decades following that tragic summer in Tuscany, Lillian Bell often wondered: What if she’d had a crystal ball? Would she have canceled the trip? Or never suggested it in the first place? Or would she have given herself over to fate, regardless of the consequences?
In the spring of 1986, Lillian and Freddie Bell were living in Tallahassee, Florida, and heading into their fifth year of marriage. Admittedly, when Lillian had first met Freddie, she didn’t have it all together. She had suffered a difficult upbringing with parents who were alcoholics in dead-end jobs they both hated. They stayed together “for the sake of the baby” when they should have split up at the outset, early into the marriage, because all they ever did was scream and fight and drink, then scream and fight and drink some more.
Lillian’s father finally left when she was ten. She never saw him again, but rather than feeling frightened and abandoned, she’d wished he had left sooner. Or that her mother had been the one to leave.
Maybe it was something in her mother’s DNA that made her stick by her husband, year after year, enduring verbal abuse and backhanded smacks to the face.
Or was it love? Lillian often wondered. Because her mother did have romantic feelings about Lillian’s father, at least in the beginning. Her mother often reminisced about picnics in the park, chocolates and flowers, and a marriage proposal on a sandy beach at sunset while foamy waves rolled in.
Lillian had no idea if any of that ever really happened, but she cherished those stories regardless, because they made her believe in a fairy-tale world where grown-ups were happy together. That belief carried her through the dark times when her parents were smashing things in the kitchen at night and Lillian was hiding under her bed, whispering soothing words to her baby doll. “Don’t be scared. I’m here. I’ll protect you.”
Later, after her father was long gone and Lillian began to date in high school, her mother advised her to avoid ham-fisted alpha males. “Marry someone soft,” she said. “The kind of man who wouldn’t hurt a flea.”
And so, after a number of years dating the types who fell into the “hard” category and liked to smash things (like Lillian’s face against a wall), she met Freddie Bell on a vacation in Florida. Disney World of all places. After standing in line for an hour to ride the Space Mountain roller coaster with two friends, she had been relegated to sit alone in the seat behind them. At the last second, Freddie hopped in beside her.
“Looks like we’re a matched set of third wheels,” he said with a shy smile. He was handsome and adorably boyish, and it felt like fate, and heaven knew she was a sucker for the idea of destiny. Why? Maybe, deep down, she relished the notion of not taking responsibility for major decisions. It was easier sometimes to go with the flow and simply let fate carry you along. Then you couldn’t blame yourself when the river got angry and threw you up against a rock. It was simply your lot in life.
She and her friends spent the rest of the week in Disney World with Freddie and his group. A month later, she quit her waitressing job in Chicago and moved to Florida to be with him. She felt fortunate because he was gentle and endearing and he passed the all-important litmus test: he had slender hands that were made to hold a pencil, not punch a hole in a wall. He was creative—an intellectual who read books and wrote poetry. He’d even gone to college to study English.
Lillian was, to put it plainly, astounded by her good fortune. She had once heard that women often married carbon copies of their fathers, but she had vowed never to fall into that trap. After a few regrettable, abusive relationships in her teens and early twenties, she’d begun to dream about the polar opposite of her father. At long last, she had found it in Freddie.
Things moved quickly after that. She got pregnant (they thought they were being careful), so they tied the knot before anyone found out about their inability to use birth control effectively. Sadly, however, a month after the wedding, Lillian lost the baby.
A terrible year of grief followed in which she blamed herself for not protecting her unborn child, and she considered it the worst failure of her life. At one point, she told Freddie that