The Book of Second Chances

by Katherine Slee

  She watched as he walked toward her, held her breath as he pulled her into a tight embrace. He was crying, talking in a mixture of English and Italian, hugging her, then holding her at arm’s length, staring at her face, then shaking his head and crying all over again.

  “Emily.” He said her name like he was afraid of it: quiet and slow. “Emily,” he said again, exploring every part of her face, resting a moment on her scar, then back up to her eyes.

  “Noah.” She attempted a smile, but there was something about this man that bothered her, because she couldn’t shake off the feeling of déjà vu, that she had met him before. Except she didn’t remember his face, so what was it? The fact he had been expecting her, or even the knowledge of what he did to her grandmother? Disappointment? No, because he was just as alluring, just as whimsical, as she had imagined. All crinkly eyes and designer stubble, with navy blue shirt, white jeans, and a diver’s watch around one wrist.

  “Are you hungry?” He was looking at her in a different way now—as if he was seeing her, not her grandmother, noticing the ways in which they were unique, as much as how they were so very similar.

  “A little.” In truth, she didn’t really know what she was. Food seemed somehow irrelevant, disconnected from this man, this place. She wanted something, but couldn’t put her finger on what it was.

  “Do you want to see the castle?” He pointed to the stone walls behind them.

  “I’ve been up it already.”

  “Did you know that it is built on stilts? Just like in Venice.”

  She liked the way his words were curling around one another, as if he was struggling to piece them together. It may have only been because he was more used to speaking Italian than English, but it made her feel more at ease, less aware of her own impediments.

  “I tell you what. Let me take you out on the boat. To a place I know a little farther up the lake. Somewhere I took your grandmother, a long time ago.”

  He was waiting for her to reply. To give her consent. To get on a boat with a man she knew only by proxy but who could, for all she knew, be an ax murderer.

  “Do you have time?”

  Three more days, Emily calculated. Three more days until the timer ran out of sand and everything she thought she had would be given away.

  “If we go now,”—he held out his hand, invited her on board his boat—“we can be there to watch the sun set, with a glass of prosecco and some fantastic linguine.”

  The boat thrummed to life and Emily sat up front, next to Noah at the helm. She closed her eyes to feel the salty spray on her face as they cleared the small marina, and he opened up the throttle, sending them hurtling across the water.

  Did you swim here? she wondered, knowing how much her grandmother loved the sea, even on the coldest of mornings, even when she was tired and frail.

  Eyes wide open, she saw houses with terra-cotta and lemon walls, children playing on pebble beaches and snow-topped mountains looming in the background. It was spectacularly beautiful, like a film set, or something stolen from the depths of her imagination.

  A heron was perched on one of the rocky outposts they sped past, all skinny legs and long beak. Motionless, the bird waited, staring into the water for its prey.

  The Greeks believed herons to be messengers from the gods, including Aphrodite. Emily stole a glance at Noah. Was her grandmother trying to send her a message, or was she simply looking for clues, for signs, that this was where she was supposed to be?

  Watching the casual way he navigated the lake, with only the slightest movement of his hand on the wheel, Emily imagined what it would have been like to have loved someone as deeply as her grandmother loved this man. For someone to love you that way in return.

  It was clear he was at home here, speaking with reverence and delight as he pointed out various landmarks along the way. He was at peace, and she couldn’t help but wonder once again why her grandmother hadn’t wanted to be here, with him.

  “Over there,” he said, pointing to a huge villa with a thin, wooden jetty that was flanked on either side by candy-striped poles, and Emily could make out an ivy-covered entrance to the house at the top of a long flight of stone steps. “Wait here one moment, I’ll see if they can provide us with something to eat.” He dipped his head, took hold of her hand, and placed a gentle kiss on her skin, watched her a moment more, then disappeared up the steps and into the house.

  Emily followed a neat gravel path around the side of the house to discover an immaculate garden with a line of palm trees that flanked a swimming pool, the surface of which was perfectly still. There was no one else about and so she decided to slip off her shoes, dangle her legs over the side of the pool and stir her toes through the water, sending ripples over the surface all the way to the other end.

  “Why did you ever leave?” she murmured, looking beyond the villa with its stuccoed walls and to the houses that reached all the way up the hillside.

  A high whistle, and she looked back to see Noah come outside, beckoning her toward where he was waiting on a covered terrace with curtains drawn back to reveal a panoramic view of the lake.

  The terrace floor was pink-and-white checkered marble, the light fittings were the same color as candy floss, and the chair Noah pulled back for her to sit upon had a satin bow tied around its back. But it was what lay beyond the terrace, back toward the jetty and a little to the right, which stopped her from sitting. Something that Emily thought she had seen before made her go back down and around the pool before running toward a view she had looked upon, over and over, without knowing where it actually was.

  “She was here,” Emily whispered, leaning both hands on the back of a wooden deck chair with deep green cushions. A pair of them, either side of a stone table, positioned under a tree with branches that reached down to wave hello.

