<< Go Back

Two from Isaac's House: A Story of Promises (Volume 2)

By Normandie Fischer

Order Now!

1 Rina
A moment in time and the rabbit hole opened, tumbling Rina Lynne smack dab into the middle of her own personal wonderland. The voice in her head cried, “Too much, too soon.”
She shushed it. This wasn’t too much, nor was it too soon. She’d been freed from the need to cower, and this—oh, yes, this—was her chance to soar, if only for a season.
A train’s whistle ricocheted in the cavernous station, and voices shouted over the hiss of brakes, upping the tension as she compared her ticket to the sign above her head. Please let her not be on the wrong track about to board a train that would spit her out in Milan, Frankfurt, or Bucharest—instead of the Umbrian town of Perugia.
Dragging her albatross of a suitcase down the platform, she muttered an under-the-breath word she’d been taught never to say. That luggage salesman had certainly seen this Morehead City girl coming. He’d flashed his oily smile and promised she could carry her world in one rolling, easy-to-handle bag. She should have exchanged it before flying 4600 miles to a country where she didn’t speak the language.
A tall man—a very tall man—mounted the steep steps, wearing a backpack and carrying a duffle bag. He glanced down, a definite twinkle in his blue eyes, before he reached back, grasped the handle atop her gargantuan case, and hoisted it up with ease.
“Thank you so much,” she said, adding a smile and a “Grazie.”
He nodded. His “You’re welcome” sounded very American. Her own smile lingered as he disappeared into the train and she searched for a seat.
She pictured the glint in those eyes. His height had made her five-foot-ten frame feel petite, and wasn’t that a novelty? Jason, at barely five-eleven, never wanted her to wear heels, but sometimes a girl needed fancy to feel feminine.
What if . . . ?
Stop it. There would be no what-ifs.
She wasn’t in Italy to find romance because, of course, she’d already found it with Jason. These next months were about seeing something of the world and making memories.
A man seated next to the window of an otherwise empty compartment remained hidden behind his newspaper when she pushed her suitcase through the door. His legs, her legs, and the case took up all the available floor space, but she couldn’t heft the thing to the rack above. She drew a paperback from her purse and settled in, determined to ignore him—until his rustling paper recaptured her attention.
He folded it and shifted his gaze to the window as the train accelerated out of town. His cropped black hair and caramel skin, the flat-tipped nose over a shortened upper lip, along with a well-trimmed black mustache made him look like a Mafia goon. And here she sat, alone with him in this small space, although safe, surely, with the door open and her suitcase between them.
When he turned in her direction, his eyes appeared as slits. She ducked her head, but not before she saw the ragged scar that sliced through one eyebrow.
The train clackety-clacked north, its rhythm lulling her toward sleep, but she couldn’t doze off alone in a compartment with a man who looked like he’d slipped off the set of The Godfather. And, yet, would she be so fearful if he were handsome? Or if he were that American?
Then, just as she was talking herself into compassion for him, he reached over his head to slide a magazine from the pocket of his duffel bag. That innocuous movement opened his jacket to reveal something tan and V-shaped hanging from his shoulder, a leather something with a black handle sticking out the top. She tried to look away, anyplace but at the gun, and shifted her attention to the corridor. When she stole a glance in his direction, the full-faced photograph of a bearded mullah stared back from the middle of exclamatory squiggles. So, not only a gunman, not only a B-grade-movie-type thug, but an Arab (or Iranian?) gunman, probably a terrorist, maybe one of those death-squad bullies. Al Qaeda? Hamas? ISIS?
She concentrated on slowing breaths that would expose her fear. What if he wore one of those bomb things under his shirt? Terrorists hated Americans. They especially hated Jews. She was all of one, half of the other.
Tan and gray towns flashed past the window. Some jumped out of green backgrounds as if plucked complete from a storybook, and others appeared sculpted into the stones. Olive trees patterned the slopes, their leaves glinting silver in the sunlight. And there beside the tracks was the stream-like Tiber, so different from Bogue Sound, the pre-ocean tidal area that separated the North Carolina mainland from the Outer Banks.
Her thoughts fled to the waters of home, to the Sound and the islands fronting it, to her Sunfish and the peace that came when she tucked herself onboard and took off for hours at a time. Like a surfboard zipping over the waves on an ocean breeze, her little boat flew across the water, hampered neither by shoals nor tidal restraints on the way to and from Cape Lookout.
