Chapter Ten Rory

Ror! Ror!”

My knees crunch down onto the gravel as the boulder scrapes my biceps, then sails over the cliff. My shoulder bashes against the guardrail. Dust sprays my face, and my eyes clamp shut, but not before sealing particles inside. I probe my shoulder, test out moving it, rolling it, relieved that I can. Then I rub my eyes and flicker them open. I look up.

Three concerned faces break the line of pure blue sky.

“Wha-what happened?” My voice is shaky, my pulse still racing.

“I don’t know,” Max says, his body still covering—protecting—mine. “It just came… that huge rock, out of nowhere.”

“It almost crashed into you,” Caro says breathlessly. “If Max hadn’t… I mean, what the hell was that?”

Now I hear a flurry of indistinct chatter; and other people swim into my vision, all huddled together, faces pinched in unease. That glamorous Italian family we passed on the way up; a youngish hipster guy with this cool silver arrow earring who’s also on the train, who took the boat over with us to the first town; his girlfriend, I think, pink hair in a pixie cut, speaking what I infer is Russian, as evidenced by a few vaguely familiar words.

“Ror.” It’s Nate now, kneeling down. “Ror, are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I say hastily. I let Nate pop me up. I brush off my pants, now shredded at the knee. “Yeah. I’m fine. Thanks.”

I turn and assess the highland from where the boulder must have come—dense, scrubby brush. Parts of the path are protected overhead by concrete, but this section wasn’t. Still, how in the world did such a big thing get dislodged?

Everyone encircles me, closing me off, proffering their water bottles and even a clove of garlic from the Russian lady. I know that people from that part of the world religiously believe in the healing properties of garlic. Papa was known to eat cloves raw, usually right before our friends were due to come over, to my and Max’s childhood chagrin.

“No thank you, but spasiba.” I hope that means thanks, and not goodbye. I must have gotten it right, because she smiles and unleashes a torrent of Russian.

“No, no, I don’t speak Russian. And you can have… here.” I thrust the garlic toward her, but she pulls her hands back like it’s a hot potato.

She says something again in insistent Russian, and her boyfriend says, “It is the Russian penicillin. To heal wound.”

“I know. But no thank you. I’m fine. Please.” I stuff the garlic clove into his hand with slight aggression. The stench of garlic wafts up from my fingers, curdling my stomach. I edge back, the adrenaline of what just happened still whisking through me.

“Coraggio!” the Italian dad says, peering down from my circle of now groupies, his voice as booming as a subwoofer.

“I’m fine, really.” Can everyone get the fuck away? But my mouth refuses to voice it, stays frozen in a rictus smile. And then everyone squeezes even closer to me, making way for a gaggle of German trekkers with their massive backpacks and walking sticks that nearly spear my elbow.

After the Germans pass, our train friends slowly disperse, leaving only us four. “I’m fine,” I say, as much to them as to myself. I lick my forefinger and massage it over a cut on my knee that’s visible through the hole.

“Should we get you to a doctor?” Caro frowns.

“No. I’m fine.”

“Well, at least we should bandage that up,” Nate says. “We should stop at a pharmacy.”

“Where? At the pharmacy around the corner?” Now I’m irritated. “A cut’s not going to kill me. The boulder—now that could have killed me.” I hear myself say it in an odd jokey tone. “Come on.” I step a tentative foot forward. “Let’s just keep on.”

“You sure?” Max asks, eyes crinkling in brotherly concern.

“Yeah. Thanks, Maxie. Honestly, you saved me.” I squeeze his forearm.

Max shrugs. “Right place, right time.”

“No, really. You seriously saved me.”

“Anytime, LS.” He looks surprised.

“Was it a rockslide?” Nate asks, gazing back up toward the high ground. “I feel like I read about that happening here.”

“Only in rainy season, I’d assume,” Max says. “Not in summer.”

“But this part of the path is the most treacherous,” Caro says. “I read it in my guidebook. See.” I follow her finger point to a sign with a red triangle, inside of which is a stick figure of a person falling.

“But I didn’t fall.”

“No,” Caro agrees. “You didn’t.”

The four of us traipse back along the dusty path. My gait is unsteady, but I soldier on, my heart still in my throat as I ponder how close I came. If the boulder had crashed into me, it could have swept me through the guardrail. Hundreds of feet above punishing rock…

We pass lemon and olive trees nestled in lush foliage, then flowering agaves and cacti sprouting from the earth at every twist—as if placed for maximal delight by an expert gardener. I try to focus on the beauty, let it temper the fear. But I can’t stop my eyes from flittering back every few feet.

