by Liska Jacobs
“He’s very handsome,” Marie says to me. “Maybe you can make him a Hollywood star!”
Hannah giggles. “I’d see anything he was in.”
I think I can see Donato at the bar inside.
“With that mustache, he’d make a good porno star, no?” Agostina says, laughing at her own joke.
Donato comes out with a gin spritzer and drinks it fast—then, before the waiter can take our orders, asks for another.
“Agostina says the grilled octopus is the best in the Salento,” Paul tells me.
Tonio signals the waiter over, asking about the octopus. Paul switches to Italian and then to English, asking if I think two orders is enough.
Donato sucks at his straw until he reaches the bottom. Then he wants to order a third.
“What about a glass of wine?” Hannah suggests.
“If I wanted wine, I would order wine,” he says.
Marie pats his hand. “You drink too much, cuore mio.”
He shrugs his mother off. “I can drink if I want to.” He peers at me from over his glass, tilting it so he can crunch on the ice.
When my phone rings I’m relieved to step away from the table. Out in the street there’s a warm wind coming from the ocean. Families and young couples drink at an outdoor bar with plastic chairs and tables, cigarette smoke wafting yellow under the fluorescent lights.
“Hello,” I shout into the phone. My mom’s doctor has to repeat himself.
“I’m having trouble hearing you,” I say. “Hold on.”
The bar has turned up its music. I can feel the bass vibrating through me, rattling my chest cavity. I walk away from it.
“What did you say?” I plug my other ear, trying to hear better. “I thought she was doing great, the physical therapist said she might be able to come home early.”
He repeats himself, “Yes, but the episodes are escalating.”
I don’t realize I’ve walked to the beach until there is sand in my shoes. He’s listing things now. “She also punched the night nurse.”
“Was it the Russian one? She doesn’t like—”
“Have you researched any long-term skilled nursing facilities? She will require a lot of care when she leaves here.”
I swallow. “She can’t stay there? I mean, now that she’s worse?”
The line is quiet for a second and I think maybe I’ve dropped the call.
“We’re a rehab center, Ms. Messing. Short-term only.”
There’s a metallic taste in my mouth now. I spit into the sand to get it out. He’s talking about paperwork and specialists. He’s telling me social services will be in touch.
“I haven’t—I’m not in the country.”
“When do you expect to be back?”
The most natural question in the world. I cannot forever be on vacation. The flight itinerary is printed, it reads late next week—but part of me, I realize, had hoped never.
A group of twenty-somethings passes by, barefoot and dressed in loose flowing dresses, casual linen pants, and panama hats. Their voices catch on the wind—a foreign language I don’t recognize and can’t understand. I watch them pad down the beach, toward the clubs, where neon lights flash across the water.
“Ms. Messing,” he is saying, “I know this is difficult.”
I feel myself recoil from the thought of having to do it all over again. The pill regimens, the grocery lists, the ordering of the medical equipment, the laundry and bathing.
I turn and see Donato making his way across the sand.
“I have to go,” I tell the doctor. It’s the first time I hear genuine alarm in his voice. “But Ms. Messing, Ms. Messing,” he stammers.
I hang up just as Donato reaches me. He doesn’t say anything, just pushes me against the breakwater. His hands are on my breasts, his tongue thrusts into my mouth. He tastes sour and leaden—and I’m thinking of that sterilized smell of medical equipment, how the cleaning solutions have that acerbic sweetness. Like store-bought diapers, like flowers past their bloom.
I push him off. “Donato, not now.”
He says something entirely in Italian.
I grab his hand. “You’re drunk.”
“Succhiami il cazzo.” He dissolves into giggles. “Do you know what that means?”
He tries kissing me again, rubbing himself against my thigh. “You should, it is your favorite thing.”
He kisses my neck, my chin. “You are good at it Cilla, Zia Cilla.”
“Don’t call me that.”
He’s undoing his pants, expecting that I will drop to my knees here in the sand.
Your mother wants to come home, the doctor had said. But is that what you want? She will require full-time care.
I don’t think I have it in me, in fact I know I don’t.
“I’m going back to the restaurant.”
