Hill Towns (47 page)

I stood for a moment more and then dropped down onto the blanket and fitted myself into his arms. I was very cold.

I burrowed close to him, wriggling until the entire length of me was pressed against him. He was very warm. I put my face into the hollow of his neck, and he closed both arms around me and wrapped me to him.

“Rest just a little while,” he whispered. The wind of it stirred my hair.

“Just for a minute,” I said. I was warm all over now. “Just for a minute.”

I closed my eyes….

When I opened them, the glade was ashen with the gray that comes just before sunrise, and he was gone.

I sat up, blinking around the glade. He had laid his blue jacket over me, and I held it close. There was cold dew in the glade now. Everything seemed damp and cold and empty.

Perhaps he had gone into the shed, or over the bridge.

But I knew he had not. The very air around me was empty of him. If he had been close, I would have known. I lay back down on the blanket and pulled the jacket closer around me, and curled up into a small ball on my side, and closed my eyes again.

I do not think I lay there long, but I seemed to hear many words. No pictures came with them, but the words were as clear as if the people who said them lay next to me.

“Americans behave badly in Italy, Cat. All of us, in one way or another,” Yolanda said.

And, “It’s all one slick, straight, hard, shiny surface. You couldn’t chip it with dynamite.”

And, “I don’t have to tell you how simple Ada has made it for Sam to paint you; she’s literally taken charge HILL TOWNS / 395

of Joe so you could be alone with Sam. I’ve watched her do it.”

And, from some earlier place, “Your vulnerability. That excites Sam.”

But I had not been vulnerable last night.

And he had not, after all, made love to me.

“You better fuck him fast, Cat,” Yolanda had called to me from the table of the restaurant in Florence.

I had, it seemed, waited too long. He had already made his love, and that was to the woman on the canvas. The woman in his arms last night had been the image.

Oh, yes, there would be a new show soon. He was burning with it, throbbing with it.

I had thought the burning was for me.

I lay with my face pressed to the old earth of the hill and knew I was not safe and never would be. And it did not matter.

Presently I got to my feet, still clutching the jacket around me, and looked again around the clearing. He had folded my dress neatly and laid it at the edge of the blanket with my shoes and underwear. I put them all on and smoothed the dress and my wild hair. Across from me the falcon stirred her great wings silently and cocked her head. But she made no sound.

I went across the glade and opened the door to her cage.

I reached in and loosened the leather tie. Then I stepped back and looked at her.

“Go on,” I whispered. “Go. No more cages for you. No more.”

But she shrank back against the bars on the far side and did not move.

“I don’t blame you,” I said. “It’s not what it’s cracked up to be out here.”

396 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

I started out of the glade, and then stopped, and turned, and went onto the bridge again, to the very middle, and looked down. The bridge itself lay in the thin first light, but whatever lay below was still in darkness. I balled the blue jacket up and held it out over the rope railing and let it fall.

I heard it tumbling through vegetation, but I did not hear it hit. Then I went back and through the glade and up the path toward the Villa di Falconi. I did not fasten the door to the peregrine’s cage when I went.

When I came out onto the gravel semicircle, it was full light, though still very early. A gardener pushed a wheelbarrow along a brick path on the far side of the garden, and an elderly man came out of the villa dressed in a warm-up suit and jogging shoes and began to trot down the drive toward the road to Siena, nodding to me as he went. But no one spoke. I thought that, in my white dress, I might have looked like an apparition sprung from the woods in the chilly dawn, but not one, now, with the power to frighten.

There was no one about in the lobby, but from somewhere just out of sight I heard the chink of china, and smelled coffee brewing. The manager’s window was shuttered. I stopped on the polished wooden floor just as a pool of sun spilled over the line of the eastern trees outside, letting its fragile warmth touch me. I stood still under it for a moment, as you might under a warm shower. Then I turned and went softly up the stairs.

