Italian for Beginners Page 23

I stood there for a while, simply looking. I knew it was just a store, of course, but there was something that moved me about knowing that my family’s hands had touched every scarf, that they had decided where the racks would go, that they had laid out the colors and the patterns, that they had probably handpicked all of the merchandise. Hands that had touched my mother, held her hand, pinched her cheeks, stroked her hair, had also touched everything in this store. And in a strange way, that took my breath away.

  After a while, I checked my watch. It wasn’t quite nine thirty yet. The store likely didn’t open until ten or eleven, and I wasn’t sure what I’d do when it did. I needed time to think.

  I backed away from the window and crossed the small street. Two doors down was a building with a small stoop out front, five wide stairs running up to a big front door. I sat down two steps up and waited.

  After a while, I pulled out my camera and absentmindedly began flipping through pictures on the screen. I’d deleted most of them from the SD card after uploading them to my computer, but I had saved a few, and as I looked through several shots of my neighborhood in New York, taken just a month ago, I felt a wave of profound disconnect.

  I didn’t belong here in Rome, on this dusty side street thousands of miles from the world I lived in. This place wasn’t my home, as much as I wanted to feel like it was, as much as I wanted to feel like I was meant to be here. Home was the brownstone I saw on my LCD screen, the street teeming with people, the coffee shop on the corner. Home was the pair of pigeons perched expectantly on a Central Park bench, the man who sold bagels from a cart on the corner, the glistening arches of the Chrysler Building. Home was the view of Ellis Island from Battery Park, the gaudy green, white, and red of Little Italy, the dilapidated charm of Chinatown. Home was Becky and Dad.

  But what if part of me belonged here, too? It was almost as if a piece of me had been here all along. From the moment I had arrived in Rome thirteen years ago, it had all felt so familiar, as if I had been here before. What if Rome had been passed down to me through my mother’s blood, a map of the city written as a sort of genetic blueprint that composed who I was to become? It sounded crazy, but what if the ghosts were more real than I’d given them credit for? Something had drawn me back here. And perhaps I needed to put that something to rest before I could rejoin my own life.

  I turned off the review screen on my camera and lifted it slowly. I looked through the lens and zoomed in on the scarf shop across the street. From this angle, I could just see the bright silk glistening in the window, beneath the bold lettering of the sign that declared the place to be, like me, a piece of the Verdicchio family.

  I snapped a single shot. I looked at it on the screen. The composition of the photo was all wrong. I looked through the viewfinder again and zoomed farther. The colors jumped into the forefront of the screen, and I snapped again. I looked at the screen, and again, I didn’t feel that the shot worked. I took a deep breath and stood up from the stoop. I walked a couple doors down until I faced the shop directly, and, still standing across the street, I began shooting.

  As sometimes happened when I was able to hide behind my camera’s lens, I became lost in the images as I worked, snapping from every angle. I moved left and right, squatted, perched, moved to catch the best angles as the sun crested the stout buildings and began to pour its rays over the street. People were beginning to emerge from the buildings around us, some dressed for work in an office, some dressed casually to take children to school or run errands. But I barely noticed them. I was lost in the world that existed for me inside the twelve-inch cylinder protruding from my camera. It was like a kaleidoscope that isolated everything else and brought its own images into sharp, unignorable focus.

  After a while, I settled back onto the stoop to wait. I wasn’t sure what I was waiting for, exactly. I knew I wanted to catch a glimpse of my aunt or my grandparents, but then what would I do? What would I say?

  Would I even recognize them after so many years had passed? Would they even still be here? What if the store had been passed on to cousins, or to strangers who had decided to keep the name the same? Suddenly, I felt paralyzed by fear and uncertainty. What if I’d mustered the courage to come here this morning for nothing?

  Thirty minutes later, I saw the lights go on in the scarf shop. I blinked a few times. I hadn’t seen anyone come in the front door. Perhaps my mother’s family lived above the store, or perhaps there was a back entrance. Suddenly, my heart was pounding double-time.

  A moment later, a woman in her midsixties with shoulder length glossy black hair streaked with a few ribbons of gray stepped out the front door with a rag and a spray bottle of blue liquid in her hand. I recognized her immediately as my aunt Gina, a woman I knew only from pictures. She began spritzing the window and wiping it off. I stared, mesmerized as she worked quickly. She looked so much like my mother, so much like what my mother would have looked like had she lived another two decades. Although I’d been stockpiling resentment toward her since I was twelve, holding on to it like currency, it sent a powerful wave of sadness through me to see someone who so strongly embodied what could have been.

  As I watched her work, I raised my camera and focused on her through the viewfinder. I zoomed in and studied the familiar contours of her face, the way she held her shoulders just like my mother, the way she was smiling to herself absently as she wiped, an expression that reminded me so much of my mother that it hurt.

  I began snapping photos, almost without thinking. I was hitting the shutter rapid-fire, not wanting to miss a single second of this woman’s expressions and motions. It was suddenly desperately important to me to capture it all.

