I nod.
“Just hold tight, okay?” he says. “Don’t worry, you won’t fall off. I’ve got you. Close your eyes and I’ll get us there safely, okay? I use this route all the time. Piece of cake. Hai capiti?”
“Ho capito.”
He shoots me a grin and guns the bike. I wrap my arms around him tighter and bury my head into his neck, making sure my face is on the left side, a.k.a. not the side that has the precipitous drop. I trust Derio completely to get us there in one piece, but I don’t trust my panic attacks.
At first I’m okay with it. I can feel the air whizzing past us, the cars and the traffic, the few times that Derio has to weave around vehicles. Then the incline gets higher and higher and we zig and zag, climbing, climbing, climbing. The switchbacks stop and that’s when I know where we are: the part at the top.
And that’s when I decide to raise my head. Because I’m an idiot. We’re actually in the midst of passing a bus on the right, which means we are hugging the edge of the road and only a short metal fence, like the kind someone would put around their yard, is between us and falling through weightless air to an imminent death.
I can already feel myself falling, feel myself going over the edge, and there’s nothing to stop me from hitting the hard ground, nothing left but the short time allowed to look back on my life before it’s all over. That’s the worst thing about vertigo, about these specific panic attacks; the actual fall doesn’t have to happen for it to feel like it’s happening.
“I’ve got you!” Derio yells, knowing I’m looking up, knowing I’m panicking. I guess the death grip I have around his chest is a sure sign. “It will be over soon.”
I close my eyes and try to breathe through it. In and out. It’s hard. It’s always hard. It’s even harder with the sounds all around me—the wind in my ears, the roar of the motorbike, the honks and gear changes and squeaky brakes of all the cars.
But eventually, like last time, I survive. I look up and see the green foliage and hidden houses of the Anacapri area and I immediately feel a million times lighter. Adrenaline is rushing through me and I feel like laughing for being such a fool. The girl who was scared, hiding from her fears, that wasn’t me, that was someone else. It’s always someone else.
Derio guides the bike up into town, snaking up the white-washed streets past stone and stucco houses, the smells of garlic and basil and fried anchovies wafting past us, and stops in front of a mural of Mount Solaro.
He turns off the bike and twists in his seat to get a better look at me. His brow furrows in concern. “You are okay?”
“Yeah,” I tell him, feeling a bit stupid. “I don’t know what comes over me in those moments.”
“Fear,” he says gravely.
“Well, yes.”
“Fear is the most powerful force of destruction. Fear is the devil’s greatest illusion.”
I frown at him. “I don’t remember learning that in church today.”
“I can help you, you know,” he says so sincerely I feel I have no choice but to believe him.
“What are you talking about?”
“Facing your fears. Even the little ones can cripple us.”
That’s all fine and dandy but I’m talking to a man who fears the open ocean so much, he hasn’t left the island in a year.
“Trust me,” he says, his voice low as he reads my face. “I have many fears, but I’m working on them. I am exposing myself to one as we speak.”
“What fear is that?” I ask.
He holds me in his steady gaze. “The fear of letting go. Of opening up. Of trusting. Of falling.”
“You have a fear of falling, too?”
“In a way . . .” He pauses. “Yes.”
I’m not quite sure what he’s saying but from his direct gaze I know he’s being honest.
“I guess we have to go back the way we came up.”
“And what about there?” He gestures to the mural of Mount Solaro and the happy painted people on the chairlift, soaring above faded wildflowers. “Will you come with me?”
“Are you kidding me?” My blood freezes up at the thought of being stuck on that skinny chairlift.
He starts to get off the bike but I’m trying my best not to move.
“I promise you it’s not so bad,” he says. “I’m serious.”
“How can it not be bad? I’ve seen the chairlifts. They fit one person at a time. Barely!”
“It is not as bad as you think. Please trust me.”
“You don’t understand,” I say, almost whining.
He tips my chin with a finger so I can meet his eyes. “I do understand, Amber. It is scary but worth it. You have to trust me and you have to trust yourself. You must trust that nothing bad is going to happen.” He swallows. “If I see you be brave, I can be brave, too.”
