by Robin Black
“Grazie.”
Before the girl even turns away, the glass is to Kate’s lips. She drinks thirstily, as though the wine might cool her down, and pours herself another glass. An English family fills the table next to hers. After they order, they set about planning the next week. The parents want to see the sights of course, the children to find a pool.
She realizes she has to pee, and now the waitress is nowhere to be found, so Kate stands and begins to wend her way through the tables. The bathroom can’t be hard to find. It can only be inside the small building. At the doorway, she crosses into darkness and into an unexpected chill. As she passes by the kitchen, she hears two voices, a woman and a man. The Italian is too rapid for her, but the anger in the man’s voice is unmistakable.
In her own life, she muses—while using the toilet, washing up—she has never had a voice raised to her that way. She has heard other people fight. She had an aunt and uncle who used to battle, roaring by the end of family meals, but she had been proud of the fact that she and Stephen never did anything like that. She couldn’t remember him raising his voice at her. At the children, yes, but not at her.
Catching herself in the mirror, she wonders now whether this detachment was something for which to feel gratitude or more like a sign of things to come.
It doesn’t matter, though, she knows. It doesn’t matter what warnings there were or were not, or whether she could somehow have averted his departure had she been more aware. That is the problem with the past, she thinks, as she flicks off the light. This illusion that revisiting it might somehow change what has occurred, the same illusion that brought her to Italy a week before, that brought her to Orvieto on this day.
Stepping outside, Kate almost bumps into Anna. There are smudges of wet mascara on the girl’s cheeks, pale streaks down her cheeks. But the girl’s mouth jumps into a smile as she asks Kate what more she needs.
“Wine,” Kate says. “I would like another carafe of wine.”
As the heat hits her again, she feels a bit faint, and sits gratefully at her table.
“Where is your husband today?” Anna asks, bringing the new carafe. “Will he meet you here?”
“My husband… the man you met…”
“Yes.”
It’s ridiculous, this confusion of a comedy braided into her tragedy, but impossible to clarify now. “No,” Kate says. “He won’t be picking me up. I’m here on my own.”
“You can call him?”
“I can’t call him. Why?”
“You should eat something. It’s not good to drink with no food.” She straightens the second chair at the table, wipes at something with her rag. She seems in no hurry to step away. “Where are you staying? At a hotel?”
“No.”
The girl doesn’t move, and with a sense of surrender, Kate explains that she has rented a farmhouse. She names the town and answers more questions about the location. Anna says she knows it, she knows the house. She went through school with the children of the spindly landlady. They were an unusual family, she says. All three left the area to study art. One became a very successful painter, living in Florence.
But there is a limit to how much interest Kate can feign. This young woman’s childhood has so little to do with her, she barely believes in it. And the farmhouse can hold no history before the one night Arthur slept within its walls. Just as it will disappear when she goes home. She is relieved when the English family calls Anna over, and she makes quick work of the wine in her glass.
It’s a good question, she thinks, as she pours herself more, whether she will ever make it home. A policeman was there at the house in the early morning, dressed in uniform, wearing what looked to Kate like an unusually large gun. A little man with a big gun. Still in her robe, she let him in and offered him coffee, which he refused. He then offered her his condolences, which she accepted, though with a sense of impatience.
They sat across from each other at the massive kitchen table—just where she and Arthur last sat—and he asked her to describe the accident again. Her answers the other night had not been completely coherent, he said, which was entirely understandable. She noticed a slightly British flavor in his speech. His circular face was bisected by an enormous mustache all but covering his mouth. His brown eyes seemed almost imploring as they looked at her. She had the strong impression that he wanted her case dismissed, that he wanted to send the poor, bereaved American lady home. He smiled as he spoke, prompting her.
“You were the one at the wheel?”
“Yes. Yes, I was.”
“And you were driving within the speed limit?”
