Thieves Never Steal in the Rain Read online

  For Ethan and Luke

  Villa Foresta

  Deluxe Meatloaf

  A Perfect Father

  The Swap

  The Birthing Room

  St. Mary’s Window

  Pretty Face

  Comfort Me, Stranger

  Forecast for a Sunny Day

  Dressed to Die

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  It was raining on the Good Friday they arrived in Rome, coming down with a vengeance. The agent at the car rental said it had been going on like that for three days: water pooling in the narrow streets as well as in the piazzas; low temperatures and wind — unseasonable weather for March.

  They had already dived head first into a disagreement about whether to purchase car insurance. Elliott hated paying the exorbitant fee; he liked to gamble that way. Of course, there was the time someone hit their passenger door at an Auto Grill in Naples while they were inside buying prosciutto and provolone panini. Two days later, someone stole the side-view mirror at a remote agriturismo. The damages had cost twice as much as the week’s rental fee.

  “But that was in the south,” Elliott said. “What’s the chance of it happening here?”

  “Sure. No one ever has accidents in central Italy,” Joanna said. “And everyone is honest.”

  It irked him the way she played by the rules. She paid her bills the day they arrived. Elliot, on the other hand, wrote the due dates of his on their envelopes, which he kept in chronological order on his desk and mailed no more than three days in advance. Occasionally he forgot and had to pay a late fee. It infuriated her, but Elliott shrugged off the loss as a fair exchange for the interest he usually earned from money that remained in his bank account rather than in that of some utility or credit card company. He took the insurance this time, however; anything to make her happy these days.

  She pulled the lapels of her raincoat tighter as they drove on the autostrada, unable to rid herself of the clamminess and feeling like a damsel in a British movie in need of the only cure for such ills — a cup of tea. He turned on the heat with some reluctance. After all, it was spring.

  A fuzzy handwritten fax with directions to the villa lay on her lap. They were expected for dinner that evening; with a good hour-and-forty-minute drive ahead of them, she fished in her bag for some trail mix.

  The travel bag had too many compartments, and it took her forever to locate anything, from her passport to a pack of gum. After unzipping and zipping several pockets, she handed Elliott an open sandwich bag from which he took a fistful of the contents, nearly emptying it. She, for her part, put a single almond or raisin into her mouth and rolled it around until she extracted all the saltiness or sweetness it had to offer. She then bit into its new softer state and chewed it well before swallowing. Each colorful M&M lay on her tongue like the Eucharistic host and remained there until the outer coating dissolved, leaving only the smooth chocolate center. The dry bump of chocolate clung to her tongue, grew smaller and smaller, and, when she could hold on to it no longer, vanished. As the commercial used to say: “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand.” Of course they never melted in Elliott’s hand, since he shoveled a mound of Trail Mix into his mouth, and with a few loud chews and a giant swallow, it was gone, sucked in like dirt up a vacuum cleaner hose. Although he denied it, she knew that eating was how he dealt with Jill’s death. He had gained 35 pounds since the accident; he weighed 220 and counting.

  He took another handful of trail mix and caught her look of disapproval. “What?” He barked.

  She didn’t answer.

  “I eat too much. I’m a pig. That’s what you think, isn’t it? That’s what you’ve always thought.”

  “It’s not healthy.”

  “Nuts? Raisins?”

  “Elliott.”

  “I know, Joanna. Everything in moderation. That’s your motto. Better yet, that’s your father’s motto — the Marco Ficola motto.”

  “You know what I think.”

  “It’s sublimation. So what if it is? You, on the other hand, can’t let go of anything.”

  “That’s right. Make light of your vice even if it ends up killing you.”

  “I’ve got to make light of something. You carry enough pessimism around to sink both of us.”

  His last sentence rang out loud and clear, uttered in the cessation of the rain as they entered a long mountain tunnel. She became claustrophobic in tunnels, and Elliott always tried to talk her through them. Even now, he made the effort.

  “The Italians might have known that you can’t move mountains, but they sure figured out how to barrel through them,” he said. Once, in the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, he’d actually managed to make her laugh.

  ***

  It had long grown dark by the time they exited the autostrada. They sat for a few moments at a confluence of several smaller roads, studying a totem pole of signs that pointed in various directions. The “Gronda” sign seemed to suggest a road to the left. Elliott turned. After a while they came to a dead end and a decaying factory. Elliott drove back to the intersection. His stomach growled; a hunger headache throbbed at Joanna’s temples. They took another wrong road and returned to the intersection. No one from whom they might ask directions appeared.

  Elliott had insisted on booking a room at Villa Foresta, but Joanna would have been content to stay with her family. How could she pass up the chance to be alone with him in a bed in a hotel room? He had asked. How was it any different than being alone in their own bed in their own house? She wanted to know. Did hotel rooms do weird things to all men? Signal torrid lovemaking, hedonism unattainable in daily living? That was unfair: there was a time when she too had relished the chance to hole up with Elliott for several days, but that seemed like a lifetime ago. Before marriage. Before the birth of their daughter. Before her death. Now Joanna just took each day as it came — her breath held in anticipation, as though the future were perched high on a cliff, ready at the least provocation to sail down, crash into the ocean, and be silenced forever. She wondered how two people who had loved so passionately could have such misconceptions about each other, how a common grief could push them apart.