  “I was working here, at the hotel, when your grandmother came back.” Noah was there beside her with a far-off look on his face. Almost as if he knew which photograph she was thinking about. A photograph that lived on her grandmother’s bedside table, of Emily’s mother as a toddler, peeping out from the top of one of those very chairs, her grandmother standing behind with both arms either side for protection, both of them smiling at whoever was taking their picture. “The house used to belong to Mussolini, before it became a hotel.”

  He was talking for the sake of having something to say. She was used to people behaving this way around her, filling in the gaps created by her silence, but this was different. It wasn’t because she didn’t want to speak, to talk to him about her mother, about why she was here and all the thousands of other questions she wanted answers to. But rather she had no idea what to say, or how to convey all of what it was she was feeling.

  “Did you know about Margot, about my mother?”

  He exhaled with relief, as if he had been holding his breath, afraid of what she was going to say.

  “Not at first, and I wish I could tell you she was mine, that you are mine.”

  Emily swallowed away her disappointment, gave a small smile as she realized it didn’t hurt half as much as she had expected it to, because on some level she had always known her grandfather wasn’t the treasure to be found. And it felt as though she had found something wonderful and unexpected in this man, in Antoine too. They were pieces of her grandmother that were still here for her to discover.

  “So why did she come back, if you weren’t the father?”

  “I think we were always drawn to one another, in some way. But we both also understood that I wasn’t right for her, no matter how hard I tried.”

  “She loved you.”

  “And I loved her. More than anyone before or since.”

  “What happened?”

  “I asked her to stay, to marry me, again. For us to become a family.”

  Emily stared at him. He was seated in the same spot where her mother once played. She could imagine time unwinding, going back to that summer. She could picture the three of them on the shores of
this very lake, with her mother, Margot, having her toes dipped into the wet and giggling with delight as those pudgy legs kicked out.

  Emily listened to the rush of waves over the shore, heard how the water here was more gentle, less aggressive, than at home, as if each stretch of ocean or lake had its own personal melody. Just like a person has their own unique scent, or tone of voice, or the exact beat of their heart.

  “She said no.” Emily sighed. It made her sad to think of her grandmother here, with him, being asked to love someone and telling them it wasn’t possible.

  “Three times.”

  “Three?”

  He laughed, a rich note of sound that filled his lungs before escaping, making Emily smile in return.

  “The first was after a drunken argument, about Antoine no less. In Sirmione, when we barely knew one another but couldn’t deny the attraction, the pull of both our hearts.”

  “He’s still mad at you.”

  “I know, and I probably deserve it.” Noah lit a cigarette, drew on it in a gesture so reminiscent of Tyler that it hurt her to watch, to see the similarities between the two men who had never met. It pained her to realize how much she cared for them both, in completely different and surprising ways.

  “She left him to come here, when she still had faith in me. It lasted for a couple of months, but then…”

  “Then?”

  “I was young, and arrogant.” There was no need for him to fill in the gaps.

  “You’re an idiot.”

  “You sound like Antoine, but you’re right. I was, and it is something I regret every single time I think about her, about what could have been.”

  “And?”

  He took another drag of his cigarette, gave himself time to think before replying.

  “I came back to find her gone. No note, just a copy of Villette left on top of an unmade bed.”

  “She was punishing you.” Emily laughed as she considered her grandmother’s choice of book. So typical of her to leave nothing but a clue as to what it was she was really thinking: a book about a lonely woman’s love for an unattainable man. Not too dissimilar to a cryptic clue that had led Emily all the way back to him now.

  “Again, I deserved it. But after a while she started writing to me. Told me she was happy, that she forgave me my sins.”

  “Do you still have it?”

  “I have all her letters.”

  “Can I…Can I see them?”

  He dropped the cigarette to the floor with a slow shake of his head, ground out the embers with the heel of his shoe.

  “I don’t know that it would help.”

  “Help with what?”

  “With saying goodbye.”

  She could feel a blockage in her throat—one that swelled and pushed from all sides, fighting to escape. Wet lines appeared on her face as tears fell fast and determined, no matter how many times she tried to wipe them away.

  He stepped forward and wrapped his arms around her, enveloping her in a hug as the hurt from deep inside eventually let go, and so he held her tighter still, tucked her safe against his heart.

  It wasn’t the sight of him, nor the sound of his voice, although the two of them combined had been enough to send her a little off-kilter, ever since she first saw him steering his boat to shore. She couldn’t, up until that moment, quite put her finger on what it was that made her a little less certain today was the first time they’d met. It was what was hidden beneath the scent of clean linen with a hint of lime, the undertones of spice and nutmeg in his aftershave, that made her remember, made her pull away.

  “You were there.”

  “You remember.”

  “Yes. I mean, I didn’t. But, you were there.” In the clinic, where Emily had been taken to recuperate, to recover, away from all the well-intentioned friends and family back in London. A place where she and her grandmother lived for just shy of two years. Where she learnt to walk, to paint, to live once again.

  “You used to read to me.”

  “I did. Wind in the Willows was your favorite, if I remember correctly.”

