“It was plenty of time to let himbegone. From my life. For good.” Her flat expression says she’s not impressed with my wordplay. I cross my arms over my chest. “I don’t see why that has to change.”
“Maybe because you’ve both grown from the people youwere back then,” she challenges. “You know I’m always on your team. But he’s been through a lot these past few years, and it might not hurt to give him some grace. That’s the last I’ll say about it.”
She raises her palms, but neither the words nor the gesture convinces me she’s really done with this little reconciliation campaign. I can’t concern myself with whatever West has “been through.” It’s not like our time apart has been a picnic for me. I wasn’t just heartbroken when he abruptly left my life; I was suddenly lonelier and more isolated than I’d ever been.
Our nomadic upbringing had made it so that, besides our parents, West and I were each other’s only constant companion. We’d been a homeschool-virtual-hybrid classroom of two, since his parents had him start kindergarten a year late to give him more time to come out of his shell and allow us to do all our schooling concurrently. We spent all our free time together, too, with countless rounds of hide-and-seek on countless dig sites where we probably shouldn’t have been playing, and as we got older, more freedom to go out and explore our new cities, just us two.
When the Jacobses left, West went to spend his last two years at a “normal” public high school in the Indiana hometown he hadn’t called home since he was a baby. I’ve imagined he was surrounded by dozens of new friends, kept busy with all the extracurriculars that had never been options for us before.
All the while, I was on my own. No one but my mom and a revolving door of her colleagues and students as we moved on to a couple more projects on different continents, until I wentoff to college last year. It had been an exciting kind of culture shock, living and learning alongside some fifteen thousand of my peers, and between my classes in huge lecture halls and my dorm with a random, social-butterfly roommate, I was never really alone at Nolan. But I hadn’t managed to make any close friends, to form connections that went much deeper than study buddies or regular dinner tablemates. I still feel the ache of loneliness.
Time has allowed me to move on from those more-than-friendly feelings for West. It just hasn’t let any friendly ones linger, either. Nor has it given me any faith that, if I was to allow him back into my life, he wouldn’t drop me again in an instant, any time he felt like it. So if I’m forced to be around him this summer—and it seems I will, if Mom gets her way—I need to stay guarded. Not let him get under my skin, and certainly nowhere deeper.
At least for now, Mom picks up on how little I want to talk about him. At her suggestion, we make our way back into the precious air-conditioning of my room. She offers to stay and help me unpack, which I decline on the grounds that I plan to take a shower before I do much else. It’s a convenient excuse, and conveniently true, but I have bigger reasons to avoid her sorting through my overstuffed luggage. Things inside that I don’t want her to find.
After I send her on her way, I kneel on the hardwood floor beside my new bed and begin pulling all the contents out of my backpack. I wish I was hiding something as simple as a drug stash I smuggled across the border, or a fake ID. Either of thosewould probably cause less of an issue than the real contraband. I set everything in a disorganized pile until I can reach the most tucked-away inner pocket, then carefully extract my treasure, which had been collecting dust in the back of Mom’s office closet for years. The better part of two decades, if I had to guess.
Until now.
I run a hand across the cover, clearing it of now-nonexistent dust after its long journey—one that’s brought it back to its original home. It’s a journal, but not just any old travel diary of a twentysomething woman abroad. This book, bound by an elastic band that’s barely hanging on, is stuffed full of Polaroid pictures, ticket stubs, clippings from maps, and most intriguing—and perhaps cringey—of all,love letters. On the cover, in Mom’s familiar, loopy cursive, isItalia field notes (unofficial), and on the first page’sThis book belongs to:line, she’s written onlyAlex.
It’s still hard for me to fathom that this gold mine of a primary source has been under my nose all along. I almost passed over it in my office closet search, where it’d been tucked away in a box under a somewhat unsettling quantity of my old baby shoes. Seriously, did she think I might want to wear them again someday?
If there’s one thing to know about my mother, it’s that she loves to documenteverything. It’s literally her job, to an extent, but she also keeps careful records in her personal life, including her daily journaling habit she’s had for as long as I can remember. I suspect she imagines some archaeologist of thefuture, centuries from now or maybe even millennia, using her notes to try piecing together how we lived in the early twenty-first century.
Judging by the bizarre hiding spot of this particular volume, I strongly suspect she didn’t want anyone in this lifetime to find it. Which, in turn, makes me all the more certain it’s my key to understanding the parts of my past she doesn’t want me to know.
