Violetta looked up and nodded, at which Lily ran to the Hotel Adesso where she told the hotel receptionist what had happened and ensured that an ambulance was called.
When she returned to the sisters’ kitchen, Violetta was still sitting on the side of the bed holding Luciana’s hand, but her bedside manner had taken a turn for the worse. She was shouting at her sister in Italian.
‘Violetta, please!’ Lily urged. ‘The poor woman’s taken a terrible fall!’
‘She should watch where she is going! This is what I am telling her.’
Luciana opened her eyes then and limply muttered something, which her sister responded to with another robust chastisement.
‘Perhaps you could quarrel with her when she comes back from the hospital,’ Lily suggested. ‘She’s weak now. She’s had a shock. She could be badly hurt. Now is not the time for arguing.’
Violetta narrowed her eyes. When she came back from the hospital? Hah! ‘At our age, there might not be another time,’ she said, but still, her voice caught.
‘Isn’t that all the more reason not to argue now?’ Lily suggested.
‘But if we do not argue, how do we know what the other one is thinking?’ Violetta asked. ‘We argue for nearly a hundred years and this is noisy, yes, but there is never confusion. She knows how I feel. I know how she feels.’
The rare sound of a motor vehicle approaching filled the room, and moments later two paramedics entered. Under Violetta’s cantankerous supervision, they manoeuvred Luciana onto a stretcher and carried her out into the street—which looked to Lily only an inch wider than the ambulance.
Indeed the vehicle was so small that when Violetta tried to get in the back, the paramedics waved her away, saying there wasn’t enough room for her and she should meet them at the hospital.
This did not go down at all well.
‘I’m sure they will take very good care of her there,’ Lily said helpfully, moving closer to the little woman as the ambulance drove off down the hill at a perilous speed considering how close it was to the walls on either side.
‘Pah! Good care? This is not what our hospital is known for,’ Violetta said, and although she sounded angry, her wrinkled cheeks were wet with fresh tears.
‘I am lost without her,’ she said, and a sob escaped, although it sounded a bit like a teaspoon going down the garbage disposal. ‘I am lost.’
Her words echoed around Lily’s tightly squeezed heart.
She took Violetta’s hand and led her inside, sat her at the kitchen table, and got her a glass of water, unsure what to do next until a neighbour popped up at the kitchen window obviously wanting to know what was going on.
‘She will take me to see Luciana,’ Violetta explained to Lily at the end of the conversation, her face smaller and paler with every word.
The elderly neighbour seemed happy to be in charge, and her landlady thus taken care of, Lily went upstairs and sat in her picture window, breathing in beautiful Tuscany, mulling over the chaotic events of the day and slowly letting the door in her memory open long and wide enough for her to see what lay behind it.
Chapter 31
Ingrid and Daniel meandered away from the river up the Via Tornabuoni.
It had moved her, almost unbearably, to hear him talk about the nightmare of returning his almost-adopted baby, but he himself seemed a little distanced from it. There was more to this sad story, she was sure.
‘So what happened?’ she asked as they slowed down outside one of the designer shops for her to admire the window display. ‘Your wife fell out of love with you after she gave up on having children?’
‘She fell out of everything,’ Daniel said. ‘I think I was just included in the package.’
‘You think she was depressed?’
‘No, I don’t think so. She just got more involved in her work—she’s a VP at Heigelmann’s—started exercising a lot, being at home less. Keeping busy, I guess, until we seemed to be living almost separate lives. It’s not as though we argued or anything. We just stopped being together.’
‘Were you trying?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What do you mean you don’t know?’
‘It’s complicated.’
‘Well, maybe it doesn’t have to be. I mean do you still love her?’
‘Ingrid, I still love her so much I can hardly get out of bed in the mornings knowing how badly I’ve screwed it all up.’
Aha, thought Ingrid. Here it comes.
‘Oh? And how did you manage that?’ she asked lightly, dawdling in front of the next sumptuous window display.
‘I made a mistake.’
‘Well, you wouldn’t be the first person to do that.’
‘It was a colossal mistake.’
‘How colossal?’
‘I met someone.’
