That Month in Tuscany (Take Me There)

by Inglath Cooper

  His eyes squint a little as if he’s not sure how to take my question. “No. We . . . it’s just kind of a misunderstanding, I guess.”

  “Really? What kind of misunderstanding?”

  He rakes a hand through his short hair, beginning to look as if he’s sorry he started this conversation.

  “Signore Harper.” The front desk clerk walks back out, forces a smile and says, “I have spoken with our manager, and—”

  I raise a hand behind Harper’s back and wave slightly to get her attention. She glances at me, and I shake my head in a small gesture. I see her blink, look from me to Harper and back again.

  “And our manager has said that is not possible at this time. If she is indeed staying here, we will contact her at an hour when it is acceptable to phone. We will inform her that you are here, if that is the case.”

  If fury in another person can be felt, Antonia and I are definitely feeling Harper’s.

  “Is there a place where I can get some coffee while I wait?” he asks, the words pinched and tight.

  “Yes, in our café. It will be open in just a few minutes. Please, go in and make yourself comfortable.”

  He drops her a curt nod, and then, glancing back at me, says, “Nice talking with you.”

  “You too,” I say, and watch him walk away.

  Once he is out of sight, I hand Antonia my credit card and say, “Could you please clear out both my room and Mrs. Harper’s bill?”

  “Signora Harper is quite popular today,” she says, a small smile on her mouth.

  “Thanks for that,” I say. “I appreciate it.”

  “Of course, Mr. Sawyer,” she says. “And I like your music too.”

  “Thank you,” I say, and for once in recent history, I’m actually glad she knows who I am if it helped prevent Harper from going upstairs.

  “You are welcome.”

  I grab my bag, the letter I had just written to Lizzy still in my hand. I think of how easily her husband could have noticed it. I wonder if I should leave as planned. Give her a chance to make things up with him. Even as I climb the stairs to her room, I’m not sure why I’m doing this. For her? So that she can make her own decision about whether to see him or not. Or for me? Because I don’t want to leave her, after all.

  I tap on her door with the back of my knuckles, lightly. I hear her call out, “Yes?”

  “Lizzy, it’s me.”

  “Ren?” She opens the door and sticks her head around, sleepy-eyed. “What is it? Are you all right?”

  “Yeah. I just saw your husband downstairs.”

  She is suddenly as wide-awake as if I had doused her with ice water. “What? How do you know?”

  “I heard him trying to get Antonia at the front desk to tell him which room you’re in.”

  “It’s barely five-thirty. What were you doing at the front desk?”

  “We might want to get out of here,” I say, avoiding her question.

  “But—”

  “I paid for our rooms. Do you want to go or stay?” I see the confusion on her face, but it only takes a couple of seconds for it to be replaced with resolution.

  “Give me three minutes,” she says.

  I stand outside the door in the hallway, wondering exactly what I’m going to say if he shows up before we manage to get out of here. But Lizzy is right on the mark, and three minutes later, we’re taking the back stairs to the parking lot.

  I open the door and follow her through. We run, our bags jostling on our shoulders, to the Fiat. She hits the remote lock. We throw our luggage in the back and jump in. I get in on the passenger side, not quite as easily. She starts the car and guns it out of the parking lot, spitting pea gravel down the long drive to the main road.

  We drive for ten minutes with neither of us saying anything. She’s gripping the steering wheel so hard that the backs of her fingers are nearly white.

  “You’re fine,” I say.

  “A vigilante,” she says, irony underlining the word. “On the run.”

  “As soon as you want to be caught, you can stop running,” I say.

  She looks at me, and I again see the question in her eyes, even before she voices it. “Why were you downstairs so early with your bag packed?”

  I can’t bring myself to be anything but honest with her. “I thought it would be best if I left,” I say. I expect her to disagree, but she doesn’t.

  “It probably would have been. Why didn’t you?”

