It should have been spooky. We were the only ones in the cemetery, walking the streets of a literal ghost town. But, when I approached one particular mausoleum with a small dome on top, I looked at the two images of a married couple, grinning in black-and-white, and I felt comforted somehow. At least they were together.
I turned around to see Daniel watching me. I wanted to say something to him, but I didn’t know what. Then I heard a loud, unintelligible sentence from behind me.
“What was that?” I asked.
Capo took a step forward.
“Un terremoto,” he said.
He paused a second, squinting as if he were searching for something on the horizon. Then he shook his hands. “The earth . . . quakes!” he said. “Capito?”
“There was an earthquake here?” Daniel asked.
“Si,” said Capo. “Un terribile terremoto.”
I noticed then that Paul was filming this, too. Capo walked up and stood directly in front of the camera, as if he had just been waiting for this moment to host his own television show.
“The whole città . . . tutto destroy. Abbandonato!”
I looked again at the little crypt homes.
“These are the victims?”
Capo seemed to understand. He nodded and gestured toward the crypts. I reached out and touched a wall. It was rough and chalky against my palm.
“So, this is the only town left?” I said.
Everyone was quiet.
I looked at the nearby tombs. Most of the pictures portrayed the victims in their youth. I didn’t know if this was because they’d actually died young or because these were the only photos the bereaved could find.
But each face seemed not much older than Jonah’s.
“It must be a relief,” I said.
Daniel squinted at me.
“How do you mean?” he said.
“To the families. Just to know the dead are not alone,” I said. “They have a whole town. They have one another.”
Capo crossed himself before he walked back to the bus and started it up again. Paul and Archie put their equipment down and took their seats. We rode for the next few hours in silence, and finally, in the early afternoon, the bus pulled up to the outskirts of Siracusa, unable to go farther due to the narrow roads.
Daniel and I stepped out with our bags. The film crew stood surrounded by dollys, mics, and lens shades, like castaways with no tools useful for survival. I walked up to them.
“What are you guys filming, anyway?” I said.
They looked at each other. Then Paul stepped forward.
“We don’t really know,” he said. “Some kind of Italian nature show. But we haven’t heard from the client in days. Instructions have been a little loose.”
I looked them over. The beginning of an idea was coming to me.
“How would you gentlemen like some side work?” I said.
35
Bringing on a film crew for no specific reason was my first mistake. Turning my phone back on was my second. As we crossed the Ponte Umbertino, a bridge into the historic quarter of Siracusa, Daniel was asking a lot of questions about the first of these decisions.
“What are we going to use those guys for?” he said. “I thought this was just for us. Seriously, Tess, why did you ask them? I don’t understand it.”
Meanwhile, I watched the message app on my phone explode with angry texts. I opened it up and glanced at the feed. I saw phrases like “calling the embassy” and “have him arrested.” And farther toward the top. “I’m afraid for you, Tess. I’m not sure you’re thinking clearly.” I tuned back to Daniel, who was chattering away beside me.
“. . . just don’t want to do anything over the top like your dad does. This isn’t some customer we’re trying to dupe; Jonah was our friend. It just doesn’t feel right to do some kind of gimmicky thing—”
“Excuse me,” I said.
“What?” he said.
Below us, on the reflective water of an inlet, some tied-up kayaks drifted into one another.
“What the hell did you just say?”
Daniel took his sunglasses off to wipe them on his shirt. His eyes squinted in the sun. He shifted his duffel bag to his other shoulder and avoided looking at me.
“I’m just saying I don’t know why you asked that film crew—”
“After that.”
He sighed.
“Look, Tess. I like your dad. He’s cool and weird, but his ideas are kind of ridiculous. You can see that, right? I just don’t want Jonah’s thing to be a joke like that.”
My throat was tightening. I felt my fist clench at my side.
“Mamie’s funeral was a joke to you?”
“The one with the strippers?”
“Yes,” I said. “The one where a woman who had been censored by her husband got a final celebration with her old friends. Doing what they loved. That was a gimmick?”
“Tess,” he said. “C’mon. You know what I mean.”
But in that moment, I didn’t. So, I just started walking.
“Wait a minute!” he said. “Where are you going?”
He started to jog to catch up. I turned around and stopped him in his tracks.
“I don’t want to see you right now,” I said. “Go manipulate someone else into hanging out with you.”
His shoulders dropped and he looked down at the cobblestones. He clearly wanted to be comforted, but I couldn’t do that right now. I had no comfort to give. So, I just kept walking into Ortygia, the historical center of Siracusa. I took deep breaths and tried to forget everything except being here in this present moment.
Everything on the island was quiet. Everyone was taking their afternoon naps. All of the little businesses had closed their metal shutters, and the outdoor displays of Limoncello and foldable chalkboards with seafood specials were safely stored inside.
