The baby’s hollowed cheeks puff in and out as it sucks furiously on Cristofana’s milky-faint index finger.
Healthy, May thinks. Thank God.
“If I do not sing or stuff my finger in its craw, it howls like a demon.”
“It’s hungry.” May reaches to touch the downy ghost forehead in that automatic way you do when someone holds a baby under your nose, but her hand passes through. “It needs milk.”
“And you have some?” Cristofana snaps. “No, nor do I. If there is a wet nurse anywhere in our foul city, she is busy with every orphan from here to Pisa.” Pursing her lips at the creature, Cristofana croons, “Isn’t that so, ninna-oh?”
“Then go find her, this nurse.”
“You think yourself fit to order me about like a mistress? Do you suppose you have the florin to pay for my service?”
Patiently, as if speaking to someone on the ledge of a tall building, May lowers her voice. “Let me help, Cristofana. Just listen. That’s all I ask.” She takes in a sharp breath. “Bring her to the convent.”
Cristofana’s eyes lock on her, intense and frightening. She steps close, bouncing the baby in her spectral arms. “What did you say?”
“I said bring her to the convent.” May’s voice cracks under the strain of her twin’s puzzled, disbelieving stare. “Yes, I know about your sister. She’ll help you. Bring the baby there.” May shudders at the thought, remembering the place, the smell and the despair. “With the other orphans.”
“I see I am not the only one who sneaks and studies.” Cristofana’s grim expression lets up, as if she’s gained newfound respect for May, but her voice is furtive. “I could bring this there, but why? It amuses me. Watch.”
She removes her finger from the baby’s mouth and tickles the child’s dimpled chin with it, her voice warbling in a way that’s almost comical for its gentleness.
May takes in the sweep of the riverbank. The fog is a patchwork, and ahead in a clear patch she sees where Cristofana likely came through, a dim alley leading back up to the crooked cart roads of the old city.
The riverside, what she can make out of it, is deserted, desolate. Despair wells up in her. May knows she won’t be able to reach out and rescue the baby, just as she couldn’t snatch the kitten from the bucket, just as she couldn’t reach for Marco after that first time (lips, skin, longing). “Please.” Her pleading voice sounds cracked and feeble. “Just think about it. Don’t let her die.”
Cristofana isn’t listening. She’s rocking the baby almost tenderly, breathing her vitriol into its entranced face.
“This isn’t a kitten,” May pleads, “and someone will care for it. Someone will. Marietta will. Just don’t —”
“Don’t what?” her twin demands, eyes flashing. “Don’t tease? Don’t sing? Don’t play or smile or breathe a word except of sorrow?” Defiant — in the face of what, May can’t say: death itself, perhaps — her eyes almost wounded, Cristofana spits. May winces, but her cheek is dry when she wipes it. “Will you come care for it, bella?”
“You know I can’t.”
“Oh, but you can.” Cristofana purses her lips, sneering. “The question is, will you? Perhaps Marco is not enough for you. But like my sister, you are a saint in your own mind. Surely you, who would save all the animals and nurse the sick, wish to help this poor child. Surely you have a conscience, like Marietta, who dooms herself nursing other people’s children.”
“I’m sorry,” May offers, and she is, though she doesn’t know Sister Arcangela. The woman strikes her as cold and distant, at least to Cristofana, but there’s probably a good reason for that, and the sister formerly known as Marietta is apparently all the girl has left in the world.
Not true, May thinks, feeling her eyes brim with frustrated tears. Because now Cristofana’s found herself a baby. Perhaps it even came from the convent, from among the last survivors. If it’s come to that. “What happened?” she asks as gently as she can. “Where did you find her?”
Cristofana is humming wildly under her breath, like the crazy bag lady May remembers from some movie, who finds a doll in an abandoned parking lot and rocks it, sings to it, won’t let anyone take it from her. She ignores May’s question completely.
“Tell me something,” May tries. “You’re here now . . . more or less, with this baby. Why not just go back, get Marco, and all three of you come through the portal together? Just wait it out. When the plague passes, you go home again. With them.” May can’t believe her own words, can’t believe she’s giving Marco away like that, as if he’s hers to give.
