Lily imagined all the things she would miss in the years to come: Pee-Wee football games, science fairs, birthday celebrations, first dates, senior proms.
The waves of Lake Ontario rushed towards the shore, the sandy beach clean and unmarked by the footprints of little boys. The house stood watch over the sledding hill, its rooms finally quiet; there were no dirty socks on the floor in front of the TV, no juice boxes in the refrigerator.
Lily freely tumbled into a sense of profound disappointment about her life. She finally understood what Dolores must have felt, what her own mother must have experienced - an all-pervasive pain that Lily herself could never have imagined, a sorrow fashioned by the knowledge that life didn’t want you, that you lived in a world that snickered at your failures as it withheld its blessings and capriciously doled out its cruel curses, never providing a clue as to how you might gain its favor.
The sun dipped its toes into the water, blazing orange across the sky. Lily stood up and went into the house, letting the door of the front porch slam behind her.
Lily stood in a scalding shower until her skin was raw and dimpled. She kept waiting to feel better, kept thinking that she should stop the tears, but she couldn’t find a good reason to try.
She grabbed her robe from the back of the bathroom door, then opened the medicine cabinet, and dropped the little brown bottle into her pocket. She had lost her sense of time, but since it was dark out, she probably wasn’t supposed to be at work. She wondered what Mrs. Windham-Childs would say to her now, what bit of advice about posture or etiquette she may deem applicable to this particular situation.
“We’ve even seen some promising results from pilot programs implemented with the underprivileged children right here in our own neighborhood,” mimicked Lily.
She stood in the hallway between the boys’ bedrooms, unable to turn around and face their absence, afraid to inhale the lingering scent of them. She let her body fall back against the wall, and then slid herself down to the floor. She sat at the top of the stairs for hours, unable to proceed from that spot.
She had done the best she’d known how with her own boys, to see that they had as many privileges as she’d been able to give them. When they were babies, she’d read her copy of Dr. Spock until its pages had come loose from the binding. She had diligently created a daily schedule that provided them with consistency, security, and boundaries. Despite Joe’s craziness, Lily had always thought she’d done a pretty good job keeping them well and safe. Despite all of her other failures, she’d always thought of herself as a good mother. But children don’t leave good mothers. They don’t turn their backs on good mothers lying injured and crying on the ground. Lily played the events of that night in her mind over and over again, wondering what she might have done differently, trying to make sense of how things had gone so wrong. If there were answers, they would not reveal themselves to her.
She glanced down the stairs, to the first floor. It seemed so far away, the effort to get there too great. She swung her legs over the top step, grasped the railing, and slid down the stairs to the dining room. She hoisted herself up with a grunt, picked up one of the boxes stacked there and upended it, spilling the contents onto the dining room floor. A dark laugh escaped from her throat.
She kicked at the contents of the box, sorting through toys and books with her foot. She picked up the next box, and upended it. Glasses wrapped in newspaper tumbled out and rolled across the floor.
“Well, I was looking for the liquor,” she said, “but at least now I have a proper glass.”
She repeated the process with each box, dumping the contents onto the dining room floor.
“Who said unpacking is hard?” she laughed.
The sixth box delivered an unopened bottle of vodka, half a fifth of tequila, and a sealed envelope addressed to Lily.
“How perfect,” she said.
She tucked the envelope under her arm, and placed the vodka and the glass on the end table next to the couch, which had been positioned to provide the best view of the lake. As the horizon warned of a new day, Lily broke the seal on the vodka and poured herself a glass.
“Today is the first day of the rest of your life!” She was unsure of what to expect, never having drunk straight vodka; she winced at the first sip. The second sip went down easier. The third sip was a gulp that drained the glass.
“This party sucks!” she exclaimed. “What it needs is a little music!”
Lily tore open the envelope and shook out the CD. She popped it into the boom box, and hit “play”. She poured herself a second glass.
