“How can I help?” she says.
I try to keep all emotion from my voice. “I don’t know. I have to think about what’s best for Peter.”
She collects herself. “Alex, I would give anything to see him.”
It comes out quickly, before I can let myself second-guess: “Then I want you to meet him.”
“Okay,” she says, suddenly sitting taller. “I would love that.”
She keeps glancing at Peter’s radio-controlled car on the floor. A red Maserati with a broken axle from a joyride into a medieval wall. Peter has written his name on the door. Mona can’t take her eyes off those scrawled letters.
“I would,” she repeats more faintly, “really love it.”
The discovery of how much those words mean to me is a warning that I need to step back. If hope comes this easily, so will disappointment.
“I can’t let that happen until Peter’s ready,” I say. “And I need time to get him ready. So you can’t just come knocking at our door again.”
She looks decimated. Trapped in her silence.
Finally I stand and say, “Peter’s at my uncle’s place right now. I need to get back to him.”
“Of course.”
She rises. On her feet again, she seems stronger. She tightens the sweater around her, then tucks in the chair. At the door, she makes a point of not moving, of letting me shepherd the parting. But the thought of her departure fills me with a premonition of vast loneliness. If in the morning she has gone back to Viterbo, I will have to hide my emotions from Peter. I will have to never let him know tonight happened.
As my hesitation deepens, she lifts a hand in the air and, as if touching a wall of glass, lets it linger.
“Here’s my number,” she says. It’s already written on a piece of paper in her hand. “Call me when you and Peter are ready.”
* * *
WHEN SHE’S GONE, LEO slowly drifts back. He doesn’t speak. We’ve returned to the oldest terrain of our friendship. In silence he walks me back to Lucio’s.
At the palace door he gives me a tap on the arm and a meaningful look. Making the sign of a telephone with his hand, he says, “If you want to talk about it.”
But I don’t want to talk about it.
Peter is asleep. His body is misaligned on the bed, feet nearly touching the pillow. I move him, and his eyes open. “Babbo,” he says lucidly, then tumbles back into the abyss. I kiss him on the forehead and stroke his arm.
Mothers in the neighborhood ask how a single father does it. They see me at playdates, at the meet-ups where rising students are supposed to become friendly before primary school starts, and they say how lucky Peter is to have me. Never do they suspect that I am a ghost. A sunken ship dragged back to the surface by the little boy hanging from the monkey bars. God took Mona but left me Peter. Now she is only one phone call away. And yet I wonder if I can bear to dial those numbers.
I say a prayer for Simon, then decide to sleep on the floor. My little boy deserves a bed of his own. But before I crawl out, I whisper in his ear.
“Peter, she came home.”
CHAPTER 18
PETER WAKES AT dawn. Lucio and Diego are still in their beds, but we find nuns in the kitchen preparing the last of the summer produce, peeling the carrots and rinsing the lettuce. They don’t seem to mind sharing their hour of peace with a little Napoleon who marches into the middle of them, pushing aside their habits like a showman forcing his way through theater curtains, and says, “Where are the cereals? What kind do you have?” No self-respecting Italian would eat cereal for breakfast, but Michael Black introduced me to American breakfast when I was a boy, just as he would later introduce Simon to American cigarettes. I think of what Mona would say, to find that her son has inherited the habit.