All the Way to Italy

Chapter 4

Chapter 3

San Francisco, California. Three months earlier.

There had been two things. One had happened late at night and was so seemingly random that Little still wasn’t sure why she had attributed any importance to it. She had been sitting on the couch in the San Francisco apartment she shared with her best friend, Aleth, dozing lightly while a documentary played itself out on the television. It was on World War II, a subject she tended not to pay too much attention to because she’d heard about it so often. Sira and Enrico had been children during the war, and it had often been the backdrop of the stories Sira had told Little growing up. The few times she’d asked her dad about his own wartime memories, he had laughed and told her it was a good rule not to make memories back then, that he’d been young, and that bombs and hunger weren’t much worth remembering.

The television was flashing pictures in black and white, slow reels of old recordings, mostly soldiers. An image flickered onto the screen, an ornate symbol engraved onto a wall of what looked like a bundle of sticks tied together with an ax emerging from the center. The image had sped by but Little leaned in closer, suddenly awake, groping for the remote before remembering she couldn’t rewind normal television.

“Hey, Aleth, hey,” she said, kicking out a foot to awaken her sleeping friend from the other side of the couch, “did you see that?”

“What? No, Little, I’m mostly asleep, what’s up?” Aleth mumbled from her cocoon of covers.

“I know that symbol. I think I’ve seen it before,” Little said, attention now fully focused on the presenter who had strolled onto a stage on the screen.

“Yes, well, that’s World War II, no? We’ve all seen all of that stuff before,” Aleth replied, wriggling out of her blankets and setting her feet down on the floor. “Terrible, tragic, all of it. Can we watch something happier? Want some popcorn?” She tugged on her socks and walked out of the living room. Little flicked off the set and got up to follow her friend into the kitchen, wondering why the image had made her think suddenly of her dead father, as though he were still around to ask questions to.

That would have been that, if Little hadn’t thought to mention it to Sira the next day during their weekly (or biweekly, thought Little guiltily as she typed the Italian country code into her phone) call.

“It felt like something that I should recognize, like there was something I’m not quite getting,” she said into the phone, lying on the couch and swinging her feet.

“Well, you’re probably just tired from school. Best not to get caught up in those documentaries late at night,” Sira replied vaguely without asking for more details. It was so unlike her that Little had been tempted to probe further before realizing she had no reason to and had shrugged the whole thing off.

The second thing had happened a few weeks later, when Little had come home to piles of papers on the floor and Aleth lugging boxes around.

“We are cleaning out our lives,” huffed Aleth as she picked up a box stuffed full of what looked like her old coursework. “Self-improving. You know.” She pointed to a small pile at the end of the hallway. “That’s the stuff you brought back with you from Italy two years ago. I didn’t want to throw it out, but, two years. I will make some tea and we can sort,” she continued as she dropped another box onto the floor. “A new semester is coming up, we need to… ”

“Self-improve?” Little grinned at Aleth, whose cheerfulness seemed ever-present, always close to the surface. It was one of the reasons Little enjoyed living with her. Aleth nodded vigorously, scooping up Little’s papers and waving them over her head.

“Get to it!”

Little had been half-heartedly going through what appeared to be old medical records, wondering why on earth she had grabbed those papers from her father’s apartment in Rome after his funeral, why it had seemed so important to keep something, anything, of his with her, when a single folded piece of paper had drifted onto her lap. She picked it up absentmindedly, smoothing out the old creases, munching on a biscuit as she did so. The chewing slowly stopped as she read the short, typewritten message again.

thought you’d leave. And if you’ve decided this, then I have only one request to make. If you do not love me enough, Delila, and maybe I have not earned your love, maybe my deceit was severe enough to cost me your love (and I do not blame you for this, and, as you asked, I will not tarnish your memory of your own father in hopes of restoring myself with you), then I beg of you, I implore you not to allow this to take away your love for your daughter. She must not pay the price for this. She is so very small, and

Little’s heart sank all the way to her feet and continued through the floor. She flipped the paper over, already knowing there was nothing on the back, that the page was a part of a longer message, though a quick rifle through the rest of the mess on the table revealed no partner page.

“What are you doing?” asked Aleth, eyeing Little’s sweeping motions across the mahogany table as they caused several papers to swoosh onto the floor.

“This,” said Little, now picking pages up seemingly at random and dropping them again haphazardly, “is part of a letter. And it mentions my mother.”

“Your mysterious mother!” said Aleth, reaching out to pluck the note from Little’s hands. “May I? Who do you think wrote it?”

“My dad, I suppose,” shrugged Little, who was beginning to feel vaguely numb. “Unless this is from Delila’s papers, and someone else wrote it to her, but I think… ” she frowned because she did not know what else to do, “I think it’s my father, and he’s talking about me.”

“This is like something out of a mystery book,” murmured Aleth, who was a big fan of the genre, as she read the note. “You should definitely ask Sira about this, Little.”

“Zia does not love talking about Delila. She starts skirting the issue, which is weird because she’s one of those head-on people, you know…” Little suddenly paused as she remembered the conversation she had had with her aunt a few weeks before. “But, when she doesn’t want to talk about something, she pretends it doesn’t exist. And honestly, Aleth, I don’t push it because it upsets her, and I never really worked out the whole thing anyway, and it’s probably best left alone.” She turned to look at Aleth, whose focus was still trained on the letter in her hand.

“That is definitely the way things gets sorted out in a detective novel, and also in real life. Everyone just ignores it, and it goes away.” She gave Little a meaningful look before moving to the phone as it rang, picking up the handset and checking the Caller ID before throwing it to Little. “Italy,” she said with a wicked grin before heading out of the kitchen, “what timing! I told you this is just like a good Agatha Christie! Wait, no, people always die in Agatha Christies… I’ll have to think of another comparison… ”

Little brought the phone to her ear while her friend’s voice faded down the hallway, mentally calculating whether it was worth it to mention Delila, her estranged mother whom they never discussed. Should she bring up the symbol again? Definitely unrelated, she knew, but it was all still stirring up old feelings in her mind that she connected to her old life, thoughts she preferred not to linger over. It was the reason she hadn’t Googled the stupid symbol, though her fingers had hovered over the keyboard. It doesn’t matter, Little. Leave it alone.

“Little?” Sira’s voice wafted over the phone, always a little bit louder than it needed to be, as Sira did not trust anything over long distances except for paper and pen.

“Ciao, zia, che c’è?” It was unlike Sira to call in the middle of the week.

“I was thinking, after we talked last week.”

“Yeah?” Little’s eyes drifted to the open letter on the kitchen table. Maybe she could ask.

“I’ve been wanting to talk to you for some time, anyway. There are some things to resolve, here at home, things your father left behind.” Little began to fidget, uncomfortable. This was a conversation she had been avoiding. “Isn’t it about time you came home, Little?”