I shook the thought out of my head, then took in a deep breath, settling on a medium pace. The air was crisp and clean-smelling, like what laundry detergents are probably going for with their “mountain air” scents, and I was crazy relieved to be running. At least now it wasn’t just my mind that was in overdrive.
One mile. Then two. I was following a narrow little footpath worn into the grass by someone who had made this route a habit, but I had no idea if their destination was the same as mine. For all I knew, I was headed in the complete wrong direction. Maybe it didn’t even exist anymore, and then—BAM. The tower. Jutting out of the hill like a wild mushroom. I stopped running and stared at it for a minute. It was like stumbling across something magical, like a pot of gold, or a gingerbread house in the middle of Tuscany.
Don’t think about gingerbread houses.
I started running again, feeling my heart quicken even more as I neared the tower’s dark silhouette. It was a perfect cylinder, gray and ancient-looking and only about thirty feet tall. It looked like the kind of place where people had been falling in love for years.
I ran right up to the base, then put my hand on the wall, trailing it behind me as I circled around to the opening. The wooden door Howard had moved for my mom was long gone, leaving a bare arched doorway that was so short I had to duck to walk under it. Inside it was empty except for a couple of shaggy spiderwebs and a pile of leaves that had probably outlasted the tree they’d come from. A crumbly spiral staircase rose through the tower’s center, letting a pale circle of light into the room.
I took a deep breath, then headed for the staircase. Hopefully all my answers were at the top.
I had to walk carefully—half the steps looked like they were just waiting for an excuse to collapse—and I had to do this acrobatic hurtle over the space where the final step had once been, but finally I stepped outside. The top of the tower was basically an open platform, its circumference lined by a three-foot ledge, and I made my way over to the edge. It was still pretty dark and gray out, but the view was stunning. Like postcard stunning. To my left was a vineyard with rows of grapevines stretching out in thin silvery ropes, and everywhere else was rich Tuscan countryside, the occasional house marooned like a ship in the middle of an ocean of hills.
I sighed. No wonder this had been the place my mom had finally noticed Howard. Even if she hadn’t already fallen for his sense of humor and awesome taste in gelato, she probably would have taken one look at the view and gone completely out of her mind with love. It was the sort of place that could make a stampede of buffalos seem romantic.
I set the journal down on the ground, then slowly made my way around the platform, scanning every inch of it. I really wanted to find some sign of my mom, a stone scratched with H+H or maybe some lost journal pages she’d tucked under a rock or something, but all I found were two spiders that looked at me with about as much interest as a pair of British Royal Guards.
I gave up on my little scavenger hunt and walked back to the center of the platform, wrapping my arms around myself. I needed a question answered, and I got the feeling this was the best place to ask.
“Mom, why did you send me to Italy?” My voice threw off the quiet peacefulness of everything around me, but I shut my eyes tight to listen.
Nothing.
I tried again. “Why did you send me to be with Howard?”
Still nothing. Then the wind picked up and made a whipping noise through the grass and trees, and suddenly all the loneliness and emptiness I carried around with me swelled up so big it swallowed me whole. I pressed my palms to my eyes, pain ricocheting through my body. What if my mom and my grandma and the counselor were wrong? What if I hurt this badly for the rest of my life? What if every second of every day would be less about what I had than what I’d lost?
I sank to the floor, pain washing over me in big, jagged waves. She’d told me over and over how wonderful my life was going to be. How proud she was of me. How much she wished she could be there, not just for the big moments, but for the little ones. And then she’d said she’d find a way to stay close to me. But so far, she’d just been gone. Then gone some more. And all that gone stretched out in front of me like a horizon, endless and daunting and empty. I’d been running around Italy trying to solve the mystery of the journal, trying to understand why she’d done what she’d done, but really I’d just been looking for her. And I wasn’t going to find her. Ever.
“I can’t do this,” I said aloud, pressing my face into my hands. “I can’t be here without you.”
And that’s when I got slapped. Well, maybe not slapped—it was more like a nudging—but suddenly I was getting to my feet because a word was pushing itself into my brain.
Look.