My heart sinks like a stone at those words and in his eyes I can see how serious he is. This lost, damaged, broken man is asking me to guide him, to show him what is possible.
I take in a deep breath and find myself nodding. “Okay,” I say in a small voice.
He takes my hand and helps me off the bike. He doesn’t let go.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Minutes later, after purchasing our tickets, we stand in line for the chairlifts up to Mount Solaro. To be honest, even though the mountain is a jagged piece of rock looming over the earth, it doesn’t look so imposing when you’re at Anacapri, which is already pretty high off the water. I can see the way the chairlifts dip up and down over the scenery, disappearing and reappearing as the little chairs coast over small hills, and it doesn’t look that high—not until you get to the last part of the lift anyway. But even then, the fact that I will have to do this alone terrifies me.
I look behind me at Derio, who seems the epitome of cool, quickly puffing on his cigarette until he has to put it out. “Do you want to go first? Or should I go first?”
“You go,” he tells me just as the empty swing comes toward me. “I have your back.”
Just then the chairlift worker leads me quickly to the seat. I sit down and the bar is lowered over me and then I’m whisked forward. I let out a little yelp, gripping the bars for dear life as the chairlift swoops over a crop of trees. Then the yelp of fear slowly turns to one of laughter as my mind begins to register that I’m secure behind the bars, that I’m moving forward, not down. I swing my legs beneath me, feeling like a child again. In a way it’s like flying, not falling.
“Hey!” I hear a jubilant voice and crane my neck to see Derio behind me. He waves at me and looks absolutely adorable in the chair, like an overgrown kid, though somehow he still manages to exude sex appeal. I don’t know how he does it.
“This isn’t so bad, is it?” he yells at me.
“Not yet!” I yell back and then turn around before I get motion sickness. I stare at my feet, glad I wore sandals with secure ankle straps, and watch as we soar over neat squares of bright green vineyards and silver-leafed olive groves clinging to the hillside. Flowers of all different colors bloom among the sun-scorched grass and yellow bursts of broom dot the slopes. I want to take my phone out and snap a million pictures but I’m not brave enough to let go of the bars so I take mental snapshots I hope I’ll be able to draw upon later.
The scariest moment is the one I predicted, when the chairs rise above the hills and the peaks of limestone cliffs, and my mind tells me we’re going to crash. But before I know it the chair turns into the roundabout and suddenly I’m on solid ground again, my legs feeling a bit like jelly. In seconds, Derio gets off, too, and joins me by my side.
“You did it,” he says, holding my face in his hands. “I am proud of you, mia leonessa.”
I laugh as he kisses me. He puts his arm around my waist and guides me toward the viewpoints.
“It wasn’t so scary,” I admit as we walk. “It was more thrilling than anything else. In a good way.”
“Brava,” he says, “but don’t get too attached. I thought maybe we could walk back down
. It only takes about forty minutes but it takes you past a tiny church that many people never see.”
“Sure,” I tell him. “And if I get too tired, you can carry me like a pack mule.”
He squeezes my hand and we start walking up a short staircase until we’re at the top. Suddenly, I stop dead in my tracks.
We’ve come through a stand of pine to the guardrails that mark the viewpoints. Beyond the people gathered at the edge of the guardrail is the most stunning, dizzying, terrifying view I’ve ever seen.
“Holy shit.” I breathe out. “This is beautiful.”
Derio takes out his phone with his other hand. “This time I will take all the photos. You just enjoy the view, the moment. Do you want to go closer?”
Normally, I would say no and stay as far back from the edge as possible but the whole motorbike ride plus the chairlift has left me with a sense of fearlessness. I’m not about to run to the edge but the terror no longer feels quite as real. Maybe it’s the man whose hand I’m holding.
“Yes,” I tell him. “Let’s go closer.”
