“Hi to you, too,” said Catherine, handing her the bottles of wine.
“Yes, yes, kiss kiss, hug hug,” said Dakota, rolling her eyes.
“Since when do you follow Italian pop stars?”
“Since she’s sitting in our living room,” said Dakota, babbling excitedly. “Besides, she has an English album. She was at the Grammys last year? Broke up that movie star’s marriage?” Dakota waited for the lightbulb of understanding to go off in Catherine. It didn’t.
Dakota sighed, tried to re-explain just why Isabella was so interesting to a college kid from New York. After a while, she frowned. “You seem different. Your skin is smoother or something. Did you change up your hair? It looks less done. But no time for beauty secrets now, Catherine!” Catherine hadn’t said a word in the midst of Dakota’s ramble about movie stars and singers and People magazine. It was as though Dakota hadn’t spoken with her in months, she seemed to have so much to say.
“And so now Isabella is in the next room—along with, like, eight million members of her entourage—and she just complimented my outfit.”
Catherine paused to really take in what Dakota was wearing: a red knitted tunic in a lightweight cashmere blend that had a series of interlocking cables across the front. The band at the bottom fell just below her butt to skim the top of her thigh.
“You’re wearing legs tonight, I see,” said Catherine. “Isn’t that the sweater you made in your senior year?”
“Totally,” said Dakota. “I reinvented it as a dress. Cool, yeah? Isabella wants one just like it. And she’s a size zero. She’d make anyone—even you—look fat.”
“Pouring on the charm today, aren’t we?” asked Catherine. “Do I get to go inside this extravaganza? I didn’t realize it was a party.”
“The party’s not supposed to be until later, up on the roof deck,” said Dakota. “But Isabella and her manager came by to hammer out a few details with Lucie. Shooting begins tomorrow.”
“Is James here?”
“I thought you just saw my outfit,” said Dakota. “I wouldn’t be wearing that if he was coming. He’s working late. Some sort of problem in Singapore or something.”
“Shouldn’t you know what’s going on?”
“Interns don’t run the show, Catherine,” said Dakota. “All I do is take notes and file.”
“How many days have you even worked?”
“Most of today,” moaned Dakota. “So I’ve only seen the city from the car.”
Spontaneously, Catherine reached around Dakota, chocolates still in hand, and gave her a big squeeze, careful of the wine bottles she’d handed to Dakota.
“Oh, it’s so hard to be eighteen and trapped with a summer job in the most glorious city in the world,” Catherine said, mocking her.
“Well, it’s not completely bad,” said Dakota breathlessly, looking over her shoulder this way and that before lowering her voice. “I met the chef.”
She waited for the awe to hit Catherine.
“That’s nice,” said Catherine. “You know, I’ve really missed you. But if your father sees you in this dress—not that it doesn’t look good—I’m not going to take the blame if you try to fob it off as my suggestion. Capice?”
“Got it,” said Dakota. “Though who cares about a dress when I can hang out in the kitchen.”
“Hang out?”
“Didn’t you hear me?” asked Dakota. “I met Andreas. In the kitchen. The kitchen!” She jumped up, exposing every inch of her long legs. Now Catherine looked around, making sure no one—especially James—was coming down the hall.
“He was making a chocolate torte and he let me watch him and then he said, ‘Would you like to get the cream out of the case?’—and it was completely huge and filled with all sorts of fruit and milk and everything you could think of—and I said, ‘Sure, chef.’ I just called him ‘chef,’ like I worked for him! And then I watched him put the torte in the oven.”
“Sounds . . . cool,” said Catherine, who rarely cooked, and baked even less often.
“Cool?” snorted Dakota. “It was a revelation. My dad didn’t even notice that I was gone for two hours. Andreas made pastry, and teeny cookies to go with espresso, and then he made a raspberry-lime granita. And he let me try it!”
“Was it good?” asked Catherine, feeling her stomach rumble.
“Good does not begin to capture the magic that is Andreas,” said Dakota, as though she were marketing his career. “It was ethereal. As all food should be.”
