Breathing Room

  Three days passed, and she didn’t hear a word from Ren. She felt rudderless, heartsick, and increasingly despondent about the course her life was taking. Not only had she failed to find a new direction, but she’d made the old one even more difficult.

  Vittorio and Giulia took her to Siena, but despite the beauty of the old city, the trip wasn’t a success. Whenever they passed a child, Giulia’s sadness became almost palpable. Although she put up a good front, their failure to find the statue had devastated her. Vittorio did his best to cheer them up, but the tension had begun to take its toll on him, too.

  The next day Isabel volunteered to baby-sit Connor at the farmhouse while Tracy kept her doctor’s appointment and Marta went up to the villa to help Anna with the cooking. As they walked through the olive grove, she concentrated on his happy chatter instead of the sharp wedge of pain that had poked a hole through her heart. Afterward they played with the cats, and when it began to grow chilly, she took him inside and let him draw at the kitchen table with some crayons she’d bought for him.

  “I drawed a dog!” Connor held up his picture for her to admire.

  “A perfect dog.”

  “More paper!”

  She smiled and pulled one of her empty notebooks from the stack of papers she’d left on the table. Connor, she’d quickly discovered, didn’t believe in conserving natural resources. How dear he was. She’d never thought much about having children, relegating them to the unspecified future. How casually she’d treated so much of what was important in life. She blinked away the sting of tears.

  Tracy appeared just as Connor began to grow restless. She picked him up and blew into his neck, then settled at the table with him on her lap while Isabel fixed them a cup of tea. “Dr. Andrea is definitely a hunk. I still can’t decide whether it’s creepy or not to get a pelvic from a great-looking doctor. He asked about you.”

  “He’s a serial flirt.”

  “True. Has Ren called?”

  She stared at the cold fireplace and shook her head.

  “I’m sorry.”

  A coil of anger singed the edges of her pain. “I’m too much for him. Too much of everything. Well, that’s just tough. I wish he weren’t coming back at all.”

  Tracy’s forehead knit with concern. “I don’t think you’re too much. He’s being an ass.”

  “Horse!” Connor shouted from the doorway, holding up another drawing.

  While Tracy turned to admire it, Isabel tried to make herself breathe, but the coil of anger had lit a flame inside her that was using up all the oxygen.

  Tracy gathered up Connor’s things, then gave her a hug as she got ready to leave. “It’s his loss. He couldn’t find a better woman than you, present company included. Don’t you dare let him see you cry.”

  Fat chance of that, Isabel thought.

  After they left, she grabbed her jacket and went outside to try to calm herself down, only to realize that anger felt better than pain. She’d been dumped twice in four months, and she was sick of it. Granted, getting rid of Michael had turned out to be a blessing, but Ren was a coward of a different sort. God had dangled a precious gift in front of the two of them, but only one of them had the guts to grab for it. So what if she was too much of everything? So was he. And when she saw him, she intended to tell him exactly that.

  She stopped herself. She wasn’t going to tell him a thing. She’d challenged him once, but she wouldn’t do it again. And not because of her pride. If he couldn’t come to her on his own, she didn’t want him at all.

  The wind shifted to the north. She was chilled and miserable by the time she got back to the house, so she lit a fire. After it caught, she went into the kitchen to make tea she didn’t want. While she waited for the water to boil, she busied herself cleaning up the papers Connor had left scattered on the table. He didn’t like drawing more than one figure on a page, she noticed. When he’d run out of the paper she’d given him, he’d commandeered the backs of the fan mail she still hadn’t attended to.

  She made her tea, then carried the cup, along with the letters, back into the living room. She’d always been diligent about answering her correspondence, but she wanted to throw this batch in the fire. What was the point?

  She remembered Ren’s disgust when she’d pointed out how few there were. “Saving souls is based on quantity rather than quality, is that it?” She’d seen the tiny pile as another symbol of how far she’d fallen, but he’d seen something else.

