Once Was a Time (16 page)

Chapter 32

A couple hours later, we were on a train toward Manarola. I watched the sparkling, almost impossibly blue Ligurian Sea pass by out the window as Rachel read from her guidebook. “ ‘Manarola is one of the five towns comprising Cinque Terre, which is Italian for—as you probably guessed—‘Five Lands.' The towns are all set along the coast, linked to one another by hiking paths. Together they're part of Cinque Terre National Park, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.' ”

“Okay,” Noah said, “but why are
we
going there?”

“Because it's supposed to be really beautiful,”
Jake offered.

“Yeah, but it wasn't on that whole itinerary Mom made. I'd never even heard of it before I woke up this morning and you told me we needed to be at the train station in forty-five minutes.”

“Sometimes plans change,” his mom said. “And Jake and Charlotte really wanted to see this place. It's the town where Charlotte thinks her cousin lives.”

“But—”

“Noah,” said Rachel sharply. “Drop it. This is going to be a beautiful place, we're going to get good exercise and fresh air, and you're having an adventure.”

“What if there was more stuff I wanted to see in
Florence,
though? More museums or whatever?”

“We'll be back there tonight,” Rachel pointed out.

“Yeah, but then we have to leave tomorrow.”

“You so did not want to see ‘more museums or whatever,'” Jake said. “You just wanted to spend more time with that front desk girl. What's her name?
Rozalia
?”

“Shut up.” Noah leaned across the aisle to punch his brother in the arm.

“
You
shut up.”

“I suddenly can't wait to go home,” their mother said with a dramatic sigh.

I just kept watching out the window, the cliffs passing us by on one side, the ocean on the other, willing our train forward. We passed into darkness, and I knew that meant we were now going through a tunnel, burrowing our way right through those lush green mountains.

“So what?” Jake had said when I told him, at five in the morning, that the letters in the town name “Manarola” could be rearranged to spell “Ron Alama.” “There's an Italian scientist whose name has the same letters as an Italian town. What do you think it means?”

“I think,” I told him, “that Dr. Ron Alama was Kitty's way of telling us to go to Manarola.”

Okay, so Kitty and I weren't psychic in the Zener card way. We couldn't tell exactly what each other was thinking all the time. Okay, that was just a childish fancy. Yet I believed that we were tied together somehow, that maybe we could communicate across time and space in a manner that wasn't telepathy, but that still felt magical.

Jake's eyes grew bigger and bigger as we stood there in the hotel hall. “Are you sure?”

I hesitated before answering. “No. I'm not sure at all. I
don't understand it. But I know what my dad would say
if he were
here: It seems too unbelievable to be a coincidence.”

And that was enough for Jake. “All right,” he'd said. “Let's wake up my mom and tell her we need to go.”

“Right now? Are you sure?”

“We go home tomorrow. I don't think we can wait.”

Now, as Jake and Noah bickered beside me, the train emerged from the tunnel and suddenly I saw it before us: a mishmash of tightly packed little houses in every bright color, clustered together, facing the sea.

Manarola.

Chapter 33

“This seems like one of those small towns where everyone knows everyone,” Rachel said as we sat at an outdoor café close to the train station, sipping from glass bottles of Fanta and watching shopkeepers bustling around. Laundry hung from clotheslines outside nearly every window, while cats wove their way around tables and rolled around on the stones, warming themselves in the bright sun. Jake kept popping out of his seat to chase down a particularly fluffy and antisocial calico.

I saw a lot of other tourists, mostly hikers with walking sticks and water bottles, but I thought that Rachel was right, and most people who actually lived here would know most everyone else. There just weren't that many houses before the town gave way to the mountains or the sea. And I saw no cars. The only way in or out was to get back on that train. Or to get on a boat, I guessed.

A waiter approached our table and asked, “What can I get you?”

Rachel removed her sunglasses and beamed up at him. “How long have you lived here?”

“Forty years,
signora
,” he replied with a little bow.

“Perfect,” she said. “Then do you know someone who lives here named . . . Charlotte, what is your cousin's name?”

“Catherine McLaughlin,” I supplied. “She's around my age, and she's English, too. She has the same accent as me.”

The waiter shook his head. “I am not familiar with anyone of that name. You are sure she lives here, yes? Many people from all across the world visit Cinque Terre. But people who live here, mostly we are Italian. Here it is very, how you say, isolated. You see this, I'm sure. It is not like Milan or Rome. This is not a place where foreigners stay for a long time. You understand?”

“We do, thank you,” Rachel assured him.

“Thank
you
,
signora
. And to eat?”

Rachel ordered a tuna salad for herself and for Jake, who was still off chasing cats, and Noah ordered the catch of the day. I ordered a pastry because the waiter wouldn't leave until I said something, but with the tightness in my stomach, I couldn't imagine eating it.

