Gwen regards them with wide eyes, turning to the plaque again. “When Ginevra knocked, Agolanti was understandably shocked and took her for a vagrant spirit, barring the way, so she hurried to her father’s house in the Mercato Vecchio, where she was also rejected. Finally she tried the home of her true love, young Rondinelli, and was received by his parents. Her marriage to Agolanti was annulled, and she was able to marry Rondinelli at last.”
This is the kind of morbid-romantic anecdote that excites Gwen beyond all reason. She already has her camera out and is trying to get an atmospheric shot of the alleyway before the light goes.
Unimpressed, May and Liam linger with their backs to stone.
“Yay for plague,” Liam offers. “I love a happy ending.”
“True,” Gwen agrees absently, framing another shot. “It’s a bit like Romeo and Juliet — only with a better outcome.”
Intervention is the trick with her, so after conferring behind her back, May and Liam wait for Gwen to let the camera rest on its strap around her neck; then they link arms with her, steering her gently out of the alley and into the waning sunlight of the piazza.
“You guys really cramp my style sometimes,” she complains, laughing. “Listen. You haven’t exactly worked hard yet, but why don’t you take tomorrow off? We’ll give each other a break. But only if you track down those photo permissions I asked for. This week. And, May, I’ll need at least an outline for one of the three papers you’re writing this summer. Also this week. Time management, dearest.”
May nods.
“What’ll you be up to?” Liam asks as they walk. It’s sweet, in a way, how he’s so protective of his mom. May supposes he’s always been that way, at least since his dad left. It’s just more noticeable here.
“I have an appointment at U-Florence. An old friend was on a team that recently exhumed a skeleton from a mass grave in Venice. They’re claiming it’s the first evidence of the vampires mentioned in contemporary documents.
“This is related to our friend Ginevra,” Gwen continues, “in a way. The focus of the dig was mass graves of plague victims on Lazzaretto Nuovo Island. Around the time this woman died, in the Middle Ages, people believed plague was spread by what they called vampires. Not the bloodsucking kind. These spread disease by chewing their way out of their shrouds after they died, so grave diggers muzzled suspects with a sort of brick. The skeleton my friend found had a stone slab in its mouth.”
“How’d they get the vampire idea?”
“I guess blood sometimes leaked from a corpse’s mouth, causing the shroud to sink in and tear. U-Florence says this is the first forensic example of these so-called vampires. It’s being contested, of course. Another archaeologist claims to have made a similar find in Poland.”
“Battle of the archaeologists,” quips Liam, rolling his eyes, and May tries to smile back.
Glancing vaguely down another twisting alleyway of stone and shadows, she thinks how strange it is that such a sunny country, with more tourists and flavors of ice cream than seem possible in one universe, has such an old, dark heart.
At dinner it takes a while to find a trattoria, osteria, or ristorante — all basically the same thing, Gwen allows — serving anything remotely vegetarian. Tuscans love their meat, their tripe and wild boar and liver and sausage, and May has a feeling she’s going to be eating a lot of white beans in tomato sauce for the next few months. Thank God for olives, she thinks, which is funny. As the child of confirmed agnostics, she isn’t one to contemplate God, but in Florence, images of sinners and saints are everywhere, and heaven and hell look like very real places.
They focus intently on their food, not talking much over dinner. The outdoor tables were all taken when they arrived, but they scored a window seat and everyone seems lost in their own thoughts and flavors, content to half listen to the accordion-and-clarinet music out in the piazza or the warm murmur of Italian, English, German, and Japanese conversation at the tiny tables crowded into a dim dining room. But Liam finally speaks, suggesting they head up to Fiesole tomorrow, walk around the ruins that Gwen mentioned on the walk over. “I know it’s only been a day, but I’m already up for some green. That B&B spoiled me.”
May meets his eyes. “We’re like some old married couple,” she quips. “I was thinking that exact thing when we sat down to eat.”
