“Do you take walk-ins?”
She clicks her tongue and looks down at her watch. “Usually, we are booked at least a month in advance. But today, my party is late. You are in luck. I’m Cecilia.”
“Lanie.”
She holds out a harness to me. “Are you ready?”
I hesitate for a moment and then step into the harness, let Cecilia tug and tighten a dozen different straps. I summon the hang-gliding scene in Fifty Ways, the commitment the characters make as they leap into the abyss.
They can’t see where they’re going, but it doesn’t stop them. They have each other and the wings of love to lift them.
I look down at the wooden ramp under my feet. To call it rudimentary would be a compliment. Ten feet long, it starts in mud and ends in clouds. This is what we’ll run off the edge of together.
Vertigo grips me, and I have to look away. It seems suddenly, urgently mad that anyone runs off this cliff with only a thin yellow sail between them and death.
“What do you think?” Cecilia asks me, bringing me back to the cliff. “Do you really want to do this?”
“ ‘Life’s greatest mystery,’ ” I say, “ ‘is whether we shall die bravely.’ ”
“I love that scene,” Cecilia says, securing my harness tightly at my hips. She hands me a helmet, makes sure I thread the strap through tightly. “I love all of Noa Callaway’s books.”
“Me too,” I say. “I’m . . .” In love with him! “I’m Noa’s editor in New York.”
“No!” Cecilia squeals. “I would say I’m her biggest fan, but my boyfriend is even more crazy for her books. Tell me what she’s like in person?”
I’m relieved to know the op-ed hasn’t made its way to every corner of the world yet. I think about how to answer Cecilia’s question, and the words that come first feel right.
“One of my favorite people in the world,” I say. I give myself goose bumps, but Cecilia doesn’t notice.
“I’m in town for the launch of Noa’s new book,” I say. “It’s tonight in Positano, at the Bacio hotel. You should come. Bring your boyfriend. I’ll put you on the list.”
“We will come!” she says, and tugs the last ropes tighter.
She takes my arm, leading me to the cliff’s edge. Now she attaches both our harnesses to the metal inner frame of the glider.
“On the count of three, we will run together. All you have to do is not stop running. When you think you’ve reached the end, get braver,” she explains.
“You make it sound easy.”
“I don’t know if it’s easy,” she says, “but it’s worth it.”
“How far is it to the bottom?”
“I’m not sure. Two thousand meters?”
There’s a metal bar in front of us that Cecilia explains she’ll use to steer. There’s a triangular sail the color of the sun over our heads. There’s ten feet of flat plank before us, and an unseen expanse of adventure beyond. Through the drape of clouds, there are mountains, villages, and sea. And the rest of my life. I can’t see it yet, and I know it won’t be easy, but I need to make it worth it.
I cry out as we start running, but the sound isn’t terror; it’s triumph. My feet pound against the wood for ten paces and then, though I feel nothing beneath me, I’m still running. On air. On faith.
A gust of wind catches our glider, and I feel both of my legs buoyed upward until my full body is parallel to the earth, like a bird’s. We puncture the clouds and the glory of the coastline comes into view. A panoply of green and gold earth spreads beneath us, pastel villages and glittering blue water as far as I can see. We’re flying. I have felt nothing so exhilarating in my life.
Mom, I think, I did it. I can feel you.
And now . . . I know what I have to do once my feet are back on the ground. I have to tell Noah. He’s the one I really, really love.
“For you, Lanie,” Cecilia says, turning the glider to the right with a pivot of the metal bar, “I present a special tour, of our most romantic allusions. Look to the right, and you will see Li Galli islands off the coast of Positano. This is where Odysseus resisted the sirens.”
I turn to see the rocky shoreline in the distance, the waves crashing on it. It’s breathtaking—and easy to imagine the sirens singing there. I think about Odysseus resisting the irresistible, lashing himself to his ship to keep from crashing, to live more life and have more joy. To make it to the place his epic meant to take him all along.
I want to tell Noah about all of this. About Li Galli islands. About lovely Cecilia and her boyfriend, the fan. About the Ducati, and the view from my hotel room, and his chic Italian editor. About how it feels to fly.
But it’s more than that. I don’t just want to tell Noah about these things. I want to share them with him. I want him here. I want Noah with me in the sky, where we can gaze out at the future—the golden, glorious, complicated balance of our lives.
* * *
I’m halfway back to the Bacio when I spot the silver Moto Guzzi V7 motorcycle in my side-view mirror. It’s a hot bike, sporty and refined—and with his vintage motorcycle boots, dark jeans, and suede bomber jacket, it’s easy to imagine the driver is as sexy underneath his helmet. When I glance back over my shoulder, he revs his engine, flirting.
“Not today, signor,” I mutter, wishing my life were so simple that I could lose an afternoon at a cliff-side café with an Italian stranger. But I’d be awful company, checking my phone every other minute, praying for Noah to call.
I try not to notice that the Moto Guzzi takes the same left turn I do onto Viale Pasitea. Or that he winds with me up the hillside growing steeper by the meter, and turns into the Bacio’s tiny parking lot behind me.
We roll to a stop at the same time under a flowering bougainvillea vine, parking beneath the breezy archway of the hotel’s street entrance.
Illicit tryst, I hear BD screaming from her Peloton back home, but that ship has sailed. I’ve got a speech to rewrite and careers to save. I’ve got a space in my heart crying out for just one man.
I climb off the bike, shake my hair loose from my helmet, fix my bangs. I’m trying to make it inside the hotel, through the lobby, and up the stairwell to my room, all without looking back at Mr. Moto Guzzi, when a familiar voice says—
“Nice weaves. Very smooth.”
I stop walking. I stop breathing. I turn around slowly, trying to prepare myself for something that can’t possibly be real. My heart is racing as Mr. Moto Guzzi climbs off the bike and takes his helmet off.