Out of the Ashes (33 page)

David’s arms tightened around her, and she heard his swift intake of breath, as if he, too, felt the emotions that suddenly seemed to swirl in the air around them.

“It looks like he was trying to shield her, to protect her from the falling debris.” She felt her eyes well up with unshed tears. “He must have loved her very much.”

David softly kissed her temple.

“Yes, I think he did.”

Staring at the tragic lovers, Sera knew deep in her soul that it was true.

Whoever they were, they had loved each other to the very end.

“They were supposed to get married first, then procreate.”

Smithers
clicked the remote control and the white screen disappeared into the clouds, taking the image of David and Sera with them.

“Got things a little backwards, didn’t you?”

“Perhaps,” Marsha sniffed. “The end result’s the same. They’re finally together, like they were always meant to be.”

“Besides,” Hershel coughed into his fist. “It was such a beautiful moment, I couldn’t resist letting it happen.”

“Hershel!” Marsha’s eyes nearly bugged out of their sockets. “You watched?”

“Of course not.” He looked insulted, then squirmed slightly in his chair. “At least not all of it. Once I was certain they were safe, and David wasn’t going to bleed to death, I gave them their privacy.”

“Good.” Marsha fanned herself with her hand. “After all, there’s only so much this old heart of mine can handle.”

“Marsha, you haven’t had a real heart for over twenty-five centuries.”

She glared at him. “Well, I did for a while, and it nearly stopped beating when you died.”

“I’m sorry, dear. I don’t know how it happened.” As Marsha continued to glare at him, Hershel searched to find a silver lining to appease her. “Besides, being an angel again enabled me to protect the plaster cast. Serafina would have been devastated if it had been destroyed.”

“But you didn’t worry that I would be devastated? I had to finish everything—help David recover, host their wedding before he was shipped back to the States, arrange
your
funeral. How could you do that to me?” Marsha turned and continued to vent her anger on
Smithers
. “And why didn’t you warn me?”

“I did.”
Smithers
sat back in his chair. He had begun to wonder when they would realize they were still in his office. “That day I came to the jailhouse.”

Marsha and Hershel exchanged confused looks as they tried to recall the conversation that day.

Seeing they were never going to figure it out for themselves,
Smithers
enlightened them. “I said, if you didn’t get David and Serafina out of Italy, someone was going to die.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Marsha huffed. “We thought you meant David or Serafina, not one of us.”

Smithers
shrugged. “Obviously, you thought wrong.”

“Well,” Marsha sighed as she rose to her feet and smoothed the wrinkles from her skirt. “At least everything worked out in the end.”

“Not so fast.”
Smithers
held up a hand that effectively halted Hershel’s rising rear end in mid-air. “Your jobs are not over yet.”

“They’re not?” They both sank back down into their chairs.

“Yes. You’ve only just succeeded in bringing your two clients together. Now, as their guardian angels, you must see them through the rest of their natural lives.” He handed each of them a packet of papers. “It’s your responsibility to watch over them, and their children, and their children’s children.”

“Oh.” Marsha flipped through the pages. “But we can do that from up here, can’t we? I mean, we don’t have to go on location again, do we?”

“No, as long as we don’t have any more
incidents
that need your personal attention.”

Hershel’s face took on a puzzled look, and he glanced at his wife.

“By the way, how is it that you’re here now? You didn’t die. Won’t Serafina and David notice you’re gone?”

“No.” Marsha crossed her arms and gave her husband a cold shoulder. “Since you left me all alone, I sold them the villa and told them I was going to live with my niece in Salerno.”

“But we don’t have a niece.” Hershel looked more confused than ever. “Do we?”

“Of course not, Hershel. But they don’t know that. Besides, they’re going to live in America until the war is over. The army is sending David home to recover, and Serafina is going with him. Plus, it’s much safer for the baby, you know.”

“Baby? What baby?” Hershel and
Smithers
questioned in unison.

“The baby they conceived that night.” Marsha smiled smugly at the two shocked angels. “See, neither of you know
everything
.”

“I love my mountain. She and I dwell together in solitude mysterious and terrible… I could not leave her. I am wedded to her forever; my few friends say that her breath will scorch and wither my poor life one of these days; that she will bury my house in streams of liquid metal or raze it to its very foundation. Already she has hurt me, has injured me sorely. Yet I forgive her, I wait upon her, I am hers always.”

— Professor R.V.
Matteucci
,

Director of the
Vesuvian
Observatory,

as quoted in
The Cosmopolitan
magazine, @ 1900

Six decades later

The room was filled with light, the curtains thrown open to let in the first glorious rays of dawn. David sat beside the bed, holding onto Sera’s weathered, blue-veined hand as if he could pull her back from the angels that had surely come to claim her.

As hard as it was for him, he knew he had to let her go.

