by Nancy Adams
“We’ll be down in a moment, Pablo,” Sam cried down to him.
He went back into the bedroom where Jenna was putting her riding boots on while sitting on the old Italian four-poster bed. Sam came up behind her and kissed the side of her neck. She immediately warmed to his lips’ touch, turned her head and affectionately returned his kiss.
Once Jenna was finished with the boots, the two went downstairs and out to the horses.
“She’s beautiful,” Jenna said as she came up to her horse, a brown filly with a white spot on her nose.
Jenna immediately stretched her hand out and stroked the horse on the white spot. The animal, sensing the tenderness in the woman’s touch, dipped her head so that Jenna’s hand could reach up between her ears.
“She’s very friendly horse, signorina,” Pablo commented.
Sam came out to his horse, a black specimen with a shock of white hair on his chest.
“He looks wild,” Pablo said in regards to the black stallion, “but he’s a kind horse who forgives his rider if they are not so skilled.”
Looking up at Pablo with a smile, Sam remarked, “I’ll be glad of his forgiveness.”
The Sicilian laughed, and after that Jenna and Sam got on their respective horses. Jenna had grown up in the Arizona wilderness. Her family owned horses, so she was a skilled rider. Sam had ridden horses at various times in his life, always for pleasure, and wasn’t either skilled nor a novice, somewhere comfortably in the middle, you could say.
The three left the courtyard and entered the small rural lane that led away from the cliff tops where the little villa was perched and down through the valley. It wasn’t long before they left the road and were heading across a mosaic of arid plains rolling along undulated hills with olive trees sticking out everywhere. Then they traveled down into the lush greens of fertile lands, riding the horses through the center of orange groves, the trees full of white blossoming flowers that grew out of the bark of the twisted little branches. Following the oranges, they rode along rows of grapes that sat in regimented columns in the vineyards, waving to the farmers and the local peasants as they strolled along, Pablo exchanging the odd word of Italian with them. Above their heads, the sky was clear and cloudless, and the sun cast the land in torrid waves of heat that bent the air as it rose up from the baking ground.
At one point, they rode past a farmhouse and the rotund old man that owned it invited them to sit with him and drink lemonade. He was sitting outside the house at a little garden table under the shade of a large umbrella. He was dressed in an all-white suit with a black tie and an old panama hat that suited the rest of his attire. The three agreed to join him and sat down at the table with the old man. When they had, he called into the open door of his house and soon an old woman appeared holding a tray with a jug of iced lemonade and four glasses. Having placed the tray on the table, the old woman bowed before returning to the house. As to the chubby old Sicilian, he was a very jolly chap and constantly cracked jokes in Italian before gazing over at Pablo with an excited look on his face as the latter explained the joke in English to his guests. When Sam and Jenna would then giggle at his wit, the old man would take ahold of his belly with both hands and roar with laughter.
After sitting with the good-humored old man for an hour or so, they said their goodbyes and left him. But not before the kindly Sicilian insisted that they water and feed the horses first, doing so from his own stables.
By the time they reached their intended destination on the other side of the island, the sun was beginning the final part of its long descent below the horizon, and the sky had taken on a darker hue as twilight approached. They stopped the horses as they reached the top of a hill and looked out at the beautiful cliff-side restaurant just ahead of them. It consisted of a small villa that was the kitchen, then a stone balcony built into the cliff’s edge stretching out from the villa, tables dotted all along it, waiters weaving in and out carrying wine and platters, people sitting eating food, drinking local vino, chatting and gazing out at the wondrous expanse of crystal sea that spread out below them.
Pablo tied the horses up while Sam and Jenna took a table right by the edge, so that they could lean their elbows on the wall and crane their necks to look down the cliff face at the crashing waves below. Once he’d finished with the horses, Pablo took a table just off of the couple so that they could be alone, but so that he could also keep an eye on them. Pablo wasn’t just an expert Sicilian horseman; he was also a skilled bodyguard.
