Burning the Map Read online

  My father, on the other hand, is so closemouthed about the subject of their marital discord, he almost convinces me there’s nothing wrong.

  But there is. Something is terribly wrong, and it can’t simply be about sleepwear.

  Francesco brings me back to the present, to Rome, by waving a menu in front of my face. I take it, realizing I’m starving, since I’ve eaten little since yesterday. It takes a glass of Pinot Grigio and a huge plate of spaghetti to satiate my appetite, but then I’m ready to move again. Sitting still lets too many thoughts surface.

  “What’s next?” I ask Francesco.

  “It is siesta,” Francesco says. “Nothing is next. Only another glass of wine.”

  “There are places open,” I say, putting on my Jackie-O sunglasses that I bought for the trip, deciding they were rather international and cosmopolitan even though they’re way too large for my face. “We could go to the catacombs,” I say, collecting my purse, putting some lira on the table. “We could go—”

  Francesco cuts me off. “Slow, bella, slow,” he says. Gentle words.

  I sit back in my chair again. We can’t go to the catacombs, anyway. We might run into the girls, and Lindsey might cause Francesco to disappear in a cloud of smoke with one of her nasty stares. She probably scares the shit out of everyone at work.

  I sip the cool, tart wine, trying to let myself get drawn back into a lazy conversation with Francesco, the way the Italian siesta was intended to be spent. I know I should enjoy this time, this day, but I’m struck by the fact that in a few weeks, there will be no more siestas for me. Instead, I’ll make a haggard run for fast food or a salad and then eat at my desk without breathing. I take another sip of wine to drown the thought.

  After siesta, Francesco leads me to a small, graceful fountain in a corner of the Borghese garden, which is situated at the top of the Spanish Steps. I study the curved nymphs of the fountain, attempting to enjoy it along with the surrounding purple blooms, but I’m not really seeing, because the more I think about the situation with Kat and Sin, the more I know they have a point. Sure, we haven’t seen each other as much as we used to, but more importantly, somewhere along the way I stopped being there mentally. I’d still meet them on occasion at some of our regular spots—the River Shannon Pub for Thursday night drafts, Gamekeepers for burgers and the Bulls games—but I hung on the fringes, listening to the conversation rather than taking an active part. I’d opt out of late-night festivities to run to John’s condo, where he’d already be sleeping, barely cognizant of my arrival.

  Maybe it was because I was overloaded with law school and eventually the bar exam. Or maybe it was my desire to spend more time with John while he just spent an increasing amount of time at work. It could also have been my struggle to hold my family together, which has been like trying to support a stumbling drunk from under the arms. Whatever the reason, it seems that this morning’s argument and the absence from home invites a certain self-awareness that lets me see myself more objectively than when I was mired in it all. Unfortunately, I’m not so thrilled with what I’ve uncovered. I’m still hurt that Sin and Kat felt the way they did for so long, that they couldn’t trust me enough to tell me, but I’m as much to blame as they are. I hadn’t really told them about my parents, after all. I hadn’t confided much in them over the last few years. Somehow we’d gotten away from each other, from the way our friendship used to be.

  I’d first learned that my parents were having problems about a year and a half ago, when I went home early on Thanksgiving morning. Our suburban stucco house on Orchard Lane was surprisingly quiet that day, and I walked through the place, past photos of graduations and Little League and a very odd one showing me in a nun’s costume and my brother, Danny, dressed like a priest for Halloween. No one was in the sunny kitchen with the brown tile floor, or the family room with its overstuffed couches and clutter of antique lanterns my dad collected. My parents’ bedroom door was open. I walked in and peeked my head in the master bath.

  “Happy Thanksgiving,” I called out, giddy at the reprieve from studying and the prospect of eating my own body weight in mashed potatoes.

  “Casey!” my mom said, a hand flying to her heart. “You scared me.”

  It was then I noticed that her blond hair, which was dyed to look like mine—and like hers used to look—was severely pulled back from her face with a thick black headband that I used to wear to high school cheerleading practice.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  “Okay.” She took a deep breath. “I have a question, and this is serious, so I need you to really give this some thought.”

