by Amy McAuley
She glowers at me, whirls around, and strides to the door. It flies open and crashes into the wall. I watch, unable to call out, as Di races away down the hall.
When I turn to do something about the weird photographer, I discover I’m no longer in the gym. I’m being led down a narrow cobblestone street at dusk. I nearly trip on the uneven stones beneath my feet.
I feel an overwhelming sense of being home. We’re in Travestere. My father owns a bakery down the street, in the square. The river, the Tiber, I can hear it. Fig trees stretch their gnarled branches over the stone garden wall beside me. I smell Father’s bread baking. And there’s the Santa Maria church.
The photographer stops walking. He glides his hands up my arms. “I cannot take another step without making love to you, Margherita.”
Kissing my neck, he backs me down the street and into a dark alley. I turn to soft clay in his skilled hands.
Bang!
I startle awake, almost bouncing off the bed. “What was that?”
“Sorry. Kicked bunk-bed ladder,” Kalli mumbles sleepily.
Nice timing. That photographer guy sure knew what he was doing.
Dear Dream Journal:
Last night I had a dream about a crazy photographer, and I realized he looked like Raphael from Kate’s art book. I’m not sure if he’s the Raphael I’ve already dreamed about or if I put him in a dream because I saw him in the book. At the end of the dream, it felt like I stopped being me and became the woman in the dream. I knew what she was thinking and seeing.
I spend my days being me, but I spend my nights being someone else. And the scary thing is, the dream part seems almost as real to me as life does when I’m awake. It’s like I’m living a double life.
Kate shows up unannounced outside Dad’s patio door while I’m slumped over the table, shoveling cereal into my mouth. My hair is sticking out like I spent the night in a tornado and my pajamas consist of a stretched-out Pink Floyd shirt I stole from Ryan and a pair of ratty boxer shorts. Maybe I should have given Kate my phone number. I’m not real big on surprises.
With my spoon dangling from my mouth, I wave her inside with one hand and straighten out my hair with the other. When the door slides open, Sandy barrels into the kitchen from the living room, nearly colliding with Kate and the dishwasher.
“Hi, it’s hot as hell out there. Let’s go. The beach is calling our names.”
I stick my spoon back in the bowl. “Okay, give me a couple minutes.” My cereal’s too mushy. I set the bowl on the floor for Sandy. “Want something to eat?”
“No, thanks, I already had a bowl of soggy cereal and dog drool.”
“I mean toast or waffles or something,” I say, laughing.
“No, I’m okay. My mom made me some chocolate chip pancakes.”
Saliva washes into my mouth like the tide coming in. Chocolate chip pancakes. Now that’s the kind of breakfast I could go for. Where can I get a mom like Kate’s?
“You can watch TV, nobody’s here but me,” I say, gesturing toward the living room. “I’ll get ready real quick.”
“No hurry,” Kate says, collapsing onto the sofa.
I yank on my bathing suit, do as much as I can to become presentable without having a shower, and grab my bag of beach gear.
At the beach, we lay my blanket out on the hot sand.
For some reason, I figured Kate to be a one-piece, cover-as-much-skin-as-possible bathing suit gal like myself. But, nope, she wiggles out of her shorts and whips off her tank top to expose a whole lot of epidermis. I don’t think the teeny cotton triangles would even classify as a bathing suit. More like a bath su. And she must lift weights, in addition to running. Her abs and biceps are totally cut and she looks strong enough to pick my dad up and whirl him around over her head, Pippi Longstocking–style.
I take off my shorts, leave my T-shirt on, and stretch out on my back. Kate pulls a tattered book from her bag and takes a seat beside me. Instead of reading, though, she fires off a ton of questions about my friends, my school, my town, my family, my boyfriend, and my hobbies. She pretty much asks me everything but my bra size, which she has probably already deduced by looking at me. If it were anybody else heaping personal questions on me, I’d definitely get creeped out. But I don’t mind giving the answers to Kate. It’s even a little fun.
“Okay, you passed the test. I deem you worthy,” she says, fanning herself with her book, a copy of Animal Farm, I notice. “Any questions you want to ask me?”