“Ask this Andreas if you can make me some muffins,” said Catherine. “I need a Dakota treat.”
“Do you think he would?” Dakota was wide-eyed.
“I doubt it,” admitted Catherine, regretful that she’d gotten Dakota’s hopes up.
“Well, that’s okay,” said Dakota. “He said I could come by after the lunch rush anytime. Nice, right?”
“Fabulous,” said Catherine. “Now can we please get out of this hallway?”
“Of course,” said Dakota, opening the door to reveal Lucie in an intense conversation with a man to one side of the room. Sitting on the sofa, fronted by several bottles of red wine on the table, sat a very slight girl—she must have been in her early twenties—with an enormous crown of curly ringlets. She was dressed in what seemed to be several layers of handkerchiefs, thought Catherine, who typically appreciated the art of skimpy dressing.
“Vino!” shouted Isabella, nodding to Dakota as though she’d gone out with the sole purpose of finding Catherine to bring more wine.
“Catherine!” said Lucie, standing up and coming over to greet her. The relief on her face when she saw the bottles of wine in Dakota’s arms was noticeable. “Do you mind if we serve this? I have more coming up but the guests are very . . . thirsty.”
In a few moments, the bottles were opened, and introductions made. Isabella drank one glass, then two.
“I love this wine,” she said, her English close to perfect. “Gorgeous and light.”
“It’s from the Cara Mia Vineyard,” said Catherine. “I sell it in my store in New York.”
“In New York? How can they let this good Italian wine even leave the country?” said Isabella.
“The same way they export you, I’d guess,” said Catherine, instantly interrupted by Lucie.
“If you like it so much, we can get more for you,” said Lucie, nodding toward her famous rock star.
“Yes, please,” said Isabella. “And not just a few bottles. I want several cases.”
Dakota’s eyes widened.
“Oh, not to drink up in one day or something,” she said. “But I know enough to commit when I see something I like. Get me more wine, and make sure some of it is on set.”
Isabella came over to Lucie and solemnly took her hand. “I know you’ll make me look gorgeous on camera,” she said. “And I wasn’t joking about this Dakota’s dress. Let’s get the stylist to make me something like that.”
“It’s hand-knit,” said Lucie. “Dakota knitted it.”
Like a floodlight, Isabella turned all her charm and attention on Dakota. “Wouldn’t you like to make something like that for me?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Dakota, entranced by her brush with a famous person. Wouldn’t this make quite the story to tell Andrew Doyle?
“So then it’s all settled,” said Isabella. “Shooting begins Thursday, you will get me my wine, and you will make me a dress. Like yours. Shorty-short. And maybe tighter.”
“I can’t do that in two days,” said Dakota. “It’d be quicker if I left off the sleeves.”
“Good,” said Isabella, taking the unopened bottle of Cara Mia Vineyard wine from the table and tucking it under her arm.
“And shooting begins tomorrow,” reminded Lucie.
Isabella grinned, her eyes sparkling. “Okay,” she said easily. “But you won’t see me until Thursday.”
And with that, she glided out of the room, taking her manager and her friends with her, and leaving Lucie, Catherine
, and Dakota wondering just what they’d gotten themselves into.
twenty-three
Finally. After a day of watching Ginger, spent mainly watching a clown at Piazza Navona and haunting a variety of toy stores, and another afternoon typing up notes for her father, Dakota had been granted a beautiful day all to herself. Lucie was going to need her that evening because the shoot was starting at night—Isabella was confirmed to show up—but for seven hours she was free to do whatever she wanted.
She followed her eyes, lured by domes this way and that, and her nose, smelling delicious food being cooked in some building nearby. In every direction, there was something to pique her curiosity, and she practically ran from one spot to the next, fascinated by everything from young men having earnest discussions over cappuccino to the bizarre display of tiny Mussolinis and Nazis in the toy store window.
“Now there’s something you don’t see every day,” she said aloud, to no one in particular.