  “All right,” I said, leaning on the lime-green countertop, wondering what this was all about and when she would start making the rice casserole with the chunks of sausage.

  “Okay,” she said again. “It’s either this—” she put both hands to the sides of her face and dragged the skin upward so that she looked like a cat “—or this.” She shifted her hands so that the skin around her eyes was pulled straight back, giving her a rather Asian appearance. She dropped her hands and turned to me. “What do you think?”

  “What do I think? What are you talking about?”

  She blew out a quick blast of air like she did when dealing with a daft store clerk. “I’m getting a little work done, and Dr. Stangey says I need to decide exactly what I want.”

  “Work done,” I repeated.

  “Yes, you know—face-lift, eye-lift, laser resurfacing, Botox, cheekbone implants.” She cocked her head at me. “I have to decide.”

  “Why would you do any of that?” This was a truly shocking turn of events. Not only was my mother an attractive fifty-two-year-old who was always being mistaken for forty, but she didn’t care about these things. She was the mom at the public pool who jumped in with the kids, not minding that her hair got wet, and she’d always spent more on our wardrobes than she did her own.

  “It’s time,” she said, yanking off the headband, stowing it away in a drawer. “It’s time I started paying attention to my appearance. Some men might still find me appealing.”

  At the mention of men, I realized the absence of my father and brother. “Where’s Dad?” I said.

  My mother picked at her hair with a comb, sucking in her cheeks in the mirror. “Working out.”

  “On Thanksgiving?”

  “Um-hmm.”

  And then a better question occurred to me. “Does he know how?” My father didn’t belong to a gym that I knew of, but I’d hadn’t lived on Orchard Lane for a long time.

  “Apparently,” my mother said in a particularly cryptic voice, straightening the lime-green towels on the rack, then moving back to the mirror and yanking at her face again. “So which do you think?” she said, shifting her skin up and down, up and down, until I started to wonder whether I was having a flashback from the ecstasy I did once.

  “Have you talked to Danny about this?”

  “Ha!” she said, and I couldn’t blame her. My brother was a bit of a shit at that point, nearing the end of his adolescence. Still, he lived here, not me, a fact I pointed out to her.

  “This is a woman’s issue,” she said. “You’re the only one I have.”

  When my dad didn’t come home that day until almost five o’clock, right when my mom was about to serve the pared down Thanksgiving feast she’d prepared—a Butterball turkey from a neighborhood store and Spuds potatoes—it was then I knew that something was truly off. Usually, my dad was in the kitchen right along with my mother, peeling the potatoes and generally poking his fingers into things that weren’t ready.

  I pulled Danny aside, asking him what in the hell was going on. But he was a senior in high school, and his vocabulary consisted mainly of two words—dude and whatever—which is verbatim what he said to me that night. “Dude…whatever.”

  After I left that weekend, I thought about talking to Kat and Sin about it. I really did. But I knew that it sounded lame—my mom wants to get a face-lift and my
dad was late for dinner. It was nothing, nothing at all, certainly not compared to Kat’s complete lack of stable family life. And besides, I wasn’t seeing my girlfriends quite as much as I usually had. I wasn’t sure whose fault it was, but I blamed it on growing up, on having more to do than practice keg stands and beer bongs. When we did see each other, we just didn’t have the same conversations that we used to—the ones that involved the minutiae of our lives. Instead, we got to the big points. We summarized.

  And so I didn’t mention that Thanksgiving scene with my mom, nor did I talk about that first scary phone call a few weeks later when she’d confided a sexual fantasy about Antonio Banderas. The barrage of alarming maternal confidences grew from there, one on top of the other, and I got used to internalizing them. Danny wasn’t any help. College just made it easier for him to get pot, easier for him to avoid home and anything associated with it. I generally mentioned to Kat and Sin that my parents were having issues, but I never elaborated. I never told them how it kept me up nights, how I’d come to fear the ring of the phone. By the time I finally realized I should speak about it, that I needed to talk about it, John seemed the only good candidate. I’d slipped away from Kat and Sin, or they from me, and we all seemed too busy for the kind of analysis the conversation required.