There were only a few wandering tourists. It was a beautiful place, though. Maybe the prettiest place I’d ever been. A Mediterranean palette of two-story buildings in reds, pinks, beiges, and yellows. The stone facades were chalky like coral, and the balconies were crowded with succulents, spilling over the metal railings. If I squinted my eyes, I could almost pretend I was underwater. No wonder Jonah romanticized this place.
I kept walking until I hit my first major landmark. The Temple of Athena. It was absolutely massive, bright white and ornate. A sign nearby said it was from the fifth century BC. And it gave way to the smoothest, cleanest public space I had ever been in. I almost felt like I should wipe my feet before stepping onto the time-smoothed stone beneath me.
The sun reflected off the white stone and seemed to create a burst of light around everything. I moved toward a bench on the far end of the piazza. I knew as I approached it that I was going to lose it once I sat down. It was all too much. All of this. I needed to cry or lie down or both.
I got within a foot of the bench when I saw him.
He looked self-possessed, sitting there by himself, sipping an espresso beneath a sign that read “Caffe Minerva.” It wasn’t an exact match, but it was close. He had the tangled blond hair and the glasses. And his body was lanky and lean in dark jeans and a crisp white T-shirt. The café must have just closed, but still, he sat there alone.
The other Jonah.
Right when I was about to take a seat nearby, he finished his coffee and dropped some Euro coins on the table. Then he got up and began to walk away. I wanted to call out to him, but what would I say? “Hey, you! Stranger! You’re my dead Internet boyfriend’s doppelganger!”
So, instead, I followed him across the piazza to the opening of a narrow cobblestone street. I realized on some level that what I was doing was not rational. The world was telling me to pull myself together and stop acting ridiculous, and I was calmly saying: No, world. Sorry. I will keep at it.
Nobody was at the top of the stone platform except for a few tourists spooning icy slushes in the sun. I couldn’t tell if he knew I was there. I watched him without speaking, and he didn’t turn around. We looked out at the same seascape: a foamy swathe of sky-blue water engulfing the rocks of a rugged beach. The waves lapped against a faded pink embankment.
But it was the ground that caught my attention.
LUCA + MARA, I saw directly beneath my feet. The names were written in red spray paint on the light stone, followed by TI AMO. I took a step to the side and saw another piece of graffiti. GIO LOVES GIULIA. There were rows of hearts drawn on the border wall of the lookout along with the occasional smiley face. A nearby bench read: SARA MI AMORE in two-foot tall letters.
The closer I looked, the more layers of graffiti I saw. Some faded messages had been left alone; others had been painted over with a more recent set of lovers. CEASERE + TIZI had overtaken GIORGIO + PINA. I kept expecting to find lewd messages, or the obligatory penis drawing that always seemed to show up in the States, but there was nothing like that. This was a sacred place.
Other Jonah didn’t seem to care about the messages. He just walked along the seawall, looking out over the water. Then I saw him pull something from his pocket. It was a cell phone, and he looked down at the screen and smiled. He typed something into it. Then he just waited. Ten minutes later, a woman showed up and greeted him with a kiss. Her hair was pulled up in a ponytail and she had a camera around her neck.
She looked nothing like me.
I suppose that was inevitable. Why would Other Jonah be with Other Me? Of course, he’d be with my opposite. Still, I felt a pang of disappointment as I watched them pull out a map and point to something in the upper right-hand corner. And when he held her hand and they left the platform, I felt no urge to follow them. I just waved a hello, or maybe a good-bye, and watched them disappear.
Then I was alone on the platform. The other tourists had left, too. Off to take their rest like the locals maybe. I looked again at all the painted proclamations. Then I reached into my bag and dug around, hoping I had what I needed. Down at the bottom, among the cracker crumbs and old lipstick, I clasped a small marker. And when I pulled it out and tested it on the palm of my hand, it bled a dark purple.
I bent down and began writing my name. The wind from the sea sent the excess mist entwining with the salty air, and it felt good against my face. Gradually I made the plus sign along with Jonah’s name after it. But I didn’t stop there. I added one more word to the message. It was one I had seen on many of the others. The word: SEMPRE. I remembered enough of my high school Spanish to take a guess at the meaning. Like siempre, I thought, it must mean “always.”
My walk back to the beautiful piazza was slow. I wandered the backstreets. I passed a small church called Chiesa San Leonardo. It sat behind a small rectangular piazza that had been paved in a striking diamond pattern, and the top of the building pinched slightly at the top like a pope’s hat. I kept going until I reached the Piazza Archimede. There was a fountain there made up of men riding sea creatures surrounding Diana, goddess of the hunt. The water cascaded in thin streams around her.
“I’m sorry,” said a voice from behind me.
I didn’t turn around. I just looked more closely at the fountain. There was some kind of a nymph escaping the outstretched arms of a man behind her. Diana stood between them, protecting the young woman.
“Listen. I didn’t mean all of that about your dad. I guess all of this is catching up to me. We’re actually here and I just want to do something great.”
