A Place in the Sun

  “I’m here to find a husband.”

  Katerina nearly spit out her sip of wine. “You’re what?”

  I laughed, but Gianluca didn’t. A quick glance back at him proved that he’d narrowed his eyes on me, curious and maybe even a bit annoyed by my answer.

  “I mean, there’s a bit more to it than that, but that’s basically the gist of it.”

  “You’re going to have to explain,” Katerina said, filling up my wine glass. I didn’t protest. The sauvignon blanc was chilled and delicious, the best I’d ever had.

  “Okay,” I relented, staring down at the stem of my wine glass as I spun it between my fingers. “Well, for the last few years, my mum has done her best to set me up with every terrible bloke in the northern hemisphere. She thinks it’s crazy that I’m still single at twenty-six and I’d had enough of her matchmaking—”

  “So you up and fled the country? Why couldn’t you just tell her you weren’t interested in being set up anymore?” Katerina asked.

  “It’s not that simple. My mum is very persistent…” I decided to leave out the details of our family’s tragic few years, skipping over all the reasons it was so hard to say no to her. “And I knew it made her happy, so I just sort of went along with it.”

  “So why here, why now?”

  Gianluca had finally spoken again, directly to me, and I tried my best not to make a show of how excited it made me. I turned to him with a shrug.

  “Well she won’t rest until I’m married off, so I had to get away, and to be honest, it’s not like I wanted to go on living life alone either. I figured if I got out of London, I could test things on my own. Go on dates I’ve set up, that sort of thing.”

  “And you like Italian men?” Katerina asked, nudging my shoulder suggestively.

  “I’ve hardly gotten a chance to get to know him—them.”

  I blushed and stared down at my wine glass.

  The conversation felt so personal, like I was practically throwing myself on Gianluca or something. I was ready to shift things back onto someone else, but Katerina spoke up first.

  “Have you got a list of requirements, then? A type?”

  I frowned, confused.

  “It just seems like you would. You’re gorgeous and single, which tells me you’re probably quite picky.”

  I couldn’t force my blush to recede. “I mean…there are a few things—”

  She clapped. “I knew it! Tell us then, from the beginning.”

  “It’s not much, really. He has to be intelligent and handsome…”

  “Boooo,” Katerina moaned. “Tell us the real stuff. He obviously has to be smart and handsome. What are you really going after?”

  I grinned, giddy from the wine. “Fine, okay. Preferably he would like to read. He’d have a well-worn edition of Great Expectations or A Tale of Two Cities—y’know, proper literature.”

  Katerina nodded with a big cheesy grin, encouraging me.

  “He’d be tall, but not gargantuan, you know? Um, let’s see…he’d like to have a good laugh. He’d like footie, but he wouldn’t be obsessed with it or anything. Oh! Most importantly, he’d be open and ready for love, without a ton of baggage—”

  Massimo tossed his napkin on the table and leaned back. “That rules out Luca.”

  Katerina laughed, but I didn’t.

  What did he mean?

  Gianluca was peeling the label off his beer bottle, seemingly unaware of the conversation going on around him, but then he glanced up and locked eyes with me. It only took a moment for me to see that he hadn’t just been ignoring us, he’d been in another world altogether.

  He fidgeted, aware of everyone’s eyes on him, and then dropped his beer and stood.

  “This has been fun, but I ought to get back before the sun drops too much lower.”

  He reached into his back pocket for his wallet, tossed a few bills onto the table, and offered us a curt nod.

  “I’ll see you around,” he said to Massimo and Katerina before turning to me. “Gigi, nice to see you.”

  What the—

  My mouth dropped, but he’d already turned and moved past the table before I could shout after him that he’d gotten my name wrong. We’d sat across from each other for the last two hours and he couldn’t even remember my name.

  Katerina reached her hand out to touch my arm. “Please don’t take it personally. He doesn’t mean to be rude.”

  Massimo nodded. “He’s been like that ever since Allie.”

