Marco’s shop, like this one — which will pass to his master’s heirs once the plague is sorted out — will probably be on the ground floor of a city-center building, a simple shop that could as easily be a shoemaker’s or a butcher’s. It will throng with boarders, apprentices, and assistants, and churn out suits of armor, theatrical costumes, and tombstones as well as sculpture and altarpieces, keeping enough chickens underfoot to feed everyone and provide eggs for tempera to bind the pigments for paint.
In an unsent letter to his brother, Marco complains (though May’s translation is painful):
There will be the boys and the chickens and noise always, and I will never know again that blessed silence I knew as a youth in Father’s barn, when my thoughts and pictures were my own, when the urge to create filled me every morning like breath and rose again in my thoughts at night, after the day’s labors, like the moon.
In another, earlier letter, also unsent, Marco wrote of there being no one left alive in a certain church to check his fresco work:
The sole remaining priest fled some days ago with the altar gold to his nephew’s country villa. He instructs from afar, but Master leaves this work to me and the other apprentices, convinced he won’t be paid for the commission. As of yesterday, he is confined to his bed, like our parents before him, and shouts visitors away from his door.
I confess I feel each day more like a fatherless son, a motherless child, a man of the ruined world. You say I am free, not bound to Sire’s fallow land, but freedom is a vast emptiness, like God . . . a speaking wind.
In the afternoon, until the light dies, Marco paints — sometimes on a canvas, but more often right on the rear plaster wall of the workshop, fresco-style — and May knows enough to stay invisible, though he never asks her to. Even Pippa seems to get it, content to play in the garden with Cristofana’s stash of stolen cards and dice games, tops and balls. There’s even a wooden sword out there, a paint-chipped hobbyhorse.
Marco works tirelessly, obsessively, stretching his aching arm. He’ll start with a formal outline on paper — today another Madonna and Child, drawn and pricked through with hundreds of tiny painstaking holes. He fixes the paper to the wall, shakes charcoal dust over, and paints the form beneath the page. Only he doesn’t, really.
Today the outline of loving arms extended, the mother’s secret smile, the infant, plump and assured, morph into a grinning, implacable skeleton, Death on a gaunt horse, reaching down for a child, robbing a mother of hope.
“I will paint it over,” he tells her later in Italian, with a sigh of what can only be regret, because in his apologetic view, the work is good — like the sprawling nude and the demon in chains the days before — very good. His best yet. “Tomorrow. I will try again.” He says it as if this is what she needs to hear, what she deserves.
At night they sleep in a sweaty tangle, all three, and this dark man kisses their foreheads while they dream.
There is something so deceptively simple in all this, so natural and domestic, that May almost forgets that she’s been robbed.
She almost lets herself fall head over heels in love with Marco, with Pippa, with the early-morning fishing excursions, and the smell of rosemary in the little crowded city garden, and the act of kneading bread dough made from scratch, from grain, baking it in an oven that’s no more than a hole in the wall. With all of it.
She almost forgets about Liam, and Gwen, and her parents, and True, and her friends, and her dreams. What recalls her, what brings her back every afternoon when the sun starts to set, when Pippa starts whimpering because she’s wet herself or wants dinner, are Marco’s daily paintings, so startling and wrong in a such a simple, closed world.
A few days later, when May is walking home from a failed search for produce, it occurs to her to detour and check on the portal. It’s a long shot — Cristofana wouldn’t have left it open — but on the other hand, May poses no threat in ghost form, which is what she’ll assume the moment she crosses over. She can’t usurp Cristofana in the future or force her twin back into the portal and the past. May can’t right the balance now. Only Cristofana can, and her twin knows that.