  She leaned back on the couch and shut her eyes. The letters felt warm in her fingers, as if they were alive. She picked up the first one and began to read. When she was done, she moved on to the second, then the third, until she’d read them all. Her tea cooled. The fire crackled. She curled deeper into the couch, and slowly, she began to pray. One by one, she held each letter in her hand and prayed for the person who’d written it.

  Then she began to pray for herself.

  Darkness slipped over the cottage. The fire burned lower. She prayed the prayer of the lost.

  Let me see the way.

  But when she finally opened her eyes, all she could see were her colossal missteps.

  She’d created the Four Cornerstones as a way of fighting her own insecurities. Someplace inside her, the frightened little girl who’d grown up at the mercy of unstable parents still craved stability so badly that she’d constructed a system of rules to make herself feel safe.

  Do this and this and this, and everything will be all right. Your address won’t change from one month to the next. Your parents won’t get so drunk they forget to feed you. No one will scream hateful words or run off in the middle of the night, leaving you alone. You won’t get sick. You won’t grow old. You’ll never die.

  The Four Cornerstones had given her the illusion of security. Whenever something happened that didn’t fit neatly inside them, she’d simply shoved in another building block to try to shore them up. Finally the whole structure had grown so unwieldy it had crashed in on her. She’d been living a life of desperation, all in an attempt to control the uncontrollable.

  She rose from the couch and gazed out at the darkness on the other side of the window. The Four Cornerstones combined sound psychology, common sense, and the spiritual wisdom of the masters. She’d heard too many testimonials not to understand how useful they were. But she’d wanted to believe they were more than that. She’d wanted to believe they were some kind of rabbit’s foot that offered protection from the dangers of being alive. If you follow these rules, you’ll always be safe.

  But life refused to follow any rules, and all the organizing, reorganizing, goal-setting, calculating, and meditating in the world wouldn’t whip the universe into shape. Nor would a thousand Cornerstones, no matter how well conceived.

  That was when she heard it. A tiny voice that came from deep inside her. She closed her eyes and strained to hear, but she couldn’t quite make out the words. Frustrated, she stayed where she was, eyes shut, cheek resting against the window frame, but it was no use. The voice had slipped away.

  Although the room was warm, her teeth began to chatter. She felt lost, alone, and very angry. She’d done everything right. Well, almost everything, if she didn’t count falling in love with a gutless coward. She’d done everything too right. She’d been so busy imposing order on her life that she hadn’t taken the time to live it. Not until she’d come to Italy. And look what a mess that had turned out to be.

  Once again the voice whispered inside her, but she still couldn’t hear the words, only the pounding of her heart.

  “Ren?”

  He snapped to attention. “Yes. That’ll be fine. Whatever you think.”

  “Are you sure?” Howard Jenks sank his burly frame deeper into his chair, looking increasingly like someone who was having second thoughts about his choice of leading man. And Ren couldn’t blame him. He kept having these attention lapses. One minute he’d be right there on top of the conversation, and the next minute he’d drift off.

  He
also knew he looked like shit. His eyes were bloodshot, and only a master makeup artist could have gotten rid of the circles underneath them. But how good could you look when you hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in days? Damn it, Isabel, leave me the hell alone.

  Larry frowned at him from the opposite chair of Jenks’s suite at Rome’s St. Regis Grand. “Are you sure about that, Ren? I thought you’d decided you didn’t want to use a double for the scenes on the Golden Gate.”

  “I don’t,” Ren replied, as if that’s what he’d meant to say all along. “It’ll just complicate things, and I’m comfortable with heights.” He meant to stop there, but the words kept on coming. “Besides, how tough can it be to catch a six-year-old girl?”

  An uncomfortable silence fell over the room. Oliver Craig, the actor who was playing Nathan, lifted an eyebrow.

  Craig looked like a choirboy, but he had the acting chops of a pro. He’d studied at the Royal Academy and done rep at the Old Vic. A low-budget romantic comedy had brought him to the attention of Jenks.

  “Those stunts on the bridge involve more than chasing little girls,” Jenks said stiffly. “As I’m sure you’re aware.”

