“Nothing’s really different,” Avery insisted. “I just don’t really live here. What’s the big deal?”
At one time in her self-righteous life it would have been a very big deal. But a man’s deceit had plunged her into the pit of misery, and now a man’s deceit had pulled her out.
“I should have told my grandmother I was gay before she died. Then again, she was sharp like you, Rosemary. She probably always knew.”
But then Lydia would have said something, Rosemary thought. She would have eased her grandson’s pain if Avery had really been her grandson. She knew that there had never been a divorce decree listed in any newspaper. What surprised her was that she didn’t care. What was true was that he had helped her. Perhaps sometimes — just sometimes — people might need to fortify themselves by averting their eyes to what they see most clearly and feel most strongly.
“They’re looking for a receptionist at the newspaper. I’m pretty sure I can persuade them to overlook your ‘criminal’ background; it’s not exactly CIA work. Besides, we have a liberal slant. This is a two-bedroom. I wouldn’t mind your staying for a while, until you get your feet on the ground. Actually, I think I’d enjoy the company. But you’d have to sleep on the floor when my children visit, and I insist you share all the chores.”
“I look forward to it.” He relaxed his shoulders and settled back into the easy chair like a man of his grandmother’s era, who had just returned from a hard day at the office and was about to light a pipe. “I’d like to tell you what I did — what they convicted me of.”
Rosemary held up her hand to silence him. “Not right now. Not just yet.”
His eyes widened with surprise.
“Let me bask a bit in relief, Avery. I must say, for a while I thought you might be a figment of my imagination or not of this world. You are something of an angel to me.”
He laughed, that childlike giggle of his she so enjoyed.
“Don’t laugh. These things happen. Take my ex-husband’s girlfriend. She’s pregnant, you know — by the devil himself.”
“Did you see him?” Marco Ficola asked his daughter. They sat side by side, separated by the contraptions engineers design to shift gears and hold coffee cups and cigarette butts.
“Who?” Joanna fastened her seat belt and placed the key in the ignition.
“The owner of the villa in Gronda. Did you see him when you were there last year?”
Joanna began to maneuver out of her parking place; her mother’s face, chalky and seemingly more wrinkled than the day before, filled the rearview mirror.
“Ma, can you move your head, please?”
“What?”
“Your head. Can you move it to one side? I can’t see the car behind me.”
“What is she saying?” Myra Ficola asked her husband, as though Joanna was speaking a foreign language.
“Take your hat off!” Marco Ficola bellowed. “She lost her hearing aid again. Can’t remember where she put a two-thousand-dollar hearing aid. Can you imagine?”
“What are you telling her?” Myra Ficola said in an equally loud voice. Joanna longed for a volume control button.
“I don’t know why you have to wear that damned huge hat all the time.” Marco’s shouting had brought on a coughing fit.
“I don’t want to catch a chill. I read that you should always wear something on your head. That’s where you lose most of your body heat. That’s probably why you can’t get rid of this thing you have. You never wear a hat.”
“For cryin’ out loud, Piovoso said it’s going to be sunny, sixty degrees today.”
“Piovoso said. What does he know?”
“He’s a meteorologist. He knows.”
“What does he know,” Marco said mimicking his wife. Then, waiting to be sure his cough was in check, he let out a sign of exasperation. “She believes everything she reads. She reads too damn much.”
“At least she still reads.” This was a jab at her father, who had given up his beloved newspapers and novels, claiming he could no longer focus.
There was a time when Joanna’s mother would have told him to shut up and stop making fun of her; there was a time when he wouldn’t have ridiculed her so much, when they operated on a more even playing field. But she could hardly hear now, and so he was free to vent all he liked, particularly when he had his back to her. She was shrinking a bit more each day and her voice becoming frailer. Joanna didn’t know for whom to feel sorrier: her mother, who couldn’t hear or remember what she had eaten for lunch five minutes after she’d consumed it, or an anxiety-ridden father whose patience had become tissue-paper thin.
“Joanna, I asked you if you saw him,” her father said. “You didn’t answer me.”
“Dad, I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“Oh, come on, Joanna. Don’t play dumb. I told you about him.”
“You did?”
“Of course. He was the owner of Villa Foresta.” He tilted his head and shouted into the backseat. “Myra, remember Harlan Bigwood?”
“Didn’t he play for the Patriots?”
“Myra, he was the owner of the villa we found the last time we were in Italy.”
“Oh yes. The New Zealand man with the large wife.”
“That’s it!” He was thrilled that she remembered. He would have kissed her had she not been sitting behind him.
This was how they spent their time, Joanna thought. No wonder they weren’t bored — it took so long for their decaying minds to unravel everything. He wasn’t always this cantankerous or she this zany; they had their good days, when they discussed the upcoming presidential election, the Hallmark movie they had just seen on TV, the sermon Father Ryan had given on Sunday.
“Maybe you told Elliott about it,” Joanna said, referring to her husband.
“I told you.”
