Chapter Text
A sailor and his joy stepped from the pier and into
the fragile boat together. Why was there only one?
Because you, dear, said to the night, I don’t care
about the rest. And I said, Neither do I.
And then the harbor was behind us.
— Matthew Olzmann, “The Millihelen”
“Patrizia quit.”
In the bright and unapologetic light of her Milan apartment, Trish watches her manager light a cigarette. The smoke briefly obscures her face, climbing lazily toward the ceiling. It only clears when she starts to pace the living room, gesticulating through the haze.
“We’ve got you in Berlin in two weeks and Patrizia quit. Says to me, ‘Giulia, I’m having a baby.’ A baby! Again and again she tells me she doesn’t want kids, says they smell, says they’re too much work. And now look at her. Can you imagine? Patrizia? The child will come out of the womb with a Tanfoglio. I’m glad she’s found her happiness, but couldn’t her happiness have waited until September? Well, mannaggia. If she wants to leave you to die, so it goes.”
Trish is stretched out on her favorite pink loveseat, the one she’d had shipped over all the way from Paris, and before the cigarette had been lit, she’d been having a perfectly relaxing time reading the May issue of Vogue Italia. She sets the magazine down on her chest and sighs.
“Do you mind?” she asks, and pointedly gestures with one hand to the window in the kitchen.
Trish had met Giulia Borroni four years ago at a music festival in Catanzaro, just after her eighteenth birthday, and Giulia had been smoking then, too. She had come up to Trish in the wine tent smelling of cigarillos and strong perfume and said, You’ve got a striking face. The kind of face that makes people pay attention. I’ll make you famous, and Trish, having had nothing to lead her forward at the time save for a handful of nebulous ambitions and her memory of a long and violent spring, had seen no reason to say no.
She figures that she might have become famous anyway, but it wouldn’t have happened as fast without Giulia, who knows everyone everywhere, at least in Trish’s estimation. That doesn’t make her any better about smoking in Trish’s apartment, though.
Giulia huffs at her and moves into the kitchen, unlocking the casement window next to the sink. The noise of the city seeps in, children yelling and someone’s music playing and the flower trader hawking bluebells across the street. Milan is beautiful in all seasons, but Trish has always liked it best in May, like this; not summer or spring but something halfway and blue.
Giulia slots the cigarette between her scarlet lips and takes a drag until the tip glows. She scowls out at the city, tapping the ashes out through the window.
“We can’t cancel,” she says. “We’ve already booked every venue from here to Barcelona. I’m closing the last leg today. God damn it, Patrizia. Two years with us, and now this. I’ll kill her.”
“It’s not like she’s the only bodyguard in Italy,” Trish says, rising from the loveseat. She wanders past the end table, where eight huge stargazer lilies from somebody in Artist Relations at Baby Records are arranged in a vase, and runs a finger along one of the petals. “Just hire someone else.”
Giulia makes a face. “And pay touring season rates? Are you joking? I’d be better off buying a yacht.”
“You have a yacht.”
“A second yacht.” Giulia grinds the half-smoked cigarette into the flowerpot saucer that Trish keeps on the windowsill for her. “Well, if you know any for hire, you tell me, yes? Bodyguards, not yachts. I’ll pay them whatever they want, as long as it’s what I paid Patrizia.”
She fans the last of the smoke out the window with one hand, glances at her thin gold wristwatch, and shouts, “Shit! I have to run!”
Trish stretches her arms over her head, unbothered. Giulia lives in a constant state of having to run.
“I was meant to call Sony BMG five minutes ago!” Giulia moans, and rushes into the foyer, heels clicking on the hardwood floor. “You’ve eaten, right? Have you eaten? I’ll order something for you in the car; tell Fabrizio downstairs not to shoot anyone carrying a pizza box. I’ll call you at seven. Please tell me you’ve started packing.”
“I have,” Trish lies.
Giulia, one hand on the doorknob, whirls around and points at her, narrowing her eyes.
“You are lying to me,” she says, and throws the door open. “Ciao!”
In the quiet that settles behind her, Trish leans against the sliding glass door and breathes out, letting her arms dangle. A breeze passes through the room from some open window, lifting the curtains and rustling the stack of magazines on the coffee table, and on it she can smell the lazy approach of summer, and the city waking slowly to it.
In three days, she’ll be leaving for Vienna, and won’t see Milan again until August. This isn’t her first tour of Europe, but it’s going to be her last, although she hasn’t mentioned that part to anyone yet. She doesn’t really know what she wants to do, apart from the abstract—keep living, be happy—but music has pretty much run its course. She’ll study fashion in Paris, maybe, or go to New York. People tend to find things in New York, or so she’s heard.
She combs her fingers absentmindedly through her hair, feeling the warmth of the afternoon sunlight on her back, and closes her eyes. She’s got nothing left to do today, but tomorrow will be busy: breakfast with the road manager, rehearsing all afternoon, looking over the nightliner in the evening, and then dinner with some producer. Exhausting.
“Well, Spice,” she mutters, “want to help me pack?”
Dead air, as usual.
“Thought so,” she says, and pushes herself off the door.
She eats too many strawberries from the box in the fridge, watches the last half of some old American movie on the TV, and takes a shower. The setting sun is turning the walls orange when Fabrizio, the guard Giulia employs for the lobby, brings up a pizza delivery, and she sits on the yellow shag rug in the living room to eat it straight from the box in her pajamas, picking off the artichoke hearts.
She’s still on the floor, thinking very hard about packing, when the phone in her bedroom rings.
“Yes, Giulia, I’m packing,” she says curtly when she picks up, wedging the pink handset between her shoulder and ear. “My place still smells smoky, by the way, so thanks for that.”
“Huh? It’s Narancia.”
Trish’s heart stops.
It stops.
“Um, Ghirga.”
It’s like the scirocco in summertime. So many things get blown in with it: morning in Venice, a pain in her wrist and a narrow boat and a touch at her back. A particular laugh, a promise of protection. An iron bar through a still hand. Vines and white flowers.
Narancia. Narancia Ghirga, from Passione. Whose hands she had bandaged. Whose life she had taken.
She hasn’t spoken to him—to any of them—in how many years, now? Five, or something like it.
She thought she’d die before hearing that name again.
“Oh,” she says. “Oh. Hi.”