“Che palle! Why not? Why not when I want to?” He punches the breakwater.
I try to catch his fist before he slams it again, but he is sweating and slick.
“Don’t do that! Your mother—”
I can feel blood from his cut-up knuckles smear on my skin. I’d forgotten that it isn’t always the parent who disappoints. Sometimes it’s the child—it must be both. Neither can be who the other imagines them to be.
“Where are you going?” Donato grabs for my hand but misses. He must swear in Italian, but it’s hard to hear anything. The wind has intensified, muffling everything except for the beach clubs, their music still thumping.
* * *
I dream that my sister is so close I can smell her L’Occitane lotion, I could reach out and hug her but she’s emaciated and frail, and I’m scared she might break.
Do you want to put a warm cloth on her face? someone had asked. She knows you’re here. And how I went downstairs and watched cartoons with Hannah, waiting for someone to come and tell us.
But then my sister’s off, running away from me as she had done in life. The sound of her bare feet slapping against the stone steps.
I follow her to that side of the property where the honeysuckle gushes over the fence. Butterflies and bees waft among its vines and blossoms. My sister, this beautiful stranger, plucks a flower. She pinches off the calyx, pulling the pistil until a bead of nectar forms. This is what hummingbirds drink, our mom had told us once. I remember worrying about that—how can anything live on such meager sustenance? They must spend their whole lives going from flower to flower, trying to fill up.
Do you want to say goodbye? someone asked because the mortuary was coming to collect the body—and Hannah, her eyes big and blank, as she came out of her mother’s room. There is my sister, I remember telling myself, trying to feel the weight of it and failing. Emily is dead.
I don’t recall who decided she would be cremated, but I remember that afterward her ashes were to be scattered in the Pacific. Only our mom kept putting it off, and then Tonio offered Paul the position in Rome. It was decided Emily would be divided. Paul arranged a small ceremony at Leo Carrillo State Beach—and the remaining ashes sit in a porcelain urn facing that large window in the living room, looking out at the sea.
I wake up parched and twisted in the sheets. I get a bottle of water from the mini fridge and open the window. The tufa rock walls, the courtyard, and the masseria’s travertine façade—everything is pale and blue.
Donato’s last text is open on my phone. After everyone had gone to bed, he messaged, apologizing and asking if I would come to his room. I did not reply.
I swipe through photos from Puglia. There is one of Hannah on the beach where we swam out to the faraglione. She is posing on her towel, head propped up by her hand, pursing her lips at the camera. She looks so much like my sister, like a young version of our mother, too, that I want to cry.
Light glows pale around the window shutters. I change into my bathing suit and slip a pack of cigarettes into my robe pocket. The door sticks, but then there are only the shocks of bougainvillea and palms, trembling in the early morning lig
ht. I walk quickly to the pool. Water striders skate across its surface. I dive in, sending the mourning doves in the nearby brush scattering.
It feels good to be weightless, free from that pull of Earth’s orbit. Maybe I can change my flight. Or cancel it altogether. When we return to Rome things could go back to how they were. I swim across the pool in one breath and when I surface it’s with the hope that not everything is inevitable.
I hear the crunching of pebbles underfoot, and there is Matteo’s dad, carrying pool-cleaning equipment. He grins when he sees me, the gold tooth stark in the pale morning light.
“Buongiorno,” I say, and climb out of the water, wrapping my robe around me. The cicadas have started their noisy song. “I couldn’t sleep.”
He sets the equipment down and leans on the wall beside me. We look out at the pool, which is calm again, quiet and serene.
“Would you like one?” I offer him the pack. Now that he’s near I can see the stubble on his head is white.
He lights mine and then his own. When he exhales he examines the cigarette, saying something in Italian.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
A breeze kicks up, bending the olive trees. I pull my robe tighter.
“It is cold, no?” he tries.
“Not very.”
“You see thousand-year-old tree?”
I shake my head. The jays nesting in the rocks are hunting for insects. They hop about the grass, heads twitching left to right.
“Come,” he says, holding out his arm to me. “One thousand years old.”
