Angela thinks about that. With the nurses gathered around her, with one of them holding her hand, she imagines her father wandering down halls. Sees him getting smaller and smaller as he pushes open doors, until finally he finds the one her mother stands behind. Angela imagines his voice hushed with anticipation. She hears him whisper, “Annabeth?” And sees her mother, turning around and smiling. Reaching for his hand as he takes hers and the years blow away like fallen leaves.
His body has already gone to the morgue. When they ask if she would like an autopsy, Angela’s throat tightens. For a second, she thinks she will be sick, then she shakes her head. When they ask if she would like to see him—to say good-bye, or to be certain, presumably, that they are not making this up—her heart stops. Quite suddenly, she feels light-headed, as if her body is no longer subject to the rules of gravity, as if it’s left the ground and is rising, like a balloon that might go too high and pop.
She must look strange, because a nurse puts her head between her knees, then brings a glass of water. They stand around her in a semicircle, and finally it’s all Angela can do to ask them to call the Barellis. She can’t face the Pirottis’ tears, or the mewling sound she knows Signora Ravelli will make. She can’t even face Nonna Franchi. As someone hurries away to make the call, she sits there, frozen in the plastic chair, and realizes that she doesn’t even care if Barbara’s mother comes, or her father with his disorganized smile and smell of cigarettes. At least, she thinks, they’ll be quiet. At least they won’t cry or wail or clutch at her. Which is important because she has the feeling that something has happened to her insides. That suddenly she has a thin inner lining made of glass that even the slightest noise or wrong word might shatter.
“Angie?”
Barbara’s face swims in front of her. She is squatting, one of her hands on each of Angela’s knees, and Angela wonders if she has been asleep because she didn’t hear Barbara arrive, wasn’t even aware of her until she spoke. She blinks, pushing away the maze of hallways she has seen her father wandering down.
“Angie? They told me. I came right away.”
Barbara’s brown velvet eyes are liquid with tears. One escapes. She lets go of Angela’s knee for a second and teeters as she wipes her cheek with the back of her hand.
“Do you want to go home?” she asks. “Or you can come to our house. Mama’s away but—” Barbara nods. “We’ll get a taxi.”
“No.”
Angela’s own voice surprises her. It sounds as if it belongs to someone else. Someone angry. She shakes her head and tries to smile so Barbara won’t think she’s angry with her.
“No taxi,” she says. Because she knows absolutely that she cannot be inside anything as small as a car.
“I want to walk,” Angela says, but that is not quite true. What she wants to do is run. Climb up onto the ramparts and run around and around and around the city walls. Circle Ferrara so fast she turns back time—swirls her whole life, all her past, and her father, and her mother into a safe pocket of stone, trapping them there, so they can never escape and she will always know where to find them.
“Come on,” Barbara says. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
She helps Angela to her feet. Angela lets her. She doesn’t resist as Barbara walks her down the long hallways, past door after closed door.
Outside the night feels almost chilly, freshly washed and still damp, as if there’s been rain. Angela realizes she has no idea what time it is. The light was falling down when she arrived, sometime just after seven. She looks at her watch as they pass under one of the street lamps in the hospital parking lot. It’s nearly ten p.m. She has no idea what she has been doing for the last three hours.
“Are you sure you want to walk?” Barbara stops and looks at her, her face creased with concern. “I can get a taxi,” she says again. “I can—”
Angela shakes her head. “I want to walk,” she says.
She tries to smile. Barbara nods and reaches for her hand, and together they step out onto the Corso Giovecca.
They take the long way, turning away from the main thoroughfare and winding toward the heart of the old city. Silence seeps in and thickens as the sound of traffic fades. They are dwarfed as they pass the Schifanoia, where for a second Angela stops, thinking of the murals of the months—of the dancing women and flying animals. Of the flowers and stars that rest inside its great stone shell like hidden pearls. She has read that the faces in the paintings are the faces of the d’Este mistresses and court ladies, that all the goddesses were modeled on the dead, and she wonders if from now on she will see her father’s face. If he will look down at her from carved lintels. Stare out from the ornate frames of paintings. Barbara waits and says nothing. Then they walk on, their footsteps tapping time, measuring the beginning of this new life as they pass Santa Maria in Vado and the blank-faced wall of the Annunziata.
