Every now and then on outings like this one, spotting an idle docent or bored-looking security guard, May fishes a rumpled sticky note from her jeans pocket and reveals the name copied there, the one she committed to memory, from letters and shipping documents in the workshop. “Have you ever heard of this painter?” Marco Veronese.
It would be easy enough to get Gwen’s advice on how to track down an artist who isn’t online — if there’s a more direct way, Gwen would happily share it at length — but May wants this research for herself. It’s private.
“When was he working?” they ask.
“Before the Renaissance,” May explains. “During the plague in Florence.”
“A minor artist, probably. What were his subjects?”
Thinking back to the first sketch she saw on his easel, of the gargoyle looming out over a doomed city, May tries to reply. “He did a lot of portraits and nudes,” she’d say, “and scary things, smiling skeletons and demons, screaming women, gargoyles, stuff like that.”
The docent or security guard would smile indulgently. “Back then and into the Renaissance, painters did mainly commissions for the Church. Private portraits were rare, nudes especially, given the influence of Church authorities. There were many masters in those decades. Too many to name.”
And? Her face must have asked.
“That name, Marco Veronese, means nothing to me, I’m afraid. Paolo Veronese, yes. Marco, no.”
All her museum hopping has a happy side effect in that it makes Gwen insanely happy. May has even finished two of the three essays due when school starts in a week.
Senior year . . . in Vermont.
And she’s made her decision, though it wasn’t easy. She’ll miss her mom — so much — but it didn’t make sense to uproot her whole life now, when college would just uproot it all over again.
Emerging from the shower the next morning, full of that restlessness you feel near the end of a trip, with your mind tugging toward the future, May fishes her charger out of her jam-packed suitcase, plugs in the phone, and watches the screen light up. While her battery recharges, May pats her long hair dry with a towel, dips her head, and winds it all up into a turban.
She still feels edgy at times, as if Cristofana might show up at any moment and press-gang her into the vicious past again, but May’s learning to live with not knowing. Maybe because deep down, she no longer believes it will happen.
Imagining Liam asleep on the other side of the wall, she thinks, That’s it, glancing around at the now-bare room, saying good-bye in mind to that strange little family to which she did and didn’t belong, accepting at last that they are a family, and that she’s too young to contemplate their reality or belong in it. May has a family of her own, and if Cristofana and the others have taught her anything, it’s that no family is perfect.
We are all we have.
May fetches her phone and scrolls through her texts and voice mails.
Are you my mother?
May longs for her like a child.
Are you really?
Right now she wants nothing more than to be a little girl again. She opens her Contacts screen. After scrolling impatiently, she highlights mom, and her mom answers on the first ring.
That night, their last in Florence, neither she nor Liam is willing to sit dinner out. It’s a beautiful night on the cusp of September. The streets are full of laughter and distant music and the smells of garlic and coffee. The city is lit like a fairy tale.
May feels light, almost ebullient, after her conversation with her mom. She cried, hearing her voice for the first time all summer. Her mom cried harder. After, they laughed that snorting, sobbing laughter that’s borderline hysterical, saying over and over how sorry they were.
Gwen does all the talking while they wait for their meal but lets things settle into an almost comfortable silence over dessert. They share one last trough of tiramisu, licking their spoons thoughtfully, and then, out of the blue, Gwen says she has to go meet a friend. “Last night here and all. I’ve already paid the bill,” she says. “I trust you two can get back to the apartment in one piece?”
May smiles sheepishly, looking away when her gaze meets Liam’s. “I think that can be arranged.”
“OK, then.” Laying her napkin on the tablecloth, Gwen walks around and kisses the tops of their two heads, breezing out without so much as a backward glance.
The silence gets oppressive fast, so May murmurs, “I talked to both my parents today.”
“Yeah?” He’s visibly relieved. “Gwen thought maybe you did. I’m glad to hear it.”
“It was weird,” she admits, “how really normal they sound. Different but normal.”
For a while he doesn’t say anything; then he looks right into her eyes, and she fights not to look away. “I’m sort of hoping we’ll get to that place, too.”
“Different?”
“But normal.”
Suddenly all the good she felt, all the relief, leaks away, leaving her with an angry buzzing in her blood. Everything that’s yours. . . .
“How can you ask me to do that? Act normal? I can’t.” She stands abruptly, her napkin slipping to the floor, and winds her way around tables and past the hostess stand with her heart hammering.
