When he pulls up to the hospital, I see a crowd of reporters outside. No one pays attention to me and I slip inside while they talk excitedly to an exhausted-looking doctor.
I don’t know where I’m going. Compared to the small Capri hospital I went to, the Rome one is a whirl of confusion, full of baffled cries and painful whimpers and the smell of iodine and sour skin. I start wandering through the halls, ignoring the nurses who glance my way, knowing if I even make eye contact with them they’ll ask me why I’m here and haul me away.
I think I want to find the morgue. Maybe the emergency room. I want to find Derio. I want him to be alive so I can tell him I’m sorry. I want so much but can afford so little.
I end up in a long hallway past the noise and smells of the ER waiting room. The hall hums with fluorescent lights.
Then I see her, leaning against the wall, hugging herself.
Felisa.
I start running toward her, amazed that she’s here but craving the embrace of someone I know in a land where I don’t really know anyone.
“Felisa!” I cry out, and when I see the tears streaming down her face, I know the truth.
It nearly knocks me off my feet.
Instead, I collide into her and she wraps her arms around me and cries. I cry. We don’t have to say anything, I can feel her grief just as I feel mine, raw and bleeding.
Finally, she pulls apart and smooths down my hair affectionately. “I look for you,” she says, her English thick and mangled. She clears her throat. “I am sorry, my English is not used much. I thought you would be here.”
“I was in Naples,” I tell her, afraid to tell her any more than that. That I left him, that I’m a deserter.
“I saw it on the news,” she says, taking a heavy breath. “I was with my partner, Lorenzo, in Umbria. I made him drive me here right away.” Tears well in her eyes again, and if I had any more left in me I would cry at the sight of an old, strong woman like herself moved to such grief. “He is like a son to me. I never should have left him. Or the twins. Or you.”
We have far too much in common now. We’re drowning in the mire of our guilty consciences.
“I left him, too,” I admit and the words burn through my throat. “Just last night. I couldn’t handle it anymore and I snapped. We broke up. We were together, you know. After you left. We fell in love and this is all my fault.”
Without you, I am nothing. Please come back to me.
His last text cuts painfully across my mind, digging in like barbed wire.
I can never go back to him now.
“It is no one’s fault but mine,” Felisa says, staring up at the ceiling. She looks at me and sighs. “You know, I knew he was in love with you. From the beginning. You made his eyes light up, just like the sun coming through a cloud. I had never seen that before. I thought you were a blessing.”
“I was a curse,” I spit out bitterly, wiping my nose on my shoulder.
She digs into her purse and hands me a tissue. “You mean more to him than I think you know.”
I can’t even be bothered to correct her use of present tense.
“Where are the children?” she asks me.
I shrug helplessly. “I don’t know. If they are not here he would have left them with someone on Capri. Maybe Signora Bagglia or Signora DiFabbia.” The realization that they are truly orphans almost floors me. I look at her. “Should I go back to them? They have no one now, no one at all.”
“If you don’t, I will,” she says, her head held high. “I just have to convince Lorenzo. It is funny, but like Derio, Lorenzo is afraid of the sea. Or like Derio was.”
I don’t understand how anything can be funny now, nor understand how Felisa’s eyes can grow so warm when she says Lorenzo’s name. How can her guilt, her sorrow, allow her even a moment of happiness? I feel like I’m six feet underground and buried alive, my screams lost in the dirt.
“No,” I say quietly, and in my heart I find the truth. “I have to go back. I am the one who should take care of them. They need me. And now I need them.” I can’t even imagine how they are going to handle the news. “Do you think they will let me?”
“Who?”
“I don’t know, the government. Do you think they will let me take care of them? Do I have to adopt them?”
She frowns at me and wipes a tear away from her eyes with long, wrinkled fingers. “If you want to be their nanny again, then be their nanny. I am sure Derio wouldn’t mind. He would be happy.”
“Yes, he would be happy if he were alive, but that doesn’t have much pull now.”
Felisa’s eyes nearly bug out of her head. “If he were alive?!”
I wonder if she’s gone senile in the stress of it all. “I don’t think the government will care what Derio would have wanted if he’s . . . he’s . . . passed on. Unless I was in his will?”
“Passed on?” she repeats, her hand clutching at her collar.
Now I have to frown. Maybe she doesn’t know the extent of it. “He’s dead.” Saying the words nearly breaks me open.
“No,” she says wildly, shaking her head. “He is not. They would have told me.”
I give her a hopeless look. “It was on the news.”
“Yes,” she says and gestures down the hall. “And they brought him here. He has burns, a bad shoulder, and broken leg but he is not dead.” She arches her brow and gives me an incredulous look. “Mamma mia.”