Three days passed with no sign of my father.
Twice a day my mother called the property manager, a British man who spoke perfect Italian. He lived down the road and had alerted the police. Each day he checked local hospitals.
I thought of telling my mother what Aria had said that night in her room. Silence hovered between us, gnawed inside me. So much had disappeared, and my body ached all around it.
On the fourth morning the phone rang. My mother picked it up, and when she heard my father’s voice, her eyes filled with tears. Then she fell silent, listening to him on the other end, her smile fading. Before she hung up, she said “Come home,” as if she were granting permission.
Late morning, we heard a car on the bridge, and a few minutes later saw my father walking up the hill.
“Where were you?” I ran to him, anger trickling into my voice.
“I took the wrong path and ended up on the other side of the mountain.” He hugged me tightly. “Roads were blocked, and I couldn’t get back.”
All that afternoon, my parents talked behind a closed door, their voices hushed. I started wondering how things would break apart, which edges would fall away, never fit again. I thought about whom I loved more, my mother or father, as if the world demanded preferences. When they reappeared before dinner, eyes red and faces puffy, I knew they had both been crying.
Late that night, my mother lay down beside me on the bed. The waterfall was loud but not loud enough. I sensed her chest rising and falling, and I heard a gasp, then several more gasps, muffled into the pillow. I knew my father had spent the last few days with Aria’s mother, and I wanted my mother to lift the burden of knowing off of me and help me understand. I whispered, “Do you believe him?”
She hugged me close. “Your father knows nothing about nature. All roads look the same to him.”
It was a new kind of loneliness, the truth dividing, and only part of it was mine.
The following day, we packed the car. Before we left, we stood together by the river and said goodbye to the waterfall—a ritual we’d always performed at the end of family trips, saying good-bye to places we’d visited. My father had his arm around my mother, and I stood between them. “We’re lucky,” my mother said, nodding across the valley at houses being torn down. “At least we can go home.”