There wasn’t much time, not nearly enough. Still, she’d spent a small fortune for a seat on that international flight, most of what she had in her savings. It was a first class ticket, at least. She tried to appreciate the lie-flat recliner, the champagne. What was that story she’d heard, once? A monk, chased by a tiger, forced to hang precariously from an eroding vine off a cliff’s face, manages yet to delight in discovering a rose.
She had only one wish, one thought on her mind: to get home. Get home before the last day. But it wasn’t home, had never been. It was the town where her mother gave birth to her, the place she loved spending summers as a child and dreaded wasting summers as a teen.
She had sworn to her American friends she would never go back - small town, narrow minds. She had been determined to break out of her alien chrysalis, to trade her Italian husk for powdery bright new American wings. Lost countries, forgotten languages, might-have-been lives, all breath lost to a race she didn’t know had no finish line.
Then, a few nights ago, the angel came. It was no dream, but that is how her husband would have described it, had he still been alive, a happy skeptic, accepting of his one and only life and managing to love it until his last breath. Her friends called it a nightmare, along careful nods to her mental state. They tried to persuade her it was grief, her recent loss casting shadows on her mind. But all she could think about was her grandmother’s home, a pixel on the time-space continuum from which she’d stepped out so long ago, now pulsing like a heart in her memory, hours before all memories would cease.
She’d already debarked at Fiumicino, in Rome, when the news began to broadcast. In restaurants and waiting areas people crowded around television sets for a NASA statement full of redactions and amgibuities. A coronal mass ejection. Optimistic warnings about satellite disruptions neighsayed by the strident doom scenarios of influencers who had made fortunes prophesying.
She observed herself jostle through the crowd, determined to get nowhere. Her nonna’s apartment had been sold years ago, after her mother died. What would she do, once she got there? Alone in a place that was as foreign to her as the language she no longer spoke. She was crazy. Maybe she’d always been. And yet, standing outside in the airport’s taxi area, her only real wish was to get there before the last hour of the last day.
To her relief, the driver did not cancel. He drove up to the curb in a shiny black luxury sedan. He greeted her with a courteous nod, and asked for her luggage in an accented English. The news channels hadn’t yet given enough details to make sense of her carrying nothing, not even a travel bag, but he accepted it without questions.
He was middle-aged and balding. He wore a neat black suit, a shiny Swiss wrist watch. At his sleeves, gleamed golden cufflinks. It would be easy to believe his success, but she knew Italy, the low salaries, the staggering unemployment. She sensed his story as if he were telling it to her. Unmarried. No children. He would not be the type to make a habit of regret.
He turned on the radio, switched channels when the news discussed the flare, not enough danger detectable in the newscasters’ wording yet. The driver fiddled with the dial until music filled the car. Classical. Chopin. An etude. Peace settled in a few moments, then a jarring jingle broke the calm with an ad for toothpaste. The driver clicked the radio off. She was grateful that he made no attempts to talk.
The drive took three and a half hours on a regular day, but maybe the newscast had begun to have an effect. There was traffic, the highways clogged. Or maybe the angel had visited others. She had no reason to think she would be the only one. The driver turned off the highway and into a countryroad coasting fields thick with chicory in bloom. Only the tick-ticking of the turn signal broke the silence, the occasional burst of static from his walkie-talkie. He knew backroads, seemed to know what it was about. Maybe he, too, was an angel of sorts.
An angel in human guise had saved her from a snowstorm, long ago. Maybe he was only a man, but that’s how she liked to think about him. She was ten. It was the last day of ski camp, a day of races to show the parents. The storm rose suddenly, without warning. The lift shut down just as she reached the top of the slope - the only child in her group. The ski instructor told her to stay close, but she soon lost sight of him in the fog, his voice swept up into the hiss and bluster of wind. The gusts blew so strong the wind moved her back uphill. She could make no progress.
Her scarf, frozen stiff around her chin, caught her breath and gathered fog that clouded her ski mask. The hail pricked her cheeks like glass shards. The wind ripped and blew her cries for help like so much trash and she could barely see the tips of her skis anymore when a man’s voice asked her if she was lost. He spoke as if there were no storms, as if the ski slopes weren’t deserted, the lifts dead and squaking, swinging wildly on the wire. How had she heard him so clearly? She was embarrassed to be caught shouting at God in anger. She could not look at the man’s face. She only ever saw his sky-blue jacket, and the red ski boots secured to his Rossignol.
When they reached the shelter, the man helped her remove her skis, but once inside, he said he’d get her a hot chocolate, that he’d be back soon, and he left her by the door, stepping into the crowd. Moments later, her father walked in: “Thank God. Where have you been? How did you manage to get down the slope?”
She pointed to the crowd, but she couldn’t see the man anymore. She could neither describe him nor spot that sky-blue jacket from all the red, black and navy ones pressed together by the coffee stand. They waited. The man did not come back.
What was all that for? Considering the outcome, this day, this end. She was not special. She wasn’t even religious. She had lived an unremarkable life. She had been an unremarkable person. She had no children, no family left alive. Why not die on a ski slope at ten? Why grow old and alone, just to bear witness to the last day?
