“Is it open? It’s almost nine.”
He groaned. “Yes, it’s open. Come on.”
I grabbed the money Howard had given me the night before, then stuffed my mom’s journal into my purse. Ren was already halfway down the stairs, but he stopped abruptly at the bottom and I crashed right into him.
Howard was sitting on the couch, his laptop balanced on his knees. “Where are you two headed in such a hurry?”
“Lina’s never been to Ponte Vecchio. I’m taking her.” Ren cleared his throat. “With your permission, sir.”
“Permission granted. That’s a great idea. Lina, you’ll love it.”
“Thanks. I hope so.”
We headed for the door, and just as Ren stepped out on the porch Howard said, “I’m keeping my eye on you, Ren.”
Ren didn’t turn around, but he straightened up like someone had just sent a jolt of electricity down his spine. Howard caught my eye and winked.
Great. Now Ren was never going to relax.
It was a hot night, and Florence seemed twice as crowded as the night I’d gone with Howard. Traveling by scooter was a little faster because we could just drive around stopped cars, but it still took us a long time. Not that I minded. Riding the scooter was really fun, and the cool air whipping past us felt like my reward for surviving such a long, hot day. By the time Ren parked his scooter, the moon had risen round and heavy as a ripe tomato, and I felt like I’d taken a long, cool swim.
“Why’s it so crowded tonight?” I asked, handing him my helmet to stow under the seat.
“It’s summer. People like to go out. And tourists come in droves. Droves, I tell you!”
I shook my head. “Ren, you’re kind of weird.”
“So I hear.”
“What are we going to see exactly?”
“A bridge. ‘Ponte Vecchio’ means ‘Old Bridge.’ It’s on the Arno. Come on, it’s this way.” I did my best to keep up with him as he elbowed his way across the street, and before long we were standing on a wide sidewalk running the length of the river. The Arno stretched black and mysterious in either direction, and the banks were lit up like a runway with strings of glittering lights that stretched and disappeared in either direction.
I gave myself a second to take it all in. “Ren . . . this is really pretty. I can’t believe people get to actually live here.”
“Like you?”
I glanced at him and he was smiling. Duh. “Well, yeah, I guess so.”
“Just wait. What you see next is going to make you want to stay here forever.”
People kept pushing us away from each other, so Ren linked arms with me and we headed up the river, stepping over a long-haired guy sitting with his back to the water. He was playing a banged-up guitar and singing “Imagine” in a heavy accent.
“ ‘Ee-magine all da pee-pull,’ ” Ren sang. “My dad has this book that’s supposed to teach English song lyrics to Italian speakers. I think that guy back there could really use it.”
“Hey, at least he got the feeling right. He sounds really nostalgic.” My arm was kind of heating up where Ren’s was interlocked with mine, but before I could think about it, he pulled away and put both hands on my shoulders.
“Ready to swallow your gum?”
“What?”
“Ready to see Ponte Vecchio?”
“Of course. That’s why we’re here, right?”
He turned and pointed. “This way.”
The sidewalk had led us to a small commuter bridge. It was paved with asphalt, and a bunch of tourists were milling around blankets set up with displays of knockoff bags and sunglasses. So not impressive.
“This is it?” I asked, trying not to sound disappointed. Maybe it was cooler at sunset.
Ren guffawed. “No. Not this bridge. Trust me, you’ll know it when you see it.”
We headed toward the center of the bridge, and a dark-skinned man stepped out in front of his blanket of stuff, blocking our way. “Young man. You want nice Prada handbag for girlfriend? Five hundred euro in store, but ten euro for you. Make her fall in true love.”
“No thanks,” Ren said.
I nudged him. “I don’t know, Ren. That sounds like a pretty good deal. Ten bucks for true love?”
He smiled, stopping in the center of the bridge. “You didn’t see it, did you?”
“See wha—oh.”
I ran over to the railing. Stretched across the river, about a quarter mile ahead of us, was a bridge that looked like it had been built by fairies. Three stone arches rose gracefully out of the water, and the whole length of it was lined with a floating row of colorful buildings, their edges hanging over the water. Three mini-arches were cut out of the center, and the whole thing was lit golden in the darkness, its reflection sparkling back up at itself.
Gum officially swallowed.
Ren was grinning at me.
“Wow. I don’t even know what to say.”
“I know, right? Come on.” He looked to his right, then his left, then launched himself over the side like a pole vaulter.
“Ren!”
I leaned over, fully expecting to see him dog-paddling toward Ponte Vecchio, but instead came face-to-face with him. He was crouching on a table-size ledge that jutted out about five feet below the side of the bridge and he looked ridiculously pleased with himself.
“I was waiting for a splash.”
“I know. Now come on. Just make sure no one sees you.”
I looked over my shoulder, but everyone was too involved in the whole fake-Prada-bag thing to pay me any attention. I climbed over, dropped down next to him. “Is this allowed?”
“Definitely not. But it’s the best view.”
“It’s amazing.” Being just a few feet lower somehow cut out the noise of the people above us, and I swear Ponte Vecchio was glowing even brighter and more regal. It gave me a solemn, awestruck kind of feeling. Like going to church. Only I wanted to stay here for the whole rest of my life.
