Chapter 13

Sasha and Lionel were still awake when the sun came up.

“I should go,” he said. “I should go check on my sister. See how she’s doing.”

“Yes, of course,” she answered.

“I will call you as soon as I hear anything.”

“Yes, please. Let me know when he gets out of surgery.”

“Yes, I will. I was talking about your container, though,” he told her. “If I don’t hear again by nine o’clock or so, I will call them back.”

“Oh! No. No, Lionel,” she protested. “Don’t worry about me and that. You just go be with your family. I’ll take care of this. Peggy and I will follow up with the company.”

“Sasha,” he said, holding her gently, but firmly, by her shoulders and looking her straight in the eyes. “It’s ok. I got this. I got you. I will keep working until we find your container. I can do that even while I worry about my brother.”

She smiled at him, and said, “Thank you, Lionel. Thank you ever so much. I want you to have the time to be with your family, too, so just tell me what you need Peggy and me to do and we will help make it easier for you where we can. We can make telephone calls and whatever. Ok?”

“Ok,” he agreed. “We have two emergencies, now, you and me. But, we will get through them.”

“We will,” she said and held him. He kissed her forehead, her cheeks, her mouth.

“Together,” he said, “and then we can get back to the fun stuff.” He ran one finger very lightly down the side of her neck and along her breastbone ‘til he came to the valley between her breasts. He stopped. His other arm pulled her a little tighter into him. She yielded her body to him. He cupped her breast and kissed her deep and long.

“I’ll call you soon as I hear anything,” he murmured into her hair, adding after a slight pause, “about anything…” She murmured back an answer, nodding gently against his shoulder.

She watched from the deck as he leapt lightly from the stern of the boat, ignoring the little bank of steps set on the dock right alongside. She kept her eyes on him as he strode away from her down the dock and disappeared behind the shrubbery and the buildings. She blew a kiss after him, picked up last night’s glasses and cups off the table and the floor, and walked heavily into the yacht.

Lionel’s brother’s surgery lasted more than seven hours. By the time his sister Francesca called to tell him and Antonella, on the other side of the continent, that the surgery had been completed, apparently successfully, their parents had arrived in Los Angeles. The family chatted via speakerphone between the hospital in Los Angeles and the hotel in Providenciales. Lorenzo, the other of the three brothers was the only one not on the call. Right at that moment, he was on a flight from Atlantic City back to LAX. He had driven to Vegas two days earlier with friends. One of them was celebrating a birthday, and another was having a last wild weekend before his wedding, so they had driven to Vegas for a show and some gambling and then taken a flight across to the Jersey Shore for more of the same.

“The doctors think the surgery was successful,” Francesca told them, “but, of course, we will have to wait and see. They won’t really know until he wakes up. He is in intensive care and still under anaesthesia and they want to keep him that way for a couple of days or so. They want to monitor for swelling in his brain – well, they want to prevent any further swelling as far as they possibly can.”

“He’s hooked up to all kinds of tubes and machines,” their mother said, almost mournfully, “and I can’t go to him.” She had arrived just in time to see her son being wheeled out of surgery, and she had cried.

“They want to keep him in a coma?” Antonella asked.

“Was he already in a coma when he got to the hospital?” Lionel asked.

“Yes,” Francesca said, responding to them both. “Well, he was unconscious when they brought him in. Not sure if that’s the same thing as being in a coma-coma, but he never regained consciousness between the accident scene and going into surgery.”

“Did you get to see him before they took him to surgery?” Lionel also wanted to know.

“Yes,” Francesca answered. “I was already here at the hospital when they brought him in, actually. It was his friend Jared who called to let me know that he had had the accident. He was on the ride with Rio and the others. It was seven of them. Two of them got seriously hurt.”

“Oh. Ok.”

“And they want to keep Rio in a coma, Leo, to prevent any more swelling in his brain. His spine is not broken, thankfully. They took x-rays and did an MRI and it seems he does have some cracked vertebra, but they think the spinal cord itself is not injured. He’s in a body cast, just to keep him stable in the meantime, because they don’t want to do anything else just yet, seeing that the damage there is not so so bad, until they get some stronger indications about his head injury and what’s going on in his brain.”

“Who did you say was the other rider that got injured, Francesca?” their mother asked.