“Hey,” Narancia says back.
His voice is different than she remembers, and yet it isn’t—it rises and hitches in the same places, and something in her chest still opens to it without wanting to run. It sounds far away, separated by too many miles, and she can hear waves and seagulls and voices, kids laughing. He must be on a beach, or close to one.
“Hi,” she repeats. “I. Narancia. Sorry, um—is everything okay?”
“Huh?” She can picture his face, bewildered in the light, the wind whipping his hair across it. “I mean—yeah? Yeah, everything’s fine. Why wouldn’t it be?”
“I just thought—” And then she remembers to breathe. “I just thought that’s… why you’d call.”
“Oh,” Narancia says in a tone that she can’t read. “Oh. Um, no. I mean that’s not why.”
“Okay,” Trish says, and thinks, and thinks. “How did you get this number?”
Narancia hesitates. “Bucciarati.”
There’s no wind in that name. It’s more like a strong wave, a rip current.
She frowns. “How did he get it?”
“I dunno. It’s Bucciarati.” Another hesitation. “So, um. How’s it going?”
“Fine,” Trish answers automatically. Her fingers have tangled themselves into the cord without her notice. “Why are you calling me?”
She winces the second it jumps out of her, the wrong sentiment in the wrong tone—brusque, accusing. This time, the silence lasts longer. The sound of the wind fills it, a choppy, grainy rumble that’s hard to hold so close to her ear.
“Sorry,” Narancia mumbles. “I just wanted to, I guess. If it’s not a great time, I can—”
“No, it’s fine,” she says in a rush. “Sorry. It’s just.”
“No, I—I get it,” he says, and she thinks in spite of herself that Narancia had always had an ear for the things she hadn’t known how to say. “I just, um, heard one of your songs on the radio a few minutes ago and—ugh, that sounds so stupid—it was just playing, I swear. In, like, the grocery store. Anyway, I just thought I…”
Then a quick inhale. “I wanted to tell you I—passed the esame di Stato. Graduation was last week.”
Graduation. The word moves through her with a quiet, unexpected joy.
“Really?” She sits up, drawing her knees close to her chest. “I mean… congratulations. Sorry for not—I’ve just been really busy.”
“That’s okay. Bucciarati took a ton of pictures! I think Abbacchio’s even smiling in one of them. If, um, if you want to see it.”
Trish doesn’t think Abbacchio had smiled at all when she’d known him. She hopes there had been white clouds over Naples for Narancia’s graduation, the full and towering ones that he had always liked the best. She hopes that the sky had been a riot of blue.
She has so many questions. She wants to laugh. She wants to hang up.
“Just if you want,” Narancia says, a little quieter.
She doesn’t think she has an answer to that. She leans against her pile of pillows, the motion pressing the receiver a little closer to her cheek, and casts around for a polite question.
“What are you going to do now?” she settles for asking.
“Man, I guess get a job?” She can hear the wince straining his voice. “A real job. No more Passione stuff. I have to save up!”
“Save up?”
“Yeah.” He’s quiet for a moment, vacillating, before he clears his throat. “I… I wanna open a restaurant. A really good restaurant! But shit’s expensive, and I don’t just want Giorno to pay for it all, so… job it is. Prep cook or something. I don’t know.”
A restaurant. The simplicity of it throws her, for a second—but she remembers the afternoon that Giorno had gone with Fugo and Abbacchio to Pompeii, and the rest of them had stayed behind in the safehouse by the vineyard, and after an hour or so she’d heard Narancia banging around in the kitchen, throwing together something with spaghetti and garlic and anchovies. She remembers the song he’d been humming, off-key. La varca mia, Santa Lucia.
She remembers so much more of Narancia—so much more of that fistful of days of hiding and running and hating—than she wants to. Even today. Even now.
“Or,” she says, “you could come on tour with me. My bodyguard just quit. Like, this morning.”
Narancia’s silence cuts across the distance. The words, which she hadn’t recognized until it was too late to withhold them, hang in the emptiness of her room like the echo of another voice, hers and not hers, planned and not planned. Maybe it’s that voice that keeps going.
“I’m going on tour this summer. All over Europe. I’m supposed to have a personal bodyguard; you know, for like, after concerts and stuff. Someone to deal with the paparazzi, mostly. It pays a ton. It would just be until August, but… you could save a lot. Travel expenses are all paid for. You don’t have to, obviously, but if you really need a job or the money or whatever—I could talk to my manager.”
More wind, and all of that scattered into it. She glances out the window, searching for the spot where the sun is sinking, as though she can line it up on a map and find Narancia underneath it, barefoot and still on a distant shore with one hand in his pocket.
She wonders, absently, if he’s gotten taller.
“What?” he finally asks, halting. “Like—are you serious?”
“I mean, yeah.” She shrugs one shoulder, a habit, even though she knows he can’t see it. “Sure.”
“Um… wow.” Then a long and comprehending silence. “Um. How much does it pay?”
“Fifty.”
“A day?”
“An hour.”
“NO WAY!” She has to tilt the phone away when he starts yelling. “For real?! What do I have to do? Do I get a gun?!”
“Just follow me around, I guess,” she half-yells back, and brings the phone to her ear again. “Between concerts and on the road and stuff. And, like, guard the door to my hotel room all night. That’s what the old one did, anyway.” She pauses. “What would you need a gun for? You have a Stand. A Stand with infinite bullets. That flies.”
“Oh yeah.” A rustle follows. Maybe he’s switching the phone to his other ear, tucking it against one narrow shoulder. “Doesn’t sound all that different from what I did before! When we were all protecting you for the boss, I mean.”
“It is,” Trish says, biting the inside of her cheek and thinking of the empty Colosseum, the continuous rain, the way the words protect and end had sounded in Giorno’s voice. “It is different. I don’t need to fight Stand users. I just need to sign autographs.”
“Seems pretty easy!” Narancia says, and there’s a smile in his voice, unmistakable. A long time ago, Trish had come to learn the sound as well as the shape. “Especially if there’s no Stand users! Hey, can I get one of those? An autograph, not a—anyway, Mista would lose his shit if you gave me one and not him.”
Unexpectedly, Trish feels a laugh building in her. She has to push it back down.
“Yeah,” she says. “Sure.”
“Sweet! I’ve got all your albums! You can just sign your favorite.”
