Italian for Beginners (31 page)

“How did you know?” I asked softly.

But she didn’t answer. Instead, she stared for a moment longer, motionless, before drawing me into a fierce, tight hug that
expelled the rest of the air residing in my already breathless lungs.

“You are Audrey’s daughter,” she said softly as she pulled away. It was like she was telling herself again so that she had
no choice but to believe it. “You are Audrey’s daughter, here in Rome.”

I hadn’t been referred to as my mother’s daughter since I was a little girl and she was walking me to my piano lessons and
ballet classes.

“Yes,” I confirmed softly. “I am.”

She hugged me again and then drew back a foot or so and cupped my chin in her hand. She stared into my eyes. “You look so
much like her,” she murmured.

I swallowed hard. “You do, too.”

“What are you doing here?” she asked. “Did you come to Roma to see me?”

Her expression was hopeful. I had been worried about how she’d feel about me should we ever meet. Had my mother told her how
hateful I’d been when she’d come home? How I’d told her I could never forgive her, could never accept her as my parent again?
Did my aunt know how much I had probably hurt my mother during her final days? A wave of guilt washed over me as I looked
into eyes that looked so much like the ones I had last seen sixteen years before.

“No,” I answered honestly. “I came here for me.” I took a deep breath and added, “But I think coming here to see you is a
part of that.”

I wasn’t sure if the sentence made any sense, but Gina nodded slowly, like she understood. “I always knew you’d come,” she
said. “Your mother told me you would.”

“What?” I asked.

She smiled gently. “Will you come inside the store with me?”

I hesitated, took a deep breath, and nodded. I stuffed my camera back into my bag and hoisted it over my shoulder. As I began
to follow her, she surprised me by taking me gently by the hand. She squeezed hard.

I followed her into the shop, which was dimly lit and smelled faintly of lavender and orange blossoms, an enticing scent that
reminded me of the perfume my mother used to wear. Gina motioned for me to wait, then she brought a chair out from the back.
“Sit,” she said with a smile. I did so, and she settled into a chair behind the cash register. She leaned forward and studied
my face for a moment. “You are beautiful,” she said softly. “It is like looking at Audrey.”

I felt tears in my eyes. I shook my head and looked down. “I look like my father, too,” I said. I immediately regretted it;
it sounded combative and ungrateful. But Gina didn’t seem to take it that way.

“Yes, you do,” she said. “Your mother always loved that about you and your sister. She said you two had taken on the best
elements of both of them. She loved you girls very much.”

I snorted and looked away. Gina was silent, perhaps waiting for me to say something. But there were no words to say. How did
you tell a woman that her sister didn’t know the first thing about love?

“Do you know where she went, those years she disappeared?” Gina asked after a while.

The question startled me, and I jerked my head up. My mother had always been so secretive about where she’d gone; I’d always
assumed that she’d moved in with a man somewhere else, trying to build a different life for herself. As a teenager, I had
lain awake at night and vividly constructed tales of her departure in my head. I always imagined she had gone out west somewhere,
Las Vegas, maybe, or Los Angeles. In the scenario I visualized, she had moved in with a man who was taller, darker, and more
handsome than my dad. And I imagined that this mystery man had a couple of kids from a previous marriage, maybe two girls,
who my mother coddled and fawned over, allowing her to forget about her own kids.

“No,” I admitted finally. “She never told us.” I had hated my mother a little bit more for never explaining where the black
hole that engulfed her had been. My father wouldn’t tell us, either; in fact, I wasn’t sure he even knew. I had asked for
the last time the year she died. After that, I had decided that it didn’t matter where she had gone, that I shouldn’t care.
All that had mattered was that she had left us without looking back.

Gina looked at me for a long moment. “She wanted you to know,” she said finally. “But only if you came looking. Because if
you came looking, it meant that you were ready for the answer.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked, shaking my head.

“She came here, Cat,” Gina said softly. “She came home. To Roma. To us.”

“What?” I stared, incredulous. I hadn’t imagined that my mother had fled her children in favor of her parents.

If she had, surely they would have sent her back, right? Surely they would have told her that it was inexcusable to abandon
one’s kids, that family was the most important thing in the world, that the tie between mother and child was the one link
that was meant to never be broken. “Why?” I asked weakly.

Gina looked down at her hands for a long time. She turned her right hand over, palm up, and traced her lifeline with her left
index finger. Finally, she looked up at me. “She was sick, Cat,” she said gently.

“Sick?” I repeated. I didn’t understand. “What do you mean?”

Uninvited images of a valiant battle against cancer filled my head. But that couldn’t be right. If she’d been sick, she would
have stayed at home with us and fought it.

Gina sighed. “In the head,” she said softly. “She was ill. Very ill.”

“What?” I stared, uncomprehending.

“Your mother always struggled with depression,” she said slowly. “Did you know that, Cat? Did you know that about your mother?”

“No,” I whispered.

Gina smiled. “Good,” she said. “She did not want you to. Not when you were young. And for a while, she was sure that loving
you girls, loving your father, would save her, would end the sadness.”

I felt tears in my eyes. “But it didn’t?”

Gina shook her head. “I don’t think depression like that is a choice, something that can be turned on or off,” she said. “For
a while, she was able to fight it. But it was always there. She would lash out at your father sometimes, for no reason, right?
And sometimes she would become angry at you girls?”

“Yes,” I whispered, a flood of memories pouring in, sad memories of my mother crying or yelling or throwing things, memories
I had locked away.

