I tell myself not to panic. Chances are she’ll walk through the door any second and there will be a logical explanation. ‘Could she have come home after her run without you realising and then left again, maybe to walk through the town?’
He shrugs his shoulders. ‘I guess. My door was closed but I think I would have heard her if she did.’
I take a deep breath. ‘Okay, let’s think about this rationally. If she went for a run and hasn’t come back, maybe she ran into someone she knew, or maybe got lost?’ By now I’m standing up and ready to run out the villa. ‘Did she have her phone with her?’
Daniel looks up in thought. ‘Yes, she did. Definitely. It was in her running armband and she had her headphones on.’
I grab my phone and dial her number. It goes straight to her voicemail. ‘It’s off,’ I say, and feel myself becoming increasingly more panicked. I hit redial and again it goes directly to voicemail.
Daniel pauses. ‘If she had her phone and she got lost, she would have just used her GPS to find her way back here. She always tracks her run on some app to see how far she’s gone and what her pace was.’
‘Well, maybe her battery died,’ I suggest, still hoping there’s a simple explanation.
He shrugs his shoulders again. ‘I guess.’
I try to keep my composure. ‘Let’s go to the piazza and start looking for her there, and if we don’t find her in the next thirty minutes, I’m calling the police.’
He quickly puts on his shoes and we’re out the door in seconds.
‘Let’s split up,’ I propose. ‘Keep your phone on you and have a picture of Emily so you can ask people if they’ve seen her.’
The restaurants are lit up and bustling with people laughing as they eat dinner and drink, without a care in the world. Italian opera blares from the speakers of a trattoria and I feel the music beating in my chest, a haunting symphony of my growing fear. I frantically search the streets and laneways, stopping only to ask complete strangers if they’ve seen my daughter.
My daughter. A young girl. Sixteen. In a pink singlet. Reddish-blonde hair. Green eyes. Jogging. Two hours ago. She’s never late. This is not like her.
Each time I force the words out they burn my tongue like acid. I have to fight the tears brimming in my eyes. The rising panic. The sympathy I see in the eyes of strangers, followed by their offers to help, only makes me feel worse.
I keep trying to assure myself that nothing sinister has happened. Maybe she ran into someone she knew or stopped to take photos. Yet at the back of my mind, I can’t deny that this is completely out of character for Emily. She might act like a typical teenage girl in many ways but one thing I can say about my daughter for certain is that she is responsible and punctual. If she said she would be back in an hour, she would have been.
By the time I return to the fountain to meet back with Daniel, I am breathless and dizzy. It feels as if the piazza is spinning around me and I am the only thing standing still.
‘I can’t find her anywhere,’ Daniel says, panting, concern knitting into his furrowed brows.
I cup my hand over my mouth as overwhelming feelings of uneasiness come over me. Call it a mother’s instinct, but I know something isn’t right. My hands shake as I dial the police and my voice quivers. ‘I need help,’ I utter into the receiver. I’ve just woken from a nightmare and found myself in a real one.
‘What’s the emergency?’ they ask.
I can barely mutter the words aloud. Saying them will make it painfully real. I swallow, feeling like there’s blade at the base of my throat. ‘My daughter is missing.’
MARCO
I’d spent my adult life pretending my childhood didn’t happen, but now that I was right in the heart of it, I couldn’t deny it any longer. It was time to face my father and force him to tell me anything he knew about my mother’s whereabouts.
It was my third day in Naples and there were no conference talks that I was particularly enthused about hearing. In fact, unless I was doing the talking, I had very little interest in being there this year.
So, with reluctance, I got in a taxi and headed back to Vele di Scampìa. It was overcast, making the towers look even more imposing; they seemed almost blackened under a thick layer of neglect.
I felt less threatened than I had when I visited Stefano, maybe because this time I had dressed inconspicuously and wasn’t carrying a large amount of cash. Or maybe it was because my fear of the dangers that lurked in the darkened corridors was far surpassed by my fear of the man fourteen flights above. As I ascended the stairs, I noticed the walls were still covered in graffiti and syringes stuck in the crevices of the stairwell.
