“Sorry—I need to take this.”
He walked into the suite’s bedroom. He left the door ajar and she could see just a portion of the interior. A plush maroon armchair, white-and-mauve-striped curtains, more flowers. Julian was sitting on the bed with his back to her—she could see only half of him—speaking to someone. Someone he loved, she supposed, at least judging from the intimate tone of his voice. She looked at the time. It was way past midnight already. She felt a strong urge to leave, to get away from him.
After a few minutes he came back into the room, scratching his head. He unlaced his sneakers and sat cross-legged on the opposite side of the couch, facing her. He sat still for a few seconds.
“I’m sorry,” Valeria said. “I know hearing all this again must be incredibly difficult.”
He didn’t answer and lifted the lid that covered the club sandwich, sneaked a glance at the fries and put one in his mouth.
“Want some?”
“No, thanks,” Valeria said, even though she was beginning to feel hungry. It felt wrong to eat just then.
“Are you married? Do you have children?” he asked her.
“No. Why are you asking?”
“Just curious.” Julian said. “That was my wife. To her Maya is just a name. Almost an anecdote from my past. I don’t think she ever realized how much it affected me to have lost her. I hardly mention Maya to her. I guess one tends to protect people we love from…” He made a vague gesture, as if he couldn’t find the right word. “Grief, I guess.”
“It’s difficult to talk to people about something that can’t be fixed, that they have no way of soothing,” Valeria offered.
Julian nodded, but as if following a new thought. Or maybe he just didn’t want to allow her the benefit of agreeing with her.
He faced her. “Did you ever talk to a therapist?” His tone was surgical, devoid of any empathy, as though he didn’t want to be implicated in any of her emotions.
“Not at the time. I wanted to get as far as possible from here; I guess I was in total denial. So I left—I moved to Los Angeles, like I told you, and went to acting school for about a year.”
Julian stared at her. Again, his expression was impenetrable, but she felt he wasn’t satisfied with what she was saying.
Valeria complied. “Basically I ran away.”
“Did it help?” Julian asked.
The question was probably meant to sound sarcastic, but she decided to ignore it.
“I saw a therapist years later and that helped, but I’m still terrified to bring it up. Not so much because it pains me but because it’s like landing a hand grenade in the middle of a conversation. People get uncomfortable; they freeze. And even when I make the effort and I try to stay honest in telling what happened, each time I feel like an impostor, as if I keep changing the angle according to the person I have in front of me.”
“Do you feel you’re being an impostor now?”
She held his gaze.
“No.”
Julian looked away from her. Valeria waited for him to turn back to her, but he didn’t.
“What was she like?” she asked, finally.
Julian gave her a blank stare.
“Maya. What kind of person was she?” Valeria insisted. “I don’t think I ever saw a picture, or if I did, I think I have made myself forget it.”
“She was…” He hesitated and looked away for a moment. For the first time his eyes lit up. “Very beautiful and very funny. She had that deadpan humor that I always tried to imitate but couldn’t really. And she was smart. She wanted to be an archaeologist, learn Sanskrit, go to India. I wish I’d known her as an adult. What hurts me the most now is that I’ll never be able to talk to her as an equal, ask her advice or show her my work, for instance. Or know what hers would turn out to be. But I know we’d have so much in common.”
Julian picked up his phone from the low table between them and started punching the screen and scrolling through images.
“Here,” he said under his breath and handed her the cell.
“Maya, my younger brother and me in Sicily. The last summer we spent together. She had just turned fifteen.”
It was a shot of a crinkled photograph on paper, probably enlarged. The margins were blurred. Two boys and a girl, slightly taller than her brothers, standing in front of the ruins of an ancient temple. Maya was in the middle, the tallest of the three, looking at her feet. Valeria couldn’t make out her face very well.
“She had just met this Italian boy in Rome and they were in love. I think it was her first boyfriend. I remember she was sulking; she resented having to be with us, away from him on a family vacation. She would find any excuse to run to a phone booth and call him, and of course I was really jealous. When we came back to Rome we found that the boy had painted huge graffiti in Italian on a wall right across from where we lived. Big, bold letters in bright green, with a crown on the top. It said something like ‘Welcome back, Princess’…”
Julian paused and in his American accent said, “ ‘Benetornota…princessa’?”
“ ‘Bentornata, principessa,’ ” Valeria corrected him.
“Thank you. Actually, in America to be called a princess is a bit of an insult. My parents were absolutely furious, but Maya thought it was the most romantic thing that had ever happened to her.”
Valeria smiled.
“My father had to pay someone to repaint the entire wall, but the writing was still visible beneath the new coat of paint. That graffiti survived her. It was eerie: it was faint but it was there and it literally faced our front door, so that after the accident each time we left the apartment we couldn’t avoid seeing it.”
Julian gave another look at the photo.
“Wait, I’ll forward it to you.”
Valeria watched him fiddle with his phone, and after a few seconds she heard a ping land inside her handbag. The photo had bounced from his phone to hers. The exchange felt too rapid, too clinical.
She checked her phone and enlarged the image. Valeria lingered, studying Maya’s slender body, her tanned legs, the Capri sandals, the short orange dress that revealed her thighs, the hair, bleached by the sun, that almost reached her waist. She looked powerful for her age. Or maybe it was just the intensity of her being alive.
* * *
Julian was also staring at the same photo on his screen. His mind went to that particular summer—their last—after which everything seemed to have come to its end.