“Jules? Did I wake you?”
“No….” He cleared his voice. “Actually yes, but it doesn’t matter. My alarm will go off in ten minutes anyway.”
“I had a very bad day. Your phone call this morning threw me off completely.”
His mother’s voice was lightly slurred. He calculated the time difference: it was late-night in New York, the end of another day of Scotch on the rocks.
“You never told me you went to see her,” he said.
“Who?”
“Valeria said you went to her apartment one night, a few weeks after the accident.”
“Who? Me?”
“Yes, you. Don’t you remember doing that?”
“No.”
“Really?”
“Vaguely.”
“That’s all?”
“I don’t know. Well, all right, yes. It was a terrible place. Dirty. She looked very scared. I don’t remember what we said. I was out of my mind, of course.”
Julian sighed.
“Mom, please go to bed. It’s late there.”
“I can’t. I can’t stop thinking about this. Can’t you see? It’s like reopening a wound.”
“I know. But perhaps we can move on.”
“Where to? To the fucking grave?” his mother snapped. “I’m seventy-six, Jules, for Christ’s sake!”
Julian looked out of the window. The April sky was trimmed with lavender. One thing that had never changed in Rome was the beauty of the light.
“It wasn’t just us. It was hard for her too,” he said quietly, almost to himself, as he opened the window and leaned over the sill. “Please, try to rest, Mom. I’ve got to go now—I need to get ready for work.”
* * *
Piazza del Popolo was deserted, and magnificent in its symmetry. The obelisk at its center and the two identical churches, one on each side of Via del Corso, formed a perfect triangle. Julian walked across that empty space, over the shiny cobblestones that had just been washed by the street-cleaning truck.
The previous night he had offered to call an Uber for Valeria, but she insisted she’d rather walk home, despite the late hour. She would be fine; Rome was a safe city, she said, and she just needed to be by herself. They had parted peacefully, knowing some of the weight they were each carrying had been dislodged and they could be grateful to each other for that. He had watched her from the suite’s window, a solitary figure turning the corner of the empty street. He’d probably never see her again—there was no need to.
The driver wasn’t coming for fifteen minutes, so Julian had a little time to be on his own before going to the production office for yet another meeting with the casting director. He was looking over at the tall, ancient pines swaying in the breeze at the top of Villa Borghese, when a gigantic flock of starlings moved across the sky like a handful of confetti thrown in the air. There were so many of them, they were like a dark stain over the pink sky. The shape they formed kept changing, stretching and contracting as if they were a single organism. He remembered how this particular pattern of migrant birds was called a murmuration, because of the sound produced by hundreds of flapping wings.
Julian stared at the dazzling display of the birds’ flight. Who is the guide that leads them wherever they are heading? he asked himself. There was so much shared information and interdependence in the dance they were doing—heading north, then east, opening up and shrinking again in a mysterious choreography—so that the birds never collided but seemed to connect with and protect one another. What an amazing image to put in a film, he thought, so powerful and uplifting.
Are we also like that, he thought, humans moving unknowingly in formation, moved by the same intention? Is there a shared brain that connects us all if we listen carefully to one another, an instinct that allows us to move in sync, without hurting one another, toward a safer place?
He had no idea. But that morning so much of what he wasn’t sure of seemed possible to him, as he stood still in the empty square, mesmerized, in that incredible sweetness of light.
From the corner of his eye he saw the car appear at the corner of Caffè Rosati. He waved a hand and started to walk toward it.