Before Trish can answer—before she can ask, pink-faced and incredulous, all of them?—there’s a low beep in her ear that signals another incoming call. Probably Giulia.
“Listen, um,” she says, hating how obvious the hesitation is, “I have to go.”
“Oh,” Narancia says, disappointed. “Okay.”
She swings her legs off the side of the bed, her feet brushing the rug, and half-consciously grips the phone tighter, the way she would a wrist.
She could let it go there. She really, really could. She’s gotten pretty good, after all, at the letting go, in years since the spring that three half-strangers had died for her—since the summer that they had all come back, one by one, unscarred.
She could let go. It would barely hurt, she thinks. It would barely leave a mark.
“I meant what I said,” she tells Narancia, soft and deliberate in the now-dark bedroom. She should turn on the lamp, but she doesn’t want to lift her arm. “About the job. You’d have to come to Milan to interview for it and everything, and we’re leaving in like—three days. But you’ll get it. Trust me. If I tell my manager I want you—f-for the job—she’ll hire you.”
Narancia is quiet for a time again. The beeping continues, subdued but unceasing.
Trish pulls in a breath, keeps it close to her pounding heart. Despite everything, she does not let go.
“Okay,” Narancia says.
Okay, pressed gently into her hands like a small fruit, cautious and alive over the sound of the ocean she can’t see. Okay.
Like that’s all there is. Like that’s all there needs to be. She can’t help feeling like he’s given this to her before, in another life.
“I’ll, um—take a bus or something,” he goes on. “Yeah. You said three days? I can be there tomorrow.”
“Sure,” Trish says. Tomorrow. “I’ll call you.”
“Okay. Okay, yeah! Call me!”
“I just said I will.”
“I know, I know.” His smile is so close that she can almost feel it, pressed to her cheek. “I’m just—I really—um, never mind. Talk to you later.”
“Narancia,” Trish says.
“Yeah?” he answers, his voice ticking up hopefully.
Trish’s fingers slacken, gentle, around the shape of the phone for a moment. It’s tucked comfortably between her shoulder and her cheek. Through the window, split by the grilles, she can see the moon, waxing in the hazy blue dusk beyond the rooftops.
She holds onto the words for a moment, and then releases them: “It’s nice to hear your voice.”
It had taken a month for Narancia to come back from the dead. Maybe a little bit longer—Trish hadn’t been keeping track. She had been back in Calabria, emptying what remained from her mother’s house in a late spring rainstorm that had lasted for days, far removed from Naples and all the ghosts that lived there. She had heard the news in the middle of the night, in the pitch-dark kitchen, and the only thing she’d thought to do was sit right down on the cold tile floor, clutching the phone to her ear.
Giorno’s voice had been murky, all words save for Narancia and alive indistinct. Trish hadn’t been able to retain much. What she knew was that Giorno had gotten a very confused call from a policeman in Rome, some foggy morning before sunrise, saying that a kid they’d found wandering around the Colosseum had given them his name.
The others had followed: first Abbacchio, and then Bucciarati. Bucciarati had taken the longest—the greenness had begun to leave the Apennines, gone for another year, and Mista had been the one to call her that time, half-crying, talking too fast for her to understand.
It had seemed to shock even Giorno, and Trish’s impression was that it was something his Stand had done of its own accord, with its vast unknowable power, simply because in his heart he had wished for it. The particulars of Stands had always seemed to grow more tangled when she asked about them, and so this time she hadn’t asked. A part of her had been wary of it anyway, as if doing so would somehow undo the repair, strange and tragic though it was.
May had passed drearily, without a shape; somewhere inside of it Narancia aged another year. Despite her trepidations, Trish had gone back to Naples on the cusp of June, not because she had wanted to but because Bucciarati had asked her to. Once more, he’d said over the phone, and Trish had been in the kitchen again, barefoot and unable to speak. Just once more.
The train ride had been long, and it had already been hot in the unfamiliar city; the clear, unbroken heat of early summer. She’d brought one suitcase and stayed in a tiny hotel room by the harbor.
Giorno had paid for it. Insisted. Trish had been less equipped than usual to turn down his generosity, though he had already given her so much of it, more than she’d ever lose the welts of carrying. He had needed to press the matter only twice, and then she’d relented.
Meeting at Libeccio had been Bucciarati’s choice. Trish had heard them all talk about it once or twice—about the white curtains and the good bruschetta—in whatever threadbare moments they’d all had between each catastrophe. It had felt strange to see the back room in person, to absorb the light in it, as though she might discover that it was a movie set, with nothing but sawdust and scaffolding underneath. She had been the last one of seven—the seven of them, as it had been in a courtyard on the white cliffs of Capri—to arrive.
She had paid attention to so little of the conversation, looking at napkins instead of faces, hearing ghosts instead of voices. Bucciarati had told them then that he would leave Passione, though Giorno had tried to convince him to stay.
“It’s yours,” Giorno said, restrained, into the silence settled across the table. “What we fought for—it’s yours.”
Bucciarati just smiled. “Then it is mine to give, isn’t it? So I give it to you.”
Abbacchio leaned back in his chair with a scoff, tossing up his hand. “I’m out, too. You can only die so many times before you take the hint.”
The rest, Trish could have predicted—Mista drawling, “I’m going where Giorno’s going,” Fugo hiding his agreement behind the rim of his glass when he lifted it to drink—but Narancia had been quiet, the kind of quiet that should have had its own seat. When she had glanced at him across the table, even then afraid to look for fear of seeing some transparency, some trick of the light, he was staring contemplatively at his plate of untouched gnocchi. He hadn’t glanced back.
Eventually, he folded his arms and leaned on the edge of the table and said, with some embarrassment and some steel, “I enrolled for the fall already, so—”
And then a hesitation.
Bucciarati caught onto it first, as always. “Of course, Narancia,” he said, in his strangely gentle way. “I’m sure you’ll do well.”
Narancia’s grin had taken up his whole face, growing only wider as Mista clapped him on the back and Giorno eloquently praised him. Trish had jabbed her fork into a slice of mozzarella, feeling suddenly out of place, unneeded, in a way that she hadn’t since a silent train ride from Rome to Naples with only Giorno and Mista beside her, waiting for dawn to dully break beyond the Monti della Meta. The conversation had left her again. She had let herself fade into its outskirts.
