All I Believe Read Free Page A

in the square, though it had been when the piazza was built. The fountain now stood quite close to the café and bakery across from the hotel, since that row of businesses had been added in the eighteen-hundreds and encroached into the public space. Viladembursa was the type of place where people still complained about the ‘new’ buildings on the piazza centuries later. The rest of the town might have grown exponentially, stretching its arms along the shoreline in either direction, but here at its heart, change wasn’t welcome.
    I leaned on the balcony’s iron railing and stared at the fountain for a while. Then on impulse, I checked my pocket for my room key and left the suite. The hotel was perfectly still. Downstairs, the lone clerk behind the front desk glanced at me before turning his attention back to a computer screen. I cut through the lobby, pushed open the heavy door and crossed the worn cobblestones to the fountain.
    It had seemed huge when I was younger, and it really was quite large. Disproportionately so, actually, for that not particularly grand piazza. The round base was easily twenty-five feet in diameter. In its center, three bigger-than-life horses bucked and reared up on their hind legs, ridden by angels with outstretched wings. I sat on the wide edge of the fountain and ran my hand over it. The stone was smooth and cool to the touch.
    All of it was familiar: the smell of the sea and of the baking bread in the shop just a few feet away, the light breeze on my skin, the sound of the water splashing in the fountain. It was exactly as it had been on another August night, years ago.
    I’d been fourteen. My parents had talked about bringing my brother and sister and me to Viladembursa for years, since we had a lot of relatives there and a family history that went back to the town’s founding. There was always some reason the trip got postponed. Often it was because of my dad’s job, which didn’t give him much time off. But that summer, we’d finally made it. I didn’t know it would be our last vacation as a family at the time.
    My fourteenth summer was when everything changed. That was when Dad stopped living with us. It was when I heard my mom cry for the first time, and my brother started getting in trouble at school and eventually was sent to live with relatives in New York. It was when my sister started caring about her friends far more than her family and turned into someone I barely recognized. But our trip to Sicily happened just before all of that, and had come to symbolize the end of my childhood. It also encompassed my most precious memory.
    I’d gotten up far too early on the last day of our family vacation, the day we were going to fly home to Marin County. Dawn was just beginning to color the horizon as I slipped out of my family’s suite and went down to the fountain. I wanted to say goodbye to the stone horses. I had gotten attached to them during my two weeks in Viladembursa. I was weird like that.
    I closed my eyes and remembered that morning twelve years ago. It felt exactly like this one, the same sounds and smells, the same breeze stirring my hair. I’d replayed it a thousand times and did it again as I sat in the town square, watching it like a movie in my mind’s eye:
     
    “What exactly are you doing?” The conversation had begun in Italian, but when I replayed it, I heard it in English, a trick of time and memory.
    I’d jumped at the voice behind me, and turned to face a tall, thin, good-looking boy of about fifteen or sixteen, with thick black hair and a quick smile that showed off a chipped front tooth. “Nothing,” I answered automatically, feeling a blush warming my cheeks.
    “You were talking to someone, but no one’s here.”
    “No I wasn’t.”
    “Were you talking to the angels in the fountain, and if so, do they answer?”
    “Of course not,” I’d said indignantly. “I was talking to the horses.”
    Instead of laughing at me as I’d expected, the boy