“As long as you start on the permissions, I don’t mind where you go,” says Gwen. The sun has almost set, and the square swarms with tourists in shorts and fanny packs. Gwen points out a little procession of formally dressed locals — Italians, anyway — meandering in their direction along the piazza’s pedestrian zone. They approach in pairs or loose groups, the women impeccably made-up and holding their backs straight for smiling escorts. Not a few of the younger men strut solo in pointy shoes, but it’s all moving at a snail’s pace.
“Parade?” Li asks innocently enough, but an old man with chiseled cheeks, eavesdropping at the table behind them, tut-tuts.
“È passeggiata, ragazzino.” His tone is equal parts nostalgia and dramatic scolding (tourists!), and when he turns back to his companion, the men bend low and commence gossiping — at least it sounds like gossip — in energetic Italian that opposes the languid, almost choreographed stroll taking place on the pavement behind plate-glass windows.
May rests her napkin in her lap, sits back, and enjoys the show. It’s a bit like running into a flock of rare birds out on a hike; you don’t know what to call them, and you don’t mind not knowing.
If there’s one thing Italy has taught May so far, it’s to value mystery.
She gets up before Liam does the next morning, and with Gwen already out and no one to muscle him out of bed, it could be hours, so May decides to take a slow stroll of her own. She scribbles a note urging him to swing by Pegna for picnic cheese and olives if she isn’t back by the time he wakes up. Then she grabs the most compact guidebook in Gwen’s pile — one with lots of pictures. For some reason, May has a burning desire to find some trinket for her mother.
Dad always says, “Thanks for thinking of me,” and politely files away any remembrance she brought him. But Mom loves gifts, not expensive ones, just what she calls “mindful trifles.” As a kid, May showered her mother with pictures, compositions of all kinds, handmade ornaments, feathers she found in the yard. Mom did the same, slipping cryptic notes into her school lunch, leaving a perfect round pebble in the dish where May kept her rings.
Mom and Dad have always been yin and yang, light and dark. Dad makes her laugh. Mom makes her think and feel — usually a frustrating kind of longing or impatience; Mom is so self-possessed, off somewhere else in her mind, even when out walking the dog. May isn’t invited along anymore. Not since she was about eleven, when she took to rolling her eyes whenever her mother enlisted her. Secretly, May loved the walks, loved racing ahead up the path to the conservation land beyond their house with their border collie, True, crashing alongside through the brush, but some defiant part of her wanted to be asked twice, begged even, wanted to be indispensable, and her mother never begged.
Maybe May blames her mother for that, too.
In any case, Mom is going. Leaving them both, if that’s what May decides — that her mother should move back to Boston, where May was born, alone.
It’s up to her to choose by the end of the summer which parent she’ll betray. Dad seems to expect it’ll be him, but May isn’t so sure. She only has one year of high school left. It doesn’t make sense to blow it all up now. Couldn’t her mother have waited one more year? Maybe it doesn’t matter since in another year May will go to college, but the choice is there, meanwhile.
Don’t make me choose. It was all she thought about, every time she looked at one of them, all through their tender, well-meaning lectures about why this thing was inevitable and how much they both loved her anyway and how she had nothing to do with any of it and they were sorry she would suffer in spite of that.
Still, May feels driven to find some small
important object for her mother, who blames herself, May knows, though she won’t admit it. Dad’s more the grin-and-bear-it type. Maybe May blames her mother, too — for the divorce, for everything — and a gift, however thoughtful, won’t conceal that fact. But still.
She knows Mercato Nuovo is somewhere south of Piazza della Repubblica, that it’s nicknamed the Straw Market because people used to sell hats and baskets there. Now the stalls sell leather goods and souvenirs. Gwen said to get there early, before the other tourists wake up or the sellers shut down for the hot hours.
It isn’t a long walk, but it’s strange being out in the echoing streets by herself. The morning is overcast but warm and muggy, and she wipes sweat from above her lip, catching sight of what looks like the market loggia and the small fountain housing a big bronze statue, Il Porcellino, that she remembers seeing in the guidebook. Children flip coins into the water, some climbing on and caressing the boar. She remembers reading that if you feed it a coin, landing it in the grille below its snout, you’ll have good luck.
