Plague in the Mirror

by Deborah Noyes

  It might be what her mother’s been feeling, though. Maybe for years. Why had May never noticed? How could people walk around like this and no one notice? She’s felt sad before, of course, hurt, pissed, but never lonely. It leaves you looking too hard into too many faces, too questioning, and strangers turn their eyes from you.

  May feels hollow and sore inside and wants her mother in that big metaphorical way that the little bird in the old children’s book wants his mother and goes around begging the dog, and the cow, and the steam shovel: “Are you my mother?” And they aren’t. They never are . . . until . . . someone is. There’s only one fit, one way to end that search, and finding that fit is the whole point, like finding a lock for a key you’ve carried around in your pocket your whole life.

  Are you my mother? May thinks vaguely, watching people flow past, feeling stupid sitting here on a bench thinking about a thing she can’t seem to do anything about. It isn’t really her mother she wants; it’s to not feel lonely anymore and for her mother to not feel lonely anymore. Why can’t they stop each other from being lonely when they would do anything else for each other?

  May imagines herself reflected in the darting eyes of passersby, an unhinged stranger in a strange land, and suddenly she would do anything to not be here in a city, in a moment, when Gwen has to keep her nose buried in her notes because she doesn’t know what to say (Gwen always knows what to say), when Liam is God knows where, pretending to e-mail his friends, when her own friends back home in Vermont, Sarah and Jenna, are sending messages like, Guess who I saw today in the Daily Grind! Lol. Her mother isn’t calling or writing at all anymore, weary, no doubt, of the answering silence.

  May gets up and begins to wander the crooked streets, trailing her hands over stone, imagining a door, a window, a rip in the air . . . a way in or out . . . a portal of her own. It’s not that she wants to see Cristofana — what May wants is to wring her identical neck — but in some bizarre way, her freak twin and the skeletal face of plague, and the wolves and the bechini and the flagellants, the monks parading candles and saints’ tongues through the streets, and Marco (and Marco) all feel more real to her than the good, ordinary people she’s known and taken for granted her whole life long, people whose stories, like her own, are small but no less baffling for that.

  I will you here . . . a quirk in your fiber.

  She feels it again, that eerie presence from the bed-and-breakfast the first night she saw Cristofana, as if she’s being watched. She can’t find anything in her peripheral vision, but on the off chance that she is — that her twin is stalking her again — May speaks the words aloud, resolutely, like the crazy person she is, talking to herself on a bench: “I want to go back,” she says, and if anyone hears, they just hurry past, “and see him again, alone. Open the portal from the alley outside his shop . . . into my room at the apartment. STAY AWAY . . . from it and from me. I’m thinking about your offer.”

  Back at the empty apartment, May pours a glass of milk. That noisy clock somewhere in the apartment, which she’s never actually seen, ticks and ticks and ticks. She sits at the long butcher-block table under track lights and dunks a stick of almond biscotto into her milk, breaking it into softer and smaller bits. She looks around at Gwen’s sprawl of books and papers, at Li’s charging iPod, attached to his laptop, the apple glowing back at her like a forbidden fruit.

  May wipes her milk mouth and drifts into her room. She changes her clothes, slips on leather sandals, and brushes her hair for a long, long time. Looking into her own eyes in the mirror, she can no longer trust them.

  After a few moments, May senses it there, the portal, waiting. Open wide. She nonchalantly strides to the far rear corner of the room with her nerves screaming in revolt.

  Testing with her hand, she steps through, struck as always by lightness, headache, and nausea. She thrusts out first one ghost arm and then the other, trailing her hand through stone as through water, letting dread and longing propel her into the street.

  Her feet know the way — though she’s trembling and everything echoes in an alarming way — and when she reaches the shop front, one shutter on the wide display window flaps open in a breeze, thunking the plaster wall.

  May locates him at once in the gloom at the rear of the workshop.

  He doesn’t notice her out there in the hot white light, but when she ducks through the door, he looks up, astonished, and back at her with liquid, questioning eyes, eyes more hollow than before. He seems almost afraid.