When you look at me, tell me
What do you see
Would you be surprised to learn
That in my heart desire burns
“To Curtis,” said Lily, raising her glass. “Who was kind enough to let me stay in his house. Wherever you are, Curtis, I hope to see you again soon. We can go fishing for real next time.”
Lily lit a cigarette, and filled her lungs with the hot acrid smoke as she walked over to the window. She watched as the rolling waves of Lake Ontario ended their journey at her doorstep. The grey-blue waters stretched out as far as her vision could take her. She could understand why people thought the world ended at the edge of the sea. She only believed in the beyond because other people had told her it was there. That was the only reason she knew that the currents of this great lake rode out to the St. Lawrence River and into the Atlantic Ocean. She imagined what it would be like to be water, to flow and travel as you pleased, with no body to contain you, no life to limit you. She imagined herself disappearing into it, flowing out across the Atlantic, slipping through the Strait of Gibraltar, and into the Mediterranean Sea. It didn’t seem so far away, if you could imagine that you were water. Perhaps she would lap at the shore, and Iris would hear her, and come down, and dip her toes in. But Lily wouldn’t even know where to begin looking for her, and anyway, Iris probably wouldn’t recognize her; she would just see water. Lily would be stuck there, slapping up against the rocky shores she’d seen in photographs, clapping furiously against the stones, “Iris! Iris!” But Iris would just sit, maybe turn to Gregorio and say, “Did you hear something? I thought I heard my name,” and he would say, “It must be your imagination, Piccolina.” Then she would pour two glasses of cognac or something sophisticated like that, and they would resume discussing their plans to go diving in the Mediterranean, or hiking in the Alps, as Iris wrote in those letters she used to send.
Lift me up, take me higher
Feel the power, feed the fire
Lift me high above the clouds
Up to a place where dreams come true
Lift me high enough to touch
The sun, the stars, the moon
“To Iris.” Lily raised her glass, forcing the vodka past her tongue and down her throat. She reached into her robe pocket and broke the seal on the little brown bottle. She shook a pile of pills out onto the end table and scooped them into her palm.
You hold the power in your hands
To touch what most don’t understand
So trust your heart, you’ll know just what to do
Lift me up, I’m reaching out for you
“And this one,” she said, raising a full glass to the rising sun, “is for you, Dolores.” Lily tossed the pills into her mouth, threw her head back as she drained the liquid, and then lay down and waited for darkness.
9. Iris
“Beautiful city, isn’t it?”
In her whole life, Iris had never told anyone to shut up and leave her alone, though that was precisely what she wanted to do. Instead, she turned to face the woman in the petunia pink warm-up suit who smiled through glistening lips coated in the exact same shade. Iris wondered how some women did that, whether they bought clothes to match their lipstick, or vice versa. She also wondered why, despite the circumstances, she would notice such details, while failing to grasp what the woman had said to her. “Pardon me?” she said.
“Roma, I
mean. Beautiful. Isn’t that right, Marty?” the woman said, turning to the man seated at her left, who looked up from his newspaper to peer at his plump pink wife over the rim of his reading glasses.
“Too much goddamn walking,” the man said. “My feet are one big blister. The food, though. Now that was good.” He patted his belly and smiled at Iris. “Met some nice folks from Jersey on the tour bus, too. Got plans to meet them in Atlantic City. Lookin’ forward to that, aren’t we, hon?” The woman bobbed her head, the dewlap beneath her chin jiggling with enthusiasm. Iris debated briefly whether she should tell the woman she had lipstick on her front right incisor, but said nothing.
She wished she had been quick enough to respond, “Non capisco l’inglese,” when the lady started talking to her, but it was just as well; she struck Iris as the type who would go to great lengths to make herself understood in any language by speaking slowly and loudly, which would be even more annoying. Iris leaned into the aisle as far as her buckled seat belt would allow, craning her neck to see whether she could spot any vacant seats on Alitalia flight 1212, just departed from Rome Fiumicino airport, with non-stop service to JFK, but the only alternatives were middle seats, where she would be wedged between two other passengers. Resigned to spending the next eight hours with chatty neighbors, she plugged in her earphones.
