Once Was a Time

by Leila Sales

  “Yes?” I said, setting aside the book that I wasn’t really reading.

  “I’ve been so glad to have you on this trip,” she said. She sat down on her bed and looked at me. “It’s really meant a lot to Jake, to share this experience with you. He’s a special kid. I know all parents say that about their children, but, well, Jake has a particularly strong personality. He has no talent for bending it to fit into other people’s lives, and I say that with love. So it’s all the more meaningful to see how the two of you have clicked. I can tell he really values your friendship.”

  I had no idea what had prompted Jake’s mom to say all of this to me right now. It was like she had some second sight telling her that he and I had been fighting.

  Or maybe she’d just noticed how little we’d spoken to each other at dinner, and how weird we’d both been about the drawing he’d done for me.

  My stomach twisted at her praise. “Thanks, Rachel,” I said, “but I don’t think Jake really likes me. He just said I could come on this trip as a ‘business arrangement.’”

  As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I worried that she’d ask what the arrangement was—what exactly I was supposed to give Jake in exchange for what he’d given me. But instead she laughed lightly. “Yes, that sounds like Jake,” she said. “That sounds like Jake trying to protect himself.” She clicked off the light and said, “Now let’s get to sleep. We have one last big day of sightseeing tomorrow.”

  Within minutes, I heard Rachel’s breathing grow deep and rhythmic. But I stayed awake for a long time, listening to the indistinct conversation and laughter coming from the piazza outside our open window.

  When I finally drifted off to sleep, I dreamt of Kitty. She didn’t look anything like herself, in my dream, but I knew that it was her because I would always know her. She was trying to anagram Jake’s name, but because it was just a dream, it wasn’t going right.

  “Jake Adler,” said Dream Kitty. “It could anagram to I See You.”

  “No, it couldn’t,” I said. “There’s no Y in ‘Jake Adler.’ Is there?”

  “Or ‘Star Wars Friend,’” she said.

  I tried to count how many Rs were in “Star Wars Friend” and how many were in “Jake Adler,” but I kept getting lost.

  “I don’t think that works,” I said. “I came up with some good ones for him already, all on my own, because you weren’t here to do it.”

  “Ooh, like what?” she asked.

  But then I couldn’t remember any of them. “Not everything anagrams, you know,” I told her.

  “Yes, it does,” she insisted. “Everything does.”

  “Not ‘Kitty,’” I reminded her.

  “Of course ‘Kitty’ has an anagram!” She sounded offended. And in my dream, she told me what it was, some other word that you could get if you rearranged the letters in her name just right. Some perfect word, and I tried repeating it to myself over and over, even as she and I kept talking, so that I could bring it with me back into my waking life—because it had just occurred to me that this was a dream, and that pieces of it would get lost when I woke up.

  But nothing forces you out of a dream faster than the awareness that waking up is inevitable.

  “Don’t go,” I said to Kitty.

  “Of course,” she said. “I never leave you.”

  And then I was awake.

  I sat up in bed and looked out the window. I didn’t hear any people yet, just the twittering of birds, but the sky was gray and I figured it was nearly dawn. I wasn’t tired anymore.

  I picked up the drawing Jake had done for me and curled up with it in an overstuffed armchair in the corner of the room. Lightly I touched my fingers to his careful pencil lines and shading. Of course this lacked the vibrant colors of the original, but I could still tell what it was. He really was a good artist. And he was a good friend to notice that I’d liked that painting, to care enough to do something about it.

  Looking at his drawing made me feel the same thing I had felt for three years, whenever I thought about Kitty, and what a committed friend she had been to me, and what a rotten friend I had been in return. I was used to feeling this way. I was comfortable with it.

  I wished Rachel would wake up and talk to me so I wouldn’t have to be alone with these thoughts, but I saw she had her eye mask on and her earplugs in. She was dead to the world. I did some anagramming instead, like Kitty in my dream. Firenze. Zen fire.

