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By Root 626 0

as if her submersion in Lake Michigan were an ordeal she was required to endure for some greater good. Ted tried different ways of making it easier for her—going in little by little, or plunging straight in—but always Sasha would gasp in pain and tighten the grip of her legs and arms around him. When it was over, when she was in, she was herself again, dog-paddling despite his efforts to teach her the crawl. (“I know how to swim!” she would say, impatiently. “I just don’t like to.”) Splashing him, teeth chattering gamely. But the entire process unsettled Ted, as if he were hurting her, forcing this immersion upon his niece when what he longed to do—fantasized about doing—was rescue her: wrap her in a blanket and secrete her from the house before dawn; paddle away in an old rowboat he’d found; carry her down the beach and not turn around. He was twenty-five. He trusted no one else. But he could do nothing, really, to protect his niece, and as the weeks eked away, he began to anticipate summer’s end as a black, ominous presence. Yet when the time came it was strangely easy. Sasha clung to her mother, barely glancing at Ted as he loaded up his car and said good-bye, and he set off feeling angry at her, wounded in a way he knew was childish but couldn’t seem to help, and when that feeling passed it left him exhausted, too tired even to drive. He parked outside a Dairy Queen and slept.

“How do I know you know how to swim, if you won’t show me?” he asked Sasha once, as they sat on the sand.

“I took lessons with Rachel Costanza.”

“You’re not answering my question.”

She smiled at him a little helplessly, as if she longed to hide behind her childishness but sensed that, somehow, it was already too late for that. “She has a Siamese cat named Feather.”

“Why won’t you swim?”

“Oh, Uncle Teddy,” she said, in one of her eerie imitations of her mother. “You wear me out.”

Sasha arrived at his hotel at eight o’clock wearing a short red dress, black patent-leather boots, and a regalia of cosmetics that sharpened her face into a small, shrill mask. Her narrow eyes curved like hooks. Ted glimpsed her across the lobby and felt reluctance verging on paralysis. He had hoped, cruelly, that she wouldn’t show up.

Still, he made himself cross the lobby and take her arm. “There’s a good restaurant up the street,” he said, “unless you have other ideas.”

She did. Blowing smoke from the window of a taxi, Sasha harangued the driver in halting Italian as the car shrieked down alleys and the wrong way up one-way streets to the Vomero, an affluent neighborhood Ted had not seen. It was high on a hill. Reeling, he paid the driver and stood with Sasha in a gap between two buildings. The flat, sparkling city arrayed itself before them, lazily toeing the sea. Hockney, Ted thought. Diebenkorn. John Moore. In the distance, Mount Vesuvius reposed benignly. Ted pictured the slightly different version of Susan standing near him, taking it in.

“This is the best view in Naples,” Sasha said challengingly, but Ted sensed her waiting, gauging his approval.

“It’s a wonderful view,” he assured her, and added, as they ambled among the leafy residential streets, “This is the prettiest neighborhood I’ve seen in Naples.”

“I live here,” Sasha said. “A few streets over.”

Ted was skeptical. “I should’ve met you up here, then. Saved you the trip.”

“I doubt you would have found it,” Sasha said. “Foreigners are helpless in Naples. Most of them get robbed.”

“Aren’t you a foreigner?”

“Technically,” Sasha said. “But I know my way around.”

They reached an intersection thronged with what had to be college students (strange how they looked the same everywhere): boys and girls in black leather jackets riding on Vespas, lounging on Vespas, perching and even standing on Vespas. The density of Vespas made the whole square seem to vibrate, and the fumes of their exhaust worked on Ted like a mild narcotic. In the dusk, a chorus line of palm trees vamped against a Bellini sky. Sasha threaded her way among the students with brittle self-consciousness, eyes locked ahead.

In a restaurant