“The other one who got hurt is the one these guys all call Lizard! You know Lizard, Mom. He’s the one with the boat down in Dana Point. He got a broken leg – broken in three places, his wife told me – and some cracked ribs and broken collar bone, but he’s going to be fine. They took him to Irvine, she’s on her way down there now. She’s driving down.”

“Ok!” said Lionel. “That’s good to know. Nella and I will head out as soon as we get flights.”

“Haven’t you booked your flights yet?” demanded their father.

Antonella responded quickly. “No, Dad. We decided to wait for Francesca to tell us exactly what the situation was before we moved. Now, we know, so now we can make plans accordingly.”

“Hmmph!” was Pierpaolo’s response. “What are you doing out there so long, anyway, Leo?”

“I’m on holiday,” Lionel answered, “You forget? And I’m helping Nella settle into her new place. Like you said I should, remember?”

“Yeah, well, how long does that take?” Pierpaolo grumbled. “I don’t understand what she is doing out there, either! Both of you need to get here. Both of you need to be here. All this running around the world that your sister is doing – that all of you are doing. I just don’t understand it. You, Antonella, just flying from one country to the next all the time; I hardly ever know where you are from one month to the next. Lorenzo, who’s now saying he wants to go back to college – to get a PhD. I don’t know what in. And Mario! He and those goddam bikes of his!”

“Oh! Not now, Pierpaolo!” his wife chided him. “Not right now. Now’s not the time.” He acted like he had not heard her.

“Francesca, here! She lives in Los Angeles, but I never see her, unless it’s when her mother makes her come to lunch on a weekend. Always too busy or something. And as for you, Leo! I don’t know what to say ‘bout you. You should be setting the example. You should be home, married and settled down by now, but you’re just the same as the others. Sometimes, I think I don’t know what kind of children I have, man. Sometimes, I just don’t know.”

“We’re coming home, Dad!” Antonella told him without missing a beat. “Both of us are coming. All your children are fine and we are coming home. You just relax and take it easy until we get there. Leo and I’ll be there soon, and Mario’s going to be just fine. Let’s all try not to worry. Let’s all think only positive thoughts and direct them at Rio! Let’s let the good vibes reach him and help him heal. Ok, Dad? We need him to get better. That’s what we’re all going to focus on now. Nothing else. Anything else, we will deal with after he is better and out of the hospital. Ok, Dad?”

“Makes sense,” said their mother. “Makes perfect sense to me. Only positive thoughts. Healing thoughts. Your grandmother says she’s praying for him. She’s been working her rosary since she heard.”

“You guys told her? You woke her up in the middle of the night to tell her this?” exclaimed Lionel, his voice bursting with concern. “Suppose you had given her a heart attack? Then, we’d have even bigger problems.”

“Well, she didn’t have a heart attack. Thankfully,” said their mother. “She is fine. She took the news very well, actually. And besides, no one called her. It was she who called. She was trying to call Rio and, of course, she couldn’t get him. Apparently, Rio had called her from San Diego, because he knows how much she likes the city. He had sent her some photographs of the beach and had promised to call when he got back home, to let her know that he had reached safely, but, of course, he didn’t – he couldn’t – and when she couldn’t raise him on his cell phone, she called me. We were already on our way down here. I told her he had had a slight accident and had to have somebody come transport the bike from the freeway. She does not yet know how badly he’s hurt. I lied and told her that he had called Francesca himself to tell her he’d had the accident. I told her there was nothing to worry about, and that we’d call her back in the morning or that he’d call her when he could. I’ll think of something to tell her when I call.”

“Or, we’ll let you make that call, Leo!!” Francesca suggested. “We all know that Grandma loves you best, and you have a knack for these kinds of things, anyway.”

“So, our mother told a lie to her own mother, and you guys want me to help you with it? Well, well, well! Mother! Mother! Mother! Tut tut! What are you teaching your children?”

“Oh! Shut up!” his mother responded, with a short laugh. “As if there ever was a need to teach any of you to lie! Puh-lease!!”

Everybody laughed. Including Pierpaolo. Tensions eased for a moment.

“Come as soon as you can, ragazzi!” said Pierpaolo, softly, so softly they almost didn’t hear him. “Come soon. See you when you get here.”

