Me and Mr. Stenner

13.

When we got to Rome, Mr. Stenner told us he wanted to spend a few hours alone on the Via Condotti, and I immediately asked, “Are you going out to look for it?”

“Yes,” he said.

“What is it? A Fiat?”

“A Fiat? That’s an automobile,” he said.

“Sure, I know. Are you buying me a car for my birthday?”

“Who’d drive it for you?” he asked, smiling.

“I thought maybe you could get me a chauffeur, too,” I said, and giggled.

It was three days to my birthday.

When he got back to the hotel, he was whistling.

“You got it, didn’t you?” I said.

“I got it,” he said.

“What is it?”

He shook his head, and smiled, but I wouldn’t give up. I kept poking and prodding and guessing and pleading, and on the day before my birthday, I finally found out what he’d bought me. We were on our way to the Villa Borghese. Mr. Stenner was driving the rented car, Mom was sitting beside him, and I was in the back.

“Is it a fake something?” I asked. “Is that what the F stands for? Like a fake diamond, or a fake...”

“No, it’s very real,” Mr. Stenner said. “And listen, Ab, I don’t want to answer any more questions about it, okay? You’ll find out tomorrow.”

“Is it a fan? I saw some pretty fans in one of the shops yesterday.”

“I’m not even going to answer you,” he said. “Really, Ab. Even if you do guess what it is, I won’t tell you.”

“Well, is it a fan?”

“No, it’s not a fan.”

“Then is it a fife?”

“Abby,” he said, “if you ask me one more question about that damn bracelet...”

He cut himself short.

He had said it. He had told me what it was.

There was a stunned moment of silence; he was realizing he’d told me, and I was realizing I’d spoiled my own surprise.

“A bracelet,” I said.

He said nothing.

“But that doesn’t start with a... oh, I get it,” I said. “A forever.”

He still said nothing.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Stenner,” I said.

“I’m the one who should be sorry,” he said.

“I shouldn’t have kept pestering you that way.”

“I shouldn’t have slipped.”

Mom looked first at him and then at me, and then she sighed.

When I woke up the next morning, there were 12s stuck to the ceiling all around my bed. Big 12s. They’d been made out of Italian newspapers, he’d cut up newspapers into 12s and Scotch-taped them to the ceiling like a canopy. There was a mild breeze coming through the window, the 12s flapped lazily. I was twelve years old. I shrieked in delight when I saw all those black-and-white 12s, and then I ran into the room next door without knocking and threw my arms around his neck and kissed him and said, “You made all those twelves, didn’t you?”

“Not me,” he said. “Must’ve been the concierge.”

“The hall porter, you mean.”

“Right, right, I keep forgetting what you call that guy downstairs. Did you see what’s on the dresser?”

An envelope was propped up against a small box wrapped in gold paper. I knew what was in the box, of course. A bracelet. That much of it I’d managed to spoil. The card was in Italian. There was a little girl skipping rope on the front of it, and the words Buon Compleanno, Mia Figlia. I studied the card for a long time, trying to make out the Italian. Then at last, I said, “What does it say?”

“It says, ‘Happy Birthday, Daughter.’ ”

I put the card down. I unwrapped the small package. The bracelet had three slender strands of something dark that looked like leather. They were fastened with thin gold strips to a thicker gold band behind them. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life.

“It’s elephant hair,” Mr. Stenner said. “It’s supposed to bring good luck.”

“Like a forever,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Thank you,” I said. I went to Mom’s little traveling kit and took the scissors from it, and carried it back to the bed where Mr. Stenner was sitting up against the pillow. I held out my wrist. I didn’t have to say anything, he knew right off, same as I’d known when he was taking pictures of people taking pictures. He cut off the forever that I was wearing, and then slipped the new forever onto my wrist.

It meant something.

I was shaking.

It all began going beautifully after that.

The plan was to spend six days at Porto Santo Stefano, a peninsula off the coast, some ninety minutes north of Rome. Then we would drive back to Rome on the night before our departure, check in the rented car, spend the night in a hotel there, and taxi to the airport early the next morning. The hotel in Porto Santo Stefano was one Mr. Stenner had stayed at before. On the day we arrived, we were sitting near the pool, Mom and Mr. Stenner drinking whisky-sodas, me drinking a silvery confection that looked like liquid mercury — when a woman suddenly said, “Peter?”

Mr. Stenner looked at her, and then jumped out of his chair. “Wenefride!” he said, and hugged the woman to him, and then kissed her on the cheek, and asked immediately, “Where’s Emile? Is he here with you?”

“But of course he’s here with me,” the woman said, and laughed. She was in her early fifties, older than Mr. Stenner, and she glanced at Mom now with open curiosity.

“Wenefride,” Mr. Stenner said, “let me introduce you to my wife and my daughter. Lillith, this is Wenefride Gastuche. Wenefride — Lillith and Abigail.”

“How do you do?” Wenefride said, and extended her hand first to Mom and then to me. “Come, let’s find Emile! He will be so happy to see you again.”

The Gastuches were Belgians Mr. Stenner had met on his last trip to Italy. They didn’t seem at all surprised that he and the former Mrs. Stenner were now divorced. (“I could sense it coming even then,” Wenefride said to him.) I liked Wenefride a lot. You should have seen the stuff she had with her. She was only going to be away from home for two weeks, but she’d taken with her enough clothes to last eight months! That very afternoon, she showed me all the gowns and wigs and jewelry she’d brought, and it was like being in the best department store in the world. Her husband Emile was a little baldheaded man who was the director of a bank in Brussels. When he saw Mr. Stenner, he threw his arms around him and hugged him like a bear. In a minute, they were making plans. Emile said he had found a wonderful place to go swimming, and he told us to be ready at seven p.m. sharp, at which time he would personally drive us all there.