  “I’m not really sure,” I say. “Was I wrong to let you know he was there?”

  She shakes her head. “Thank you.”

  “I’d like to say I just did it for you, but I’m not sure that would be the truth.”

  She looks at me then. Something softens in her eyes. She quickly blinks it away, as if recognizing her vulnerability. She puts her gaze back on the road. “I kind of wanted to see San Gimignano.”

  “San Gimignano, it is,” I say.

  23

  Ty

  YOU SIT IN THE small cafe off the main lobby of the hotel, sipping a far-too-strong-for-your-taste coffee while you practice every speck of temper control you can summon up.

  A ten-hour flight across the Atlantic, in coach because there were no last-minute seats available in first class. That miserable experience, and then you finally arrive here only to find that Lizzy has checked out of the hotel in Florence. That she isn’t even in the city. Having to track her down by your credit-card statement.

  Your shirt collar suddenly feels tight around your neck. You run a finger around the rim and blow out a breath of disbelief. The Lizzy you’re married to would never do something like this. Then again, she’s never been told before that you are cheating on her. Or at least you don’t think so.

  A waitress in a white uniform comes to the table every fifteen minutes or so and asks if she can get you anything else. You notice that she never quite meets your eyes, and you start to wonder if you’ve missed something.

  What kind of hotel refuses to give a husband the room number of his wife? Of course they would be taking your word for it, but you do have ID, and you do have the same last name.

  You drum your fingers on the tabletop, replaying the scene at the front desk when the clerk had said you would have to wait until a more reasonable hour. You had been sure she was about to say something entirely different. But then she had glanced at Sawyer. You still can’t believe he was standing right behind you.

  Had something passed between the two of them, or was your imagination simply working overtime? And what could it possibly have to do with Lizzy and your wanting to see her?

  You have no idea, but something doesn’t feel right. As an attorney, you long ago learned to trust your gut. To listen to it, even in the face of evidence to the contrary.

  And your gut is telling you that Sawyer had signaled the clerk not to give him the information.

  The question is, why?

  24

  Kylie

  IT’S THREE O’CLOCK in the morning, and Kylie wants to go back to her dorm.

  Now that some of her alcoholic haze has started to recede, she raises up on one arm to squint at her surroundings. The hotel room is just this side of repulsive. There’s a smell that makes her stomach twitch.

  She glances at Jack, stretched out beside her on the paper-thin white sheets and wonders if she should wake him to walk her back.

  The almost empty bottle of rum on the nightstand catches her eye, and she recalls exactly how intoxicated he had been just before passing out in the middle of kissing her. That’s where the fantasy had come to a startling stop. Rock star in the making. Out of all the girls at the club that night, he had picked her.

  Only now did she think regrettably.

  She swings her legs over the side of the bed, stands and teeters slightly, grabbing onto the bed’s headboard to steady herself. She finds her clothes piece by piece, realizing what a waste it had been to take them off.

  Once she’s dressed, she goes into the bathroom
, turns on the faucet and uses her hand to scoop water into her mouth. It tastes like the room smells. She spits it out and longs for some mouthwash.

  She gropes around the darkened room until she finds her purse and phone, considers calling a cab, but then decides it would take too long to wait. She just wants to get back to her room and into her own bed, with its clean sheets and fat pillow. The dorm is only a mile or so from where she is, and since she can run that in under seven minutes, walking shouldn’t take so much longer, even in the shoes she’s wearing.

  She lets herself out of the room without looking back at Jack, reluctant to further tarnish what little remains of her earlier hopes for the night.

  The motel parking lot is dimly lit, at best, and she sets off down the street that leads back to campus with purpose in her stride, her phone clutched in her right hand. She hears a dog barking somewhere in the distance, traffic sounds from the nearby highway. She can feel her heart thumping with her pace, anxiety accelerating its beat more than the exertion.