  It takes him awhile to stand, and when he does, he remains motionless for an unbearably long time, wrestling with what must be disbelief. When he finally reaches the door, gesturing her in with a few hoarse words of Italian May can’t understand, he won’t look at her at all, as if he doesn’t trust himself . . . or her.

  She tries to approach with the question in her eyes, but he moves away, matching her step for step as if they’re dancing. He closes his own eyes, rubbing the lids roughly with his palms, letting his hands fall to his sides again.

  “What?” she asks softly, under her breath. “Did I do . . . something?”

  The anguish in his face deepens. He can’t understand her.

  Either way, words are meaningless right now, and May isn’t sure how to manage without them.

  Marco’s loose linen shirt or tunic is specked with paint, its sleeves rolled to the elbows. He smooths one down almost shyly, covering a sinewy forearm only to reveal wrinkled linen stained with what looks like egg yolk. He rolls the sleeve up again, apparently nervous, and when she tries to reach for his arm and assure him it’s OK, that he shouldn’t stand on ceremony for her sake, he flinches.

  Shaking his head, he brings a slow forefinger to his lips, murmuring, “I morti non parlano.”

  “Please,” she tries, because she doesn’t understand what he’s saying — something about death, or the dead, and talking, speaking. The dead do not speak.

  “Oh, no,” she cries, shaking her head, “I’m not dead! I’m not a ghost. Please.” But with every step she takes, he backs away.

  She’s reminded how tall he is, and his gravity and intensity embarrass her. May crosses her arms against the silence between them, and he smooths hanging hair behind his ears. It’s a predicament, this communication thing, and in a way a blessing, since what is there to say? Where to begin?

  Now he’s eyeing her warily, his face drawn and sorrowful, and at long last he reaches for her, reaches through her, slowly, and lets his hand drop. He looks sick and astonished, deflated. When he turns away, it’s with finality, crossing himself, as if May is just another figment of his artist’s imagination or something worse. Something despised by God, which he must believe in, which everyone believed in then . . . now . . . even if the plague and its ravages have challenged those beliefs, as the history books claim.

  She can only watch him go and trail soundlessly to the corner where he’s taken his seat again. This time his easel is fitted with a tall wood panel — part of an altarpiece, she thinks. Gwen explained on some recent outing that altarpieces were commissioned, like a lot of religious art, as a way of telling Bible stories to the illiterate masses. The biggest churches had many, painted by leading artists of the day. Was Marco already a leading artist? Or had the plague smashed that social distinction, along with so many others? His master could already be dead, along with his fellows and competitors in the workshop — if the black cloths adorning their easels were any indication.

  May stands as close as she dares, trying to breathe him in while he squints at the image emerging at the edge of the panel. He’s decided she isn’t here, that the plague has taken her like the others and she no longer exists as she did the day he bandaged her knee. The irony isn’t lost on May: he who seemed to see inside her that day, to know her — body and soul — now refuses to see her at all. Can she blame him?

  They will doubt their own eyes, Cristofana has said, doubt their own minds.

  He stares trancelike at the unformed image on
his board, and though she longs for him in a way that hurts, May finally accepts that she isn’t here. Not like before. She couldn’t touch him if she tried, not without Cristofana’s permission, not without a “trade”— and forever is just too long. But you are tempting, she thinks, inhaling or imagining a rich blast of linseed oil or turpentine combined with the earthy smell of sweat, her fingers burning to trace his jawline. Beyond tempting.

  He’s pushed his hair out of his face and to one side, and May sees the sheen on the brown back of his straining neck and knows she wouldn’t taste him either, if she bent down and touched her mouth to his skin the way she wants to.

  As Marco cranes toward the forms emerging on the board, his body concentrating with his mind, all tension, May can only follow his movements with her eyes, touch and taste him in her thoughts, and she’s almost glad he’s given up on her shadow-presence, that his hollow, dark eyes are turned away. It would be like falling down a well, looking too long into those eyes, at least with this barrier, this layer of time or chance, between them. He might as well be a movie actor, a flat fantasy on a screen.