They continue like this, not speaking, holding hands, feeling the layers of the city close around them, until suddenly Angela is aware of something other than their footsteps. A voice, muffled and crackling. It sounds like a radio that’s been turned up so far up it distorts, or a huge television set that’s been left on.
“What’s that?”
She stops, unnerved. Barbara shrugs.
“Probably the vigil.”
“What vigil?”
For an insane moment Angela wonders if the city somehow knows that her father is dead, and if all the old black-dressed ladies, and the fruit sellers, and the women from the bakery and the laundry and the man from the kiosk where her father bought his cigars have turned out to make speeches and light candles for him.
“What vigil?” she asks again, and Barbara looks at her.
“For Mara.”
“Mara?” Angela frowns.
“Oh,” Barbara says, as if something has suddenly occurred to her, “you don’t know? I mean, you didn’t see the TV tonight?”
Angela shakes her head. Of course she has not seen the TV. She has not seen anything except halls and doorways and her own shoes when the nurse shoved her head between her feet. She has no idea what Barbara is talking about.
“They killed Mara Cagol.”
For a second Angela doesn’t know who Mara Cagol is. Or was. Then she remembers. The five-pointed star that looks like it’s leaning backward. The men who disappear like smoke.
Before she can ask anything, Barbara says, “This afternoon. They were doing house to house searches. You know, looking for that guy, the rich guy who got kidnapped. Gancia. Anyway.” She shrugs and starts walking again. Angela falls in beside her.
“Yeah,” Barbara says. “They were doing house-to-house searches. I don’t know, somewhere outside Milan. And all of a sudden there was a lot of shooting. At least that’s what they say. At this one house. Two carabinieri were killed. And so was Mara. She was inside.” Barbara shrugs. Her eyes slide sideways, finding Angela’s. “My dad says she was murdered. He heard, when they found the body, that she’d been shot in the back. Other people are saying she was wounded and trying to crawl away and they just shot her. You know, like an animal.”
They have reached the small piazza in front of the Palazzo Paradiso. The noise is coming from a man standing on the steps speaking through a megaphone. It makes his voice so muzzy that Angela can’t really make out what he’s saying to the two, or maybe three, hundred people, mostly students, who drift and eddy below him. She looks around. Flyers have been pasted on the walls of the surrounding houses. LOTTA ARMATA PER IL COMUNISMO, Armed Fight for Communism, the headline reads. The same photograph, the one on the television, stares out from all of them. Over and over, everywhere you turn, there is the pretty dark-haired girl with the five-pointed star leaning backward behind her. Underneath, the words Mara, il tuo assassìnio non restera impunito—Mara, your assassination will not go unpunished—appear again and again.
Someone is handing out candles. One is thrust into Angela’s hand, and before she even knows what she is doing she is
holding a flame, raising it above her head. It flickers, then glows—one of dozens, hundreds, that fill the tiny piazza, turning it into a sea of stars. All fallen to earth and burning for the memory of Mara Cagol.
* * *
Angela’s father is buried five days later, his body laid at the foot of the stone angel beside Annabeth’s. She has been waiting for him, Angela thinks, for a long time. A lifetime. Hers. Seventeen years, four weeks, and one day.
Bending to place the white roses she has brought, Angela feels the locket inside her black dress, tapping against her chest like a finger tapping some last tiny message from her parents. She presses her hand against it, wondering if she should have given it back, sent it to be with her father the way she sent his best suit and blue tie and the black shoes Nonna Franchi had come to the house to polish specially.
Leaning in the kitchen doorway, Barbara had watched the old lady, and commented afterward that it was creepy, the way she had rubbed and polished. Spat on the toes, her creased lips puckering a kiss to bring up the shine. But Angela didn’t think so. If anything she wished that there was more—a few favors, a few small kindnesses that could be done for the dead.