“So what do you think?” Ren asked.
“It makes me think of this time my mom and I drove to a poppy reserve in California. The flowers all bloom at once and we timed our visit just right. It was pretty magical.”
“Like this?”
“Yeah.”
He shimmied back next to me and we both rested our heads against the wall, just looking. I have finally found the place that feels right to me. It was like she was waving at me from just across the water. If I squinted I could almost see her. My eyes fogged up a little, turning Ponte Vecchio’s lights into big gold halos, and I had to spend like thirty seconds pretending to have some mysterious Arno dust in my eye.
For once, Ren was being totally quiet and once the crying jag had passed I looked over at him. “So why is it called ‘Old Bridge’? Isn’t everything old here?”
“It’s the only bridge that survived World War II, and it’s really, really old, even by Italian standards. Like medieval old. Those house-looking things used to be butcher shops. They’d just open the windows and dump all the blood and guts into the river.”
“No way.” I glanced at the windows again. Most of them had green shutters and they were all closed for the night. “They’re way too pretty for that. What are they now?”
“High-end jewelry shops. And you see those windows spaced out across the very top of the bridge?”
I nodded. “Yeah?”
“Those go to a hallway. It’s called the Vasari Corridor and it was used by the Medici as a way to get around Florence without having to actually walk through the city.”
“Elena’s people.”
“Esattamente. That way they didn’t have to mix with us commoners. Cosimo Medici was the one who kicked out all the butchers. He wanted the bridge to be more prestigious.” He looked at me. “So what was that book you were reading? The one you had under your bed.”
You trust him. The words elbowed their way into my head before I even had a chance to wonder. So what if I’d known Ren for only two days
? I did trust him.
I took the journal out of my purse. “This is my mom’s journal. She was living in Florence when she got pregnant with me and it’s all about her time in Italy. She sent it to the cemetery before she died.”
He glanced at the book, then back up at me. “No way. That’s pretty heavy.”
Heavy. That was exactly it. I opened to the front cover, looking again at those ominous words. “I started reading it the day after I got here. I’m trying to figure out what happened between Howard and my mom.”
“What do you mean?”
I hesitated. Was it possible to condense the whole messy story into a couple of sentences? “My mom met Howard when she was here going to school, and then when she got pregnant, she left Italy and never told him about me.”
“Seriously?”
“Once she got sick she started talking about him a lot, and then she made me promise I’d come live here with him for a while. She just never actually told me what went wrong between them, and I think she left me the journal so I could figure it out.”
I turned and met Ren’s stare. “So last night when you said you don’t know Howard very well, it was like a huge understatement.”
“Yeah. I’ve officially known him for . . .” I counted on my fingers. “Four days.”
“No way.” He shook his head incredulously, sending his hair flying. “So let me get this straight. You’re an American, living in Florence—no, living in a cemetery—with a father you just found out about? You’re even stranger than I am.”
“Hey!”
He bumped his shoulder against mine. “No, I didn’t mean it that way. I just meant we’re both kind of different.”
“What makes you different?”
“I’m sort of American, sort of Italian. When I’m in Italy I feel too American, and when I’m in the States I feel too Italian. Also, I’m older than everyone in my grade.”
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen. My family lived in Texas for a couple of years when I was really young, and when we moved back I didn’t speak Italian very well. I was already kind of old for my grade, and they had to hold me back a year so I could catch up. My parents ended up enrolling me at the American school a few years later, but the school wouldn’t allow me to skip forward to the grade I’m supposed to be in.”
“When will you be eighteen?”
“March.” He looked at me. “So you’re really only staying for the summer?”
“Yeah. Howard and my grandma want me to stay longer, but the circumstances are obviously pretty weird. I barely know him.”
“But maybe you’ll get to know him. Chainsaw aside, I kind of like him.”
I shrugged. “It just seems so bizarre. If my mom hadn’t gotten sick, I probably still wouldn’t know anything about him. She’d always just told me that she’d gotten pregnant young and decided it was best to keep my father out of the picture.”
“Until now.”
“Until now,” I echoed.
“Where will you live when you leave Florence?”
“Hopefully with my friend Addie. I stayed with them for the rest of sophomore year, and she’s going to ask her parents if I can stay with them next year too.”
He looked at the journal. “So what have you been reading about in there?”
“Well, so far I know that they had to keep their relationship a secret. He was an assistant teacher at the school she was going to, and I guess the school wouldn’t have liked it. And she was hard-core about keeping it a secret. Like after they started dating, she stopped writing his name because was afraid someone would read her journal and find out about them. She just calls him ‘X.’ ”
He shook his head. “Scandalous. Well, that’s probably your answer right there. Seems like most secret romances have a shelf life.”
“Maybe. But when I first got here Sonia told me that my mom lived with Howard at the cemetery for a while, so that’s not exactly secretive. And she said that one day my mom just left. She didn’t even say good-bye to Sonia.”
“Wow. Something must have happened. Something big.”
“Like . . . my mom got pregnant?”
“Oh. I guess that would be a big deal.” He chewed on his lower lip thoughtfully. “Now you have me curious. Keep me in the loop, would you?”
