The things well never ha.., p.24
The Things We'll Never Have, page 24
Marta pauses. “If she is dizzy, can you hold her?”
I am not about to admit how dizzy I feel, how shocks travel up and down my legs, how utterly terrified heights make me, and how it is amazing I haven’t already thrown myself crashing to the river. Coming up with a plan and implementing it is the only thing that seems within my power at the moment, so that is all I can do right now.
“Tell her to keep holding my hands. We’ll stand together. Slowly does it.”
Olivia
Standing up on a narrow ledge of a cliff might well have been standing on a tightrope. My body refuses at first. It feels unfair that I must make an effort to move. That I should put any effort into saving myself. I am injured; I am the victim. It should be up to someone else to rescue me.
“Olivia.” Her voice is firm, Italian again. “The stranger is your eyes. You need to trust her. Put your feet exactly where she says.” The nostalgia of her voice. She is, I realize, the only person who can rescue me. Aside from Bernardo, she is the only person who truly understands the precision I need in the instructions.
I do it. I stand up—with help from a stranger—but I do it. It occurs to me that this is very much how I am living my life. I know—I have always known, deep down and profoundly—that Ricci is not the man for me, but I only admitted it to myself when I fell. He is self-absorbed, delighted in details, but only to flatter the women he dresses so he can line his pockets. He never describes anything to me that is not for his own benefit. He takes my body as though it is an object he deserves. This talk of me becoming his wife is just so I could become his servant. No longer a prized lover but to cook and clean, as best I can in any event. It is the best way he has to move me into a new role and make room for a new mistress. Someone fresh and exciting who will make him feel fulfilled in a temporary, superficial way.
These are not novel thoughts. I have known all along he would never be satisfied with one lover. I have known the relationship would cause nothing but pain, and pain was the main thing that drew me to him.
Now, this act of standing up, of doing it on my own, perhaps I can rescue myself from Ricci, rescue myself from my own stupid behavior, pick myself up and stop throwing myself off into precipices just so the pain I inflict upon myself will smother the pain I feel from my brother’s loss.
I can do it. Find purpose. Acknowledge, at last, the person who has loved me, really loved me, for as long as I can remember. It is time I need to confess to myself that I need help, too.
But before we go any further, I need to know who this person is who is helping me now. In whose hands I am in and whose eyes are going to dictate whether I come out of this or whether I fall. Whether I live or die.
Marta
“Marta?” Olivia says my name as a question. There is so much in that question, way more than just getting my attention. She is asking whether I am going to save her, despite her ignoring my existence for five years. Despite never acknowledging my son.
Everleigh tells me Olivia is standing. She explains her first step. I translate, hear movement, then I hear the scratch of stones, and a few moments later, the sound of a stone falling on stones. If she falls now, she will fall on the rocky beach.
Everleigh gives me the next instruction to translate. Moments ago, her voice trembled. Her instructions were sketchy, indecisive.
Now her voice holds steady. Her descriptions are thorough and delivered with patience. I recite them in a similar manner to Olivia, though I could be talking to a total stranger.
They are both out of my sight, hidden by cliff and foliage. I am in Olivia’s world, relying on sound to try to understand what progress, what movements they have made and need to make. Olivia does not attempt to communicate with me while they accomplish a second step. A single step, so complicated, so fraught with danger. One mistake and one or both of them will fall. Neither of them narrates their progress. I just have to wait, to trust, to feel helpless knowing that all I have is my voice. I cannot reach out a hand to comfort or to save them. I feel meek. I am in Olivia’s world.
A pause, no gravelly sounds of feet or hands against rock, just breathing as jagged as rock.
“Marta?” Olivia says again, her voice is breathy with fatigue yet steady with resolve. “Who is this stranger? Why is she here?”
Olivia
She hesitates. She hesitates too long for it to be simply waiting for the stranger to speak.
We have a pattern going. A movement, a pause while we come to grips with the fact that the movement has not sent us falling, to catch our breath. Then the stranger thinks about the next step, plans what she will say to Marta before she begins to speak.
Her body is not close to me. Her hand is outstretched. This tells me there is a gap in the path. That with my next step I will have to pass over thin air, reach for the next section of ground, and if I miss it, well, I will never know what it would feel like to save myself from my own destructive path and reach my hand out to the person who loves me. The fact that he might not accept me after all he has seen me do is something I refuse to think about right now. That is a destructive thought, the very behavior I will now put behind me.
Papà cares about me. Papà always has his hand stretched out to help my next step. Ma cares about me, too. For all the ways she confused our childhood by planting vegetables in the piazza, our adulthood by strewing bowls of minestra throughout town. All the times she has told us how limited we are, the times she has guided us to a place where we do not want to be, she has done it from love. She has done it because she thought her way would save us. The path she would see for us was mistaken, but her love and intention were true.
I must get back to them. I cannot make them suffer another death. And so I resolve I will make that next step across the gap. I will find the ground and I will not fall. I have let myself fall enough for one lifetime.