The sun has risen, everywhere is swelling with morning sounds. Things scatter from beneath our feet. Animals rustle in the bushes and trees. I want to ask about snakes, but I’m afraid he won’t understand. In the distance, I hear the train whistle as it continues its slow push through the olive groves, heading farther into the Salento.
Twice Matteo’s dad helps me over a stacked stone wall or crumbling fence. He has very rough hands—dockworker hands. I wonder what his life has been like, how he met Agostina’s daughter. What would it be like to be with him? He’s holding my hand again, because I’ve lost my balance in the thick mushy dirt. One of his fingers has gotten twisted in my bikini tie. I blush and awkwardly try to untangle him.
It’s very ugly, this millennium-old tree. The trunk is large and bulbous, as if it had bubbled in places and then been petrified. It is so large the two of us cannot wrap our arms around it.
“It’s gigantic,” I say, and for some reason this makes Matteo’s dad laugh. I say it again, throwing my arms in the air for exaggeration. Gigantic.
He takes my hand then, placing one of the tree’s small dark olives in my palm. He motions for me to eat it. His eyes are such a dazzling bright blue that I ignore his mischievous grin. He is practically jumping up and down. I play along, examining the olive and sniffing it.
“Mangiala,” he coaxes.
It is unbelievably sour; my whole face puckers. He is already laughing.
“Disgusting, no?” he says, wiping his eyes.
“Sì.” I spit, and laugh with him.
“Cilla,” Donato shouts, grabbing my arm. He looks as if he’s been awake all night walking the olive groves, hoping I might appear. His knuckles are cut up and bruised from the night before. I slipped on the rocks, he told his mother when he finally returned to the restaurant. Poverino, she worried over him.
“What are you doing out here with him?” He says something in Italian at Matteo’s dad, who has propped himself against the tree trunk, looking amused.
“Let go of me.” I wrench free from his grip. “Nothing is going on. He was showing me their thousand-year-old tree. I tried one of its olives.”
Donato’s chest is heaving. His complexion is sallow beneath the sunburn, his lips knitted in a thin grimace.
“Il ragazzo è innamorato,” Matteo’s dad says, laughing. The boy is in love. When he walks past Donato, he pats his face, speaking Italian in that same condescending tone.
I keep Donato from following after him.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I ask when it’s only us and the cicadas.
“Sticazzi.” He shrugs. “Who does he think he is?”
“You can’t keep acting like this.”
He lights a cigarette, blowing out a plume of smoke. The morning heat has already intensified, and it makes his tobacco smoke heavy. My robe and bathing suit will reek of it. It’s the first time I feel real panic—cold and suffocating. Maybe he has already told someone. I can see him bragging to one of his friends. If not, then it’s only a matter of time.
“Donato…” I try to make my voice steady. “No one can know. Look at me and swear.”
But he won’t look at me. He just kicks the trunk of the ancient olive tree, breaking some of its rough bark, and takes off, jogging farther into the groves.
* * *
Hannah and Donato are fighting. I’ve missed what it’s over, but I can tell by Donato’s sullen expression that it could have been anything. He picks at his cornetto beside my niece, who does not look up from her bowl of fruit when I tell them buongiorno.
Nearby, Paul is thumbing through a newspaper, Tonio a book; both pretending not to notice the two sulking teens sitting one table over. Bowls of cereal sit untouched in front of them, a plate of half-eaten toast. There is an empty seat between them.
“Everyone is quiet this morning,” I say, taking a slice of plum cake from the sideboard. The panic I felt earlier creeps in again, but then Paul pulls out a chair for me.
“What did I miss?” Marie asks when she comes into the breakfast room.
Tonio grumbles something in Italian, gesturing to my niece and Donato. I imagine he is thinking, I knew this is how it would play out.
Paul fidgets in his chair. Marie’s knife and fork scrape against her plate. I hear the clock in the main hall chime above us. Tonio turns a page of his book.
There is a commotion at the top of the stairs, and each of us strains to look. Matteo appears, dressed in a Spider-Man costume. He clambers down each step, with his dad in tow. Instantly everyone is transformed. Donato sings a superhero theme song, Hannah wants Matteo to sit on her lap, Marie wants to make him a plate of food—even Tonio and Paul must smile when Matteo shows them a drawing he made.