“We can ask other locals after we eat,” Rachel assured me. “I'm sure someone will know her.”

Even if people didn't know Kitty's name, I thought they would notice if a random English girl with no parents had moved to town. Wouldn't they? A lot of people in Sutton had noticed
me
, and Sutton was much bigger than Manarola.

But we asked a number of people—shopkeepers and fishermen and even some kids around my age. “She goes by Catherine or Kitty,” I explained. “She has hazel eyes just like mine, and blond hair. She's fair-skinned and very good at word games.” Nobody had seen anyone like that. Or maybe they just didn't speak English fluently enough to understand what I was looking for.

As we got closer to the harbor—a rocky little inlet with some small boats resting on shore and others docked in the water—we saw more and more people. At first I assumed they were tourists taking photos, as we ourselves were doing—how could you not? But then I noticed that the water was filled with swimmers, and many of the people standing ashore were cheering them on, and snapping
photos
of
them
, not of the gorgeous landscape after all.

“What's going on?” Rachel asked a guy who looked to be a little bit older than Noah, who was whooping and jumping up and down as he watched the water. “Is it a swimming race?”

“Not a race, exactly,” he replied in an Italian accent, not taking his eyes off the swimmers. “There are no prizes. It is the Miglio di Manarola.
Anyone in good health can swim in it, so many people do!”

“The Manarola Mile?” Jake guessed, and the guy nodded eagerly.

“Stop acting like you understand Italian,” Noah muttered to his brother. “Show-off.”

“Well, it would seem like I
do
understand Italian,” Jake pointed out.

“It starts here in Manarola,” the guy went on, “and follows la via dell'Amore down to Riomaggiore. It is not a very far distance, but you must be a good swimmer!”

A mile sounded far to me—I'd never swum more than two laps in the pool without needing to take a break.

“Via dell'Amore,”
Jake repeated. “The Street of Love?”

“
Stop
,”
Noah moaned. “I knew that one anyway.”

“Oh, right,” Jake said. “How could I forget you are a total love expert now?”

I grinned. Since we'd made up this morning, Jake had seemed so confident as to be almost cocky—as if now that he officially had a friend, nothing could keep him down.

Rachel thanked the Italian guy, who hollered, “
Vai,
Aldo
, vai
!” out at the swimmers, punching his fist in the air. The sea crashed dramatically on the rocks before us, and the spectators standing closest to the edge laughed and sputtered as the water hit them.

“Do you think Kitty might be here somewhere,
watching
this?” Jake asked me quietly, looking around at the crowds.

I shook my head. “If there's a swimming event that anyone can participate in,” I said, “and if Kitty is really here, then I doubt she'd be watching it. She'd probably be
in
it.”

“Really?” Jake asked. “How do you know?”

“I don't,” I said. “I don't know anything. But Kitty loved swimming. Even her obituary mentioned it,” I added bitterly. “I can't imagine her sitting back and watching something like this when she could dive right in herself.”

“So how do we find her?” Jake asked. “If you think she's in the water right now—it's not like I'm going to jump in and swim up to everyone and say, ‘Excuse me, sorry to interrupt your breaststroke, but are you Kitty?'”

“I think we go to the finish line,” I said, “and we watch them get out of the water.”

“And if she's not there?” Jake asked.

“Then we're no worse off than we are now.”

We told Rachel and Noah the plan, and Noah said, “Whatever,” and Rachel said, “I'd love to walk the via dell'Amore. That's a terrific idea. I read about it in the guidebook on the train ride here.”

So we started to follow the trail. It wasn't hard to find, since so many people were walking along it, many clearly tourists, others there to cheer on their swimming friends below. It got crowded, so tourists would squeeze past one another saying “Excuse me” in their own languages: “
Excusez-moi
,” “
Entschuldigung
,” “
Desculpe
,” and, of course, the Italian “
Permesso
.” I kept staring over the walkway's railing at the colorful swim caps bobbing below, imagining as hard as I could that one of them belonged to the girl I knew.

The path was surrounded by flowers, ferns, cacti, and palm trees. Butterflies flitted through the air before us, as if guiding our way forward, while tiny green lizards darted off the path and disappeared into the thick vegetation. Seagulls cawed overhead.

Jake was captivated. He started keeping a running tab of every color as he spotted it in a flower. We hadn't walked that far before he had completed a rainbow. “This is even better than it looked in that painting,” he said. “I think it's the most beautiful place I've ever been in my whole life.”

It was the most beautiful place I had ever been, too. And I wondered whether maybe that was the whole reason Kitty had lured me here: maybe not to find her at all, but just so I could see how much majesty the world had to offer.

