Sure, Matelda thought to herself. All the time in the world might only be a matter of minutes. She relaxed under the covers. The sounds of the machines that monitored her breath marked time with their ticks and whistles, lulling her into a deep sleep.
Matelda dreamt of her mother, who came to her as clearly as she had been in life.
* * *
Diaphanous clouds floated over the beach like loose wedding veils.
“What did you find?” Domenica called out to her daughter, who ran along the water’s edge. She reached her hand out for her daughter, and Matelda ran to her. The girl was five years old. She opened her hands, revealing a collection of delicate seashells the color of the water.
“Did you leave any shells for the other children?”
“There are lots more. I didn’t take them all,” her daughter said as she loaded the shells into the pocket of her mother’s apron.
Matelda’s hair was a nest of brown curls that turned gold under the summer sun. Her mother pushed a curl from her daughter’s eyes.
“The ocean brings more when the tide rolls in,” the child reminded her mother.
“You have an answer for everything.”
“Sister Maria Magdalena said you have to seek answers,” Matelda said.
Domenica watched as her daughter ran into the surf. “Don’t go out too far!” she shouted after her. “Stay close to the shore!” She sounded like her mother when Netta Cabrelli had taken her children to the beach. Everything had changed and yet it resembled the past she remembered. Her parents were back in Villa Cabrelli. She knew how much joy it brought them to have her and Matelda living in their home; it was almost as if things were as they had been. Aldo had died in Tunisia in the war, and her mother decided to pretend that he was in the army permanently instead of coping with the grief of the loss of him. Her mother wasn’t the only one in a state of pretend after the war. No one in the village referred to her as Signora McVicars; in their minds, she had returned to Viareggio redeemed. The priest who had banished her had also died. The only evidence that Domenica had ever left Viareggio was her daughter, Matelda.
Domenica was resigned when she looked down the beach, no longer the pristine playground of her youth. The white sand she remembered was now ashen with flecks of hardened black char where the tanks had rolled over it, leaking oil.
There were monuments to destruction up and down the shore. The rusting shard of a blasted gangplank was marooned in the sand. There were deep pits where fires had been built by the enemy to signal their bomber jets. The sandbags of the abandoned dugouts where German soldiers had sheltered, in their futile last stand against the Allies, remained stacked by the pier, at the ready for nothing. The seawall had been blown apart. Hunks of ancient stone that anchored the pier were shattered by the shells. The smooth wooden planks on the boardwalk were splintered and missing where the soldiers had sliced them open to create entries for soldiers who entrenched beneath them. The steps to the boardwalk were loose and missing, like a prizefighter’s teeth after a brutal battle. In the end, it was all stagecraft, as flimsy as a magician’s handkerchief. As if the greatest general could keep anyone or anything off an open beach! By the end of the war, the Italians had no bullets, not even a kitchen knife to use in self-defense. Mussolini had stripped them of everything they had and would need to save themselves in order to save himself. He had been a failure at that too. What a waste. Poor Viareggio. The war had stolen her beauty for an enemy who did not value it. The time wasted was incalculable.
Viareggio was home, but every corner was filled with disappointment, when it wasn’t filled with hunger and despair.
Matelda ran to her mother.
“Look.” Matelda went up on her toes and held a seashell close to her mother’s face. “Scungilli!” she said proudly. The white conch was streaked with pale blue like an opal. “Bella!”
“Bella, bella,” her mother agreed. “Let’s go up to the boardwalk.” Domenica took her daughter’s hand once more. “Someday you’ll see this beach as I remember it. When I was a girl, I played on the white sand. It was smooth, like a silk coverlet. There were red-and-white-striped umbrellas, as far as you could see. The beach looked like a field of peppermint candy. When I stood on the water’s edge in the shallow ripples during low tide, little pink fish would swim around my feet in the blue water and tickle me.”
“I haven’t seen any pink fish,” Matelda admitted before she ran ahead to the steps to climb up to the boardwalk. Luckily, the little girl was still young enough to see magic in the world. The rusted equipment that had been abandoned on the beach became kingdoms in Matelda’s imagination, while they were shapes of grief for her mother. As Matelda climbed the rickety steps, she knelt down and picked up a small, thick piece of glass wedged between the slats. “Mama! A clock!” Matelda shouted.