The morning my father disappeared, my mother and I waited half an hour at the café. My mother seemed more irritated than worried. “Perhaps he went into the woods to pee and got lost.” After searching the deserted village and finding no sign of him at the church, we walked up and down the steep road twice, a two-mile zigzag stretch, our voices echoing: “Roooobert!” “Dadddeeee!”
My mother stopped to stare at the river crashing down the mountain. “He hates nature. He loathes hiking. Where would he have gone?” She flagged down a truck of soldiers, alerting them to be on the lookout for an American man. “Forty-eight. Gray hair. He speaks Italian.” The driver grinned. “É un uomo, Signora.” I knew enough Italian to translate: He’s a man, Signora. But I didn’t understand his meaning until my mother responded with anger. “He’s American, not Italian.” The soldiers in back laughed.
We returned to the house to wait. Local roads were blocked by the mudslide, and the only way to reach the nearest town was over the mountain, a hazardous three-hour trip by car. Our rented Renault sat in the graveled parking space next to the house. My mother was alternatingly angry and forlorn, not yet fearful. Every few minutes she would stand on the marble Ping-Pong table that had drawn us here in the first place and yell up the mountain, “Roooobert,” her voice echoing across the valley, “Rooobert… ooobert….bert.”
People disappear in many ways. Months before our trip to the mountains, I had disappeared into a friendship. Aria BelCastello. Tall, thin, huge eyes that watched you. Watched me. Watched all the girls, all eight of us in the fifth grade class at the American International School of Florence. She assigned us numbers, one through ten. She herself was an eight, a self-assigned eight, and no one else in the class received a higher number. I was an eight, too, and so was Cristina, which is why we ate lunch together, the three of us eights sitting on the low wall, our backs to the other girls, who were fives. Aria’s mother, Signora BelCastello, was a ten—the only ten on Aria’s list. A former top model in Milan, Aria’s mother was from New Orleans. She’d met Aria’s father when she was seventeen during fashion week in Milan, Aria explained, nodding at the new English teacher from London. “Eight face, five legs.”