“Because he’s Edoardo!”
The back seat of the Mercedes was so roomy that she could stretch out her legs and Tanner could open his guitar case. He immediately began to play, because playing was what he did, day and night. Becky was so used to the sound of his Guild that she only paid attention when other people were listening, as Renata was doing now, from the front seat, her body angled toward him, her blue eyes more fervent than Becky cared to see. Where the harassment she’d endured in Rome was strictly about her as a sex object, Tanner’s fascination to women seemed more romantic, and she’d come to resent that other women felt free to imagine romance with her boyfriend. It occurred to her that Renata had invited Tanner to Tuscany because she was very into him.
Hanging on a string from the car’s rearview mirror, lurching and spinning with Volker’s brakings for rude Italian drivers, was a painted plastic Buddha. Along the narrow streets were tiny trattorias, inviting but unaffordable, and bars with colorful bottles doubled by the mirrors behind them, and long, unpainted walls gouged by trucks and plastered with posters for a circus, for an automobile show, for FOLKAROMA, 29–31 Agosto. Wider avenues offered glimpses of churches and ruins and monuments, pastel in the haze, that Becky might have visited with Shirley, or with her mother, but hadn’t with Tanner, because theirs was not that kind of trip.
There ensued an uglier Rome, more sprawling than the pretty Rome. They passed scooters in buzzing packs of twenty, apartment blocks bedecked with drying laundry, pyramids of car tires, gas station after gas station. Tanner was improvising and the Germans speaking German, Renata consulting a map, while Becky monitored her condition. For four and a half years, her period had arrived as reliably as the thunderstorms that ended a sweltering Midwestern day. Now she felt nothing in her belly, no change at all, an ominous stasis. Even before the last of ugly Rome fell away and they reached the autostrada, a dread had taken root in her.
Volker’s acceleration pressed her back into her leather seat. He was driving so fast that the trucks they passed looked stationary. She saw the speedometer needle trembling at two hundred kilometers an hour, climbing higher. The sky was white hot and the windows were down, the roar of air so loud that she could hear only Tanner’s high notes. He was still immersed in his music, Renata gazing at him again, Volker serene at the wheel. The Buddha’s string tightened and tilted as he braked for a car going only recklessly fast, not insanely fast.
Stiff with dread, barely able to raise her arm, Becky touched Tanner’s shoulder. He smiled and nodded in time with his strumming. She was too frightened to move again or speak. Beyond the dangling plastic Buddha, another nearly stationary car rushed up to meet them. Volker flashed his headlights, the Buddha smiled, and her dread branched out in all directions. What did she know about Volker, except that he looked like Charles Manson? Did he believe in Buddhist reincarnation? Was he trying to crash them to a higher plane, beyond the whiteness of the sky? And the weirdness of Edoardo, his thing for pretty houseguests, the vacancy of his apartment—was everyone perverted? Was this why Volker and Renata stayed there? Did they pay Edoardo to cruise the streets and find fresh meat? Was the farmhouse in Tuscany just a lure for unsuspecting Americans? She’d placed herself and Tanner in the hands of people she knew absolutely nothing about. She wanted to ask Volker to slow down, but her jaw was locked, her chest muscles petrified. The Mercedes was flying at airplane speed, meteor speed. It telescoped the passing trees and road signs, smashed them together in a blur of violence. Was this how she would die? She could see her death as clearly as if it had already happened. It filled her with sadness, but at least she’d had a chance to live in the world, at least she’d experienced real love and beheld the light of God. The unborn soul in her had never even seen the light.
Dear God, she prayed, if this is the final test, I accept the test. If my time has come, I’ll die rejoicing in you. But please let it be your will that I live. If it’s your will that I live, I promise I will always serve you. If it’s your will that I be pregnant, I promise I will never harm my baby. I will love her and cherish her and teach her to love you, I promise, I promise, I promise, if you would only let me live. Please, God. Let me live.
Clem met Felipe Cuéllar at a construction site where the work consisted of shoveling sand, under a sand-colored Lima sky, and pushing it up narrow planks in a wheelbarrow. For a month, they shared a corrugated metal lean-to near the water treatment plant, shared food and beer, awakened to the smell of each other’s farts. Like other young men from the highlands, Felipe had come to the city in the winter to earn some cash. When it was time for him to go home, in November, Clem offered to join him and work for his family in exchange for food and shelter. The nonweather of Lima, the identically beige-skied days, was oppressing him, and throughout his months in Peru he’d seen the Andes in the east, the sun reflected on their heights, without getting any closer. He knew so little of farming, it didn’t occur to him that planting season coincided with the arrival of the rains.