  Five minutes into the walk, she’s starting to think this might have been a mistake. There’s absolutely no one around. It’s as if the whole town has disappeared. She can still call a taxi, but the thought of stopping and waiting makes her quicken her stride. The dorm can’t be more than ten minutes away, at the most.

  She focuses on her pace, counting the steps in an effort to tamp back her fear. It works because she can no longer feel her heart pounding against the wall of her chest. The dorm building appears in the distance, and she starts to sweat with relief. She thinks of all the times her mom has told her not to do things like this. “Don’t ever put yourself in a position of vulnerability, Kylie. Bad people look for opportunity.”

  She hears the words as if her mother is standing beside her. She knows that is exactly what she has just done, and she feels a slight flare of gladness that her mother hasn’t been proved right, this time anyway.

  With the building in sight, she slows her pace a bit, her breathing less of an effort.

  She glances at her phone, checking for text messages. There’s one from Peyton.

  Where are you?

  She’s just started to tap in an answer when she hears the car behind her. The engine is loud, and it’s as if the sound has dropped from the sky. She turns to look at it, the headlights blinding her for a moment. She raises a hand to block the glare, but it doesn’t help.

  The car screeches to a stop beside her, the passenger side door opening. Fear grabs her by the throat, and she bolts, knowing in that instant that she should run.

  She focuses on the sounds of her own footsteps, pounding on the concrete sidewalk. She can’t tell if anyone is behind her. It’s only when she feels the hand grab her arm and jerk her to a halt that the scream breaks free from her throat.

  Her phone slides from her grip and skitters away just before she lands with a thud on the unforgiving surface of the sidewalk. A grunt of pain erupts from her throat, but even as it does, she’s fighting to get up.

  He’s too strong though, too big. Her efforts are puny, pathetic.

  The car roars up beside them. The man picks her up as if she is a ball of fluff, opens the back door and shoves her inside. Her left shoulder hits the other side of the car, and pain flashes red in front of her eyes.

  He gets in the back seat with her, slams the door. The car peels away from the curb, shooting off into the night just as consciousness recedes from her vision, and the night is no more.

  25

  Ren

  WE DRIVE FOR forty-five minutes before Lizzy mentions stopping for coffee. I’m dying for a cup, but I figured she would rather put some distance between us and the likelihood of Harper catching up.

  A small sign on the side of the road says Ristorante with an arrow pointing right and then it reads, 2 Km.

  Lizzy points at it and says, “Sound good?”

  “Yeah.”

  She swings the Fiat into the turn. We blow dust up the dirt road that winds past one clay-tile roof house after another until a second sign declaring Ristorante appears, and we turn into the parking lot.

  The outside is plain enough. White stucco. Tile roof. Shutters that droop a little at the edges. Window box flowers add some color.

  Inside, we are greeted with the smells of bread baking in an oven and roasting coffee beans.

  A round-faced woman who introduces herself as the proprietor leads us to a table and asks us what we would like. In my rag-tag Italian, I manage to convey two Caffé Americanos and bread.

  She nods in approval, disappears to the kitchen and returns moments later with a French press pot of coffee and two cups. She pours for us both, sets a pitcher of cream and a dish of sugar cubes on the table, then heads back to the kitchen.

  Lizzy and I sip in silent appreciation.

  “So good,” she says.

  I nod, and then say, “He and I talked a bit.”

  Her gaze pops up to mine.

  “Your . . . Ty.” I start to say husband but somehow can’t bring myself to say the word.

  “I . . . what did you say?”

  “Small talk. Said he liked my music.”

  Her eyes go wide then. “He recognized you.”

  I shrug.

  “Did he know that you and I—”

  I shake my head. “I managed to convey to Antonia, the front-desk clerk, that she shouldn’t tell him where you were. He seemed pretty frazzled.”

  She takes another sip of her coffee. “He’s not used to being bested.”

  “Has he been?”

  “For the moment, anyway.”

  “Did you know he was coming?”

