Rachel stood on the pier that rose and fell with the lake, nose down in her phone, reading another very important email from one of her clients. The day’s losses were still coming in.
Such was her vacation.
A gull cried close overhead, and she twitched. The sun was dropping toward the far shore, the water creasing where the wind crossed it.
She thumbed down to the notifications.
Sorry Rach, I’m not coming. See you at home.
Rachel didn’t need to read the message from Mark again. She did it only to remind herself that he had ditched her.
For fuck’s sake, you could have at least come on the boat tour, she thought, knowing that he wasn’t obliged to. That had been her idea. The whole trip had been her idea. She’d needed out of the office before she lost it.
Now here she was, with the boat tour prepaid, alone in a fine dress. Rachel shifted from one foot to the other: the shoes were wrong, too, but she’d worn them for him.
To hell with you, she thought.
“Miss Ezra?” The voice was a woman’s.
Rachel looked up, frowning.
The woman was tall and sun-dark, in a faded shirt and rolled trousers, canvas shoes – dressed for the boat the way Rachel was dressed for a dinner that hadn’t happened.
“I’m Ori,” she said with a very Italian smile and almost no accent. “Your boat tour guide for this evening.” She glanced across the pier, empty at this hour. “Should we wait for a second person? We have time.”
Rachel shook her head slowly. “No. I’m alone.”
“Oh. Alright. Come on in, then.” Ori smiled again, as if smiling were what she did with her life, and held the dark wooden oar like it weighed nothing.
I paid for it, she reminded herself. Did I pay for the tour, or for the walk of shame?
“Don’t worry, Miss Ezra.” Ori offered her free hand. “I’ll hold you. I’m not going to let you go for a swim, trust me on that.”
Rachel took a step forward, and then another. Ori’s hand held hers, and she was inside the boat, arms out for balance. She sat on the bench, gripping the sides, and could only watch the pier move away.
* * *
The boat moved more smoothly than Rachel expected. She kept her hands on the sides anyway.
“So,” Ori said, settling into the oar with both hands. “I’ll give you the tour, but the short version, yes? You look tired.”
Rachel glanced up.
“I mean, the long version is for people who are taking notes. You’re not taking notes.”
“No.”
“Good. So.” Ori turned them toward the open water. “This is Lake Como. You know this, of course. We are leaving from Bellagio.” She lifted her chin toward the western shore, where the hills rose dark against the sunset. “Over there is Tremezzo. The big yellow building is the Grand Hotel. Hitchcock stayed there. Everyone stayed there. It’s that kind of hotel.”
Rachel nodded. She had read about the Grand Hotel.
“On the other side is Varenna. Behind you – don’t turn, you’ll see it on the way back. Smaller. Prettier, some people say, but I don’t. I grew up on this side.” Another smile, conspiratorial. “Biased.”
“Mm.”
“The villa with the white columns, there: that one is from the eighteenth century. The family still owns it but doesn’t live there. The garden is open to the public on Tuesdays.”
She had thought about going on Tuesday. She had read about that one. She had read the whole paper guide cover to cover, for that matter.
“And up there” – Ori pointed, without breaking the rhythm of the oar – “is where George Clooney has his house. Everyone wants me to point at it. So.”
Rachel almost smiled.
“That’s the patter,” Ori said. “More or less. There is also a story about Pliny the Younger that I tell sometimes. Do you want the story about Pliny the Younger?”
“Not really.”
“Thank God.” Ori laughed, a real one, short. “I don’t like that story either.”
The oar dipped and lifted, dripping between strokes. Neither of them said anything.
“May I ask your name? I have you down as Ezra, but–”
“It’s fine. Rachel Ezra.” Drier than she meant; it wasn’t a secret.
“Rachel Ezra.” Ori turned the name over, pleased with it. “That’s a whole name: the matriarch and the scribe, Jacob’s wife and the one who brought the Torah back from Babylon.”
“You know that off the top of your head.”
“You learn what people are called in this job.” The oar dipped and lifted. Then, lighter, reaching: “Mine just means light. Ori. There’s a verse that goes with it–”
“I’m not interested in religion.” Flatter than she’d meant it.
Ori took it without a flinch – a small nod, tucking it away somewhere – and the verse went back wherever it had come from. “Should I shut up and let you look?”
“No. Keep going. Just – less of that. More solid ground.”
“That will be difficult. We’re in the middle of the lake. I once guided a honeymoon couple. They didn’t look up from their phones for the entire tour.”
“I pretend there’s no signal,” Rachel chuckled, this time for real. “Otherwise I’d be on the phone too. Some of my clients haven’t figured out that vacation has been invented.”
Ori took a second, then let out a small laugh. “You’re just like my mom. She’s an accountant.”
“So am I.”
“Huh. Well.” Ori shook her head, smiling. “One American, one of those people who take notes, asked me if there are sharks in the lake.”
“Are there?” A swell reached them from somewhere out in the dark, a late ferry maybe, and the boat rocked. Her hands stayed in her lap. She noticed them stay.
“Nope. Did you see a shark?”
“Actually, I did. I’d been with–” Rachel didn’t want to say Mark’s name. “With my partner. The one who bailed today. We’d been to a resort, and I saw sharks from the boat.”
Ori huffed. “Sharks in Italy, no. Moron boyfriends, plenty.”
“Yeah.”
They drifted for a moment. The sun was almost gone now, the lake going from gold to something deeper, and the lights of Bellagio had drawn back into a single low string behind them. They were further out than Rachel had realized.
Ori pulled the oar across her knees and let the boat coast. “Rachel.” She said it like she was trying the name again. “Can I show you something? Off the tour.”
“Off the tour.”
“There’s a place, not far. The brochure doesn’t have it. I don’t take everyone.”
