italian, hoping I can keep up with these fluent native speakers. “My name is Serena. I’m Bruno’s… um…”
“My fiancée,” Bruno
intercepts in Italian. “Mama, Papa, Domenica—this is Serena De Laurentis. We met in New York when we were teenagers. I have loved her since the first day I saw her. She’s come a long, long way to be here with me. With you.”
I give them all a sheepish smile. It’s been a long time since I’ve been introduced to someone’s family, and never in a foreign language I can only speak with some small degree of fluency. I can get by, but I have a feeling I might fall behind if they start talking rapidly.
And of course, as soon as that thought crosses my mind, they all launch into one big hailstorm of rapid-fire questions and comments. They ask about how we met, how long I’ve been in Italy, who my parents are, where I come from. Am I hungry? Thirsty? Tired?
Once they take notice of my hand resting on my stomach, the topic switches gear and gains even more intensity. Am I pregnant? Are they going to have a grandchild? How far along am I? How do I feel? Have I been drinking enough milk? Is it a boy or a girl?
“Slow down,” Bruno interrupts, laughing. “There will be plenty of time to ask all the questions you want, but for now I think Serena might like to sit down and get comfortable. We have had a rough time getting here. Lots of travel.”
Bruno’s mother rushes over to take my arm. I’m not an incredibly tall person, but next to her I feel like a giant. She’s barely over five feet tall, and I find myself wondering how funny it would be if Bruno had inherited his mother’s height rather than his father’s. Mrs. Lomaglio leads me into a little sitting room down the hallway, plopping me down on a cushy red couch before hurrying off to the kitchen. Bruno, Domenica, and Mr. Lomaglio come in after us.
Mrs. Lomaglio comes back quickly with a cup of something warm and vaguely sweet. Maybe some kind of tea. I’ve never been much of a tea-drinker, but I’m not about to refuse anything this sweet woman offers me, so I gladly take a sip. She smiles broadly, pleased.
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