“Sophie, give me your hand.” El-Mudad steadied me as I stepped down into the craft. Though we’d bundled up in anticipation of the temperature, I was still shocked at just how cold it was; I’d imagined Venice as a city of endless summer.
“Are there life jackets?” I asked, casting my gaze doubtfully around the craft.
“We don’t need life jackets. Everyone in Venice can swim,” the captain said with a wide grin. He wore a knit cap pulled low on his forehead, covering the tips of his ears, and his puffy coat zipped to his chin. His accent was so thick that by the time I understood his joke, he was already reassuring me, “No, no, no. You don’t have to worry. I have lived in Venice all of my life. I have only drowned two people.”
I really hoped that was a joke, too. El-Mudad laughed at it, anyway. We sat down and the captain pulled a short canopy over our heads. It was claustrophobic and coffin-like.
“You’re trembling,” El-Mudad said softly beside my ear. “Are you all right?”
“I’m just not a huge fan of boats.” If I’d said that back home, where fishing and tubing and kayaking were beloved summer activities, I would have gotten...well, the same kind of look the Venetian boat driver gave me at that moment.
At least, El-Mudad was sympathetic. “Do not fear, my love. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
“You’ll swim me through this cold ass water to shore?” I teased, but my feeling of dread increased when the engine roared to life. We drifted away from the dock and my stomach pitched.
“Hold on,” the captain called back to us. “I drive a little crazy.”
I shot a wide-eyed look at El-Mudad, but it was too late. The driver hit the throttle and the boat shot forward. When I’d been little—before I’d had a concept of my own mortality—I’d loved going fast across a placid lake. There was just something about the hull of a boat slicing through the glassy reflection of an upside-down sky.
That was not remotely fucking like what the ride into Venice was. The water, already choppy, was made rougher by the wakes from other craft. We seemed to hang suspended in mid-air from one wave to the next, landing hard enough to make my teeth chatter. I seriously doubted the craft—or we—would survive. After what seemed like an eternity of harrowing near-death moments, we abruptly slowed. The engine noise died down enough for El-Mudad to ask the captain something in Italian, to which the captain quickly agreed. El-Mudad ducked out from beneath the canopy and folded it down, and I got my first real glimpse of Venice.
My charmed life had brought me the opportunity to see so many amazing sights, but nothing would ever take the place of the towers and domes rising above the terracotta tiled roofs of the city. The traffic increased as we drew closer, the water buses like whales beside our sleek, unstable shark, schools of smaller boats keeping closer to the docks.
“Oh my god, it’s a gondola!” I shouted, thrusting my arm to point.
El-Mudad chuckled. “Yes, I see that. If you like them so much, you’ve come to the right place.”
I gave him a playful shove. “Hey, Mr. Jaded Traveler. I’m a small town girl. I never thought I’d see Venice. Like, Venice in Las Vegas was a far-off dream, even.”
The captain looked back at me. “I’ve been to that hotel! I gave the gondoliers some advice.”
“You’ve lived in Venice your whole life...and you went to Las Vegas and stayed at the Venetian?” Okay, that was pretty charming.
He shook his head. “No, no, of course not. We went into the Venetian. We stayed at your President’s hotel.”
Ugh.
“If you had stayed in his hotel, you would not have voted for him,” the man concluded with distaste.
“Believe me, I didn’t.”
Just as I was about to apologize on behalf of my nation, we made a slow turn off the lagoon and into a canal.
“This is the Grand Canal,” El-Mudad explained. “The famous one.”
I took out my phone and clicked pictures like mad. “I can’t believe I’m really here. I can’t believe this place is real.”
The captain deftly navigated the smaller waterway, practically in idle the whole time. The canal was as busy as Midtown traffic back home, but none of the drivers seemed as frazzled. Maybe they were too cold to scream at each other.
“I want to come back in the summer,” I announced, the plans already firmly set in my mind. Fuck Laurence and his opinions about how we should live our lives. Olivia would be enchanted by—
I thought of taking Olivia on this boat, racing across all that terrifying water and immediately changed my mind.
The captain did his best to talk me out of it, too. “You don’t want to come here in the summer. Come in the spring or the autumn. Summer is too hot, too crowded. All the tourists come.”