Summer in Tuscany

TUSCANY…Vineyard-covered hills, silvery olive groves, fields of dazzling sunflowers, old pastel-colored villas and ancient stone villages, cool archways flashed with sunlight, and the village of Bella Piacere
^*
on the crest of the hill. Paradise…

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

Chapter Thirty-four

Chapter Thirty-five

Chapter Thirty-six

Chapter Thirty-seven

Chapter Thirty-eight

Chapter Thirty-nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-one

Chapter Forty-two

Chapter Forty-three

Chapter Forty-four

Chapter Forty-five

Chapter Forty-six

Chapter Forty-seven

Chapter Forty-eight

Chapter Forty-nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-one

Chapter Fifty-two

Chapter Fifty-three

Chapter Fifty-four

Chapter Fifty-five

Chapter Fifty-six

Chapter Fifty-seven

Chapter Fifty-eight

Chapter Fifty-nine

Chapter Sixty

Chapter Sixty-one

Chapter Sixty-two

Chapter Sixty-three

Chapter Sixty-four

Chapter Sixty-five

Chapter Sixty-six

Chapter Sixty-seven

Chapter Sixty-eight

Chapter Sixty-nine

Chapter Seventy

Chapter Seventy-one

Chapter Seventy-two

Chapter Seventy-three

Chapter Seventy-four

Chapter Seventy-five

Chapter Seventy-six

Epilogue

Gemma

Let me tell you right from the start, you wouldn’t want to know me. Especially on a Saturday night. Why? Because that’s when it’s toughest here in the emergency room, and the only reason you would ever get to meet me is if you were wheeled in here on a gurney. Then it would be my face looking down at you under a glare of white light, saying, What’s your name?…Where does it hurt?…Who did it?…

I’m Gemma Jericho, resident-in-charge at New York’s Bellevue Hospital Trauma Department, and Saturday night is always hell on wheels. Right now I’m forging through the usual weekend mayhem of stabbings, shootings, and road accidents, wailing women and haggard drunks, overdosed addicts and a poor limp baby in a frantic mother’s arms. I’m on an adrenaline high, calling instructions, going from victim to victim: an intubation; a CAT scan; another shot of ephi; tending the comatose baby; paging the pediatric surgeon.

Sometimes I ask myself, What am I doing here? How did I get here? Why are most of my Saturday nights spent like this? Where’s
my
life? Then I catch a glimpse of myself and I see the answer.

I’m wearing scrubs and the equivalent of a plastic shower cap over my hair, sneakers, and a white coat. I’ve been on duty for eight hours already and with a few more still to come. I’m tired, tousled, and cranky, and I need a shower. Plus this face is never going to launch any thousand ships, even though my mom tells me I’m a bit Meg Ryanish, albeit on one of Meg’s bad days, but that’s just my mom talking. The truth is that besides being an emergency physician, I’m thirty-eight and divorced, with a teenage daughter to support. And that’s reality talking.

Add to that, I have a secret that I’m not telling, a horrible secret guilt that will haunt me all my life, but it explains why I believe no one would want to
really
know me. The true me that lurks beneath this efficient, noble, white-coated doctor exterior.

Sometimes, before I leave for the hospital, I look in the mirror longer than the minute it takes to make sure my face is still there and that my hair has at least been combed, and instead of seeing reality, I remember when I was in high school and thought I might be reasonably pretty.

Gemma Jericho, the Dancing Queen, that was me, and boys were my main interest and girlfriends the center of my life. I remember my mother trying to drill some sense into me, the way I try now with my own daughter, telling me to think about my future and not just throw it away on the high school football hero. Which, of course, is exactly what I did. But that’s another story.

Those teenage years are long behind me now. I mean, thirty-eight is awfully close to forty, don’t you think?
The Big Four Oh
. It seems so far away when you are only sixteen. How many of us ever really think we will get there? Certainly not me…or do I mean “not I”? Whatever, forty is forty. Right. And
plain
with it. Plus I probably rate a zero in “style.”

What do I really look like? Okay, so I’m on the skinny side and, as my mom tells me every Sunday when we go to her place for lunch, I could use a bit more meat on my bones. Actually, bigger breasts might help. Maybe I should think about that? I used to stuff my bra when I was younger, but I gave that up long ago. Anyhow, I’m a leggy five-ten, but that doesn’t make me “elegant.” I’m a bit of a klutz, really, and somehow prone to accidents, except when I’m working, and then I’m a fine-honed speed machine.

Last time I looked I had blue eyes, usually hidden behind horn-rims, the kind that swoop up at the sides. I’m so nearsighted it’s pathetic, and without glasses I practically have to grope my way around. You would have thought, me being a medico and all, I would have succumbed to the lure of laser eye surgery by now, but who has the time?

My hair is a sort of subdued natural blonde, short, wavy, and choppy (choppy because in moments of panic looking in that bathroom mirror, I tend to chop chunks off it myself). Plus it seems to have a will of its own—it stands up in a kind of awful springy halo no matter what I do, and it’s always untidy because when I’m frantic, which is most of the time, I have this habit of running my hands through it.

The rest of me? Let me think. Ah yes, I have a nose of the usual sort, with a bit of a bump in the middle from a whack with a tennis racket when I was thirteen that seems to have gotten bigger over the years and gives me an arrogant look that, I can assure you, is absolutely not justified. Oh, and I have kind of a smiley mouth that turns up at the corners even when I’m not really smiling, but it makes the patients feel better, so that’s okay.

