Midnight at the Tuscany Hotel

by James Markert

  She nestled deeper into the niche created by his chest and shoulder, seemingly comforted by his words. He couldn’t take his eyes from her hair.

  Juba had been misted by enough waves to soak his shirt, so he removed it, revealing a broad, muscled chest, the cavern from which that deep voice bellowed. He watched the waves as if they calmed him, too, closing his eyes to the occasional spray. It was as if he were speaking to it, to the water. To the sea.

  “We were all birthed from the waters, were we not?”

  Robert watched their new friend, confused.

  Magdalena tilted her head out toward the vast waters, ears perked as if she’d heard some distant voice calling her name. She smiled, leaned back into his shoulder. “From the waters we shall rise.”

  She and Juba shared a smile.

  Juba told them that he, too, was an orphan—from a tiny Sudanese village called Juba, near the White Nile. Robert said nothing. He didn’t tell them that he was also an orphan. That Cotton Gandy had found him on the banks of the Conecuh River in Alabama while fishing and had taken him home. After his pregnant wife miscarried two days later, they’d played it off as if he was the newborn—their gift from God—and nobody had ever been the wiser.

  He especially didn’t tell them—not then, anyway—that ever since he was old enough to read about the ancients, he’d believed he was somehow one of them—that he was a god wielding that hammer and chisel. And that his fourth-grade teacher, after explaining that Leonardo da Vinci was not only a sculptor and painter but also an inventor and mathematician, had asked him during class, “Robert, how do you know so much about the Renaissance?” And he’d answered, standing with his arms outstretched: “Mrs. Peters, I am the Renaissance.”

  But it was Magdalena’s hair that had brought about his now-constant smile. He’d seen flickers of orange the day he first set eyes on her, flickers of colored strands every day thereafter, and he’d wept. For what he wouldn’t tell them, couldn’t even begin to explain, was that except for in his dreams, in seventeen years on earth, the fire-orange of her hair had been the first color, other than black and white and gray, that he’d ever seen.

  Even now, as the waves lulled them and the mist sprayed and the water somehow whispered the unspoken, her hair shone so starkly colored in his otherwise gray world that it looked wet, like fresh paint. He couldn’t take his eyes from it. And then, upon her stone-colored shoulder, where her dress sleeve and arm and hand and fingers had been a mixture of grays and whites and stone colors since he’d known her, he suddenly saw the smallest hint of what he knew to be yellow—first as a flicker and then as a dollop as the true colors of her clothes and her skin revealed themselves to him.

  Twenty-One

  1946

  Juba was adamant that they call no doctor, ultimately convincing them all, even a panicked Valerie, that he was fine and would take care of what he called the metal splinter on his own. So he pulled the bullet from his arm with some tweezers, a leather belt made into a tourniquet, and a few slugs of Old Sam whiskey John had found behind the bar to ease the pain. He was bandaged and standing fully alert by the time the new last call went off at nine.

  The bullet had hurt like the dickens, he said, and the blood trickling from it had certainly been real, but the collapse on the piazza had been for show: “Seemed like the perfect time for a diversion.” And the diversion had worked. Officer Tubby had been so rattled from accidentally shooting someone—and not just someone, but a Gandy celebrity—that he and his officers seemed to have forgotten why they were there at all. After cautiously approaching to help the felled giant, who halted them with an upraised hand and eyes that said come no closer, they had fled the hotel. The reporter, Landry Tuffant, hadn’t been far behind. After promising Vitto he’d be back, he’d chased after the coppers, asking why they weren’t pressing charges or arresting Robert Gandy for attempted murder and euthanasia.

  “Has anyone died?” Officer Tubby had called over his shoulder on his way out of the hotel.

  “No . . . not yet, at least,” Tuffant had responded.

  “Then there’s nothing I can do. There’s no proof that water does anything but restore people’s memory, just as the newspapers have been saying all along.”

