Chapter 26

TWENTY-SIX

MAY 2019

Thursday

After saying goodbye to Emilio at the café, Tori spent the rest of the morning roaming the shops on the piazza. She was in no hurry to get back to the museum, as all she wanted to do was to explore more boxes in the archives, and she wouldn't be able to get back in there without Emilio. He'd gone back to the hotel to take a nap and change his clothes for tonight, his second and final night shift of the week. He'd promised to meet her at the dock at four o'clock so they could travel to the museum together. Then he'd let her back into the archives, as he'd done for the past two afternoons. He seemed less reluctant to do so, compared to how he'd been yesterday and the day before. It seemed the discovery of the hidden bullets had piqued his curiosity. When they'd parted ways at the café, he'd sounded almost as eager as she was to learn more about Giulia.

Returning to the center of the piazza, Tori decided to carry out something for lunch before all the shops and restaurants closed for the afternoon riposo . She was in the mood to try something new, and opted for a pane e panelle from a small outdoor eatery. The English-speaking owner described it as a Sicilian specialty featuring chickpea fritters on a sesame seed roll. She ordered a cappuccino as well, and he wrapped the sandwich for her so she could take it to the park by the dock.

As the shops began closing, she unwrapped her lunch and dug in. The fritter was delicious, the sesame seed roll a perfect accompaniment, and she savored each bite. It was strange, but she felt a new mood overtaking her. Maybe it was the magic of this lovely town, but she also thought it had to do with what she'd learned about Giulia. She still didn't understand why Giulia had never returned to her baby, but the mysteries about her life were increasing. And the more Tori gathered about Giulia, the more she wanted to know. Could the bullets and the words Pietro had written in his notebook somehow tie together with Giulia's decision to abandon her baby? There seemed so much more to her grandmother than Tori had realized when she'd decided to take this trip.

And even if she found out that Giulia had no good explanations, she no longer felt it would be best to go home without ever meeting her. She wanted to know Giulia, no matter what she might find out. Sitting here in the sunshine with the water sparkling ahead of her and the castle rising in the distance, she decided that light was better than darkness, knowledge better than secrecy. In unlocking the mystery of Giulia, she'd finally be able to understand where she came from—and possibly learn more about who she was and why she felt the way she did about lots of things.

But mostly about commitment. And why she'd sooner give up the man she loved than marry him.

And for this reason, it felt like her mission here in Italy had changed. She'd arrived here determined to find her grandmother, confront her, and demand an explanation. If Giulia was alive, she'd decided, then she was going to be found. Now, Tori believed that if she never found Giulia, if finding her was impossible, it would still be okay. Because she was getting to know her. She was learning about her. And as long as she could solve the mysteries she uncovered, she'd go home richer and more satisfied than she'd been when she arrived.

She finished eating and called home to catch Marilene and Molly before Molly had to go to school. Thankfully she was getting used to the time change; in fact, she was getting used to a lot of things about Italy. For the first time since she'd arrived, she spent more time talking about what she'd been doing than asking questions of them. She still felt it was better to save all she'd discovered about Giulia for when she returned. But she did talk about Emilio and the hotel and the food. Even Molly seemed drawn in by Tori's enthusiasm and made Tori promise again to bring her to Italy before long.

A little while later, Emilio showed up, and they joined the line to board the next ferry. Tori couldn't wait to find out what she would discover in the archives today. They reached the island and made their way up the stairs, and she marveled at Emilio's stamina. She wandered around the lobby while Emilio checked in for his shift and put on his vest. At a little before five o'clock he let her into the archives, and she rushed back to the shelves. She pulled out the box from yesterday, then drew the brass bullet from her bag and tucked it into the little pocket in the dress formed when she'd ripped the one stitch in the hem. She pushed the box back into its place on the shelf and pulled out the next closest one.