But some part of Cristofana, May supposes, must worry that if she severs the link from the future, the old rules will no longer apply, that she won’t be able to restore travel if and when she decides it’s time. Would her magic hold hundreds of years away? May would certainly worry along those lines, but then again, May is as ignorant as she is cautious. Can it really be that simple to manipulate the space-time continuum, or whatever the hell her twin is doing? Maybe magic is that simple. A ring, a poppet, an incantation or two, but May can’t credit it. Her mind doesn’t work that way, though Cristofana’s clearly does. Maybe they’re two parts of the same puzzle, mirror halves of a single mind.
She can’t believe it hasn’t dawned on her to check before — with her (portion of?) mind too much on Marco and finding food and staying out of the path of the plague — but it’s got to be worth a try, and May feels her step quicken as she heads south toward the alley where the sideways 8 is scrawled.
Ducking in, May gropes the air, and sure enough, it’s there, still there, that formless absence with its mild magnetic pull. To test, May thrusts a tingling hand through but pulls it back, panicked by a surge of conflicting feelings. What will she find on the other side? What has Cristofana been up to in May’s name? What if her twin dismantles the portal with May on the other side? If Cristofana catches her out in ghost shape, in the future, will that be it? And what if May does find a way to reverse all this — and never sees Marco and Pippa again?
But she does step through, tentatively at first, though the sensation of intense atomic movement is so swift and jarring that the passage is over before she knows it. May finds herself standing in her bedroom in Florence Present, a ghost furiously faced with a girl, her flesh double stretched long across the bed in one of Gwen’s silky nightgowns with Vogue open on her lap.
“A visitor!” Cristofana croons, her voice thick with irony. “How lovely.”
“Are they home?” May whispers, gesturing as she floats forward.
“No . . . they are embarked on one of that woman’s ceaseless errands. I have been sick in bed for days. It surprises me, frankly, that you have stayed away so long.”
Like May, Cristofana has had to attend to Now, be present in her present and not consumed every second by what she’s missing, by the disappearing days and hours of her rightful life, hasn’t she? She can’t have stayed in bed the whole time.
“And how are you enjoying my life?” May accuses, stopping when she reaches the bed, her ghost legs merging with the end of the mattress.
“Much more than you did. I have no doubt.”
May ignores the faint, wry smile and just glares back at her.
The waiting silence actually seems to unsettle Cristofana, who closes her magazine, if slowly, then smoothes it with her palm. “In truth”— she looks up —“it is exceedingly dull here, and I cannot sleep.”
“Why’s that, Cristofana? Bad conscience?”
“No, never. I simply find it too noisy. There is a forever of bleating and howling out there, like a monstrous wolf in the night.”
“Sirens.”
Cristofana looks up sharply. “What?”
“Never mind.” May sighs. “It’s a little early for bed, isn’t it? Tell me what you’ve been doing.”
“I told you. I have been deathly ill.”
They stare at each other, exasperated.
“I’m sure you know now,” Cristofana goes on, her tone shifting, “that our duck has terrors when she wakes. The infant cries out until someone comes to her.”
“Not on my watch. But does this mean you miss her?” The ice in May’s voice thaws. Incredible. “You do, don’t you? You miss Pippa.”
Cristofana nods. “It is my newest sin against myself. He called me once a mockery of motherhood but meant it not.”
“And Marco. Do you miss Marco, too?”
Silence.
“Because I’ve been wanting to thank you. You were right, you know, about everything. He does taste like honey from the hills. . . .”
Silence.
“He is a master with his hands. . . .”
“I believe you once said, wisely . . . how do you say? . . . Shut up, bitch. . . .” Cristofana’s smile has the violence of a lightning bolt.
“Hey, they’re your words.”
Pulling herself upright, her back straight against the padded headboard, Cristofana tilts forward, as with a secret. “But how long, bella, will it take him to see that you are not me? You couldn’t be, could you?”
Silence.
“He calls me his pirate queen. If you would mimic me, you must bring him a new surprise every day: a spool of colored ribbon, the skull of a cat, a bottle of aged sherry, a tarnished spoon. Marco likes surprises. He tells me I am beautiful but mad, like a dream of perfection one day and a sleek harpy the next, a perverse and reckless shadow, and this you will never be. These you will never be. Though you may sleep through the night.”
