May doesn’t believe in God, or devils, or angels, didn’t, at least, before Florence, but she hurts, everything hurts, and the question forms itself. “Are you Death?”
The figure in odd garments — feathers, lace, and rags, wings hidden in the squirming hump on its back — nods. Wake up now, it urges. Walk with me.
No.
It’s time.
No.
It’s time now.
Some cogent part of May, the part that understands safe zones and that death has borders, lies heavy in sweat-soaked sheets; the other part craves relief, attainment, a sinking into the soft of knowledge. I’m coming, that part whispers in the dream, rising in sleep, swiveling to rest feet on the floor, sliding them mechanically into flip-flops to follow the winged shadow with its familiar walk, a sashay. The giggling child clings to its back like a flying monkey from The Wizard of Oz, peeking out from a moth-eaten wool blanket. Coming.
The moment the single, united form enters the portal — with dream May at its heels — May hears it, a wailing baby, and the sound holds the end of night like an egg in its palm. It rakes her brain like blades, and there are no slamming doors or searching voices. No reassuring sirens. No noise of rescue. Only a lone, intermittent cry of pain and outrage that echoes everywhere.
She finds herself in the familiar alley in Old Florence in nothing but the long white T-shirt she slept in. On the ground by her feet, in a basket lined with straw, is Pippa, plump and red faced, writhing over the great play wings Cristofana must have fashioned for her out of wire and who knows what. The wings are crushed under her, and May watches a single feather float down, rocking on the still air. She can’t say whether it’s the feather or the act of looking up into May’s face that calms her, but the big, dopey baby goes quiet. She offers a grasping hand, and May kneels, reaching back.
The touch is tickling and soft and stuns her, like being closed in a dark room, like the clank of a lock.
She never even felt the shock of her own flesh, but it’s obvious now that Cristofana has dumped the baby at the exit and ducked back into the portal, leaving May stranded on the other side.
May straightens and juts out her dream arms — and they’re hers, tan and freckled. She looks at her dream feet — sage rubber flip-flops, bony toes, mango nail polish. The panic hits hard, wave after wave of it. What did she expect? May turns and turns, her eyes scanning the predawn light of the alley, landing again on what Cristofana has left her, a whimpering baby in a basket.
She won’t be back.
May thinks to leap into the portal after her twin, hound her to Hell and back if she has to — haunt her, like the ghost May knows she’ll become the moment she follows into the future — but she can’t leave this baby exposed and alone in this deserted corner of the city. Cristofana knew she couldn’t, and just before May wakes with a start, she imagines her twin on the other side, wielding her mojo, locking time’s door forever.
May fumbles for her bedside lamp, breathing relief as light floods the room, her own room in the apartment in Florence Present, with Liam right behind the wall, asleep on the other side.
But the room and the night feel curiously hushed and hollow, and the looming emptiness of the portal accusing.
Keep your head.
Trying to ignore the paradox of how she is close to — and yet very far from — Marco . . . and her fear for the child Cristofana has in her clutches . . . and to what tonight’s dream suggests about her mental state . . . May glances over at the Wikipedia printouts on her dresser: The Black Death, Yersinia pestis (also/previously known as Pasteurella pestis), Plague (Pathology, History, and Treatment), and Plague Vaccine (Streptomycin, Chloramphenicol, and Tetracycline), together with a printout on antibiotics generally, since no one then would know what the heck they were.
Keep your head.
She bolts upright, swinging out of bed and swiping the documents from the desk. True, Wiki isn’t some peer-reviewed medical journal, but there has to be enough information there, presented simply, to help doctors of the day make sense of what they’re up against. May has the opportunity to change everything, go back and bring the key to a cure with her, and maybe then they’ll all be safe, Marco and Pippa, Cristofana, those countless doomed strangers. She slips into her flip-flops. The anxiety of the dream has made her decision feel all the more inevitable, but she’ll go on her own terms, not Cristofana’s. May won’t be tricked or led. She’ll get in and out of the past before her twin knows she’s there, knows to steal her life and annihilate her.
