Chapter Sixteen
That summer, Will took me on a two-week vacation to Italy. We had been dating for a little over two months, seeing each other mostly on weekends. Ronnie was surprised when I told her of our travel plans. She thought we were moving quickly. But I felt that I had known him for years. No matter how my time in the city had smoothed my rough edges, it could never cut away the gnarled parts of me that were rooted at Horseshoe Cliff. It comforted me that Will knew where I had come from, and that we had met in Osha.
It also comforted me that Will and Amir were nothing alike. Amir loved what was most familiar; Will was curious about the world and craved new experiences. Amir made art from instinct; Will admired art through the lens of a scholar. I had learned that I could not trust Amir, who had hidden within him a capacity for violence that I could hardly bear to think about. Will was upstanding and dependable.
But of course Amir had known so much trouble, while Will had known only peace.
“Who is paying for this trip?” Ronnie had asked, watching me pack.
She already knew the answer, so I didn’t respond.
“Merrow.”
I zipped my swimsuits into an inner pocket of my bag.
“Merrow!”
I looked up at her. “Listen,” I said. “I know you don’t like Will. But I do. What does it matter if he pays for our trip? He knows I’ve always wanted to travel. We talked about it when we first met, years ago. It makes him happy to be able to do something nice for me.”
“I bet it does. I’m sure it’s a heady feeling to have so much money that you can make someone’s dreams come true.”
“Ronnie, I’m excited to go away with him.” This was an understatement. I had been looking forward to the trip so much that I had hardly been able to sleep. It hurt me that Ronnie was not happy for me. “Please don’t ruin it.”
Her face softened. “I’m sorry. It’s not that I don’t like Will. He’s nice. The whole family is nice. And the way he looks at you...”
“Yes?”
She hesitated. “It’s clear he really cares for you.”
I laughed. “So why do you sound so skeptical?”
“I don’t know. I’m not.” She ran her hand over a sundress that I had laid out on the bed and then stood. “Hang on.” She left the room, returning with one of her own dresses, a white one I had always loved. “Take this. It looks great on you.”
I thanked her, promising to take good care of it. Ronnie claimed that she didn’t know why she was skeptical of Will, butI thought I knew the answer. Since Will and I had started seeing each other, I was spending less and less time with her, and she did not like the growing distance between us.
Will had many friends, and my weekends had become filled with events at museums and restaurants and carefully decorated homes. When, at a dinner party several weeks earlier, Will had introduced me as a writer, I had felt a wave of pleasure move through me. I found myself telling the table memories from my earliest years at Horseshoe Cliff, when I’d had little for company but the sea, the land, and my father’s stories. Will’s friends’ attention dazzled me; I went on too long. Will watched me, his expression amused and—I thought—proud. But when at last I fell quiet, I was filled with regret. What would they think of me? At best, they would decide I was eccentric—at worst, downright odd. Within moments, though, Will put my fears to rest.
No one in this room has ever met anyone like you,he said, his hand low on my back as he whispered in my ear.And you’ve just made each one of them fall in love with you.
INITALY, OURfavorite thing to do was to get lost. In Rome, we wandered through the shadows cast by the ancient arches of the Colosseum. We walked the old streets and admired the stone buildings, the way the sun hit the red roofs at dusk. In Florence, we returned each afternoon to drink red wine in the most perfect little café that we would have missed if we had not happened to have wandered down one narrow, winding street and then, instead of turning back, wandered farther along another. In Venice, whenever we crossed a bridge, the light on the watercompelled us to stop and take in the view. I felt in awe of the beauty that we saw everywhere we went.
The world was so large, and I had only seen such a small part of it. I had understood this the moment our plane had lifted into the air and the coast of California, which had always felt so powerfully large, fell quickly away from view. I had never felt so distant from Horseshoe Cliff, but for the first time in years, I did not feel homesick. In fact, I felt almost as though I were someone else entirely. In a foreign country, I stood apart from the young Merrow who had lived that peculiar, wild childhood with Amir and her vicious brother and the lonesome beauty of Horseshoe Cliff. It felt natural to evolve, to take on a new shape and outlook while traveling. It was not a shameful or even a particularly intentional shift. It felt like growing up.
Will had been to Italy many times before that trip, but he looked around with the same wide-eyed excitement that I felt. When we grew hungry, he never steered us in the direction of a particular restaurant unless I asked him to. He made me feel as though he were seeing Italy through fresh eyes, each turn a new discovery.
We were discovering each other as well, of course. Traveling was an aphrodisiac. We made love in the morning and again at night, falling asleep naked with the bedsheets twisted at our feet.
One morning, my happiness vanished when I awoke to find Will’s side of the bed empty. I listened for sounds from the bathroom but heard only the noises of Venice beyond the open window: a man calling to someone in Italian, water lapping against stone, the flap of wings. I sat upright.
“Will?”
There was no answer.
Panic swelled within me. For the first time in days, I thought of Bear and remembered how fragile happiness was, how easily stolen. I remembered then that the man who had checked us into the hotel had warned us of a rash of burglaries, advising us to store our passports and valuables in the safe. We were not to leave the window open.
We had left the window open all night! And now Will was gone. In my panic, these two events seemed connected. I ran to the window, but before I managed to shut it, I caught sight of Will strolling toward the hotel. He held a bouquet of flowers in his hands, a burst of pinks and oranges so bright that I was sure that even someone flying in an airplane far overhead would have spotted it and thought,What beautiful flowers!
“Will!” I was so relieved that I could not stop myself from yelling to him though I was naked and he was not alone on the walkway below.