The nervous energy that had been sustaining her bottomed out as she surrendered to the plane the responsibility of holding up her body and getting it to where it needed to be. Shivering with exhaustion, she tore open the plastic bag she had been sitting on, and unfurled a thin green blanket that crackled with static; she tucked it gratefully around her trembling legs.
The shock of her father’s unexpected death and, more recently, of Henry’s fatal accident, had caused a shift in Iris’s perception of permanence. Painfully aware that tragedy could strike at any time, she vowed never to be caught unprepared again, and always carried her passport with her whenever she left home. Though such foresight could do nothing to cushion the blow delivered by Violet’s phone call, it had enabled her to catch a plane from Cagliari to Rome the previous evening and secure a seat on the morning’s first outbound flight to New York. Too confused to deal with the practicalities of finding a hotel, she had wandered aimlessly around the Fiumicino departures terminal until her indecision became a decision; she ended up spending the night in the airport, where she eventually attached herself to a molded plastic chair riveted to a row of other molded plastic chairs, and waited for the check-in area to open.
As the plane circled over the Mediterranean and climbed to cruising altitude, Iris heaved a sigh heavy with impatience and dread, one moment wishing the thousands of kilometers ahead of her were already behind her, the next wishing she could remain suspended above the earth indefinitely. She tucked the blanket more tightly around her thighs, and thought of reclining her seat, but didn’t want to bother the person behind her the way the person seated in front of her was bothering her. She wished sleep would come to rescue her from her sadness and restore her strength, but doubted it would be possible without the pills she had forgotten in her haste to leave Carloforte. Neither the dark lenses of her sunglasses nor the puffy lids she closed over burning eyes could shut out the images of the past twenty-four hours which danced across her mind on their way to becoming firmly embedded in her brain.
Was it just the previous morning that she had taken part in the mattanza? Despite the rapidly increasing distance between herself and the island of San Pietro, she could still see the tunas thrashing about wildly, still smell their blood in her nostrils, still taste it in her mouth, still feel it on her skin, still see it on the clothes balled up at the bottom of her backpack and on the sneakers she wore on her feet. After that, everything had happened so quickly: the phone call, the discussion with Max, the hasty preparations for her departure.
Tears rolled down the well-traveled path on her cheeks as her thoughts turned to Max. Through the blur of events and emotions, she recalled all too vividly his expressions and comments when she had announced that she must leave at once, and wanted him to come with her, to be by her side, and take his place in her family. First, he had laughed, and asked if she were serious. Then he had told her he was sorry for what she was going through, but she could hardly expect him to just drop an important assignment and fly halfway across the world for the funeral of a person he had never met. Next, he had tried to convince her that she should stay on with him, insisting it was pointless for her to rush home, that there was nothing she could do that the rest of the family couldn’t. Finally, he had reminded her that he had gone to a lot of trouble to bring her along, and that if she deserted him, she would not only be leaving him without an assistant, she would make him look bad.
Iris was too overwhelmed by the news, too stunned by Max’s reaction, to do anything but cry. She went through the mechanical motions of packing, while Max arranged for one of the crew to drive her back to Cagliari. The look on his face as she boarded the ferry to Portovesme, had been one of hurt and betrayal. She had seen variations of that same expression in the past, each time they had spent a day or an evening together, at the end of which she had been forced to abandon Max, and return home to Gregorio. It was an image that picked at the old scabs of pity and guilt that failed to heal; it made her remember the look on Lily’s face when she went away to college, and the look on her father’s face when he walked her down the aisle, and the look on Auntie Rosa’s face when she moved to Italy, and the look on Gregorio’s face when she fled their home. It was the image that accompanied her over France and Ireland, and out across the Atlantic ocean.