  She glances away and then back at me. “He sent a fax to the hotel in Florence that he would be arriving late yesterday morning.”

  “Ah. Hence the hasty departure.”

  “Yeah,” she says.

  The proprietor brings us a basket of fresh-out-of-the-oven pastries and two glasses of orange juice. We eat in silence for a few minutes. And then, because it has begun to feel like the elephant in the middle of the room, I force myself to say, “Lizzy. What happened last night—”

  “Don’t,” she says quickly, an expression closely resembling pain crossing her face. “Really. Let’s not go there, okay?”

  “I just want you to know that—”

  “There’s nothing to know that I don’t already know. Nothing about any of this has made a grain of sense. Least of all that.”

  I want to tell her that she is wrong, that nothing has made as much sense to me in longer than I can remember. But I know that to do so would be to act as if what I said last night wasn’t true.

  Only, it is true.

  We finish our coffee in silence. I pick up the check and pay at the front register, ignoring Lizzy’s protest that she will pay for her own.

  In the parking lot, a man in a white cook’s apron is yelling something in Italian and chasing a small, very dirty, very matted, possibly once white puppy around a large cypress tree.

  The puppy can’t be more than a few months old and is carrying, more like dragging, what looks like a large soup bone in its small mouth. The man’s face is red, his voice rising with another sputter of angry Italian. He claps his hands together hard. The puppy drops the bone and runs straight under the Fiat.

  I can tell by the look on Lizzy’s face that none of this has settled well with her. The round woman comes out of the restaurant then, spouting off something to the man in equally angry Italian. She points to the door and makes a shooing motion for him to go back inside. She looks at us and shakes her head. “No patience, that one. Someone has left the dog here, a few days ago. I have been feeding a bit, but if I keep doing so, it will not leave.”

  “Maybe it could stay?” Lizzy suggests.

  She shakes her head. “It is covered with the fleas. Not good for ristorante patrons.”

  Lizzy drops down on her knees beside the car, peers under one door and makes a patting motion for the puppy to come out. From the
other side of the car, I drop down and look under to see that it is huddled in a small, dirty ball, shaking like the only leaf left on an end of fall oak tree.

  I sit back while Lizzy coaxes and sweet talks. But the puppy isn’t budging, so I decide to give it a try. I walk around to the driver’s side, stretch flat out on the ground with my head on my forearms and start talking to him.

  It is still shaking so hard that I think I actually hear the poor thing’s teeth chattering.

  Footsteps sound on the gravel drive. The round woman is back, assuring us that we will be able to leave momentarily since she has called the animal polizia. They are on their way.

  I look at Lizzy and see the instantly stricken look on her face. I have to admit I feel a plummet of fear for the little guy myself.

  “What will they do?” Lizzy asks.

  “They have pole thing with hook to pull him out.”

  Lizzy looks at me with a near-frantic expression.

  “I will be inside if you need me,” the woman says.

  “We can’t let them take him,” Lizzy cries, as soon as she leaves. “Maybe I can crawl under there.”

  “He’s scared,” I say. “He might bite you. He’s young, but still—”

  “What else can we do?”

  I turn over on my back, stare up at the sky and do the only thing I know how to do. I start to sing, a low hum at first and then find the words to a song I wrote with Colby when we were just kids.

  First chance to win this fight

  Last chance to get it right

  Come on now, you know it’s true

  Give up now, and it’s all through

  Make up your mind

  Can’t take your time

  “His ears are perked,” Lizzy whispers. “Keep going.”

  And so I do. Snatches of one song or another for ten minutes before he starts to crawl toward me on his belly until Lizzy says, “It’s working.”

  I feel my heart beating really fast and realize how much I want him to come to me. I’m still humming softly when I feel his small chin drop onto my shoulder. I reach my hand back to scratch his side, feel the mats in his fur and wonder how anyone could leave something so young and vulnerable to fend for itself.