The best she had been able to think of was cleaning the apartment. Especially the kitchen. After the funeral, after the lunch the Ravallis insist on hosting—the Pirottis and Nonna Franchi and Angela and Barbara and even Cousin Ubaldo, clustered around their table—it still smells like bleach. Acrid and eye stinging. Barbara opens the window and stands in front of it, eating a cucumber from the dish on the counter, cutting it into wedges, salting it, and chewing it methodically. Angela sits at the table watching her. Outside there are footsteps, and the sound of a Vespa. Angela lays her head on her arm and closes her eyes, breathing in the sharp smell and letting her hand wander across the scrubbed wood, reading the map of its scars.
Later, despite the heat, she wraps herself in the maroon blanket and lies on the couch, her father’s slippers on her feet. At dark Barbara makes a nest of cushions and bed pillows on the floor beside her. When, in the early hours of the morning, Angela’s hand drifts to the floor, she feels the silk of Barbara’s hair, then the answering pressure of her fingers. A few moments later Barbara unwinds the blanket and slips beneath it. Her body is hard and soft at the same time. Her long thighs and muscled back as warm and smooth as sun-touched marble.
* * *
“Here,” Barbara says. “Try one of these. They’re orange. You like orange.”
Angela opens her mouth and closes it. She was going to say that she does not like orange, at least not in particular, not any more than she likes any other kind of fruit flavor. But she doesn’t have the energy. Since the funeral her mind has been heavy and lumbering, like an overweight animal. And Barbara is only trying to help. She is sitting on the stool beside the cash register in the butcher’s shop with a box of chocolates on her lap insisting they will make Angela feel better.
The box is huge and made of quilted satin, like the inside of a coffin. It’s a gift from Barbara’s parents, to congratulate her because she has actually won a scholarship to one of the American universities. She heard the day before yesterday. She had been on a waiting list, and now someone has decided to go somewhere else so Barbara will be able to go in her place. To somewhere called Ohio, which means nothing to Angela because she knows nothing about America.
Barbara insists—when she isn’t touting the beneficial effects of the chocolates—that Ohio is beautiful. From the way she says it—her voice high and fast, as if her insisting can make it be true—Angela doubts this. She doubts, in fact, that Barbara knows anything about Ohio. In fact, she doubts Barbara can even remember which of the seemingly hundreds of applications she filled out belonged to this particular university. She suspects Barbara will arrive expecting to be somewhere else. But that doesn’t matter, because Barbara is happy, and for once both her parents are proud of her, and she is going to escape them. So she has brought the chocolates to share with Angela, who isn’t the least bit interested in them.
She doesn’t like their shape, the small glossy brown lumps. And the smell of them—the bitter cocoa-ness and sweet ooze of the cream centers—is making her feel sick. Angela glances at the box. Its quilted sides bulge like a dead animal that’s rotting. The nests of paper rattle as Barbara selects one and bites into it, her teeth flat and shiny now that the braces have been removed.
“Ubaldo’s in love with you,” she announces.
Angela shakes her head.
“Don’t be stupid.”
They have had this conversation before, several times since the funeral. It is true that Ubaldo comes to the shop more often now, that once or twice he has even appeared on the weekends, carrying his rolled-up newspaper that he picks horses out of to bet on, and wearing what looks like a new cap. But Angela thinks this is just because he feels sorry for her. The idea of anything else makes her even queasier than the chocolates.
She pushes the cash register, which opens with a ping. There is more than usual in the black plastic trays, but she does not find that especially reassuring. She knows it is only because, like Ubaldo, everyone feels sorry for her. So they are coming to buy ground meat and roasts and chops in the same way that Signora Ravalli has taken to leaving her soup—pots of saffroned yellow broth slick with egg yolks and shredded chicken that she finds almost nightly on the landing. Angela pours them down the sink where the celery and sinews stick in the drain and have lately begun to smell.
Soon, she thinks, Signora Ravalli will stop. And so will everyone else. They will all forget her father is dead, just as Barbara is forgetting it. Then they will stop feeling sorry and go on vacation because it will be August. And when they come back, sun shriveled and short tempered, they will return to the supermarket where everything is cheaper and wrapped in colored plastic.