“I shall have to go call my CEO and then make arrangements with my assistant for when I’m away,” Antonella said to her brother. “We don’t know how things will turn out with Rio, so I can’t really set a time for when I’ll be back, but the sooner we go, the better, I think.”

“Yeah!” her brother answered. They had been sitting quietly side by side on the sofa for some time since the call had ended, each one lost in their own thoughts and fears for their brother. This was not the first time Mario had had a motorcycle accident, but it had never been this bad. There was the time when he had skated along the street after a fall, tearing off his boots, burning a hole right through his jeans and removing every inch of skin from his hip to his ankle on his outside leg. That accident had left him limping for several months, as his leg healed and the skin took its own sweet time to grow back.

There was also the time when he had rolled over and over down a hill in the desert – after a bad jump in a moto-cross race – on sand dunes, fortunately for him. That time, his bike had landed on top of him, breaking his left arm and leaving burns and a series of cuts on different parts of his body that had required several stitches. Their father had gone and brought him home from the hospital the very same night.

This time was different. This time, the man they all affectionately referred to as Rio was in real danger. A head injury might not mean that he would die, but it could leave him “severely incapacitated” as the neurosurgeon had warned. That would be another tragedy altogether. This was a worrying time. It would be that way until Rio was awakened from the coma, and the doctors could fully assess his condition. They knew that Pierpaolo was just as worried and scared about the probability of losing his son as they all were about their brother possibly dying. Emotions were strong in LA and in Provo.

“I am still helping Sasha and Peggy find the lost container,” Lionel was saying, “But I can still do that from LA, so I can leave whenever you can, Nella. I’ll book the tickets as soon as you tell me when you can travel.”

“Hmm? What did you say?” his sister asked.

“I said I will book the tickets as soon as you tell me when you can travel.”

“Sorry, Leo,” she told him, “I didn’t realise you were talking to me. You were talking so soft, I really thought you were talking to yourself.”

“Well, I was, kinda, I guess. I was talking to you, but I was thinking aloud, too. I’m still trying to help Sasha locate her lost container, but I don’t need to be here to do that.”

“She hasn’t found it yet?” Antonella was incredulous. “What the hell? It couldn’t have just disappeared like that! Somebody must know where it is.”

“Yes, and we are going to find that person and that person is going to tell us where to find the container.”

“You will have to do that fast,” Antonella said, “if she is still to open on the date she had originally said. Personally, I think she needs to go ahead now and change the date already. Even if you guys do find the container with everything intact, it will still be a very tight squeeze to get things sorted and the space ready in time. It would be best if she gave notice now. You should probably suggest that to her.”

“You’re right and I had been thinking the same thing, but I know how she is dead set on making the date. I don’t think she has any choice now. I have the guys who ship for M’arello searching and calling in their favours from people who can help, but we still haven’t come up with anything yet. It’s been several days now, too.”

“I will also tell her myself. From the perspective of the hotel, it would really be best if she was ahead of the game. We wouldn’t want any more inconvenience than absolutely necessary. If she called it now, it wouldn’t discommode anyone really, but if she waited too late, too much closer to the original date, then people will very likely get annoyed. They will already have made their plans and having to change those plans at the last minute will not be pleasant. Nah! She needs to call it now. It’ll give her more time to pull things together whether she finds the container or not.”

“And if she doesn’t find it, or if she finds it and things are missing or damaged, she will have to shop and ship all over again. That’s going to take another forever.”

“So, but, how are things going between the two of you, anyway?” Antonella asked with a big grin. “You making any headway? She letting you in at all?”

“You need to learn to mind your own business, is what you need to do,” her brother chided her, with an equally big grin.

“Yeah! Nah! I don’t know how to do that.”

“Oh! Don’t I know that!”

“So…erm!! Well, then?” she pressed him some more.

“Well, then, what?”

“Well, then,” she repeated with emphasis, “have you made any progress with the beautiful woman? Which part of that question don’t you understand? Which word you having trouble with, brother dearest?”

“Good lord, woman!” he exclaimed, finally getting to his feet. “You are something else, man! You are incorrigible. That’s what you are – incorrigible. I have nothing to tell you, sister of mine, especially because the minute I tell you, the whole world will know everything I said. I know. I know. Even before I reach the door, they will already be hearing about it all the way out in California and over in New Jersey and even across the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, all the way in the south of Italy!”