  Craig came to his rescue. “Ren and I were talking last night about the balance between the action scenes and the quieter moments. It’s quite extraordinary.”

  Larry picked up the conversation—how glad Ren was to finally have a part that would display his amazing talent, how brilliantly Ren and Oliver were going to work together—blah, blah, blah. Ren excused himself and headed for the bathroom. When he got there, he leaned over the sink to splash his face with cold water. He needed to pull himself together. Last night Jenks had taken Larry aside and asked him if Ren was using.

  He grabbed a towel. This was the biggest break of his career, and he was blowing it, all because he couldn’t concentrate. He wanted to hear Isabel’s voice so badly he’d nearly called her a dozen times. But what would he say? That he missed her so much he couldn’t sleep? That his need for her had grown into an ache that never went away? If he hadn’t agreed to attend the harvest feast, he could have slunk off into the night like the reptile he was. Instead, he was going to have his guts wrenched out all over again.

  Yesterday he’d run into an American reporter who wanted to know if the rumor he’d heard was true. “Word is, you and Isabel Favor are an item.”

  Savannah and her big mouth had already gotten busy. Ren had denied everything, pretended he barely knew who Isabel was. Her fragile reputation could never survive a public liaison with him.

  He told himself the same thing he’d been saying for days. At some point an affair either had to end or take the next logical step forward, and there was no next step for two people who were so different. He should have left her alone from the beginning, but the attraction had been more than he could resist. And now, when it was time to walk away, some needy part of him still wanted her to think well of him afterward. Maybe that was why he was trying so hard to come up with at least one good memory he could hand her before they said their last good-bye.

  He flushed the toilet he hadn’t used and went back out. The conversation stopped when he appeared, which took away the mystery of what they’d been talking about. Oliver, he noticed, had left. Not a good sign.

  Jenks pushed his half glasses on top of his head. “Sit down, Ren.”

  Instead of dropping into a chair as he should have to show that he understood the gravity of the situation, Ren wandered over to the bar and popped a bottle of Pellegrino. Only after he’d taken a slug did he sit. His agent shot him a warning look.

  “Larry and I have been talking,” Jenks said. “He keeps reassuring me that you’re totally committed to this project, but I’m having some serious doubts. If there’s a problem, I want you to put it on the table so we can deal with it.”

  “No problem.” A bead of sweat had formed near his hairline. He knew he had to say something that would reassure Jenks, and he tried to find the right words, only to hear himself come out with the opposite. “I want a child psychologist on the set whenever the kids are there. The best you can find, got it? I’ll be damned if I’m going to be responsible for any little girls’ nightmares.”

  Except that was his job, being responsible for people’s nightmares. He wondered how Isabel was sleeping.

  The furrows in Jenks’s jaw grew deep enough to plant wheat, but before he could respond, the phone rang. Larry picked it up. “Yeah?” He gazed at Ren. “He’s not available at the moment.”

  Ren whipped the receiver from his hand and brought it to his ear. “Gage.”

  Jenks exchanged a long look with Larry. Ren listened, then shoved the phone back into the cradle and headed for the door. “I have to go.”

  Isabel’s anger stayed with her. It simmered beneath the surface as she chopped vegetables in the villa’s kitchen and pulled serving dishes from the cupboard. By late afternoon, when she met Giulia in town for a glass of wine, it still hadn’t gone away. She stopped to see the Briggs children, but even as she listened to them talk, the anger bubbled inside her.

  She’d just started to drive home when a splash of color in the window of the local boutique caught her attention. The dress shimmered there, a flaming red-orange confection that burned as hot as her anger. It was like nothing she would ever wear, but her Panda didn’t seem to know that. It swung into the No Parking space directly in front of the store, and ten minutes later she emerged with a dress she couldn’t afford and couldn’t imagine wearing.