The air is slightly cooler by the fountain, and she sits enjoying its faint mist on her cheek and arm for a moment, dragging her hand across the murky, greenish surface. The market stands are beginning to open now, so she wanders north, nodding at the smiling vendors with handbags, colorful scarves, and jewelry to sell. Nothing seems a match for her mom, though May stops to admire beribboned boxes of marbled paper. It’s beautiful stationery but not special enough, so she makes a mental note to come back if she can’t find a more unique offering.
The city is really waking up now, with women in fashionable suits clacking past on heels and children clustering outside idling cars en route to school. She heads back toward Piazza della Repubblica, crossing under an arch and trying to avoid the crowds gathering outside sidewalk cafés where waiters in red jackets bustle back and forth.
Then, on instinct, she veers off course completely. She can always fish out her map and find her way back to the apartment later. She’s always been like this — at least since her parents learned to let her be independent on trips — willing to be lost. It makes her late a lot and frustrates other people, but it’s led to adventures over the years, like the time she wandered into a street cordoned off by a film crew in Montreal and got to watch them shooting a car chase. It’s also led her into some bad neighborhoods.
She walks a long, long time until she’s in view of one of the old medieval walls snaking and climbing along the city’s edge. Unlike some cities she’s visited, Florence never seems far from the wide open, and because it’s a hilly street, she can see green in the distance.
May stops to rest on a stone bench near the entrance to a residential courtyard, her gaze shifting to the early-morning light cupped inside it, a buttery, soft light saturating the white sheets and women’s silky slips hanging at haphazard angles on laundry lines. She sees glimpses of green in the courtyard, too, a massive climbing flower vine on a trellis, potted lemon trees, a jumble of terra-cotta flowerpots filled with plants. The golden light filters through their colors like a kaleidoscope, hypnotic.
And that’s when May sees her. The girl from the dream.
She’s standing among the rustling sheets, barely visible, a milky shadow of a girl identical to May, a girl who flickers and fades as she shifts position. May can’t ignore her. They’re looking right at each other.
The ghost girl stops just shy of the courtyard gate, out of view of others passing on the street. She waves May over.
May shakes her head, her heart loud in her ears.
The girl parks a phantom hand on a phantom hip. “Have you no curiosity?”
Home in Vermont, pinned on the corkboard over May’s desk, is one of her favorite quotes — by Dorothy Parker — about how curiosity cures boredom but there’s no cure for curiosity. Her parents fed her that line of thinking all her life, and old habits die hard, it seems, because May is curious, insanely curious, though she won’t say so yet. Not to this girl or anyone. It’s easier to stay under the radar, in Pityville, where no one expects much.
She hesitates.
“You do wonder, don’t you? Where I come from? Why I look like this?”
This? May thinks. Me. You look like me exactly. Only you’re not real.
The sun’s movement is beginning to affect the light. May can almost see a bar of morning brightness trailing the tops of the shuttered stucco buildings around the courtyard. She manages to open her mouth, breathing out the word, a question. “Yes?”
The girl’s laugh is less amused than pitying. She stares back as if weighing every last one of her private options; the delay is maddening, and finally May can’t stand it anymore. There’s a roiling in her head, like a storm building. “Well, where do you come from?”
“I won’t tell you,” she challenges. “I’ll show you. You are ready?”
“Ready?” Are you crazy? May looks around . . . for a way out, a witness, a sane bystander. The street is strangely deserted.
“Come.” The girl — May remembers her calling herself Cristofana — holds out a hand and drops it again.
“Will I look like you if I go?”
“You already look like me, bella. Esattamente.”
“I mean, will I be a ghost?” May can’t believe she’s even having this conversation.
“Will you know the difference?”