  * * *

  Dinner that night had been a quiet affair. The day’s excitement seemed to have sucked the energy from the piazza, from the hotel itself, and now that night was upon them, many of the guests seemed lost in the contemplations of their next move. To stay or go? To continue drinking the water and take their chances or to stop drinking it and return to the painful life that had brought them here in the first place?

  Now, with the sun below the horizon and darkness creeping in, Vitto sat on the lip of the fountain, listening to the water spill and ripple. Most of the guests had gone into their rooms, and even Robert was nowhere to be seen, his slab of marble still untouched. Juba, too, had opted to rest until time for last call.

  It had been a frightening thing to see Juba go down. And for Vitto, the worst part hadn’t been the blood coming from Juba’s arm, as alive and red as it had been, dripping onto the travertine, but the fear he’d seen in Valerie’s eyes when Juba fell. Seeing the panic in her eyes had nearly paralyzed Vitto.

  The quickness and desperation she’d shown running to his side had reminded him in a flash that Juba was much more to her than a friend. After her parents abandoned her at the hotel, Juba had been her father figure from day one—from minute one—holding her hand the instant she walked from their room, rubbing the sleepers from her eyes and asking where her mother and father were. He’d held her hand as he walked the grounds with her, turning it into a game to find them—“They’re surely around here somewhere, Miss Valerie”—held her hand when the entire hotel began looking an hour later to no avail, held her hand when they realized the car was no longer in the parking lot and the dressers in the room were empty of the clothes that had been neatly stacked and folded within. And later that evening, when they found the note Valerie’s parents had left on Juba’s windowsill—hard evidence that they’d deliberately left their daughter, who they’d claimed was better off there without them, better off learning her music and learning life from Juba than from two parents still searching for themselves—Juba had gathered her in his arms and held her close.

  It was all this that Vitto saw flash before his wife’s eyes when Juba hit the travertine. He now sat on the fountain seeking to breathe fresh air, to clear his head, to avoid holing himself back up with Mr. Carney’s wooden ships, but mostly because, like a child scolded and awaiting punishment, he knew his was coming—and well deserved.

  If it hadn’t been for his temper, his near drowning of Landry Tuffant, perhaps the reporter would not have been so dead set on ruining them. If he hadn’t given his young son a hand grenade, William never would have thrown it across the piazza at the most intense of times. If he hadn’t thrown the grenade, Officer Tubby would never have panicked and fired his weapon. If he wouldn’t have fired his weapon, Juba would have never been shot, and Valerie wouldn’t have had the second worst scare of her lifetime.

  Valerie’s approaching footsteps sounded a few minutes later, signaling the beginning or end of something. She sat beside him on the fountain, but not too close. A good minute went by, and neither of them said a word. If it was possible to have a silent argument, they were doing so now. He’d have a hard time writing this one down to bury it.

  Finally, he gathered the courage to speak. “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too.” She glanced up at him but then looked down between her narrow feet.

  Her apology put him on edge. She couldn’t be sorry for anything she’d done because she hadn’t done anything wrong. So the alternative was that she was apologizing for something she was about to do, something she was about to say.

  He braced himself for the worst. But still she said nothing, which might have been hardest of all, because the two of them throughout their childhoods and early-adult lives had
never been lost for words. And then finally she said, “I don’t know how to fix this, Vitto.”

  “I don’t either.”

  “I thought a few weeks ago we’d done it, but it . . . it didn’t hold.”

  He looked at her. “But at least it was a glimmer.”

  “A glimmer of what?”

  “Of some hope.”

  She nodded, couldn’t deny it, which meant that there was some left. Hope. His posture eased on the fountain. He wanted to reach out and touch her, but he didn’t. Wanted to rub her back and shoulder and tuck the loose strands of hair behind her ear in order to see her face more clearly, but he didn’t. “We had an argument the night Mamma died. You remember?”

  She nodded.

