All the Way to Italy

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Present day.

Little was leaving home, but also, she supposed, she was returning home. She was settled as comfortably as possible, lost in thought, her face pressed to the window while the engine rumbled underneath her feet. Lost in thought was a phrase that could often describe Little, and just now she was wondering why it was necessary for a plane to be so cold. She supposed that there were all sorts of logical reasons for keeping humans at nearly subzero temperatures, squashed this many miles in the air, but she couldn’t hear anything over the constant thrum of the air-conditioning, and she also hadn’t been able to feel her toes for the last two hours.

Glancing at the austere businessman next to her, she was also thinking that planes were simultaneously wonderful and wretched creatures. All of us locked in together, she thought, while knowing nothing about each other. Who was the man going to greet when he arrived? Whom had he just said goodbye to? How did the city they were both going to tie them together, and, more importantly to Little—who had wept so copiously when departing San Francisco that her nose was still bright red—did they both love the city they had just left? She wanted to tap the man’s shoulder and ask him if a place can ever shake off the people who had belonged to it, or if those tendrils would feed her nostalgia forever, for the rest of her life, which in that moment felt like it could be hundreds of years. It was then that the man noticed Little distractedly gazing at him and looked at her curiously. Maybe she should just write her thoughts down in her notebook, she considered, and let the man get on with his preferred onboard flight entertainment. At the moment, it appeared to be scratching at his nose.

Her name wasn’t really Little, of course. Her father had started calling her that when she was small, before she had much of a choice, because she was the youngest. The name had stuck until everybody called her that, and she didn’t mind, not really, since it had come from him. She frowned slightly in her seat in the middle of the sky and forced her thoughts to something else. She did not want to cry, so she rearranged her face and turned to the clouds outside.

“So, what takes you to Munich?” The deep voice startled her, and she turned back to the man, surprised that he had spoken so far into the flight. The rules of whether or not they would be the chatty type of seatmates should have already been set.

“Oh, I’m not staying in Munich. I’m going on to Rome.” Here it goes. Now he’s going to tell me about his trips to Italy.

“You don’t say! Is this your first time? I’ve spent lots of time in Italy. Great place, great place. If you need any tips, you just let me know. Been there lots of times with the wife myself.” He peered at her with interest.

“Oh, how lovely,” she said, flinching at how insincere she sounded. “Not my first time, though, I’m actually going home. I’m from Rome.”

“Really! How come you speak English so well? You sound just like an American!” This reaction always made Little feel even more of an impostor in the culture.

“I grew up studying in the States. I’m going home to be with my family because my father passed away.”

The real story was that though Little was a card-carrying Italian (or Roman, as she had been raised always to say—Italians seemed to consider themselves by nationality and not by region only when Italy was playing in the World Cup), she barely considered herself one. When she had been a little Little, her father had sent her on a trip to San Francisco with his sister, who had been living there for years. Once ensconced in her Aunty Sira’s world, Little had never wanted to return to Italy. And so she had spent her childhood and the majority of her teenage years growing up in California, only seeing Rome on occasional summer holidays. She had liked it that way, had thought it would stay so forever.

“So, you’re going back to stay?” the man asked.

“Yes,” she said, deciding on impulse that there was no reason to explain the whole story to a stranger.

“Well, that’ll be just lovely. Sorry to hear about your father.”

Little tried not to grimace back, her hand instinctively reaching for the safety of the notebook in the seat pocket in front of her, flipping it open to the first blank page, only to find she had nothing to write. As was becoming increasingly the case, there was only silence.

She began to flip through the pages for inspiration, finding the beginning of a letter to Sira, one that had never gotten past the first line: Zia, I’ve lost my words. One page before that was the scribbled list she had made out a few days before, the one of things she wanted to remind herself about Sira. Sira, who had always baffled her, protected her, raised her without question. She looked at the list, smiling to herself, thinking of the tidbits of guidance that Sira threw out while she waved a kitchen spoon around, or picked out a pair of shoes, or walked the dog. Offering advice that she had carefully garnered throughout her long life was how she protected those she loved, padding their lives with the things she wished she had known herself. Little had always listened, because she found Sira’s stories enthralling, but as she grew up, she realized more and more the worth and soundness of what her aunt had shared with her. Little scribbled a title on the top of the page: Top Ten Points You’ll Hear Most Often If You Grew Up With Sira.

“So! When was the last time you were in Italy?” The man had started to speak again. She thought for a moment.

“About two years ago,” she answered. After her father had succumbed to the cancer in his lungs and she, eighteen years old, an adult, had boarded the first plane she could get a seat on just days after the funeral.

“Quite a long time!” he crowed.

“It’s been… ” She was looking for a word to express what it had been, and came up with nothing. One morning during the year she was seventeen, Sira had walked into Little’s bedroom in San Francisco and told her that they needed to go home. Little had been confused for a moment about what she meant, and if she had known what Sira would say next, maybe she would have held her ears and closed her eyes. She would have forced the world to stay in that moment where she was sure that home was where she stood. Where she could place everyone that she loved in the certainty that the pieces were falling the way they were meant to.

But it had turned out that wasn’t how cancer worked, and so they had left Northern California together. They left the place where they were both safely at home with every turn of the sycamores, and returned to a place Little barely knew, so that she could help a man she also barely knew die. Then she had run back to San Francisco under her student visa, started college there, and tried to pretend she had never left. Sira had stayed in Italy.

A few months after the funeral, which she tried her hardest to never ever consider, she began to notice that she was losing her words. Little had always written things down, had found a cauldron of words at her disposal when she had a pen in her hand, even when her shyness made it difficult to express herself out loud. It had always been so easy. Then, slowly, came an uncomfortable realization born of continual frustration at not being able to find the right expression in her writing. She disliked needing to repeat herself, to employ fallback words more and more often. She worried about the sieve. Now she no longer felt the urge to write stories or jot down a summary for herself, whether at the end of an ordinary day or because of a thought she wanted to remember. She didn’t want to remember, anyway. She had realized then that something inside of her was making sure she knew she had made a mistake, that even though she could physically run away, she would still have to face herself.

Still, Little was convinced she could have borne it and pushed through until it had all meshed into something logical. She would have been able to move forward, forgetting about lingering family drama and old-fashioned Italy. She would have stayed in San Francisco. She fit there, felt modern and brand new. She was building something for herself that was the opposite of antiquated, a life that had nothing to do with anything before it. If she hadn’t found what she had found. If she was one of those people who could leave well enough alone.

She excused herself to her seatmate, who was now flipping through the channels on the little screen in front of him, and walked to the bathroom. With the door locked, she turned to face the mirror. Wide, scared, dark brown eyes stared back at her reflection, and she suddenly missed Sira violently. You’ll see her in a few hours, she said to herself, watching the words form on her lips as she pressed her hands against the mirror and leaned into herself.

Why does a memory matter? Little thought now, frowning at her own reflection. Why do I need to know what I’m missing? She wished planes could reverse.

When the plane set its wheels down in Munich several hours later, the thin businessman (was he a businessman? Little realized she had never even asked) turned to her and shook her hand formally.

“Good luck, then.” He smiled, but was not paying real attention. His mind was already collecting his luggage, leaving the airport, calling a cab.

“Thank you,” Little replied graciously; and only once the plane had settled on the landing strip and the man had left his seat did she finish quietly, “I wish I could be sure that luck was all I needed.”