I turn on my side and give her a one-shoulder shrug. “You like Pink Floyd?”
“Of course.”
“Okay, you passed the test. I deem you worthy.”
“I noticed your T-shirt this morning,” Kate says. “You like Pink Floyd? For real?”
“I’m a Pink Floyd addict.”
“Next time you’re in my room, I’ll show you something,” she says with a chuckle.
I suddenly get wistful for Ryan, like some sappy girl in a melodramatic romance novel. I roll onto my stomach and rest my chin on my arms, wishing I could talk to him more often.
“I went through my art books,” Kate says. “You’re in a bunch of other paintings.”
“I’m telling you, that girl doesn’t look like me,” I say. “Want to go for swim?”
“She does too. Well, you with a bit of a thyroid problem. But otherwise, she looks like she could be your great-great-great—okay, a lot of greats, grandmother.”
I open my mouth to change the subject.
“The thing is,” Kate says, “up until Raphael moved to Rome, the girls in his paintings were these scrawny blond chicks, because that was the type of girl everybody loved, how truly pathetic that nothing has changed in five hundred years, and women used to, even back then, dye their hair blond or wear blond wigs, and—”
“What happened after he moved to Rome?” I blurt at the first opening I get.
“After that, the women in his paintings became chubbier, olive-skinned girls with dark hair and dark eyes. It’s like he was using the same model over and over.”
“Oh.” I turn my head and watch two little girls build a sand castle at the water’s edge.
Kate lies on her back and cracks open the book, holding it high to shield her face from the sun. “Do you want to come over to my place this afternoon?” she asks, after reading through a few pages.
The prospect of checking out Kate’s art books doesn’t sound very appealing. I give a noncommittal groan. The warm sunshine zaps my energy, and my eyes slip closed.
I’m nude. Not completely naked, but the gauzy veil draped across my middle isn’t covering a portion of my body that it definitely should be covering.
Raphael steps out from behind his easel, and I yank the veil higher. Why’s he painting me naked? He must be some kind of pervert.
“Keep that smile,” he says. “It is perfect.”
Smile? That’s sheer terror and embarrassment on my face. Just when I’m about to wake myself up, something glitters, catching my attention. I stretch my hand out. It’s a ring. And not just any ring either, it’s a monster, the most gigantic ruby I’ve ever seen. It dwarfs my ring finger.
From behind the canvas, Raphael says, “Penny, you should wake up now. You’re getting sunburned.”
“What?”
“Wake up, girl,” he calls out. “Your face is frying.”
I open my eyes.
“Flip over, Penny,” Kate says. “You’re well done on top and rare on the bottom, and nobody likes a half-cooked burger.”
Still half-asleep, I flop over onto my stomach.
“Let’s go get some ice cream. I’m buying.” Kate sits up, folds the corner of the page in her book, and sticks it back in her bag. “Then we’ll go to my house.”
It’s unacceptable to turn down free ice cream. I lumber to standing and pull on my shorts. After I gather up my beach stuff, we walk over to Dad’s to deposit it on the deck. Kalli, back from a sleepover, walks out the patio door with Megan in
tow. Megan’s so dainty and cute. It’s a shame she comes with an extraordinarily high annoyance factor.
“Some man just dropped off a box for you,” Kalli says. “I put it on the table.”
“A box. What’s in it?”
Hopping down the deck steps, she says, “Like I know. The box is long and skinny.”
Megan leans over, shielding her mouth with her hand and whispers something in Kalli’s ear. I overhear the word “vibrator.” Oh, she’s such a delight, that Megan. She and Kalli run off, their megaphone mouths blaring nonsense and shrill giggles.
Inside the kitchen, I find the box on the table. What a doughhead Kalli is. The name of the florist shop is displayed right on the lid of the box. I open it up.
“Roses. Who are they from?” Kate asks. She whips the mini-envelope out of my hand and holds it to her forehead, squinting hard in concentration. “The answer is: the guy who hasn’t been able to get in your pants yet.”
Embarrassed, I grab the envelope and pop it open. “Wish You Were Here—Ryan.”