As in the dream, May doesn’t bother changing. It’s the dark before dawn in Old Florence, as here, and she won’t stick around, just long enough to traffic some information (and say good-bye . . . touch him once and say good-bye?). If she looks outrageous and alien, it will help them believe she is who she says she is, a girl from the future bearing strange gifts.
But who best to receive? The convent is the obvious choice, or the only one, and May hits the ground running, going ghost with the familiar surge of nausea, forgetting that she doesn’t have to worry about her flip-flops slapping noisily on cobbles. In fact, because they slow her down, she takes them off, hooking them on her forefinger, dodging manure patties and other debris.
The dark crush of towers looms over her, but May finds the moon between the maze of buildings, fat and full, and its light soothes her. She more or less remembers the way south to the hills and the convent, though it hurts in a way to have Marco so close and not go to him. But May has to do this. Marietta speaks both English and Italian. She’ll be able to read the printouts. She’ll know powerful men in the Church who might direct things. What’s more, she’ll take one look at her sister’s ghost double and know that something real and miraculous is happening. Identical though they appear, May isn’t Cristofana. Her sister will also see that, and embrace the truth; she’ll have to.
Despite her shaky confidence, May gets turned around, disoriented, comparing her mental map of the old city with the new. Her detour leads her onto a street where a hospital stood in Cristofana’s day. May remembers passing this way on one of her twin’s bleak tours, and it was bad enough the first time. Under cover of near darkness — it’s not quite dawn — there seems to be a surplus of hushed, furtive activity out front. The only sounds are the creaking of rope pulleys as bodies are lowered from windows on planks into the extended arms of men on the ground, or the blunt thumping as they’re hurled onto waiting carts. That, and the stamping of horses, swishing their tails at flies.
May remembers reading that even before the Great Mortality, Italian hospitals were the pride of all Europe. Often designed by famous architects and beautiful for it, they could boast careful attendants, clean linens, and learned physicians when a lot of medieval European hospitals couldn’t. During the Black Death, some were spitting out five hundred bodies a day for burial. Besides giving medical care, they were retirement homes for old people, shelters for the homeless, and traveler way stations. More fodder for contagion.
Paused out of view, May takes her moment to hurry past the open entrance, glimpsing wavery figures in the torchlight inside, patients curled on temporary cots or propped against walls and pillars, the crisscrossing shadows of attending nuns. An indignant stray rooster shoots out the doorway, clucking, driven from underfoot, and May pauses again for just an instant, wondering if she should just go the direct route.
But even if she weren’t ghosted, in this getup — flip-flops, arms and legs exposed — with her lousy Italian, they’d think she was a deranged prostitute, or just deranged, and shut her away. No. May needs a buffer, a translator.
She keeps going, trying to drown out Cristofana’s voice in her head. Time will be tricked but never cheated.
Dodging a cartload departing for the churchyard, May looks for a gap between buildings and makes for the river and the bridge. Once she has them in view, she rights her course. The sun is rising beyond the hills, and by the time she makes it through the nearest city gate and a
cross the still Arno, dawn light falls softly on a summer landscape streaked with dew.
Swallows dive-bomb the golden grass for insects, bringing May a moment’s peace, a stubborn hope, and by the time she reaches the arched convent doorway scarred with a red X, she’s as calm and ready as she knows how to be.
She reaches pointlessly for the knocker, but the stooped woman who answered the last time, when Cristofana rapped, appears as if on cue, tiny in the massive doorway with her broom. She points to the X, waving May away, then thinks better of it, setting her broom aside, her expression tender and sorrowful. She must think May is Cristofana.
“Suor Arcangela?” May asks.
The woman winces, shaking her head, her eyes full of pity and grief. “No, mia cara. È troppo tardi.” She opens the huge door, gesturing inside. Even in the curtained gloom May can see that the simple, stark furniture in the long hall has been covered with sheets. The cots are cleared out. The splintered floor is swept clean. The silence is vast, and May backs away from it, her ghost hands eluding the woman’s grasp.