“Wouldn’t that be convenient for you and your precious conscience?” Cristofana shakes her head as if to clear it. “There is no telling how long the Pest will stay. Even before, many in my Firenze would not live to see their children grow. Mothers die birthing them. Babes do not survive childhood. I loathe death, above all things, and as I stand here with my head aching — without blood, flesh, or hunger — the sands pour through the hourglass. My life is flying now, like a bird, and I will not trade on it any longer than I have to.”
May thinks of her own last real visit to Marco in the workshop, that ghost loneliness. As hard as the feeling was for May to endure, it must be unbearable for Cristofana, whose will and appetites are so obvious. “But it’s all beside the point if you’re dead,” May argues. “Why don’t you just trick me, then?” she says, laying it out there. “Or force me to make this trade you keep talking about? What are you waiting for? You don’t seem like you’re above that kind of thing.”
Cristofana tilts her head, a wild look in her eyes, like someone hearing voices in her head, voices growing louder and more insistent by the minute. “I want from you only the life you would otherwise waste.” She circles May, lulling the poor baby under her breath with that sick nursery tune. “You sulk and resist, and I can’t but wonder if you have a right to life at all, as I do. As this hungry child does.”
Stunned and somehow resigned, May whispers, “Just don’t hurt it.”
“It is a she, bella. Pippa, who knows her name. Don’t you, duck?” Cristofana tickles the grinning baby. Saliva pools in the dirty creases around the heart-shaped mouth. “She has a little locket to prove it.”
One dimpled baby hand gropes and smacks at Cristofana’s face while a lazy eye fixes sideways on May. She’s an ugly, battered-looking kid, about eleven months old. Fat and gangly, worried and trusting — even in shadow form, there is something funny and sweet about Pippa, and May feels a strange affection for her.
The word kitty works its rough magic, and May shudders as if drenched in cold water, realizing she’s lost sight of Cristofana, who has wandered off into the fog with her prize. May feels it again — that now-familiar, impossible urge to reach, to alter something — and snaps to, angry at herself for being lulled again into trusting Cristofana. I hate you, she thinks, stepping back into a rank yellow fog that reminds her of illness, and though May can no longer see her shadow double, for a while she still hears her and stands very still, like prey, listening.
May can’t see her own hand in front of her, and her compass is thrown. “Don’t hurt her, Cristofana!” she yells, her voice echoing all around.
When the voice sounds again, it is already far away.
Cristofana was wise to leave the portal there, in May’s room, a gaping mouth with a siren’s song in its throat. A mousetrap.
May can’t help but muse on this as she comes and goes, regarding that unused back corner of her room and the gaping presence there that feels like absence. What if a mouse . . . or some other animal . . . a plague-ridden vagrant, for example, scavenging in the alley marked with a sideways 8 (or Gwen or Liam, for that matter, on this side of time), darted or stumbled or swooped through, like Cristofana’s hapless bird? Never to be seen again in their own age. Cristofana obviously knew to isolate her portal points, but someone could happen through. Someone might.
Vowing it won’t be her, not voluntarily, May takes the next few days to c
atch up on tasks for Gwen, staying out of her room, staying busy: chasing down photo permissions and quote attributions, photographing restaurant fronts and gravestones with Gwen’s digital camera, taking a day to bus over to Oltrarno to visit Palazzo Pitti and Boboli Gardens, waiting in line at archives.
There’s no way to destroy the portal, a structure she can sense but not see. There’s nothing visible there for May to work out, no tangible clue, apart from the weird mirrored fabric she once saw Cristofana use to close it down, and there’s the dim possibility that her twin might be too caught up in her conflict with Marietta and the demands of a baby to seriously think of leaving Old Florence.
Either way, May’s last and only option is to stay clear, avoid getting caught on the wrong side of time. No more risky outings. No more curiosity. No more pity. No more Marco.