She folded up her map into the pocket of her jeans jacket and simply let herself wander, experiencing the joy of discovering a fountain with turtles in the middle of a neighborhood, not seeing any sign of explanation or anything other than apartments and cars nearby. This, then, was Rome, a city built upon a city built upon a city. She rang a bell to be let into a fancy china shop, the sole clerk sitting at an elegant desk, seemingly oblivious to the gorgeous array of plates along the wall and up to the twelve-foot coffered ceilings. A china plate fantasy. The building itself stood just behind a huge set of columns, Latin letters etched on their front. A few steps away, an apartment building had been finished inside the ruins of what looked like an ancient theater, with modern brick and glass windows above rows of arches, the “lawn” a series of pieces of fallen marble and stone, some of it intricately carved, just lying around like so. A small sign in multiple languages warned passersby about taking a souvenir ruin or two. How much history must be here, thought Dakota, to be able to just let it sit here, waiting until there was enough time and money to come and collect it.
She took photos of churches and cafés, of cobbler shops and drugstore windows. Of Vespas parked and on the move. She bought herself too many pastries to even eat by herself, eager to taste all the flavors and enthralled by the painstaking tissue paper wrapping and thin string placed around each treat. A Danish stuffed into a white bag as was done back home never seemed more amateur when compared with the love the baker and his wife showered on each and every pastry. His gift to the world.
Dakota put her fingers in the Mouth of Truth at Santa Maria in Cosmedin, and she stared across the street at the Temple of Portunus, amazed at how the old and the older collided with the new, as buses and cars honked their way up the busy road to head to what Catherine told her was called “the wedding cake”—the monument to Victor Emmanuel—and the ruins of the Roman Forum.
But she felt drawn to go in the opposite direction, her wish to get to the Colosseum notwithstanding. Dakota crossed a wide bridge—the Ponte Fabricio—over the Tiber to poke her head into the church on the Isola Tiberina, and then she wandered the streets of the Trastevere neighborhood, snacking and sampling from all manner of bakeries and gelato shops.
The trick to finding the freshest, most natural gelato, Catherine had told her, was to check the color of the banana gelato. If it was yellow, it was artificial. But if it was a creamy color, even a fair bit gray, then it was the real deal.
Dakota walked around the long stretch of walls of a cloistered convent, wondering about the women inside, and then she joined an impromptu soccer game in a random square, trying desperately to keep up with the ten-year-old dynamos who kept laughing at her inability to kick the ball very far.
That was when her feet finally registered their protest: Dakota had been on the go all day long and her body ached for rest. And Rome, unlike any other city she’d ever seen, had a church on every corner. Good cover for a chance to get off her feet—she could often even put her shoes up on the kneeler—and seem very pious at the same time. Dakota was not religious by nature; her mother had been Presbyterian but never attended services, and her father, who was Baptist, tended to go to church only when his mother, Lillian, was in town or when he and Dakota went to visit. Not going to church was fine by Dakota, who liked having her Sunday mornings free to bake. But still she found her quick dashes into the churches and basilicas to be soothing, some combination of the quiet and of the cool inside the buildings providing a reprieve from her exhausting—and exhilarating—explorations of the city.
“Sì, sì,” yelled the boys, trying to get her to stay and play with them. “Viva il football.”
Dakota waved them off and headed through an arch toward an ancient fountain in the square in front of the Church of Santa Cecilia, hoping a mist from the fountain might blow her way. The large fountain was centered on a small grass lawn, and all of it was ringed by a raised edge of stone and tile. She walked through the square and into the church, admiring the beautiful sculpture of the prone figure of the martyred Saint Cecilia, the delicate way she turned her face in her suffering and yet projected eternal strength. Lazily, Dakota wandered down into the crypt, paying a white-habited nun a couple of euros to see the excavations below. The remains of a house, an altar to a temple, an early church. All together. Worlds colliding.