“I’m sorry Ma’am, but this flight is full,” the agent at the domestic airline’s JFK service desk said with as much courtesy as minimum wage could buy. Sorry her ass. She couldn’t care less. All she wanted was to get her fat butt out of there and drive home to some shitty apartment in Astoria or Brooklyn, where some freeloading boyfriend was sitting on a recliner, pumping up his paunch with beer and watching whatever sports it was the time of the year for on cable TV.
“But you don’t understand,” Iris said. “I have to get there tonight. I can’t wait.”
“Due to weather-related issues, two earlier flights to Rochester were also cancelled. We are doing our best to reschedule all our passengers. We can put you on a flight tomorrow at noon, flying into Syracuse,” she said, staring down at her computer as she spoke, her acrylic nails hammering the keyboard.
“But I don’t want to go to Syracuse tomorrow at noon! Or ever! I want to go to Rochester. Tonight! It’s an emergency!” She bit her lip to stop it from trembling, determined not to melt into a puddle of tears again, like she had back at the gate when her flight, after being delayed seven times in five hours, was finally relegated to the status of cancelled.
“I’m sorry, Ma’am. That’s the best we can do. You’re booked on the noon flight.” She glanced up briefly to hand Iris a new boarding pass, then turned her attention back to her computer. “Kindly step aside so I can assist the other people in line.”
Iris scanned the crowd of annoyed passengers who, like her, had been swept from the departure gates by the wave of delays and cancellations and found themselves like so many pieces of driftwood washed up at the customer service desk. Surely the dismay caused by their thwarted plans was in no way comparable to the anguish Iris was suffering. She wished someone would sense her desperation and offer a solution, but all they would do was check their watches and cell phones obsessively, roll their eyes and glare at her as if she were a madwoman. Mad she was. If the airline had been honest about the circumstances, she could have rented a car hours ago and been well on her way to Rochester. Now it was dark, and from what she could see through the thick glass panes overlooking the tarmac, the rain was coming down even harder than before.
She was beyond exhausted, but there was no way in hell she would spend a second night in an airport. She had to get home. Tonight.
Two hundred miles later, Iris wa
s fighting against the hypnotic effect of the windshield wipers, and trying to focus her bleary eyes on the road ahead. Her progress north and west across the state of New York in the downpour had been marked by a succession of coffee counters and rest rooms, and now it was time for both; she swerved just in time to catch the exit ramp to a service station. She was just north of Binghamton, and estimated she had another two and a half hours to go. She could make it. She had to. She pulled into one of the many empty spots, parked, cut the engine, then checked her cell phone. There was a message from Max.
cazzo capo i cant believe you left
Her heart swelled as she recalled once more the expression of hurt and accusation on Max’s face. He was right, it was horrible of her to abandon him so suddenly, but what was she supposed to do? She thought back to just a few hours before the phone call that had changed everything, when the day had seemed so full of promise as she lay next to Max, stroking his thick, black hair while he slept in the early morning hours, smiling to herself as she wondered how many more islands they would visit over the summer, how many other unforgettable adventures they would share in their life together. She typed a reply:
Still trying to get home. Be back asap. Baci.
It would be morning in Italy now. The sun would be climbing in the deep blue sky, its rays already deliciously warm. It hardly seemed possible such a sky could be on the same planet as the one pissing on her head as she sprinted across the parking lot. She made a beeline for the ladies’ room, where the sound of her coffee-induced pee streaming into the toilet shattered the after hours silence. At the sink, she splashed her face with cold water, unwittingly catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror. The eyes looking back at her in the fluorescent light were puffy and shot through with red, but the effects of the Mediterranean sun and sea shone in her tanned face, and in the streaks of blond highlighting her tousled curls. It shamed Iris to admit that apart from the sadness and strain in her eyes, she had never looked this good.
[Iris and Lily 01.0 - 03.0] The Complete Series Page 128