“I do. . . . I sleep in his arms.”
“He told me on the last morning we spent together that I was the sound of his heart waking and breaking. Does he tell you such things?” She scoffs. “I think not.”
“You’re surprisingly sentimental for a sociopath, Cristofana. Has anyone ever told you that?”
“Mock me if you like. I do not know these words. But you don’t know him.”
And just like that, May doesn’t.
She thinks of the way she has followed Marco with her eyes, day after day — for how many days now? — hungry for his hands on her. Marco hasn’t touched her since that first time, except to hold her in the dark, except in forming the protective circle with Pippa while they sleep. He is always and feverishly working. What goes through his head is as much a mystery as his frightening paintings. Marco would be easy to love and hard to know, May thinks, and the language barrier is the least of it.
“I can’t sleep,” Cristofana complains loudly, jarring May out of her thoughts. “I can’t I can’t I can’t.” Her eyes, an exact replica of what May used to see in the mirror each morning — when she had a mirror — do in fact look drawn and puffy, raccoon ringed. May wonders if her own look as bad. She realizes, without admitting it aloud, that she hasn’t been sleeping well, either, even in Marco’s arms. We correspond.
“Then just come back home,” May says feebly, “where you belong.”
This weak appeal seems to rally Cristofana, who strikes a suggestive pose on the bed, all snaky in Gwen’s silk nightgown. (Who said you could wear that?) “I cannot,” she says, “Li-um would not part with me now. . . .”
“If you lay one hand on him . . .”
“You’ll do what, traveler?”
“Look,” May begins, pacing around the side of the bed. “You have what you want. Just be here and be satisfied you’re not back there. You’re not dead.” May lifts her arms, as evidence. “But then again, in case you haven’t noticed, neither am I.”
“I cannot sleep,” Cristofana complains again, softly now, sadly, glancing toward the window. “I cannot go out.”
“Why not?”
“Because . . . it may please you to know . . . I am frightened. This is not my Florence. It is crowded and fast and terrible in its noise.”
“Just come back.”
Silence.
“Fine,” May almost spits out. “Then be content. Appreciate what you’ve taken from me.”
Her face darkens, remembering what drove her away, no doubt. “I cannot.”
“Then what? What the fuck do you want from me?”
May isn’t sure if she’s being taken in, but Cristofana looks genuinely small and needy there on the hotel-style bed — so different than the vast barge they sleep on back at the workshop — and even helpless in her modern costume. “Tell me what to do . . . how to be here.”
May longs to do something with her hands, her flesh — it’s not often that Cristofana reveals vulnerability, and not being able to act on it makes May feel half mad with frustration, unmoored, as if she’ll float away. “Try being nice,” she says, “for one thing. Don’t hurt anyone. We’re all very nice in the future.”
“Bah.”
“Seriously. Are they OK? Is Liam OK?”
“I find your lover very amusing. . . .”
“It’s not a finders-keepers kind of thing. You’re aware of that, right?”
“Are you?”
“One day you’ll answer a question with something other than a question.”
“Keep them safe,” Cristofana says, opening her magazine again, settling back against the pillows as May — reassured but only just; formless but still, somehow, exhausted — turns back toward the only home she has left. “And I pledge the same.”
May wakes the next night with her chest in a knot. As soon as her eyes adjust, she slips out from under Marco’s arm and heads to the hearth, groping along the stone mantel for the tinderbox and a candle. She lights a waxy stub and slips out the garden door with it.
She sits under a new moon among the motionless plants. There isn’t a breeze to be had, but the scent of rosemary and thyme and lavender still permeates the air. May looks up and can almost make out the Big Dipper, and the thrill of the familiar makes her eyes tear up.