  This is how true ghosts feel, May thinks, though she’s never believed in ghosts before, and she begins to doubt — as he must — that he even saw her today.

  You are nothing here.

  With Cristofana’s voice echoing in her thoughts, May turns toward the door, the street, the courtyard, the portal, letting the relief of now cover her like a wave.

  Since the portal conveniently leads home to her bedroom, May tries to take a nap, but she can no more rest her head than clear it. So she changes into shorts and a T-shirt and heads downstairs, walking in the general direction of the Uffizi. Somehow she knows she’ll find Liam there. The museum not only has masterpieces in every room, Botticellis and Michelangelos and Raffaellos; it also has a room entirely devoted to Leonardo — the original Renaissance man and one of Li’s heroes (more for his visionary scientific mind, perhaps, than his artistic one). They visited Saturday without Gwen, and it had to be the first time that May or anyone ever dragged Liam out the door of a museum and not the other way around.

  Since then, he’s already gone back once, and sure enough, May spots him today as she enters the far end of the walkway in the courtyard outside the gallery. He’s resting on a low step in the sun, way down the pillared aisle by the niche with the statue of Galileo. Li has his headphones on and looks blank and more or less content with his own company, the late sun catching the red highlights in his hair. He might be waiting for her, May thinks — keeping out of view like the stalker she’s apparently becoming, in one Florence or the other — but he isn’t. May feels a sudden and terrible tenderness for him and almost strides across the loggia with the idea of grabbing those big bony hands fiddling with his iPhone and demanding, Are you my mother?

  This cracks her up, and here’s the funniest part: if she did do something stupid like that, say something that stupid and manage to explain herself before Li felt mocked and turned tail, he’d get it. They’re the same kind of stupid.

  Sensing something, he stirs uneasily on the step, checking the time on his phone. What’s for dinner? What am I waiting for?

  Me. May smiles. You’re waiting for me.

  When he gets up and heads out the entrance side of the almost deserted walkway, she follows from a distance, passing Dante in his niche, and all the other great men of Tuscany whose names she doesn’t know, and finally, marble Galileo, his hand and bearded face raised toward the heavens.

  Liam takes a long way back to the apartment, stopping in at Pegna — Gwen probably furnished a list — and when he emerges again with his brown bag, she trails him home, feeling good, better than she’s felt in a long time, clearer.

  When the front lock clicks, she presses her ear to the apartment door from outside. No voices. Gwen doesn’t seem to be home yet. Good.

  May wrestles her own key in the lock, breathes deep, and hurries to the kitchen before she can change her mind.

  “Li?” she blurts, leaning in the doorway for support. “I’m sorry about the kiss.”

  He stares back at her, the expression morphing through hostility, defensiveness, amazement; he lays out his groceries on the counter. “You mean the non-kiss.”

  “Right,” she admits, “but if we did kiss, it wouldn’t be because we’re going to hook up and be a thing — because we’re not — but on the other hand, we trust each other, and I do want my first real kiss to be with you because there are too many things in this world you can’t trust.”

  He takes his time, his brow drawn, emptying the brown paper bag, folding it carefully along the seam as she steps closer.

  “Yeah,” he says, deadpan. “Your first real kiss. I’m sympathetic with that, but no tongue. I draw the line at tongue. And don’t think this means I trust you, because —”

  She shuts him up, and it tastes good. He tastes good, and his mouth feels warm and hungry and comfortable, and she almost can’t breathe and is ashamed to be thinking about Marco, thinking and kissing hard, which is wrong, very wrong. She knows that. When they pull apart, she wipes her mouth, almost reeling away, and tells him truly, “Don’t trust me, Li. OK? I’m not trusting me right now.”