Bucciarati had shocked her by offering her a house by the sea to call her own. In spite of herself she had been able to picture it—the places she would put the relics from her mother’s house; a hand mirror here, a vase there—but a jagged, hateful feeling had restricted her from doing any more than that.
She couldn’t look at him when she refused, saying it to the napkin in her lap instead.
“I’m all right,” she said, hating the taste of it. “I… Naples isn’t where I belong.”
She hadn’t called it running, then. But Bucciarati had seemed to see it for what it was and let her take it anyway, a rope flung, an unobstructed exit.
He only bowed his head and said, “I’m not worried, Trish. You seem—” A portion of a smile came to him, which Trish hadn’t known what to do with. “You seem like you’ll be at home wherever you go.”
It humiliates her now, but she had come so close to crying, right then—so close that she would feel it for years.
That afternoon in Libeccio was the last official meeting of Bucciarati’s team that she was privy to. The seven of them had eaten a quiet meal, settled into the threadbare miracle of being alive, and Bucciarati had paid the tab, and then they had left.
Outside in the heat, as Giorno said something to Fugo and Mista about a meeting with Polnareff, Bucciarati’s eyes had landed on her. His mouth had opened, faltered, and closed again.
He had only said, “Be well, Trish.”
How? Trish had wanted to ask, on her knees, in the middle of the street. How?
The others had given her their goodbyes, too: Mista with a crooked smile and a knuckle nudging her chin; Abbacchio with a turned head, Fugo with a gesture; Giorno with nothing more than a silent, apprehending look, as if he could see her intentions even then. Trish can’t remember what she had given them in return. Maybe nothing.
“You know that you can write to us,” Bucciarati had said, “or call for us. For anything.”
Abbacchio had nodded behind him. “One word, kid.”
“Okay,” Trish had murmured, even though whatever word he meant wasn’t one that she’d known how to build.
They had all lingered for a moment in the sunlight, unable to separate, held together still by something that none of them could name. In that final, crucial moment, Trish looked at Narancia.
Maybe she shouldn’t have been surprised that he was already looking back. But she was. She had gone still, and her throat had closed.
That was when she had known, one way or another: this, all of it; it wasn’t a trick of the light at all. Narancia was not dead. Narancia was alive, with the same dark lashes and attentive eyes, the same sharp elbows, the same body and the same breath. Narancia, unbent, unwounded. He was alive—and she was, too.
She hadn’t known what to do with that, though it had been so plainly given. She had searched herself for the right word to leave him with, for anything, but it had been too much. A paralyzing, unfelt grief.
“Good luck with school,” she had said to his chest instead of his face, with one hand on her arm. Inside her hollow chest, her Stand had almost wept. “And, um, thanks. For everything.”
It had been a quick and painless replacement for the truth. I cried when you died. I cried.
Narancia’s voice had sounded far away, invented. “Yeah. Just, um—” And he had gone quiet, bowing his head, his hair veiling his eyes. Trish had been able to intuit nothing. “Yeah. Take care, Trish.”
Trish had gone back to Calabria, made her mother’s funeral arrangements, and stayed for a time in the house where she grew up. It hadn’t been so bad, except in spring. The loneliness had given her room to move again, rebuild again, nail by nail. She saw Giorno in wildflowers, Bucciarati in the scales of fish, Mista in the gold grass. Abbacchio in the fog at night, Fugo in the mended fences. Narancia in the clouds beyond the Apennines, and in the flight patterns of swifts, and in the blossoms on the orange tree.
She endured it. She let herself bend.
Eventually, in the wine tent in Catanzaro, she had met Giulia. A life had spiraled out of that, for better or worse. Her mother had raised her to sing, so that’s what she had done, navigating the electric guitar in the studio at Giulia’s villa over the course of a rainy autumn: first a song about the ocean, then one about a scar. Then an EP, then a studio album, then a tour, and then the cycle over again. She had seen herself on televisions, magazine racks, the sides of skyscrapers. She had stood on so many stages, in so many cities. She had written songs for each of her old guards, carefully disguised. Bucciarati’s, the one about the ocean; Giorno’s, the one about the butterflies; Mista’s, the one about rolling down the windows.
Narancia’s—she’d lost track.
And maybe all of that had been fate, or something like it; maybe that had been the ending that Bucciarati and the rest had all hoped for, the closest thing to his promise outside a narrow elevator: a far-off country, a new name, a morning in another life where she left Italy and never saw any of them again. Maybe they had only ever belonged to something violent and unknowable, a strange week in a strange season—a series of wounds.
In the end, she hadn’t kept in touch with any of them—no phone calls or letters, no utterance of the single miraculous word Abbacchio had been so sure existed—not with Bucciarati, and not with Mista, and not even with Narancia. Dreams had replaced them, pulling her out of bed in the middle of the night, jumbled with the nightmares about airplanes and a hole in her stomach and a voice from the Tiber River, calling out to her.
On an unadorned summer evening, during apricot season, she left Calabria for Milan with a hand mirror and a vase. She didn’t tell any of them. With mountains and roads and cities between them, they were living, and she was living. And at the end of it all, or what had felt like the end, that had meant something. It had meant everything.
“You’re distracted,” says Giulia.
Trish lifts her chin out of her hand, pulling her eyes away from the car window and turning her head to the left, where Giulia is sitting next to her, viciously clicking away at her BlackBerry.
“That’s twenty minutes you’ve been staring out the window and sighing,” Giulia continues, her focus unbroken. “I have counted ten. Sighs, that is.”
“I wasn’t sighing,” Trish mutters.
“You cannot fool Giulia,” Giulia says, putting a finger in the air for emphasis. “She knows all, hears all. Are you lovesick, mia passerotta? Is it true you have a heart?”
Trish is long past rolling her eyes at the nickname, but she still huffs. “What are you even talking about? I’m just hungry.”
“Hungry, she says. Well, fine. I will find another topic. That—what is it—Narancia of yours. He’s nice,” she says, in that way that she says all people are nice, like it’s its own joke. “A very nice boy. His bus came in at four A.M., did you know this? How grueling it must have been. I took him to lunch. He held the door open for me—so very funny. How did you meet him?”
“He’s not mine,” Trish snaps. “He’s—an old friend. Sort of.” She wants to ask, how is he; she wants to ask, does his smile look the same; but what she asks is, “Will you hire him?”
