Promise Me

I have wondered if those who say “it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” have ever lost their loved.

Beth Cardall’s Diary

An hour later Matthew returned. He lay down next to me and put his arms around me and held me through the night. Usually, when my heart is wracked with pain, I seek sleep to escape, but not this time. Pain or bliss, I didn’t want to miss any of his touch. I just lay in his arms feeling his body against mine, absorbing his warmth as if I could somehow store it. I don’t know when I fell asleep, but when I woke the next morning, the sun had already climbed above the Sorrentine mountains. Matthew rolled over and kissed me. “I’d like to take you out to dinner tonight. Just the two of us.”

“I’d like that.”

“I’ll be in Capri most of the day making arrangements. I’ll ask Nonna Sonia to tend Charlotte tonight. Okay?”

“Grandma” Sonia was our cleaning lady, though she seemed more like family than housemaid.

“Okay,” I said.

I spent most of the day with Charlotte. I needed to tell her that we were leaving. In the early afternoon we took the chairlift to the top of Mt. Solaro. From the mountain vista we could see 360° around the island clear to Naples and south to the Amalfi coast. I bought her an orange Fanta and we sat down on a bench.

“We’re very high up,” I told Charlotte. “This is the highest place on Capri.”

“Is it the highest place in the world?”

I shook my head. “No. Only our world.” I pulled her in close to me. “It’s time to go home, sweetheart.” I realized that she might not be sure where that was anymore. “Home to Utah.”

She looked down but said nothing.

“Did you like living here?”

“I want to always live here,” she said. “With Matthew.”

I looked down at her. “Don’t ever forget that. Your wish may come true.”

That night I wore a hand-sewn white linen dress that Matthew had bought for me from a tailor in Anacapri. We went to a small restaurant about twenty minutes from the piazza, away from the tourists and their haunts.

It was hard finding words adequate for the moment, so we ate. I asked Matthew to order for me and we had ravioli in sage butter and tender steak cutlets with parmesan and rucola. We had finished our meals and were drinking prosecco from beautiful crystal glasses when Matthew said, “I have something for you.” He reached under the table and brought out a small, cedarwood box.

I looked at the box then up into his eyes. “I want you to open it for me.”

He held the box in front of me and pulled back its lid. Inside the velvet-lined box was a ghostly blue cameo pendant attached to a gold rope.

I put my hand over my mouth.

“I bought it in Positano. I was just waiting for the right moment.”

I just stared at it. It was beautiful. The cameo had the profile of a woman carved in an abalone shell, set in a gold bezel.

“Do you like it?”

“Oh, Matthew.”

He lifted the necklace from the box. “Let’s see how it looks on you.” He reached around my neck and connected the clasp. I suppose that the simplest of things, when facing extinction, become of utmost worth. The touch of his hands on my neck filled me with exquisite pleasure. He sat back and I looked down at the cameo, touching it against my breast. “Thank you.”

“It’s something for you to remember me by.”

He said this as if it were possible that I could forget him. “I don’t need anything to remember you by or this time we’ve had together. I could never forget.” I looked into his eyes. “Do you know what I fear most?”

He shook his head. “No, amore.”

“That you won’t remember me.”

The next morning we packed our necessities. A little after noon, a truck arrived outside the villa, and Matthew’s two friends, Nonna Sonia’s grandsons, Salvatore and Dario, helped us with our baggage and drove us down the mountain to the port of Capri. Several large boats had docked in the marina that hour and the city was crowded with tourists.

Using handcarts, our friends lugged our baggage through the crowd along the long, wooden pier to a ferry on the far end of the Capri dock.

We kissed them both goodbye, then climbed aboard the boat minutes before it pulled away from the dock. I never looked back at my beloved Capri. I couldn’t.

In Sorrento, Matthew got us a cab and we went to the train station, where we boarded the train to Rome.

It was late, nearly eleven o’clock, when we disembarked at the Rome Termini and checked into the Ambasciatori Palace Hotel on the Via Veneto near the U.S. Embassy and the Church of the Cappuccini with its four thousand sleeping residents.

We slept for much of the next morning, Matthew transacted more business downstairs, and it was afternoon when we went out as a family into the city for our last night in Italy.

At twilight we ate dinner in the Piazza Navona with its three Bernini statues. It was a sullen time and only Charlotte had much to say, as she ran excitedly between the fountains, artists, merchants and mimes on the cobblestone surface.

Matthew and I finished our cappuccinos, then, taking Charlotte’s hand, walked the crowded sidewalks about a half-mile to the Trevi Fountain, the final outlet of the ancient Roman aqueducts.

You can hear the Trevi waters before you reach the fountain, which is always crowded after dusk. At night the blue, illuminated waters shimmer seductively beneath the statuary, casting golden webs across its marble facade. The central figure of the Trevi is a trident-wielding Neptune, the Greek god of water, flanked by two Tritons, one trying to rein in a wild seahorse, the other leading a docile one, symbolic of the contrasting moods of the sea.

Holding tightly to Charlotte’s hands, we walked down the crowded stairway to the marble retaining wall of the pool. The churning waters dulled the sounds of the crowds and I looked over at Matthew, who was staring at the fountain, lost in thought. Then I saw him reach into his pocket and bring out coins. He leaned close to me to speak.

“The legend says that if you throw one coin into the fountain, you will return to Rome. If you throw two, you will find love.” He held out the coins.

I shook my head. “Then I don’t want them.” My eyes welled up with tears as I turned away from him.

“Beth.” He grabbed my shoulders and pulled me around to look into my eyes.

“I’ve found love, Matthew. I don’t want to love someone else and I don’t ever want to come back here without you.”

For a moment he just looked at me, his beautiful eyes mirroring my sadness. Then he said, “If this is what I’ve brought to your life—then I’ve failed. I promised to come back to take care of you, not to take you. I came to bring you hope.”

I turned away from him. I looked down for a long while, then up at the pulsing theater around me, the vibrant, boisterous crowds—the camera-toting tourists, the fresh-faced students in their Levi’s and sneakers, the young American women with hopeful eyes, the Italian women with their scolding lips, the Gypsy boys selling roses—each of them playing their roles, each playing out their parts. And then I grasped what it had to teach me, that life would go on. Just as the fountain’s water flowed each night for different eyes, with or without him, my life would still flow and churn and bubble. I looked out over the waters, then back into Matthew’s eyes and put out my hand. “I want two coins.”

He grasped my hand as he gave them to me. I turned my back to the fountain and threw both coins over my shoulder.

“Brava,” he said, his eyes moist.

“Let’s go home,” I said.

We got up early the next morning and took a cab to Leonardo da Vinci airport. Our flight was direct to New York’s JFK, with a connection to Salt Lake City. We passed through customs, then rechecked our luggage and boarded a new flight. We arrived in Utah at around six o’clock on the same day we left. I habitually did the calculations—it was two in the morning in Italy.

It wasn’t snowing when we landed, but it was freezing cold and the landscape was white beneath a blanket of snow.

Roxanne and Ray picked us up outside the terminal. Oddly, even Roxanne, for once, seemed subdued, as if she sensed that there was something to be mourned. As we drove up the quiet, holiday-dressed street to my home, our ten months already seemed like a dream. I couldn’t believe our time together was gone. You can cheat time, but it will find you.