The Cost of Wishes

Matteo caught glimpses of sparkling lakes between the thick foliage as the train picked up speed, blending it all to a green and brown blur. He caught Lydia’s sly glance. Without words, he knew she was silently commenting on his pink cheeks, his face flushed from Campari and a bit too much sun on their weekend. Deeply tanned, Lydia was too elegant to burn, too refined to redden after a cocktail. Matteo snuck a glance at her delicate hands, fingers for piano, for a subject of sculpture, a goddess, the gold wedding band glinting in the sun. Some days he still couldn’t believe she was his wife. Bashfully, he met the deep pools of her mahogany eyes. He blushed.

She chuckled softly, returning her attention to her tablet and e-book. Matteo lowered his eyelids, pretending to return to his black Moleskine notebook, but he studied her through the screen of his eyelashes. Even carelessly slung across a bench seat, slouched and creasing her white linen shirt, her beauty was breathtaking. His gaze traveled down from her angular shoulders to her lap where her tablet rested, its blue light shining on her abdomen. He could almost imagine her belly swollen with their child. The thought of it made him smart.

He sat up straighter in his seat and set his notebook beside him. He picked up his phone and checked emails – the onslaught of messages populating made him close the app and open social media instead.

Apparently, their friends had spent the summer weekend on beaches and lakes, too: sun-soaked family selfies, the infamous leg and feet images with a beach in the background, infants in sunhats with the victorious smiles of discovering the feel of sand for the first time. He snapped his gaze away, out the window, slowing his rapid heartbeat, softening his pained frown. The return home meant the return to work, to normalcy, to their busy lives and too-small house and doctor appointments with disappointing news about ovaries and sperm count.

His phone buzzed. Startled, he juggled it before answering. “Novello.”

Lydia could hear the rapid-fire Italian on the other end. She darted a glare at him. “Work already?”

He held up a finger, nodding to the caller, “Si, diretto.”

As he ended the call, Lydia shifted in her seat, closing her arms over her chest. “That was fast.”

Matteo shrugged, jotting down an address in his notebook. “Promotions don’t come free.”

“And with your boss still at his lake house…” Lydia trailed off as the color drained from Matteo’s face, realization dawning that he was in charge.

Investigation etiquette raced through Matteo’s mind, even though he’d done this a thousand times before. He stood and wobbled from the train’s reckless speed on rickety tracks and checked his bag’s front pocket for the spare pair of latex gloves he always kept in case. He glanced at his watch.

“You still have some time,” Lydia smirked.

Matteo fidgeted at the thought of another hour on the train before an officer would collect him from the station and take him to the scene. He reached again for his notebook.

Something to ease his mind. A list, he thought. That always helped. He had read years ago about Oprah’s concept of a “love list,” writing down things one wanted, goals, dreams, desires.

Money, house, baby, he jotted in the notebook.

Matteo had littered his notebooks with lists like this over the years and he loved reading them back, noting which items he’d achieved, like a form of magic, of destiny. Today he could cross off “promotion to detective sergeant.”

But as he flipped through the prior pages, he found no love lists – lists of other kinds, scribbled and scrawled beyond recognition, nonsensical things, but nothing in his own hand. Dotted between the lists were stark pen-and-ink sketches, images in profile, gaunt faces with eyes in shadow and lips curled in cruel smiles.

He flipped instinctively to the inside cover page. This notebook belongs to…a scribbled name he couldn’t make out. Ennio something. Berlusconi? Bertuccini? It was impossible to tell. The reward offered below the name, €20,000.

Matteo’s fingers reached out blindly on the bench for his own notebook, and his hand closed around it. He compared the two – almost identical black Moleskine notebooks, their rounded edges and hard-backed covers a comfort in his hands.

“Did you see this other notebook when we sat down?” Matteo asked his wife.

Still reading on her screen, Lydia rolled her eyes. “Another notebook. I doubt I’d notice.”

Instead of regaling his wife (yet again) with the illustrious history of papermaking in Italy, Matteo flipped back to the name page of the mystery notebook. He traced it with his thumb.

At long last, the train arrived, Matteo bid his wife farewell, and met the officer at the station. Dusk gathered around them as the police car climbed further into the hills outside Milan. The city’s lights faded and darkness descended in full as the officer stopped the car in front of a small villa on the neighborhood’s far edge.

“The Belviaggio estate,” Matteo breathed. He’d known it since he was a boy. The place looked even more derelict than he’d remembered.

“Groundskeeper,” the officer told him. “The coroner’s with him now.”

Matteo surveyed the scene as his crew rigged floodlights that cast a glare across the grounds. Instead of dispelling the gloom, the bright lights only served to darken the unseen corners and lengthen the prowling shadows.

The coroner, a portly man with a perpetual frown, scowled at Matteo. “It appears to be natural causes, Novello,” he said. “But the call came in as a disturbance in the house, so of course they call out the cavalry. We’ll send along the post-mortem and toxicology when they’re ready.”

Matteo made his way to the house, memories of the late-night dares of his friends chasing through his brain, the cold iron under his fingertips, the sudden shriek of a grouse, the panic and scramble to mount bicycles, shoes scuffing the pavement, whirring away into the night.

