So I carried his rocks when I should have been carrying schoolbooks, but I cannot pretend I hated him for that. I had no use for school, hated to study, hated to read, felt acutely the stifling heat of the single room schoolhouse, the only good thing in it my cousin, Lithodora, who read to the little children, sitting on a stool with her back erect, chin lifted high, and her white throat showing.

I often imagined her throat was as cool as the marble altar in our church and I wanted to rest my brow upon it as I had the altar. How she read in her low steady voice, the very voice you dream of calling to you when you’re sick, saying you will be healthy again and know only the sweet fever of her body. I could’ve loved books if I had her to read them to me, beside me in my bed.

I knew every step of the stairs between Sulle Scale and Positano, long flights that dropped through canyons and descended into tunnels bored in the limestone, past orchards and the ruins of derelict paper mills, past waterfalls and green pools. I walked those stairs when I slept, in my dreams.

The trail my father and I walked most often led past a painted red gate, barring the way to a crooked staircase. I thought those steps led to a private villa and paid the gate no mind until the day I paused on the way down with a load of marble and leaned on it to rest and it swung open to my touch. My father, he lagged thirty or so stairs behind me. I stepped through the gate onto the landing to see where these stairs led. I saw no villa or vineyard below, only the staircase falling away from me down among the sheerest of sheer cliffs.

“Father,” I called out as he came near, the slap of his feet echoing off the rocks and his breath whistling out of him. “Have you ever taken these stairs?”

When he saw me standing inside the gate he paled and had my shoulder in an instant. He hauled me back onto the main staircase and cried out, “How did you open the red gate?”

“It was open when I got here,” I said. “Don’t they lead all the way down to the sea?”

“No.”

“But it looks as if they go all the way to the bottom.”

“They go farther than that,” my father said and he crossed himself. Then he said again, “The gate is always locked.” And he stared at me, the whites of his eyes showing. I had never seen him look at me so, had never thought I would see him afraid of me.