  “We should have stayed at my aunt and uncle’s. You know they won’t hide the fact that we’ve insulted them,” she said.

  “It’s an act.”

  “I can’t believe you said that.”

  “It’s true. Your father told me.”

  “Well, I can’t believe he said that about his own brother. He just gets upset that this brother never visits the brothers who live in the States.”

  “He’s got a point. Yet you and your father keep coming here.”

  “We love it here.”

  Up hills, down hills, around bends, through a small town, into desolation. The fog was thick and eerie. Why did they always end up searching for a place to stay in pitch blackness? Everything was so much more difficult in the dark, laden with a sense of urgency and desperation.

  “Let’s return to Go and start over,” she said.

  “Just a little longer.” Elliott dragged out the words as though he were talking to a patient he was stitching up in the ER.

  After about a mile, a sign on their left indicated the villa. The gate was open, smoke rose from the chimney. They drove up the graveled drive to the long stone building and parked beside a horseshoe-shaped wooden portal.

  Thanks to a lengthy layover in Zurich, they had been traveling for nearly 26 hours, and she just wanted to stop moving. Lately, a growing antsiness afflicted her on trips; being confine
d for longer than two hours nearly drove her crazy. Elliott loved long car rides; he loved to travel. So had she once, but she’d become restless, fidgeting in her seat like a toddler. At least on planes she could read, or use the excuse of avoiding jet lag to drug herself. In cars, however, it was impossible to glance at print without being overwhelmed by nausea, and beyond the first hour Elliott and Joanna fell silent.

  ***

  “Buonasera!” Joanna called out, her voice bouncing around the terra-cotta floors, the white plaster walls, the dark wooden beams. She inhaled the aroma of roasting meat.

  “Buonasera,” someone sang from the kitchen beyond the vacant dining room.

  In a moment, Paolo appeared, rubbing his hands together in eagerness to greet his guests, then pushing his black-rimmed glasses further up the bridge of his nose to see his guests more clearly. “Signora Ficola, benvenuta.”

  “This is my husband, Elliott,” she said in Italian.

  “Benvenuto, Signor Ficola.”

  Elliott stammered in the little Italian he knew to explain that his surname was not Ficola but Blake. He failed and remained Signor Ficola.

  Paolo didn’t ask for their passports or give them identification cards to fill out. She couldn’t tell if he was acting out of kindness, since they stood before him like two refugees emerging from a tempest, or negligence.

  He pointed to their bags. “Leave everything here for now. Come. I’ve prepared a special dinner for you. Prego.”

  They followed him into the dining room, where a table set for two faced a large hearth in which a few flames struggled with damp wood. Still, the fire cast off enough heat to warm them. When she told Paolo that it smelled good, he smiled with pride, the eyes behind his glasses widening.

  “Are there any other guests?” she asked.

  “Only you. It’s still off-season.” His gaze lingered on them for an awkward moment as though he were waiting for them to ask another question. Then he returned to the kitchen.

  “Odd fella,” Elliott said. “Did you notice his hands? They’re enormous for such a little guy. He looks like Mickey Mouse.”

  “You know what they say about big hands.”

  “I’d like to disprove that theory once and for all,” Elliott said, an allusion to his small hands and ample penis.

  The demanding weight of expectation rose around them like the fog they had just escaped. No other guests to wonder about, whose relationships they could conjecture upon, and on whose childrearing capabilities they could pass judgment. No conversations on which to eavesdrop. No other lives to imagine. Just Elliott and Joanna.

  ***

  Paolo brought their antipasto: a plate filled with crostini, hot peppers stuffed with tuna and a slice of prosciutto.

  “Do you like pappardelle?”

  “Oh yes,” she said.

  “I’ve prepared it especially for you. But I confess that the peppers are sent from my mother.”

  The pasta, light and topped with a smattering of tomato sauce, slid down their throats.

  She had been starving, and she ate so fast that, by the time the grilled sausages came, she could barely finish one. She gave the remaining two to Elliott, who downed them along with his own three, the potatoes, and green salad.

  “Now I have a very special dessert for you.” Paolo added that it too had been made by his mother. He brought them fruit fermented in liquor, and some biscotti.

  While the meal was delicious, it was simpler than Joanna had expected to be served at an inn. It was as though Paolo had tried to make as elegant a meal as he could from staples and his mother’s leftovers.

  After dinner, Elliott went back to the car for the luggage. Since they were the only guests and it was raining, Paolo said they could leave the car out front for the night instead of in the parking lot down the hill.

  “Did you lock the car door?” Joanna asked Elliott when he returned dripping wet once again.

  “Don’t worry, signora,” Paolo said. “Thieves never steal in the rain. If they were that ambitious, they would get a real job.”

  Elliott smiled when she translated; she knew he was thinking that perhaps he and Paolo were of like minds. Elliott carried the bags upstairs.