“This is an incredible spot, Sam,” Jenna commented as she looked down at the waves.
“It is,” Sam agreed. “Only the locals really know about it. I’d been coming here for seven years before I even found it. It was one day when Marya—”
Sam went silent and gave Jenna a guilty look as she glanced up from the waves.
“It’s okay, Sam,” she said gently. “She was a huge part of your life for fifteen years. I’m sure there aren’t many memories from that time that don’t involve her, so it would be pretty difficult for you to reminisce about the past without mentioning her.”
Sam flashed a bright smile at her from across the table and took one of her hands in his own.
“You really are the sweetest, Mrs. Blackwell,” he beamed.
At that moment, the waiter came over and the two ordered a bottle of Pinot Noir that was from a small vineyard situated somewhere in the neighboring valley. They then ordered a starter of Arancini, which is a mushroom-and-mozzarella Risotto shaped into balls, covered with breadcrumbs and deep fried. For their mains, under Sam’s guidance, they both ordered Caponata, a traditional Sicilian stew of eggplant, celery, and capers in a sweet-and-sour-style sauce, served with a traditional Sicilian bread called La Mafalda, golden and crusty and covered in sesame seeds.
The food was served and they enjoyed every bite as the sun disappeared and the waiters lit candles all over the tables and along the walls, the whole area cast in a flickering field of illumination. Soon, all that was left was the last of the wine and each other, the sound of the waves crashing against the shoreline in the background.
“I’ve been meaning to ask since we got here,” Jenna said as they gazed out to sea.
“What have you been meaning to ask?” Sam replied as he pressed his glass to his lips.
“Why Sicily?”
“What do you mean?”
“You said that you’ve come here lots of times, but I was wondering what first brought you here.”
“My father, I guess,” Sam responded. “His grandfather, my great-grandfather, was originally Sicilian. He came to America in 1910 when he was only sixteen. He came over with a friend of his to find work in New York. In the end, they went down to Texas to work on the oilfields, and that’s what every generation of my family did until my father went up to Alaska and traded the oilfields for the forestry, before coming down to Oregon and meeting my mom.”
“So your father used to take you here?”
“God no! My father couldn’t afford to take us on vacation in America, let alone to Europe. No, my father never came to Sicily. I don’t think any of my family have ever been here. I just remember my father telling us all about the stories his grandpa used to tell him about the old country. It sounded an exciting place full of horses, vineyards, olive trees and Sicilian bandits. He made it sound adventurous. When I first came to Europe with Marya when we were nineteen, the first place I wanted to visit was here, the birthplace of my great-grandpa. The first time I stepped foot on the island, I felt an aura that put me instantly at ease. It’s a beautiful place and the locals like to keep it that way. Of course, most of it is run by local mafioso. But, although a slightly corrupt and anarchistic system, it does do well to stop much of the wildlife from being ruined with ugly constructions by preventing a lot of the government industrialization plans from going ahead.”
“Let’s drink to the Sicilian Mafia,” Jenna said, raising her glass.
Sam couldn’t help but grin. He raise
d his own glass and clinked it with Jenna’s as they both said, “To the Mafia,” before draining the contents of their glasses.
“You never thought about bringing your father here?” Jenna inquired once she’d placed her glass back down on the table.
A glum feeling hit Sam, eroding the joy of just a moment ago.
“No,” was his brief reply.
He instinctively began refilling his glass with wine.
“I’m sorry,” Jenna said, sensing his sadness.
“It’s okay,” Sam replied despondently.
“In our sessions you told me that your parents were dead. May I ask how?”
“You really wanna know?” Sam asked as he lifted his glass to his mouth, frowning a little as he did.
“Yes, I would. I love you, Sam, and that means that by proxy I want to learn all there is to learn about you.”
