“Look,” Mom said, pointing. “A one-way street.”
All the ruts on the one-way street were on one side; the street that intersected it had them on the other side. It was incredible to see.
We ate the picnic our mother had packed on a grassy area near a small theater. Salami, cheese, olives, bread, and limonata, the lemon soda I like so much. Limonata, such a funny name. I suddenly started to feel less tired, less overwhelmed.
“Tomorrow can we go to some churches?” I asked my mother.
“All day. Every church in Naples,” she said.
Always, behind us or looming ahead, no matter which way we turned, stood Mount Vesuvius. Its top was not pointed like other mountains; instead it was heart-shaped.
“That top,” Mom explained, “blew right off.”
I was amazed. Life had been ruined and then recovered in this place.
“Exhilarating, isn’t it?” Mom said. “It’s hard for you to understand what it’s like when you feel like your life has been destroyed. I know this place might seem sad to some people, but to me it feels hopeful.”
“Hopeful?” I said. “You ruined all of our lives and now all of a sudden a volcano makes you feel hopeful?”
I couldn’t believe I had said it. I didn’t know where it came from.
Immediately, I felt bad. The way my mother’s face collapsed, the way I could tell she was fighting back tears. Right when we were actually getting along.
“Is that what you think?” she asked finally. “That I ruined everything?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I mumbled.
“That is what you think,” she said, as if she had just realized that all my scorn for her was actually based on something.
I waited for her to prove otherwise. But of course she couldn’t. Everything I knew to be true was true. My mother just sat there, staring.
Later, when she went to the trash can to throw out the remains of our lunch, Cody said, “How could you choose Ava over Mommy?”
“No one’s choosing,” I said. “We have them both.”
“Well, lucky us,” Cody said.
He ran to our mother and took her hand. I walked a few feet behind them, not because I was so tired anymore, but on purpose.
Saints had to suffer. I knew that and I knew I was really suffering. I was sick of being torn like this, of always having to take sides, even if it was only in my heart. I didn’t know how to love each of my parents the same. More than anything, I wished I could go back and somehow make a different miracle. Of course I wanted my father saved. But maybe if there had been no avalanche at all, things would have stayed the way they were.
I had managed two miracles. If I could find another one, I could change things and be noticed. I lay in bed in the hotel in Naples, listening to the motorcycles whizzing past, the sounds of people having fun. Sometimes I even wished, in a very secret place, that my parents would get back together. I knew it was ridiculous. Why would Dad come back to his old boring life in Providence? And what would happen to Ava and Zoe if my father left them? And even if he did, with them in his life, it wouldn’t be the same as before. I knew better than to waste my prayers, the way Antoinetta did. Her dead mother wasn’t coming back. And how was her father ever going to meet a new woman if he never even got out of the car?
No. I needed to pray for the right thing.
I got up and stood by the curtain that opened out to the balcony. Beyond it was the Bay of Naples, the island of Capri, Vesuvius. Tonight the moon was a crescent one, my favorite. Most people liked full moons. They even wrote songs about them. But I liked this tiny sliver moon, the moon that was hardly there. I let myself pretend that when I turned around, my mother wouldn’t be alone in the other bed. Instead, my father would be there beside her.
I remembered what it used to be like to crawl into their bed early in the morning. I would have to squeeze to get between them because they slept so close. Like spoons, my father used to say. How could two people who slept like spoons, year after year, not even live together anymore? I felt hot tears spill out of my eyes and run down my cheeks. I swallowed hard, in gulps. That was one way I knew to stop tears. And even though I was wasting prayers on the impossible, I prayed:
“Dear God, please bring our father back to us. Please let him be here, like spoons, with my mother.”
It was ridiculous and useless and impossible, but wasn’t that what a miracle was, making the extraordinary, the impossible, happen?
I turned around.
The hotel bed, a queen-sized one with lots of pillows and a fluffy comforter, looked as vast as the ocean with my mother there, drifting in it alone. I went over to it and climbed in beside her, turning so my front was pressed against her back, shaping myself into my mother’s form. Without waking up, she felt me there instinctively and snuggled close. Then I closed my eyes, and filled with disappointment and confusion and faithlessness, slept.