His phone rang – the boss. He answered and filled him in with the details he knew.

“It looks like we promoted you just in time,” the boss said. “The raise will be reflected in your next paycheck, you know.”

“Thank you, Sir,” Matteo replied, beaming. He thought back to his love list: money.

Inside the foyer, the house looked formidable, nothing like its chipped and sagging exterior. “The house was left to the historical society,” an officer informed him, “and they’ve started renovations. Should be habitable in another few weeks.”

Matteo padded through the hallway, noting the portrait of the last owner painted with a curious smile on his face and eyes that followed Matteo. The constable introduced him: “Ennio Belviaggio.”

Matteo felt for the extra notebook in his coat pocket and produced it, reading the front page again. “Ennio Belviaggio,” he repeated, seeing how the scribble resembled just that. He placed the notebook on the table below the painting.

The rest of the house seemed untouched in an inch-thick layer of dust, and officers assured him the house had remained locked during the estimated time of death.

When Matteo headed back to the police car, a dark shape in the back seat made him pause. It was an elegant leather satchel, much too fine for a police duffel.

An ivory card resting atop bearing his name.

“Your bag, sir,” the officer said, indicating. “I assume you brought this from your trip?”

“My wife took our bags home,” Matteo said, opening the door cautiously and checking for tell-tale signs of explosives. “This isn’t mine.”

At that remark, the officer mumbled a few words into her radio unit, Matteo overhearing “bomb-squad.” He couldn’t resist grabbing the ivory card, thick, luscious stationery, with nothing but his name in a barely legible script – a script not unlike the notebook’s.

Ignoring the officer’s pleas and protestations, Matteo felt an urge driving him on. He unzipped the bag a few inches, enough to observe the shape (and smell) of cash. At least €10,000 - €15,000 in tidy, bound banknotes…he suddenly pictured the scribbled reward amount in the book’s front page, €20,000.

“Log it as evidence,” he ordered. “I don’t know what it is or where it came from, but it’s not mine.”

Ignoring the suspicion painted on the officer’s face, Matteo took the letter and headed back toward the manor. “I have to compare something.”

“Sir!” a junior officer shouted to him, waving a phone. “Sir!”

Matteo fought through the crowd of faceless forensics in masks and white coveralls back to the portrait. He compared the note’s handwriting to Ennio’s scrawled name. The same, unmistakable.

But as he lifted the notebook, his finger found the crease of his own list – and this time, “money” was crossed out.

“Who wrote in this?” Matteo demanded of the blue-gloved crew. A few looked up at him, shrugging.

“Nobody was working over there,” one of them said. “And we’re a bit busy.”

Matteo’s eyes again met the portrait’s. He hardly heard the whispers among the officers behind him, whispered speculation and accusations about the cash in the leather bag, a discreet call placed to his boss, the mention of an investigation.

“Sir!” The junior officer burst in. “Sir, there’s been an accident.”

The stink of stale smoke permeated the entire neighborhood as Matteo stood in front of the charred, water-logged frame of his house. The fire crew still ambled about in their heavy gear, more floodlights glared, and for the life of him Matteo couldn’t remember how it had looked before the black scorches and pluming smoke had rendered it uninhabitable.

He stood among his own detritus, lamps with shades askew, a few books, boxes of old photos. Someone had even managed to save Lydia’s family heirloom crucifix. On the wet grass before him, the bronzed Christ writhed in static agony.

Neighbors gathered in clamoring crowd, sharing sympathy and stories. Matteo’s skin crawled from the presence of too many people –a gaggle of voices, hands grasping his arm, clapping his back, faces too close, words a jumble.

“We’ll set up a fundraising page,” someone said.

“He won’t need that,” said another. Matteo recognized the woman as the president of the historical society. “The man who lived at the hilltop left his house to the society.”

Matteo felt his heart sinking as she spoke. “He had a unique clause in his will. He left it to our discretion to gift the house to a family in need and deserving of it. I’m sure we can work something out. I’ll get you an application in the morning.”

Numbness filled him, his thoughts racing, body paralyzed. It was a villa. He imagined climbing the ornate staircase, wandering through the spacious rooms.

The wind picked up, rustling the pages of the notebook in his hand. His thumb still marked the spot on his list. When he glanced down, the word “house” had also been struck through.

At long last, the only person he wished to see emerged from a police car – Lydia.

“You’re alright,” he repeated, processing it, praying it, pronouncing it.

“Matteo,” she breathed, “They ran a test at the hospital,” she said, her face flushing. “Standard procedure. Matteo, it’s a miracle.”

His face chiseled into a frown as she continued. “I’m pregnant.”

Matteo held his wife, burying his face in her hair, the smoke stinging his nostrils. Surely this was his deepest wish, now granted. He squinted his eyes closed against the sight of the too-small house and thought about the cost of wishes.

Matteo didn’t have to look; he knew what he would see. Somehow, he saw through the paper, through the third item on the list crossed out, through the trees and the roads between here and there, through the solid oak door and the granite foyer to the eyes and crooked smile of Ennio, another lover of paper and lists.