“Buongiorno, signora,” a waiter says. He can’t be more than seventeen, with bright green eyes and pockmarked skin. “Can I help you?”
“Just looking,” I say. I can feel my heart in my lungs, the surge of anxiety and excitement, the possibility, the hope.
“Perfetto.” He gestures his arm toward the inside of the restaurant. I scan the tables. I don’t know what I’m hoping to find—some relic she left behind thirty years ago, her name scrawled into the wall, or a message telling me what to do next?
But the restaurant is near empty, the patrons undisturbed. She is not here, of course. Why would she be? She is dead.
I hear the familiar siren of oncoming dread. The sound of a roaring engine before a tsunami. The past forty-eight hours have been a reprieve of this grief, the intensity of her absence. But now I feel it curling back—about to crescendo and sweep me under.
“Excuse me,” I say.
“You eat, miss?”
I shake my head. “No, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
I leave, take up my sandals in my hand, and pace down to the ocean. Some families are already at the small beach, on towels, playing in the sand. Charter boats bob close to the dock where people huddle, waiting for the next ship to Capri, Ravello, the beach club for the day. A woman on the dock trips, and a man catches her. They embrace, their lips meeting. The roaring in my chest gets louder and louder.
At the water’s edge, I sink down. I don’t have a towel, so I sit in the damp sand. I want to call Eric. I miss my mother. I suddenly feel utterly and completely foolish for coming here. What did I expect to happen? Did I think I’d find her, sitting at a table at Chez Black about to order lunch?
I realize what a long way from home I am, how many planes and trains and cars it will take to get back. I’ve never even been on a weekend away by myself, and now I’m alone on the other side of the world.
I miss her I miss her I miss her.
I miss her warmth and her guidance and the sound of her voice. I miss her telling me it was really all going to be okay and believing it, because she was at the wheel. I miss her hugs and her laughter and her lipstick, Clinique Black Honey. I miss the way she could plan a party in under an hour. I miss having the answers, because I had her.
I look out over the horizon, the sun high overhead. The wide expanse of sea. It seems impossible she is nowhere. It seems impossible, but it’s true.
I swallow down an unsteady breath and stand. I cannot be here for two weeks. I cannot even be here for two days. I hadn’t considered the fact that I’ve never been alone in my life, not really. I didn’t think about how I went from my parents’ house to a dorm room to an apartment with Eric. I do not know how to do this.
I’ll go home. I’ll tell Eric I made a mistake, that this is hard and I’m sorry. I’ll make amends, and life will go on.
I climb the stairs back up to the church. I take the road back up to the hotel, past the shops. A woman calls out: “Buongiorno, signora!” I do not turn. I am already gone.
Outside the hotel, a young man arrives for his shift. He parks his Vespa out front as he chats with a woman across the street, the one who must own the small grocery. They speak quickly, and I do not understand them.
I take the four stairs up to the lobby, and when I step inside, there she is. She is talking to a man behind the desk. She is wearing a dress from one of the shops in town—green with yellow lemons, revealing her slim and tan shoulders. Her sunglasses are perched high atop her head, holding her long auburn hair in place. She waves her arms around. A small package sits on the welcome desk in front of her.
“No, no, the hotel always mails for me. I have done it before. Many times. I promise.”
“To post?”
“To post, yes.” She looks relieved. I have not exhaled. “Yes, to post! And here, for payment.” She slides a bill across the table.
“Perfetto, grazie,” the man at the desk says.
I am trying to get a good look at her, to confirm what it is I already know to be true, when she turns. And when she does, the wind is knocked out of me. Because I’d know her anywhere. I’d know her in Brentwood and I’d know her in Positano. I’d know her at sixty and sixteen and thirty, as she stands in front of me today.
Impossibly, the woman at the desk is my mother.
“Mom,” I whisper, and then the world goes black.
Chapter Seven
When I come to, I am lying on the cold marble of the lobby floor, and my mother—or the thirty-year-old version of her—is holding me.