  That evening she began to cook in a frenzy of hostility. She turned up the flame on the stove until the skillet sizzled and fried the spicy sausage she’d bought earlier. Her knife pounded the cutting board as she rough-chopped onion and garlic, then threw in hot peppers from the garden. When she realized she hadn’t boiled water to cook the pasta, she poured her fiery sauce over a thick wedge of day-old bread, then carried everything out to the garden, where she sat on the wall and devoured the food with two glasses of Chianti. That night she washed dishes to the blare of Italian rock and roll on the radio. She broke a plate and threw it into the trash. It hit so hard the pieces shattered.

  The phone rang.

  “Signora Isabel, it is Anna. I know you said you would come up tomorrow morning to help arrange the tables in the tent, but it is not necessary. Signore Ren is taking care of it.”

  “He’s back?” The pencil that had found its way into her hand snapped in her grip. “When did he arrive?”

  “This afternoon. You have not spoken with him?”

  “Not yet.” She put her thumbnail to her teeth and clipped it off.

  Anna began going on about last-minute details for the festa, the girls she’d hired to help, the fact that she didn’t want Isabel to do anything but have a good time. Isabel’s anger burned so hot she could barely manage a response.

  Later that night she gathered up the pages of notes she’d written for her book on overcoming personal crisis and tossed them into the fire. When everything had turned to ash, she swallowed two sleeping pills and went to bed.

  In the morning she threw on her clothes and drove to town. Generally she felt groggy after taking sleeping pills, but her anger was still with her, and it burned away the cobwebs. She downed a lethal cup of espresso in the bar on the piazza, then walked the streets, but she was afraid to look into the shop windows for fear she’d crack the glass. Several of the villagers stopped her, anxious to talk about the missing statue or the feast that afternoon. She dug her fingernails into the heels of her hands and kept her responses as brief as possible.

  She didn’t return to the farmhouse until a short time before the festa. She headed for the bathroom, turned the shower water to cold, and stood under it trying to make her skin stop sizzling. When she began applying makeup, her fingers pressed more firmly than usual on her eyeliner pencil, and the bronzing brush took an extra swipe at her cheekbones. Foundation, eye shadow, mascara—each seemed to have a will of its own. Tracy had left behind a lip wand fille
d with bloodred gloss, and Isabel slid it over her mouth. When she was done, her lips glimmered like a vampire’s.

  She’d hung the dress she’d bought on the door of the wardrobe, and it beckoned from its hanger. The fabric fell straight from bodice to hem in a slim, fiery column. She never wore bright colors, but now she yanked it from the hanger and pulled it on. Only after she’d jerked up the zipper did she remember to put on a pair of panties beneath.

  She turned to look at herself in the mirror. The scattering of tiny amber beads hidden in the fabric glowed like banked embers. The slashed bodice left one shoulder bare, and the jagged, scarf-point hem flickered like flame tips from midthigh to calf. The dress wasn’t right either for the occasion or for her, but she intended to wear it anyway.

  She needed dangerously high stiletto heels with gilded beads across the toes, but she didn’t have any, so she pushed her feet into her bronze sandals. All the better to stomp your heart into a thousand pieces.

  She gazed into the mirror. Her scarlet lips clashed with the dress, and her sandals didn’t match, but she didn’t care. She’d forgotten to dry her hair after her shower, and her wild blond curls looked like her mother’s at her most reckless. She remembered the men, the screaming, all the excess that had marked her mother’s life, but instead of reaching for a headband, her fingers closed over her manicure scissors. She stared at them for a moment, then lifted them to her hair and began to snip away.

  Little chopped ends curled around her fingers. The scissors made angry clicks, moving faster and faster until her sleek bob became a riot of disheveled wisps. Finally she pulled off her bangle, tossed it on the bed, and left the room.

  As she made her way up the path from the farmhouse, the heels of her sandals sent the stones scattering. The Villa of the Angels came into sight, and she spotted a dark-haired man climbing into a dusty black Maserati. Her heart gave a lurch, then settled back into its normal rhythm. It was only Giancarlo moving the sports car off to the side of the drive to make more room for the cars of the guests who were still arriving.