Barbara nods, not because she is reading Angela’s mind and agreeing, but because she is still going on about Ubaldo.
“He is,” she says. “You’ll see. I bet he asks you to marry him. You can be Signora Ubaldo.”
The words hit Angela in a puff of violet cream. Her stomach drops. She has to cover her mouth. Her eyes water as she looks up, not sure what she’s looking for, and comes face to face with the grinning pig painted on the wall.
“Angie?” Barbara’s hand is on her arm. “Angie?” she says. “I was only kidding.”
“I’m fine.” Angela pushes her hand away. “I’m fine,” she mumbles. And before she knows what she is doing, she has grabbed one of the chocolates, and stuffed it in to her mouth, and swallowed.
Barbara leaves on the twelfth of August. She is going to stay with her father while he finishes his summer teaching job, then he will take her to Ohio. Before that she goes with her mother to Milan to shop for her new life. When she comes back, Angela goes after work to the Barellis’. She sits on Barbara’s bed surrounded by the stuffed animals and watches as Barbara shows off her new clothes, then helps her to pack them in her new suitcase, which is pink and has flowers on the side. They talk—make promises, bring food from the Barellis’ kitchen, and eat it sitting cross-legged, picking crumbs out of the white shag rug. But for all of that, their conversations aren’t the same. This leaving has built a wall between them. Or rather, Angela thinks, a window. A plate-glass window just like the one at the shop. They can see each other through it. They can read each other’s lips. Even tell what is behind each other’s eyes. But there is no press of flesh. They can stand hand to hand, but they can no longer touch.
On the actual day, Angela arranges for Ubaldo to be at the shop and goes with Barbara’s mother and sister to the train station. When the train comes, she hugs Barbara. She can smell the sandalwood oil, feel the familiar brush of her hair, but it’s like holding a doll. Something inside of her is already gone. Angela is almost relieved when she finally climbs into the carriage and opens the window and leans out and waves. Angela waves back. As the train begins to move, she keeps waving. She doesn’t stop until it
has grown as small as a toy.
Angela leaves the platform with Barbara’s mother and her sister, who has finished university in Padua and is home for a visit before going back again to live with the boyfriend everyone hates. When they reach the front of the station they look at her like she’s something they’ve found and don’t know what to do with. Finally Barbara’s mother asks if Angela would like a ride home. Angela shakes her head and thanks them, then stands and watches as they walk quickly away not looking back, as if they’re afraid it might encourage her to follow. After they have driven off, she goes down the steps and turns in the other direction.
It is very hot, and most of the town is already closed for Ferragósto, but the supermarket is open. In all these years Angela has never once been inside it, and only rarely walked past—and then fast and with her head turned, as if whatever’s in there might jump out and grab her. Now she stands looking at the big bright green sign, and at the posters advertising soap powder and discounts on pasta. The rubber mat makes a pinging sound as she pushes open the door. Inside the air is as cold and damp as winter fog.
Angela goes up every aisle, examining the toothpaste and the shampoo, the plastic bags of oranges and grapefruit, and all the boxes of cereals and different kinds of tea before she comes to the meat counter. Which isn’t really a counter because there are no display cases. Instead the meat is all piled in a kind of trough. Frost spangles its back, as if the chops and bacon and legs of chicken are guests of an ice queen.
Each cut sits on a little Styrofoam tray—pink for pork, blue for lamb, yellow for chicken, and green for beef—and is wrapped in layers of see-through film. Angela pokes a chicken thigh. She expects it to be hard, at least partially frozen, but it’s oddly springy, as if it’s made of rubber, not flesh. The indent lasts a moment, then oozes away. Two women pushing silver carts come around the corner. Angela watches as they stop and pick up packages and put them down again and finally don’t choose anything. When she leaves she sees them standing in the checkout line with frozen pizzas. She bought one herself. It’s pepperoni with double cheese, and when she gets home she puts it in the oven, then eats the whole thing standing at the kitchen window looking down on the Spanish Synagogue, whose doors are still padlocked, and still peeling, and that someone really ought to paint.
The Lost Daughter Page 23