  Liam smirks, wiping his mouth, too, and shrugs a little wildly. “This is messed up, May —”

  She catches his hand before he can walk away because she can’t stand to lose him again. “It isn’t you I wigged out about before. It’s the end of us the way I knew us, easy. . . . When my parents told me this winter they were breaking up . . . I can’t explain this to you —”

  “Why not? You’re forgetting my dad cut out pretty early.”

  May is struck. She hardly remembers Billy, Mr. Macintyre, but there he is suddenly, in her mind’s eye, a smiling skinny man with a goatee and a mandolin and rockabilly sideburns. Two freckled arms, one with a mermaid tattoo, throwing them off the dock into the icy Maine water. That feeling she had remembered on the porch earlier today, with the dusky lake and the mayflies and the wistful content, that was Billy and his mandolin, not the radio. He’d been a part of that feeling, and she had forgotten him.

  Liam’s waiting eyes are so good right now, and his chapped lips, and those hesitant hands that just a minute ago were moving in her hair. She wants to kiss him some more, wants to feel him press her back against the fridge, wants to stop longing for what she can’t have, or at least share the unfamiliar crush of longing; she wants to just relax, but she can’t. And she won’t use him that way, even if he wants her to. But she can’t let him retreat back into that funk, either. “Can I tell you something?” May leads him by the hand over to a stool at the breakfast nook, where he sits obediently. She has to twist her hand free and back away before she can concentrate on her words. “Something weird?”

  “Always.” He studies her with more patience than she deserves. “Look who I was raised by. ‘Weird’ is my birthright.”

  “Well, I’m having these . . . episodes.”

  “What kind?”

  “Time . . . episodes.”

  He nods slowly. “All right, I’m with you so far.”

  “Where I’m here, and then I’m . . . there.”

  “‘There’ being what? West Virginia? Topeka?”

  “Here. Florence. But back in 1348 or so . . . around the time of the plague. There’s this girl who looks like me, and she’s sort of twisted.”

  “That I believe.” He shrugs when he sees that she isn’t kidding. “You’re messing with me, right? To get my mind off the fact that you’re willing to kiss me when you don’t really want to?”

  “I want to, Li. Just not as much as you want me to.”

  “What else are you willing to consider wanting less than I do?”

  She sighs, and he sighs back.

  “I wish I could explain . . . all of it. But I don’t understand myself. . . .”

  “OK. So there’s this girl in 1348. Maybe she’ll be into me.” He shrugs, smiling wanly.

  “You
have no idea how much that disturbs me.”

  Do you think he’s pretty, bella?

  “Then you’re jealous?”

  “She’s not very . . . nice.”

  “So she’s, like, some kind of mean, dangerous version of you? Even better. Maybe you can learn from this girl, dude.”

  “Li. I’m serious. Something’s wrong with my head. This trippy thing . . . keeps happening.”

  He frowns to get his face in order. “Well, what’s it like? Describe it. Maybe we’ll find something online.”

  She nods gratefully — hadn’t dared go online before, alone; it made it too real — and they put their heads together in the Google glow of his laptop.

  “You really are your mother’s son, you know.” May smooths the fox-brown hair from his eyes so he can see the screen. “It’s all about the research.”

  Liam slaps her hand away lightly. “If you want my help, leave my dignity intact, OK?”

  “’Kay.”

  “But will you kiss me again if I find out something?” He leans sideways, just slightly, typing in keywords. “Because you smell good.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  Cristofana leaves the portal open in May’s bedroom to tease her, no doubt, and the new reckless May, the one willing to play Russian roulette with her life, actually does sneak through that week, twice, but only for as long as it takes to get to the workshop and back.

  She does it to catch a hungry glimpse of him, assure herself the artist is still there, still alive — but she also does it to remind herself that the impossible is possible.

  May lives in abject terror the entire time she’s on the other side, her nerves screaming because it would be easy, should Cristofana spot her floating along the cobbled, dead-strewn streets of Old Florence, for her twin to seize the opportunity and slip through to the present, closing the door with May stranded in the distant, terrible past.