Gently unsealing that one, she looked inside. It was filled with papers—letters, notes, official-looking documents that seemed to have come from an old-fashioned typewriter, slips of paper with handwritten notes that looked like they were scribbled in a hurry. There had to be hundreds of pages altogether—and, she noted to herself wryly, they were all in Italian. How could she know which documents and letters might reveal more about Giulia, or even point to Giulia's whereabouts? She longed to bring the whole box out to show Emilio and ask for his help in translating, but she knew he'd blow a gasket if she took even a small percentage of the contents out of here. As good-natured as he was, he'd been agitated that she'd brought out the notebook and the bullet, even though she'd returned them both. And there were way too many documents for him to translate them all before she left for home next week.

With a heavy sigh, she tried to sort through all the pages, putting aside the ones that looked official and hunting specifically for ones that seemed to be written to or about Giulia. Halfway through the pile, she found a small, yellowed scrap of paper. There seemed to be a poem on it, two lines in verse, the handwriting elegant and precise:

Dovunque tu vada io andrò e

Dovunque ti starai io restarò.

Beneath the verse was one word: Giulia .

Tori froze. What was this poem, which her grandmother had apparently written out? Too curious to wait to show it to Emilio, she opened her phone and typed the first two lines of the poem into the search bar on her browser, then asked for the English translation. A moment later, it appeared:

Wherever you go, I will go.

And wherever you stay, I will stay.

It seemed a simple enough pair of sentences, and yet there was something formal about it, something lyrical. She was sure it wasn't just words that had popped into someone's head; they were words that someone knew, that had significance above and beyond their literal meaning. She went back to her browser to type the English words into the search box, to see if they had some historical significance. But before she could finish, her eyes caught the time in the upper right corner of her screen.

Five fifty-five.

"Oh no!" she hissed, shoving the page into her bag and putting the box back on the shelf. She ran past the tables and chairs, and hurried down the hallway and to the front entrance. Remembering that Emilio was again working overnight, she hurried outside and down the stone stairway. But by the time she reached the bottom step, the ferry had left the shore and started back to the mainland.

She climbed back to the courtyard and knocked on the glass doors. The entranceway lanterns switched on.

"I missed the boat," she said when Emilio opened the door.

Twenty minutes later, they were seated at the end of a rectangular table in the museum's cafeteria, one set of overhead lights shining above them and an assortment of antipasti and warmed-over gnocchi alla Romana, the baked gnocchi golden brown and topped with a mixture of butter, sage, and Gorgonzola cheese.

"One benefit of staying here overnight," Emilio said as he poured red wine from a small bottle into two plastic wine glasses. "You get to enjoy the café's leftovers."

"Thank you," Tori said. "And I'm sorry for burdening you with me tonight." She'd resigned herself to staying until morning, as Emilio had explained there was no alternative. No boat would come back for them tonight; and if they called the police, she could face some tough scrutiny.

"Not a burden, my friend. I'm glad for the company. Salute ." He tapped her cup with his. Then he handed her an empty plate and some plastic utensils. They both helped themselves and started to eat, Tori amazed at how delicious the café's food was.

"I hope you found something important enough to justify your being stuck here," he said in between mouthfuls.

She scowled. "I don't know if I did or not," she said. She finished the morsel on her fork, then wiped her hands on a napkin and pulled the yellowed paper from her bag. "It seems to be from Giulia," she said as she handed it to him. "It looks like a poem or a verse. Do you recognize it?"

He gave her a look, no doubt because she had again taken something from the archives. Then he read it over and shook his head.

"Maybe I'm just imagining it because I want it to mean something that matters," she said. "But it feels… lyrical to me. A love poem, maybe. I translated it on my phone. Wherever you go, I will go… that sounds like love. Doesn't it?"

He shrugged. "Maybe. Maybe not. I'll go where you go… people say that all the time. I've probably said it a million times to everyone I know. My granddaughter, my father… you go to Rome on the eight-fifteen train, I will, too. You want spaghetti, that's fine. We'll eat wherever you want. ‘I'll go where you go.'"