“Not true! The only person I ever tell is Cesca, really. You know how we just love our big brother and want only what’s best for him. You got a problem wi’ dat?”

“Yes!” he announced, laughing and giving his sister a hug. “Sister dearest, I love you. Mind your own business. You and your sister and your mother and your grandmother and all y’all! Love all o’ you, but please go find somebody else’s business to mind today. I shall see you later. Our brother will be fine.”

“He will, yes.”

“His is the only business we’re minding for the time being.”

“Yes.” She lay her head on her older brother’s shoulder for a moment and they both half-laughed together through their worry for their injured younger brother.

“For the time being,” she said, and then repeated, lowering her voice into an ominous whisper. “Only for the time being.”

“So, we’re booked to fly out with the birds tomorrow morning,” Lionel was telling his sister Francesca on the phone. “We’ll be in LA for lunch.”

“Great!” she answered. “Mom and Dad could do with the support. They need all the support they can get.”

“Is Lorenzo there yet?”

“Yes,” he landed in the middle of the night, a little after we hung up last night. He came straight to the hospital first, but he’s gone home now to shower and change and then come back to sit with us.”

“What about Mom? How’s she doing?”

“She’s being a trooper. She’s doing ok. Dad, on the other hand…”

Lionel interrupted her. “What about Dad?”

“Well, he’s not handling it so well at all. We had to have the doctor check him early this morning. His heart was racing and he was getting cold sweats and stuff. They gave him something to calm his nerves and he took a nap on the couch here in the suite, but now he is out with Renzo.”

“Aww! Man! That’s not good. Not good,” Lionel said. “Tell him to hold it together. The last thing we need now is for him to have a heart attack or something. Tell him to take it easy. Nella and I will soon be there.”

“It’s good that Renzo’s here already, keeping an eye on him,” Francesca agreed. “Him getting sick would not have been helpful. It would just have made everything that much worse. When you come, you must all do everything you can to help him keep calm. And Mom, too, but not so much. But, Rio’s going to pull through. He has to, Leo. So…And then, everything will be fine.”

“Everything will be fine,” she repeated after a moment – a long moment of silence on the telephone line between a hospital suite in Los Angeles and a hotel suite in Providenciales.

Lionel called Sasha before he bought the airplane tickets to California. It was early afternoon, now, and he still had not heard any new news from the Pacific about the missing container of merchandise. In a flash, he realised that he probably should call for an update before contacting Sasha, so he quickly tapped the red telephone button on his phone screen and terminated the call before she could answer.

The update he was given was partly good news. Sasha would be reassured to some extent, just as he was. A message popped up on his phone while he was talking to his agent Siro; call coming in from Sasha. She had probably seen his call and was calling back thinking that she had missed it, he thought. He sent a message that he would call her back right away. He knew it would not be quite so soon, but that was the best option offered by his phone.

“I have partly good news for you,” he began as soon as she answered, when he did finally call her back a good few minutes later.

“Any little bit of good will be welcome at this point,” she responded. “What’s the news?”

“So, they have located the container. It has been reshipped back to Shanghai, as we had been afraid might have been the case.”

“Oh! Kay!” Sasha replied, very slowly, obviously not exactly agreeing with Lionel that there was any good at all in this piece of news. “Yeah! Well! Erm! So, we know where it is, now, but that was one of the very worst-case scenarios. Right below, “fallen overboard and lost as sea”!” Lionel did not respond at once.

“We-e-ell! Erm! Yes. It was,” hedged Lionel. “The good part is that we have found the documents and the agents have confirmed that it is on a ship that is headed back to China and will eventually arrive in Shanghai.”

Sasha immediately picked up on what he said. “What do you mean ‘will eventually arrive in Shanghai’? What does that mean, exactly? Eventually?”

“Oh dear! I know. I totally understand how you’re feeling, Sash! but let me explain. Siro says the agent told him the ship is going to other ports in China before it gets to Shanghai; that the container is on it because it is labelled as “unknown addressee” for some reason that we have not yet been able to figure out.”

“Unknown addressee?” Sasha almost screamed into the phone. Lionel moved his phone sharply away from his ears and tapped the speakerphone icon. “Unknown addressee?!” Sasha asked again, actually screaming this time.