I was breathless by the time I reached the fourteenth floor and my T-shirt was damp with sweat. I stopped to compose myself and regain my breath. I needed all my energy. I walked to his doorway and, without consciously doing it, I automatically stepped over an area of the hallway carpet that used to creak.
Unit 1405. The number made my skin go cold. I didn’t want to be here. And yet I did. I raised my hand to knock and prepared myself for whatever monstrosity I’d find inside. My hand hovered over the door for a few moments before I finally mustered the courage to bring my knuckles to the wood.
On my third knock, I called out. ‘Papà, it’s me. Marco.’
It felt strange to call him Papà. He was not a dad to me. He was Angelo. And I immediately regretted my poor choice of words. That’s when I heard movement inside and a small part of me wished I had come there to find he wasn’t home.
The door swung open to reveal a small, old man, thin and frail, his hair balding except for a few grey patches on the sides. I blinked. Maybe Angelo had moved to another unit in the building. But when he spoke in his cold, condescending voice, I knew I was looking at my father.
‘You finally came back to see your old man,’ he said, with a mocking grin. ‘It’s only taken you twenty years.’
He was not the father I remembered. In my recollections, he was tall and strong, a towering figure. I guess that was the art of perception – things may not change, but the way we saw them did.
He left the front door open and walked inside, which I assumed was his way of inviting me in. I closed the door behind me and looked around. The place was a pigsty. Pizza boxes sat on the kitchen counter. The floor was littered with empty beer bottles, and there were wine and food stains everywhere. He sat on a faded and scratched red couch. The windows were closed, so when he lit a cigarette the small space quickly filled up with its toxic fumes. ‘You smoke?’ he asked, offering one to me.
‘No,’ I said as he blew the smoke in my direction, making me cough. I sat on a faded yellow chair opposite him and crossed my hands awkwardly. Where did I start?
‘How’s your health?’ I asked, thinking about what Stefano had said and pretending to care, in an attempt to warm him up before questioning him about my mother.
He laughed, a guffaw, and smoke flared out of his mouth and nostrils. ‘My liver is fucked. Apparently my ticker,’ he said hitting his chest, ‘is irregular, and some bullshit doctor said I’ve got cancer spots on my lungs.’ He laughed again. ‘But hey, I’m seventy-five and I’m still here.’ He lifted a bottle from the side of the couch and took a swig. ‘A bottle a day keeps the doctor away.’
The man repulsed me, but I tried to hide my disgust. I thought if I got here early enough he might be moderately sober, but clearly he was an early starter – or he simply didn’t stop.
‘Fancy clothes you’re wearing,’ he said with sarcasm, the cigarette hanging out of his mouth. ‘Did you dress up just for me or do you always look like a segaiolo?’
I ignored his derogatory remark. ‘I’m here for a conference. I’m the guest speaker,’ I said with an air of importance. For some reason, I still felt the need to prove my worth.
‘You still digging around in the mud? Trying to find some gold or something. They used to call it prospecting in my day.’
‘I’m an archaeologist,’ I said coldly. ‘It�
��s nothing like prospecting.’
‘Whatever,’ he said. ‘Same to me.’ He inhaled heavily on his cigarette and let the ash fall on the floor.
‘So,’ Angelo said, distracting me from my thoughts, ‘why did you come see me?’
‘To see how you’re getting on,’ I lied.
‘Bullshit,’ he said, putting out his cigarette and lighting another one. ‘What’s the real reason?’
If he was not going to play games, neither was I. ‘I came to ask you about my mother.’
He laughed again and then started to cough wildly. His face and eyes went red and it sounded like he was choking. I stood there numbly and watched; I would let him die in front of me before lifting a finger to help him. He reached for the bottle and took a heavy swig and then gathered his breath. ‘What do you want to know about the puttana?’