“You sure you’re okay?” Nate asks, filing in beside me. “That was weird. I mean…”

“I’m fine. I’m okay.”

“Ror?” he says, his gaze penetrating.

“Really.”

We walk on in silence, but eventually the landscape compels us to resume proclamations—I’m never leaving! (Max) Bury me here. (Caro)

Only Nate is still quiet. I wonder if he’s thinking the same thing I am. That it’s probably rare for boulders to dislodge for no reason… in the middle of summer.…

The route is blessedly flat now, the air perfumed with juniper and oregano. Occasionally we pass terraces festooned in magenta bougainvillea, with clusters of people drinking slushy granitas and eating twirly forks of pasta, some bites green with what I suspect is pesto, some red. Caro walks slightly ahead, marveling at the scenery, snapping pictures that I know I’ll see soon on Instagram. It’s a little bizarre that she’s not hovering close, especially after the weird boulder thing. Typically, Caro and I are conjoined, not a bit of space between us to hide a secret, to store a lie. But we haven’t seen each other in a while. We haven’t yet had that thaw, where one of us says something that pings our history, our shared language, and I’m right back into the thick of our sisterhood. Instead I’m a fritzing light, on and off, on and off, stuck on Ginevra’s allegations of Caro embezzling from Max.

“Watch it,” Nate says when I get close to the seaward edge. He skirts around me, so he’s next to the sea.

“What?”

“Look. I don’t think they’re great at maintenance. There are places where the supporting soil looks like it’s eroded.”

“I should have worn better shoes like you said.” I muster a smile.

He smiles back. “It’s taking huge restraint for me not to say I told you so.”

“I applaud your restraint.”

“Hey, let me take a breather.” Max pauses to gulp from his bottle of Evian. Nate wanders ahead to an overlook, and I stop with Max, leaning against the stone wall, on vigilant lookout in case another boulder comes flying toward me.

Okay, I’ve got to tackle something, deal with one of them. Might as well begin with my brother. Especially after he saved me, now that I feel my anger toward him loosening.

I let out a deep exhale. “Max, you know your first memory?”

Caro watches us from ahead. Somehow, I know she attunes, gets that this conversation is important. She whispers something to Nate. Nate’s glance flickers between Max and me, then the two of them slip farther ahead.

Max finishes his water and swipes at his mouth. “Yeah, of course.” He pulls off his sunglasses—ancient Oakleys that really should be tossed. He eyes me wearily as we pass a cluster of olive trees. I slow to give Nate and Caro more time to get significantly ahead. “Why?”

“Well… it’s why I’m upset with you. And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. I needed to process it first myself.”

“You’re upset me with me about my first memory?” Max’s voice tunes up. “You mean, like when I was four? You haven’t answered my calls for weeks… because of something from when I was four? How could that possibly upset you? All I’ve ever said was you were pink and scrunchy and I loved you instantly.”

My heart swishes over itself. “I know you love me. But honestly that doesn’t have anything to do with what I’m trying to say now.”

“Okay.” He nods, swallows. I can tell he’s trying hard to keep it friendly and together. Not lose it. CEO Max tries not to lose it, but my brother, Max? I’ve seen him lose it many times. “Then what? This is because of the book, isn’t it? The author? I started it last night, Ror. Or should I say, Laci Starling?”

I eke out a smile. “It’s horrible, isn’t it? Thankfully one hundred thousand dollars makes it easier to swallow.”

“It’s horrible,” he confirms, smiling. “You belong swinging on poles.”

“But she’s good, huh? Ginevra? I mean, objectively, as a storyteller. How she took me and turned me into—”

“Yeah. She’s good.” He indicates his backpack. “Got it in there to finish on the beach. I’m dying to know which one of us is murdered. And who did it.” His smile fades. “Okay, Ror. Just tell me already.”

I know he’s talking about why I’m angry, not the murderer in a fake story.

“Well, look, Ginevra’s methods for creating her main character aren’t exactly orthodox. She hired a private investigator to, like, look into my life. Our lives, I guess. And then she informed me that I was adopted.”

Max stops. I watch it dawn. “She told you that you were…”

“Adopted. Ring a bell?”

“And she hired private investigators? Seriously?”

“That’s not the newsworthy thing here.”

He’s quiet as we continue along a bridge with a little stone statue that looks like birds kissing, with thousands of locks attached to the guardrails. Couples are kissing and fastening new locks as we pass. It’s clearly a lovers’ bridge, where you attach a lock and toss the key away to assure the eternal strength of your bond. I see Nate and Caro as dots in the distance, having the same idea as I do—bolting right past. Nothing to memorialize.