We make our way through the people and then it’s all there in front of me. Unlike the stunning views I’ve seen before, this one makes you think you’re God himself with the whole world at your feet. From here, Capri town and the Faraglioni Rocks lay beneath you like a postcard, like something you can hold in your hand and hang on your wall. The water and sky meld together into a smooth plane of cerulean blue, and white clouds hang like accents. The island itself is sharp and distinct, even in the summer haze, and you can almost count every white house, every green tree, every ecru-colored slab of rock.
It’s sobering. Not just the fact that I’m able to stand near the edge and not feel sick but because this view makes me realize how small the island is. Somewhere down there, Alfonso and Annabella are with their new church group. Somewhere down there—and if I had binoculars I could probably see where—the house of the sad lemons sits along the promenade. So many sorrows and tragedies and small triumphs contained in the history of one place, hidden from most people’s eyes. I wonder how many other stories of heartbreak and hope are attached to each of these houses.
“No wonder your mother was a writer,” I blurt out.
Derio looks at me sharply. “What do you mean?” Though he looks wary, as he always does when the subject of his parents comes up, his voice is gentle. I know he’s not going to fly off the handle this time.
I gesture to the miniature island below us. “Look at that. Look at all those people, all those lives containing all those stories that we have no idea about. Your mother, she must have come here sometimes and wondered these same things. She gave those people the lives she imagined for them.”
He nods slowly, chewing on his lip for a moment. “Yes, she came here sometimes.” He glances at me. “But, you know, not all of her books were set on Capri. Only one was. Well, two, technically.”
“House of the Sad Lemons,” I say and then catch myself. “I mean Villa dei Limoni Tristi.”
“Correct.”
“And what is the other?”
He looks around us at all the sunburned, baseball-cap-wearing tourists clamoring for the best shot and then guides me away from the viewpoint. When we’re far enough away, he says, “Correre il Sole. Racing the Sun.”
“That’s the book I saw on your desk.” He flinches at that. I stop walking and look up at him, holding on to his arm. “I told you I didn’t read it and I meant it. I just saw the title and your mother’s name. You know I can’t read a lick of Italian anyway.”
“Yes,” he says carefully. “Well, the book was never published. She . . . died before she could finish it.”
“Is that what you’re doing in the library all day? Are you reading it?”
He exhales sharply out of his nose and looks at the ground before straightening his shoulders. “I was reading it. For a year, it’s all I would read. I thought that if I kept reading it, I would know how it would end. If I knew how it ended, she wouldn’t really be gone. I wanted answers, any kind.” I hold on to him tighter, my heart bleeding for him. He goes on, though I can tell it’s difficult for him. “But there never were any answers. Not in the book. So I started reading all of her books. She has so many, you know, over thirty. And in my whole life I had only read one of them, Villa dei Limoni Tristi, the one that made her famous, successful. I wanted to keep her alive by reading her work. She would often say that immortality was the writer’s gift and the writer’s curse. I believe her now. She’s always haunting me but she’s never here.”
I pull him over to a low, flat stone beneath a cypress tree and we sit down. “You were close with her, I gather.”
He smiles to himself, scratching at his sideburns. “All Italian boys love their mamas, or at least that’s what they say. And it is true. But I really did love her. She sacrificed so much for me. When I said I wanted to race, she was the one who convinced my father that it was something I had to do, something I would be good at. Of course, I loved my father, too. He was a good man, very smart, and he worked very hard. But he wasn’t as open as she was. His love was harder to earn. Her love was so free.” He pauses and places his hand on top of mine, bronze against white. “You remind me of her in a way. You’re both free and looking for something. My mother was always looking for it in her books. I don’t know if she ever found it.”
He blinks and his eyes are wet. My insides feel like they’re being shredded by what he has lost. “I like to think that she did but maybe it was always out of reach,” he says. “All those days she would spend in that office, hours, living in her own world and giving so much to that. Then she would come into my world and give so much to me and my father. She never stopped giving. I don’t know how she never ran out of love. God chose to end it all before we had a chance to find out.”
I run my fingers over his cheek, feeling his permanent stubble. “I am so sorry,” I whisper.