“You’ve fought long and hard,
cara
mia
. It’s time.”

The frail chest under the crisp white sheet rose and fell steadily, and he swore each breath would be her last.

“Don’t you worry about me, sweetheart. I’ll be fine. After all, I’ve got the kids to keep me company, now don’t I?”

He squeezed Sera’s hand, as he’d often done every time he walked past her. Always a gentle touch, a loving caress to let her know that even after all these years, he still loved her.

“We’ve had a wonderful life together, haven’t we? And we’ve been blessed with two wonderful children and five beautiful grandchildren to show for it. I’d say we didn’t do too bad for ourselves.”

Sera’s breathing became ragged, and David panicked, almost reaching for the buzzer that would bring the hospice nurse running into the room.

He stopped himself. No, it was better this way. It was what she wanted—to go now, peacefully in her sleep, in the comfort of their home. After moving heaven and earth to get her released from the hospital, he couldn’t risk them taking her back now. If she was going to leave him, then she would want to do it here, where they had spent most of their lives together.

As he watched, Sera drew in one last breath, and with what David could have sworn was a gentle squeeze of his hand, she quietly slipped away.

* * *

Sitting on the edge of the bed, David gazed out the window at the quaint town of Pompeii. It was a view he’d shared with Sera for over sixty years.

Oh, Sera, how am I to go on without you now?

A soft knock rapped on his door, and he turned to see his family crowded in the hallway. His oldest, Marie, stood in the doorway with her husband and their two kids. Behind her stood his son, Bert, with his wife and their three. Named after Maria and
Heberto
, the kids, as he called them, were both in their fifties, and the grandchildren were grown with busy lives of their own. Old habits
died
hard, he supposed.

“
Papà
,” Marie said. “We’re going down to the
piazza
for lunch. Are you coming?”

“No, you go on without me. I’m not hungry.”

Marie looked as if she was about to argue with him, and then seemed to change her mind. She was so much like her mother, sometimes it made his heart ache.

She stepped into the room and came to sit beside him.

“Are you all right,
papà
?”

David breathed in deeply and stared at the brass urn sitting on the table by the window.

“I’ll be fine, honey. Just as soon as I do what I have to do.”

Marie squeezed his shoulder, shaking her head. “I’ll never understand why
mamma
wanted to be cremated.”

“When I first met your mother, she was knee deep in the ashes of Pompeii.” David chuckled at the memory. “She didn’t seem to mind them then, so I don’t think she’ll mind being a part of them now.” He patted Marie’s knee. “It’s what she wanted. Besides, she always loved working outdoors, so I don’t think a coffin would have suited her anyhow.”

“No, I don’t suppose it would have. She always was a free spirit, right up to the end.”

“Yes, she was. It was one of the things I loved most about her.”

Marie kissed him on his cheek.

“Call my cell phone if you need us. We won’t be long.”

“Take your time. I’ll be fine.”

As his family left, David turned and stared out the window once more, looking through the clouds to the mountain of Vesuvius in the distance.

When the villa grew too silent, he stood up and walked over to the table. He picked up the brass urn with Sera’s ashes, caressing its smooth polished surface with his thumb.

“Care to go for a walk,
cara
mia
? Take one last look at Pompeii before…” The words caught in his throat. Tomorrow the family would scatter her ashes over the ruins—new ashes to mingle with those of the people who had perished nearly two thousand years before. It was what she wanted. It was where she belonged.

He took solace in the thought that for today he still had her and their memories. He needed this time to be alone with her, to say goodbye.

David tucked the urn into its leather carrying case and pulled the strap over his shoulder. The walk to the ruins from the villa they’d bought from Maria after
Heberto’s
death took about twenty minutes, but he didn’t mind. After paying the admission fee, he joined the other tourists in the walk up the ramp through the
Porta
Marina
, the same stone arch he had walked through over sixty years before.

He gazed down the stone-paved street past the skeletons of buildings still familiar from the past. Sixty years was nothing compared to the history this city had known.

He found it hard to believe almost two decades had passed since the last time he and Sera had worked in the ruins together. Even after they’d officially retired, she’d spent each summer helping archeology students at the site, until the grueling work had gotten too hard on her.

The place still looked the same, and yet some things had changed. Grass and weeds were creeping into crevices, trying to reclaim the stone roads, and walls that had stood for centuries supported by
Vesuvius’s
ashes were starting to crumble from exposure to the sun and rain.

As he walked along the street, he saw that many areas had been closed to the public. These were places he had once moved freely around in, places he had spent hours exploring with Sera.

Sera. Everywhere he looked, he saw her. He remembered every stone she had touched, every hole she had dug. The very ruins themselves seemed to echo with her presence.