“Nice.” Kate’s elbow jabs my arm. “Any guy who makes references to Pink Floyd albums when he sends flowers is all right by me.”
“Nobody’s ever given me flowers before,” I admit. I have such a great boyfriend, and I can’t see him for a month. At this moment, a month might as well be a year.
I put the flowers in the vase they came with and set them on the kitchen table.
“Aren’t they beautiful?”
“Sure,” Kate says. “If you’re into flowers and junk.”
I narrow my eyes at her and she laughs.
“You know what else is beautiful?” she asks, leading me to the patio door. “Rocky Road ice cream.”
We walk downtown, behaving like an older version of Kalli and Megan. When we get close to the ice cream parlor, my shoulders tense up.
“Uh, I just remembered I can’t get ice cream here unless I order in a Scottish accent.”
Kate snorts. Staring me straight in the eye, she says, “What do you want?” She doesn’t even ask me to explain the Scottish accent thing. I tell her what kind I want and she strolls away, reaching deep into the pocket of her shorts.
“Hello, there,” the woman in the parlor calls. “How’s the vacation going?”
My shoulders crank a little tighter. I glance up to see her smiling at me, elbow deep in a bucket of ice cream.
“Super,” I say, and it rolls off my tongue like melting Scottish butter.
Kate gives me an amused grin over her shoulder. She’s loving this, I can tell. With both cones in her hands, she strides back to me.
“Have a nice afternoon,” the ice cream woman says, and this time I just wave.
I take my cone from Kate. My sunburned cheeks glow like neon signs.
“Thanks for the ice cream.” I’m back to being non-Scottish.
Kate’s tongue whirls around her ice cream and she bites the peak off. “Nuuuuu problem, lassie.”
The amount of time it takes to walk from the middle of downtown to Kate’s house is exactly how long it takes to eat an ice cream cone from start to finish.
“C’mon upstairs,” Kate says, wiping her hands on the back of her shorts. “I’ll take out my art books.” She winks. “And I’ll expose my room’s deep, dark secret.”
Kate shuts the bedroom door behind us and motions for me to take a seat on her neatly made bed, which I do.
“See this cork bulletin board,” she announces, striking a game-show hostess pose to showcase the board’s notes and photos and reminders.
She grabs the board down from the wall and turns it around. The back of the board is completely covered in Pink Floyd photos and memorabilia.
“My whole room is reversible. One side of this board goes with the My Mom Reliving Her Teen Years theme. The other side is the real me.” At the window, she tugs on the window-blind cord and the slats rotate shut. “These blinds appear to be plain, old, boring white.” With a yank to the opposite cord, the blind slats flip over to reveal a colorful and remarkable painted collage. Trees, stars, cats, sections of sheet music, black and white reproductions of photos, and many other images that mean nothing to me, but must have great significance to Kate, fill the window frame.
I shake my head in awe. “That’s intense. You painted that?”
“Yeah,” she says, smiling. “There’s more, though.”
Around the room she goes, pointing out all the things that are reversible. Each one takes me by surprise. She turns her back to me, gathering her hair up. The section of hair at the base of her neck, visible only when all her hair is up, has been dyed alternating strips of purple and lime green. I’ve seen her hair in a ponytail plenty of times, but only from the front as she jogged past.
“That’s wicked,” I say. “Does your mom know about your secrets and reversibles?”
Kate lets her hair fall back around her shoulders. “Some.” She walks over to her bookshelf. “She definitely doesn’t know which body parts I’ve had pierced.”
My eyebrows shoot up. Wherever Kate’s piercings are, they’re not visible to the naked eye.
She pulls out the same big book she showed me the last time I was here, and I cringe as she flips through the pages on her way toward me, her eyebrows furrowed tight with determination. She sets the book on my lap, open to the one painting I don’t want to see. I don’t want to know that it’s real.
“There she is.” Her finger stabs the nude woman draped in a veil. “That’s the same girl we saw in the other painting. Who is she? That’s what I want to know.”