  She was just about to finish the window when she turned around and looked straight at me. I snapped a quick shot of her before I could think, and then I guiltily lowered the camera and tried to act as though I was looking somewhere else. My heart hammering, I feigned calm and turned around to photograph a trash can to the right of the stoop. I didn’t know if she was still looking at me, so I also pretended to be incredibly absorbed in the red bicycle tied to a lamppost two doors down. I shot several frames of it, too.

  By the time I glanced back to the storefront, she was gone. I breathed a sigh of relief, but I felt a surprising tinge of sadness, too. There had been something about looking at her, even through my lens, even from afar, that made me feel closer to my mother than I had in years. And to my surprise, I liked the feeling. Perhaps the walls I’d built around my heart weren’t as high as I’d thought.

  I sat on the stoop for a while catching my breath, trying to gather myself. I felt like an emotional wreck. Slowly, I turned the camera back on and began flipping through the images, studying my aunt’s face, her posture, her expressions in each one.

  Suddenly, I heard footsteps approaching. I shook myself out of my trance and looked up. My eyes widened in horror as I realized that my aunt Gina had come back outside and was not only staring at me but was now just a few yards away, charging toward me with determination. I stood up quickly, fumbling with my camera and almost dropping it.

  She was saying something in rapid, sharp Italian, waving her arms around dramatically, but I was too stricken by the familiarity of her voice to muster any kind of logical response. She sounded so much like my mother, whose voice I had been sure I’d forgotten. I knew she was berating me for taking her photo without asking; I was sure she was probably wondering why I had done so. But all I could do was stare.

  Finally, she stopped talking and seemed to be waiting for a response. I swallowed hard a few times, trying to dislodge the lump in my throat. “Non parlo italiano,” I managed to choke out. I added weakly, “I’m sorry.”

  She opened her mouth right away to say something else, but then she stopped. She looked at me for a moment and took a step closer. Something in her eyes changed. And just like that, I knew that she knew.

  “Catarina?” she asked softly. My heart jumped into my throat. “Cat?” She paused and shook her head, lik
e she couldn’t quite believe it. “You are Cat, aren’t you?” she asked. But this time, although it had been phrased like a question, I knew she meant it more as a statement.

  “How did you know?” I asked softly.

  But she didn’t answer. Instead, she stared for a moment longer, motionless, before drawing me into a fierce, tight hug that expelled the rest of the air residing in my already breathless lungs.

  “You are Audrey’s daughter,” she said softly as she pulled away. It was like she was telling herself again so that she had no choice but to believe it. “You are Audrey’s daughter, here in Rome.”

  I hadn’t been referred to as my mother’s daughter since I was a little girl and she was walking me to my piano lessons and ballet classes.

  “Yes,” I confirmed softly. “I am.”

  She hugged me again and then drew back a foot or so and cupped my chin in her hand. She stared into my eyes. “You look so much like her,” she murmured.

  I swallowed hard. “You do, too.”

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. “Did you come to Roma to see me?”

  Her expression was hopeful. I had been worried about how she’d feel about me should we ever meet. Had my mother told her how hateful I’d been when she’d come home? How I’d told her I could never forgive her, could never accept her as my parent again? Did my aunt know how much I had probably hurt my mother during her final days? A wave of guilt washed over me as I looked into eyes that looked so much like the ones I had last seen sixteen years before.

  “No,” I answered honestly. “I came here for me.” I took a deep breath and added, “But I think coming here to see you is a part of that.”

  I wasn’t sure if the sentence made any sense, but Gina nodded slowly, like she understood. “I always knew you’d come,” she said. “Your mother told me you would.”

  “What?” I asked.

  She smiled gently. “Will you come inside the store with me?”

  I hesitated, took a deep breath, and nodded. I stuffed my camera back into my bag and hoisted it over my shoulder. As I began to follow her, she surprised me by taking me gently by the hand. She squeezed hard.

  I followed her into the shop, which was dimly lit and smelled faintly of lavender and orange blossoms, an enticing scent that reminded me of the perfume my mother used to wear. Gina motioned for me to wait, then she brought a chair out from the back. “Sit,” she said with a smile. I did so, and she settled into a chair behind the cash register. She leaned forward and studied my face for a moment. “You are beautiful,” she said softly. “It is like looking at Audrey.”

  I felt tears in my eyes. I shook my head and looked down. “I look like my father, too,” I said. I immediately regretted it; it sounded combative and ungrateful. But Gina didn’t seem to take it that way.

  “Yes, you do,” she said. “Your mother always loved that about you and your sister. She said you two had taken on the best elements of both of them. She loved you girls very much.”

  I snorted and looked away. Gina was silent, perhaps waiting for me to say something. But there were no words to say. How did you tell a woman that her sister didn’t know the first thing about love?

  “Do you know where she went, those years she disappeared?” Gina asked after a while.

  The question startled me, and I jerked my head up. My mother had always been so secretive about where she’d gone; I’d always assumed that she’d moved in with a man somewhere else, trying to build a different life for herself. As a teenager, I had lain awake at night and vividly constructed tales of her departure in my head. I always imagined she had gone out west somewhere, Las Vegas, maybe, or Los Angeles. In the scenario I visualized, she had moved in with a man who was taller, darker, and more handsome than my dad. And I imagined that this mystery man had a couple of kids from a previous marriage, maybe two girls, who my mother coddled and fawned over, allowing her to forget about her own kids.