  I MET ALLIE at university the spring before we graduated. I was already set up to take a job in finance in London and she was going to teach. We should never have crossed paths, but we did. We crashed into each other’s lives. I was riding my bike on campus, racing to meet my mates at a pub a few blocks away. Allie was heading in the opposite direction. I skipped a traffic light and collided into her. She went flying and landed with a thud on a spotty patch of grass a few feet away. Her pink bike was nearly bent in two.

  I opened my mouth, prepared to defend myself, but she was laughing, lying flat on the grass with a giant grin on her face.

  “Oh god, are you okay?” I asked, rushing forward to help her up.

  She didn’t move right away, not really concerned with me.

  “Why are you laughing?”

  She tried her best to quell her laughter, but it was no use. For a minute, I thought she might be insane, but finally she pressed her hand to her mouth and glanced up to me. “I have absolute shite luck. My parents bought me that bike as a graduation gift, just this morning.”

  I groaned. “And now I’ve gone and ruined it.”

  Good going, Luca.

  She sat up and shook the hair out of her face. For the first time, I got a good look at her. She was lovely. Blonde and sweet.

  “It’s okay, really.” She turned to assess the damage and her smile faded. I didn’t want it to fade. “I’ll tell them a car smashed it. They’ll moan about it but—”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head adamantly. “I’ll repair it.”

  Her brows rose. “You know how to mend bikes?”

  “Yes,” I lied.

  She grinned. “Brilliant. It’s the least you can do considering it was you who crashed into me.”

  She was teasing and I liked it.

  I didn’t end up meeting my mates at the pub. No man on Earth would have gone to meet his mates after meeting a girl like Allie. I rolled our bikes back to her flat and she invited me to come in with a promise of “lukewarm beer, crisps, and a well-stocked first aid kit.”

  We got married a year later, ignoring our parents’ warnings about how young we were. Allie and I knew what we were doing. There’s no sense in waiting, Allie would say.

  She moved to London with me and looked for a teaching job. My entry position at the firm kept me busy, but Allie and I made the most of the time we had together. We loved being outside, riding bikes, and hiking. On the weekends, we’d pack the car and go on adventures. We talked about getting a dog and raising kids in the city. We strolled hand in hand through Hyde Park, feeding the ducks in front of Kensington Palace.

  We’d been married for four years when she started falling behind on hikes, blaming it on a sore knee. I encouraged her to see a physio about it, but she put it off for a few months, icing and laying off of it when she could.

  Finally, I set up an appointment for her, after a canceled backpacking trip with friends. The first doctor she spoke to chalked up her injury to hiking, and suggested more ice, rest, and naproxen.

  Six months later, Allie fractured her tibia on a simple hike we’d breezed through dozens of times. At the hospital, the MRI revealed an osteosarcoma tumor.

  I went through a period of denial. We both did. We consulted multiple doctors, assuring each other it was a simple mistake, a bad radiologist, an off day. How could something like this come out of nowhere?

  “I guess I really do have shite luck,” Allie said to me after the third doctor confirmed her prognosis.

/>   Just like the first day we met, I took her hand and promised her I’d fix it.

  “You know how to mend cancer?”

  “Yes,” I lied.

  Allie was 24. She was tall and slender. She liked to wear bright dresses that wrapped tight around her middle and cut off high on her thighs. She always knew the right thing to say and she was an ace in group settings. She loved bringing people together and she had a real knack for it. She put me at ease, she was comforting and kindhearted. She was my wife and she had cancer and I couldn’t do anything to fix it.

  Seemingly overnight, our vernacular turned clinical: osteosarcoma, metastases, clinical trials, treatment plans, survival rates. Allie’s life hung in the balance of cold statistics, and we clung to that limbo. When her oncologist told us to not lose hope, explaining that there are better survival rates for young women, I had to bite my tongue.

  What about survival rates for someone’s wife?

  What about survival rates for the future mother of my children?

  What about survival rates for the person I can’t live without?

  What are those survival rates?

