Rome moved at an entirely different pace than Irvine. Life in Irvine was all about moderation—the street lights were timed to anticipate traffic flow, keeping drivers from abrupt stops and starts; shops closed early, by nine or ten; regular speed bumps ensured that no one went too fast through residential areas. Moderation.
Rome was all about extremes. People drove too fast, motor scooters edging up on sidewalks and blasting their horns at pedestrians to make them get out of the way. Tourists took too many pictures. Meals started late and went on for hours, the sun setting and the sky darkening before the waiter would bring the check.
“Don’t they want to get paid?” I asked Mom.
People meandered on street corners, gesturing in big wide arcs with their hands, the ash from their cigarettes threatening to spill. People talked loudly, and laughed loudly, and embraced and kissed in a way that made me feel so boring and ridiculously American.
Mom had first come to Rome during her junior year of college. This was where she and my father had met. That much I knew, but none of the details. It had never occurred to me to ask, I guess.
When we first landed, I stood feeling stupidly half-awake as Mom hailed a taxi. “Portarci al Boscolo Exedra Roma,” she told the driver.
“Naturalmente, bella,” he answered, smiling warm and slow at us in the backseat. He dropped a heavy wink—at me, at my mother, I couldn’t tell—before he turned back around and pulled away from the curb.
The hotel was beautiful, an old castle they’d made into a modern resort, and the people working there were beautiful, too. Our room had only one bed, and as I sat on its edge I thought about how this was supposed to be my parents’ romantic getaway. I thought about the things they might have done together in this room, in this bed.
Mom was putting away her dresses in the closet, taking them out of her suitcase one at a time, shaking out the wrinkles, hanging them on wooden hangers just like the ones we had at home.
“Tell me how you met Dad again?”
“Again?” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever told you before.”
“Well, I know you met here, in Rome,” I said. “But where, exactly?”
“At a church,” she said. “In front of a statue.”
“Oh. Which statue?”
She hung the last dress and closed the closet. Then she walked in front of me to the window and stared out onto the street below. She stared out the window for a long time.
“The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa,” she said at last. When she spoke, her back was still to me.
“What were you doing at the church?” Neither of my parents was religious.
Finally she turned and looked at me. She looked at me the same way she had looked at me back in our kitchen, just two days ago. This time I didn’t arrange my face. I didn’t try to look any special way.
“I was there because I was studying art history, and my project was about the bodies of female saints,” she said. “You know I’ve always been fascinated by the stories of the saints.”
“You used to tell me their stories,” I said. “When I was little. At bedtime. You told me terrible stories about women getting cut up and being killed and going to heaven to be with Jesus.”
“That’s insane,” Mom said. “I never did that.”
“Yes,” I said, “you did. All the time. I remember their names—Philomena and Dymphna and Agatha—”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I did no such thing. Anyway,” she went on, “I was there doing research, and your father was there on vacation with his family.”
“You mean with Nona and Dada?”
“No,” she said. “With his first wife.”
“Oh,” I said, and I felt things whirring around in my head, the picture I had always imagined shifting and rearranging to make room for this new piece of information. I knew that Dad had, of course, been married to Judy before my mother. What I did not know was that Dad had still been married to her when he met my mom.
“I’m not proud of it,” Mom said, but she lifted her chin in a way that made her look proud. “It was just one of those things. There he was, with his wife, taking pictures of saints they knew nothing about, and there I was, barely twenty years old, half a world away from my real life, all on my own.”
“Oh,” I said, again.
“I’ll take you tomorrow to see the saints,” Mom said, turning back to the window. Like the saints were the interesting part of her story.
???
I woke up in a pitch-dark room with no idea where I was, no idea who was in bed next to me breathing steadily, and no idea why my thighs felt sticky.
I woke with a gasp and the certainty that I was dead, only to recognize almost at once that I was still living. But my heart pounded hard in my chest, as if I had been chased, as if I had fallen from the sky. I reached under the covers and touched between my legs. My sleep shorts were wet.
It was my mom in bed with me, still asleep. We were in a hotel room in Rome. The bedside clock’s glowing red numbers told my squinting eyes that it was 2:43, and the velvet darkness all around told me it was the middle of the night, not the afternoon.
I’d never experienced jet lag before. I didn’t know that this was how it was, that you could be dead asleep one moment and more awake than you’d ever been the next, but that part of you would be missing, that part of the brain that made sense of things.
I threw back the covers and stumbled across the room. In the bathroom I felt around for the light switch and found it at last. The light flickered on and I squeezed my eyes shut against its sudden painful brightness. When I opened them again moments later, I saw the wall where I’d fumbled for the switch, I saw the white switch itself. They were smeared with blood.
Someone was dead. It was my mother. Someone had murdered her in bed next to me. I was sure of it for less than half of one second, not even long enough to scream, before I remembered that I had heard her breathing. I looked into the mirror above the sink. There I was, my hair a mess from sleep, my eyes squinted and swollen from the time change and my broken sleep. There was my body, the word—SPARKLE—on my tank top written in reverse on mirror-me. And there were my thighs, smeared like the light switch with blood.
I’d gotten my period. That was all.
I grabbed my glasses from the counter where I’d left them and then I pulled off my shorts and my underwear and peed in the toilet, watching the clear yellow stream of urine jet out from me, watching it mix with the bright-red drops of blood that splashed into the toilet bowl.
It was the first time I’d ever had my period.