“Breaking and entering.”
He turned his wrist over to look at his watch. 9:15. Shit. Why were Americans soprompt? If she didn’t hate him after last night, she surely was going to hate him now.
“Please tell Luca to not process anything. I am on my way.” He ended the call and turned to his parents. “We’re going to have to talk about this another time, OK?” Standing, he popped the rest of the cake in his mouth, rinsed the plate, and tucked it into the dishwasher. “Love you both,” Andrea called, rushing out the door.
If anyone had asked Andrea when he graduated from high school if he wanted to become mayor of his hometown, he immediately would have said that he’d rather be forced to spend the rest of his life cleaning up after one of the wild boars that occasionally got hit on the highway—the big ones. With the fangs. It’s not that he didn’t like the idea of working hard—he eventually became an asset fund manager, dealing with some of the wealthiest, most demanding clients in the world. It’s that it seemed like there couldn’t be anything on earth more boring than being the mayor of Baia Santa. The town was old, not because the main church was built in 1090,but because even back then, the average age of its inhabitants must have been seventy-two. Jobs were scarce, so other young people were even more scarce, and most of them moved to Genoa, Milan, or Rome to explore more opportunities. His older sister, Carla, went straight to University College London, got a job at a tech company, and sent plane tickets to their parents when she missed them. His older brother, Massimo, made it to Boston College on early decision, then Boston University dental school, and only visited every other year when he could get away from his practice in Newton, Massachusetts. When Andrea was accepted to NYU with a scholarship, Paola and Antonio gifted him a new suitcase, hugged him tight, and drove him to the airport. To them, he was doing the best thing possible. And he was. For a while.
It was hard to know if he’d begun feeling hollow in the city or if the city had begun feeling hollow to him. The result, however, was the same. Ten years after starting his very own American dream, he had his first panic attack. It was about a month after he’d ended things with Danni. Breaking up with a model unfortunately meant that he’d had to continue to see photos of her on billboards across the city. As the face of Cartier’s holiday-themed blast of advertisements, she had been everywhere he looked, her face frozen in crimson-lipped surprise as a satin jewel box sat open in her hand on every available surface clear up to Queens. It was also about a month into working with a new client who had the biggest portfolio he’d ever managed before, and after a week of holiday parties that had pickled him in vodka. He had been at the Whole Foods in Union Square on a Saturday afternoon between Christmas and New Year’s, and theplace was absolutely packed. Taking the escalator down to the grocery store entrance felt like descending into a melee, but he was hungry and craving curry chicken salad. Everything was fine, or as fine as could be in Union Square during the holidays, until he got to the checkout line. It was a convoluted affair, with a snaking line and large screens set up with blinking, colorful numbers and a voice telling the next customer in line which cash register was available. Holiday songs blared from the overhead speakers, and the temperature hovered around a balmy seventy-five degrees while he was dressed in a down parka and wool hat. Ten minutes into the wait, he looked down at the container of chicken salad and noticed that the price was incorrect. Instead of $8.47, it said $8,470. He started to think about whether the person at the cash register would simply make the adjustment or send him back to get another. Then he realized that he had forgotten to grab a drink out of the cooler near the checkout line and wondered if he should ask the person behind him to hold his place while he got one, or, since he was already out of the line, try to run back to the prepared-foods case and exchange the chicken salad for a different container. He couldn’t decide what to do. His chest started to feel tight as Mariah Carey launched into “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” and the beeping, flashing light above his head kept pushing the customers forward. He was sweating in his coat, feeling full rivulets run down from his lower back, and then he thought maybe he was going to have to get to a bathroom immediately because something was definitely happening in his lower abdomen that didn’t feel like tidings of comfort and joy. There were only two people ahead of him, and he would have had to make a decisionquickly. His eyes darted to the chicken salad, the cold drinks, the numbers, Mariah—beep, number seven please—his chest was really hurting, he wonderedwas he going to poop right here?and the whole time it was hot, hot, hot.
He didn’t remember dropping the chicken salad at the cash register, running the wrong way up the escalator stairs until he got outside, or ripping off his parka and sweater. The only thing he remembered was staring up at the Union SquareMetronome, a gigantic digital clock mounted on a building that used to tick down fifteen digits every day to midnight, wearing only a T-shirt in thirty degrees Fahrenheit.
“Blood sugar,” said his doctor when he went to get checked out after the incident. Andrea lay on the examining table with electrode tabs stuck to his chest, prepared to hear the worst about whatever ventricle had closed for business permanently. “Did you eat breakfast that morning?”
“Yes, I had my usual,” he’d said, watching the doctor pull off his latex gloves and drop them into the trash.
“And what was that?”
“Coffee and two or three plain cookies.” It was more or less the same version of what he’d been eating since he was a kid, minus the smear of Nutella. He’d figured that was an improvement.