  Manarola. A Alarm On. Loan A Ram. Ron Alama.

  My breath caught.

  Ron Alama?

  Yes. Ron Alama.

  Still clutching Jake’s drawing, I crept out of the room, easing the door shut behind me. I walked down the darkened hallway to the boys’ room and banged and banged on their door.

  After a few moments, Jake flung it open. “Charlotte!” he whispered loudly. His hair was sticking up in all directions, and he was engulfed in a T-shirt that read one ring to rule them all. “Are you okay? Is my mom okay? What’s wrong?”

  “We’re fine,” I said. “Everyone’s fine.”

  His concern faded into a scowl. “Then what are you doing?” he asked. “It’s five in the morning.”

  “I wanted to say I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry I told you that you were a big fat baby on the playground that time, I’m sorry for everything since then, and I’m sorry that I won’t be able to get Dakota and the rest of them to be nice to you and invite you to parties and stuff. I know I said I could, but I can’t. I’m not friends with them anymore. And Miss Timms is leaving, so I guess I don’t really have any friends at all now, but I have you—I hope—that is, if you’re willing to be friends with me. I would really like that. For the past couple years, I’ve thought that we get what we deserve. And—well, I want to believe that I deserve a friend like you.

  “I was lying earlier, Jake. I think you do see who I am. And I know that’s not why I came on this trip with you, but it’s true anyway.”

  “Okay,” Jake said, looking baffled.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Okay. I never really cared about those girls in particular. I just wanted somebody at school to be on my side.”

  “I’m on your side,” I told him.

  “Great.” He pushed his hair out of the way. “Then who needs them?”

  I smiled at him, and Jake smiled back.

  “Oh, and since you’re awake anyway,” I said, holding up his drawing. “I think I figured out the next clue.”

  Chapter 32

  A couple hours later, we were on a train toward Manarola. I watched the sparkling, almost impossibly blue Ligurian Sea pass by out the window as Rachel read from her guidebook. “ ‘Manarola is one of the five towns comprising Cinque Terre, which is Italian for—as you probably guessed—‘Five Lands.’ The towns are all set along the coast, linked to one another by hiking paths. Together they’re part of Cinque Terre National Park, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.’ ”

  “Okay,” Noah said, “but why are we going there?”

  “Because it’s supposed to be really beautiful,” Jake offered.

  “Yeah, but it wasn’t on that whole itinerary Mom made. I’d never even heard of it before I woke up this morning and you told me we needed to be at the train station in forty-five minutes.”

  “Sometimes plans change,” his mom said. “And Jake and Charlotte really wanted to see this place. It’s the town where Charlotte thinks her cousin lives.”

  “But—”

  “Noah,” said Rachel sharply. “Drop it. This is going to be a beautiful place, we’re going to get good exercise and fresh air, and you’re having an adventure.”

  “What if there was more stuff I wanted to see in Florence, though? More museums or whatever?”

  “We’ll be back there tonight,” Rachel pointed out.

  “Yeah, but th
en we have to leave tomorrow.”

  “You so did not want to see ‘more museums or whatever,’” Jake said. “You just wanted to spend more time with that front desk girl. What’s her name? Rozalia?”

  “Shut up.” Noah leaned across the aisle to punch his brother in the arm.

  “You shut up.”

  “I suddenly can’t wait to go home,” their mother said with a dramatic sigh.

  I just kept watching out the window, the cliffs passing us by on one side, the ocean on the other, willing our train forward. We passed into darkness, and I knew that meant we were now going through a tunnel, burrowing our way right through those lush green mountains.

  “So what?” Jake had said when I told him, at five in the morning, that the letters in the town name “Manarola” could be rearranged to spell “Ron Alama.” “There’s an Italian scientist whose name has the same letters as an Italian town. What do you think it means?”

  “I think,” I told him, “that Dr. Ron Alama was Kitty’s way of telling us to go to Manarola.”