  A storybook that used to help block out the nightmares. The low rumble of his voice when he imitated Badger, the crazy flap of arms supposed to be Toady that almost, almost, made her laugh.

  More often than not, she would turn her head away; close her eyes as she didn’t want to see the way he looked at her grandmother. It was the same way her father used to look at her mother—with so much love. Only their story was tangled up with a lifetime’s worth of pain.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “What for?”

  “Forgetting.”

  Noah exhaled slowly. “It’s not something you need to apologize for. You were broken in so many ways. All she ever wanted was for you to get better.”

  “What about her?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She was broken too.” Emily was crying again thinking about how hard it must have been for her grandmother, how for years all Emily could focus on was her own pain, what she had lost, never stopping to think about the ways in which her grandmother had suffered too.

  “Losing a child isn’t something anyone can ever even begin to imagine. The tragic unfairness of it all. But she had you.”

  “All I did was push her away.”

  “You were her reason not to give up.” He took hold of her shoulders, brought his face close to hers. “Do you have any idea how much she loved you? How much she adored the time you had together?”

  “I miss her.” It was no more than the suggestion of a whisper. Words felt but hardly spoken.

  “So do I, mia cara, so do I.”

  “Why didn’t you stay, or come back to England with us?”

  “She didn’t want me to.”

  “Because of me.” Everything her grandmother had turned her back on, abandoned, was because of her.

  “No,” he said firmly. “That fault lies entirely with me. I was trying to save her, always trying to save her, and that’s never what she wanted.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You have to understand, back then, for her to decide to raise Margot by herself was more than hard. Everyone was telling her not to. Everyone had an opinion on it, but she felt completely alone.”

  “She had you.”

  “Yes, but I didn’t have her. She was fierce and strong and annoyingly stubborn,” he said with a poignant look at Emily. “But she was also right. We would never have worked because I was trying to make her into something, someone, she was not.”

  Emily thought of the heroine from her grandmother’s second book, who, at the very end, when she had what others would deem a perfect life, decided to walk out on her fiancé. A woman who took passage on an ocean liner to Australia, hoping to start a life of her own with nothing in her pocket but a handful of hope.

  “You are more like her than you think,” Noah said, holding out a brown paper parcel, tied up with string. “Come,” he said, taking her arm and escorting her back to the terrace. “You can read while we eat.”

  Someone had set down two enormous silver domes and placed a bottle of prosecco in an ice bucket next to the table to chill. Emily lifted her dome high to reveal the scent of sweet chili, salt, and lashings of lemon.

  “Eat,” Noah said as he poured her a drink. “You look like you need fattening up for Christmas.”

  Taking a long sip, feeling the crisp explosion of bubbles against her tongue, Emily pulled apart the brown paper and lifted out the next clue.

  There he is, she thought with a smile, tracing over the cover with her fingers. She remembered when she first showed the drawing to her grandmother and how shocked she had been when she had started to laugh and cry all at once.

  It was Emily’s favorite of all her grandmother’s book covers—an enormous, violet dragon with eyes of gold and teeth like shards of glass, soaring high over a river filled with lantern-lit boats, all heading out to sea.

  It was also the last book in the ser
ies, written just before Catriona first fell ill. When Ophelia had learnt to walk again. A medical miracle, according to the doctors, but of course she and Terence knew better. The miracle was Ophelia swimming in enchanted waters at the bottom of a waterfall, behind which lived a fearful dragon, a dragon who the local villagers believed to be wicked and cruel, but Ophelia heard him crying while she swam and asked him what was wrong. The dragon was grieving the loss of his brother, who had been shot down by a cannon as he flew over the seas. His grief made him angry, made him roar and breathe fire over the villagers, burning their houses to the ground.

  “Don’t be too quick to judge the monsters,” Emily said as she opened the book to read one more dedication.

  For Beth—thank you for saving us both.

  “Monsters?” Noah asked as he wiped his mouth with a napkin. It made Emily think again of Tyler, of that first morning back in her Norfolk kitchen, when he helped himself to a snack and told her they had a train to catch.

  “Everyone has a secret pain they’re trying to hide,” Emily replied, staring down at the name of a woman she knew only too well. Someone she dared to think might possibly be the final piece of this puzzle, and might just be the last step on her journey back home.

  “She loved to watch you draw,” Noah said, as Emily slowly turned each page. “She said it was when you were most at peace.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ll show you.” Emily reached into her bag, found an empty space where her sketchbook should have been, then looked across at Noah as she tried to think back to when she last had it. “Verona.”

  “What about it?”

  “I must have left it in Verona.” Along with all the other people and places she had been trying to forget.

  “What was it you wanted to show me?”

  “I can’t.” Emily shook her head no. Squeezing tight her eyes, she tried to block out the memory, all the memories, that she had been shown, that she had been drawing ever since she left England.

  “Yes, you can.”

  He told me to talk to them. Emily remembered what Giancarlo had said. He told her not to forget them, because then they would never be gone.