“I need to do something on my own.”
He’s exasperated, as he is every time we talk about this. “I know. But this is more than standing on your feet. When a ship is sinking, you abandon it.”
I straighten up on the floor, rise to standing. “At least I have my own ship. I have to go. I have people who need me,”
“Annie, it is not bad being helped. Are your employees helping? How different is this?”
“It’s different!”
“How, Bella? How?”
“Because they’re helping me fix something I created. Your life, Christiano – you created it! I just fit myself into it. It was your house. Your furniture. Your friends.”
“You took them when it suited you.”
A pause hangs as wide as the miles between us. “Christiano, I’m sorry for what I’ve done to you by leaving things so ambiguous like this.”
“Ambiguous,” he asks with that tone he uses when he doesn’t understand a word.
“Leaving things up in the air, unsettled. Am I coming back or not…”
“You always say you are.”
I don’t speak. “I want to. I wish we’d stop fighting about this.”
His voice is filled with pain as he says on a tired whisper, almost to himself, “How can I hold onto a bird?”
Oh God, it kills me when he says things like that. He’s so poetic, my Christiano. Why don’t I run to him and forget all about this stupid need to stand on my own? I go to the safe to do what I came here to. “I feel like my heart is pulled in two directions, but my soul in only one. I have to try. I'm sorry. I so appreciate your giving me the space. And please, I know you’ve said you don’t want to, but…”
“Don’t,” he interrupts. “Don't say it, Bella,”
It takes me two times to get the code right, I’m so overwhelmed. “What?”
“Do not say for me to see other people again. I don’t want to hear it!”
My hand is shaking as I slip the bank’s canvas lock bag into my purse. “Okay.”
“I should come to San Francisco.”
“You can’t leave work, baby. Am I scared? Yes! Do I want your help? Yes! But don’t you see, that’s exactly why I can’t take it!”
“No. I don’t see.”
“I know. And that’s been our biggest problem.”
A long sigh comes through the phone. “I am going back to sleep.”
“Okay. I’ll call you later.” The phone goes dead. I stare at the calendar on the wall, thinking, that’s the first time we didn’t say, I love you. Staring back at me is a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge, its base surrounded in fog. The fog makes me think of last night. I’m drowning in uneasiness. It takes too long to find the doorknob. The door feels heavier than it was. I want to rejoin them, but I’m walking slowly. The phone is hanging from my hand. My bag, filled with too much money for all the wrong reasons, is hanging off my limp shoulder.
“I’m not going to the hospital. I need to go home and make some calls to repair this window.” Standing in the center of the room, I’m staring at my phone, seeing me dialing 911 with it. Running to him. Scraping my knees as I slid to the floor. There’s Christiano’s face also and he’s yelling, a memory of a dozen arguments always over the same thing. “I need to call the insurance company,” I mumble, swaying to my right towards a table. Something. I need something solid to hold on to.
“Annie?” someone says.
I whisper, “Plus, I think I need to sleep.”
Color trails sweep in drug-like zigzags.
The room spins.
Finally… darkness. Sweet, forgiving, darkness.
For a flash of a moment, faces are above me. A mask is on my face. My body sways. The roof of an ambulance.
Darkness again.
Then there is nothing. Not even a dream.
Chapter Four
Christiano
Dreaming of a better time when she was here and we were happy.
“Christiano, look!” Annie cries out, leaning forward in the gondola.
I turn my head, smiling as I put my arm around her and follow her pointed fingers. “It’s a bird, Bella.”
She shakes her head and leans into my shoulder. “Nothing is just a bird anymore. Everything is so beautiful here.”
A tugging at my chest pulls a kiss from me onto her head, the short light red waves of her hair blowing and tickling my lips. “You are as fresh as this breeze. You make me very happy,” I whisper into her ear, out of range of the gondolier hearing. What’s ours is ours,