I am calm, confident. I will make it home. But again, I need to know whose hand, palm sweaty, but grip solid, is holding me.
Marta
I owe her nothing. All the wrongs she has done to me. Yet I cannot hold a grudge as she and the town have held one against me this long. I am more than that. I can rise above. I will tell her that her brother is alive. I will tell her the truth because I am not a liar, as Everleigh accused me.
And yet if I tell her now, when she is on the edge of this path, the news will be too much. She will lose focus, take a misstep. Right now, her life is as much in my hands as it is in Everleigh’s.
But I am not a liar. I am not a misleader. I merely speak the truth. And so I have to take this chance.
“She is here looking for your brother, Olivia.”
I expected a barrage of questions, of demands for an explanation, for denial, noncomprehension—something.
The next to speak is Everleigh. We are a mere two steps into this, and her descriptions are improving. She describes the slope of the cliff face first, differences from what it was a few steps ago, and how this information applies to Olivia. Where Olivia should place her left hand while keeping hold of Everleigh’s with her right.
She has found strength, and I have lost it. She has mastered the situation so quickly, such a difference from the mess she has been since she arrived. She is calm, assertive, grounded. Applying the knowledge of her surroundings to benefit her presence and not to fuel the fears that until now appeared to inform everything she does.
This time she does not describe the cliff face first; she describes the width of the path after the gap. Two grapefruits wide. Good, fruit. Everleigh is making the right connections. Narrow, but enough for one foot, and Olivia is to place her left foot there, and bring her right foot steadily and slowly past and place it immediately in front of the left, right heel touching left toe. And she needs to make exactly the right length stride across the gap. The gap, she adds, is the length of a Labrador retriever, backside to nose, and there is nothing for her to hold on to. Instead of a cliff face, there is a deep fissure.
“She is not fond of dogs,” I tell Everleigh. “One on a leash made her fall down the stairs as a child.”
A pause and then Everleigh changes her description. The diameter of a Hula-Hoop.
The diameter of a Hula-Hoop is a big step. The ground where she needs to put her foot on the other side is not big. There is a real chance of her falling. Placing her foot one grapefruit too far over, or an apple short. She could fall without knowing the truth. She could fall because she does not have the motivation to not fall. I can give her that motivation.
“Bernardo is alive. He lives in London.” My words tumble down the cliff in Italian and through the foliage and are caught, I hope, by Olivia.
Everleigh
She is doing well. Way calmer than I would be. Way calmer than I feel.
I refuse to look down, and it appears to help. It also helps to focus on the descriptions, on illustrating Olivia’s surroundings to her. You’ll think me odd, but I begin to see unexpected beauty in the sheer rock, the tenacious bushes that cling where the slope eases just enough.
A dragonfly rests on the sheer face in the rock fissure, on Olivia’s side. I imagine a skirt made from its iridescent wings. And I imagine the dragonfly watching us, trying to understand why we are here, out of the normal domain of humans.
There are moments, in between me describing the terrain to Marta and sharing instructions on how Olivia will move, Marta passing on my words, repackaged into Italian, that Olivia pauses. I imagine her converting the words Marta has said into three-dimensional surroundings.
Perhaps as reassurance to Olivia, perhaps to myself, in those moments I recite the colors around us. In their bare, basic form, verde, marrone, giallo, wishing I could share them with their actual nuances. It is true that the plant is verde, green. But that truth doesn’t convey the actual, true image. In English, I would say sea-foam green, but I don’t know the Italian for that. The green of fresh mint in summer.
I don’t know if she hears me. Her facial expressions give no hint at all of what she is hearing or thinking or feeling. Not until Marta says something about Bernardo, alive—vivo—and London—Londra.
Then she begins to cry—no, she’s laughing. She is spilling emotions all over the place, and I don’t know if she’ll keep her balance. Her hand clasps mine even tighter. And suddenly it is all true. Bernardo is still alive. I am stuck on a ledge over a raging torrent, holding hands with my almost sister-in-law I didn’t know I had. And we’re about to reach the most challenging moment on our cliff walk to safety.
I want to warn Marta, but what does one say? I have not yet formulated a thing when Olivia reaches her left foot out and places it perfectly on the grapefruit-width ledge, a Hula-Hoop away as though she can see it. I barely have time to shuffle backward to give space for her right foot to land, heel to toe, on the same ledge.
Marta
It is impossible to understand what is going on. Guttural noises, laughing or crying or primal fear—I cannot tell which. Yet Everleigh continues to give instructions. I continue to translate them for Olivia.
They must have made ten terrifying steps before the instructions from Everleigh cease. Leaves rustle and feet shuffle, then they appear, hand in hand, as though Everleigh has always been part of the pack. Everleigh’s face is astounded, still in shock from their ordeal. Olivia’s face is half scrunched, wrapped in Everleigh’s shirt. I still cannot tell her emotions. She is not wearing her sunglasses.
They are both safe.
They walk to the little dip and sit down, and I am not sure which one of them led the other. I join them. Olivia holds out her hand, fingers splayed as though waiting for mine.