Staring back at the girl, she thinks, How do you know? It’s infuriating but also flattering, in a way, since everyone else, even Liam, would rather pretend May is fully present — a former, better version of herself — and not, in fact, a hollow automaton going through the motions. Her tired mind is playing tricks on her. “Is it safe?” she asks. “It can’t be safe.”
“Do you always carry on so? I am proof of this. Living proof.”
“If you call it living, Ghost Girl.”
Cristofana steps closer, her phantom basket swaying. “Spoken like a true authority.”
May won’t get up and back away. Part of her, the curious, scientific part, would like to reach out and see what happens.
If someone asked her to describe the ghosting precisely, she’d tell them it’s like looking at a black-and-white photographic negative. Before digital, Gwen used to keep a darkroom, and when Liam and May were old enough, she taught them how to develop the long reels of film and make prints. On her ghost twin, the areas of definition or shadow, what would be the blacks in a final print, are bleached; the highlights/whites and midtones/grays are transparent.
“Long ago,” the haughty stranger says, “in the year of our Lord 1347, I caught a sparrow in my hands and sent it through my portone — you have this word? Doorway, I think — to test this magic. In the bird flew and out again two hours later, still with the same piece of straw in its beak.”
Tell her no. “If I could actually see you, I’d call you nuts,” May complains, resorting to sarcasm to mask her fear. Just no. “But you must have turned sideways or something and the not seeing you part has me doubting myself —”
“You are bitter company, bella, a great disappointment to me, but I have picked you and have no one else to share my story with.”
“But why me?”
“Your soul remembers what you do not — and shone for me like a star in the dark of time. There is only one of it and two of us, but you live in this layer of time and I in another. A soul exists in many layers; the soul’s container or likeness in only one.”
“We share one . . . soul?” And now May identifies that unfamiliar stirring inside: foreboding, dread.
“It would very much amaze you, what can be accomplished with our wills.”
Does May have a will? Real and unreal are seriously mixed up at the moment; they have been since she arrived in Florence, since home ceased to be a refuge and people started flinging untenable choices at her.
“I am a pale shadow of myself . . . without will or action or substance. I can affect nothing here.”
May looks away, lowers her voice. “Can anyone
else here see you?” She feels the dread coiling now, like a dragon, all through her body. Don’t give yourself away. Don’t start shaking.
“If they do, it is as you see me, as a ghost. They doubt their eyes and hurry past. I try not to be seen. It confuses them and draws attention. You I enjoy confusing.”
“Clearly.”
“And yet I like you.”
“I can’t say the feeling’s mutual.” But a smile twitches on May’s lips. There’s a rush in all this, a crazy rush. Like it or not, she’s blundered into something extraordinary, impossible, and it’s hers. It might be scary, but it belongs to her alone. “Weren’t there other generations? You said something about 1347? If what you say is true, our . . . soul had other lifetimes, right? Maybe lots. Between mine —”
“Enough. Do you suppose you have earned my secrets? I assure you, you have not.” The ghost girl’s voice is clipped, but her smile’s indulgent. “I found you. That is all. And I offer to show you my Florence in turn. Do you accept?”
With dread before and behind her, May floats a moment in the ensuing pause, outside herself. “All right. Yes.”
“Then follow carefully.”
May rises from the bench like a sleepwalker and crosses to the archway. She trails Cristofana into the rustle and hush of the courtyard, into a tunnel of swaying, pale laundry shot through with light, toward an empty stone corner at the courtyard’s far edge — and then out again, with her head roaring.
May feels hollow and nauseous, held in check by gravity only. Cristofana, on the other hand, is solid, all color and hard line. She’s delighted with her trick. She applauds it, right there in what appears to be an alleyway behind an abandoned shop.
Luckily, this street at the edge of the city is even more deserted in Cristofana’s world than it was in May’s. As her twin marks a course, a sideways 8 on the stone near where the portal must stand — the sign for infinity? — May juts out first one arm and then the other, and her arms are a luminous outline. She looks just as Cristofana did on the other side . . . a pale shadow of myself . . . without will or action or substance.
Plague in the Mirror Page 2