She’s afraid to stay in her room, afraid of what might echo out from that blankness — what pleas, demands, or horrors — so she moves out that weekend to the front room, transfers her laptop, research books, and magazines to the glass coffee table, keeps her clothing in her suitcase on the floor, and starts sleeping on the striped, satiny couch. Out of sight, out of mind, right?
But he isn’t. He isn’t. None of it is, though May persists in believing otherwise.
Gwen and Liam don’t say a word. They must figure that May thinks her room’s haunted again. And it is, in a way. She is. By guilt and longing, mostly. Marco seems like a promise the world retracted, and the loss, the not knowing what’s become of him or what they might have been, is a cruel torture. May has never in her life, for a moment, felt tragic, but her decision to stay away, stay safe, feels like tragedy in that grand sense, the way Shakespeare meant it. (After this, she’s mused more than once, choosing which parent to live with will be easy: Mom. Dad. Dad. Mom . . . )
Knowing what’s behind the closed door of her bedroom has an almost magnetic attraction for May, and she’s actually relieved about a week into her resolution when Gwen lays out some dozen tourist pamphlets on the table at breakfast. “What’s your pleasure? We need to jar ourselves out of routine here. I haven’t been up to Fiesole yet. But maybe you two are ready for Siena or Rome now, or Venice?”
May and Liam sit on their stools, scraping spoons in cereal bowls, each waiting for the other to answer. They stayed up way too late watching on-demand, and Liam’s still wearing his clothes from last night. They haven’t talked much — since the bar — about May’s episodes, partly because his questions trailed off and May began to understand that it was making him uncomfortable, not being able to believe her when he wanted to so badly.
These days it’s almost as if she’s forgotten how to distinguish waking from sleep, flesh from nightmare, but she remembers well enough the smell of Liam’s T-shirt while they were dancing that night, the slight heat off his skin, and the good, simple feeling of safety. She feels herself blushing now, wondering if it can ever happen again. If it ever will.
“Come on, you two. I know you had another late night, but I won’t have you going home to the States with nothing to show for yourselves. I seem to recall journal entries and essays need to be written. You can’t write about sitting up all night watching bad action movies.”
“My English teacher would be all for it,” Liam tries. “‘A real writer,’ he’s always saying, ‘makes something out of nothing.’ ‘Heaven in a grain of sand,’ right?”
Gwen levels him with a look. “You think you’re going to impress me by quoting Blake?”
“Yes?” Liam slurps up some milk from his bowl of Weetabix — Gwen’s a fiend for Weetabix — wearing a white mustache with his smile. “Distract you, at least.”
“Your father was always handy with a quote. One for every occasion. I never knew if he was mocking me or not.” It’s impossible not to pick up the subtle shift in Gwen’s voice, from amused to bitter. “He had a way of making a person feel pretentious.”
May can tell by the way Liam looks down, stirring the soggy flakes left in his bowl, that this is in the category of Too Much Information. Did Gwen date after Billy left? It’s a weird idea, even weirder in a way for May than her own mom dating. Both Gwen and May’s mom seem to live in their heads. Did you get old and just stop sharing yourself that way? Or will May have to deal with a stepfather or stepmother? Or worse — siblings? She’d always wanted brothers and sisters when she was young. But not like this. And that was then.
“I have a question. What’s a wet nurse?” she demands, in a voice that suddenly seems way too loud.
Gwen smiles, her gaze intent. “A lactating mother who nurses another woman’s baby. Often a servant or a peasant hired by a wealthy woman who can’t be bothered to do it herself. You don’t hear the term much anymore.”
“Lactating is not a word I hope to hear again anytime. Ever.” Liam winces, raising an arm as if against a blow when they turn scolding looks on him. He walks his bowl to the sink, rinses it, and turns to the window. When he speaks again, his voice is cheerful enough but far from kidding. “I’m bored, Ma.”
His mother abruptly clears butter dish, jam, and fruit bowl from the table. Her sigh goes on forever, and she actually looks angry. “You know me pretty well, Liam, and you know boredom’s one sin I won’t tolerate. You can drink beer or cuss or bring home the occasional C in calc, but you can’t, you don’t dare, look me in the eye and admit to being bored. Not here. Not anywhere. Stupid people are bored. People with no imagination.”