  “No,” I admitted finally. “She never told us.” I had hated my mother a little bit more for never explaining where the black hole that engulfed her had been. My father wouldn’t tell us, either; in fact, I wasn’t sure he even knew. I had asked for the last time the year she died. After that, I had decided that it didn’t matter where she had gone, that I shouldn’t care. All that had mattered was that she had left us without looking back.

  Gina looked at me for a long moment. “She wanted you to know,” she said finally. “But only if you came looking. Because if you came looking, it meant that you were ready for the answer.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, shaking my head.

  “She came here, Cat,” Gina said softly. “She came home. To Roma. To us.”

  “What?” I stared, incredulous. I hadn’t imagined that my mother had fled her children in favor of her parents.

  If she had, surely they would have sent her back, right? Surely they would have told her that it was inexcusable to abandon one’s kids, that family was the most important thing in the world, that the tie between mother and child was the one link that was meant to never be broken. “Why?” I asked weakly.

  Gina looked down at her hands for a long time. She turned her right hand over, palm up, and traced her lifeline with her left index finger. Finally, she looked up at me. “She was sick, Cat,” she said gently.

  “Sick?” I repeated. I didn’t understand. “What do you mean?”

  Uninvited images of a valiant battle against cancer filled my head. But that couldn’t be right. If she’d been sick, she would have stayed at home with us and fought it.

  Gina sighed. “In the head,” she said softly. “She was ill. Very ill.”

  “What?” I stared, uncomprehending.

  “Your mother always struggled with depression,” she said slowly. “Did you know that, Cat? Did you know that about your mother?”

  “No,” I whispered.

  Gina smiled. “Good,” she said. “She did not want you to. Not when you were young. And for a while, she was sure that loving you girls, loving your father, would save her, would end the sadness.”

  I felt tears in my eyes. “But it didn’t?”

  Gina shook her head. “I don’t think depression like that is a choice, something that can be turned on or off,” she said. “For a while, she was able to fight it. But it was always there. She would lash out at your father sometimes, for no reason, right? And sometimes she would become angry at you girls?”

  “Yes,” I whispered, a flood of memories pouring in, sad memories of my mother crying or yelling or throwing things, memories I had locked away.

  Gina nodded. “I know. She felt very guilty about that. She would tell me she was sure she was ruining your lives. She always said you and Rebecca deserved better.”

  “But she left us,” I said. I felt like my voice sounded very small, almost as if I had regressed to the age of eleven. “How could she have left us?”

  “I don’t know that I will ever understand that, Cat,” Gina said. “You may never understand, either. But please know that when she came home to Roma, to us, she spent every day thinking of you and your sister and your father. She cried about it all the time. But she thought she was doing the right thing. She thought you were better off without her.”

  “ But—” I began. I stalled. I didn’t know what to say. “This is impossible. She didn’t love us enough to stay. If she had loved us, she would have stayed.”

  Gina’s eyes filled with tears. “Cat, she didn’t leave because she didn’t love you,” she said. “She left because she did. She did love you. More than she could bear. And she thought she was hurting you by staying there with you. She thought you would be better off without her.

  “I tried to persuade her to go back to New York,” Gina continued. “But Mamma and Pappa, they were just glad to have her home. They didn’t want her to be in America. They never liked your father. They felt as though he had taken your mother away. So they let her stay, and they told her it was okay. They blamed America fo
r her depression. But it wasn’t America. It wasn’t her life there. She was just sick.”

  “This isn’t possible,” I said softly.

  Gina looked at me sadly. “It is the truth,” she said. “She finally began seeing a doctor. And slowly, things got better. She began taking medication. She learned to deal better with things. And when she felt ready, she came home to try to become a part of your family again.”

  I could feel tears streaming down my face now, rapid and unbidden. I wiped them away, angry that my emotions would spill over. “Why didn’t she tell me?” I whispered. “Why did she just let me hate her? Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

  “She thought it was a sign of weakness,” Gina said. “And she felt that she deserved your hatred. She wanted to win you back on her own. She wanted to show you that you could trust her, that you could love her. She wanted to spend every day making it up to you.”

  I thought about how many times my mother had tried to talk to me, how many times she had listened as I told her I hated her, how many times she had simply said, “I love you, Cat. I always have, and I always will,” in return, instead of fighting back. Sitting here with her sister, with a woman who looked so much like her, I could almost hear her voice in my head now.

  “But then she died,” I said softly. The tears were rolling down my face in rivers now, and I was having trouble catching my breath.

  “Then she died,” Gina repeated with a nod, her own eyes growing watery.

  I was sobbing now, full force. “I never told her I loved her,” I said. “I never said it after she came back. But I never stopped loving her. I just didn’t want to. It was easier to hate.”

  Gina looked at me for a moment. Then she stood up and gathered me in her arms, letting me sob into her shirt. “But she knew, Cat,” she said softly. “She knew you loved her. She always knew.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  With the truth out on the table, there was nothing left to say. I needed time to digest everything. It was as though my whole world had changed.