Maybe her father had. Maybe she was becoming like her mother, her life slowly getting caught between the slippery folds of her brain. She suddenly felt remorse for her own lack of tolerance. She’d quit talking to her parents — really talking; it just took too much effort. It was easier to phone the doctor herself or to send the thank-you notes, rather than explain to them what had to be done. She had been that way with her daughter, but Myra had told Joanna that if she didn’t let Jill do things on her own, how was she to learn? Well, Joanna’s parents didn’t need to learn anymore, so why did she have to humor them? Time was running out for her too.
“I don’t know why you always have to come with us to the doctor, Joanna,” her mother said. “Your father is perfectly capable of driving.”
“Please stop interrupting, Myra. I’m trying to ask our daughter a question, but she keeps avoiding me.”
“I’m not avoiding you.” Joanna was laughing now. “How could anyone avoid you, Dad?”
This statement offended him; he knew it was not meant as a compliment, so he turned sullen, his body sinking into his car seat.
“It was a joke, Dad.”
“Yeah.”
***
“How are you feeling, Mr. Ficola?” Dr. Adler asked, looking not at Marco but at his chart.
“I’m fine. I don’t even know why I’m here. At my age, if you look for something, you’re going to find it. I have a lot of symptoms — comes with the territory. I told you, I’m good — good to go.”
“Dad, tell him about your cough and — ”
“I brought my mother,” Marco said sarcastically, interrupting Joanna, who sat with a notebook on her lap.
“The cough still keeping you up at night?” Dr. Adler asked the chart.
“I get up so many times to go to the bathroom, I don’t know which keeps me up. How about you give me another antibiotic? I can shake this thing. I licked typhoid fever during the war, I licked pneumonia last year, and I can lick this.”
“You’ve alread
y been on two antibiotics. That’s why Dr. Mathas sent you to me.”
“Enough of the chitchat. What did my test show, doctor?”
“Your CAT scan confirmed my suspicions. You have adenocarcinoma.”
“And that’s — ?”
“Lung cancer,” Dr. Adler said without changing his expression or intonation. He said everything matter-of-factly, as though he were hooked up to an IV of ice water. “Most likely from the smoking.”
“I quit 15 years ago.”
“You smoked for 45.”
That last remark silenced the mighty Marco Ficola. Joanna had never seen her father at a loss for words. His eyes filled with disbelief. When they told him Joanna’s daughter Jill had died, he had broken down and wept and cursed God. But now, confronting his own mortality, he sat in shock. Joanna decided they’d get a second opinion. She didn’t like Dr. Adler.
“I’m sorry about the diagnosis, but this is what you have to do now.” This was routine for Dr. Adler, who was running a tape he’d run many times before. Joanna put down her pen, and wondered how this man could get up in the morning, have his coffee, and set out to play the Grim Reaper every day.
“We’ll need a biopsy to confirm the cell type and the staging, to see how far it’s spread.”
“What about surgery?” Joanna managed to say.
“Depends on how advanced the cancer is. I doubt it will be an option. I’ll recommend an oncologist, and she’ll prescribe medical treatment. My guess is that it’s at the point where there can be no remission. It’s all about stabilizing it at the original site. There are certain protocols; it’s a matter of your oncologist opting for a better outcome or quality of life. But I’ll leave that for her.”
You’re damned right you will, Joanna wanted to say. We don’t like your conjectures.
As though someone had snapped fingers, Marco emerged from his trance.
“So what now?” Dr. Adler’s last statement had escaped him.
“There’ll be more scans of your body to see how far it’s spread.”
Marco’s last defenses crumbled. He had no more bravado. “Well. I see.”
“He’s okay? The chest was clear?” Myra asked Joanna.
“No, Ma.”
“Oh.” Her voice trailed off, her eyes welled up.
The couple left the office arm in arm, their gait slowed by a decade. Dr. Adler held Joanna back.
“The age of course is a double-edged sword. The cancer grows more slowly, but the organs are weaker, function less efficiently. They can put up with only so much treatment.”
She nodded.
“You’ll need to make plans. It’s clear that your mother isn’t capable.”
“Of course.” Her father was the caretaker — the keeper of pills and appointments, he was his wife’s chauffeur, delivery boy, and personal shopper.
From a plastic rack on the wall, Dr. Adler removed a pamphlet with a list of names and numbers and chanted another litany: “Visiting nurses, in-home care, Catholic Charities, hospice.”
“Hospice?”
“Not yet, but you need to be thinking about it. Does he have a living will?”
“Yes.”
“Get it to me.”
Joanna carried her resentment for this little man in the long white coat with the big name tag out to the enormous parking lot. There she stood without the faintest notion of where she had parked.
“It’s way down that third row over there.” Marco pointed to his left.
“I don’t think so.”
“Joanna, I’m telling you, it’s down there.”
He was right, of course. And the fact that his memory surpassed hers terrified her. Or was it that she couldn’t go through it all again — a funeral, an adjustment, the emptiness only four years after having lost Jill? Twenty years from now would still be too soon. And then there was her mother to worry about. Joanna’s father might have just been handed a death sentence, yet the person she felt sorriest for was herself.