He nodded as he asked. It all felt like a formality, as though there was an implied response of yes. She could almost hear it, the next word he wanted her to say. The word that would make all of this disappear, as if it had never happened. She looked away from him, from his encouraging smile, down at her own bruised arm, her skin lined with small brown moles, galaxies of freckles. Her brother’s skin, on her arm.
“No. No, I wasn’t,” she heard herself say.
“No? Do you understand? The question?”
She thought for a moment. “I don’t know the exact speed limit, but I believe I was above it.”
“You told us previously that you were not.”
She could remember the scene. Her hospital room, the day after. The story she had told was that she had been driving carefully but the road had been terribly slick. Or maybe there had been something wrong with the car. Sitting at the kitchen table, she could clearly recall the sensation of trying to get away with it, and a chill ran across her flesh. The idea of trying to get away with it had become repugnant. If she killed him, let her pay.
“I misspoke the other night. I know I was speeding, or at least driving very fast. There was a storm coming on and I was…”
“Yes?”
“And I had been drinking.”
“This is not what you said before.” His features had settled into exasperation.
“It may not be,” she said. “But it’s the truth.” As she spoke, she tried to shut out the voices of her children, urging her to retract. Retreat. Stop playing this game and just get the hell home. The image of Stephen, wild over his insurance bill, wondering what has happened to the wife he so confidently left. “It’s as simple as that,” she said. “I wasn’t being adequately careful. And I probably shouldn’t have driven at all.” She frowned, as something obvious occurred to her for the first time. “I would much rather it had been me.”
The captain scribbled notes. He would have to speak with his colleagues, he said. He would be back in touch soon. It would be better if she stayed in the country for a while.
And so she will stay.
The carafe is empty when Anna returns.
“I’ll take the check,” Kate says. “But first…” She gestures toward the building, the ladies room again. She stands, she tries to, but the world is lost, a black screen fluttering before her eyes.
“Here,” the girl says. “Sit. Here. Here.”
Somewhere far, somewhere else, the metal table is searing into Kate’s cheek. A hand touches her. A motorcycle guns. There is a voice. Then nothing at all.
“Kate’s heading out again,” Arthur would say. “Hold steady, there… tim-ber!” It was a family joke. Even at her wedding, in the receiving line, she had needed to sit for fear that she would crumple to the floor. “Good thing you’re marrying a…”
“Doctor,” Stephen had supplied.
The waitress is holding a glass of water to Kate’s lips. Kate shakes her head. No.
“You should,” Anna says, now sitting. “You should drink.”
Kate takes the glass in both her hands, then puts it down. “It’s so silly…” she begins. “It’s the heat. And I haven’t eaten. But really, I’m fine.”
Anna looks concerned. Gone is the professional smile. She touches the glass, moves it an inch toward Kate, repeating her entreaty to drink. She suggests that the husband s
hould be called. Kate can’t drive, she says. She shouldn’t drive.
“I’m fine. I will be. In just a few minutes…”
“It isn’t safe,” Anna says.
“I have no choice.” Kate can hear the sharp edge of her tone, but does nothing to soften it. “I’m all alone.”
Anna nods, slowly, as though considering, and then she looks toward the café building. “Maybe you can help me,” she says. “Maybe I can help you.”
As Kate sips at the water, the girl tells her that she herself has no ride home at the end of her shift. She knows the house where Kate is staying, and she can drive her there. She has a cousin who can fetch her then. “My own ride has disappeared,” she says.
The chill of the water spreads through Kate’s body, waking her.
“It isn’t only you,” Anna says. “Or me. It isn’t safe for others, to have you drive your car so…”
“Drunk?” The girl is silent. “Well, you’re right,” Kate says. “About the others. It’s the others, isn’t it, who always get hurt?” She puts down the glass. “Thank you. I accept your offer. I appreciate your help.”
Anna tells her she only has to work a few more minutes. They will be gone very soon. Kate should use the ladies room, she should be ready to go home.
