All the Way to Heaven

Chapter 2

I came awake slowly, regret pressing down on my eyelids. A haunting aria had found wings and escaped my dreams to accompany me back to reality. The words were unintelligible, but each phrase tore new holes in the fragile fabric of my heart. I groaned and curled in on myself, not yet ready to face a new day.

Alone. It was not how I'd planned to spend my first trip to Italy.

Morning, however, wasn't something I could hold back by refusing to open my eyes. The melody of the rich mezzo soprano didn't fade away either, but grew louder and more heartfelt as the real-life songstress below my window warmed up in the morning sunlight. As the notes soared higher and higher, I realized that I recognized the aria, "Doretta's Beautiful Dream," from La rondine, one of my parents' favorite Puccini operas.

Giacomo Puccini. He was the reason I was here. The reason I'd chosen Lucca, the birthplace and stomping grounds of the illustrious composer, in which to find my footing again. I was not an opera buff myself, but I'd grown up with strains of Nessun dorma and Quando men vo emanating from the kitchen practically every evening. My parents always made dinner together, mainly because my mother did not enjoy cooking, at least not alone, a trait I seemed to have inherited. The music helped turn a mundane chore into an event for them, one to which I was always invited.

It was, in fact, Puccini's music my father used to woo my mother. On an enchanted evening in May, twenty-six years ago, a rather smitten Alex Tomlin escorted Tammy Robinson to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. There she experienced—because one did not simply see an opera—her first Puccini masterpiece, La boheme. "When I turned to find her weeping even before Rodolfo had finished wooing Mimi in the first act, I knew I was going to marry that girl," my father liked to say. Before Tammy slipped inside the door of her parents' home that night, Alex slipped his class ring onto the delicate gold chain she always wore around her neck, replacing it a few months later with an engagement ring on her finger. Needless to say, after dozens of operas experienced together over the duration of their marriage, Giacomo Puccini was still their favorite composer. A household name in our home, his music was part of the soundtrack of my life.

The fact that Puccini had walked these very streets, had birthed some of the stage's greatest arias in this very town, gave Lucca an odd cerebral echo of the familiar to me. A connection to home in this faraway place, circling back in on itself.

I'd tried to explain it to Tish when she asked why not Florence, Rome, or Venice. She didn't get it. I wasn't even sure I got it. But it did make my parents feel a little better about me running off to Italy for a couple weeks, knowing I'd be spending so much of my time in Puccini's home town.

Seven AM in Lucca, and the quaint medieval town was teeming with life, fueled by a caffeine-and-Mediterranean-air-induced high. Bicycle bells jingle-jangled, and boisterous greetings volleyed from one side of the narrow streets to the other. School children laughed and called out to comrades as they scurried off to class.

"Why is everyone so happy?" I pulled a lumpy pillow over my head, but I could find no entry back into the anesthetizing arms of sleep.

My first morning in this enchanted place, and I felt more like a forgotten princess in a tower than a girl on a much-anticipated trip to Italy.

Perched two stories up, my guesthouse accommodations had a surprisingly high ceiling, a tiny private bathroom, and access to a kitchenette shared with two other rooms on the same floor. My window opened out over the narrow street below.

It also provided a perfect view into the window of the second floor apartment on the other side of the lane.

Last night, a woman, maybe a little older than my twenty-two years, waved and smiled from across the way. "Buona sera," she called out in a lilting voice, just before a set of dark arms encircled her waist from behind, pulling her, laughing, back into the room. Moments later, a slightly disheveled, balding man wearing a playful grin, a pair of dress pants, and a white t-shirt, waved at me, too. Then he leaned out and drew their shutters closed. The light from inside still thrust its way between the dark green slats of the wooden panels, and the woman's voice, raised in saucy notes, poked at my bruised heart. I turned away, but left my own window open, listening like a too-curious child standing outside her parents' bedroom door.