“Okay. Whatever you want. I owe you. I don’t want you to think badly of me. Where, at the baths?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll find you.”
“Today,” she gasped. “It has to be today.”
Again she heard him hesitate, and she cursed herself for her lack of control.
“Okay,” he said slowly. “I have a study break this afternoon. I can get away. I’ll see you there. What, about three?”
“That will be fine.”
“Okay. Ciao … ”
She put away the phone. Her heart was hammering, her breath short.
She made an excuse and got out of the office. She changed into a shapeless patterned smock, loosely tied by a belt at the waist.
She caught a taxi back to the baths.
This time she walked around the complex until she came to the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli. In the sixteenth century this had been built into the ruins of the baths, to designs by Michelangelo. The church’s name proudly adorned one of those broken-open domes.
Inside, the church was bright, spacious, and open, nearly a hundred yards across, richly decorated. There was an elaborate sundial inscribed on the floor, a great bronze gash that cut across one nave. She followed it to a complex design at its termination, where a spot of sunlight would map the solstices of years far into her own future. Here and there she made out relics of the building’s origin, like seashell motifs on the walls. Michelangelo and the architects had used this great vaulting space well, but once this had been nothing more than the tepidarium of the tremendous complex of the baths.
She had chosen this place for Daniel’s sake. She had been nervous about how he would react to her, especially in her changed condition. She thought the baths would pique his interest in the deep history of Rome, and how its buildings had been used and reused. Maybe he would come for the buildings, if not for her.
“… Lucia.”
She turned, and there he was. He wore what looked like the same faded jeans, a T-shirt labeled ROSWELL U RUNNING TEAM, and he clutched a baseball cap in his hand. The light behind him caught the unruly hair around his face, making it glow red.
He grinned. “You’ve changed. You’re still beautiful, of course. What’s different? …”
At the sight of him, the sound of his voice, the tears seemed to explode from her, fueled by longing, unhappiness, grief. She dropped her head and covered her face with her hands. How she would have reacted if he had come to her and taken her in his arms, she didn’t know.
But he didn’t. When she was able to look up, she saw that he had actually backed away a couple of steps. He was holding his baseball cap up before him, like a shield to fend her off, and his mouth was round with shock. “Hey,” he said uncertainly. He laughed, but it was a brittle sound. “Take it easy. People are staring.”
She struggled to get herself under control. Her face felt like a soggy mass. “Well, fuck them. Even if it is a church.”
He was staring at her, eyes wide, mouth still agape.
She said, “Let’s sit down.”
“Okay. Okay. Sitting down is good—”
She grabbed his hand to stop him talking. She marched him to a pew in the nave where the sundial glistened on the marble floor.
They sat side by side, far from anybody else. He wasn’t looking at her, she realized; his gaze wandered around the paintings on the wall, the marble floor. At last he said, “Look, if you’re in some kind of trouble—”
She hissed, “Why didn’t you turn up?”
“What?”
“Here, at the baths. On Tuesday. You didn’t come.”
“Hey,” he said defensively. “So what? It wasn’t important. It was just—” He leaned forward, so he was facing away from her. “Look. You have to be realistic. I’m seventeen years old. You’re a pretty kid. And, well, that’s pretty much it.” He ticked off the points on his fingers. “I saw you in the Pantheon, and I spotted you in the park that day, and I thought, what the hell, and I said I’d meet you in the Piazza Navona, and there you were, and then—”
“And then?”
“And then you told me you were fifteen.” He shrugged. “It was just a few moments, months and months ago. It wasn’t even a date.”
“It was important to me.”
“Well, I’m sorry. How could I know?”
“Because you met me. We talked.”
“Only for a few minutes.”
But in that time, she thought, we made a connection. Or did we? She looked at him again, in his nerdish T-shirt, with his baseball cap on the wooden seat beside him. He was so young himself, she realized. He was just playing at relationships, playing at flirting. That was all he had been doing, all the time; even his supposed seriousness was just part of the game. Hope started to die.
He said, “I didn’t mean to hurt you. Really. And anyhow, I did like you, you know.”
She sighed. “Look, I don’t blame you. The irony of it is, with almost anybody you met it would have made no difference.”
“But it does with you.” He turned around and looked back at her. In the church’s soft light his skin seemed very smooth, very young. “Look, I was, am, and always will be an asshole. And I’m sorry.” His face clouded. “I remember now. You said something about problems at home. Your family? If there’s something serious, maybe my dad can help—”
“I’ve had a baby,” she said simply.
That took him aback. His mouth opened and closed. Then he nodded. “Okay. A baby. When? How old were you? Fourteen, thirteen—”
“It was two months ago.”
He laughed, but his face quickly drained of humor. “That’s ridiculous. Impossible, in fact.” He frowned,
trying to remember. “You sure didn’t look pregnant when I last saw you.”
“That’s because I wasn’t. I was a virgin,” she said. “I became pregnant in March.”
That, absurdly, made him blush; he briefly looked away. “So,” he whispered, “you had sex with some guy. You got pregnant. Then, what, you had a miscarriage—”
“I had a baby,” she said rapidly. “A live, full-term baby, after thirteen weeks. I don’t care whether you think that’s impossible or not. It happened.”
He sat silently for a moment, mouth gaping. Then he shook his head. “Okay. Suppose I concede you had a baby, six months premature, as if … Who’s the father?”
“His name is Giuliano … I have forgotten the rest.”
“You’ve forgotten his name? Did you know him?”
“No. Not really.”
He hesitated. “Was it rape?”
“No. It’s complicated.”
“You’re telling me.”
“It’s a family matter. There’s a lot you don’t know.”
“Sounds like there’s a lot I don’t want to know … This guy who knocked you up. Was he older than you?”
“Oh, yes. About thirty, I think.”
“Is that legal here? … Oh. He wasn’t a family member, was he?”
“No. Well, a distant cousin.”
“Murkier and murkier. Did your parents set you up somehow? Did they sell you?”
She shook her head. “It wasn’t like that. I can’t explain it. And you probably wouldn’t believe me anyhow.”
He gazed back at her, exasperated.
She studied him, trying to understand his mood. He wasn’t scared anymore — or at least that wasn’t his only emotion. He was genuinely listening, genuinely trying to understand, and his face showed a kind of determination.
He was constructing a new model of their relationship in his head, she thought. First he had believed he was a kind of romantic hero, the traveler in Rome. Then when he found out she was too young for a relationship, he decided he was playing a flirting, slightly edgy game with a precocious kid. Her news that she had given birth, and in a manner he couldn’t understand, had broken all that apart. But now he was trying to construct a new vision. Now he was the knight who could ride in to save her, solve all her problems at a single blow — or anyhow a single phone call to his father.