He nods. “I know. I know you can feel it, that you are not just saying it. That is why I . . . You are good for me, Amber. You bring things to the surface but you do not run away. I have not had someone care for me the way you do in a very long time.”
I kiss him softly on his cheek and am surprised to feel a tear escape from me. He brushes it away with his fingers, smiling beautifully with those perfect teeth. “See. You feel everything. You make me feel everything.”
I do feel everything. I feel so damn much for this man that I’m not sure what my heart is going to do. It wants to hold me hostage but it also wants to be a protective shield.
“So,” he says, clasping his hands together, “I’ve decided to try to help my mother the way she would have helped me. I knew she was working on this last book but had not talked too much about it. I knew it was set on Capri and she said she hoped her publishers would want it but she was not sure. She thought it was her best work and it just flowed out of her fingers. That’s how she would describe it on good days. So I decided to read it. Then, after I couldn’t figure out the ending anymore, I decided to edit it. Such a simple thing, just making sure it was the best it could be. I know nothing about editing but she had said she never even went back once to read it. She was too much involved. I started cleaning up the misspelled words, strange sentences. It gives me a sense of purpose, and at the same time it makes me feel connected to her. I know it’s something I will have to let go of one day but . . . I cannot yet.” He gives me a shy look. “It’s one of those fears I am trying to face.”
I want to sit on the top of Mount Solaro and talk to him forever. I want him to keep opening up to me, not just for my own curiosity or to stroke my ego, but because it’s making him stronger. I want to help him. I want to talk about what happened the night they died and he survived, I want to get him on a boat, I want to find out why he quit racing when it was supposed to be something he lived for. I want to know so much more but I’m too afraid to uncover more than one rock at a time.
“We should go, it’s getting late,” he s
ays, glancing at his phone.
“Wait,” I say, putting my hand on his arm. “Take a picture. Of us.”
He sticks his arm out—long and strong, perfect selfie material—and takes the picture. When we look at the result, I’m absolutely smitten with it. I look happy. He looks happy. And damn if we don’t look good together. Beauty and one sexy Beast.
“E-mail that to me,” I tell him.
He scoffs. “E-mail? I will print it out and frame it. We are a work of art.”
I beam at him, feeling absolutely girlish, like what he said means that we’re “official” and serious. As silly as it is, I won’t be faulted for feeling giddy over a boy. It’s one of the best feelings in the world.
We follow a dirt path that leads away from the tourists and heads down the slope past yellow-flowered broom, graceful pines, and fragrant shrubs. The sun is more potent up here but the heat is tempered by the constant breeze. We walk for a while in silence, just enjoying being outside in this beautiful place, alone as we make our descent.
“So,” he says as he finishes the cigarette he was smoking, “now you know about my parents. Time to tell me about yours. Wasn’t that the deal?”
“Was that the deal?” I ask, feigning ignorance. “It was so long ago, I don’t remember.”
“Yes it was, and you know it. Tell me about your mother.”
I sigh. This is the absolute last thing I want to talk about. “I don’t want to spoil our day.”
He takes out his phone again and shows me the timer. “I’m counting down five minutes. In five minutes we will come to the church and the Cetrella Valley and you can stop talking and I will make you smile again.”
“You promise?”
“You know I will deliver,” he says with a wink and there’s just enough suggestion in his voice that solidifies the deal.
“The CliffsNotes version is—”
“What is CliffsNotes?”
I smile. Sometimes I forget that we’re from two different worlds. “Just a shortened, condensed version of things. Basically my mother is a very nice woman but she’s everything that I don’t want to be. She married for security, not love, and she gave up her dreams of interior design to become a mother. Now she spends her days taking on part-time work, mostly for direct sales companies, even though she’s fully capable of getting a real job. When I was little, she sold Avon products but then ditched that for sex-toy parties, then she ditched that to sell freaking Tupperware, then she ditched that to sell skin cream and magazine subscriptions. Now she sells stick-on nails. If there’s any wonder why I’m trying to find myself, it’s because I don’t want to be finding myself like that when I’m older.”