Giulia hums again. When Trish glances at her face, she’s smirking down at whatever email she’s sending with one eyebrow raised.
“Maybe I will and maybe I won’t,” she replies. “When I asked him about his work experience, he choked on the garganelli. But the most important thing is not my trust; it’s yours. So?”
“So what?”
“Do you trust that boy with your life?” Giulia asks.
Trish thinks of ice cubes in a glass, how they’d shrunk so quickly the moment that she’d touched them. She thinks of light glinting off of a blade, and a bruise on Narancia’s jaw, and how he had leaped onto the deck of a motorboat in the dark outside Rome; how his face had looked from below, set against the stars, when he had reached in desperation for the wheel.
“Yes,” she says.
Giulia finally clicks the keyboard back into place, slipping her phone into the pocket of her blazer.
“Then I do, too,” she replies. “Trust him with your life, that is. Mine, I am not so sure. For that I have Carolina.” She sits abruptly forward, smacking her hand against the back of the driver’s seat. “Fabrizio, I’d like for us to get to Ortensia sometime in the next geologic era. Before I am a mummified corpse, yes? Are you not familiar with a gas pedal? It is a marvelous invention! Use it!”
Trish tunes out the rest, sinking back into her seat and watching the city pass. They’ve been stuck in traffic for almost half an hour, crawling along at a slower pace than the pedestrians. She’s already restless, the way that she always is when she’s locked in a car for too long, subduing the instinct to wrench the door open.
She lets her eyes wander along the sidewalk, passing over storefronts, lingering on a cute dress on a mannequin, a thing with long sleeves that glitters. She wonders what the light had been like when Narancia’s bus had gotten in, when she’d been wide awake halfway across the city with her covers thrown off and her hands wrung at her stomach. She wonders if—
“Beatrice Una, are you listening to me?” Giulia interrupts, snapping her fingers once in front of Trish’s face. Trish jumps—she hadn’t even noticed that Fabrizio had pulled over and parked. “If you fall asleep in front of Valentina Montalto, I will never work for you again. I will repeat myself only once more. Your boy is right there ahead of us, you see? Get out of the car!”
Even now, though Trish would never say it, she thinks that she could find Narancia through anything: a crowd of thousands, a firefight, a hurricane. All of that considered, a sidewalk in Milan is nothing.
She sees him through the tinted window, lean and restless in a bright orange-and-white jacket, rocking on his heels with his hands in his pockets. He has the same headband, the same wild hair; the same tendency to hold himself a little warily, as if waiting for a gun to go off. He’s looking at the sky.
Trish loses track of what happens between catching sight of him and feeling Giulia’s hand at her back, shoving her firmly out the open door and onto the sidewalk.
Her heels click loudly on the stone. Narancia’s eyes—the same eyes, still vigilant, still violet—abandon the sky and come to her.
The look on his face is difficult to comprehend, but it’s so familiar that her first instinct is to burst out laughing. She manages not to.
She ends up standing a little closer to him than she’d planned—close enough to feel a warmth unfolding in the silence between them, evidence of life and something else—and she almost loses her balance on the heels. Almost.
She opens her mouth to say something, maybe a hello and maybe his name, isolated. Narancia opens his, too, smaller.
There’s a sudden burst of sound, the ascendant roar of an engine—and then Aerosmith has launched itself from the familiar blaze of light at Narancia’s edges and zipped past him, straight to Trish, soaring in circles around her head in the middle of the sidewalk.
“A-Aero!” Narancia shouts, embarrassed. “Stop that!”
Aerosmith does a loop at Trish’s side, a twirl above her, revving excitedly. Wind rises in its wake, rushing over her face and tousling her hair—and it stirs some helpless, joyful thing in her chest before she can put a name to it. It takes her a second to even realize that she’s laughing.
“Okay, Aerosmith, okay!” she exclaims. People are staring, but she doesn’t care. When Aerosmith comes to hover in front of her face, she sets a hand over her hair to keep it in place against the gust and fondly says, “I missed you, too.”
Her eyes catch on Narancia’s face over the wing. He’s staring at her with wide, almost disbelieving eyes. Trish’s heart leaps inside of her at a pace too frantic to keep hold of, so fast that it might outrun her.
After a moment more, Aerosmith returns to him, glinting under a street light for a moment as it goes. It skids along his shoulder and is gone. The wind fades, and then only the still night is left, and Narancia looking at her in it—Narancia, in front of her for the first time in years she realizes only then she’s been keeping count of.
After a second, he closes his mouth, eyes darting to the pavement and then back to her again. There are no bruises on his face, no cuts. His hair is still in his eyes.
“Hey, Trish,” he says.
And Trish says, “Hi.”
Narancia has gotten taller. Maybe. Maybe Trish is imagining it—maybe she feels so much like he should have that she’s letting the low light invent growth. It’s hard to tell for sure when he’s sitting down, and when there’s a whole table between them.
She’s had this dinner with Valentina Montalto, a major record producer, on her calendar since January. Giulia had made the reservation at Ortensia, some exclusive nouvelle cuisine restaurant in Zona Tortona that Trish has never been to. It’s dim inside in the way that all fancy restaurants are: golden and sophisticated, commanding a particular quiet. Food portions the size of a clementine are presented on plates triple their size, garnished with pan-fried herbs or edible flowers. The menu is printed on birch bark.
It’s kind of funny. Trish has seen Narancia stare down death itself as naturally as taking a breath, but the blank terror on his face when the server asks him to make a wine selection is extreme. It’s a little mean, but she has to discreetly cover her mouth with one hand to keep from laughing at him.
Now, she’s supposed to be paying attention to what Valentina Montalto is saying about the future of popular rock music, but all that she can actually focus on is Narancia’s miraculous face, and the places where his hair has grown out, and the fact that his shoulders are a little wider, his jaw a little sharper. He’s been thumping his foot restlessly ever since they’d sat down, and he still has his jacket on; he’d given the maître-d’ a distrusting look when she’d offered to take it for him.
He looks out of place in a jagged, obvious way, his eyes canvassing the room, flitting to Trish at the slightest breath or movement. He just about springs out of his chair anytime their waiter comes by the table to check in. His shirt is different, but it still has a lot of straps, and the jacket’s pretty cool. She’d caught a glimpse of some kind of green mesh belt thing outside, which she doesn’t really get, but somehow, on Narancia, it works.