  Joanna moved her chair directly in front of the fireplace, kicked off her shoes, and placed her feet on the low wall of the hearth. She began to peel the chestnuts Paolo had roasted in the fire. Chestnuts. They were something her father prepared every holiday. He used a sharp paring knife and made a cross through the shell. Then he soaked the chestnuts in water and waited until the family was just about to sit at the table before he put them into the oven. Sometimes he forgot them and they burned; sometimes he forgot to put them into the oven altogether. But there were times when they were warm and soft and smooth, and the shell slipped right off when you peeled it back from the starlike points of the cross that had curled upward.

  She thought of her father now, back in Boston recovering from pneumonia. He was too weak to make the trip to be with his youngest brother, who had remained in Italy with Joanna’s grandparents when her father and the rest of his brothers emigrated. She’d had trouble deciding whether or not she should be away from her father at this time, which was probably why she had come: to lighten the onus of responsibility and, of course, to satisfy Elliott’s desire for them to get away. Her mother was with her father; they hadn’t left each other’s side for as long as Joanna could remember — just in case. If something were to happen to him in her mother’s absence, after fifty-two years of marriage, she would never have been able to forgive herself. Growing up, Joanna had thought their relationship smothering. They were co-dependents in neuroses, always waiting for the other shoe to drop in a fatalistic approach to life Joanna could never, as a young adult, comprehend. Now she coveted the endearment in their fear of letting go.

  Joanna hadn’t been with Jill when she died, and in the last three and a half years barely a night had gone by without her dreaming about her daughter. Parents are supposed to protect their offspring, ward off evil spirits. If you turn away from the crib for a second, she might suffocate. If you send her up on that jungle gym and blink, you might miss her fall.

  Joanna’s father, however, hadn’t tried to stop Joanna from attending his brother’s anniversary party, though she knew he worried whenever she went away. Before she left, he would dig his calloused hands into her shoulders and stare into her eyes as though he might never see them again: something might happen to him and she wouldn’t be there; something might happen to her.

  “Is there anything else I can get for you?” Paolo asked.

  “I’m never moving from this spot,” she told him.

  “You like the fire?” He was pleased.

  “Very much.”

  “Che tempaccio!” He indicated the beating of the rain against the windows.

  “What’s the forecast?”

  “Three more days of the same.”

  “What time is breakfast?” she asked.

  “Whenever you like, signora.” He waved his hands in the air as if to say: What does it matter? You’re the only ones here.

  “Eight-thirty or nine?”

  “Va bene.”

  They said goodnight. She tore herself away from the fire and went up to the apartment and Elliott.

  ***

  With their pick of apartments in the empty villa, and all for the same price, they had chosen the largest of the three. It was ridiculously big for two people: two living rooms of substantial size, a bedroom, a full kitchen, and a big sunroom with a dining set. Elliott was already asleep, fully clothed on the bed, when she arrived. He had placed her suitcase on a chair and unzipped it for her. She fumbled through it in the dark, feeling for the silk of her pajamas, and undressed in the bathroom so as not to wake him. She was too tired to wash. In her head she heard a movie star she had once seen on TV explain the secret of her fl
awless complexion: “Never, never, no matter how tired I am or how late it is, do I go to bed without washing my face.”

  “Well, lady, you’re a better woman than I am — or a liar,” Joanna whispered.

  In bed, she studied her husband as her eyes adjusted to the dark: sparse strands of hair, translucent eyelids, wafer-thin cheeks veined with fine red capillaries. Everything appeared so delicate, everything but his belly, which seemed to be growing like a woman’s whose gestation was the time that had elapsed since Jill’s death. By Joanna’s calculations, he would have been forty-two months pregnant. She tried to remember the excitement she’d felt during their first years together, when her attraction to this slender, calm, and very American-looking man had nearly consumed her. It should have been just an affair, she decided.

  They lay there, the bed linens a barrier between them. He slipped his hand under the sheet and it found its way to one of her breasts.

  “You should get undressed,” she said.

  “So should you,” he mumbled, eyes still closed.

  “I am.”

  “Mmm.” The cadence of this murmur indicated disappointment that she was wearing anything at all.

  “Someday I’d like you to come to bed naked.”

  “You know I need to warm up first.”

  “After all that time in front of the fire, I’d say you ought to be well done.”

  “It’s late for us,” she whispered, meaning the time change.

  “Too late?”

  Even in his semiconscious state he knew the weight of that question. She didn’t know the answer. Worse, she didn’t know if she cared to know the answer. Their relationship had lost its priority. What she hungered for — her only child — was out of reach, and, at her age, so were her chances for another. The distributor had run out of stock, the manufacturer had stopped producing. We’re out of business; you’ll have to do without, they said. Do without. That was something she’d heard repeatedly as a child. In the Depression, her family had done without. During the war in Italy, they’d done without. When they first came to the States, they did without. Doing without made them strong and industrious. It built character. It proved that family was all one really needed in life. But she also remembered her mother telling her, when their next-door neighbor had had an affair that sent her husband packing with the children, that a woman could live without her husband but never without her children. It had been a warning to Joanna to behave in her marriage — to watch her step, to let him be the one to stray. However, Elliott and she had been faithful to one another, yet both no longer had their child.