Pushing on through the crowds, David made his way down the
Via
dell’Abbondanza
. He passed by the
Stabian
Baths and the House of the Orchard, both popular sites for the tourists. But he didn’t stop to pay them much attention. There was only one thing here that he needed to see.

David skirted around a wooden barricade with more agility than an old man should have. The small side street was empty, and as he walked down it, he felt himself travel back in time, back to 1943 when he and Sera first started working in this area of the ruins.

At the end of the lane, a section of volcanic rock and ash rose nine feet above street level, looking like a grey plateau between the ruined buildings and the old city wall.

Stepping carefully on the make-shift stairs, he climbed to the top. Metal scaffolding supporting large panes of glass formed a roof over the raised area. In later excavations, more bodies had been found in the area—a young family with three small children, all tragically dying within feet of each other. Rather than move any of them as had been done with many of the other plaster casts, the archaeologists had decided to leave these poor souls where they were found. Thus, the area beneath them had never been excavated down to the street level.

David skirted around the family and came to stand beside the cast of the slave gladiator and his lady, lying just as they had died—on a bed of stone, in each other’s arms.

He found a shady spot nearby and eased himself down to sit on a low ridge where he could lean against the wall. Hidden here in the back of the ruins, the body casts were protected from over-zealous tourists, vandals, and, thanks to the glass canopy, the elements.

Pulling the urn from the leather pouch, he cradled it in his lap as he stared at the cast. For long moments, he never moved, never took his eyes off the couple.

He felt so proud. It was Sera’s greatest find, still perfectly preserved—two lovers frozen in time, just as the volcano had left them so long ago.

At times, he almost could’ve sworn they moved—that maybe the gladiator’s hand caressed the girl’s face ever so slightly.

David laughed at himself. He was getting senile, as the grandkids would say. Either that or the light was playing tricks on his old eyes.

Time slipped away, and the day grew late. He was reluctant to go, but the last of the tourists would be leaving, and the employees would be closing the ruins for the night. Still, he felt desperate to have just a few more moments with the cast, knowing this would probably be the last time he ever saw it.

He closed his eyes and absently caressed the urn, its metal warm from the last rays of the setting Mediterranean sun. Then he rose and stepped up to the cast to get one final, closer look. Sighing heavily, he felt a sense of peace for the first time since Sera had died.

He reached out and touched the plaster man on the shoulder.

“Goodbye, old friends.”

Turning away, he left the gladiator and his lady to their eternal sleep.

With a start, David suddenly realized he wasn’t alone.

A young girl stood on the other side of the body casts, a strange, ethereal glow hovering about her. Dressed as she was in flowing Roman robes, he thought at first she was a statue. Then she moved toward him, appearing to glide across the ground, not even glancing down as she passed the plaster lovers frozen in time.

“David. It’s me, Sera.”

He felt rooted to the spot. As she approached, she changed from the young girl to a dark, Mongol-looking woman wearing a fine ornamental tunic and furs. Drawing closer, she materialized from a medieval peasant into an older woman with a white powdered wig and a wide bustled gown. Finally, she stood before him looking like Sera as he last saw her, old and frail.

“Sera?”

As she reached out to touch his cheek, she changed yet again. Right before his eyes, she became young again, just as she’d looked the first time he laid eyes on her over sixty years before.

With her gentle touch, something within him shifted and changed. He suddenly felt more alive than he had in years. There was no pain of old age, no aching of brittle bones.

“Sera? I don’t understand. What’s happening?”

“Look.” She turned him around. David saw himself, still sitting against the wall, his head with its thin gray hair resting on his chest as if in a gentle slumber, his arms cradling the urn with her ashes inside.

Then he looked down at his hands. Gone were the brown spots and painful, swollen joints. His hands looked like those of a young man, healthy and strong in his prime.

He turned back to Sera, unable to voice the many questions that came to his mind. Somehow, she seemed to read his thoughts and answered him.

“You see me as your heart remembers me, and I see you as my heart remembers you. Young and strong, and oh, so brave. When the children’s time comes, they will see us a bit older, as their memories of a mother and father should be. Where we’re going, you only see through the eyes of love.”

“Where are we going?”

“Home. It’s time to go, David.”

She reached down and took his hand. They started moving toward a ray of bright light floating on the gentle Mediterranean breeze.

“But what about the kids? The grandchildren?”

She smiled, her big blue eyes shining with all the love in her heart.

“They’ll be fine. After all, they’ll have us up there looking out for them.”

He glanced back once more at the shell of the old man he used to be, the reality of what was happening just beginning to dawn on him.

He watched, detached, as the weathered hand dropped limply to his side and the urn slipped out of his slack grasp, tumbling to the ground.

A sense of love and completion filled David as he watched Sera’s ashes spill silently on the ground near the plaster cast, only to be picked up and carried away on the wind.