“You need to write more love songs,” Valentina Montalto says loftily to Trish as the waiter comes to distribute their entrees. She takes a pointed sip of her Chianti. “That’s where the market is these days. The world needs a ballad from Trish Una. Something vulnerable.”
Trish only half-hears this, since the disgusted noise that Narancia makes when he sees his plate drowns out the rest. He slams one hand on the table and whirls on the waiter with a scowl.
“What the fuck,” he says, and jabs a finger at the plate, “is that?”
The waiter blinks back at him for a second, then frowns.
“That’s—your spaghetti, signore.”
“Do you have eyes, stupid?” Narancia snaps. “Does this look like spaghetti?”
“W-Well, it’s been emulsified, you see—”
“I don’t see the damn pasta, si-gno-re,” Narancia drawls over him, and starts to rise menacingly from his seat. “Are you messing with me? Huh? You think you’re funny?”
“Not at all; I—”
“Oh yeah?” Narancia says, and reaches in one broad sweep for his back pocket—his switchblade pocket. “Cuz I don’t think you’re funny either!”
“Narancia,” Trish says sharply.
Narancia freezes, eyes narrowed at the waiter’s ashen face, his hand poised in midair. Trish tilts her glass back as casually as possible, and when Narancia looks down at her, she clears her throat quietly against the rim.
Just like that, he clicks his tongue and straightens up, his arms dropping to his sides. He falls unceremoniously back into his chair. He links his hands behind his head, churlishly closes his eyes, and that’s the end of that.
To her credit, Valentina Montalto seems completely unperturbed by this incident. She goes on talking to Trish as if nothing had happened, and Narancia sits quietly for the rest of the meal, slouched into his jacket, prodding at his food with a salad fork.
At the end of it, Trish is pretty sure she’s landed a record deal—Valentina likes her enough to insist on paying for the meal—and after the polite, professional goodbye she finds herself on the sidewalk with Narancia, watching the nightlife dart past them like so many fish, without a clue of what to say.
She shifts her weight from one foot to the other and tucks one hand under her elbow, glancing at Narancia without turning her head. His lower lip is sticking out, the way that it does when he’s thinking.
“So,” she begins. And ends.
Narancia jolts a little, eyes darting to her and then back to the street. He clears his throat.
“So,” he replies.
Trish combs a set of fingers through her hair, gathers up a sentence.
“I’m supposed to go home,” she says.
“Oh.” Narancia blinks, turning his head to the right and the left. “Like, which way?”
“That way.” Trish points across herself, to the left.
She regrets it immediately, because it prompts Narancia to look at her head-on. He follows the line of her finger, leaning over and balancing on one foot.
“Okay,” he says, nodding slowly. “Do you, um, need me to come… with you?”
Trish shrugs with her hands. “Probably?”
“Huh?” He swings back onto two feet again, frowning. “What do you mean probably? I’m guarding you, aren’t I?”
“Well—yeah.” She throws one hand up, a little annoyed. “Giulia’s your boss, not me. Didn’t she tell you my schedule?”
Narancia’s face stiffens with displeasure at the word schedule. “I mean, yeah, but…”
“If I call her, she’ll send us a car,” Trish says, rummaging in her clutch for her Nokia. “Just give me one—”
Narancia suddenly lets out a loud groan, throwing his arms over his head. Trish jumps.
“Screw that! I’m still hungry!” he yells to the sky, and drops his arms again. He whirls on her. “Come on, Trish. Let’s go get some real food.”
Before Trish can react, he reaches across the space between them and closes his hand around her wrist. His fingers are firm and sure and warm—so warm that Trish feels it all the way to her face.
He tugs her toward him with no more force than a gust of wind, capricious and inviting—and that’s it. She lets it carry her, two steps behind him, down the street.
All of that time in the restaurant wanting to talk to him, and now she can’t think of anything to say. The heels of her shoes click along the stone more loudly than they should, or maybe it’s her imagination. Narancia slows occasionally to glance up at a street sign, mutter to himself, and stride confidently onwards. He doesn’t let go of her hand.
“Where are we going?” she finally has the sense to ask.
Narancia tilts his head over his shoulder. “Hm? I told you. We’re gonna get some food. Bucciarati recommended a place.”
“In Milan? When has he—”
“Bucciarati knows places everywhere,” Narancia says, and grins wide at her over his shoulder. She knows that grin still—the one that illuminates his whole face, the one that’s impossible to argue with. “He told me last night when I—oh! This is it!”
Trish almost crashes into him when he stops in the middle of the sidewalk. She glares at him for a second, unnoticed, and tugs her hand free.
At the end of the alleyway is an osteria without a name. Warm light swells against the windows and spills onto the street through the open door. At least seven of the guys crowded inside have shoulder holsters.
“Um,” she starts to say, but Narancia is already springing inside and yelling for the owner in such rapid Neapolitan that she can barely keep up.
He gets them a tiny corner table by one of the windows, flanked by two high stools. He swings himself onto the one wedged against the wall, leaving her the other, with more space behind it—the way she’s always liked it. His feet touch the red tiled floor at the toes. Ah, Trish thinks, a bit triumphantly, lifting herself onto the other stool. Taller.
He brushes some crumbs from the tablecloth and nudges the tea light in the red candle holder out of the way so that he can set his elbows on the table. When he orders a margherita pizza, he emphatically says con funghi, gesturing with both hands so that the small flame sputters, its light flickering against the plane of his neck.
They’re quiet while they wait for the food. It sounds stupid, but Trish is strangely at ease just watching Narancia be: exactly as she remembers, and yet not quite. He seems a little more patient, although he’d always been patient when it had come to her—good at listening as well as hearing—but his habits are still the same: he scratches at his head, drums his fingers, bounces his leg. When the waiter comes back with his pizza and her Coke, his face lights up the same way, too.
Trish pinches her straw between two fingers and watches him start eating. Messy and noisy and—happy.
“You’re still you,” she blurts out.
Narancia lifts his head mid-chew and blinks at her. Trish feels stupid, but she doesn’t know how else to say it. It’s true. It’s so true that she could write a song about it.