All the doors on my floor were shut, and there was no sound. I do not know what I had thought to hear. At my own door I stopped, and reached into the pocket of my dress for my key, but then saw that the door stood slightly ajar. I pushed it open and went in, feeling absolutely nothing except a great, simple desire for sleep.

HILL TOWNS / 397

Joe sat on the far side of the big bed, his head turned toward the open window that commanded the distant skyline of Siena. He still wore the oxford shirt and chinos he had worn last night, but he was tieless, and the shirt was as wrinkled as if he had picked it out of the dirty clothes hamper. His hair fell over his eyes, and even from the doorway I could see the glint of stubble on his jaw. He held the telephone in his hand. He was not using it, simply holding it.

He turned slowly to face me, and I saw that his eyes were sunken in the blue hollows where they retreat when he has had no sleep, and his face was dirty, actually striped with dirt. He took a deep breath and let it out in a long, shuddering sigh. His lips moved, but he said nothing, and then he said, “Cat. Where have you been?”

His voice was old. Thin and weak, cracked, old.

I shook my head, looking at him.

“I’ve been out all night looking for you,” he said in his old, old voice. “You weren’t here last night when I got back, and I couldn’t raise anybody in Sam and Ada’s room, and Colin and Maria didn’t know where you were, and the manager didn’t. And the car was gone. I went back down to Siena looking for you. I looked in every restaurant and bar and joint and hole in the wall and back alley I could find; I had a cabdriver with me, and he looked too. I was going out into the hills around here this morning. I’ve just talked to the police. They wanted me to come in and sign some stuff.

Some
documenti
.”

Incredibly, he smiled, but it did not hold. His mouth began to shake and he closed it. He got up and walked to the window and put his hands on the sill, as if to rest his weight there. With his back to me, still in the old 398 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

eggshell voice, he said, “They’ve gone, you know. Sam and Ada. Colin and Maria. Gone back to Rome in the station wagon. I saw them as I was coming back in this morning.”

He stopped and I nodded, as if he could see me. Of course they had gone. I had known that back in the glade. He was not anywhere in the air of this place. Ada would get some rest now. Her job was over; his was just beginning. That was what the look that had passed between them at lunch yesterday had said. He had even said it aloud to her: “You’ve earned it.”

I still did not speak. I looked at Joe’s back.

“Cat,” he said finally. “You and Forrest. Did you…?”

“No,” I said. “No, we never did.”

He did not move, but his shoulders slumped.

Then he put his hands up to his face and rubbed his eyes, and I saw that the right hand was wrapped in white, white spotted with red. His handkerchief, I thought. I went a little way into the room, near enough to see that the hand was swollen, the flesh pouching redly around the sides of the tight cloth.

“What did you do to your hand?” I said. It was my own voice; how strange.

He still did not turn.

“I knocked him down,” he said.

“
You knocked Sam Forrest down
?”

“I asked him where you were. He wouldn’t tell me. He said it was for you to decide if you wanted to tell me or not.

And…I knocked him down.”

His voice sounded queer and stifled; I had the wild thought that he might be laughing.

“Wow,” I said. It sounded precisely as stupid as it was, but I could think of nothing else to say.

HILL TOWNS / 399

He did laugh, then. He put his face back down into his hands and laughed and laughed; his shoulders shook with it. And then he took a deep, strangled breath, and I knew he was crying, not laughing. Crying in a terrible and total way I had never heard before; crying and trying not to.

“Please don’t,” I said softly. “Please don’t.”

“I thought you had gone,” he said. He could hardly speak.

“I thought you had just…gone. I’d have died if you had, Cat.

I wouldn’t blame you, but I’d have died.”

I went around the bed and put my hands on the back of his shoulders and steered him to the bed. The sobbing did not stop, and I did not look up into his face. I did not think he would want me to do that. I sat him down on the bed and pulled the covers back.

“Let’s sleep,” I said. “That’s what we both need, more than anything. Come on, slip in here. We’ll both sleep. After that we’ll talk.”