  Okay, so Kitty and I weren’t psychic in the Zener card way. We couldn’t tell exactly what each other was thinking all the time. Okay, that was just a childish fancy. Yet I believed that we were tied together somehow, that maybe we could communicate across time and space in a manner that wasn’t telepathy, but that still felt magical.

  Jake’s eyes grew bigger and bigger as we stood there in the hotel hall. “Are you sure?”

  I hesitated before answering. “No. I’m not sure at all. I don’t understand it. But I know what my dad would say if he were here: It seems too unbelievable to be a coincidence.”

  And that was enough for Jake. “All right,” he’d said. “Let’s wake up my mom and tell her we need to go.”

  “Right now? Are you sure?”

  “We go home tomorrow. I don’t think we can wait.”

  Now, as Jake and Noah bickered beside me, the train emerged from the tunnel and suddenly I saw it before us: a mishmash of tightly packed little houses in every bright color, clustered together, facing the sea.

  Manarola.

  Chapter 33

  “This seems like one of those small towns where everyone knows everyone,” Rachel said as we sat at an outdoor café close to the train station, sipping from glass bottles of Fanta and watching shopkeepers bustling around. Laundry hung from clotheslines outside nearly every window, while cats wove their way around tables and rolled around on the stones, warming themselves in the bright sun. Jake kept popping out of his seat to chase down a particularly fluffy and antisocial calico.

  I saw a lot of other tourists, mostly hikers with walking sticks and water bottles, but I thought that Rachel was right, and most people who actually lived here would know most everyone else. There just weren’t that many houses before the town gave way to the mountains or the sea. And I saw no cars. The only way in or out was to get back on that train. Or to get on a boat, I guessed.

  A waiter approached our table and asked, “What can I get you?”

  Rachel removed her sunglasses and beamed up at him. “How long have you lived here?”

  “Forty years, signora,” he replied with a little bow.

  “Perfect,” she said. “Then do you know someone who lives here named . . . Charlotte, what is your cousin’s name?”

  “Catherine McLaughlin,” I supplied. “She’s around my age, and she’s English, too. She has the same accent as me.”

  The waiter shook his head. “I am not familiar with anyone of that name. You are sure she lives here, yes? Many people from all across the world visit Cinque Terre. But people who live here, mostly we are Italian. Here it is very, how you say, isolated. You see this, I’m sure. It is not like Milan or Rome. This is not a place where foreigners stay for a long time. You understand?”

  “We do, thank you,” Rachel assured him.

  “Thank you, signora. And to eat?”

  Rachel ordered a tuna salad for herself and for Jake, who was still off chasing cats, and Noah ordered the catch of the day. I ordered a pastry because the waiter wouldn’t leave until I said something, but with the tightness in my stomach, I couldn’t imagine eating it.

  “We can ask other locals after we eat,” Rachel assured me. “I’m sure someone will know her.”

  Even if people didn’t know Kitty’s name, I thought they would notice if a random English girl with no parents had moved to town. Wouldn’t they? A lot of people in Sutton had noticed me, and Sutton was much bigger than Manarola.

  But we asked a number of people—shopkeepers and fishermen and even some kids around my age. “She goes by Catherine or Kitty,” I explained. “She has hazel eyes just like mine, and blond hair. She’s fair-skinned and very good at word games.” Nobody had seen anyone like that. Or maybe they just didn’t speak English fluently enough to understand what I was looking for.

  As we got closer to the harbor—a rocky little inlet with some small boats resting on shore and others docked in the water—we saw more and more people. At first I assumed they were tourists taking photos, as we ourselves were doing—how could you not? But then I noticed that the water was filled with swimmers, and many of the people standing ashore were cheering them on, and snapping photos of them, not of the gorgeous landscape after all.

  “What’s going on?” Rachel asked a guy who looked to be a little bit older than Noah, who was whooping and jumping up and down as he watched the water. “Is it a swimming race?”

  “Not a race, exactly,” he replied in an Italian accent, not taking his eyes off the swimmers. “There are no prizes. It is the Miglio di Manarola. Anyone in good health can swim in it, so many people do!”