“Sure.”
“So she loved Ponte Vecchio. What other places did she write about?”
I took the journal from him and started flipping through it. “She talks about this club a couple of times, Space.”
“Space Electronic?” He laughed. “No way. I was there like two weeks ago. Elena loves it. She knows one of the DJs, so we usually get in for free. Where else?”
“The Duomo, Boboli Gardens . . . He also took her to a secret bakery. Do you know where one is?”
“A secret bakery?”
I handed him the journal. “Read here.”
He scanned the entry. “I’ve never heard of this, but it sounds awesome. Too bad she didn’t write down the address—I could totally go for a fresh cornetta.”
His phone started ringing and he pulled it out of his pocket and hesitated for a second, then hit SILENCE. It started ringing again right away and he hit SILENCE again.
“Who is it?”
“No one.”
He shoved the phone back in his pocket, but not before I saw the name on the screen. Mimi.
“Hey, do you want to get a gelato?”
I wrinkled my forehead. “What’s that?”
He groaned. “Gelato. Italian ice cream. The greatest thing that will ever happen to you. What have you been doing since you arrived?”
“Hanging out with you.”
“And you’re telling me I only have one summer.” He shook his head, then stood up. “Come on, Lina. We’ve got work to do.”
Chapter 12
SO . . . ITALIAN GELATO. TAKE THE deliciousness of a regular ice-cream cone, times it by a million, then sprinkle it with crushed-up unicorn horns. Ren stopped me after my fourth scoop. I probably would have kept going forever.
When I walked in the front door Howard was watching an old James Bond movie with his bare feet propped up on the coffee table. There was an industrial-size bucket of popcorn sitting next to him.
“Movie just started—want to watch?”
I glanced at the screen. Old-school James Bond was swimming toward a building wearing a disguise that basically consisted of a stuffed duck attached to a helmet. Normally I was all over cheesy old movies, but tonight I had other things on my mind. “No thanks. I’m going to get some rest.” And hopefully some answers.
NOVEMBER 9
Tonight was the best night of my life, and I have a statue to thank for it.
X and I were standing in Piazza della Signoria looking at a statue by Giambologna called The Rape of the Sabine Women. The name confused me because it doesn’t match what’s going on. It’s of three figures: a man holding a woman up in the air and a second man crouching down on the ground looking up at her. There’s obviously something distressing going on, but the three of them are graceful, harmonious even.
I told X that I thought the woman looked like she was being lifted up, not hurt, and as usual he knew the story. When Rome was first settled, the men realized their civilization was missing one very important ingredient: women. But where to find them? The only women within striking distance belonged to a neighboring tribe called the Sabines, and when the Romans went to ask for permission to marry some of their daughters, all they got was a big fat no. So in a particularly Roman move, they invited the Sabines to a party, then, partway through the night, overpowered the men and dragged all the women kicking and screaming back to their city. Eventually the Sabines managed to break into Rome, but by that time they were too late. The women didn’t want to be rescued. They’d fallen for their captors and it turned out life in Rome was actually pretty great. The reason I was confused by the statue’s title is that it is mistranslated in English. The Latin word “raptio
” sounds like “rape” but actually means “kidnapping.” So really the sculpture should be called The Kidnapping of the Sabine Women.
It was already late and I told X I needed to head home, but suddenly he turned to me and told me he loved me. He said it casually, like it wasn’t the first time he’d said it, and it took a moment for the words to seep in. Then I made him repeat it. He LOVES me. Carry me off. I’m invested.
NOVEMBER 10
Went to class this morning on about two hours of sleep. X arrived late, and even though I knew he’d probably gotten even less sleep than I had, he somehow looked perfect. He broke our act-like-friends-in-school rule and gave me a big shiny smile that anyone could see. I wish I could pause this moment and live in it forever.
NOVEMBER 17
Sometimes I feel like my time is divided into two categories: time with X, and time spent waiting to be with X. Since that night in Piazza della Signoria, things have been up and down between us. Some days we get along perfectly, and other days he acts like I really am just a friend. Lately I feel like he’s been overly cautious about keeping things secret. Would it be that big of a deal if everyone knew? I think they’d be happy for us.
NOVEMBER 21
When I left for Italy in June, six months sounded like an eternity. Now it feels like it’s slipping through my fingers. I only have a month left! The school director, Signore Petrucione, told me they’d love to admit me for another semester, and I would kill for a little extra time to study and be with X, but how would I make that work financially? And would it completely devastate my parents? Every time I talk to them, they bring up nursing school and I can hear that I’m disappointing them.
When I got home from class today there was a letter waiting for me from my parents. They’d enclosed two letters from the university telling me that if I don’t return for spring semester I will lose my spot in the program. I basically just skimmed the letters, then shoved them in my closet. I secretly wish it would just be over with.
Uh-oh. First signs of trouble. Like those minishakes you feel before an earthquake hits. What were they called? Tremors? I was definitely feeling them in these entries. He told her he loved her, but he wouldn’t let her tell their friends about their relationship? Why was he so adamant about keeping things a secret? She didn’t seem all that worried about it.
Love & Gelato Page 11