ion…I cannot understand it.”
“Yes,” Amelia said. “You are right. We are puzzling and incomprehensible. Thank you, my friend. Ciao.”
“Ciao, signora,” he said, looking away from her again, down at his hands. “Grazie.” What a sorrowful man, she thought, with his sorrow painstakingly narrated every day. You would never see such a man in the States. She had almost returned to the stolen Fiat when her Italian cell phone rang. When she answered, there was silence. She hung up.
The American couple waved her over. They were drinking wine.
“Hey there. Good afternoon,” the man said in English with a slight southwestern accent. “Care to join us?” He wore a Tyrolean hat, a blue shirt, a tan-colored sport coat, a string tie, and cowboy boots. His wife, deeply tanned, wearing a plain gray dress and a collection of thin gold bracelets that rattled like jail keys, smiled nervously upward at the sky, avoiding eye contact. She had very expensive hair, Amelia noted, highlighted with blond streaks.
“How did you know I was an American?” Amelia asked.
“Aw, you look like one of us,” the man told her. “It’s a duck recognizing another duck.” The wife nodded at the sky. Amelia felt all her strength leaving her body: she was heavily invested in appearing to be Italian or French, with a trace of beautiful haughtiness, or at least generically European snobbishness, and if she could be exposed this easily by lunkheads, then her nationality might indeed be an essence that no role-playing could disguise. Being an American was a curse — you were so recognizable everywhere that your nationality was like a clown suit. Maybe Jack would escape it. She had come to think of her own countrymen as them. She shivered. After all her efforts, she was instantly identifiable and still looked like one of them. Fucking hell.
“Sorry,” she said. “I have to get back. They’ve prepared lasagna,” she said. “The kids.”
“We’re going to be here in town for a few days,” the man said, before gulping down half his glass of wine. “You just drop in on us any old time. We got ourselves that villa up the hill. There for the whole week.”
“Okay,” she said, before waving goodbye to them.
—
On one of the hairpin turns on the way back, her phone rang again, and this time, when she answered it, the voice that came out — the connection was poor — sounded like her brother.
“Amelia?”
“Yes?” She held the cell phone in her left hand as she downshifted with her right. The steering wheel wobbled. “Jerry? Is that you, Jerry?”
“Yeah. Of course it’s Jerry. Who’d you think it was?” Amelia let her foot off the clutch, and the car lurched into the lower gear. “Sorry. That was rude. I’m really sorry. I mean, we’re on pins and needles here. I’m a damn mess, is what it is. Yvonne’s a mess, too.”
“What is it? What’s going on?” There was another pause for the transatlantic long distance or for her brother’s hesitation. “Is it Catherine?”
“Yes, of course it’s Catherine. She’s taken a bad turn. The doctors have been saying that…actually, I don’t really know what they’ve been saying. It’s all a jumble to me. But like I say, she’s worse. Now her kidneys aren’t working. And that’s on top of everything else. The pneumonia. But I’m not saying you should come here. I’m not saying that.”
“Of course I’ll come,” Amelia said to her brother. “I’ll be there as soon as possible.”
“Thanks,” he said. “We could use some bucking up.” Amelia heard another voice in the background, and then her brother said goodbye and broke off the connection.
As soon as she had parked close to the villa, she emptied herself out of the car, looked at the package of cigarettes in her hand, and went inside. The table had been set, and Gwyneth and Jack were waiting for her on the sofa, both of them beautiful and radiant. This world was paradise, after all, when your son and his girlfriend, healthy and in love with each other, cooked dinner for you inside a cool dark Italian villa, and you could worry all day about a line of poetry that you couldn’t translate properly, and you could be annoyed by simpleton American tourists. To be bothered by trivialities was sheer heaven.
“Momma,” Jack said. “What happened to you?”
“Your cousin Catherine’s worse,” Amelia said, tossing the cigarettes onto a side table, as if she’d never bought them. “I’m going to have to fly to Minneapolis. You two will have to hold down the fort here for a few days. Can you do that? I’ll even leave you the Fiat if you drive me to the airport.”
Jack nodded. Gwyneth rose and walked over to Amelia, taking her hand as if she were offering preliminary condolences. “Do you still want dinner?” she asked. The girl gave off a musky odor, and her face was slightly flushed and sleepy; naturally they’d had quick sex in Amelia’s absence, and now they’d be soft and cuddly and compliant.
“Of course,” Amelia said. “Of course, of course. And let’s get drunk. Okay? Are you willing to do that?”
They all laughed. Laughing, Jack asked, “So what’s Catherine worse with?”
“She’s dying,” Amelia said. “She can’t breathe. That’s what she’s worse with.”
—
Although she loved him, of course, Amelia didn’t like her brother very much, mostly because of his employment situation. He worked for a Minneapolis real estate tycoon, Ben Schneiderman, a feral-looking man barely over five feet tall, whose customary expression—Amelia had met him once — was one of superpredatory avarice that mingled from time to time with his one other singular expression, massive sleepy indifference whenever matters of common human experience, those that were not for sale, were exposed to him. Schneiderman had run several newspapers into the ground, bought and sold a few major league teams, and built multiple granite-and-glass high-rises and shopping malls. His wife, Bitsy Christianson, was a patron of the arts. Their personal website (and editorial sounding board) was www.whatsittoyou.com. They owned eight or nine homes. Schneiderman had said many times that his motto was I never suffer. And neither should you. Jerry served as the primary consigliere for Schneiderman’s various enterprises and spent much of his life on a private jet, scurrying from one financial brush fire to another. He negotiated, threatened, and placated. Amelia’s brother was balding from all the stress and had taken to brushing his remaining hair, like tendrils or waterweeds, across the top of his scalp.
And of course there was the other thing: Jerry supported his sister financially. Some of Schneiderman’s money trickled down to her. He had paid for Jack’s private schools in Switzerland and Italy. Her brother’s charity was Amelia’s safety net, along with alimony from Jack’s father, the man who had caused Amelia to swear off love forever. Well, no one’s hands were clean.
But now, in the St. Mary’s Hospital’s ICU, while Yvonne sat next to the bed holding her daughter’s hand, Jerry leaned back against the window, and the blank stare on his face showed Amelia exactly how inwardly broken her brother actually was. She went up to him and hugged him and pecked him on the cheek and quickly did the same to Yvonne, whose cheeks were tear-streaked. In the bed, her niece seemed to be gasping for breath. Another man was in the room, introduced to Amelia as the child’s pediatrician, Dr. Elijah Jones, who wore rainbow suspenders with cartoon faces on them. Everybody thanked Amelia for coming.
“Anyone would have done it,” she said. “You would have done it for me, if Jack, God forbid, got sick. Where’s Gerald?” Gerald was Catherine’s little brother.