  “You were right in worrying about her. We were blind, me and Dad. And after that I was just . . . angry.”

  She bit her lip. “I have scars, too, Vitto. This hasn’t been easy.”

  He didn’t have to ask what. All of it. The war. Dealing with Robert when his mind was gone. Living with an angry, unpredictable husband who frightened their son. But it now made some sense that his anger had all begun with his mother.

  “Her death made me angry, Val. The mystery of it. The rumors. I was angry at her. Angry that she wasn’t alive to be at our wedding. Angry she wasn’t alive for William’s birth. Angry because . . . because she wasn’t perfect like I thought she was. And I was angry at Dad because he didn’t do enough to stop her. I just . . . I don’t know . . .”

  He felt Valerie looking at him, longer than a glance, and they locked eyes. “You’re angry at yourself, Vitto.”

  He didn’t disagree; it was easier to admit now that it had been verbalized. He was angry at himself, and he’d taken that off with him to the war, which had made him even angrier.

  “Your mother was a wonderful woman,” Valerie said. “But she wasn’t flawless. And there near the end, she was falling apart.”

  “I know that now. I think I knew it then.”

  “Me and Juba,” she said. “We would play for her. He sensed it, too, that something wasn’t right. The music helped calm her in the last weeks.”

  “Did you know she was drinking that water?”

  “No. But she killed herself because she had stuffed it down, Vitto. She killed herself because she had buried it.” She stressed the word bury—hating the way that, even as a child, Vitto had buried his own unhappy memories. “She never should have told you to do that. As innocent as it was, it was misguided. Here she was, a woman with the inability to remember giving advice to a little boy who couldn’t stop remembering.”

  She stared out across the piazza, toward the bar where Magdalena’s round wall clock ticked. Ticktock goes the clock, Vitto.

  “You can be hurt by your memories, Vitto, but you can also be healed by them.” She gestured to all the rooms, all the guests still residing within. “Look around.” She nodded toward Robert’s room, his closed door in the shadows. “You’ve always resented your father, but he’s the one still alive. There’s still time with him.”

  He scooted closer, inched until their legs touched, and then he draped his arm around her shoulders. She rested her head against his. “Dad said Mamma told a story during last call, hours before she jumped. We’d argued about her, so I didn’t attend that night.”

  “Neither did I,” said Valerie. “But I remember an eerie silence across the piazza after she finished. Like the story she had told weighed heavy on people’s minds.”

  “Or it was too confusing to understand.”

  She nodded, and they shared a smile. “And then it was lost in the sorrow the next morning. I asked Juba about the story she told that night.”

  “And?”

  “He said that maybe sometime he’d try to tell it.”

  “Of course he did.”

  “But not yet.”

  Vitto laughed. “But not yet.” He held her, listened to the breeze circle in from the ocean. He tempted fate. “Is this an argument I need to run out and bury with my shovel?”

  She elbowed him in the ribs. “It’s a conversation, Vitto, one we probably should have had before now. But promise me you’ll never bury another.”

  “I promise.”

  “Good,” she said. And then, “This is a start.”

  “Yes.” He kissed the top of her head, thought about suggesting they sneak up to the loft of the olive mill.

  “Are you ready for your penance?”

  I’d rather go up to the loft. “I suppose.”

  She disengaged, gripped his hand. “Practice being a father. William’s in the room waiting for you.”

  “He’s still awake?”

  “It’s been an exciting day,” she said. “You’re the one who gave him that stupid grenade. You can level the punishment.”

  Twenty-Two

  “I promise to not throw the hand grenade where there’s people.”

  “Good,” Vitto said, sitting on the bed opposite his son, the two facing each other, one with his feet firmly on the floor, the other dangling.

  William adjusted the notepad and pen on his lap. “How many times do I have to copy it?”

  “How about a hundred,” Vitto said. “Can you count that high?”

  “No.”

  “How high can you count?”

  “Ten.”