Fifteen minutes into the drive, the women pass the site of the crash. Anna slows down and points out the small roadside shrine someone built, a cross made of white-painted sticks, a basket of purple flowers, drooping, long dead now themselves. She tells Kate about the tourist who was killed. A man, she believes.
“This is why you have to be… to be…”
“Careful,” Kate supplies. “Yes. This is why.” She thinks of asking Anna to stop the car, but her mind is moving slowly and the shrine has been left far behind before the thought can leave her lips. She wonders if she will come back tomorrow, maybe bring fresh flowers. She wonders how long it will be there, once she is back home—assuming she doesn’t land in an Italian jail instead.
Night is still some time off, but the sky has lost its brightness. Still, Kate can feel the heat of the air through the open window. She is just beginning to doze off when Anna asks if it’s okay that they stop by her house. She may be needed to help with her brother, she says. It’s on their way. It won’t take very long. Kate agrees without thought. “Anything,” she says, then realizes how very little she cares what happens now. Nothing feels real anymore. She is in a car she doesn’t know, with a girl she doesn’t know, and she has loosened the truths of her life with this girl, allowed reality, which has been supposed to hit her, like the slap on a newborn child, instead to fade and disappear.
Sitting up a bit, she asks Anna how old her brother is. He’s seventeen, she says, but that isn’t his true age. Not really. He’s like a child in a grown body. Like a baby. He is mentally retarded, she says.
“He can be a problem for my mother. I only want to look at them and tell them I’m going to my cousin for the night. It won’t take long. Then I can bring you home.”
“Take your time,” Kate says. “I’m in no hurry to be home.”
Soon, Anna pulls the car up into a dirt patch—barely a driveway. On the lawn are terra-cotta pots, most of them empty, two or three holding scrubby shrubs. Anna repeats that they won’t be here long.
“It doesn’t matter,” Kate says.
“You can come in, if you like. It isn’t…” Anna pauses. “It isn’t so nice,” she says.
“It doesn’t matter to me,” Kate says again. “It doesn’t matter to me at all.”
It isn’t clear to Kate what does matter now.
Inside the house, the air is dark in a way that night is not, a hazy dimness falling like gauze. A woman, younger than Kate and worn thin as a leaf, sits with a newspaper folded on her lap, where it looks more like a covering of some kind than something to be read. An enormous boy, his long hair pulled into a ponytail, sprawls on the couch. He wears jeans and an orange T-shirt. His feet are bare. As she steps closer, Kate can see filth on the balls and heels of his soles, only the high arches not black with grime. The sight holds her attention for several seconds, until she forces her gaze away.
Anna speaks rapidly, quietly to them both and Kate picks out the story—her own story. A customer. Wine. A husband. A home.
She looks back at the boy. His eyes are like one-way streets, taking in, taking in. Nothing revealed. Kate tries to smile and he looks away.
In one corner is a stove, something cooking. As Kate steps closer, the smells of lemon, of rosemary, something to long for, rise in the air, at odds with the squalor and sadness of the room. Anna throws her purse down on the long wooden table and pulls out a straight-backed chair. “Please,” she says. “Please have this seat. I won’t be long.”
All around Kate are unfamiliar sounds and scents, unfamiliar sights, people she understands she cannot know. She closes her eyes, as though to limit this flood. She concentrates on the voices only, how they stop one another, then seem to spur each other on. The boy speaks only in answers. Sì and no. Anna’s tone is the questioning one, the mother the hardest for Kate to understand. She says the most, all of it addressed to Anna, all of it in urgent whispers. Soon, Kate picks out a pattern: the mother speaks, a long string of words. Then Anna asks a question to the boy, who answers his sister, yes or no. The mother speaks again. There are no silences between them. None of the pauses Kate has spent a lifetime filling—or not.
She opens her eyes. Anna is by the stove, dishing food into a bowl.