“There you go. That’s caffeine and sugar. It’s got to be an Italian thing, right? I remember when my wife and I went there on our honeymoon, at least one of us would turn into a wildebeest about ninety minutes after breakfast. I swear we would have ended up divorced already if we kept trying to live on sweets and coffee every morning. Your heart is fine.You just need protein and more calories, kid. Try a good old egg sandwich. It’ll balance that blood sugar right out.”
So he had switched his breakfast to eggs and spinach. After he got bored of that, he tried oatmeal with walnuts, a wheat bagel with lox, and when he started spending more time at the rock-climbing gym, it became whey protein smoothies with bananas and peanut butter. It was all delicious and he definitely felt better, but none of it stopped the freight train of panic that would run over him from time to time. The second attack happened in an air-conditioned movie theater while he was on a date. The woman he was with showed him pictures on her phone of a spiral galaxy in the Canes Venatici constellation forty million light-years away that had been captured by the Hubble telescope that week, and before he knew it, he was pushing out the emergency exit door onto West Sixty-Eighth Street. The universe was too, too big. No matter how much he gasped for air to prove he was a part of it, nothing could take away the cold, dark feeling of infinity.
On some level, he understood that New York did not cause the panic, but there was something inside him that continued to sense panic in the city anyway. When the possibility of moving back to Italy came up, he couldn’t deny the slight sense of relief. So far, it had been four years since he’d been back in his hometown and four years since he’d had any episodes. It was hard to ignore the correlation, even if there was no causation to rely on. It wasn’t that this job was without stress, but somehow the stress felt different. It felt productive, even useful sometimes, and overall made less noise in his head, though he never knew what was comingnext. Sometimes he’d be securing funding to rebuild a pier, but other times he had to try to subdue a very eagerpoliziottofrom running off a beautiful woman who probably wanted to throw something very heavy at his head. Weirdly, he was OK with all of it.
He didn’t know if he should expect to hear shouting upon entering the building—no, probably not. Lora definitely seemed like the type to silently fume a hole into the floor before she would start screaming. He walked directly in the front door and caught Franca’s eye. She frowned deeply and pointed back toward his office. Lora and Vilmari were sitting in the chairs in front of his desk with, as he’d expected, murderous expressions. Luca Zingaretti, his one and only police officer at all of twenty-three years old, stood ramrod straight against the wall next to the door, his eyes focused somewhere ten feet above the heads of the accused.
He nodded to the women, trying not to flinch at their faces, then turned to Luca. He explained that he was the one who had invited these women to come to his office, and though he was late, they were more than welcome to be there, so please accept his deep apologies, but his services were not necessary. Luca, of course, replied that it was considered a federal offense to enter into the office of a government official without said government official present and asked if Andrea would like him to do a sweep of the office to check for any missing items or planted devices.
“Nononononono,” said Andrea, shaking his head vigorously. “Non é necessario. Grazie mille, Luca.” The young cop raised a questioning eyebrow, but was finally appeased. He left, reminding Andrea that he would be nearby in thepiazza should any concerning behaviors require his assistance. “Grazie, sì, grazie mille. OK, ciao.” He slowly closed the door on the retreating Luca. “Ciao-ci-ci-ci-ciao. Ciao. Ciao.”
He turned to the women again. “I am so, so sorry. I truly apologize. I should have been here earlier, but I needed to make a stop before my day began. Please accept my sincerest—”
“I admit that I did not think I would be starting my day breaking the law,” said Lora, her face tight.
“Luca is a little bit enthusiastic, I’m afraid,” he said.
“Asking for her phone number is enthusiastic. Pulling a badge on a tourist is grounds for litigation.” Vilmari pointed at the door.
“I agree. It will not happen again. Please,” he said, gesturing toward the cabinet. “Go right ahead.”
“The door was open, by the way,” said Lora, standing. She wore a black tank top and black shorts that required him to physically force his eyeballs away from watching the muscles in her legs flex with movement. Edging over to the cabinet, she pulled open the left side and gazed at the disorganized contents.
“I know the door is broken. I will fix it. Here, please take your time. There is a table there.” He pointed to a small wooden table under an alcove of arched wooden beams in the back corner of the office. “You can use it as you like. I’ll be here working. The office is technically closed today, as I said.”
“You’re going to be here?” asked Lora. “The whole time.”
“It’s my office.”
“You said it was closed.”
“To the public. I am catching up with work.” He gesturedtoward the listing tower of files perched on the corner of his desk. “I’m really behind on some things, so I’ll be here all day.”
“Is that why things take longer to get done here?” Lora’s eyebrows drew together.
“OK, OK, we got this,” said Vilmari, grabbing a stack of papers from the cabinet. Andrea heard her add quietly, “Let’s keep it light, Mami, it’s going to be a long day.”
“Let me know if you need anything. Really,” he added, though it didn’t seem like either of them was listening. He sighed, pulling the first folder off the stack. If he got anything done today, it would be a miracle.