  “The Manarola Mile?” Jake guessed, and the guy nodded eagerly.

  “Stop acting like you understand Italian,” Noah muttered to his brother. “Show-off.”

  “Well, it would seem like I do understand Italian,” Jake pointed out.

  “It starts here in Manarola,” the guy went on, “and follows la via dell’Amore down to Riomaggiore. It is not a very far distance, but you must be a good swimmer!”

  A mile sounded far to me—I’d never swum more than two laps in the pool without needing to take a break.

  “Via dell’Amore,” Jake repeated. “The Street of Love?”

  “Stop,” Noah moaned. “I knew that one anyway.”

  “Oh, right,” Jake said. “How could I forget you are a total love expert now?”

  I grinned. Since we’d made up this morning, Jake had seemed so confident as to be almost cocky—as if now that he officially had a friend, nothing could keep him down.

  Rachel thanked the Italian guy, who hollered, “Vai, Aldo, vai!” out at the swimmers, punching his fist in the air. The sea crashed dramatically on the rocks before us, and the spectators standing closest to the edge laughed and sputtered as the water hit them.

  “Do you think Kitty might be here somewhere, watching this?” Jake asked me quietly, looking around at the crowds.

  I shook my head. “If there’s a swimming event that anyone can participate in,” I said, “and if Kitty is really here, then I doubt she’d be watching it. She’d probably be in it.”

  “Really?” Jake asked. “How do you know?”

  “I don’t,” I said. “I don’t know anything. But Kitty loved swimming. Even her obituary mentioned it,” I added bitterly. “I can’t imagine her sitting back and watching something like this when she could dive right in herself.”

  “So how do we find her?” Jake asked. “If you think she’s in the water right now—it’s not like I’m going to jump in and swim up to everyone and say, ‘Excuse me, sorry to interrupt your breaststroke, but are you Kitty?’”

  “I think we go to the finish line,” I said, “and we watch them get out of the water.”

  “And if she’s not there?” Jake asked.

&nb
sp; “Then we’re no worse off than we are now.”

  We told Rachel and Noah the plan, and Noah said, “Whatever,” and Rachel said, “I’d love to walk the via dell’Amore. That’s a terrific idea. I read about it in the guidebook on the train ride here.”

  So we started to follow the trail. It wasn’t hard to find, since so many people were walking along it, many clearly tourists, others there to cheer on their swimming friends below. It got crowded, so tourists would squeeze past one another saying “Excuse me” in their own languages: “Excusez-moi,” “Entschuldigung,” “Desculpe,” and, of course, the Italian “Permesso.” I kept staring over the walkway’s railing at the colorful swim caps bobbing below, imagining as hard as I could that one of them belonged to the girl I knew.

  The path was surrounded by flowers, ferns, cacti, and palm trees. Butterflies flitted through the air before us, as if guiding our way forward, while tiny green lizards darted off the path and disappeared into the thick vegetation. Seagulls cawed overhead.

  Jake was captivated. He started keeping a running tab of every color as he spotted it in a flower. We hadn’t walked that far before he had completed a rainbow. “This is even better than it looked in that painting,” he said. “I think it’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever been in my whole life.”

  It was the most beautiful place I had ever been, too. And I wondered whether maybe that was the whole reason Kitty had lured me here: maybe not to find her at all, but just so I could see how much majesty the world had to offer.

  “What are all those locks doing here?” Noah asked. Thousands of padlocks were affixed to the railing between the path and the sea, to the netting keeping back rocks overhead, and to pretty much anyplace else that a padlock might fit. Some of them had names engraved or handwritten on them—“Matthew + Ame,” for example—or little expressions of devotion.

  “Let’s see what the guidebook says,” Rachel replied, pulling us aside so that the other hikers could pass.

  “Noooo,” Noah groaned. “The guidebook is so boring. I’m sorry I asked.”