“It is of his favorite cat,” his dad tells me. Micia.
“Let’s pretend he’s ours,” I hear my niece say to Donato, Matteo babbling on her lap.
“We should all go to the beach,” Marie suggests, looking around the room. “It would do us good to be in the sun and swim in the sea.”
“It’s the weekend,” Paul says. “The beaches will be crowded.”
Matteo jumps from Hannah and runs to his dad, who lifts him high into the air.
“I know of a secret beach,” his dad says. “Il Luogo Solitario.”
“The Lonely Place,” Agostina translates. She’s come out from the kitchen, carrying Americanos for Donato and me. “It’s a long hike, very steep.”
The two of them chat in Italian.
“Is it a real beach?” Hannah interrupts. “I don’t want to lie out on rocks. I’m always bruised afterward.”
“A sandy beach,” Agostina says. Hannah sits up with interest. “And there are caves with early Christian frescoes.”
“I’d put on sunscreen for that,” my brother-in-law says, smiling.
“Do you know how early they are?” Tonio asks. “Never mind, don’t tell us. It will be more fun to figure it out ourselves.”
“How much of a hike is it?” I ask.
“I show you how to climb down,” Matteo’s dad says to me. “You swim out. The water—è bellissima.”
“Donato?” Marie calls to her son. “Will you come with us?”
Donato has given up on his cornetto. He’s pushing a spoon around a bowl of yogurt without taking a bite. He looks at me, then shrugs.
“Allora.” Agostina claps. “I will pack a lunch.”
We
take two cars, and arrive at the cliffs past noon. The wind is gusting. It knocks the car door closed when I try to get out. Marie ties her hair into a knot to keep it from whipping her in the face. Hannah pulls her baseball cap low. It’s decided that Matteo’s dad will show us the way down and come back for our lunch. “It can be dangerous,” he shouts over the wind. Agostina holds Matteo tight. Donato carries a stack of towels and an umbrella under each arm. When one drops, Matteo’s dad is there to retrieve it, hoisting it over his shoulder like a rifle.
Seguimi, he motions to everyone. The trail is overgrown with scrubby brush, nearly leafless from the harsh wind. I shield my eyes from bursts of dirt and sand.
Behind me I hear Paul. “Did you put on sunscreen?” he shouts to his daughter, who is hiking in a bikini and shorts. His nose is white with zinc.
When we start to descend, the wind is abruptly silenced by the sheer rocky cliffs. Matteo’s dad stays a few feet ahead. He climbs down, then turns to assist me. I’m struck again by how rough his hands are. I can feel where he’s gripped me long after he’s let go.
“Let’s rest here,” Marie says, fanning herself.
Tonio shifts his backpack that has his camera and journal and books from one shoulder to the other. He uses a handkerchief to wipe his brow.
Matteo’s dad offers me his water bottle. Grazie. I shield my eyes to look where the others are. Paul helps Agostina with Matteo, handing him over the rocks like a bucket of water between firefighters, Hannah pointing where to step. Donato’s fallen behind, I can only see the umbrella, bobbing as he descends. He shouts in Italian to us.
“What is he saying?” I ask.
Matteo’s dad chuckles.
“Not to wait,” Marie says and smiles. “My son is very stubborn.”
The last stretch is almost vertical stairs, carved right into the rock. I keep close to Matteo’s dad, who leaps the last few feet into the white sand. He turns, those blue eyes bright against his ruddy face.
“A sandy beach,” he says. He wants me to repeat after him in Italian. Spiaggia sabbiosa.
“My pronunciation.” I laugh. “It’s hopeless.”
He holds out his arms.
I catch a whiff of him when he lifts me—different from Donato, who smells like expensive Italian cigarettes and a beguiling musk, almost herbaceous. Or Guy, who is all mints and cigarillos and chic cologne. I do not realize how wobbly my legs are until I’m standing in the sand. I lean against the rocks while Matteo’s dad helps the others from the stairs, Marie and Hannah giggling as he swings them into the sand. He takes Matteo from Agostina and lifts him onto his shoulders. Donato is still far behind.