Too bad Jason didn’t like to sail, but she’d be back out there someday, Jason or no, her one point of independence in a world that had offered too few chances to rebel.
Before her father’s death, her life had been circumscribed and limited to trips to Atlantic Beach or sailing her little Sunfish. Death brings change, but how often does it recalibrate a lens to this extent? Uncovered secrets can dry tears faster than most anything else. Certainly faster than her father’s old slap-to-the-cheek method or his cold words, which had begun shortly after her mama’s death from cancer all those years ago.
The Arab/Iranian gunman shifted position. He checked his watch, set the magazine on the seat opposite his, and stood. Negotiating past her suitcase and feet, he left the compartment and turned toward the front of the train.
She’d move, find a toilet, go look for another seat. She tucked her book away and gathered her purse. No one would touch her big bag. Still, she whispered, “Stay,” as if it were a dog.
The bathroom wasn’t very clean, but the door locked, and the toilet paper dispenser had real, if slightly scratchy, tissue. A papered seat made the accommodations infinitely superior to the hole in the floor she’d met at a non-upgraded-for-tourists trattoria yesterday. “Relax. Remember adventure.”
Talking aloud to the walls did as much good as sticking out her tongue at the mirror and succeeded only in making her feel ridiculous. But ridiculous was a step up from terrified.
A lot of people carried guns. Not any she knew, aside from the Morehead City police, but people did. Movies were full of men with shoulder holsters, and some were on the side of peaceful, law-abiding, non-interventionist, non-terrorist humanity. She just needed to relax and act naturally. Soon, she would get off the train, and the gunman and she would go in different directions. And she’d never have to see him again.
She jumped when a thud sounded against the bathroom door. Someone was awfully eager—or in need. Suddenly, something slid down the door’s length. The red bar above the handle would tell whoever was in the corridor the toilet was occupied. Maybe if she stayed quiet, he, she, it would go away, go try some other restroom.
The door handle jiggled. She called again, trying to remember the Italian words and came up with “Un momento.” After a long silence, a sharp slap echoed off the metal wall. She flinched back and held her breath. A whoosh, a rumbling, and clanging noises amplified. It sounded as if the outside door of the car had opened, the door for entrance and egress, supposedly shut except when the train was at full stop. Something raked along the floor, bumped, thumped, and a door banged shut. The outside noises stopped. And then—quiet. At least, a relative quiet. The track’s rattle still echoed from the drain below the toilet.
The effort to muffle breaths that wanted to whoosh through her lips forced her eyes closed. Someone might still be out there.
At a peremptory knock, she nearly fell off the seat. Words in Italian, a child’s voice whined. She croaked out, “Sì. Coming,” then washed her hands and opened the door.
A smiling woman waited with a small boy. Just an ordinary child with an ordinary need. Rina glanced in both directions before heading back to her suitcase and the safety of the known.
The gunman was back, flipping through his magazine again. She caught her toe under the suitcase and fell forward, landing on the empty space beside him. “I’m sorry, so clumsy of me.”
He whipped his gaze in her direction. “Anh.”
Was that a word in whatever language he spoke or merely a grunt in answer to her apology? He didn’t look confused, so she assumed he understood English.
She tried to smile as she recovered, but her upper lip caught on too-dry teeth. Out the window, the sun still shone, and little wisps of cloud still decorated the sky as the train lumbered toward its destination. She glanced at her watch but didn’t register the time as the gunman returned to his magazine. Nothing had happened. Everything was normal. The thump had meant nothing. Neither had the banging.
Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out.
Maybe she’d dreamed it all. Maybe the man across from her had toppled out of one of Auntie Luze’s romance novels and was really an Arab sheik—no, an outlaw—who carried a ruby-encrusted dagger with which he planned to kidnap and hold her for ransom at his desert outpost. Before she could people the daydream with a hero, two women walked past the compartment. One, tall and red-haired, spoke over her shoulder to the second. “He wasn't in the club car?” Her voice carried the flavor of the South.
The other woman’s accent was British. “No, and the train’s not that large, is it?”
Two women wandering the corridor, chatting, and a man reading his magazine—each behaving normally. All was well.
It was, as long as the scarred man didn’t follow her off the train. As long as she never saw him or his gun again.

Order Now!

<< Go Back