‘Well, that’s hardly—’
‘She fell pregnant. I have a six-year-old daughter and to all intents and purposes a two-year-old boy in Montevedova.’
This stopped Ingrid in her tracks.
‘You want to slap me, I know you do,’ Daniel said when she turned to face him. ‘And I deserve it, but the truth is, it couldn’t make me feel worse than I already do. It is the worst betrayal, the greatest deceit, the lowest of the low. I know all this. Trust me, I know.’
They stood there, looking at each other for a few frigid moments, then Ingrid raised her arm, but not to slap him. Instead she held a cool hand against his cheek. It burned as though she had struck it. He was perhaps the saddest man she’d ever met.
‘The woman in Montevedova,’ she said.
‘It was nothing—a weak moment.’
‘But the children make it difficult.’
He nodded. ‘It’s complicated, but I can’t abandon their mother, and because of that, I can’t be happy with my wife.’
‘Are you sure about that?’
‘I have everything that Lily wants only I have it with someone that precludes her from having anything to do with it. I’ve tossed the options up in my head a thousand times, but I still don’t know what to do.’
‘What’s wrong with things the way they are?’
‘Eugenia is what’s wrong with things the way they are. She’s given me an ultimatum—shape up or ship out. I’ve wanted to ship out since the very beginning, but once Francesca came along…Eugenia has problems. She is not robust. She needs a lot of help.’
‘So what are you doing here in Florence?’ Ingrid asked.
Daniel had nothing left to hide.
‘I’m running away,’ he told her.
‘Now, I could slap you,’ she said as the crowd rippled and flowed around them. ‘Running away never solved a problem for anyone, you know that. I think you know exactly what you have to do, you just need someone to agree with you.’
He thought then how lucky her three sons were to have her for a mother.
‘Come on,’ Ingrid said. ‘Let’s go get a drink and make a plan. You need to go back and sort your life out.’
Chapter 32
Thankfully there was no one in Montevedova’s only phone booth, because Lily needed just the slightest excuse for her courage to abandon her, but once inside the dusty little box she quickly dialled Rose’s phone number and held her breath as it rang.
‘Hello, Harry speaking,’ a youthful voice tinkled down the line from across the ocean.
‘Hello, sweetie, it’s your aunt Lily here,’ she said, unable to keep the tremor from her voice. ‘How are you doing?’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘I can read almost as fast as Jack now, but he’s much better at soccer.’
‘I’m so happy for you, honey. That is such great news. You’re such a big boy now! Hey, is your mom there?’
She heard the phone drop to the floor and Harry roar into the background that Lily was on the phone, that he’d told her about the reading and the soccer.
Rose was there in a moment.
‘Lily? Is that really you?’
‘It is,
yes, I’m in Tuscany.’
‘Oh my God, I can’t believe it! You sound like you’re just around the corner. AL! TAKE THE KIDS OUTSIDE AND DON’T COME BACK UNTIL I TELL YOU TO, I’M ON THE PHONE TO LILY IN ITALY. YES, ITALY! So what happened? Did you find Daniel? What’s it like? How are you?’
‘I’m fine but I didn’t find Daniel. He’s not here.’
‘Not in Italy?’
‘I’m not sure, but he’s not in the place where I thought he would be, where he usually is, where I am now.’
‘And what about the floozy?’
‘Well, she’s here, but to be honest, she hardly fits the floozy bill. It’s a long story but I think Daniel has run out on her as well.’
‘You’re kidding me,’ breathed Rose. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes. No! Actually, I don’t know. I have absolutely no idea. I’m just not—God, Rose, I just can’t believe this is Daniel we’re talking about. My Daniel. What happened? One minute we’re just us, an ordinary happily married couple, and the next it’s like being in one of those awful dreams where everything just keeps getting worse and worse but I can’t even wake up. I’m stuck in this. I’m completely stuck.’
‘Oh, honey, I can’t imagine what you’re going through,’ her sister said, and the truth of that burrowed into Lily’s untapped loneliness so swiftly it floored her.
No one knew what she was going through. No one ever had. Other people might have suffered the same sorts of losses as she had, but other people weren’t her. They did not know what it had done to her. They did not know how hard it was, how hard it always had been, to manage her survival. She was so tired of it.