“I know, Sash. I know,” Lionel tried to reassure her. “I totally understand, but let’s stay focused. We have to figure out what to do now. Things are a little different than we had discussed. It has been reshipped and is on its way back to China, but the thing is, if it’s not really addressed to anyone, it is going back to the shippers and they will have to figure out how to get it sorted and back to you. And, in addition, the ship it’s on is one of those that don’t really have a set schedule, because they’re just small operators – a man with a boat and a couple of guys, basically – who only pick up cargo if and when they find it. They kind of just arrive in a port and hustle for whatever cargo they can get going wherever it seems worth their while to go in that moment. So, we can’t tell in advance what route exactly this ship will take to get to Shanghai, or when it will get there.”

Sasha did not speak. For a long time, she could think of nothing to say. On the other end of the conversation, Lionel understood and waited, allowing her the time she needed to process the information. It was a big deal. There was more than twenty thousand dollars of merchandise in the container. More than that, there was almost her entire business development plan for the year in that one container. People were expecting things from her; people were depending on her. So much of her future was riding on this shipment. He thoroughly understood. He’d been in this same situation before; he had worked with lost or mis-directed shipments several times over the years. It had happened with Leonello M’arello more than once. It was bound to happen to her sooner or later. It’s never a welcome circumstance, but it is one of the frequently occurring hazards of doing business on the international scale. He was not familiar, however, with this particular shipping problem – the catch as catch can kind of shipping as his friend and agent Siro had described it to him. He didn’t know quite what he could say to reassure her at this point. So, he remained silent, too, and waited with her.

“How’s your brother, Lionel?” Sasha asked when she did finally speak again. “What are the doctors saying? You didn’t say, and I never got a chance to ask.” Clearly, she had decided to put her distress aside for the time being and focus on something else. It had been quite a shock, the found but not quite found situation, the latest development in the missing container saga.

“I’m heading back to California in the morning,” he answered. “Antonella and I.”

“Oh. Ok,” she said in a hushed and careful tone.

“The surgery went well, as far as the doctors could tell,” he told her, “but of course, they won’t know for sure until he is awake and they’re able to test his functions and responses and so on. They are keeping him in a coma to help keep his brain from swelling. But he’s going to be alright. He’ll be fine.”

“I’m sure he will, Lionel. I really do hope it’s not as bad as it seems right now. Did your parents get there alright?”

“Yes. And my brother who had gone to Vegas for the weekend, he’s back there, too. He flew back to LA in the night. My dad’s not handling the situation too well, though, it seems. My sister says he’s had to be seen by the doctors for heart palpitations and cold sweats and stuff.”

“I can understand that. Of course, he’s worried that his son seems to be so badly injured.”

“Yes, and he is a bit of a wuss with these kinds of things, anyway,” Lionel related, laughing a little at his memories. “Ever since we were kids, if one of us fell out of a tree, or fell off our bikes, or scraped some skin off somewhere or something, it was always Mom who took care of it, not him. He just can’t deal with things like this. Mom even says he refused to ride a bicycle when they were in college, like all the other students did – and professors, too! – because he was so deathly afraid of being hurt in an accident. So, you can imagine. Every time my brother has one of his accidents, my dad about loses his mind!”

“I guess we’d have to be parents ourselves to truly understand how he feels,” Sasha remarked.

“I suppose so,” he answered. “When we get children of our own, we might behave the same way. You never know. You can never tell beforehand, I guess.”

For a moment, there was only the soft rustle of two people breathing. Lost in thoughts of their own and of any children they might bring into the world. Neither of them spoke, so neither of them knew that the children they each imagined would have them both for parents.

“I’ll call you later,” Lionel eventually said to Sasha. “I am to call back to get instructions for what to do about your container, and I have to book our tickets to go home, and I will come round to you later. I need to see you before I leave. Until we know more about Rio’s injuries, I can’t tell you when I’ll be back, so we’re going to have to figure something out about us.”

Sasha felt something flutter around in her stomach when he said that. Her heart skipped several beats and all she could think was, “About us?”

She heard herself say it out loud to him. “About us?”

“Yeah!” he answered. His voice suddenly low and deep. “About us. I’ll come to the boat round six or so. You’ll be there by then?”

“Yes,” she agreed.

“Ok! See you at six.”

“Yes.”