She smirked. "Well, when you put it that way. But it… I don't know, it rang a bell for me somehow when I read it. Like something I had heard long ago, in a dream or something. Or something my mother said to me. Something she sang maybe. Although the words aren't quite the same as what I remember…"

She didn't know why but suddenly she felt her eyes welling up. She sniffled. "This is all so crazy," she said. "I never cry. But here I go again. Because I'm starting to believe that I'm never going to find her. I've distracted myself with this little game of hide-and-seek in the archives." She shook her head. "What am I even doing here?"

"You came to look for Giulia. Because you were angry with her."

"Yes, I was," she agreed. "And not just me. There's been so much sadness and anger around me. My grandmother, at least the one I thought was my grandmother, is also angry. She's so mad about Giulia never coming back. And my mother was angry and sad. I barely knew her growing up—that's what I most remember. Until the day she died, she was angry and worked up. And scared. I guess she never got over being abandoned."

She thought for a moment. "Although maybe there's more to it. It was such a bad time for me when I saw the postcard with the wedding dress. Everything was falling apart in my life. Maybe I was just looking for an excuse to get away. I saw myself being so much like my mother. Not able to let things be. Not able to trust. I didn't want to keep going down that road. I didn't want to be my mother. Considering all that happened."

He raised his eyebrows.

"It's an awful story," she said. "I was eleven, Molly's age, and I was at the town swimming pool, and I wanted to go with my friends to the deep end. I really thought I could do it, even though I wasn't a great swimmer. My mother was always so nervous about me. She'd lost track of me at a department store years earlier, and she never could let that go. And she seemed to become more unhinged when my dad died in a car crash the year before.

"Anyway, I followed my friends to the middle of the deep section, and I couldn't make it across. I honestly thought I was going to drown. A man was standing there with his friend in the pool, maybe in his twenties, and I reached out and put my hand on his arm and said, ‘Please help me get across.' He thought it was funny, I guess because I was almost there, so he just let me hang onto his arm as he pulled me to the pool ladder. I guess it didn't look like I was in danger, as the lifeguard didn't even notice. But my mother saw the whole thing. And was so upset. She was mad at herself for not being there in the pool with me.

"The next morning she wasn't in her bed when we got up. Marilene called the police." She paused.

"They found her at the bottom of the pool," she said. "She must have been hallucinating, maybe she'd been drinking. The gate to the pool complex had been locked, but she'd somehow gotten past the chain-link fence. She had to have been reliving the moment when I was in the deep end. I know that in her head, she was trying to rescue me. I feel so guilty about that. And I'm mad. Because she never got over being abandoned, and it damaged her for life."

Emilio put down his fork and tilted his head. "I'm so sorry, Tori," he said. "I'm sorry she didn't get help. It sounds like she was a sick woman. It wasn't your fault."

"I know. She didn't think she was sick, though. And often she was fine. But then she'd have these episodes… anyway, it all came to a head when Marilene showed me the museum website. That line in the bio, how Giulia lived peacefully in a suburb of Rome. Peacefully!" Her voice was filled with outrage. "That's why I wanted to find her. I wanted her to know what happened. How she left her baby and how much suffering she caused."

She rolled her eyes at what she'd just said. "I was so self-righteous, blaming Giulia for what she did, leaving her child behind. And yet, I feel like I did the same thing."

"But… but your daughter is not a baby, is she?" he said.

"No."

"And you left her with family."

"Yes, but… but no, actually, I didn't," Tori said. "I left her with Marilene. Just like Giulia did when she left my mother. Marilene's not family. But here she is… she's been taking care of us, three generations of us—my mother, me, and now Molly. We don't belong to anyone. We… forced ourselves into her life. And she had no choice. Because she's a good person, and she wasn't going to abandon us. But we're not hers… "

She put her elbows on the table and dropped her forehead onto the heels of her hands. "Oh, God," she said. "I feel terrible. I never saw us this way before. We belong to no one. We never have."

There was quiet for a moment. Then Emilio slid a clean napkin her way, and she took it as she lifted her head to wipe her eyes. She couldn't remember the last time she'd cried in front of someone she knew. But if she had to do so, he felt like a safe choice to witness her tears.