“Oh.” He looks self-consciously at the tablecloth, swallowing. “Um—is that—good?”
“Yeah,” Trish answers. “And you’re… taller.”
“Really?!” he exclaims, brightening. “I knew it!” He pumps his fist, grinning smugly at the ceiling. “Suck it, Mista.”
Fondness flits across Trish’s face before she can hold it back. She bends forward to disguise it around the straw.
“How is he?” she asks. “Or—everyone, I guess.”
Narancia beams, clearly happy to be asked.
“They’re all great!” he says, animatedly going back to eating. “Passione’s super different now, but also… not? I dunno. Giorno cleaned out a lot of the drug rackets; now it’s just gambling and protection and stuff. There’s a ton of Stand users still. He’s been working really hard, and he’s crazy busy, so Mista’s crazy busy, too. Oh, Mista and I got this place on Via Toledo a while back—but he’s like never there, and when he is it’s always, ‘Giorno said this, Giorno said that, what do you mean you haven’t seen Breakfast at Tiffany’s.’ Like I care. Let’s see… Bucciarati and Abbacchio are really good—they let me come over a lot, and sometimes I get to help Bucciarati fish! But Abbacchio usually doesn’t come. He gets seasick.”
“Did Bucciarati…” Trish pauses, stirring the ice cubes. “I mean, I remember him saying something about… getting a boat?”
“Oh, yeah,” Narancia says. “Some piece of junk he bought for, like, nothing. He spent forever fixing it up—all of us helped. Now he and Abbacchio just lounge around on it all day and listen to boring music. Like old people.”
Trish can picture Abbacchio lounging without much trouble, but the notion of Bucciarati lounging anywhere seems surreal. She’s glad, she guesses, that he has the occasion for it now.
Narancia glances at the ceiling, mouthing to himself like he’s running through a list.
“Oh, and Fugo’s—” He frowns, squints, and then shrugs. “Still Fugo, I guess. Giorno was all nervous cuz he didn’t know whether to make him or Polnareff consigliere. Then Mista told him to just do both, so he did. All the old guys were losing it. ‘Two consiglieri?!’ Who cares? Anyway, kinda perfect for Fugo; he still rides everybody’s ass, but now he gets paid for it.”
Trish almost asks about their Stands—although she hasn’t been on the best of terms with hers for a long time—but then Narancia waves a hand, bending over his plate to cut into the pizza.
“Anyway, what about you?” he asks. “How’ve you been?”
“Oh, um,” Trish says. “Fine.”
“Fine? You’re, like, famous and everything! That’s awesome!”
Trish doesn’t feel like faking enthusiasm, so she makes a noise of half-acknowledgment, toying with the corner of her napkin. Narancia doesn’t seem too bothered by the noncommittal answer.
“Do you like it?” he asks through a mouthful of pizza. “Like, are you happy?”
Trish glances at her plate, suddenly unable to look back at something capable of seeing her.
“I don’t… hate it,” she answers. “It kills time. And I guess it’s fun. Like, traveling, and stuff.”
Narancia’s chewing slows. He lowers his fork.
“But you don’t want to do it forever,” he says for her.
Trish’s eyes flick back to him. He’s watching her intently, his hair still mussed from the windy walk, his face bright from a faint sweat. The restaurant really is hot and noisy, steam wafting out between the tables from the kitchen. He glows in the light.
“I don’t think so,” she says. It’s the first time she’s told anyone. Not even Giulia knows, yet, about her thoughts of another city and another dream. Leave it to Narancia to get it out of her with nothing more than a slice of pizza and a long look. “It’s not that it’s bad. I’m just… bored, I guess. It doesn’t feel like it used to.”
“What’d it used to feel like?” Narancia asks, scooting a little closer.
Trish considers him. She lifts one shoulder, evading his eyes again, rolling her head to look instead at the fogged-up windowpane.
“I don’t know,” she says. “Not like this.”
From the moment that she’d met him—really met him, not just twisted his arm and stuck a blade in his jaw—Trish had taken notice of the way Narancia listens. It’s the same way that his Stand listens, breath by breath. This is yet another thing that hasn’t changed.
“I didn’t even know you could sing,” he tells her after a while. “Back then. But you’re really good.”
Trish stiffens against the compliment, the same as always. “I’m just lucky.”
“Lucky and good,” Narancia retorts. A smile breaks on his face. “I really like the new one, you know, the one that goes like—” And then he starts singing it, from the chorus. The one about the rain in Naples.
Trish lunges across the table and claps a hand over his mouth. He blinks back at her with wide eyes, but stops all the same.
“Don’t do that,” she hisses.
“Why?” Narancia asks, muffled, against her palm.
“It’s—” She doesn’t know how to say it. Writing songs is one thing, but the idea that people hear them—that Narancia hears them—that he knows the words well enough to say them back to her—is another one entirely. She settles for a lie. “It’ll make people look over here, and if they see me…”
“Oh,” Narancia says, with complete understanding, and then he faintly sniffs her hand. “Your perfume smells nice.”
Trish’s hand darts back so fast that it bumps against her chest.
“Thanks,” she says. “It’s Versace.”
Then the conversation lags—Narancia eats; Trish absentmindedly stirs her Coke. The buzz of the restaurant occupies the silence, snatches of laughter and responses, crowding together into a single, unbroken current of noise. Trish, with her chin in her palm, comfortably watches Narancia exist—watches the way his eyes seem to glow a little when he takes each bite, like he’s tasting it for the first time.
“Are you sure you don’t want some?” he asks, nudging his plate closer to her with two knuckles. “It’s pretty good.”
Trish tries not to make a face her mother would scold her for. Before she can turn him down, though, he doubles over a little, snorting into his fist.
“Just kidding,” he says, and slides the plate back. “I know you hate it.”
“Y-You remember that?” she exclaims.
“Huh?” Narancia frowns. His cheeks are bulging and there’s some sauce on his face. “Sure I remember.”
Before Trish can answer, he drops his left elbow onto the table and starts lazily ticking things off on his fingers.
“No Margherita pizza,” he drawls, the same way he’d recite the multiplication tables for Fugo. “No orange juice. Mineral water, but only if it’s from France. Vogue Italia. Nylon stockings—reinforced at the thigh, right?—and Givenchy blush.” He grins smugly afterwards, clearly expecting praise. “Well? Am I right?”