‘Those babies, Rose,’ she whispered. Those beautiful lost babies. Little slips of hope and prayer that had almost delivered her everything she dreamed of.
Survival? The world she’d built to keep from pining for those lost babies crumbled inside that phone booth right then and there—and Lily with it. She slid down the wall, collapsing on the dirty floor.
‘I’m so sorry, Rose,’ she sobbed. ‘It’s all my fault. Everything is my fault. I just couldn’t bear to see you being so happy with your children when I couldn’t even have one of my own. I’m so sorry, I really am, and if I could turn back the clock I would, but I’ve missed you so much. I really have and I’m so sorry.’
Her head in her hands, she pushed the phone to her ear as though it were Rose herself.
‘Oh, Lily,’ her sister said. ‘Please, I’m sorry too. I could have fixed it myself, you know, but I didn’t. You’re the one who fixes things and so I left it to you, but I shouldn’t have, so we are both at fault. And I might have all these kids, but the truth is I’ve envied your life too. I SAID OUTSIDE, AL, ALL OF YOU! I’ve envied your beautiful clothes not covered in spit, your varicose vein–free legs, your tiny little figure, all your sleep, the quiet. Seems you never want exactly what you have, no matter what that is. And the way I feel about Al right now I’d give anything for him to run away with someone else, only I wouldn’t even go looking. I’d move houses so if he ever brought his sorry ass back home again, he wouldn’t find me.’
Lily sniffed. ‘You are joking, I hope.’
‘Honey, sometimes all you can do is joke. Don’t worry about us, we’ll be fine as soon as these kids grow up and get scholarships to good universities and leave and never come back. It’s you we need to worry about.’
‘I need you, Rose,’ Lily said. ‘I really need you. Without Daniel there isn’t a single soul who gives a damn about me.’
‘I give a damn, Lily, and you only need one single soul that does. That’s all any of us needs—just one person who’ll walk on hot coals for them.’
‘I thought it was him!’
‘I know you did, sweetie. I know you did. And it was, too, but right now it’s not. It’s me.’
‘But you’re there and I’m here!’
‘That doesn’t matter. It’s not like I have to tie your shoelaces. I just need to be rooting for you wherever you are; that’s what you told me when we were kids and you were going off to middle school. Remember? I can help you from here, Lily. I can help you from anywhere. Just tell me what’s your plan?’
‘I don’t have one,’ Lily cried. ‘At first I thought maybe I’d find him and make him come home, then I thought I’d just come home without him and either file for divorce or pretend nothing had ever happened. But then I met his daughter, and now I don’t know what to do. Her name’s Francesca, she’s nearly seven and she looks so much like him, you wouldn’t believe it. And she’s great, she’s really great, but the mother—the floozy who isn’t really a floozy—is a total mess and Daniel’s missing in action so…oh, it’s all screwed up.’
‘Oh, brother,’ Rose breathed. ‘I could kick his polo-shirt-wearing ass!’
‘You don’t like the polo shirts?’
‘I don’t like them now!’ Rose exclaimed. ‘I don’t like anything about him now. You must hate him. You must want to snap his neck in half or take to him with a pick axe.’
‘I can’t even find him,’ Lily protested. ‘I’m not even sure I’m looking for him. And I know about the pick axe and maybe I will feel like using one when I see him, but before I can hate him I just need to know why he would do this to me, why he ruined everything and why he’s still ruining it. If that seems weird and not angry enough or whatever—it’s just that if you could see Francesca, you wouldn’t want to kill her father either. She’s so young and, I don’t know. This could really mess with her. Look how having our so-called father hardly ever there messed with us.’
‘Lily, it wasn’t not having a father that messed with us. It was having our mother.’
‘But Francesca’s mother is a wreck too! And if Daniel abandons those kids…’
‘Listen, Lily, don’t jump the gun too much. We might not have led the life of fairy-tale princesses, but we actually turned out OK.’
‘Well, you can say that now, but you know how horrible it was back then and it’s just that Francesca is so—I can’t explain it, Rose. She’s just at that age where she could be anything she wanted but she could also just as easily be crushed.’
‘That’s every kid in the world, Lily. They’re all fragile little eggs whose shells can be broken.’