“What are all those locks doing here?” Noah asked. Thousands of padlocks were affixed to the railing between the path and the sea, to the netting keeping back rocks overhead, and to pretty much anyplace else that a padlock might fit. Some of them had names engraved or handwritten on them—“Matthew + Ame,” for example—or little expressions of devotion.

“Let's see what the guidebook says,” Rachel replied, pulling us aside so that the other hikers could pass.

“Noooo,” Noah groaned. “The guidebook is so boring. I'm sorry I asked.”

“It says that closing a lock with your loved one here on the Lovers' Way is a symbolic gesture of securing your love forever. Like carving your names into a tree used to be, I suppose. Now, was that boring?”

“Yes,” Noah said, squinting his eyes shut.

“Are you going to put on a padlock for you and Rozalia?” asked Jake with delight.

“I don't know—are you going to put on a padlock for you and
nobody
?”

I ran my fingers over the metal locks hanging overhead, studying the names and phrases on them. I wondered if Kitty really was here, if she would have left a padlock with our names. I didn't see one. But that didn't mean it didn't exist. We kept walking, slowly, with me inspecting as many of them as I could.

When we saw an opportunity to turn onto a less crowded path, we took it. I could still see the swimmers from here—in fact, it was easier, without so many other tourists getting in my way—but this path was steeper, with long sets of stone stairs leading up into the mountainside. It wasn't long before all of us were huffing and puffing.

“I don't know how anyone who lives here manages to carry their groceries home,” Rachel gasped out with a laugh.

I thought maybe that was why so few people
did
live out here, far from the town center. The only hint of civilization we saw was farmland—until, out of the blue, we saw a sign that said
BAR
. We climbed the twisty path behind it, and what do you know—there was a bar.

“That's so random,” Jake said, snapping a photo.

“I'm going to buy a beer,” Noah said.

“No, you are not,” said their mother. Instead she bought us all sparkling waters, and I finished mine in one gulp. The August sun was now high overhead, and the sea breeze wasn't doing enough to wick away the sweat gathering on my forehead and lower back.

We set back out, but somehow the path was still climbing higher. The swimmers were mere specks in the distance now. “Can we sit down for a while?” Jake asked a few minutes later. “My legs hurt.”

“That's because you don't get enough exercise,” his brother told him.

“And you do? Like playing video games all summer has given you just such well-defined muscles?”

In response, Noah held up his arm and made a fist.

“I don't see anything,” Jake said. “Are you flexing? That can't be the best muscle you get when you
flex
.”

“Boys,” their mother said tiredly.

“Hey, look,” Jake said. “There's another sign ahead. Maybe it's another bar and maybe this one will have actual chairs in it. And a bathroom.”

We approached the sign, set among the trees, but this one did not say
BAR
.

It said
WILLS TOWER
.

“Maybe that's the name of a restaurant?” Jake suggested.

“I don't think they have
restaurants
in the middle of the woods,” Noah said.

“Yeah, well, you didn't think they had a
bar
in the middle of the woods, either,” Jake said.

“It's not a restaurant,” I said. “And it's not a bar. It's the next clue.”

They both fell silent.

“Clue?” Noah asked at last.

“To finding Kitty.” I felt like everything about me, even my very skin, was vibrating in anticipation.

“How can you tell?” Jake asked.

“Because this is where we said we'd meet. If the war ever separated us, this was where we would find each other again.”

“What war?” asked Rachel with concern.

“You said you'd find each other
here
, in the middle of the woods?” Noah asked.

“No,” I said. “At Wills Tower.”

And then I couldn't discuss it with them anymore. I pounded up the narrow path marked by the sign, up the wooded hill, toward whatever I might find there.

A little house. That's what I found. A stone house with dark green shutters covering its windows, surrounded by trees on all sides. No one would know it was here if they hadn't seen the sign.

I started toward the front door, then turned around when I heard the Adlers still behind me. “Please don't come with me,” I said.

Rachel frowned. “Of course we're going to come.”

I shook my head.

“Plus,” Jake said, “you promised . . . you know.”

“I will tell you every single thing I find out,” I told him. “But please don't come with me. I need to do this alone.”

“I'll make you a deal,” Rachel said. “We'll hang back here while you knock. And if anyone other than your cousin opens the door, we're going to join you
immediately. Fair?”

“Fair.” My chest felt tight, and I was struggling for air. I tried to mop up the perspiration on my face. Then I walked forward, one foot in front of the other, and in all those miles and all those years I had spent separated from Kitty, those last few steps felt like the longest of all.

I banged the door as hard as I could, in the pattern Kitty would know.
Slow. Slow. Fast-fast-fast-fast-fast.

A minute passed. Then another. And just when I had started to think this wasn't right, this was all just a series of coincidences, the Florence postcard and the Manarola anagrams and all of it—the door opened.

It was her.

“Lottie,” she said.

And we fell into each other's arms.