“That too,” Adam says.
We arrive in Naples, and I see what he means—the outskirts look poverty-stricken. As we pull into the city center, things get noisier, busier—drivers peel around one another, ignoring any kind of road rules. It’s so much more chaotic and stressful than where we’ve just come from.
We park near the Duomo, one of more than five hundred basilicas in Naples.
“It’s probably the Italian city that has held on to its Catholic roots the tightest, and the longest,” Adam tells me. “The people here are very religious. They are also very rowdy.”
The streets are busy and gritty. There is more trash than I have seen anywhere in Italy. My journey through Rome was brief, nearly nonexistent, but even so, I know the two cities are nothing alike. I’m struggling to determine what, exactly, Adam loves about the place.
“Come on,” Adam says. “I want to walk a little with you.”
He touches my elbow and turns me down a street. On the corner, a man and a woman are in a heated debate. She gestures with her hands in his face. He grabs them, and I think, for a sliver of time, he might shake her, but then she yanks his face down and they are making out, fast and furious.
“Italy,” Adam says.
“Italy,” I repeat.
“I just realized I don’t even know what you do for work,” Adam says.
“I’m a copywriter,” I say. “I help companies and sometimes individuals say what they need to say. I give the language for their websites, and newsletters, and I’ve worked on a few books. I was in-house somewhere for a while, but I left when my mom got sick.”
“I see,” Adam says. “How long ago was that?”
“A few months. Caring for her was…” I look at two older women carrying plastic bags. The bags look too heavy for them. “My mother was my best friend,” I say.
Adam tucks his hands into his pockets, but he doesn’t say anything.
“She was the most vibrant woman. She just knew everything, you know? Everyone who knew her went to her for advice. She was so good at being human, she just had it all figured out, and I—”
“You come from her,” he says.
“Yeah, but we’re nothing alike.”
Adam glances at me but doesn’t break stride. “I have a hard time believing that’s true. She taught you to be like her, no?”
I think about my mother in my home, bringing over a vintage kilim for our kitchen floor, new throw pillows for our couch, home-cooked meals for our fridge.
Something dawns on me, but I’m not sure how to identify it, what it will mean if I acknowledge it out loud, or even just to myself. And then I do.
“No,” I say. “She didn’t. I was just the recipient.”
I don’t cook; I don’t decorate. I don’t know the right place to order flowers from in the Valley, because I always just called her. And now she’s gone and I can’t help but think, in this moment, that she left me unprepared.
“I’m sorry,” Adam says. “I know how hard this is for you.” He clears his throat. “When I was very young, my sister died. She was playing on the jungle gym at the park. She fell the wrong way, and she just never woke up.”
“Oh my god.”
“My mom was there.” Adam shakes his head. “Sometimes people ask me why I’m not married, and I think about Bianca, that was her name. That’s my first thought. Is that strange? I don’t even know why, exactly.”
“Because you don’t want to lose someone that close to you again.”
Adam shakes his head. “I think it’s more like…” He pauses, considering. “I don’t want to see anyone suffer. When I think about Bianca, I don’t think about me; I think about my mother. Watching her cry every year on the anniversary, on her birthday, at Christmas, every time anyone asked her how many children she had. It’s the suffering that scares me. The way I might feel about someone else’s losses.”
“It’s probably the worst thing,” I say. “Losing a child.”
Adam nods. “She never got over it. How could you?”
I think about how many times I’ve asked myself that. If I’ll ever feel normal again. If I’ll ever be okay. The answer has always been no, but being here now, I think that maybe there is space in that, too. That maybe the expanse of time without her isn’t a battlefield, but an empty lot. With some dirt, even. Undeveloped land. That maybe, given time, I get to choose.