I glanced at him, then back up at that small disc of light. We’d both been raised Catholic, but whereas he still attended Mass at the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart when he was home visiting his parents, my family hadn’t stepped inside a church since the day of my brother’s funeral.
I wanted to believe Lenny was up there somewhere, staring down at me, and that maybe one day—if I did all the right things—I’d get to see him again. “I guess I do,” I said, but I was lying. The truth was that, when I looked up at the magnificent ceiling, all I saw was a gaping hole.
13.
THE NEXT MORNING,we woke early and caught a cab back to the airport. The Alisarda ticket counter was no less chaotic than it had been the day before, but we managed to check our luggage and find our gate with no problems.
The flight from Rome to Olbia took less than an hour. It was one of those tiny planes that you want out of the second you sit down, and as it bumped its way along the runway and up into the air, I squeezed Paul’s hand and tried not to think of the call my parents would get from the airline—or maybe the U.S. Navy—telling them I’d disappeared somewhere over the Tyrrhenian Sea.
As we began our descent, I caught a glimpse of Sardinia out the window. It was more barren than I had expected, with lots of rocky outcroppings and scrub grass. But what struck me most was the water, which was so clear along the coastline, I could see straight to the bottom.
The landing was as bumpy as our takeoff, and for a minute I thought I might be sick. But then the plane pulled to a sudden stop, and everyone started to clap, which was more than a little disconcerting. Still, I was as happy as the next person to have landed in Olbia in one piece, so I joined in, and after I gave Paul a nudge, he did, too.
We disembarked right there on the tarmac and stood waiting while two young guys in polyester uniforms scurried to remove our bags from the hold. Nearby, a woman about my age, decked out in one of those traditional Sardinian dresses, all black with white lace and red trim, wandered through the crowd placing garlands of white roses atop the heads of the female passengers.
“Don’t take it,” Paul whispered, “she’s going to try to charge you for it,” but it was too late. The roses were on my head, and the woman—who was strikingly beautiful—was waiting for her money, which Paul begrudgingly retrieved from his wallet.
Paul’s sponsor was a guy named Tom Mueller, who headed up the Radiological Controls Division, otherwise known as R-5. The way it worked, back then anyway, was that your sponsor was usually the guy you were replacing. This guy—and in 1974, it was always a guy—would spend a couple of weeks showing you the ropes, then wish you well and take off for parts unknown.
When Tom had written to Paul back in Charleston, he’d said that he planned to pick us up from the airport in Olbia and drive us to Palau, where we’d catch a ferry to La Maddalena. All night at the Pensione Michigan, Paul had worried that Tom hadn’t gotten the message about the rescheduled flight, but he needn’t have lost any sleep over it; as soon as we arrived at the terminal, we spotted a wiry guy with thinning hair and big ears waving a sign over his head that read:LT. AND MRS. PAUL ARCHER.
“That’s us,” said Paul in a voice loud enough to carry.
I had yet to figure out when these guys saluted and when they shook hands, when they wore uniforms and when they didn’t, and when I was or wasn’t allowed to call someone by their first name, so I just bobbed my head and waited for Lieutenant Mueller, who was wearing a pair of blue jeans and a Pink Floyd T-shirt, to tell me I could call him Tom.
Tom took two of the biggest bags, and in no time, we were in the parking lot, watching him pop the hatch of the tiniest car I’d ever seen. It was mustard yellow and so small that, I swear, the three of us could have picked it up and carried it out of the parking lot. Plus, it had to have been almost as old as I was.
“What kind of car is this?” I asked, and Tom laughed.
“It’s a Fiat Cinquecento,” he said as he stacked the bags at all angles, “which is just about the only car you can buy in Sardinia.”
“Well, I like it,” I said as I slid into the backseat. What I wanted to say was that Tom’s Fiat reminded me of the yellow VW Bug Lenny had driven before he’d left for Vietnam, but by then I’d learned not to bring my brother up in casual conversation. If I said something likeThis reminds me of my brother’s car, then Tom might ask if he still owned the car, and I’d have to say he was dead, which was a real conversation stopper.
“Did you ship a car?” Tom asked Paul.
Paul said that we had, but this did not deter Tom from trying to sell mehis jalopy. “If you decide you can’t get by with just one car, I’ll give you a real good deal on her.”
“Is she reliable?” I asked, only half serious.
He held up a screwdriver. “The key broke off in the ignition, so you’ve got to use this to start the car. But once you get her going, she’s solid.”
14.
OLBIA’S OUTSKIRTS WERE A LOTof asphalt and concrete, and for a second, I worried that perhaps La Maddalena wasn’t going to be the paradise I’d imagined. But then we were on the open road and heading into the mountains, which were thick with cork and chestnut trees. Periodically, I could make out these incredible vistas—undulating hills covered in juniper and rockrose—that reminded me of the wakes of two motorboats headed in different directions. Somewhere beyond these hills, I knew, was the sea.
“Oh, look!” I said when I saw a goat out my window, but by the time Paul and Tom turned their heads, he had disappeared into a ravine.
“The thing about Sardinia,” Tom explained, “is that the whole island is one big sheet of granite. It’s a miracle they manage to grow so much as a grape here.”
“Do they really grow grapes?” said Paul.
“Sardinian wine is second to none.”
I had read Paul’s welcome packet cover to cover, and there had been a section specifically devoted to dispelling our notions of a year-round summer. June, July, and August would be hot and dry, but in winter, it was rainy and the temperatures dipped into the low fifties. “I read it gets really windy,” I said, more a statement than a question.
Tom nodded. “Especially on La Madd, where all the trees were cut down a couple of hundred years ago.”
I had never heard the island referred to asLa Madd, but over the next couple of years, I would hear the moniker constantly. I didn’t love it, even in the beginning, but it took me a while to figure out why. Here was this island with this gorgeous name—named for Mary Magdalene, of all people—and it was like we Americans were those kids in high school who give you a nickname you didn’t ask for, then convince everyone to call you by it.