Rachel waited for the reflex, the polite refusal, the I should probably get back. It didn’t come. She noticed it not coming, and turned the absence over the way she would have turned over a number that didn’t add up.
“Alright,” she said.
Ori smiled and put the oar back in the water.
* * *
By the time Rachel spotted the cliffs ahead, it was full dark. The moon was rising behind the hills, just a sliver of it showing. The cliffs stood in outline, water lapping at their bases.
Ori handed her the oar with no explanation, just held it out, and Rachel took it without asking why. The wood was warm, polished by years of hands.
“Eyes,” Ori said, bending and rummaging under the bench until she pulled out a flashlight and switched it on. She swept the beam across the cliffs, and a dark passage showed between the rocks.
Rachel held out the oar, and they traded. She pointed the beam into the cave, but it seemed to vanish a few feet in.
Ori steered the boat under the arch, pushing against the walls with the oar until the passage opened into a small grotto with a sandy shore. One last push, and she ran the boat up onto the shore, hopping out as it grounded. “There,” she said, offering Rachel her hand.
Rachel stepped onto solid ground that swayed underfoot, her balance still somewhere out on the water. She ran the beam along the walls.
“You’re looking in the wrong direction,” Ori snorted. “Up.”
“Oh.” Rachel looked there. Through a ragged hole in the roof: stars, a few threads of cloud crossing them. When she looked back down, the boat sat all the way up on the sand. She hadn’t seen Ori move it.
“Move aside for a moment, will you?” Ori rolled out the blanket under the hole and lay back, then patted the space beside her. “Switch it off and come here. The tour’s over, by the way.”
Rachel set the flashlight on the flat rock, slipped off her shoes, and lay down. The sand held the day’s warmth through the blanket; outside, the lake kept working at the rocks, a soft repeating sound.
“When I was a kid, eight or so, we lived in an attic,” Ori said. “There was a window in the roof, right over my bed. I loved that window.” A pause. “Then we moved somewhere bigger, I had a real room, and I missed it for years.”
“When I was eight, all I had were roofs. A bit of sky if I leaned out far enough.”
“Sounds like Milan.”
“Because it is Milan. Did you–”
“Yes! Ten years. Left the day I could.”
They lay there for a while. The cloud had cleared off the hole in the roof, and the stars in it looked sharp now, and cold.
“My mother grew tomatoes on the balcony,” Rachel said. “Tiny ones, sour. But she was sure they were the best in the world, and we ate pasta with them all summer like it was a holiday every time.”
Ori made a small sound, not quite a laugh.
“I can’t eat that,” she said eventually. “Pasta with tomatoes. Had it three times a week the year I changed schools. There was a boy.” She left it there.
“What happened with the boy?”
“Nothing. That’s the whole story. Three weeks, nothing.”
Rachel laughed. “I can top your nothing. Sixteen – a boy tried to kiss me in the cafeteria, and I turned a plate of pasta over his head.”
Ori came up on one elbow. “You did not.”
“Whole plate.”
That got the real laugh, short and surprised.
Rachel had another one queued behind it and didn’t reach for it. “I wouldn’t do that now,” she said instead.
“Flip a plate?”
“Any of it. I think I’d just sit there.”
The sand had gone cold under the blanket, and she hadn’t felt it go. She always knew what time it was, but not now.
“You came by train?” Ori said after a while. “I rent a room in Como, window right over the tracks. Thought I’d never sleep. Turns out I sleep like a corpse.”
“My window’s over a kindergarten.” Rachel considered it. “Forty toddlers at eight in the morning. I’d take your trains and pay you the difference.”
Ori laughed, turned and kissed her quickly on the corner of the mouth, turned back to the sky. “Anyway – I had a passenger once who could name every star up there,” she said. “Pointed out all of them. Then he asked if I was single. Only time all evening he stopped looking at the sky to look at me.”
“Were you?”
“Single? Yes. Didn’t tell him.”
“Did he tip?”
“He did not.”
The moon had crossed out of the hole in the roof, and Rachel shivered at the cold that had come into the air.
“Five more minutes,” Ori said, “and we really have to go back. The tour ended an hour ago.”
They took ten.
Ori helped Rachel up. She rolled the blanket while Rachel held the flashlight, squinting. They got into the boat, and Ori took them back through the passage.
The lake was dark. Across the water, the shore lights reflected in long ribbons that broke and reformed as the boat moved through them.
Ori stopped the boat at the pier and climbed up first. “Here,” she said, taking Rachel’s hand and pulling her up.
“Thank you.”
“Anytime, really.”
Rachel stood on the pier a while after the sound of the oar had gone. Her phone was in her bag with all of it – the losses, Mark, the emails – and she didn’t take it out. She’d stopped knowing what time it was somewhere back in the grotto, and she still didn’t, and for once she let it go uncounted.
By the time she started back toward the hotel, she was already wondering when the season opened again.
* * *
Rachel came back the next summer, and the summer after. Then whenever the season was open and her life had got loud enough to leave for a few days. There was always a reason: a client who couldn’t be reasoned with, a Sunday call from her mother she’d let ring out, the apartment over the kindergarten gone small again – and the reason was never the reason.
She booked the same tour, the evening slot. Ori was there, mostly; twice it was someone else, and Rachel turned back at the dock and stayed two nights anyway.
With Ori she was sixteen again, and had nothing to reconcile.
They lay on the sand.
They gossiped.
The stars were the stars.
Photo by me. Yes.
Gossip came to me from Montenegro, just like that shot. I wondered about boat tours. We had one, not like this one, though, and the idea of the boat tour that goes somewhere neither of the characters could imagine stick to me. And here they are, gossiping.
Next short story at 15th of November, Lest The Eye See. There will be a girl and a witch.
Thank you for reading.
Aldwin