She weaves through the crowd mobbing the front door and can’t explain why she starts running when she hits the curb, when she senses him catching up, except that Liam isn’t hers and she isn’t his, and there is no such thing; people don’t own other people or belong to them, and even if it means she has to be an idiot tripping over the cobblestones, she doesn’t have to hear it; she doesn’t have to pretend otherwise.
He’s stopped saying her name. He doesn’t seem to want to calm her down anymore or even catch up to her. He just walks behind at a fast clip, and when it finally sinks in that he isn’t going to give up and let her walk home alone in the dark, she stops and reels to face him. In the same moment, she realizes where they are, in that narrow alley near the Misericordia, leading away from Piazza del Duomo — Via della Morte, Way of Death.
To her left is the plaque explaining how a daughter of the noble house of Amieri got sick during a bout of plague. She looked dead, so they shut her up in her husband’s ancestral vault in a cemetery between the cathedral and campanile. Ginevra woke in a panic, squirmed out of her shroud, raised the stone slab, and fled in terror from the vault, returning wraithlike to her husband’s home. When he and her father both refused her, Ginevra braved the home of her forbidden love, young Rondinelli, and was received. Her marriage to Agolanti was annulled, and she was able to marry her true love.
May is still trying to catch her breath, but as she and Liam stand there wondering what to do or say, she imagines that poor woman waking up in her pitch-black tomb, alive but utterly transformed, severed from her past and all she took for granted, her life divided by the plague into before and after. But at that fateful moment of waking, she was just there, poised in the present, between no more and not yet.
Slowly and gently, Li walks her backward to the wall, enclosing her there with an arm on either side, laying his palms flat on the stone, and she feels like some kind of wild animal he’s calming. They catch their collective breath, and May doesn’t try to get away or shove him back. She wants the warmth of him, the comfort in what’s familiar; she’s curious, too, about what’s not.
Normal but different.
“Did you even tell them how you felt before you left?” he demands. “I’ve been meaning to ask. Did you tell them you were pissed? That you had an opinion?”
“I go quietly,” she complains, looking away. “That’s what I do. What difference would it make?”
“Absolutely none, but it might’ve felt good.”
“No. I didn’t tell them, and I’m not telling you, either.”
He tries to cup her chin, and she jerks her face aside, feeling the closeness of his body, his ready warmth.
“Yeah, you piss me off,” she relents. “They piss me off.
Everyone pisses me off.”
“Well, congratulations, May, and welcome to the real world. People get mad here and make mistakes and shit on each other and are even wrong sometimes.”
Now she does try to shove him, aware that to people passing at the mouth of the alley they must look like a crime scene in the making. He doesn’t budge, so she shoves him again. “Fuck you.”
“I’m all for it,” he says wryly, almost apologetically, under his breath.
She kicks him in the shin, not hard, but hard enough to take him off guard. He turns with a guilty smirk, back against the wall for balance, and gradually slides onto his rear, at which point she kicks him in the thigh, halfheartedly . . . a little kid winding down in a tantrum. He grabs her ankle and urges her down with his hands until she kneels in front of him, and for a second they jostle and bump heads until finally she lets him fold her in his arms, into his worn-soft T-shirt and his smell. “It wasn’t me,” she sobs, sloppy and ecstatic and relieved. How could you do that? . . . “It wasn’t —”
“Look,” he says, his voice low in her ear, “it was, for me.” He leans close and kisses her lightly, tipping up her chin to make her look at him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about half the time, but who the hell else would it be?”
“Are you ready for this?” May asks, rolling to face him.
Their first flight’s delayed, the gate waiting room is all but deserted, and she and Liam lie afloat on a sea of carpet, heads propped on suitcases, surrounded by a fairy ring of drink cups and snack wrappers, cells, iPods, and essay fragments.
Across the aisle, Gwen hunches on her plastic chair, scribbling on a yellow legal pad and swilling espresso.
“Home, you mean?”
The sight of him sawing at an apple with a plastic knife suddenly rivets May; for half a second his concentration in profile reminds her of Marco, of that rush moment when she woke wrapped in his blanket with his liquid eyes intent on her over the green of apple.
“Life?” Liam asks, answering his own question. “Yeah, ready as I’ll ever be. What about you?”