Gina nodded. “I know. She felt very guilty about that. She would tell me she was sure she was ruining your lives. She always
said you and Rebecca deserved better.”

“But she left us,” I said. I felt like my voice sounded very small, almost as if I had regressed to the age of eleven. “How
could she have left us?”

“I don’t know that I will ever understand that, Cat,” Gina said. “You may never understand, either. But please know that when
she came home to Roma, to us, she spent every day thinking of you and your sister and your father. She cried about it all
the time. But she thought she was doing the right thing. She thought you were better off without her.”

“ But—” I began. I stalled. I didn’t know what to say. “This is impossible. She didn’t love us enough to stay. If she had
loved us, she would have stayed.”

Gina’s eyes filled with tears. “Cat, she didn’t leave because she
didn’t
love you,” she said. “She left because she
did
. She did love you. More than she could bear. And she thought she was hurting you by staying there with you. She thought you
would be better off without her.

“I tried to persuade her to go back to New York,” Gina continued. “But Mamma and Pappa, they were just glad to have her home.
They didn’t want her to be in America. They never liked your father. They felt as though he had taken your mother away. So
they let her stay, and they told her it was okay. They blamed America for her depression. But it wasn’t America. It wasn’t
her life there. She was just sick.”

“This isn’t possible,” I said softly.

Gina looked at me sadly. “It is the truth,” she said. “She finally began seeing a doctor. And slowly, things got better. She
began taking medication. She learned to deal better with things. And when she felt ready, she came home to try to become a
part of your family again.”

I could feel tears streaming down my face now, rapid and unbidden. I wiped them away, angry that my emotions would spill over.
“Why didn’t she tell me?” I whispered. “Why did she just let me hate her? Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

“She thought it was a sign of weakness,” Gina said. “And she felt that she deserved your hatred. She wanted to win you back
on her own. She wanted to show you that you could trust her, that you could love her. She wanted to spend every day making
it up to you.”

I thought about how many times my mother had tried to talk to me, how many times she had listened as I told her I hated her,
how many times she had simply said, “I love you, Cat. I always have, and I always will,” in return, instead of fighting back.
Sitting here with her sister, with a woman who looked so much like her, I could almost hear her voice in my head now.

“But then she died,” I said softly. The tears were rolling down my face in rivers now, and I was having trouble catching my
breath.

“Then she died,” Gina repeated with a nod, her own eyes growing watery.

I was sobbing now, full force. “I never told her I loved her,” I said. “I never said it after she came back. But I never stopped
loving her. I just didn’t want to. It was easier to hate.”

Gina looked at me for a moment. Then she stood up and gathered me in her arms, letting me sob into her shirt. “But she knew,
Cat,” she said softly. “She knew you loved her. She always knew.”

W
ith the truth out on the table, there was nothing left to say. I needed time to digest everything. It was as though my whole
world had changed.

My mother had still left us without a word and without an explanation. No matter the reason, that fact would always haunt
me, and it would always hurt. I didn’t think I could ever fully forgive her for that.

But for the first time in my life, I understood that it didn’t have to do with us. Not entirely. She hadn’t left because she
didn’t love us. It was because she was fighting demons she couldn’t understand, and because she didn’t want to drag us down
with her.

It meant it wasn’t my fault.

On a logical level, especially now as an adult, I realized that when a couple splits from each other, it generally was between
the two of them, not because of anything that had happened with their children. I knew I shouldn’t be carrying the blame around
on my shoulders.

But when you’re eleven and your mother walks away, it’s impossible
not
to blame yourself. So even though my father would tuck me in at night and tell me that our mother loved us and would be back
soon and that her leaving had nothing to do with us, I never quite believed him. Maybe if I’d cleaned my room better, picked
on my sister less frequently, stopped arguing about staying up past my bedtime, she would have stayed. Maybe if I’d been better
organized, had been able to take care of myself, had helped out more around the house, she wouldn’t have felt so much pressure.

And so I became the person I thought she wanted me to be. I stopped fighting with Becky; I did my best to take care of Dad;
I vacuumed, I did dishes, I cleaned up after all three of us, I learned to cook dinner, and I did everything I was told. I
never went through a rebellious phase as a teenager, because what if rebelling made my father want to leave us, too? I never
took chances, because what if they didn’t turn out right and something bad happened to me? Who would take care of Becky?

I had become the woman I was today because I thought my mother had left us because we weren’t worth the hassle, because we
weren’t worth loving. I had become who I was because I thought that if I could just make myself better, I’d be easier to love,
and she’d come back.

But it hadn’t had anything to do with me. She hadn’t fled our family in favor of a mysterious stranger. She hadn’t left us
to love another set of kids. She had left because she didn’t know how to take care of herself, and she didn’t know how to
ask for help.

Her solution had been to run away from what was inside of herself, from what was right in front of her. And hadn’t I spent
my entire adult life doing nearly the same thing?

* * *

Karina listened that afternoon, openmouthed, as I poured out the story of meeting my aunt Gina that morning.

“I’m so proud of you for doing all this,” she said softly. “So where are your grandparents? Did you meet them, too?”

I looked down. “Gina said that my grandmother died five years ago, and my grandfather died last year,” I said. “She runs the
store alone now.”

“I’m sorry,” Karina said.

I shook my head. “No,” I said. I felt tears in my eyes. “I actually think it’s okay. It means they’re probably with my mom,
right?”

Karina nodded quickly, and I looked up in time to see tears glistening in her eyes, too. She blinked them quickly away. “So
what are you going to do now?” she asked.