He said nothing more, but he did slide into the bed and under the covers. Still in his pants and shirt, he rolled over onto his side, as he did when he slept at home, away from me. I pulled the covers up around his chin. I could still hear his breath, still catching, still uncontrolled, as I went to the window and closed the shutters. He did not sob again, but he still did not breathe well.

I slid out of my dress and shoes and crept into the other side of the bed. I lay looking up at the ceiling. Small bars of sun, going from white to yellow now, danced there, cast up through the shutters. They were hypnotic. I don’t know how long I watched them. I could not seem to capture a thought, so I simply lay, watching sun flickers.

After a long time Joe said, “What will happen now?”

400 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

He did not turn to me.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Another pause, then: “Can we go home?”

“Whenever you like.”

“No…I mean,
can
we? Can we go home again?”

As I had on that morning in Florence, on the terrace by the pool with Yolanda—had it only been two mornings ago?—I thought of the stone house on the lip of the Steep.

I saw it again as I had then: saw the bright rooms washed by the thin, clear air of the Mountain, one by one; saw my garden with all its flowers blooming; saw scrubbed counters and kitchen flagstones, shining softly; saw sofas indented by years of our bodies, pillows that held the imprint of our heads, newly vacuumed rugs that still held the tracks of our feet.

I did not see us, though. Joe and I were not there. But then I looked again, and there were our shadows. The two of us, shadow Cat and shadow Joe, close together in the sun of the living room, in the sun of the kitchen. We were there, then.

We were still there. I just could not see us.

“I think so,” I said.

He did not say any more. But in a moment he reached over his shoulder with the bound hand and laid it on my hip, and I covered it very lightly with mine. I left it there, listening to his breathing. Pretty soon it slowed and deepened, and his hand slackened and slid from under mine.

Joe has always gone softly down into sleep.

I felt my own sleep coming toward me then, felt the shape of it out there, white and deep and vast as a glacier. With my thoughts I reached out toward it, wanting that great, softly hissing whiteness, wanting just that.

Before it reached me I heard the falcon. I knew HILL TOWNS / 401

instantly what it was, that primal unearthly cry, high in the air over the villa.

“
We-chew
,” she called. “
We-chew, we-chew
.”

I lay listening, eyes closed, mouth curved in a smile. I heard her as she made her old immutable patterns, wove them into the high, thin blue air, back and forth, back and forth. The call receded and came back. Receded and came back. I lay waiting.

Finally it did not come back. I listened as it climbed up into the vault of the morning one last time, and then it faded and faded and finally vanished. I could not hear it anymore.

But I thought that if I got up and went to the window and leaned out and looked up, perhaps I might see her, just for a moment, just for a heartbeat, a speck against the sun that was only now brushing the tops of the city below us on the hill.

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS’s bestselling novels include
Nora, Nora; Low Country; Up Island; Fault Line
s; Downtown; Hill Towns; Colony; Outer Banks; King’s Oak; Peachtree Road; Homeplace; Fox’s Earth; The House Next Door; and
Heartbreak Hotel.
She is also the author of a work of nonfiction,
John Chancellor
Makes Me Cry.
She lives in Charleston, South Carolina.

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RIVERS SIDDONS AND
HILL TOWNS

“Another tour de force…. Anne Rivers Siddons aficionados are in for another treat.”

San Antonio Express News

“All that intense sensuality in the intense Italian sun keeps you turning the pages and—as the last chapter looms—wishing you could go on and on from town to town with these charming, brilliant, out-of-control people.”

Detroit Free Press

“[Siddons] creates a passel of characters her fans will find reassuringly familiar, and then sends them far out of ken—to Italy….

Siddons’s tried-and-true fans will be pleased.”

Kirkus Reviews

“An affecting love story, a drama of psychosocial tension, a tale of sexual suspense…
Hill Towns
keeps revealing more and more surprises right up to the end.”

Oxford Review

“Anne Rivers Siddons’s vibrant,

compassionate tone captures Italy’s powerful effect.”

Entertainment Weekly

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