She shook her head. “Still don’t get it. Are you saying he’s Camorra?”

“Who knows? Maybe.”

“He’s Filipino, for Christ’s sake.”

I looked over Maggie’s shoulder, trying to get a glimpse of Bernard inside. He was sitting with Theo, and it looked like a typical guy-bonding kind of conversation-lots of nodding, laughing.

“Iz,” Maggie said, “I think you need to be taking a vacation on this trip instead of…”

“Instead of what?”

“Oh, baby girl.”

I snapped my head back to look at her. Maggie only called me “baby girl” when she was really worried about me. It was what she called her nieces, like the niece I had once babysat. Her name was Kaitlyn, and she was a handful. But even kids like Kaitlyn had bad days, and so if she fell down on a playground and busted a lip, and then had been bullied by a pack of older kids, Maggie would sit her down and say, “Oh, baby girl.” And now she was saying it to me.

“Are you seriously that worried about me?” I asked.

“Well…” She drew out the last word. “You have been…I don’t know how to put it…You’ve been a little off lately, and who wouldn’t be? I mean, this thing about your dad, the thing with the police a few months ago, Sam disappearing a few months before that. You’ve been going through a really hard time. It would be nuts if someone wasn’t, you know…going nuts from all that. I just think you need to take a breath.”

“Are you saying I’m being paranoid?” I wasn’t even insulted. I was in such a tailspin with all this, who knew what was cooking inside my head? And I trusted Maggie to be an objective observer.

“No,” she said. “Not paranoid. I just don’t think Bernard has anything to do with…anything.” She looked over her shoulder and stared at him inside the window. “Except me.” Bernard saw Maggie looking at him. He smiled, waved. She did the same.

“Wow, you are into this guy.”

She nodded.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you like this.”

“I don’t want to jinx anything. Let’s not talk about it. Let’s talk about Theo.”

“What do you think of him?”

“I think he’s the most gorgeous guy I’ve ever seen in person.”

“Hey! We finally agree on a guy.”

“I agree about his looks, but I could never date him.”

“Why?”

“I can’t date a guy who’s better-looking than me. I don’t have enough self-esteem.”

The ferry hit a few waves and the boat lurched. Maggie and I gripped the railing. Inside, Theo mouthed, You okay?

I gave him a thumbs-up and looked back at Maggie. “Do you think he’s prettier than me?”

“I think you guys are sizzling together.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“ Ischia!” a voice called over a loudspeaker. “ Ischia!”

Inside the ship, passengers began to gather their stuff. Bernard and Theo got up from their seats.

“You ready?” Maggie said.

“I guess.” I only wish I knew what to get ready for.

Ischia was a sandy, hilly island covered in wide swatches of grass and shrubs-all a vibrant green. Amongst the green were purple flowering trees and pristine white houses with arched doorways. The port was full of vendors selling coffee, snacks, trinkets and maps. We found a cab station and squashed ourselves and Maggie’s huge bag into one.

The driver knew the Poseidon Gardens and squealed away from the port, heading to the right and forcing the little car upward.

We would, we decided, go to the gardens for the day and look for Elena. If we didn’t find her, we’d get a hotel. The driver told us that hotels were plentiful, especially on the other side of the island where Poseidon was located.

“What are the chances we’re actually going to find Elena?” I said, suddenly deflated.

Bernard turned around from the passenger seat in the front. “What does she look like?”

I described Elena, a woman in her fifties with chestnut-brown hair and brown eyes flecked with green.

“We’ll try, Izzy,” Maggie said.

“Yeah, we’ll try,” Theo said, taking my hand in his. “That’s all we can do.”

The cab dropped us at the Poseidon gates. We paid and were given maps of the place. When Theo asked the ticket taker exactly how the garden was laid out and what we were supposed to do here, she held up a finger. “Wait, please for inglese.”

Soon another woman came over. She spoke English. “You see,” she said, pointing at one of the maps, which was dotted with different blue shapes. “These are all pools. The pools marked with number one are the coolest. The temperatures rise, so you go to a pool with number two, then three and so on.” She looked at us. “You understand? You go inside any pool number one, then you relax, then find a pool number two, and then three, and you keep going until you get to a number six. Then you do the whole thing over. But make sure you rest in between.” She pointed at the other areas of the map. “Lots of places to rest and to eat. Maybe you lie on the beach.”

We thanked her and wandered through the gates and into the gardens.

The place was stunning, full of lush green bushes, magenta bougainvillea, cypress trees and orange blossomed plants, all of it riding the coast of a sandy beach and the sparkling blue sea.

The gardens were full of nooks and crannies, lots of lounge areas, each with yellow and orange canvas chairs and thatched umbrellas. And scattered throughout the property were steaming pools, waterfalls running alongside them, coursing down from the cliffs above.

When we got to the locker rooms, an attendant directed us to the one for donne-women-and the other for uomini. In halting English, she told us bathing caps were required. I had never worn a bathing cap in my life, and I must have looked perplexed because the woman pointed to a boutique, then redirected her finger to my hair, frowning.

“Wow, she’s right,” I said, looking over her shoulder at one of the pools. Everyone bobbing in the water wore a cap. Even the people lounging around the sides had bathing caps on. “That’s going to make it even harder to find Elena.”

“Let’s give it a shot,” Maggie said.

In the locker room, we stowed our luggage and I put on my blue bikini, while Maggie slipped into a red one-piece with black racing stripes, the kind designed for swim teams. I had never been able to convince her to wear anything other than a trusty one-piece.

I had bought a blue-and-white cap, and after changing into my bikini, I stood in front of the mirror and pulled the cap over my head. The material was thin, and I couldn’t seem to stuff all my curls under the thing. Orange spirals sprang out on all sides.

A woman walked into the changing room, saw me, laughed. She dug in her bag and fished out a ponytail holder.

“Grazie, grazie,” I said.

The woman laughed, nodded, walked away.

Maggie and I grabbed towels and walked outside. Bernard and Theo stood there, Theo in long surfer shorts slung low on his hips, showing those distinct muscles that carved lines over every inch of his body. Bernard wore a T-shirt and baggy brown trunks that looked about twenty years old. They both held bathing caps in their hands.

“We’re the only guys not wearing Speedos,” Theo said.

We glanced around. It was true.

“Lots of banana hammocks,” Maggie said.

“I’m starving,” Bernard announced. He had said the same thing at least four times since we’d gotten up that morning, and he’d had something to eat each time.

“Let’s find something.” Maggie took him by the arm. “We’ll all look for Elena, and text each other if we see her. Otherwise, we’ll meet back here later?”

Theo and I nodded, then walked around the sprawling gardens, studying the pools, the beach, the ristorante. All the while, my eyes were searching for Elena. I seemed to draw a lot of looks from the other bathers, some of them openly staring at me as they bobbed in one of the pools or gazed at me from their supine position on lounge chairs. I knew it wasn’t my hair, which was now under the cap and out of sight, so at first I thought maybe I was looking particularly good in my bikini. But when I heard an older man murmur, bianco, I realized that they were commenting on my Casper ’s-ass-white skin. Everyone else in the place was tanned to perfection. Actually past perfection and moving toward crispy.