Page 17 of Lost Dreams

“What will be your medium?” Roberto returned part of his attention to his food, wrapping pasta around and around his fork.

“Maybe film,” Aurora said, thinking of her Grandmother Francesca’s famous filmmaker father. “Or maybe painting? I’ve always loved painting. It’s too bad that I never really took to piano, like you, Mama. But not everybody has what you have.”

Lorelei waved her hand, but Roberto interjected.

“Your mother was a singular talent,” he said firmly. “I’ve never seen anyone take the stage like she did. Not before nor since.”

Lorelei’s smile waned the slightest bit. Aurora felt the weight of the past tense in her father’s sentences, but she knew better than to call him out.

It was, of course, a mystery in their family as to why Lorelei had stopped playing the piano. It felt too personal to ask about. Aurora imagined she would never get to know.

Rather than hang around Rome all summer, waiting for the Berlin art semester to begin, Aurora went traveling by herself. She’d worked for years at her father’s restaurants as a server, and she’d saved up a great deal so that she could take buses and trains all over Europe. Her parents had shown her their version of the world—their high-class version—but she decided to take control, going to dive bars in Athens, exploring caves in Spain and France, trying her best to master other languages, and meeting travelers in hostels from all over the world.

Everywhere she looked, Aurora was inspired to make art. She kept a little notebook with her at all times so that she could write down her ideas or sketch things out. She wanted to charge into the first semester at her Berlin art school and show her professors what she was all about.

Maybe because of how busy she was, and maybe because of how difficult it was to own three restaurants across Italy, Aurora’s conversations with her parents became fewer and farther between. Nadia and Pino still texted her pretty often, but they were busy with their own lives. Aurora felt an isolation that she’d never encountered before, one that she knew she needed to become more familiar with if she was going to be an artist in Berlin. She couldn’t lean back on the comforts of home, not if she wanted to grow.

Aurora returned to Rome the week before her move to Berlin to pack the last of her things and arrange for everything to be shipped to Germany. While there, she experienced her parents’ summertime chaos and hardly saw her brother and sister. The night before her departure, they all went out to dinner, but Roberto had to leave the table halfway through to deal with a problem in his Sardinian restaurant, and Lorelei seemed distracted and upset.

“What’s going on with them?” Aurora asked her brother and sister later on, at home.

Pino and Nadia shrugged.

“It’s been a weird summer,” Nadia explained.

“I don’t think they’re getting along very well,” Pino said.

This was the first time Aurora had ever been frightened that her parents might divorce. She’d never imagined it before.

But she couldn’t dwell on her parents’ problems for long. Soon, she was getting off the train in Berlin and wheeling her suitcases to a waiting taxi, which took her to her pint-sized studio apartment in the quaint neighborhood of Friedrichshain. Once there, she decorated the place to her liking and prepared for her first week of classes.

Little did she know, her life was about to change forever.

On her first day of classes at her Berlin art school, Aurora met her professor Sebastian. He was in his mid-twenties, maybe, but he’d already made a name for himself in the Berlin and European art worlds, as he’d made a series of paintings and sculptures that attacked what was going on in the government and actually got the conversation going in a different direction. He was proof that art was a living thing, that it could change things politically and emotionally.

He was also sensationally handsome.

Aurora had never seen anyone like him. He was maybe six-foot-four, with broad shoulders and blond hair and an air about him that felt grounding yet also made you feel like you could do anything you set your mind to. When Aurora showed him the sketches and paintings and notes she’d made over the summer, he sat with them for a full half hour, going over what she’d done, then talked with her for more than four hours about how she envisioned her first semester at the university. “What do you want to accomplish? Because I want to help you get there.”

Aurora had never been taken so seriously before.

At the end of her first week, Aurora called home. She was sitting at her kitchen table, drinking tea and watching the rain outside her window. On her screen, in a video chat, sat her mother and father, both of them looking drowsy and anxious.

“I’m definitely in the right place,” Aurora told them. “I can’t believe it, but my professor really believes in me. He thinks I have a shot of really making it.”

Lorelei smiled. “Of course you do, honey. You’re brilliant.”

Roberto grunted in response but seemed distracted. Soon, he left the call to make another, leaving Lorelei and Aurora alone.

“Mama, is everything okay?” Aurora asked, surprising herself. Maybe she could ask her mother more about Lorelei’s life, now that she was away from it.

“Everything’s great!” Lorelei so clearly lied. “We’re so happy you found a program that speaks to your heart. You know, when I first made a real shot at performing as a pianist, it was because I met an agent who really pushed me. Maybe this professor of yours, Sebastian, is your version of my Raffaello.”

“Tio Raffaello?” Aurora had met him when she was a girl, but she hadn’t known that Raffaello had been her mother’s piano agent.

“Of course. Oh, how I miss him sometimes.” Lorelei chewed her lower lip, and Aurora remembered that Raffaello had died of cancer several years ago. But by then, Lorelei hadn’t been a world-class pianist any longer. Why had Lorelei’s career dried up?

Before Aurora could ask, Lorelei admitted she had to go help Roberto with something.