In a few hours, everything she knew would burn away into a blinding flare of white and orange. The angel had shown her what the world would look like, after. Alien, bare. Sanitized. As if humanity, and all of life, were a virus. To angels, she considered, maybe so. A bitter taste in her mouth, an ache in her heart that was also strangely sweet, like unrequited love. Her husband, lost only months ago, was lucky. Or maybe she was the lucky one, to know, to prepare, to decide where to be, even if no one else she knew and loved would be there to hold her hand.
The sites became familiar, the hills dotted with cypress trees, the sepia-colored houses, the train station. They drove past the old Romanesque church and bell tower, a Vespa impatiently buzzing past them, then the children’s park with the moss-covered rock and the koi pond where she had played princesses and castles with her sister. She had driven into her childhood.
The car stopped before the brick two-story building, with the familiar three marble steps leading to the front door. Efficient and sure, the driver in the black suit stepped out, held the door open for her. Maybe out of habit, he went to the trunk, but he must have remembered: no luggage. So he stood before her, waiting.
She’d run payment through her credit card, already. She tried to interpret the look on his face, his shifting posture. She had been certain that he knew, but maybe he didn’t. Maybe he was blessed to think this just another working day, the broadcast just another media hype. She searched in her purse, found a bill, a fifty, and held it out to him. He shook his head and shrugged, a little snort as if amused, or maybe surprised.
“Please, signora,” he gestured to the building.
“Oh, no, no, no,” she said, understanding, finally. “I have no keys. Please. You don’t have to wait. I’ll be all right.”
“You call someone, maybe?”
“My mother died here, years ago,” she explained. “There’s no one else. They’re all gone.”
If her words confused him, he didn’t show it. He looked up the building’s facade, maybe for someone at the window, someone willing to buzz her in.
“I don’t know what I was expecting,” she said. She was embarrassed but she couldn’t help talking, now. His waiting. His concern. The whole thing was starting to feel so absurd. “I just needed to be here. I don’t know why. I’ve been trying to run from this place all of my life, but here I am.” Silence. Was his English…? No, it was her insanity that he couldn’t puzzle through.
She was about to sit on the front steps, when the front door buzzed and clicked open. An elderly woman in a black headscarf stepped out in such a hurry that she almost stumbled right over her.
The driver offered an arm to steady her, but the lady frowned, refusing it, and hurried off down the street at the speed of her disapproval.
“Do you have somewhere to be?” she asked the driver, catching the entrance door before it closed. She meant to invite him to go up with her, but then, what would they do, sit on the landing in front of the apartment that had once belonged to her nonna, no one inside but strangers. They’d even miss seeing the flare.
The driver was already behind the wheel, engine turned on, a hand out the window: “Ciao.” “Ma scusi,” she called out. “Il suo nome?”
“Tommaso,” he said. He drove away without asking for hers.
She climbed up the steps to the first floor, alone, but she hoped that Tommaso would have time enough to meet a loved one, a friend. She had stolen his last hours. Else he’d sacrificed them to her willingly. It humbled her, shamed her, really, but at least she had made it, to this place that for practical reasons, she and her sister had sold to strangers.
She buzzed the doorbell all the same. What else would she do? Maybe, through all the rust in her mouth that was her Italian, she could explain.
From the other side, she heard her mother’s voice. “Marta, sei tu? Sei venuta alla fine, vedi?”
The bolts clacked; the door swung open. She failed to feel startled. She could not bring herself to question this small mercy. Something lifted, the weight of her exile - self-chosen, out of shame or rebellion, heavy all the same. She breathed as if she’d spoken a sentence so long that it had taken years to conclude.
It had started to happen, the last hour. She’d already left behind the Newtonian certainty of her every day. She had stepped into something fragile, delicate, and infinitely more precious.
“At least, you came,” said her mother, planting a kiss on her cheek. “At least, one of my children made it home.”
She followed her mother into the living room, careful not to disturb this moment, or spoil it into illusion with a doubt. Her nonna and her aunt sat on the old velvet couch, one knitting pearl stitches from a cerulean wool thread, the other crocheting a white cotton rose. The smell of cigarettes and baby powder teased her with the sweetness of her familiar past. Nonna smiled, her one tooth missing. “Eccoti,” she said, patting the couch cushion next to her. Aunt looked up from her needlework squinting, fingers busy twisting threads into rose petals, asking, “E’ Marta, allora? Eh, si, e’ proprio lei.”
Light filtered through the wood blinds, softening all angles and edges with golden halos of floating motes. They were an old family photograph, gracefully aged.
“You must be exhausted,” her mother said. “Such a long way to get here.” The room brightened, searing the shadows and the silhouettes. There was just enough time for her to say, “Yes, but at least, I made it home,” and to feel her mother’s fingers reach for her hand.
Laura Valeri is the author of four short story collections and a book of essays. Her short stories, essays, and translations have most recently appeared in VIA (Voices in Italian Americana), LIT Magazine, Moon City Review, The Account, and many others. Laura was born in Italy and came to the United States when she was 12. She lives in Savannah, Georgia, and teaches creative writing at Georgia Southern University.