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They’re all inside the turtle, en route to Firenze, and Mista makes a joke that Narancia doesn’t hear. Fugo’s on one side of the couch, next to Giorno, and Mista’s on the other. Trish is in the armchair with a bottle of Perrier. Bruno’s standing quietly by the armoire, watching Abbacchio drive through the domed roof. And Narancia’s on the floor, peeling an orange.
It’s the kind of thing that he’d have missed if he hadn’t already been looking, in some small, unconscious way, at Trish’s face. It’s hidden behind the neck of a bottle—but Narancia swears he catches it. The gentle spasm of amusement in the corners of her mouth. The subtle flaring of her nose. The glimpse of two front teeth, biting something back. The crinkled eyes.
Narancia’s hands forget themselves. The long and perfect ribbon of orange peel between his fingers breaks in the middle, unfinished. The expression vanishes from Trish’s face as quick as it had come, too miraculous to last, but Narancia remembers it.
They’ll reach Sardegna in two days. The weather on the island is windier than the mainland, and it makes flying Aerosmith that much harder during training with Bucciarati. Narancia gets his ass handed to him; he can’t focus at all in the wind-whipped afternoon, and his wounds from the fight with that Stand that attacked them on the plane may be healed over, but they’re still stiff.
Plus, he’s built up decent strategies for combat against the Pistols and Gold Experience, but he’s never any good against Sticky Fingers—and his regular self-defense is shit against Abbacchio, but that’s true of anybody. The bastard’s got police training. It gives him an unfair advantage, in Narancia’s opinion.
He comes out of it bruised and sore, dropping churlishly against the trunk of a cherry tree next to Mista, who’s asleep. He doesn’t know where Giorno and Abbacchio went; he just hopes it wasn’t in the same direction.
Bucciarati’s putting Trish through the wringer on offensive drills. Her defense is second to none—her Stand’s made for it, after all—but even Narancia can tell that she holds back when it comes to direct attacks. It doesn’t make any difference to him; after all, he and Mista and Giorno and Bucciarati have the team covered in a brawl. But Bucciarati seems to expect more. Nothing new.
This, too, he almost doesn’t catch: Spice Girl ducking under Sticky Fingers’s jab and landing a right hook, vicious, powerful. It knocks the Stand back with such force that Bucciarati stumbles, too.
Narancia’s eyes are drawn to Trish. That’s been happening a lot lately. And Trish’s face is fierce and brilliant and shines with sweat and the grin that cuts across it is triumphant, untamed. It commands each tree to watch.
He’s never seen Trish like that. Like she’s got all of her power right there, crushed into one fist.
He pulls restlessly at a clump of grass, feeling the satisfying sensation of the the blades breaking off between his fingers, all in a row. Trish exhales; one heavy, exhilarated breath. At a distance, Narancia opens his hand.
After everything, Trish moves to Milan to design clothes. The year that he turns twenty, Narancia goes to visit her at the edge of August, boarding a bus with nothing but a rucksack and a shopping bag of Giorno’s lemons.
It’s hot when he gets there, but hot in a different way than Naples. There’s no trace of the sea in it, no moisture with no place to go. It’s the heat of dust and stone and dry laundry, and of the leftover bus ride, the hours accumulated between his bones. It’s the kind of heat that swallows weeks whole.
He’ll be there for a full weekend. They’ve been planning it for months, always at the tail end of phone calls, a collection of vague offhanded notions until suddenly it wasn’t. And now he’s here, in front of a buzzer that says Una. Here, with a bag full of lemons and a sweat-bent paper handle and, behind it all, a heart that he hasn’t had a claim to since he was seventeen, with a bruise on his chin and a cherry tree against his back. Here, at the beginning of something.
There’s a movement behind the door, and then it opens—and it’s Spice Girl, and her long, curious gaze, and Narancia doesn’t think he’s ever been so happy to see a Stand in his whole life. When he steps inside, Trish is on a green couch.
