I stayed where I was.
“If you wanted to get me in a hotel room,” I said, “we didn’t need to fly all the way to Italy. There’s probably dirty motels in New York.”
“That’s not fair,” he said.
He sounded genuinely hurt, but I didn’t turn around to see his face. We were quiet then for a few minutes. Outside, I could still hear the traffic in the street. The staccato honk of the horns. I heard Daniel breathing heavily and I thought maybe he had gone to sleep. But, then he spoke up again.
“You don’t really think he’s watching us, do you?” he said.
He paused a moment.
“I mean, you don’t believe...”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “It’s hard, but I don’t think so. I thought he was still alive on the Internet for a while, but it just turned out to be some creep who was stalking me.”
Daniel sighed.
“Why would anyone who’s dead spend their timewatching the living?” he said. “That’s what I want to know. If there’s an afterlife, there have to be more interesting things to do.”
“Like what?” I said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Flying. Being out of your corporeal body. Living outside of time. Any of that would beat the TV station of my life. I can tell you that much.”
“Mine too, I guess,” I said. “Except when I’m naked.”
He didn’t say anything to that. I raised my body off the mattress and crawled up to the top of the bed and settled into a spot next to him. We lay still for a minute, only inches apart. I felt like I could feel every ounce of blood pulsing through my body.
“Put your arm around me,” I said.
He put his arm around me.
“No,” I said. “Like this.”
I moved it over my hip and across my waist. He kept it there.
“Look,” I said. “I didn’t really mean what I said before. About the hotel. But I just want you to know, I have to be here for Jonah. It’s the only thing that’s holding things together right now.”
I rested my hand on his chest.
“I understand,” he said.
I blinked. The jet lag was finally kicking in, and I found I could barely keep my eyes open.
“Some honeymoon, huh?” I said.
He let out a long breath.
“I don’t have any others to compare it to,” he said. “Maybe it’s perfect.”
And with that, we both closed our eyes.
34
The next morning, we grabbed our small bags and boarded a tour bus and took off through the heart of Sicily. The bus was big enough for fifty, but there were only five of us. Me and Daniel and some random guys on a TV film crew from the States. There was a hefty dude named Paul, who had the largest, thickest black glasses I have ever seen, and another slightly less hefty man named Archie, who had tattoo sleeves and a fanny pack.
The film guys were camped out at the back of the bus, surrounded by black cases of equipment, passing a tablet Scrabble game back and forth without speaking. Finally, there was our driver, a white-haired Sicilian who only answered to Capo. Within the first ten minutes of the ride, he shouted a word that sounded like “catso” over and over again. I asked Daniel to look it up on his phone and we found out it meant “dick.”
I kept thinking that I should have felt calmer—I was ona bus, finally heading to Siracusa, a place with real meaning for Jonah. Instead my nerves were fraying one at a time. The problem was that there were still so many loose ends. We didn’t have a plan yet for the ceremony. We didn’t even know where we were staying. And I had yet to turn on my phone to see the barrage of messages from my father and others.