It’s been less than twenty-four hours, but now that she knows she can go back, even ghosted, the pull of the portal is irresistible, just as it was from the other side. It’s as if the device and its options make it impossible to be happy or content in either place.
May returns inside but can’t lie down again, can’t do anything but glance with mounting sorrow at Marco and Pippa sleeping soundly. She can only pace and wonder, wonder and pace, understanding that somehow Cristofana is on the other side, wondering and pacing, living, like her, in both places, both times, and in neither.
May now bends to kiss them good night — or good-bye; she still isn’t sure which — kisses as light as moths’ wings, first on Pippa’s temple and then Marco’s. There is no time for second thoughts, but May has them anyway, fleeting ones. She doesn’t belong here, doesn’t belong with them, and Cristofana does. May just hopes that her twin will learn to deserve them.
Marco and Pippa.
She says each name softly under her breath as she makes for the alley, ducking and dodging through old, bleak streets under cover of darkness.
Tonight, when May comes through the portal, Cristofana is at the chair by the tall window, gazing forlornly out at the sliver of city visible through encroaching walls. May has never seen anyone look so sad, and because Cristofana is a sort of mirror, May feels it, too, that sadness. Or maybe she’s been feeling it all along.
“Why don’t you tell me what happened with your sister,” she says softly, trying to be kind, to build a bridge between them. They are so alike, after all, but when Cristofana lifts her head, her look is startled, ferocious.
“Marietta?” May adds, wary now, on her guard. “At the convent? Did you get to see her again before . . . you left?”
She’s still standing at the invisible mouth of the portal when Cristofana lunges, howling with rage and anguish, falling through, the wind of her body taking Ghost May with her.
They collide inside the portal with a crushing force, as if every bone in May’s body is being mashed and mauled in a blender. It’s pitch-dark in there, or she’s blinded by pain, but May hears Cristofana’s voice in her ear, in her mind — May can’t be sure; it seems to echo all around and inside her — screaming, screaming like a wildcat, and all at once they are two bodies fused together but craning apart. May tries moving toward the light on one side, the side opposite where she came in; Cristofana leans in the other direction, but the pressure to settle into the other, to clip into oneness, is so intense that May can’t breathe. At last she slumps — they do as one — breathless and gasping for air.
“What’s the matter with yo
u?” she howls back. “Your sister may be dead, but you know where you belong!”
Cristofana just howls harder, without words, as if to drown out the noise of May’s voice in her head.
It hurts to speak. It hurts to hear.
“You made a home with them. . . . Even I can see that. . . . It’s chaotic, like your brain . . . all odds and ends and feathers and broken toys, but it’s home, Cristofana. They need you in it.”
May feels her head shaking, though she isn’t shaking it, feels her jaw clamp and her eyes tear up.
“I never asked to be needed. I have no wish —”
“It’s not just about you!” May screams. “Don’t you get that?” Breathing out, she feels the tension wane, their single body wearied for the moment beyond recall.
“I don’t remember family,” the other admits in a hoarse whisper. “What must I do?” She winces as if the question, or the imperative, hurts her head.
Everything hurts, thinks May, throbs, aches . . . Their body in revolt against itself.
May tries to imagine Marco asserting his role as a fourteenth-century man of the house. When church elders come knocking, requesting altarpieces and frescoes, and he has to worry again what the world thinks, about morals and ethics and social status and money, what will he do? How will he keep his nutso, thieving sex partner a secret or hide their hastily adopted child?
May tries to imagine Cristofana giving up her spells and wanderings to mend underwear and hold Pippa’s restless hand in the pew on Sundays, and though there’s something very wrong with this picture, what May wants to say, what she would say if she were more generous and less resentful of the brand her double has obviously left on the workshop, on Marco and Pippa: You’re already doing it.
“Forgive them,” she says instead, “and make them laugh. Quit stealing and waving that knife around. The sickness will pass, so think about the future now. He won’t have you — won’t keep you — if you can’t behave.”
Plague in the Mirror Page 17