“Okay then, but it’s not the type of story that will make the night any brighter; rather it’s the type that will bring a black veil over it all. So if you really wanna hear it, you have been warned.”
“I really want to know, Sam,” Jenna said looking into his eyes and taking his freehand from across the table.
“Here goes,” Sam said lowering his voice and leaning toward her so that he was close to the gloomy light of the table’s candle. “In our sessions I told you that after I was sixteen, I never saw my parents again. That’s completely true. However, not seeing them didn’t mean that they didn’t attempt to get in contact with me. When I made my first million from a patent that I sold to IBM, I was seventeen and I knew that as soon as my face had appeared on several magazine front covers it’d be spotted by someone in my old town and they’d go to my folks. Sure enough, not one week after, they began calling all the time. I wouldn’t have minded, but after I left them that last time and didn’t bother to call them anymore, I got only a handful of phone calls from my ma asking about me. I had Brian and Stephany tell her that I was away all the time. It only took a month for the calls to stop and I didn’t hear about another call from her for over a year. That was, until I was rich.”
“That’s a bad pill to swallow, Sam, I’m sorry,” Jenna said in a compassionate tone, rubbing her thumb softly across the top of his hand.
“Ah! It didn’t matter,” Sam shrugged. “So anyway, in the end, they sent me a letter after I refused to answer them. Basically asking for money. The house was being repossessed, my brother’s court costs were bumming them out, my pa had hurt his back and the insurance company was refusing to pay, etc. etc. I simply crumpled it up and threw it in the bin.”
“They had no right to think of you only when it suited them, Sam. You—as a seventeen year old—had every right to throw their letter in the bin. What had you done to bring their poverty down onto their heads? You told me before that your father drank and gambled; what right had he to expect his own son to pick up the bill?”
“I felt in the right then,” Sam said softly as he gazed blankly into the dancing flame of the candle. “Looking back, I probably was. But in the end, I was more guilty than them.”
“How do you mean?”
Looking up from the candle and into her eyes, Sam said in a sad voice, “I killed them, Jenna.”
Jenna felt a wave of shock and his hand went cold inside her own.
“I don’t get it,” she muttered with frightened eyes.
Sam grinned and said, “Don’t worry. I didn’t kill them directly, Jenna. I didn’t go around there with a gun or anything.”
“That’s good to hear,” she said with a relieved smile. “But what did you mean then?”
“After I didn’t respond to their letter, they decided to sell their story to a tabloid newspaper. By then it had been a year since their letter and I had been part of a team nominated for the Noble Prize for Technology. I’d made several more millions and was being hailed as the boy genius. They picked their moment and then sold their story. ‘Rich boy callously leaves parents to live in squalor,’ was the headline of that particular story. That's when it began, my family’s attempts to make money from my name.”
“How did it make you feel?”
“I was furious. Everywhere I went people would ask me about my brother in prison or my sister with five children by three different fathers who lived in a trailer on welfare. They called them the Jerry Springer family. Anyway, eventually—as I predicted—the papers lost interest in them, and the money they’d gathered from the stories disappeared like every other piece of money that’d ever fallen into my parents’ hands.”
Sam went quiet here, his eyes going blank once again as certain ghostly forms flittered across his mind’s eye.
“Three years ago,” he continued in a dispirited tone, “I got a call from Billy. Somehow he’d managed to get my private number. He told me that mom had cancer real bad. He said that my parents didn’t have health insurance and that it was terminal without the right treatment. Billy wanted me to pay for my mom to get the best care…”
Sam’s voice trailed off here and his eyes misted over.
Clearing his throat, he continued, “Anyway, I told him to tell my parents to sell another story to the press and put the phone down on him. I immediately had my number changed after that and heard no more. That was until I was sent an envelope that arrived at the gates of the reserve one day. When I opened it, all I found was a small newspaper clipping from my old hometown’s local paper. It was a small story about a local couple. The wife had gotten sick and was set to die painfully. So her loving husband sat them out on their porch alongside two vials of morphine that he’d illegally bought, ready to watch one last sunrise with his love. He injected one into the wife and then one into himself. They were found dead on the porch the next day, cuddled up together one last time.”
