Later when we were alone, Luca said that if Rennie had always known he’d come home, then she’d known more about it than he did, because his plan had been to go back to Italy when released and never to set foot on American shores again. He had been so angry at me for so long, been so convinced that I had wronged and betrayed him, felt so righteous about his indignation that he was sure he could not love me ever again. As for Rennie, he was convinced that she would be better off without a father who felt nothing but bitterness and resentment toward her mother. So his plan was to sail for Naples, find work, and send us money every month. It was hard to hear him talk about how much he had hated me, but I had to know. “What changed your mind?” I asked at last because so far, I had heard nothing that would make him want to come back for us.
Luca said a man had visited him in prison, the only visitor he had ever had except for my one visit to him. The man seemed to have known Rennie and me, though he never volunteered how he knew us. He spoke little and there was something peculiar about his speech, as if words were a foreign language that he had to translate from another medium. He told Luca that he would be released soon, and Luca didn’t believe him because he still had almost a year to go on his sentence. He told him that he must go back to his wife and child and take them back to Italy with him where others would be waiting. Luca asked him why he must do this, and the man responded without a hint of sarcasm, “Otherwise the world will end.” Luca had laughed out loud at that and had begun to think it was a trick perpetrated by one of the other prisoners, who often tormented him because he was the warden’s favorite. But the following week, he was told that he and a few other prisoners were being released unexpectedly to make room in the overcrowded prison for new offenders. Still Luca doubted on what authority the visitor had spoken with such conviction and he had not abandoned his own plan. He had gone so far as to enquire about the train schedule to New York and how much passage was to Naples. But very soon he realized that leaving us behind had only been what Rennie would call “for pretend.” In his anger, he had needed to pretend for awhile that it was possible to leave us. It wasn’t. It had never been. We were a family for better or worse, not because he and I had uttered some words to each other fraudulently years ago, but because joy in each other and misery and longing had welded us together as surely as the flame-forged locks of my bedroom door. I realized, too, that in every moment that he had hated me, he had loved me in that very same moment, and that’s the way of things that are joined and which “no man can put asunder.”
I told Luca all about our boarder, how it must have been him who carried us out of the burning house, how he must have gone to visit Luca because everyone in the whole county knew where Luca was and why. And he said that all made sense, except that his visitor was tall and fair and not short and dark, and he looked more like a Viking than an Oriental. So we decided that it had been one of Galen’s newsy bodies and left it at that. To continue to question it would just have caused an itch in our minds that could never be scratched.
I asked Luca how close Italy was to Kathmandu. He didn’t know. I hadn’t thought of Kathmandu for a long time. I felt certain that I would never in my life go there, and I didn’t care. We imagine our zenith. But neither a zenith nor a nadir is fulsome enough to be the whole of a life, and ruined life is still life. I gave up Kathmandu for Naples, bartering a life that could never have been for one that was. An excellent trade, and there was no tragedy in it. It was as it should be. Or the world would end.
We booked passage to Naples a few days later, and when the time came for us to walk down our road for the last time, I turned to look at what was left of the inn and was surprised to feel nothing but relief that the past had been purged so completely. Jewel, my sisters, Aaron, Seth, I let them all go now, like birds I had held in my hand. “And lo the bird is on the wing,” Omar would have said.
When we stood on the deck of the ship pulling out of New York harbor, I looked at my child waving to people she did not know and my husband’s profile as he gazed out at the receding land, and I felt what Eve must have felt on the first morning in the Garden. In the end, there was nothing left to do but sigh at the incoherent coherence of every life. Luca said the Italians had a saying: “Since the house is on fire, let us warm ourselves.” And we would.