Dakota made her way out of the building, stopping to admire the mosaic friezes on the façade. All in all, it was a day well spent. And that’s when she saw her: a woman, with curly brown hair, sitting on the edge of the fountain area, her back to Dakota. The woman’s elbows were sticking out a bit from her sides and her shoulders had that hunch Dakota knew all too well.
She was knitting.
Not being able to see her face, it was easy to think, for just a split second, that it was her mother there. Waiting for her all afternoon, just to come and have a chat in the church. How long had she been inside? she wondered. The woman hadn’t been there when she entered the church and now here she was.
That kind of thing hasn’t happened to me in a long time, thought Dakota, as she remembered the period shortly after Georgia died when she would have that strange sensation that somehow, around any given corner, she might just run into her mother on the street. Or she would see a tall, curly-haired figure in the subway and run to catch her, hoping for some sort of miracle or time warp—she didn’t care which—to have occurred.
Of course this woman couldn’t be her mother. And yet she felt a lump in her throat as she watched this stranger intently work her rows, enjoying the sunny afternoon, oblivious to all.
In her mad tear to see everything there was to see in Rome in one day, Dakota hadn’t expected to be confronted by something—knitting—that was essentially hers. So personal. It seemed out of place to see an everyday Roman woman knitting and yet it was perfect. One more great discovery in this beautiful city.
Slowly, Dakota crept up to the woman, drawing out the moment when she’d really see her face and know, without a doubt, that it wasn’t Georgia.
She sat down just slightly behind and to the right of the knitter, taking furtive peeks. Her hair was a bit wild, obscuring her face. And she wasn’t wearing jeans like Georgia had typically done. But her stitches were good, Dakota could see that, as she worked up what looked to be a crimson sleeve. A sweater for someone. A daughter, maybe.
Dakota closed her eyes, feeling only the warmth on her face as she listened to the faint burble of the fountain water and the steady click-clack of the needles. This, then, was also Georgia’s trip to Rome. Tagging along in her memory. Dakota loved knitting, enjoyed the feel of the yarn in her fingers. But she just didn’t want to run a yarn shop. She wanted the freedom and flexibility to do her own thing.
The woman pulled more yarn from a skein in her bag, one fluid motion without even breaking rhythm. Georgia had knitted like that. Effortlessly and quickly.
How nice it would be just to have a conversation, Dakota thought, running through all the places and people she’d seen in just
this one day. In the end, though, she settled on just one thought.
“I miss you, Mom,” said Dakota aloud.
She stood up reluctantly but she had just enough time to return to the V to watch confusing Italian television with Ginger and Sweetness before bath and bed.
“Sì, sì,” said the knitter, smiling in her direction and raising her knitting just slightly in greeting as Dakota continued to make her way.
twenty-four
As wonderful as it was to be in Rome, Catherine remained a late riser, even though she’d been in Italy for weeks. She just stayed on her magical Catherine schedule: no sunrise could get her to open an eyelid before at least nine a.m. And, to ward off any possibility of interrupted slumber, she’d made sure to pack a selection of silk eye masks that matched her silk nighties. All that meant she wasn’t very receptive to the loud banging on her door at seven a.m. Not at all.
“Catherine!” She could hear the shout-whispers but tried to ignore them, hoping they would go away. An early housekeeper, perhaps? Unlikely that they’d call her by name.
“Catherine!” And it didn’t sound like Dakota. Soon the other patrons of the hotel were going to open their doors and ssshhh this maniac into silence. Catherine dove under a pillow, waiting out the noise.
“Catherine, it’s Lucie!”
Thwarted. It wasn’t like she could simply ignore Lucie. Also, Lucie was smart enough to realize she could just go pick up her phone and call the room. With a heave and a moan, Catherine got up and looked through the peephole in the door.
“Open up!” Yep, it was Lucie all right.
“I’m not awake and I don’t believe in unannounced appointments,” said Catherine, opening the door about one inch.
“This is an emergency,” said Lucie. “A real crisis!”
Catherine let her inside. “Really?” she said, worried. “Is Dakota okay? Ginger?”