No lovers now, not among us four.

“She told me I’m adopted, Max. And of course I thought instantly of your first memory when you were four. You tell it to me on every birthday—I was pink and wrinkly and you loved me from the start. You said you remembered everything from that moment, when I came home. That it was sunny, and Papa made borscht.”

“It’s what happened,” he says quietly. “I didn’t make it up.”

“But implied in that memory was the fact that I was a newborn, not seven months old. Apparently I was seven months! Sitting up, maybe even crawling. And now I realize, how would Papa have had time to make borscht if he was in the hospital? You made it sound like I came home from the hospital, with Papa and Mom.”

“Mom.” Max winces, looks away.

“But I didn’t,” I continue, feeling tears press at the corners of my eyes. “I didn’t because Papa adopted me. A blind adoption, at least as far as the paperwork goes. Crystal clear from what Ginevra showed me that Papa isn’t my father, not genetically. And the woman I’ve always thought of as Mom was apparently never mine. And you knew. I just know it—you knew.”

Max chews his lip as we walk. I know we’re both thinking of her. Mom, who as the story goes, as Papa has always said, as we’ve treated as the foundational fact of our family, died a month after I was born, from a brain aneurysm. We have a single photograph of her—stunning and windswept, with a kind, toothy smile.

Papa always said there was a flood in the attic that ruined all the photos, and that Mom didn’t have any family besides us. I was never suspicious of his explanation. I didn’t have a mother—what did it matter if there were pictures to cling to, or not? Or maybe that was what I told myself to keep on coasting, not have to face the lies.

“She shouldn’t have told you that,” Max finally says.

“Who? You’re blaming Ginevra? For what Papa did?”

“What did Papa do?” Max erupts. “Bring you home and love you? Love the hell out of you? Love you more than he even loved me?” He’s panting, his face pained. “That’s all he did, Ror. That’s his crime.”

We both stop, stare at each other. There it is—a firm tenet of Max’s existence, that somehow Papa loved me more. It’s not true, not in the least. But I was always confident of Papa’s love, and Max always doubting. Who can say why? Max didn’t need much attention—he could play on his own for hours at a time, hunched over test tubes conducting obscure experiments, reading Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography at age ten. He could drift off into his imagination, scribble endless ideas in a notebook. I was different. I preferred being with people. I liked tasks. Ride a bike, bake a cake—but with people watching, people helping. Usually Papa.

“I remember once, you were playing in puddles outside,” Max says. “You were six, maybe, and I was ten. And you were jumping in all the biggest ones, so muddy, so… I don’t know, gleeful. And Papa was watching you from the deck. We were both watching you. And Papa had this look on his face. Such a weird look. Like he was sad or something. I said, Papa, what’s wrong? And he said, It’s scary how much I love you and your sister. I didn’t know what he meant. He shook his head and said, Sometimes I watch you both with a little bit of dread. One day, you’ll go. One day, this will end. And I just remember—all I could hear in his whole speech was your name in it! It’s scary how much I love you and your sister, but he was watching you! I was standing right beside him, but his eyes were on you. It took you to make him feel that way. Always you.”

I blow my baby hairs off my forehead, feeling frustrated at the trotting out of this memory, one Max clearly has selected to make me feel guilty. Cacti lining the edge of the path prick my ankles. The air feels as scorching as our words.

“I know he loved me. Of course, I know that. But honestly, Max, you have a revisionist memory. He loves both of us the same. And back to the adoption—” My tone is icy, but that’s because he’s steered things away from what we’re supposed to be addressing. “He should have told me. You should have told me.”

Max is silent.

“Like, I remember my birthday when I was, I don’t know, maybe eight,” I say. “How I’d been asking about Mom. Who her parents were and stuff. If we could at least visit the house she grew up in. See something that would clue me in on who she was. And I heard Papa and you in the kitchen. He told you that I could never find out. I remember asking you about it after, because you would tell me anything, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t hide things from me. It was us against the world, even against Papa. Always, or that’s what I thought. And you just said that he was talking about a big surprise he’d planned, which was true, in a way. He’d rented the ice rink for the afternoon—”

“The Zamboni!” Max smiles. “All you wanted to do was ride the Zamboni. And get nachos. Those were by far the exciting parts of the rink, over actual skating.”