“We won’t be long,” she says. “They’ll be okay here, while I’m with my cousin. I just wanted to… to be sure.”
Kate needs the bathroom, and Anna sends her up the stairs.
“Just a few minutes more,” she says. She looks like a different girl from the one at the café. She looks a decade older. “I’ll be ready to go when you’re back down.”
In the car again, Kate asks where the father is, and the girl tells her he left long ago. “I think it was the sadness. About Marco, about… life. Sadness. And maybe he is a…”
“Womanizer?” Kate asks. “A man who likes ladies too much?”
“No. Not that. A man… a man who is afraid. There’s a word…”
“Coward.”
“Yes, that’s the word. My father is a coward. So he left.”
“Many men do leave,” Kate says. “Do you see him still?”
“No. I don’t want to.”
“I thought maybe the café, in the kitchen… ? I heard voices…”
“No. He is someone else.”
Her tone bars further pushing, so Kate asks about the cousin, and Anna smiles, as if remembering a joke. He is her best friend, she says. He is the funniest person she knows. “We laugh whenever we are together.”
“I don’t have cousins like that,” Kate says. “I’m not sure I have anyone like that.”
“That’s too bad. You have to have people for fun.”
At the farmhouse, Anna parks and says she’ll call now for her ride, but Kate has already realized she doesn’t want the girl to leave.
“If you stay for dinner, for the night, I’ll drive you back to Orvieto tomorrow. Or to your home.”
Anna says she is going with the cousin to a festival in his town, a festival of flowers. They have plans for the day.
“I’ll take you there, then. I’ll be sober by tomorrow. I’m sober now.” It’s almost true. “I just don’t want to be… to be…”
“Alone?”
“That’s it,” Kate says. “I don’t want to be alone.”
“But where is your husband?” Anna looks toward the dark house. “He isn’t here?”
“My husband has left me. Like your father. He too is a coward. And he won’t be coming back.”
Kate’s cell rings two times as together the women heat up the landlady’s latest offering—a veal shank about which Anna has nothing good to say—and pour themselves more wine. She ignores it. It is the children calling, no doubt. Martha wan
ting to know when Kate will be home. Or possibly, just possibly, she thinks, it is Stephen again, with his doing-the-right-thing tone of voice. Checking in on her the way one checks in on an ancient, burdensome aunt.
Let them go to hell, she thinks. Let them all go to hell. Every single one of them.
Over the meal, she asks Anna about her brother. Has he always had problems? Or was there an accident? An illness? Anna tells her he has been like this since birth. There was something wrong with the pregnancy, she explains. Her face seems to slacken as she speaks. She tells Kate her mother had been sick with fever. “I’m six years older. And a girl. My mother is not good with him. So, he has always been my…”
“Responsibility?”
“Yes, like that. Like my job. My mother and my father, they are both people who… people who…” As Anna concentrates on pouring more wine, Kate allows the moment to extend, understanding with something like gratitude that this silence isn’t hers to fill. “They are not strong with problems,” Anna finally says. “And then they have a big problem in their life, so I have to be good with it. I know there are better doctors for him, in Rome. I did research on the computer at the library. There are people who can help. They can’t fix him, but he can have a better life than this. There are things to do. But it’s expensive. It’s not just like a pill he would take.”
“You’re so young to be so responsible.” It’s true. She looks like a child.
“I don’t feel like I’m young.”
“I had a brother, too,” Kate begins. “But I wasn’t… I wasn’t… We were twins.” Kate thinks of the shrine. Of the ashes upstairs. “He died,” she says. “He’s dead.”
“I’m sorry. Were you close? Were you friends?”
Kate considers. “Yes, we were. Most of the time. I don’t think I was always a good sister, though. I was… I was impatient with him. Very often.” In the car. Just before the crash. She had been so angry. She says nothing more.
“I am also impatient with Marco. It’s very bad. All the time, I feel…”
“Guilty,” Kate supplies. “You feel guilty. All the time.”