  “I have to get back to the hotel,” I say now, interrupting something Francesco is telling me about the fountain.

  “It is early, bella,” he says, looking at his watch again and raising his perfectly arched eyebrows.

  His bedroom eyes turn back on like floodlights, and he lightly touches my collarbone, as if we’d been together a long time, and this is a familiar gesture.

  “I really have to get back,” I say.

  Ten minutes later, I stand on the stairs leading to the pensione. With Francesco on the ground, we’re at eye level, his face an inch from mine.

  “I will miss you, bella.” He breathes the sentence. Despite the warring thoughts in my head about John, Kat and Lindsey, I’m stirred again.

  He leans forward, his kiss infinitesimally slow. I feel the sun on his face as he moves from my mouth and kisses my eyelids, my forehead.

  “Why don’t you stay a few more days? You could meet your friends later.”

  I laugh. Kat and Sin would love that.

  But I don’t answer right away. His suggestion makes me think about a woman I knew during my semester in Rome. She met a metal worker in Cannes while we were there for a weekend trip, and she never came back. She dropped out of school, out of sight, out of the U.S.A. She was ridiculed by all the women in my school for selling herself short and giving it all up for a man. Secretly, I thought her brave.

  Maybe I could do that, too. Sure, Francesco is only asking for a few days, but couldn’t I stretch it out and never go back? I wouldn’t have to start my job at the law firm. Instead, I’d find something wonderfully exciting to do here, like work for a fashion magazine or become a painter. I wouldn’t have to deal with my family, or anything else, for that matter.

  Yet as quickly as I conjure up these possibilities, I know my answer is no. I’m too much of a planner. Danny is the spontaneous one, the appointed nutball of the family, not me. I’ve always valued responsibility over spontaneity, strategy over impulsiveness.

  “Sorry, Francesco,” I say. “I have to go.”

  I put my hand on the back of his head, feeling his curly hair, damp from the heat. I pull his face to me. Soon, both of my hands run through his hair. He holds my face while he kisses me as if he won’t let me go. He ducks and kisses my neck, my collarbone where he had touched earlier. It’s only when I hear myself moan that I come to. I snap my head around, embarrassed. The only person in the vicinity is an older, well-dressed shopkeeper, sweeping his sidewalk across the street. He studies his work intently, but a quick smirk over the top of his broom tells me he’s enjoyed our little public display.

  “I have to go,” I say again. I push Francesco gently away from me.

  “Okay, bella,” he says, his chocolate eyes on mine. “You will write me, yes?”

  He hands me a white card with neat handprinting that says, “Francesco Giacobbe, Via Majorana 122, Roma, Italy, (06) 59 88 299.” Funny, I never asked him his last name before.

  I can’t stop looking at the card. The fact that he has printed it out ahead of time touches me, and I don’t want him to leave. A few seconds go by.

  “Bella?” he says.

  “Of course. I’ll write you.” I look up and smile. “Thank you, Francesco.”

  He shrugs, a nonchalant movement, as if to say there’s nothing to thank him for. I open my mouth to tell him otherwise, but I can’t find the words.

  I kiss him one last time, a chaste kiss really, compared to our prior rumbles.

  “Ciao, bella,” Francesco says, and starts his scooter. I watch him as he pulls away, his light blue shirt flapping behind him, his quick wave to someone he recognizes in the street. A moment later, he turns the corner, and I can’t see him anymore.

  7

  Once in the room, I open the windows to let in some air and start repacking my stuff in the massive backpack I borrowed from my brother. Most of my clothes are scattered around the room from my “dress” rehearsals before going out with Francesco last night. It seems so long ago.

  I fold my clothes quickly, nervous about seeing Kat and Sin again but looking forward to the rest of our trip. They were right about me changing. We’ve all changed, actually, but it doesn’t mean we can’t be close like we used to. I’m still a tad annoyed that they laid out their gripes now, after two years, but I’m willing to let it go.