For a moment, it’s hard to know who she is, hard to feel a border between herself and Cristofana. Suddenly the dream makes sense. Cristofana’s one solid link to her past, her life in the past, has been severed. She has no reason to stay now, apart from Marco and Pippa, whom she’s only known as long as May has.
Hurrying out through the gate in the hedges, May almost trips (mentally, at least) over a man in a long robe, a priest maybe — no, a doctor; May saw the same costume on the beaked men in the aisles of the hospital the time Cristofana brought her by. His robe is tangled around his legs, which are bent under him at an obscene angle, like a very frail old man’s. May knows that many of his fellow physicians fled for the hills at the first signs that spring. This man must have stayed, administering to the dying, sacrificing for them, and his herbs and poultices and urine treatments proved as useless for him as for his patients, and now that he’s dying, he’s come looking for God.
Hands shaking, frantic now — she has to get back to the portal before a grieving, enraged-at-God-and-the-universe Cristofana learns she’s here — May blindly fishes the ghost pages out of her ghost backpack and waves them in his face, trying to get his attention before it’s too late, stammering in horrible Italian. Help . . . another . . . smart . . . doctor . . . where? But he’s ranting even louder, and anyway, May has gone limp, her hand sinking to her side. Because the ink on the pages, she sees with despair, like every other dark or defining edge on her and her belongings, has been ghosted. Against the barely opaque paper, the pages might as well be blank.
She’s found the resolve to back away when she feels that now-familiar rush of nausea, that hollow reeling, together with the jarring sensation of the doctor’s hands clamping on to one of her ankles.
Trapped in the heat and stink and contagion of here, May tries to pull free, but the man is looking up at her as if his life depends on it; he has very little life left to speak of. He’s sickly pale and breathing funny. His eyes are wild.
Thrusting his free fist at her like a boxer, he cries out something in Italian that she can’t understand.
“Per favore —” Just, please, take your hands away. . . .
He doesn’t seem to hear, murmuring, “Caterina, amore mio, sono pronto,” and he looks at her with something like love, demented, mistaking her for someone, his breath heaving now. It occurs to May that she must have looked like a proper ghost to him, one that suddenly, before his eyes, became flesh. Flesh. Real. Here.
Now he extends both hands — how do you refuse the dying? — releasing her ankle but lunging for her nearest hand. He’s incredibly quick and strong, considering. Please, don’t . . . don’t touch. . . .
He has her hand in a hot clamp, her knuckles crushed, and she feels hysterical but can’t get away. In that instant, crayon-flat faces, comically distorted — the faces of everyone she loves — flip through her thoughts like the pages in a child’s hand-drawn book. Her mom and dad, Gwen, Sarah, True, Liam . . . Marco? “È vero, amore mio.”
The hand that felt so warm at her ankle now burns like ice. The strength drains from his frail grip, and he kisses her bruising knuckles, one by one, tenderly, his lips cracked and faintly blue, and May feels it in every cell, atom, and molecule of her body. She feels it all. He slumps forward until his head knocks the ground and her hand slides free.
“Please,” she tries, lifting his head or trying, her skin cringing on contact, but when she manages to turn his face to her, May has nothing to say. What can she possibly say? His eyes are blank. This is the first person taken by plague that has actually been a person for her, not a corpse or an abstraction but a live person robbed of life. Her backpack slides off, still ghosted like the printouts fluttering nearby on the ground. They must not have corresponded with whatever Cristofana brought into the future. As a page tumbles away in a breeze, May feels the sting of tears.
Her mind sifts through a thousand emotions. Pity, sorrow, and — like a kick to the chest — a fear that knocks her to her knees beside a very contagious corpse.
If her life wasn’t over before, it very likely is now.
There is only one place she can think to go, not that she’s thinking straight. Driven by panic, May hurries past the few incredulous early-morning strangers who spot her en route to the bridge. Once through the city gate, out of the open, May can dodge from alley to alley or otherwise conceal herself and her strange (highly revealing, by fourteenth-century standards) clothing.