“You’ll love it,” he said, and waggled his eyebrows.

Mr. Stenner doubted very much that we’d enjoy swimming in the ocean after sunset, but Emile was a man of many surprises, and the spot he took us to was a thermal spa that bubbled up out of the ground and tumbled over a waterfall to dozens of little pools below. Sitting with Mr. Stenner in one of the pools, I said, “This is the best time I ever had,” and then slid over the polished rocks to join Wenefride, where she was splashing in a pool some fifteen feet below.

Mom sat down beside Mr. Stenner.

“Are you happy?” he asked her.

“I’m very happy,” she said. “Are you?”

“I’m very very happy.”

“So am I!” I shouted up to them.

Mr. Stenner burst out laughing. “Do you know what I like best about you?” he shouted.

“What?” I shouted back.

“Your ears!”

The next night, Emile drove us to a rustic old inn high in the mountains. He got lost on the way there, and we didn’t arrive till almost ten o’clock, but ahhh, what a feast! To start the meal, we had a breaded vegetable soup called zuppa alla Certosina. And then we ate fresh rock mullet in tomato sauce, and lamb roasted on a spit, and fried zucchini, and funghi alla Fiorentina, which were mushrooms prepared in the Florentine manner. The wine was delicious, the bread was hot and crisp. There was a blazing fire, and laughter from the kitchen, and laughter at the table, and I felt happier than I ever had in all my life.

In the morning, Mr. Stenner rented a fifty-one-foot ketch with a captain and two crew members and he took us and the Gastuches for a sail up the coast to a cove where we swam till noon, and ate sandwiches the hotel had made for us, and then dozed on the beach till the sun grew weak. He danced with Mom in the hotel lounge that night, and when he got back to the table, I said, “Aren’t you going to dance with me?”

It was all going so damn beautifully.

Until, you know, I went and spoiled it again.

On the morning we were supposed to leave Porto Santo Stefano, I went into the room next door, and told Mom I wanted to talk to her privately. Mr. Stenner was still in bed, half-asleep. Mom was sitting at the dressing table, putting on her lipstick. I whispered in her ear.

She looked at me.

She put down her lipstick.

“I think you’d better discuss that with him,” she said.

“You tell him,” I said.

“Tell me what?” he asked, and raised himself up on one elbow.

“Never mind,” I said.

“What is it?” he asked Mom.

“She wants to give you back the bracelet,” Mom said.

“What?” he said.

“Before we go home. She doesn’t want her father to see it. She’s afraid it’ll upset...”

“What?”

He got out of bed in his pajamas, and walked into the bathroom. I could hear the water running in there. Mom looked at me and shook her head. I went back to my own room. In a little while, I heard the door to their room opening and closing, and I peeked through my window and saw him walking down to the sea. I watched him. He went all the way to the edge of the ocean, and stood there on the rocks looking out at the deep blue cove. A sailboat was anchored just offshore, bobbing on the choppy water. The sky was overcast, the wind blowing fiercely. I saw him pull the shawl collar of his cardigan high on the back of his neck, and thrust his hands deep into his pockets. I put on one of his old sweaters over my long pink flannel nightgown. He’d given me the sweater a long time ago, it was the blue one with a hole eaten in it by Singapore the cat. I put on his leather hat, too, and pulled it down low on my forehead, almost hiding my eyes. Then I went out of the room.

He was climbing back up to the hotel when he saw me standing at the top of the winding steps cut into the rock ledge.

“Get back to the room,” he said. “You’ll catch cold.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“The hell with it,” he said.

“Can’t you tell I’m sorry?”

“No,” he said.

“It’s just...”

“Save it,” he said, “I’m really not interested.”

“It’s just I have two of you, and it’s hard. I don’t want to hurt either of you, don’t you see? I love you both.”

“I don’t believe you,” he said.

“Oh, please believe me,” I said. “I love you.”

He told me later that he realized something in that instant. He realized that never in all the time he’d known me had he said those same words to me. I love you. I was only twelve, I was far too young to treat those words cheaply, they were to me treasured words. I love you. In Milan, Mom had asked him, “Have you ever tried loving her?” As he climbed those steps in Porto Santo Stefano, he wondered if he ever had.

I stood silhouetted against the sky. He climbed to where I was standing, and we looked at each other silently and solemnly, and then he put his arm around me, and together we began walking back to the hotel.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” I said.

“I know you didn’t,” he said. “Let’s talk about it, okay?”

“Okay,” I said. “And while we’re talking, could we also figure out something else to call you? Because if you love somebody, you just can’t go around calling him Mr. Stenner all the time. And I do love you. I wish you’d believe that. It makes me mad as hell when I tell you something, and you don’t believe it.”

“I believe it now,” he said.

“That was my secret,” I said. “Remember when I asked if you wanted to swap secrets? When you wouldn’t tell me what my present was? Well, that was my secret. That I love you.”

I stopped dead on the path, and looked up into his face. The cap was tilted low on my forehead, and my hair was blowing in the wind, sweeping across my face with each fresh gust. But I knew he could see my eyes clearly, and I only hoped he could read what was in them.

“I love you, too,” he said.