I normally prefer to read a book no more than once, no matter how much I love it; there are already too many to get through in this one life. But I’ve torn through Alex’sItalia field notes (unofficial)from cover to cover, and have done countless additional rereads of specific pages or sections I marked with adhesive tabs that I may or may not have also borrowed from Mom’s office.
I flip through a few of the tabs, feeling this illogical need to check that all the two-dimensional people smiling in Polaroids or described in my mom’s stories made it overseas safely. One slight challenge when it comes to connecting these characters to the real humans who were once involved in my mother’s life is that Young Alex decided to call everyone by their initials. I don’t know if she was trying to protect their privacy or trying to save time, or if it was simply an artistic choice. But the result is that all the Potential Father Candidates (PFCs) I’ve made note of so far are only known to me by two letters each.
All save for one guy, who doesn’t even get initials. I stop on one of the pages where he’s the focus, which are scattered throughout the first two-thirds of the journal before he isabruptly never mentioned or pictured again. Not that he’s very identifiable even when he is present—none of the Polaroids with his sandy-blond curls show his face, only a side profile as he kisses Alex’s cheek, or the back of his head as he walks away from her. The accompanying journal entries refer to him only as a heart symbol, their sappy notes to each other written and signed back and forth tomyandyour.
My first instinct was that it had to be him. Boom, search over. But the more I read about their intense feelings toward each other, the more I became convinced of the opposite. Unlike some of the shorter flings in these pages that seemed to come and go with minimal damage in their wake, Alex andseemed to have something bigger. I’d never been in love, but I couldn’t imagine theirs was anything but real and powerful. And someone who loved my mom’s twenty-five-year-old self that much wouldn’t have left her when he learned she was having his child.
Would he?
A noise in the hallway startles me into snapping the book shut and throwing it back into my pack, before I remind myself that no one else has a key to this room, nor any reason to barge in here. But the sound helps yank me away from the journal rabbit hole I could’ve easily fallen down for the rest of the night. It’s not like my dad is going to pop out from between the pages if I look over them enough.
No, it’s time for the real investigation to begin. To get down in the proverbial dirt and start digging. There are answers around here—in the halls of Villa Russo, the trenches of Villadi Bronzo, the streets of Naples, and who-knows-where-else across the vast Italian countryside. I’m more determined than ever to find them.
Twenty minutes later, I’m standing in an indoor pool of my own making. Mom might have been on to something with the offer of her private shower.
I don’t know what I thought I was proving, forgoing the more luxurious bathing option in favor of the Villa Russo communal shower. Let alone who I was proving it to, since I still haven’t laid eyes on any other humans allegedly living on this floor with me. What I do know is that the only two water temperatures here are “North Pole” or “surface of the sun.” And that neither option managed to get all the shampoo out of my hair, though I might have second-degree burns on my scalp from the effort. I also have a sneaking suspicion that the drains in the floor are more cosmetic than functional.
I wring out the heavy, still-slightly-sudsy mass of red curls hanging over my shoulder one last time, trying to aim the excess water toward my stall’s imposter drain. It’s like trying to keep a wet bathing suit off the outdoor furniture during a tsunami—completely pointless.
My rubber flip-flops feel just as pointless as I begin to slosh my way out of the flooded stall and into the equally flooded room, clutching my towel tight to my chest with one hand and my old clothes, travel-size toiletries, and detangling comb withthe other. I peer around, wondering if I’ve missed something—a series of dials by the entrance, perhaps, that allow users to choose a Level of Difficulty for various aspects of their shower, all of them turned to a setting that’s simply a middle finger emoji.
But I only see identical shower stalls with orange walls and doors lining three sides of the large square room, sinks and mirrors along the fourth. I splash-step to the middle of Russo Reservoir, where a long shelf sits at my eye level between two columns. The two rows of hooks on its underside are empty except for the one where I left my fresh clothes hanging, limp and lonely. Between the water underfoot and the steam clouding the air, I don’t see any way I’ll dry off enough to get dressed while I’m in here, so I grab the clean T-shirt, shorts, and underwear and wriggle them into the bundle already in my arms.
It’s only when I reach the door to the hallway that I pause, looking down at the white terry cloth covering me from chest to mid-thigh. The risk of a towel-clad run-in feels low in this ghost town of a residence hall, right?
Wrong, as it turns out. So tragically wrong.
I’ve almost made it back to my room, just a couple doors away, and glance back at the trail of wet flip-flop prints I’ve left. When I face forward again, I hear a low, slow creak. I register too late that it’s a door opening—the door right beside my own, the one that I’m about to pass by. The one from which a tall figure emerges…and walks directly into me.
Chapter Four