  Vitto figured ten times would be too lenient for Valerie’s liking. With that look she’d put on him earlier—the one that said you’d better take this seriously—he probably needed to come down harder on the boy than he was inclined to do. Vitto was impressed William could write at all, let alone a full sentence, albeit just a copy of one. To him ten times was plenty. But instead he said, “How about you copy that sentence until your hand falls off?”

  “Really?”

  “Or how about until it gets tired?”

  “Okay.”

  William reached his hand out, and Vitto shook it. “Are you really my dad?”

  “I am.” Vitto waited through weird silence. “Does that work for you?”

  “Does what work for what?”

  “Is it okay that I’m your dad?”

  William shrugged. “You always been my dad?”

  “Yes. But I had to go away for a while.”

  “Mommy says you’re my dad, but you came back different.”

  “True, but how about I promise to fix that? I’m better now.” At least I know our relationship shouldn’t have restarted with the gifting of a Nazi hand grenade. William stared, nodded. Vitto said, “I’m sure I’ve done and said some things since my return that have frightened you.”

  “I asked Mommy if I should bury those memories in the ground like you do.”

  “You’ve noticed?”

  “Yes. But she said that would be a silly thing to do.”

  “Yes. Very silly. As childhood habits sometimes are.”

  William nodded. “I thought Grandpa Robert was my dad.”

  “That’s ’cause you don’t remember me from before I went to war.”

  “Maybe if I drank some of that fountain water I could remember you better.”

  “No, William. You don’t go anywhere close to that fountain water. Do you hear me?”

  He nodded. “What’s in it?”

  “We don’t know for sure.”

  “What’s war like?”

  Vitto appreciated the change of course, although not the direction. He didn’t feel the need to sugarcoat his answer, though. This was already the longest talk he’d ever had with his son by far, and he thought some truth medicine might help bridge the gap between them even faster.

  “War is terrible, William. People die. They kill each other. You know what that means?” William shrugged. “That grenade I gave you was something that could kill some people. That’s why everyone reacted like they did. They didn’t know it’s a dud.”

  William nodded and changed course again. “How’s Juba?”

  “Juba is just fine.”

  “Good. I like him.”
/>   “We all do. Now, time to get to work.”

  William focused hard on copying that first sentence, the tip of his tongue protruding from his pale lips. The pencil scratching over the paper and through the quiet room was poignantly palpable. William finished it successfully and moved down to the next line to begin again.

  He looked up midsentence. Vitto nodded his approval and walked to the window. Robert was out there now, staring at that marble slab. Otherwise the piazza was empty. Last call had come and gone. Had anyone bothered to attend?

  In total, so far, only twenty-seven guests had checked out of the hotel after Valerie’s announcement, and nearly all of them had a loved one making the decision for them, as Beverly had done with Louise. He’d heard more than once, “It’s not your life to be deciding about.” Or variations of those words. And they were right, but that didn’t make the situation any less difficult. If the water was killing at the same time it was restoring, he didn’t want Robert drinking it either, and he’d told him as much.

  He’d gotten the answer he’d assumed he would.

  “Not your life, Vitto. I’m not going back to being what I was—a child needing to have my rear end wiped.”

  A life gone full circle.

  A shadow moved near the hotel entrance, and Vitto flinched at the window. A stooped-shouldered man in a fedora walked across the moonlit piazza, went right to the fountain, and dipped a cup into the water. Mr. Franklin, who’d been the first to leave in the afternoon, was apparently the first to return. Did he crave the water like a drug? Or did he just miss the way things had been? The way he’d been. Mr. Franklin drank from the cup and stood there for a minute as if content. Then he walked to the room he’d vacated that morning and closed the door behind him.

  William said, “My hand’s tired.”

  “How many have you done?”

  William counted, looked up. “Six.”

  “That’s good enough.”

  William put the notepad aside and swung his legs again. “How’d I throw it?”