"Tori," he said gently. "What happened to… Molly's father?"

She scrunched up the napkin and put it on the table. "He lives in California," she said. "He's never been in the picture. I met him at a party in New York a long time ago. He was my friend's cousin. He was nice-looking, fun, smart. In graduate school, studying engineering. Neither one of us was looking for anything serious. Don't get me wrong, Molly's the best thing that ever happened to me. But there was never any way… I mean, Brian and I, we weren't going to be together. That was never going to happen."

"He just left? Does he ever see her?"

She shook her head. "He sends her birthday gifts."

"But he never wanted to meet her?"

"There was no reason for him to. He was never going to be a real part of her life or anything. Why open a can of worms?"

"So he wanted to meet her."

"I don't know. Maybe."

"And you wouldn't let him?"

"No, it wasn't like that. You've got it all wrong. Maybe you have to be in my shoes to understand why I handled it this way." It had been the right decision to keep Brian out of Molly's life. Things were hard enough for Molly, having a single mom. Why make things harder by adding a dad who left New York after grad school and never intended to live anywhere but California?

"Of course," Emilio said. "Forgive me. I have no idea what you've had to deal with."

She looked at him. His eyes were sorrowful. She felt bad for snapping at him when he was simply showing concern. And she appreciated him for that. It had been nice these last few days, having a kind of father figure in her life. She hadn't realized how much she'd missed by not having had a father for so long. Or even how much Molly had missed, by not having one at all.

"I know I have a very unusual life," she said. "I never planned it, our little family—Marilene, Molly, and me. It just turned out that way."

"Has there been anyone else?" Emilio asked. "Since Molly's father?"

She paused, then nodded. "Yes. We were together for five years. It ended before I came here. Maybe that's also one of the things I was running away from. Being alone again. Which is why I feel so bad about Molly now. She's learning to live without him, too."

"She liked him?"

"She adored him."

"And you did, too?"

She looked upward and shook her head. "He's the best."

"Then why did it end? If you don't mind my asking."

"Because…" she paused, then pointed to the poem on the yellow paper. "Because I can't do this, okay? I can't tell someone I'll go wherever they go, I'll stay wherever they stay. Whatever this poem is, wherever it comes from, it has to do with giving yourself up completely for someone else. To making the ‘together' part more important than the ‘you' part. The ‘me' part. And I can't. It's too risky. I've had too many people leave. We've had too many people leave to trust like that ever again."

She picked up the paper and scowled. "It's ironic, isn't it? Giulia's saying in this note that she'd go to the ends of the earth for someone. But at the end of the day, she wasn't capable of that at all. It was a lie. She left the one person who needed her—her baby. And all the damage that happened ever since—it happened because of that. Because Giulia didn't love. She wasn't capable of love. She couldn't have done what she did if she knew how to love."

"The poem in your hand suggests otherwise."

She tilted her head skeptically. "What are you getting at?"

"I'm saying that from what I've learned this week about your grandmother, I don't think she was incapable of love."

"But what about the bullets and Pietro's notebook and how he said she betrayed him?"

"I don't think it's a reasonable conclusion to say she never could love. And I think you are hurting yourself to feel that way. She may have loved very deeply. People often love more deeply than we see. Or realize. It's not something that gets switched on or off."

"Oh, you're a fine one to talk about love," Tori said. "What about you? You're clearly in love with Gabriella. I saw it that night at dinner. And she loves you, too. I saw that today."

"You saw Gabriella today?"

"I was in her shop. She said to say hello to you for her. And the way she couldn't help but smile when she said it—I could tell how she feels about you. So you tell me, why are you so willing to be alone? Why are you telling me one thing and yourself another?"

"We are different, you and me," he said, holding up his index finger as if to make an irrefutable point. "I'm an old man. I had a wonderful marriage, to a woman I fell in love with when I was fourteen years old. We have six children, fifteen grandchildren. We had a long, full life together. But you… you are still young. You are still learning what love is. But there's time. You don't learn what love is at a party in New York or even after spending five years with someone. You are throwing away something that you don't even yet know…"

He breathed out and looked at the table. She could see his hands trembling. She had figured he was a widower. But she hadn't known the extent of his grief.