I smile, too, despite myself, despite this conversation. “It was the best birthday gift, riding the Zamboni with Papa across empty ice. Even though I remember thinking your explanation didn’t really make sense. I remember Papa’s exact words. She can never find out. That didn’t really jibe with a surprise I was soon going to discover. But you were a good liar.”

“Papa never wanted you to feel different. To feel less his,” Max finally says.

I feel a crushing pain in my chest, that Max is confirming it. Confirming that I am not who I thought I was, that the entire life that has been fashioned for me is a lie.

“How did Papa get me? Who are my birth parents?” I whisper.

“I don’t know.” Max’s face is ashen now, the pink flush expunged. We stop overlooking a picturesque harbor, hundreds of sailboats and yachts dotting the water like confetti. “Papa never said. And I didn’t lie about the memory. I remember the day he brought you home, exactly like I said. He had made me borscht earlier. It was all true. You were pink and scrunchy and I loved you instantly. We both did. I wonder if…” Max’s face shades. “No.”

“What?”

“I don’t know, I guess I wondered for a second, if your author, if the reason she brought it up was because…”

“What?” Then it hits me, what he’s suggesting. “No.” My breath hitches in my throat.

“But—”

“No. I mean, there’s no way, there’s no… She’s Italian. And besides, she didn’t bring it up like that. She was asking about Mom… I mean, your mom, I guess. Sandra Lowenstein. And we talked about her, and what it was like to grow up without a mother.” I avoid looking at Max. It wasn’t easy for either of us, even though Papa was wonderful, and tried his best to be two parents in one.

But one person can never be two people. Math doesn’t work that way.

“And then Ginevra asked, What about your birth mother, then? Obviously I froze. And she got it immediately—that I didn’t know. She felt guilty, I think.” I recall it, how she handed me tissues and even came over to me on the couch. I thought at first she’d hug me, and I didn’t really want her to. She’s not the huggy type—more witty and terse, with a frenetic sort of energy atypical of the superrich. But she’s kind. Somehow I trust her. I did, at least. Anyway, she put a hand atop mine, but we didn’t hug. Maybe because I used to interview her, and now she was my boss. Keep some good barriers. Even when we parted in Rome, my last day working for her, we just shared a firm handshake.

“Did you ask who…?”

I stop, out of breath and keel over, hands to my shins. I notice the blood has congealed on my knee, on its way to a scab. I stand, dizzy. We’ve been walking on a ledge of sorts, one side of which is hewn into a mountain, the other side scrubby with vegetation, a veritable free fall if I were to misstep. I inch over to the mountain side, put a hand on the earth to steady myself. I watch Max over at one of the ubiquitous water fountains, filling up our bottles. He returns, hands one to me, and I chug, squinting, trying to make out ahead. Finally I pinpoint them—Caro and Nate, still specks in the distance.

“Of course I asked.” I swipe water from my lips. “I think I went through the five stages of grief or whatever all at once. Anger, mostly. Well, everything other than acceptance. It still feels absurd, Max. Like it can’t be real. Like Papa had this whole hidden life…”

I don’t tell him that it made me think about Sandra Lowenstein, and wonder which parts Papa invented. Just that she was my mother? Or more?

When you identify one lie, it’s difficult not to wonder what others supported it.

“I asked Ginevra who my birth mother was, and she said she didn’t know her name, but that she thought it could be a waitress who worked at Papa’s restaurant. A girl who had drug problems, who couldn’t be the mother her baby—me—deserved.”

“Really?” Max’s eyebrows flick up. “Huh. I guess that’s possible.”

“Yeah.” Papa was always helping everyone, especially the Eastern European immigrants who worked at his diner—looking over résumés, giving our old clothes to the ones who had children. We didn’t have much, but we had more than a lot of them. Is it a stretch to think that if someone needed to give up a child, Papa wouldn’t have stepped in to take her? To take me?

“Ginevra could have lied, though,” Max says. “I mean, if it’s her… if she…”

I swallow hard. “But how would her and Papa’s paths have ever crossed? It makes no sense. But…” I remember how Ginevra was kind of evasive when I pressed for details. She seemed shocked I didn’t know. Maybe she just regretted telling me, when it wasn’t her place to dig and share.

“And if Ginevra is actually my…” I can’t say it. It’s too crazy. “Then why would she have told me I was adopted but lied about who gave me up?”

“I don’t know. I have no idea, and, like, yeah. There’s no way she would know Papa. He was in the Soviet Union and then Michigan his whole life.”

“Right. There’s no way,” I agree, even though something heavy sits in my stomach—the feeling that I am not very sure about anything right now.