A tear dropped from one of Sam’s eyes and Jenna reached across and took his head in her hands. He bent his cheek into the soft palm of one of her hands and gave a withered smile.
“So,” he said tearfully, “you can see why I blame myself. All I had to do was send some money to them. But instead I let them die.”
“I’m so sorry, Sam,” Jenna said softly.
A gentle shudder rose up through Sam’s back and he visibly shivered.
“It is good to talk,” Jenna offered him. “Even though it often hurts, it’s very good to get it out in the open. For what it’s worth, I don't think you should blame yourself. A son can’t be held responsible for his parents. Especially when they cashed in on you. They should have used the money more wisely.”
Sam smiled at her before turning his attention to the large full moon that now hovered in the sky, illuminating the black water of the sea in a shimmering strip of golds and silvers.
“Isn’t the moon beautiful tonight?” he remarked to Jenna as he gazed at it.
“The moon is always beautiful with you,” she replied, taking his hand and lifting it up to her face, kissing it and then pressing it lovingly against her cheek.
Sam turned back to her from the moon and smiled. His heart appeared to feel a little easier and he was thankful for her company as the two of them sat at the cliff’s edge within the gloomy light of the candles, the waves crashing below, feeling the glowing warmth of each other.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It was six weeks since the fateful call with her mother, and Claire was leaving the enrollment hall at her college with Paul. A wave of happiness permeated out of both of them as they walked arm in arm, the bright sun illuminating the sparkling smiles on their faces as they strolled through the park toward The Little Dog coffee shop. The moment Claire had finished enrolling and knew for sure that she would be starting her long-awaited second year within the week, she had felt a giant weight raise itself from off of her soul, one which had been pressing down on it for such a long time, and felt able to breathe freely for the first time in almost a year. The biting anxiety that had existed in her gut for so long was instantly lifted the moment she realized that she had climbed back onto the rails
of her life and was once again heading in her preordained direction.
In regards to her mother’s worrying nature; Claire had made sure that she’d spoken with June at least once a day since the letdown of the deceitful letter, to keep her fully informed of her life at that time. She was constantly at pains to reduce her mother’s nervous state. Now that she was enrolled, she decided to call June as she walked with Paul.
“Hi, ma,” she said as June answered.
“Sweetie,” June burst into her ear through the phone, “you back on course?”
“I’m back on course,” Claire let out gently. “I reenrolled today and now I get to work harder than I ever have in my life to make this work.”
“It makes me feel so good to hear you talk like that, Claire. How’s Paul?”
“He just enrolled for his third year, so he’s with me now.”
“Give him my love,” June said sweetly.
Turning to him, Claire said, “Ma sends her love.”
“Thank you, June,” Paul called out toward Claire’s phone. “All my love too.”
On the other end of the phone June giggled out loud.
“He’s such a sweetie,” the mother exclaimed softly. “Anyway, I just wanted to say…”
As mother and daughter talked over the phone, Paul watched Claire as she joyfully chatted, a bright smile spread like a rainbow across her lips, such brightness in her pretty face, an unbreakable happiness in her voice. While she talked, her merriment spilled out of her and spread over him. With every drop of blood that ran through his heart he loved the girl whose arm interlocked with his; whose soul interlocked with his.
Not long afterwards, Claire’s call ended and they were emerging out of the park, strolling across the street toward The Little Dog. Soon, they were sitting in their cozy little alcove sipping coffees—Claire returning to java now that she wasn’t pregnant—with two blueberry muffins in front of them.
“Your mom sounds happy,” Paul said.
“She is. She’s gotten over things now and she’s calm. Let’s just hope that I don’t actually fail this year and then confuse her by repeating it for a second time.”