He said it with a grin, as if he knew his choice of words would get a rise out of me. I wanted to lean across to the couch and smack the smug look off his face. He was a shrivelled old man and I was not afraid of him. I could kill him with my bare hands if I wanted to. ‘Do you know where she is?’ I said through gritted teeth.
He did that mocking laugh again. ‘Six feet under,’ Angelo said simply and kept his cold eyes on mine, waiting with a sort of glee to see the shattering realisation dawn on me. ‘Maybe you can get your spade and dig through the sand and see what you find.’
‘You fucking bastardo,’ I spat out, fighting the urge to strangle him. I stood up and paced around the squalid space, hoping to God he was lying. I stopped and turned around. ‘Is she really dead?’
‘What do you care? She left you here with me and disappeared. She didn’t care about you, so why should you care about her?’
‘She didn’t have a choice,’ I snarled. ‘You used to beat her senseless – or did the alcohol block you from remembering that?’
For the briefest moment, I thought I saw regret flash in eyes but just as quickly, it was gone. ‘It was cancer,’ he said flippantly. ‘Ovarian. She died about three years ago.’
I punched a wall and my fist instantly formed a welt, blood callused on my knuckles. I was too late. She was gone.
‘She came here to ask where she could find you. She was in rotten shape. Bald and pale. Her skin was that awful grey colour. She looked like a walking corpse.’
I swallowed, struggling to speak through the surge of sadness and anger that engulfed me. ‘Did you give her my number?’
‘Nah,’ he said casually. ‘Told her I hadn’t heard from you for years and didn’t know where you were.’
I grabbed him by the neck and lifted him off the couch. He managed to smile even though I could see he was hurting. I released him and flicked him back onto the couch. ‘I could kill you right now and your body would rot in here and no one would come looking for you.’
He leaned back against the couch, regaining his breath. ‘You could,’ he wheezed. ‘But you won’t – because you’re a coward.’
He had called me a coward since I was a boy. Now as he taunted me with the same words, I held my head high and stared down at him so they wouldn’t bruise me like they once did. ‘Why did you lie to her?’
He looked away blankly. ‘Because she left us and she didn’t deserve to know where you were.’ He touched the red marks around his neck. ‘And it wasn’t the first time she came looking for you,’ he said, with a cruel glint in his eyes.
The anger that consumed me was so intense that I felt unsteady. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘About two months after she walked out on us, she kept trying to come back to take you with her. But I wouldn’t let her in. So then she started writing you letters. The same shit each time – where to find her, how to contact her, that she was sorry she didn’t take you with her, that she’d found a place to stay and that she wanted you to go with her, how much she loved you. Blah, blah, blah. I wrote back and told her that you wanted nothing to do with her.’
I couldn’t fathom what I was hearing. My whole life I’d believed that my mother abandoned me, that she left me with my alcoholic father, and never cared to see me again.
‘Give me the letters,’ I demanded. When he didn’t get up, I lifted him by the neck again. He started to cough, so I released him. He put a handkerchief to his mouth and when he moved it away, I saw blood. I assumed the cancer was in its advanced stages. I followed him to his bedroom, which smelled like urine and alcohol. His bed was unmade and the linen probably hadn’t been washed for months. He reached under his bed and pulled out a box and kicked it to me. I opened the lid to see a wad of unopened letters in my mother’s neat handwriting, all addressed to me.
I turned to him. ‘I never thought even you could stoop so low or be so cruel. But you continue to prove to me how pathetic you really are. Except karma has already worked its magic. You’ll be dead soon. And no one will come to your funeral. No one will celebrate your life. No one will remember you.’
He sat on his bed and said nothing. I opened my wallet and flung two hundred euros at him. ‘There, go buy enough alcohol to top yourself off.’ Then I picked up the box of letters, spat on his floor and didn’t turn back as I walked out of his miserable apartment and out of his life forever.
On my way out of the Vele, I went past Stefano’s unit. I knocked on his door but no one answered. I needed to talk to him. I had to tell him that he was right. I had changed. I wasn’t a Scampìa kid anymore. And I was nothing like my father.