I admired Diana’s bow and the stoic, badass expression on her face. Finally, I turned around and looked at Daniel. He was pink from the sun, and his eyes looked red. It was possible he’d been crying.
“Let’s find a hotel,” I said.
He nodded. I reached out my hand and he took it.
We walked back toward the temple and found a place nearby. We slipped inside a lobby, which had the same style columns as the temple. I let Daniel make the arrangements. And when he got the room key, we walked up the stairs to our room and closed the door.
Then I pulled Daniel’s shirt over his head and brought him close to me. He seemed tentative at first, but eventually he got the idea. He took off my tank top and unhooked my bra. And then we kissed and dropped onto the cool bed beside us. It was a nice kiss, a little hesitant, but his lips were warm and I felt the urgency building when I rolled on top of him.
“We can call this off,” he said. “We can just go home if that’s what you want.”
“Do you have a condom?” I asked.
He held still.
“Yeah,” he said in a sheepish voice.
He took his wallet out and removed one. It looked new.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
I unbuckled his belt and I unzipped my pants, and while I wish I could say we proceeded to have the most mind-blowing sex ever, that wasn’t really the case. But we got over the initial awkwardness and it felt good after a while. I held tight to him and watched his shoulders tense. His face relaxed. And when we lay cooling on the bed afterward, an Italian game show played on the TV.
“Is this what being an adult is like?” I asked.
“Which part?” he said.
“Fighting and having sex and having no idea what you’re doing?”
“I don’t think adults have sex,” said Daniel.
“Tell that to my dad,” I said.
On the TV there was an older couple playing some kind of newlywed game. The man’s face was turning bright red.
“Speaking of your dad . . .” said Daniel.
I looked away from the TV.
“What?”
“He’s kind of been leaving me a lot of voice mails.”
“Oh yeah?” I said. “Restaurant recommendations?”
Daniel didn’t smile.
“The last one came an hour ago. He said he doesn’t have a passport, but he’s sending someone here to bring us home.”
36
I woke up hours later in the dark of the hotel room, sweaty and unsure of where I was. I stumbled into the bathroom on wobbly legs and sat down on what I thought was the toilet. I didn’t realize it was the bidet until I leaned back on the faucet and sent a powerful jet of ice-cold water straight up my back. I leaped up and smacked my hip on the sink. My hand searched out the light switch near the mirror, and finally the fluorescent bathroom flashed around me.
The bidet was still going off like a geyser behind me. I was shaking and dizzy and I wanted very badly to laugh, but I couldn’t. So I just stood there for a moment, wholly aware of how confused and vulnerable I felt. I was in a bathroom in Sicily. I had just had sex with my dead boyfriend’s roommate. And I had no idea what I was going to do next.
I turned off the cascading bidet and walked into the hotel bedroom. Daniel was still sleeping. He stirred a little beneath the rumpled sheets and then fell back asleep. I didn’t regret what we had done. But I didn’t quite know how to feel about it. I grabbed my phone and saw that there was a new message that wasn’t from my father. I didn’t recognize the number, but I knew who it was right away. It read:
I’m here, Tess. Where are you staying?
I immediately wrote:
Meet me at the Ponte Umbertino.
Then I pulled some fresh clothes from my bag and got dressed. I
grabbed my room key and took the elevator down to the lobby where there was no desk clerk on duty. I continued out the door and into the streets of late night Siracusa.
The town was ghostly and I wondered if walking through it was the best thing to be doing right now. But once I got used to the quiet, and the feel of the stones beneath my feet, I felt my heart rate begin to drop.
I walked past the Chiesa San Leonardo, the lonely church that I had passed earlier. At night, it looked even smaller: just one door and a window, the entrance to its tiny courtyard chained off. I wondered if there were people buried beneath it. A few priests of local renown. Maybe a saint.
When I reached the Ponte Umbertino, I spied some drunken tourists, tottering home in the amber lights. On the other side of the water was a small wine bar. An enoteca Daniel had called it. Outside of it, a boy of about ten played the accordion and waited patiently for the occasional tip.
I took out my phone and turned on the camera. I pointed it at the scene in front of me and watched the world pulse in and out of focus. I hadn’t taken a single picture since I arrived in Sicily. Now I had the sudden urge to capture all of it at once.
I went to press the digital shutter, but I heard footsteps behind me. And when I turned, I found a woman walking toward me from the other side of the bridge, and I knew it was her.
Grace the Rower.
She had come by land this time.
I expected to get a lecture right off the bat. Some tough love, or just toughness without the love. What I found was a woman in no shape to lecture anyone. Her lids were heavy, and her hair was spilling out of a loose tie. When she got closer, I noticed she was carrying a bottle of wine.
“It’s table wine,” said Grace. “I know because I took it from a table.”
She sat down and set the bottle next to her. She closed her eyes and leaned against the side of the bridge.
“Grace,” I said. “Are you okay?”
She didn’t say anything for a moment. She just took a few deep breaths. Then she opened her eyes and pointed off toward the distance.
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