May looks away, embarrassed for him.
“Ouch,” Liam goes on, “that’s harsh. But May’s bored, too. Aren’t you, May? Work with me here.”
“No,” May says. “I just feel disconnected sometimes, left out, like I’m missing the point. Like a tourist, I guess . . . and not just because I’m in Italy. Does that make sense?” It feels weird, admitting this, but Cristofana, who hardly knows her, sometimes knows more about May than May does.
Gwen smiles. “It makes perfect sense. I often feel the same way — especially when I travel — until I find myself in some conversation or landscape that reminds me why I came and brings me back to wonder.”
“Please don’t get her going about wonder and imagination.” Liam groans. “Then it’ll be Einstein and on and freaking on.” He turns to May. “Here’s why Dad had to go around groveling and quoting Great Thinkers all the time.”
May shrugs, so he turns back to Gwen. “Can’t we quote Lady Gaga instead? Or SpongeBob? I’d like to talk about SpongeBob.”
He’s kidding, May thinks, but he isn’t, and part of her understands . . . part of her wants to be lying on the rug on Saturday morning watching cartoons, with a milk mustache and a bowl of Lucky Charms at her elbow and True licking the last of the milk out of the bowl. No relics or divorces or essays to write, or phantom lovers or babies to rescue from sociopathic doppelgängers when you’re not physically in the same layer of time. May rubs what she imagines are dark circles under her eyes with her thumbs.
Gwen reaches out, lifting her chin. “I’m curious,” she says. “What made you ask about a wet nurse?”
May looks at Liam, who shrugs as if to say, You’re on your own with this one. “I had another bad dream, I guess.”
“About a wet nurse?” Gwen’s trying not to smile. “That’s, well . . . different.”
“Not exactly about.”
Gwen’s digging in now, looking too hard at first one and then the other of them, so May knows she’d better tie this up. “What I’d like to do today is learn more about the plague here in the fourteenth century. I’m writing one of my essays about it, remember? The one for history.”
Gwen’s face lights up. “I’ve got just the place, then. I know a museum with an interactive exhibit. . . . A microcosm of medieval life, at least as the underclasses lived it. The exhibit’s a bit sensational, but it gets its point across. I came when I was here last time.”
“A little microcosm is just what I need,” May says, looking at Liam, who rolls his eyes. “Right, Li? ‘He
aven in a grain of sand’?”
“More like Hell,” Gwen adds, her voice matter-of-fact and chilling. “And the exact lines are ‘To see a world in a grain of sand, / And heaven in a wild flower.’ Has anyone seen my other hiking boot?”
“‘Through interactive guides, films, and images,’” Gwen reads from the guidebook, “‘the display creates a picture of life as endured by those men and women not born to wealth and noble privilege,’ blabbity blabbity, ‘an existence characterized by injustice, disease, and filth. Here the republicanism and’ blabbity blabbity ‘for which Florence was famous were nowhere in evidence. Law and punishment were dispensed by the rich at the expense of the poor; those with money paid; those without were executed.’”
When they arrive, Liam more or less camps out in a room full of torture devices, while May and Gwen continue on past a re-created market cart stocked with typical Florentine fare of the day — most of which the average peasant could only salivate over, an interactive audio explains in Italian, English, German, and Japanese — and, finally, past a room devoted to medieval medical and dental practices and diseases like leprosy and, yes, the plague.
Though May can’t help comparing the audio and what she reads on the placards to what she’s seen, she’s too distracted to form an opinion either way, though Gwen keeps soliciting one.
Next up is a reconstructed peasant dwelling, an underground building with no windows or light coming in from the outside. The ceilings are barely five feet high, and it’s humid as hell inside. The audio guide says that in real life the house would be teeming with vermin, parasites, and the stench of human waste. Here again, in the back of her mind, May can’t help comparing these models to the real thing and wonders all over again what’s real and what isn’t, wonders — at mention of parasites — if her dad is remembering to give True his worm meds every month and check him for ticks.
Plague in the Mirror Page 13