  They scheduled surgery to remove the tumor on her knee, but further scans showed metastases in her lungs, stage III. They started Allie on aggressive chemotherapy while she was still recovering from the tumor removal. Those weeks were utter crap. Her hair fell out. The radiation did a number on her body. If she wasn’t sleeping, she was throwing up. If she wasn’t throwing up, she was crying and asking me why this was happening to her.

  Toward the end of chemotherapy, things started to look better. Allie was handling treatments well. She was up and walking around, going through physio for her knee.

  We started to talk about our life post cancer. P.C. How we would live, where we would visit, how big our family should be.

  “P.C. I’m going to hike every single day,” she said over lunch in the hospital one day.

  “P.C. we are going to make love every single day.”

  “Luca,” she hissed, blushing.

  I couldn’t recall the last time we’d slept together. It’d been months. She’d grown shy in the bedroom, less confident now that radiation had added pounds onto her once slender body. She hardly ever let me see her without a scarf on, and when I insisted that the baldness, the pounds, the patchy radiated skin didn’t matter to me, that I’d love her forever, she’d smile and press a kiss to my cheek, promising intimacy soon.

  I reached across the table and gripped her hand. “I love you, you know that?”

  Her thumb brushed across my knuckles. “I know.”

  Two months later, during a follow-up CT scan, they found the worst case scenario: the tumors had spread to Allie’s hips, and just like that, we added another term to our vernacular: life expectancy.

  One year.

  Allie could expect to wake up 365 more times.

  There was never any question of where Allie would spend her final days. Growing up, I’d spent my summers in Vernazza, visiting my grandmother and my cousin, Massimo. Allie had never been, but I’d told her about it. My grandmother’s crumbling villa had been passed down to me after her death and that afternoon, after the final CT scan, Allie dragged a suitcase out of our guest room, declaring that she was foregoing further treatment and would like to spend the last year of her life in Vernazza. She wanted every last sunset to be in the golden light.

  GIANLUCA WAS A widower. Katerina and Massimo had walked me through a short version of his story after dinner. I’d sat in silence and listened, but really, I was being selfish. Incredibly selfish. Because deep down, in the center of my soul, I was thinking of how it was such a bloody shame. I was in Vernazza to have a laugh, meet a few blokes, and loll about on the beach. I wanted to have a proper holiday fling with lots of sex and maybe some flippant promises of love. I was in no way looking to mend a broken heart. It wasn’t fair, really. Gianluca was the nicest-looking man I’d seen in the last decade and he was unavailable, moping about for a wife he’d lost five years earlier.

  I know it seems so callous to think of his situation as anything but heartbreaking. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel for him or that I didn’t understand everything he’d suffered through with Allie. God, untimely death is the saddest thing of all time. Unfortunately, I’d experienced it firsthand. I’d lost my father when I was a young girl and my eldest brother a few years later. Heart failure and a car crash. Both sudden. Both devastating. Two deaths in a family of five had nearly crippled us. My mother fell into life as a widow. My brother, Fred, took over the family title and all the responsibilities that came with running the estate, and I settled into the only role I knew: the court jester, the clown, the only bit of light in our family during those tough few years. I was there through my mother’s heartache; I’d endured the dates and the silly setups because it took my mother’s mind off the real troubles of her life to see me get tarted up for an evening out. I’d joked and I’d forced her smiles through all the hard times because she needed to be reminded that life marches on even when we desperately wish it wouldn’t.

  A few years back, my brother had met Andie, the love of his life. They had three children now and my mother doted on them whenever she got the chance. With so many good things going for our family, I finally felt as though I could pack away my jester hat. They didn’t need me anymore, which was why I didn’t feel bad up and leaving London for an adventure of my own.

  And then as fate would have it, upon my first day in Vernazza…WHAM. I met Gianluca. The widower.

  See?

  What tragic luck.

  …

  The next morning, I lazed in bed, thinking over the story of Allie. It should have made it easy to subdue my silly crush on Gianluca. Normal women would run for the hills, but it only intrigued me more. I’d never had a man love me like that. In some grim way, the depth of his despair over losing another woman became an advertisement for the quality of his love. I felt guilty for thinking that, but not guilty enough to stop.