I want to look away, but I can’t. Something about the painting is off. It’s wrong. Then in a flash it comes to me. “Where’s her ring?” I cry.
Kate spears me with a look that’s filled with curiosity. “Say what?”
Damn. My big mouth strikes again. “Nothing,” I say with a nonchalant shrug.
“No way. Tell me what ring you’re talking about.”
I inhale deeply. “It’s nothing. Forget I said that.”
“I ain’t forgetting nothin’. I’m getting the willies all of a sudden and you’re going to tell me what you mean, or I’m”—Kate holds up the book—“I’m going to show this nekked picture of you to every single person I know.”
This makes me laugh, despite being angry at my big mouth. “I’ll tell, but promise me you won’t think I’m weird.”
“It’s too late, I already think that. Now tell me about the ring, or this picture of your boobs is getting scanned into my computer. You’ll be Internet porn within a matter of minutes.”
“Okay, fine. It’s a huge, square ruby ring. Are you satisfied?”
Kate throws the book over her shoulder and leaps off the bed. At her desk, she whacks the computer mouse and clicks and clacks noisily on the keyboard.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m putting the words Raphael and ruby ring into a search engine.”
I freeze in the middle of getting up from the bed.
Kate leans close to the monitor, intent on reading an article she’s brought up on the screen. Slowly, she turns around to look at me. “Did you already read about that painting or see something on the news about it?”
“Why?” I ask, wishing I could zip back in time. I should have said no to the free ice cream and stayed at the beach. I should have kept my big stupid mouth shut.
“Come look at this.”
I unwillingly move closer to the computer.
“This article says there is a ruby ring, possibly an engagement ring, on her finger.” A flicker of excitement goes through Kate’s eyes. “A couple of months ago, they did an X-ray on the painting to restore it, and found the ring, hidden under a layer of paint.”
I swallow hard, but my mouth has gone almost dry.
“There was a ring on her finger, just like you said. It was kept secret for almost five hundred years. So how did you know it was there?”
12
I shrug, not knowing what to say. L
ies never spring to my mouth when I need them. My silence drags out for way too long. I could leave without telling Kate about the ring, but I have the feeling she’d tackle me to the ground on my mad dash to the door.
“It’s pretty strange,” I say.
“Of course it is. That’s why I want to know.”
I can’t spontaneously explain it to Kate, here and now, and expect everything to come out coherently. “Can I tell you later? I need some time to think about what to say.”
Kate breathes out through her nose, loudly, like Sandy does when she’s bored. Her lips press tight. We stare into each other’s eyes.
“I guess,” she says. “But don’t think I’ll forget. I’ll pester you constantly. You’ll rue the day you asked me to wait. It might take a whole lotta liquor, but I’ll get you to talk.” She points a finger at me, squinting mischievously. “I know where you live.”
The tightness in my chest relaxes. “Yeah, yeah. I get the picture.”
Diana strolls into the room where I’m modeling for Raphael. The close fit of her fur-trimmed velvet gown accentuates her beautiful figure and a jeweled caul holds her blond hair off her pale face.
My hands clench as she crosses the room.
“Maria, how lovely to see you,” Raphael says to her.
“Will you not greet your fiancée with a kiss?” she says, coyly, and Raphael steps out from behind the canvas to give her a peck on the cheek. “Please ask Margherita to excuse us.”
Holding back my anger, I hurry from the room and close the door. When I turn to leave, my arm knocks against a wooden table. I study the objects neatly laid out before me: An open bottle of red wine, a wineglass, a shallow bowl of paint pigment, and a note.
On the note, written in a spiral pattern around skull and crossbones, are the words “Orpiment: Do Not Eat, Do Not Drink, Do Not Touch.” I scoop up a pea-sized amount of the bright yellow pigment. Into the wineglass it goes. I fill the glass with the blood-red liquid and swirl to mix. Glass in hand, I return to the room.
“Maria,” I interject, and she stops talking. “I brought you a glass of wine.”
She snatches the glass from me and takes a sip.
“I apologize, Maria, but I must return to my painting,” Raphael says, laying a hand on her arm. “Perhaps we can continue our conversation another time.”