‘Or not, Rose. Or not. I guess she reminds me of me, of you and me. Actually, she’s sort of why I’m calling. She wants me to teach her how to make oatmeal cookies.’ A hard ball of something indescribable rose up from somewhere below Lily’s heart, squeezing it as small as it could, then pushing its way past to her throat. ‘We used to make them with Mom, right?’
‘Oatmeal cookies? With Mom? Yeah, right!’
‘The thing is, Rose, I keep having the strangest feeling, this weird sort of half a memory.’
‘Half a memory is generally enough in our case, Lily. The woman was a monster. Especially to you. A monster. Don’t go there.’
‘Rose, she had an apron. It was pale blue and it had little yellow and mauve flowers on it with greeny sort of ivy winding around them. Do you remember?’
There was a long silence. ‘No, I don’t.’
‘Before he left for good, Rose, before the drinking and the hitting and—’
‘And the kicking,’ Rose butted in. ‘Don’t forget the kicking.’
Lily blinked as a tiny torn piece of memory fluttered into a corner of her mind. It wafted from side to side before settling long enough for her to grab hold of it. She saw Rose’s chubby legs in Mary Janes standing on the kitchen chair. She saw the footstool next to it.
‘Before all of that, Rose, she had this pale blue apron with little yellow and mauve flowers and she bought us our own special spoons and you stood on a chair and I was on a foot stool and we made cookies with her.’
‘I don’t remember,’ Rose whispered.
Lily pushed away the memory of ice clattering into a glass, the crackle as warm gin hit the frozen cubes, the jangle of her mother’s bracelets as she lifted the glass to her bright red
lips again and again and again.
‘Before all that, Rose,’ she said, shutting her eyes against the pain of the hair being pulled from her head, the welts on her legs, the bruises on her arms.
‘Before all that, we made cookies with her, I remember, and she was laughing and dancing around the kitchen and she kept kissing us, Rose, and telling us how pretty we were, and she was beautiful. And happy. She made frosting and we were allowed to eat it in spoonfuls out of the bowl. And I think she loved us then, Rose. I think then she really loved us.’
‘I’m crazy about frosting,’ Rose said, crying softly. ‘I’ve always been crazy about frosting. And she must have at least really liked us. You don’t bake cookies with kids unless you really like them. I know this. They make such an unholy mess of the kitchen.’
Lily laughed—an impossibly light, unfettered sound that seemed totally unfamiliar to her. ‘We did turn out OK, didn’t we?’
‘It’s going to be all right, Lily,’ Rose sniffed from across the world. ‘Everything is going to be all right.’
Chapter 33
It was a small subdued collection of widows waiting in the church basement when Fiorella made it there at the end of the day.
‘I just passed Lily in the phone booth by the piazza,’ she said. ‘Should someone have been snooping?’
‘Luciana’s had a fall,’ a white-faced widow Pacini reported. ‘She’s in the microwave and Violetta’s in there with her.’
‘That will be the end of her,’ the widow Ercolani added. ‘That will be the end of both of them.’
‘What was Lily doing in the phone booth?’ the widow Benedicti asked. ‘Was she talking to Alessandro?’
‘Never mind that,’ said the widow Pacini, ‘it’s the Ferrettis we need to think about now. If they don’t make it out of the microwave, what will happen to the League? Violetta has always made the big decisions and without her…well, it hardly bears thinking about.’
‘At least no one will have to eat their cantucci anymore,’ Fiorella said. ‘That stuff is the pits.’
‘How dare you!’ The widow Ciacci rose to her full height of just about five feet tall and pointed a shaky finger at Fiorella. ‘How dare you waltz in here and start criticising the Ferretti cantucci. It has been eaten by popes, I’ll have you know. By popes! It is the best in Tuscany and it always will be and for you to suggest otherwise when poor Luciana is in that place and may never come out again, well, it’s disgusting. You should be ashamed. Poor Violetta, if Luciana goes, she is sure to follow. And then where will we be? Where will any of us be!’ She collapsed on a chair, her face in her hands, and the widow Mazzetti shuffled over to put an arm around her shoulders, glaring at Fiorella.