  I hook up my CD player to two tiny speakers and crank up a Grateful Dead album. Sometimes I use music like a drug to elevate my mood, and I decide that after the last few months, I could use some drugs. Jerry Garcia sings, “What a long strange trip it’s been.” Like a drug, the effect isn’t immediate. It takes a while to settle into my brain and my limbs, but soon I’m snapping my fingers. I have my hair dryer in my hand, and I’m dancing around, coiling the cord, when Kat and Lindsey fall into the room laughing, juggling packages. I freeze like I’ve been caught doing crack cocaine. Silence greets me.

  “Hey, guys,” I say, my anxiety returning. “How’s your day?”

  “Fine,” Lindsey says, her eyes wary. She stands hesitantly in the doorway.

  “Are you all right?” Kat says.

  “Yeah. I’m great.” I walk to them and try to grab them both in a bear hug, envisioning a tearful reunion in a made-for-TV movie, but neither returns my enthusiasm.

  “Listen,” I say, taking a deep breath and a step back. “I realize that I’ve been out of it lately. I can’t explain it, but you’re right. I have no excuses, no reasons, but I think I’m shaking it off. I’m starting to feel like my old self again.”

  “Well, well,” Lindsey says, dropping a Versace bag from her hand. It lands with a soft thud on the tile floor.

  Kat says nothing but looks hopeful.

  “I know I shouldn’t have gone off with Francesco today, not after what happened this morning, but I was so shocked and hurt about everything you said. I was upset that you dropped it on me now—on vacation.”

  “There was no time before,” Lindsey says. “You were always with John, or there were other people around. You never seemed like you wanted to talk about anything.”

  “Well, I think you could have found a minute or two to try.” This comes out sounding snotty. I shake my head, as if I can erase it. “The bottom line is that I want us to get back to how we used to be.”

  Lindsey stands with her arms crossed. “That’s great, Case. Me too, but it’s not going to happen overnight.”

  This throws me a little. I’d imagined apologizing and then everything returning to some semblance of normality.

  “All right,” I say, “but I’m ready to have the best trip of our lives. I really want to do anything I can to make it better.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Kat says. “We all
have to try, right?” We both look at Lindsey.

  “I don’t think it’ll be that easy,” she says.

  Kat gives Sin a poke in the ribs.

  Sin glares at her. “I guess we can all give it a shot,” she says, nodding as if to convince herself.

  I exhale a short burst of relief.

  We get on the Rome subway, our backpacks knocking into the poles and other passengers. The subway will take us to the Termini, where a train will take us to Brindisi, at which point we’ll hop a taxi to the port and board an overnight ferry to Corfu. I’d never even consider traveling like this in the States. If any destination requires more than three hours of auto travel, I fly, or I skip it altogether. But there’s something that sounds authentic and wonderful about sitting in the cabin of a train as it chugs past the European landscape. And while I’ve heard that the boat to Corfu is much like those carrying immigrants to the U.S., I’m looking forward to it. To Greece. To patching things up with Kat and Sin.

  As I stand in the subway car, separated from them by the crowd, I stare at the profile of a guy a few persons ahead of me. I take in the sensuous curve of the corner of his mouth, the dark hair curling slightly over his collar. The time that I spent with Francesco seems to have awakened a new crop of sexual feelings in me. I see and feel sex everywhere. Although I can’t see the guy’s eyes, or most of his face, I picture those lips on mine, whispering in my ear the things he wants to do with me, to me. I envision him taking me to his family’s house in Capri, making love to me on the patio overlooking the water.

  He shifts his body so that I glimpse his face, and I’m surprised to see that he’s nothing like what I’d thought. His nose is crooked, eyes too deep set. Certainly not unattractive, but not my type, either. Shit. Now he’s noticed me critiquing him, and he’s obviously mistaken my surprise as interest. He smiles a slow, and what he must believe to be sexy, smile and gives me a meaningful look. Strangely, I feel trapped, as if he might come over to me at any minute and act on my earlier thoughts. I look around for somewhere to move, but with my pack strapped on I’m like a turtle, and abrupt movements don’t work well.