Let me tell you about my marriage to him-who-is-better-not-spoken-of. You’ll gather from that, that my ex is not exactly Mr. Popularity around here. Actually, in my high school days, when I was considered fairly cute and a great dancer, I had quite a few boys after me, including “the football hero.” I’m sighing as I say this because, as I tell my own daughter now, it gets you nowhere except maybe to the prom.

Anyhow, I was hanging out with this teenage football hero, and oh how I worshiped him. I would have kissed his sweaty feet when he pulled his boots off after the game had he wanted me to. And oddly enough, he was hot for me.
So
hot, we married right out of high school.

Then I went off to college, and so did he—me north, him south, though I gather he spent more time in pool-rooms than in class, while I suddenly got this fixation on medicine. I had a goal, he had none. We lasted on and off until, when I was still in med school, I got pregnant. And then he just took off.

That was fourteen years ago. I have never seen him since, and he has never seen his daughter. I divorced him, and I’ve never taken a cent from him. Not, of course, that he
offered
. I struggled on through medical school, working and studying, and I raised Livvie by myself. And if you ask is there anything I’m proud of, the answer is yes. I’m proud of Livvie.

I have this picture of her in my mind, silhouetted against the bright sunlight: long skinny legs, big feet in clunky platform shoes, narrow hips, wide shoulders, long giraffe neck, and hair that looks as though it’s been run over by a lawn mower, especially when it’s tinted green with that spray stuff from the drugstore, which it sometimes is, though usually it’s just bleached banana-blond.

Livvie is fourteen and into the latest in Outrageous, and you never know with her what you are going to get. Still, I figure this post-punk image is all a phase and that sometime soon she will grow out of it. I’ve drawn the line at body-piercing and tattoos, though. I mean, I couldn’t sit opposite her at dinner knowing she had a
ring
sticking through her tongue or a rose embossed on her behind. My stomach churns at the thought, and as a doctor, my heart simply turns over at the risk.

The third member of our small family is my mother, Livvie’s grandmother, Nonna. Of course,
nonna
means “grandmother” in Italian, which is what she is…an Italian grandmother. That’s her profession. And she does it at full pressure.

Nonna has lived in the same small suburban town on Long Island for forty years, and it’s where I grew up. Her shabby old house is a startling Mediterranean blue and stands out from the other gray suburban houses like a scrap of summer sky on a cloudy day. She had it painted this color because it reminded her of Bella Piacere, the village in Tuscany where she lived until her family emigrated to New York. She has never returned, and I doubt she even thinks about her homeland or “the old days” anymore, though she still keeps the photos in silver frames on her mahogany sideboard to remind her.

There’s a picture of my immigrant Italian grandparents there, caught forever in blurred sepia, sitting on the stoop of their Bensonhurst apartment house.

There’s also a photo of me and Livvie, taken at a Little League game when Livvie was about seven and still just a simple little blond kid whose only dream was to hit a home run, and I was about thirty and not so simple anymore and my dream was still to meet Mr. Right. Life offered infinite possibilities back then. The home run. The right man. And you know what? It almost came true. And you know what else? I don’t want to talk about that.

Then, of course, there’s my favorite picture of Nonna, only she wasn’t Nonna then. It was taken in the fifties, before she married, when her name was still Sophia Maria Lorenza Corsini. She was seventeen, tall and pretty, with flashing dark eyes and a mass of dark hair flowing to her tiny waist. In the photo, she’s wearing a flowered dress with a sweetheart neckline and platform sandals with wedge heels. I can hardly believe this fashionable vision was my mom.

Now Nonna is sixty, a widow for twenty years, in the basic black of the Italian grandmother with sturdy shoes, a little white lace collar, and glasses perched on the end of her arrogant nose. She’s usually to be found standing over the stove cooking up the big ritual Italian Sunday lunch, just the way she has for decades.

Nonna is tall, still with generous curves, but she swears that at her age no man would look at her twice. Unless he’s after a good meal, that is, she’ll add with a disparaging sniff. Hair pulled back into a neat bun, she still has those flashing dark eyes and a flashing temperament to match, and she keeps us in order with a hard stare or a cutting remark.

So that’s who we are. The Jericho family. Oh, plus there’s Sinbad, the fattest ginger cat you ever saw. Sinbad is enormous, but he eats so fastidiously, polishing his face with a well-licked paw between bites, you never notice how much he’s really consumed. He’s also close kin to a dog. He brings his ball—a beat-up Ping-Pong ball, much squashed and bitten—for me to throw. This cat plays catch like a wide receiver—he’s up there with the football greats—and he has the neck to prove it.

Actually, he’s Livvie’s surrogate dog, the huge Newfoundland I promised her when I still believed in that future dream of a house in the country. Because there was a time, you know, not so long ago, when life could have been different…a time of “might have been.” A time when that country house loomed as a bright possibility, filled with a normal, happy family unit: husband, wife, a few kids, dogs and cats….

What am I thinking? I’m
not supposed to go there.
He
isn’t supposed to
be
there. I’ve trained myself never to talk about him, never to think of him. And yet there he is in my memory, larger than life and twice as handsome. Cash Drummond, the man who brought magic into my life. And changed it forever.