Ava said it had to do with learning to walk, which Zoe had done on their first day in Rome. She had stood, teetered, then, zombie-like, made her way across the floor. Day after day she’d picked up speed, and was now climbing onto chairs and beds, always seeming about to fall off at any moment. She scurried up the stairs, glancing behind her at the adults who chased after her. She stopped taking her regular morning naps and instead cried from exhaustion, falling every few steps but unwilling to stop.
On our second day in Rome, Ava hired Carmela, the old lady who lived on the first floor, to take Cody and Zoe to the Borghese Gardens. The moment they left, Ava locked herself in the bathroom and took a really long shower. She emerged from the bathroom, her hair wet, wearing a fluffy white bathrobe that made her look fat. Even though she smiled at me, her eyes had a bruised look about them and the corners of her mouth were pulled in tight. She didn’t look very pretty lately. I thought of my mother in Positano, her coral necklace, the flowered scarf she bought that made her look like an old movie star. She had stopped using that weird hair stuff, too, and her hair had grown a tiny bit and she stuck it behind her ears, which was so much better than the electrocution look.
Thinking of Mom made me sad. All of a sudden I felt all the sadness I should have felt when my father first moved out and Mom used to cry all the time, over the least little thing. I had a terrible memory just then, one I had tried to forget: Once, just a couple of weeks after he left, Mom decided to bake a cake. It wasn’t anybody’s birthday or anything; she just wanted to bake a cake. Baking relaxed her, she always said. But she kept messing up. She couldn’t remember whether she put in the baking powder or not. We were out of vanilla so she used almond extract instead. I sat in the kitchen watching her getting more and more upset at how she couldn’t even bake a simple cake. It was one of the things she was good at and now she couldn’t even do that. And every mistake she made started her crying again. When she took the eggs out of the fridge, she tripped over nothing at all, and dropped the whole dozen on the floor. She plopped down, right there in the middle of the kitchen, trying to pick up the long strands of yolk, the pool of goo slowly expanding, refusing to be caught. She cried, harder and harder, as she worked at those broken eggs. Now I wished I had tried to help, had done something. I thought about the way my mother felt during a hug, as if her whole body might just melt into mine. It sent a cozy warmth right through me.
Ava was making her coffee in the press pot, thick stuff that left black grounds in the bottom of the cup.
“Did you know that I’m the one who saved Dad?” I asked carefully.
“Saved him?” Ava said, without looking up.
She was too busy concentrating on getting the coffee right. Yesterday the whole thing had exploded in an eruption of boiling water and coffee grounds, spraying the floor and walls and Ava’s white robe. I could still see some faded brown stains at the hem.
“Saved him how?” Ava said.
“In the avalanche,” I told her. I don’t know what made me tell my miracle to Ava Pomme. But she put down the coffeepot and gave her full attention to me.
“That avalanche?” she said. “But you were at home. You were a little girl.”
“No, I wasn’t,” I said, irritated. “I was ten.” I added under my breath, “I wasn’t little.”
“I just mean I don’t see how—”
“Forget it,” I said.
Ava hesitated. She wasn’t always sure what the right thing to do with kids was. That was one of the things that made her so appealing usually. She didn’t know you weren’t supposed to let kids stay up late or give them cappuccino, or a million other things. But all of a sudden, it seemed stupid for her to be so clueless about kids. For one thing, she had her own kid. For another, she was a grown-up.
Ava began to heat some milk for the coffee.
“Do you believe in miracles?” I asked her, studying Ava’s back, her slim waist under the belted robe, the shape of her rear end. When I first met her, Ava was already pregnant with Zoe, a tall skinny woman with a ridiculously big belly.
“No,” Ava said. She put her hands on her hips and stared into the pot of milk.
“How do you explain things like Saint Bernadette?”
“I saw the movie,” Ava said, “but I can’t really remember.”
“Lourdes,” I said, disgusted. Even my mother knew about these things.
“Right,” Ava said. “All those sad people go there to drink the water—”
“Bathe in it.”
“Okay. Bathe in it. Then they go home and die, anyway.”
That picture of Antoinetta’s mother flitted across my brain.
“Well,” I said, uncertainly, “God has to agree that the person should be saved.”
Ava laughed. “That hardly seems fair, does it?” She poured some milk into her cup, then added the coffee. When she sipped it she grimaced. “It’s so hard to find good decaf coffee here.”