“But—” Trish blinks hard, shakes her head. “When Fugo was giving you the driving directions… you couldn’t—you had to write them down. On the map.”
Narancia wrinkles his nose. “Why would I care about Fugo’s shitty directions?”
He lowers his hand into the crook of his other elbow, and gazes unreadably at the table.
“I remember a lot,” he says, quiet, “about you.”
I remember a lot about you, too, Trish almost says. I remember everything.
“Anyway,” Narancia goes on, waving a hand. “I think if you’re bored, you’re bored. You’re gonna be amazing no matter what you do. Don’t worry about it so much.”
“Well,” Trish says, even though Narancia saying things so plainly makes them somehow undeniable, “for now, I’m still doing this. So…”
She sets her fingers on the edge of the table, running her thumb along the line where the tablecloth bends to feel the wood underneath.
“So…” she mumbles, suddenly self-conscious. “Thank you. For coming.”
“You asked,” Narancia says frankly, instead of something normal like you’re welcome. “So I came.”
“I—I know I asked,” Trish says, and Narancia tilts his head. “But you didn’t—I mean, you didn’t have to say yes. Like… you didn’t have to do that.”
Now Narancia’s looking at her like she’s explaining algebra. “I… know?”
Speechlessly, she bows her head over her almost-empty glass—she had held one just like this, that first afternoon in the turtle room, when the flowers in the vase had died so quickly and Narancia been limp in her lap, bird-boned, breathing too slowly—and looks at the small flame still burning in the candle holder, made crimson.
“Um, Trish?”
She slackens her hand on the glass until only her fingertips remain, glancing hesitantly across the table, first at Narancia’s elbow, then his face.
He seems determined to look at everything between them in sequence: the plates, the crumpled napkin, the candle, and, for an instant, her hand. He finally sets his mouth into a line and lifts his chin, so that their eyes are level.
“You’re still you, too,” he says.
“I am?” Trish asks faintly.
It gives too much away, she knows—but Narancia takes what she gives easily, without fanfare or expectation. He hasn’t changed after all, she thinks. Not even a little.
“Mm.” He nods again, slower this time, and scratches absently at the back of his head. “Yeah. You are.”
Trish lets it sink into the air between them, at their private table in the corner, by the window. She couldn’t say why those words might be enough to light the way home through any darkness she can imagine.
“Well,” Narancia adds, and when Trish glances up at him, his eyes evade hers, darting to the pane. “Except your hair.”
She reaches up reflexively to tug at a strand, narrowing her eyes. “What’s wrong with my hair?”
“N-Nothing! It’s just different! You know,” Narancia waves a hand over the crown of his head, “choppier? But it’s cute!” Panic seizes his face. “Um! I mean—nice. It’s just… it’s nice.”
Trish starts laughing. It surprises her, and she tries to hold it back, but the rest of it bursts out, doubling her over for a second. She lets it pass through her until only the breath remains.
When she recovers, Narancia’s watching her with something adjacent to awe. That’s right, she thinks, with a pang between her ribs—he never did see this.
“Sorry,” she gets out, laying a hand over her mouth. “I mean. Just. Thanks.” She realizes that she means it. She realizes how much. “Thanks, Narancia.”
“No problem,” Narancia answers, admiring, and then he clears his throat and sits up straighter.
After that, Trish finishes her Coke, and Narancia finishes his pizza, and afterwards he walks her back to the main street, and waits with her there. Fabrizio pulls up after only a couple of minutes in the Lancia.
It only occurs to Trish as she’s lowering herself into the backseat. “Where are you staying, anyway?”
“Huh?” Narancia pauses in the middle of stretching his arm behind his head, his fingers going slack behind the elbow. “Staying? Hm…”
His eyes wander to the sky, lingering there thoughtfully. After a couple of seconds, he shrugs.
“No idea!” he says. “I think that manager lady said she got me a hotel after she took my stuff.” He looks from side to side. “Probably around here somewhere…”
“Ugh. Call her, will you?” Trish shuts the passenger door, tossing her clutch onto the other seat, but rolls down the window and pokes her head out to keep talking. “There’s a payphone back by the restaurant. She’ll tell you what to do. Her name’s Giulia, by the way. And she would definitely fire you if she knew you forgot.”
“I didn’t forget!” Narancia snaps, but at Trish’s discerning look he relents. “Okay. Giulia. Fine.” He mutters it two more times, emphasizing each syllable. After a second, he stuffs a hand into his jacket pocket, rummaging for something, and pulls out a crumpled piece of paper. He smooths it out, squinting at whatever’s written on it. “I’ve got her number. I think. So…”
“So, see you,” Trish says, settling back into the seat.
As she fastens her seatbelt, she sees Narancia stepping closer in her periphery, the heels of his shoes landing brisk on the edge of the sidewalk. He leans down to prop both elbows on the bottom of the car window, and when Trish lifts her head, he’s smiling.
“What?” she asks.
“Nothing,” he says happily. “Just—you’re really still you. You know?”
Trish sucks in a breath. Narancia doesn’t seem to notice. She jabs her finger into the button to roll the window back up, and he springs back in alarm.
Before the last inch closes, she lifts her finger away. Through the tinted glass, Narancia’s silhouette is dimmer, but she can still see his eyes through the opening, hopeful and expectant.
“Thanks for showing me that place,” she says. “It was good; the—” Wait. She hadn’t actually eaten anything. “The… Coke was good.”
How lame.
Narancia blinks once, twice, and then beams.
“It was pretty good!” he replies. “Better than whatever that shit spaghetti was. Let’s go again sometime!”
Trish blinks. Sometime, huh?
“Sure,” she says, before she can keep it to her chest. “Let’s.”
When the car pulls away, she goes limp in her seat, eyes wandering to the soft gray ceiling. The radio is tuned to the classical station, a little muffled through the speaker embedded in the door. The car still smells like Giulia—like cigarettes.
After a while, she reaches for her phone. There’s a text from Giulia, sent an hour ago, and a bunch of missed calls—also from Giulia.
I have called you three times. No answer! So either you are dead, or you are happy. Tell me which one so that I can sleep tonight.
Trish’s thumbs linger over the keyboard, lit in golden blurs by the passing highway lights. From the speakers, an oboe.
Not dead, she types eventually. See you tomorrow.