"I'm sorry. Again," she said. "I had no business saying all that. And I know that I'm stubborn and haven't yet figured out many things about life. I guess I was hoping that being here, that knowing about my grandmother or even meeting her, would give me some… guidance. And… and she must have been a wonderful person, your wife. I'm sorry she's gone."

He grinned. "She was the best."

She smiled at his use of her words. Then she grew serious again. "So how do you go on?" she asked. "After that kind of loss?"

"You learn to accept it," he told her. "I think if you live in a place like this, where there's so much history, there are always ghosts. You always live with shadows. Although maybe that's true of everyone. No one can escape what came before or what is inside us. You go on. And at some point, you start to appreciate exactly that. That you have those shadows. Those ghosts. They're even here all around us. They always will be, all the people who died. Oh, the memories my father used to share of making deliveries to this island. The views from the water into the castle, the dancing he could see on the top story through the open windows, the music he could hear. It was a very special time, before the war. And it will never come back.

"Although you know what?" he said. "I think now when my father looks across the water, he sees life. He sees a little of what isn't there anymore. People falling in love, enjoying art, music, dance. And it comforts him. I stay here, in the home he grew up in, and try to find the world my father saw. It will be completely gone in a few years, when his generation is no longer around. The castle will just be a museum, a tourist site people can check off on their list of what to do when they come to this part of Italy. I fear it already is."

Tori sighed. "You've been so good to me this week, Emilio," she said. "And I appreciate it so much. Especially tonight. I can see that I've been on a wild goose chase, fooling myself into thinking I could glean something valuable. When the truth is, I need to go home and straighten out my life. I have a business that I'm trying to build, and Molly needs me. It was frivolous to come here. All I did was delay a lot of thinking that I have to do."

"So you're calling off the search for Giulia?"

"I think so."

He paused. "What kind of business?" he asked, his eyes lighting up. Tori could tell he was glad to change the subject to something cheerful.

She smiled. "Believe it or not… I design wedding gowns. I want to open my own shop."

"Wedding gowns!" he said. "What do you know! Well now, that's a wonderful business. A hopeful business. That makes me happy."

They finished their last few mouthfuls of food and then gathered the trash. Emilio took it to the trash bin. "I take it you're thinking of shortening your trip? How many days do you have left?"

She nodded. "Six."

"When will you leave?"

"As soon as I can get a flight. I'll figure it out tomorrow."

"I'll be sorry to see you go. But don't worry," he added with a twinkle in his eye. "I won't charge you for the cancellation."

They left the café and went into the lobby. Emilio showed her the way to the employee lounge. "There's a small sofa where you can get some sleep," he said. "It's not great but it's the most comfortable option. And set your alarm on your phone. We should be down to the dock by nine twenty to catch the first ferry back."

"But what about you? Won't you get to rest at all?"

"No, I'll be in the lobby watching for unauthorized boats. Of course, there's never been an instance of an unauthorized boat showing up, but they still like to have someone there just in case."

Tori looked at the paper that was still in her hand. "Maybe I should put this back now," she said. "So we don't have to worry about it tomorrow."

"That's probably a good idea," he said, and they turned in the direction of the archives.

"I still wish I knew who she wrote this to. Who she was willing to give up everything for."

"You have no idea at all?" he asked. "Marilene never recalled anyone?"

Tori thought for a moment. "Now that you mention it, she did tell me about someone from Giulia's past. Someone she said Giulia talked about when she first arrived on their island. His family had some kind of dry goods market in Anzalea—you know, like the one your family had. His name was something with a V… Vincenzo maybe…"

She continued walking until she noticed Emilio was no longer beside her. She turned to see him a few steps back, stopped in his tracks.

"What's the matter?" she said.

"Tori," he told her. "My father's name is Vincenzo."