In the long alley beside the workshop, which cuts back to a claustrophobic fenced-in garden, she slips off her bracelets, stashing them and her flip-flops under an upturned terra-cotta window box. She pads to the front entrance, rapping softly with a knuckle, though the display awning has been taken down and the street-facing window shuttered. Where are you?
Her waiting heart hammers, and when no one comes, she tries the door, terrified.
You can’t be dead. You can’t be.
The space has changed radically since May was here last. It’s dim and dusty inside, cluttered as ever, but now evidence of Cristofana’s scavenging is everywhere. She’s like a raven, May thinks, feeling wired and alert, circling the silent room, trying not to hate her twin and failing.
There are the shiny things, of course, what Cristofana steals outright from the deserted homes of wealthy merchants taken by plague: candlesticks with beeswax tapers, jeweled rings, an ornate dagger. There’s a Venetian glass mirror with a chipped gilt frame, a now-soiled oriental carpet, pewter plates and pitchers.
Looking more closely, as early daylight begins to spill in from the one high window that isn’t shuttered, she sees an unfamiliar — and gigantic — carved bed with a feather mattress, hung with rich curtains. Cristofana must have dismantled and transported it piece by piece, or bewitched an army of children into scurrying through the streets, hunched under their burden, in the dead of the night. As big as a barge, the bed takes up a quarter of the large studio space, and May’s tempted to run a hand over its rumpled silk coverlet and imagine Marco lying there, but then, it seems, she’ll have to imagine Cristofana beside him. If anything’s clear, agonizingly, it’s that Cristofana has taken things a step further with Marco. She’s moved in.
The stolen finery has no natural place in the jumble of easels and half-carved statues, paint pots and skinny chickens, silk and straw, but even stranger and more incongruous is the evidence strewn about of Cristofana’s own enigmatic craft: delicate eggshells still sticky with inner membrane, bird feathers and shells, bunches of dried herbs hanging, the dainty skeleton of a dead bird, owl pellets. These objects, together with the baskets of pewter flatware and tarnished jewels, tell of a feral, singsongy creature, and the desk in the corner where the master’s business was conducted is crowded with vials and beakers. “Strega,” she had called herself, and yes, when May consulted one of the dictionaries at the apartment, she understood. Strega. Witch.
Even odder than that barge o
f a stolen bed, that carved monstrosity, is what has to be the baby’s bed, a giant round market basket overflowing with feathers, as if someone had sliced open a dozen pillows and poured their contents inside.
It looks itchy, but May can see that someone has carefully culled through and left only the small downy under feathers, the soft ones, May knows.
Pippa is loved. But by whom?
Does Cristofana leave the baby completely in Marco’s care? Dump her there while she traipses about raiding dead people’s houses and murdering kittens and bullying nuns? What are they to each other? And does he even know that May and Cristofana are two different people? If not, what must he think of her? He can only have deduced that “she” is crazy and learned to live with it, the way he’s learned to live daily with death and deserted streets and the anguished moaning beyond his walls at night.
Remembering, May roots quickly through the wardrobe, extracting one of Cristofana’s crazy stolen dresses, the simplest, though also — and here May surrenders to a moment’s vanity or hope — bright red and fitted at the waist, with a low-curving embroidered front. She has to lift the hem when she walks, but no use alarming Marco any more than she has to. She stuffs her white sleep T and Old Navy bikini briefs, the last telltale artifacts, beneath a pile of linens in a basket.
How have they been surviving? How will any of them survive now that Cristofana’s abandoned them? Struck by her isolation, May feels like an interloper, a spy in their home — and what are they, some kind of family now? That’s how it looks. Except that Surrogate Mom has bailed ship and left a changeling in her place, one with absolutely no survival skills, one too sad and overwhelmed by good-byes unsaid to know which end is up.
Light-headed with exhaustion, May lies down, hiking the scarlet gown over her knees, sinking into the soft feather mattress. She takes in the already familiar room with bleary eyes (thinking how quickly a place can begin to look like “home,” or, for that matter, stop looking like one).
Plague in the Mirror Page 15