***
“Well, it’s been a good run,” Marco said, breaking the silence on the ride home. He stared out the windshield; he saw nothing.
“It’s not over, Dad. We’ll get a second opinion.” The flatness of their voices bounced words between them like a ping-pong ball hit in slow motion.
“My father used to say that if you’re afraid to die, you don’t deserve to live. I’ve lived my life, Joanna. I would have given it four years ago, if I could have to save Jill’s.”
“Don’t, Dad.” It wasn’t the first time he’d made this impossible offer.
“Listen, Joanna.” He whispered now, to make absolutely sure his wife couldn’t hear. “What’s she gonna do? She can’t manage alone. You don’t know the extent of it —how I cover for her, what I hide from everyone. Gets worse and worse every day. I don’t care for myself. But what’s she gonna do?”
“You know I’ll take care of her. But Dad, it’s not the end; there are other specialists and treatments. Besides — it’s never really over.”
“No, no.” He shook his head. “Don’t start that. I don’t believe in any hereafter, if that’s what you’re getting at. What happens to us when we die? We go into the ground, period. That’s it. That’s it for all of us.”
“Yet you go to church.”
“For your mother. That’s all. For her.”
“I don’t believe in that kind of hereafter either, Dad. You know I stopped believing a long time ago. But I do believe — I know — the spirit lives on in another form, another body.”
“And what if it does? Is that spirit gonna cook for your mother? Is he gonna put the toothpaste on her brush in the morning? Is he gonna kiss her good night?” He was getting worked up now, his voice growing louder, and Joanna feared that soon her mother would demand to have their conversation explained to her. And Joanna would lose it then — she’d have to pull over to the side of the road and break down at the sadness of it all, because she could feel the weight of emotion in her throat.
Though he disregarded his feelings at times, Marco was not an ignorant or an insensitive man. The color had drained from Joanna’s face, and she blinked rapidly to see through tearing eyes. Her anguish touched him; he lowered his voice.
“You really think that about the spirit?” His tone was considerate, respectful.
“I know so,” she said, grateful for the opportunity to salvage her composure and eager to tell him about the little girl she had met at Villa Foresta the year before, but she held back. There had been far too much shocking news revealed on this sunny day.
“You never told me whether you saw the owner of the villa.” Her father returned the conversation to her last trip to Italy, as though he had read her mind. He was looking at her now, searching for an answer.
“The owners weren’t there, but I know that they’re from Naples and that they recently bought the villa from a New Zealand couple.”
“He’s dead. I knew it.” Marco turned melancholy.
“Oh, I don’t know if we’re even talking about the same person. I just know that that couple doesn’t own the villa any longer.”
“He would never have given up the place unless he had to. He had cancer.” Marco coughed, but it was a cough of discomfort, an attempt to cover up a quivering voice that could barely speak the word that had taken on a life of its own inside his body.
“How do you know?”
“He told me that day your mother and I stopped there while we were driving around the countryside. He was thrilled to have someone to talk English to yet someone who also belonged to Italy. Sometimes two people just hit it off. We sat in his restaurant and drank wine for hours.”
“Restaurant? There wasn’t any restaurant when we were there. No one was there except a caretaker-concierge-cook all rolled into one.” Thinking about the villa, she became animated.
“And he didn’t tell you about Harlan?” He cleared his throat of phlegm and turned toward the back seat. In the rearview mirror, Joanna saw what her father was looking around to confirm: Myra’s eyes were closed; her head rested on one side as her lips muttered sleep garble.
“No.”
“A dynamic man. Very tall, strong. Good looking. Engaging.” He became more excited with each word, and Joanna could swear her father was smitten with this person. She had never heard him pay this kind of tribute to another man, let alone one outside the family.
“Worked for an international relief organization. Traveled the world. He was passionate about rebuilding that villa. Didn’t know a damned thing about construction though. He was arguing with the workers while I was there about that long flight of stairs that leads to the parking lot. I knew he was all wrong about the pitch but I didn’t say anything.”
“The stairs are falling apart, cracked all over.”
Marco let out a roar of satisfaction.
“Figures. I knew that would happen. A stubborn man. Said he would finish that villa even it killed him. Said he wanted to be buried there.”
“He is — under those stairs.” Joanna remembered Paolo telling her that at breakfast. She remembered the firm grip that had held her down when she had tried to run off with Elisabetta. Marco, caught up in his own reverie, ignored her last statement.
“He said he didn’t want to die until he saw his son kick his drug habit, too. He was a real fighter.”
“Did you see the son?” Joanna was quick to ask.
“No. He was in New Zealand at the time. He came and went. They all did.”
Joanna hesitated to tell her father what she was about to reveal, but in view of the news he had received and the story he had just shared, he was more vulnerable than she had ever seen him. And she needed to tell him. She couldn’t think of him leaving this world without knowing.
Thieves Never Steal in the Rain Page 13