Her hair is damp like she’d just showered. There’s a coffee mug on the table in front of her, holding down a stack of papers the corners of which are fluttering in the breeze from an open window. The place is full of light. All of the plants are fake. It smells like burned toast.
At the sound of his footsteps, she looks up.
It’s funny. Narancia had gotten so used to having to watch and work for expressions like this, once upon a time. He’d gotten used to their rarity. But this one—sudden, heartfelt, folded away between her lips—comes as if it’s never had to hide from anything.
Eight months on from the dawn breaking over the boat, Trish comes to Naples for Christmas. Bucciarati offers to let her stay with him and Abbacchio, but she goes for a hotel. That’s fine, even if it’s a hotel Narancia couldn’t afford if he could blow money out of his nose—which is where the money would have to come from for him to spend it on something like that, but he’s not about to say it.
After a reunion at Giorno’s, an understated thing for eating and reminiscing, built around a table, Narancia walks her back to her hotel through the rain-glossed city. It’s late—dark windows-late, empty streets-late—and even out here, even after a full night, he can still smell Trish’s perfume.
It’s not significant, the distance, but Narancia finds that Trish is walking slowly and so he does, too. Their strides match up without plan or desire. Overhead, Aerosmith does loops and turns, following them past the streetlights, contented and free.
If Narancia were to walk a little closer, his knuckles might brush hers in passing, but he keeps his distance. She and Bucciarati had spent half the party in the kitchen, leaning against the countertop with their glasses of wine, and Narancia had caught snatches of a conversation about fishing. Bucciarati had been describing the nets, and Trish, in her black dress and black tights and bare feet; Trish, with her pearl earrings, had been listening.
Now, Trish’s heels click along the cobblestone. She’s humming a song. In his periphery Narancia sees her crane her neck back to watch Aerosmith’s flight patterns, the relentless rising and diving and rising again, and in the dark she softens, softens, into a smile, his favorite smile in the whole world—as if to say to his soul, Go where you’ll go. As if to say, I missed you.
No matter how you slice it, this is how it happened: Narancia was dead and then he wasn’t. He had no memory of it—the being dead part—only the distinct before and after, King Crimson jutting out of Mista’s, Trish’s body, coming right at him while nobody saw—and then—and then—and then.
After he came back, with an unwounded body and unwounded hands, he woke up in Rome on a bed of dead flowers and scared the shit out of the night security guard. After he came back, he couldn’t taste anything for three days. After he came back, he didn’t call Bucciarati. He called Giorno.
Giorno came all the way to Rome to get him. They went back to Naples on a train, sitting opposite each other, sharing a bag of raisins. Narancia asked how long it had been and Giorno said a month. Narancia asked how it had happened and Giorno said he didn’t know. Narancia asked if it had been bad, him dying, and Giorno looked out at the window at the countryside blurring by and didn’t answer.
When they got to Giorno’s, Bucciarati and Abbacchio were there, too, and when he saw Abbacchio sitting there in an armchair drinking coffee Narancia started crying messily before Abbacchio could even get up.
Narancia crossed Giorno’s living room in a run. He held on too tight. He knew he did. But Abbacchio let him.
Mista and Fugo came next. It wasn’t even morning yet. Mista made no secret of his crying; he did it in convulsions, hugging Narancia with one hand cradling the back of his head. Fugo stood next to him in a daze, mistrusting his own happiness, uncertain of how to hold it.
Just before dawn, the front door flew open—the foyer was out of sight, but Narancia could hear it. They all could. After the door, a series of footsteps: halting, hesitating, as if expecting an empty room. And then, in the doorway beside the philodendron, Trish.
Trish, in a designer coat and pajamas. Trish, with one hand on the frame and the other holding a purse. Trish, with red-rimmed eyes and a dry face, looking at him with something between love and terror.
Narancia didn’t remember what he said. What he remembered was that she was so still for so long that he walked up to her, and stood across from her, and brushed the side of her wrist with his fingertips, until she remembered how to move. When she did, it was her face before all the rest: a shaking, disbelieving smile, barely held in place, but enduring, enduring. Enduring.