I kept knocking until my knuckles felt bruised but it was clear no one was home.
My blood was still boiling by the time I returned to my hotel. I felt sick all over, unable to digest what my father had told me. I held the box of letters close to me but I couldn’t bring myself to open them.
That night, I disappeared into a bar and drank grappa, swallowing it down even though it burned my oesophagus and caught in my nose and made my eyes water. I drank until my insides felt numb, until my heart felt numb, until my mind felt numb. I had an understanding then of what my father’s existence must have been like. How easy it was for him to block his feelings like this. To drink so much that he felt nothing at all. No guilt. No remorse. No sorrow. Nothing.
I stumbled back to my hotel in the early morning hours and vomited into the toilet until the back of my throat felt chafed. Then I turned my phone onto silent, took the hotel phone off the hook and fell into a dreamless sleep.
I was so wiped out that the light flashing on my mobile didn’t stir me awake. It was not until the next morning when I would wake up nauseated and with a heavy headache that I would come to feel the full weight of my world falling apart.
SARAH
The first officer to arrive at the villa is from a local station in Bellagio, a village just across the water. He’s young and seems inexperienced, so although he’s polite and professional, I quickly make the assumption that a missing persons case is entirely out of his depth. He’s not fluent in English, so we manage to converse in my broken Italian and his sparse English, with Daniel on hand to translate anything either of us don’t understand.
‘When did you last see your daughter?’
‘Emily went for a run at six pm. She told my son, Daniel, that she’d be back in hour and she hasn’t returned and her cell is off.’ I’m on the cusp of fully-fledged panic and I feel like we’re wasting time going through the details when no one is out looking for her.
‘Did you have an argument or any sort of disagreement before she took off?’
‘No, not at all. We’d spent a lovely day visiting the villages around the lake and she seemed her usual happy self.’
I assume he’ll write her off as a disgruntled teenage girl and won’t escalate this fast enough. ‘Please, this is not like my daughter. This is completely out of character. You have to help us.’
‘And your daughter, she is sixteen, and born in Australia? Is that correct?’
I nod.
He glances at my antique diamond wedding ring. ‘And where is
your husband?’
I can see Daniel shift uncomfortably next to me. ‘He’s in Naples at a work conference,’ I say.
His eyes dart from the ripe red scar on my forehead and then down to my plastered wrist. I’m probably imagining it but I feel like he’s drawing some connection between my injuries and my husband’s absence. ‘A car accident,’ I say quickly, even though he hasn’t asked the question.
He’s making notes and stops to look at his watch. ‘Excuse me,’ he says suddenly and walks to his police vehicle, leaving me stunned. He obviously isn’t taking this seriously. He dials a number on his phone, gets in the car and closes the door. I can’t see anything because the windows are tinted. I tell myself that if he doesn’t return in five minutes, I’m going to bang on his window and demand something is done until he listens.
Right on cue, five minutes later, he returns with a stern look on his face. ‘I’ve called the public prosecutor’s office. State polizia and the carabinieri have been dispatched.’
I exhale with relief and rub my eyes, feeling a stress-induced headache forming. He starts to explain something to me in Italian but he is speaking so quickly that I can’t follow. I look to Daniel to translate.
‘He says that the first forty-eight hours of a missing-persons case is critical.’ The policeman doesn’t elaborate on that point and I wonder if it’s because after that time, the chance of seeing them alive drops dramatically. ‘They are taking her disappearance very seriously,’ Daniel translates as the man continues. ‘They’ve classified the case as high risk.’
The words ‘high risk’ make me feel queasy. They make this terrifyingly real. While I’m relieved that they’re taking her disappearance seriously, it means that they have reason to, and that realisation is horrifying. I shudder, knowing that if she was abducted here, she might have been taken on a boat or ferry to any village, or even across the border to Switzerland. She could already be far away. Untraceable. ‘What happens now?’
The Perfect Couple Page 15