I reach out my hand and clench hers, hold my other hand out for Everleigh.
We have survived this ordeal. We have survived the loss of the same man. Whatever differences we have had, our survival is more meaningful.
Olivia
I want to ask how he is alive, why he left. But this moment with the curvature of the land cradling us feels familiar. It has been waiting here all this time for our return. I feel relief that I did not break Ma today, and the warmth from reuniting with Marta, it’s all I want. Even the closeness of the stranger who saved me.
In another moment, I am sure I will have questions. For now, I have Marta’s hand.
Everleigh
I have a question—I have a billion questions. I also wouldn’t mind a shirt, but Marta has seen me in less than my tatty bra. If Olivia notices my flesh being bare where her hand rests, clasped with mine, she has said nothing. And what would I do, take my bloody shirt from her head?
I look at Marta, then flick my eyes in the direction of Olivia’s wound, a gesture I’ve seen Gual-Nado do—a name I came up with when Marta was directing Olivia and I was trying not to think about the sheer drop.
He does the eye flick when he wants me to look at an extraordinarily well-dressed or awfully dressed person on the Tube, to let me know the waiter is bringing our lunch at Terroni’s, when he’s had enough at Mum’s and wants to leave.
Marta understands. We need to check the gash on Olivia’s forehead. Find a way to clean the blood smeared down her face. Marta looks at Olivia’s face, then she looks at the hands she holds as if deciding which to let go of. Crikey, the way Olivia has treated her, the choice seems obvious, but there is something about Olivia that makes you want to keep her close. A few hours ago, I might have guessed the vulnerability of a blind person to be endearing, but even when Olivia is stock-still on all fours, it seems it is because of her firm resolve not to make the wrong move. She is strong, not vulnerable.
Marta lets go of my hand with her left and lifts the corner of my cotton shirt tied around Olivia’s forehead. I have tied it tight; she can’t lift it high enough to see much.
She surprises me then by grasping my hand again. “We’ll find something at my house.”
And I suppose she wants to go back to the sense of connection, of peace that we had a few moments ago, but something about the moment has shifted, and I can’t hold in my burning questions any longer.
“Why did he say she had died?”
Marta
Everleigh does not have our history. She cannot know the way my and Olivia’s hands are filling an abyss that has lasted five years.
I could just sit here and, through Olivia’s hand, let the touch begin to build the first threads of reconnecting, of bridging that abyss.
Instead, Everleigh is fidgety. She wants me to look at Olivia’s head. She wants me to answer questions. She wants to know how Bernardo could have announced that the person he loved most in the world was dead.
Since I first suspected he had written the letters, it has not made sense to me, either, why he left her. But when I read that letter this morning, when it was obvious that Bernardo thought Olivia was dead, that was when everything became clear.
Everleigh
I presume she is thinking things through. Contemplating the truth, which isn’t encouraging, because the truth is the truth. It doesn’t need packaging or fluffing up or reinventing. It just is.
Then she says, “He cared for her more than anything. Thinking she had died, feeling he was to blame for her death, it would have killed him. The people who saw, they said he hesitated before he jumped. Wrapped his arms around his head as though to say, what have I done? He was—is—a normal man, not a hero. He would not have jumped for anyone else. He probably meant to save her, but when he survived and thought she did not, he probably could not face his parents. He was not brave enough to do that. That’s the only way it makes sense.”
“So he let them think they’d lost them both.”
“I never said he was courageous.”
Olivia
“Everleigh is asking questions,” Marta says to me. Her voice near, familiar. I want it to hold me a bit longer before we address more pressing things, like this thing tied around my head, which is starting to throb. And the commemoration that I am certainly going to be late for. “Do you have any?”
I have a lot of questions, most of which would change this moment of solidarity. “Repeat her name again for me slowly so I can learn to say it.”
“E-va-li,” Marta sounds out. And-go-there, it means. Well, she has come here, so I suppose her parents could see the future.
Why did he leave me, I want to ask. But that question comes too close to acknowledging that he is truly alive, so I ask, “He speaks English? What does he sound like?”
Marta relays the question to Everleigh, who answers—like a foreigner. That makes me laugh. They laugh with me, which makes me laugh all the more. Three women, one with a shirt around her head, one without a shirt, one properly dressed, as far as I know, huddled together in a dip and laughing like we have something to laugh about.
Then my laughter leaves as abruptly as it arrived, and I ruin the moment for them, too. “The men who said they saw him jump, did they lie?”
“My guess is that he jumped and landed on the same ledge as you just did.”
The threads of solidarity are severing. Time to go and face Ma’s disappointment in me, and her grief for her son, who is not dead.
“Come, let’s leave this place.”
I am in Marta’s hands. She must get this thing off my head, then maybe she will take me home, make sure I get there. My solo walking has not served me too well so far today.
I want her to walk me there. I want to hear her voice, hold her hand. Ask her about my nephew, talk to her like we have not treated her so terribly all these years—I did it for Ma, I want to tell her, like that would have been a good enough reason.