May shrugs, thinking about the postcard in her backpack and of some myth or tradition Gwen related once about souls traveling in packs from life to life, through birth and death and rebirth, recycling and magnetically reengaging every chance they got.
She lets Liam stuff a jagged wedge of apple into her mouth and wonders irrationally — the thought making her giddy, almost sick — if maybe Liam was once Marco. She keeps thinking of them in tandem. Would that make her Cristofana? We share the same soul. She has to smile at the thought, chewing, and Liam gives up on the rest of the already browning apple. He rolls sideways, curious, propped on his elbow to look at her.
They speak at almost the same time:
“Do you believe in past lives?” she asks.
“What’d you buy in the museum shop?” he asks.
“Not really,” he says.
“Just a postcard,” she says.
“Not even a little?” she asks.
“Can I see?” he asks.
“No.”
“No.” It’s playful, her refusal, but she means it.
On the one hand, showing Liam the postcard would explain a lot. It might even help him believe her. He’s never said outright that he didn’t, but Liam is a guy who likes math, formulas, certainty. He must figure that if he can make sense of physics, he can make sense of anything, but Cristofana inhabits a universe all her own, one stitched together with blood spells and lies and nursery rhymes. It’s no world for Liam. It’s no world for May, either, and maybe in the end, forgetting will be easier (for both of them) than just not getting it.
The postcard could be a kind of proof. But for some reason, May doesn’t want to explain it, doesn’t want it justified, dissected, categorized, or cured. She wants to keep it for herself. What I did on my summer vacation . . .
According to the caption, the painting on the postcard (Untitled; Italy, circa 1350; artist unknown) was “an unusual/anachronistic early example of surrealist technique.”
On the postcard is the portrait of a young woman with long dirty-blond hair beside an ornately carved floor-length mirror with a little girl clinging to her leg. The woman’s expression is playful, withholding with a hint of wickedness. But her reflection in the mirror — identical, apart from a dress that seems a plainer shadow of its counterpart — wears a completely different expression. The features are the same, but the reflection’s face is grave and secretive, thoughtful, almost startled. The fact that the two don’t match makes the picture disturbing to look at. And fascinating.
To avoid Liam’s puzzled eyes, May starts organizing and flipping through scattered essay pages. Remembering the history lesson that Liam inadvertently gave Cristofana, May finds confirmation in the paper she started on bioterrorism and the path of the plague. The Black Death ended in September 1348, she reads, smiling to herself. The painting in the postcard is dated 1350. Safe bet, then, that Marco, Cristofana, and Pippa all survived the end days of the plague . . . and managed to stick together. At least for a couple of years.
Maybe Cristofana managed to change, after all.
Maybe Marco tamed her.
Looking up, May notes Gwen asleep in her hard airport chair, her back straight and the straps of her handbag wound severely around her right hand. Sliding their trash aside, May pivots, shifting her weight to lay her head on Liam’s chest. She hopes he’ll reach around and stroke her face, and he does, looking down at her with eyes the same relentless blue as the sky in the wall of windows behind them. “You gonna miss Chicago at Princeton?” she asks, staring hard at him, memorizing him.
“Not like I’ll miss you.”
There it is, plain and simple, and now he’s waiting for an answer, for a sign.
“But Jersey’s closer to Boston,” he says, “than Second City.”
“I don’t know what school I’ll get into,” she protests, looking away. She’s actually kind of crazily thinking premed. “There’s so much. . . . I’m not sure I want to be with anyone now. Not sure I can be. But if I could”— he doesn’t seem to need May to say more, but she does, aware of his heat and his heartbeat beneath her —“it would be you.”
“Yeah. Me too,” Liam says, tilting his head in that rakish way of his. “Both of you.”
May mock pounds on him, and they roll and tussle. She pins him under, straddling him until a buttoned-up businessman formerly concealed in a seat behind a pillar — the only other human (now) in sight besides the snoring Gwen — leans to the side and clears his throat meaningfully as if to say, Get a hotel room, and May scrabbles like a crab out of view behind the pillar, Liam moving with her. They huddle back there like children, laughing mutely and hysterically, and May will never feel so extraordinarily normal again.
www.candlewick.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2013 by Deborah Noyes
Cover photograph copyright © 2013 by Ricardo Demurez/Trevillion Images
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.
First electronic edition 2013
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2012947257
ISBN 978-0-7636-5980-6 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-7636-6356-8 (electronic)
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