  Oh god, I needed to get out of my head and definitely stop thinking about Gianluca. After all, the bloke thought I was named Gigi! Ha. I’d file the papers to change my name before correcting him.

  I pushed off my covers and decided on a whim that I’d head to Monterosso al Mare for the day. The sun was already high in the sky, warming everything it touched. I strung on a red bikini and tossed my beach supplies into a straw bag: sun cream, my floppy hat, and my worn paperback. I tugged on a loose cover-up and slipped into sandals before locking up my room and flying down the stairs.

  Chiara wasn’t manning the desk, so I headed out to the station. I hadn’t been back on a train since the first day I arrived. Monterosso al Mare was the northernmost village in Cinque Terre and only one stop over, so fortunately, the five-minute journey didn’t cause my small breakfast to make an encore appearance.

  I stepped off the platform and followed the string of tourists heading toward the sea. Unlike Vernazza, Monterosso had a proper beach that stretched on for a few miles. It was early, but the beach was starting to fill fast. I paid to reserve an umbrella and chair in the first row and plopped myself there, lathering on sun cream as I watched a group of children run into the surf, squealing as waves crashed against their legs and running back onto the pebbled beach as fast as possible.

  I let my cream soak in and then I stood and slipped off my sandals, walking with careful steps toward the water. The soft sand turned to pebbles once I approached the water’s edge, and though none of them were sharp enough to cut me, it hurt to put too much pressure on them at once. I eased into the surf, hissing as the cold water lapped up over my legs and thighs. With a final resolute breath, I pinched my nose and dove under the water.

  My brother had taught me proper swimming technique when I was young, and I thanked him for it as I kicked farther from shore. The Ligurian sea was pure bliss: cold turquoise water beneath sunny skies. I flipped onto my back, closed my eyes, and let the waves drift me where they wished. Afte
r a few minutes, I’d flop back over and swim closer to the buoys, repeating the process until my fingers were pruned and my cheeks were warm from the sun.

  When I swam back to shore, my things were right where I’d left them beneath the umbrella. I sprayed a bit of after-sun on my hair, lathered up more cream, and set off toward Monterosso for a snack. It wasn’t quite lunchtime, but my small breakfast had burned quickly in my swim. Like Vernazza, Monterosso had a few small shops wedged between restaurants and hotels. I begrudgingly walked past the gelateria and instead went into a small grocer.

  “Le fragole sono succose,” said the girl behind the counter, pointing to the small basket of strawberries I’d nabbed as soon as I’d walked in. “Juicy.”

  She hadn’t been kidding. I carried the strawberries back to my beach chair and ate them leaning over the sand. I’d never tasted fruit so fresh in my life. It wasn’t like the produce I could pick up in the shops around London. The strawberries were soft and tender, so full of flavor I couldn’t help but moan with pleasure every time I bit into one. Had anyone been sitting near me, they’d have assumed I had a bit of a berry fetish, and well, maybe I did. I didn’t stop until I’d eaten every last one, and then, full of sugary sweetness, I waded back into the sea, using the cold water to wash the juice off my chin and fingers.

  By the time I rode the train back to Vernazza, I was sated. Even with the sun cream on, I had a nice tan going on my arms and legs. My hair was wavy and wild, and my skin was still sticky from the sea and sand and strawberries. (I’d caved and gone back for a second basket.)

  I took my time strolling down the main road, popping into one of the fancier shops to pick up some olive oil to send home to my mum and Freddie. I picked up some lemon candies for Andie and wrote a note to slip into the post—something that would put my brother’s mind at ease about my stay in Italy.

  Dear Freddie,

  I know you think I’m silly running off like I did, but I swear I know what I’m doing. Mum had gone completely mental with the matchmaking and I needed to put some boundaries between us—rather large boundaries, it seems, like the Alps and the English Channel.