The Girl in the Glass

by Susan Meissner

  Sofia reached across the table and squeezed my other hand. “It was a long time ago, Marguerite.”

  I thought of my own losses that seemed tiny compared to hers, and I shook my head. “How … how did you recover from all of that?”

  She smiled, patted my hand, and then sat back in her chair. “It took a while. Took a long while. But I had my papa to travel the road of grief with. It’s not as scary when you have someone who walks it with you. He would remind me, at my darkest moments, that I had the blood of the Medici running in my veins. I was strong. I was resilient. I was able to stand under the crushing weight of this double sorrow. I told him one day that I just wanted to close my eyes and never wake up again. And he went into my old bedroom, found that five-hundred-lire coin, and pressed it into my palm. ‘That is not your way,’ he said to me. ‘That is not your way.’ ”

  She paused and drank the last of her cappuccino.

  “Was … was there ever anyone else?” I asked. “I mean, did you ever think of getting married again?”

  “No. I never met anyone who could love me the way my papa loved my mama, and that’s what I wanted. Love like that. The other isn’t really love. If the Medici know anything about love, it is that there is no substitute for the real. I have no regrets, Marguerite. My papa and I found happiness after our sorrows. Until he became ill a couple years ago, we had a lovely home together in the flat. I wish sometimes that I’d had a child, just one. I am the last. There are no more Medici after me, at least none that can hear what my father and I can hear.”

  I thought of what Geoffrey had said to me when I first told him about Sofia’s claim. “But aren’t there others out there who can trace their lineage back to the Medici? I mean, it was a big family, and they were always marrying their children into royal families of other nations, right? Aren’t there little Medicis running around the royal houses of England and Spain and France?”

  Sofia laughed. It was good to hear her laugh.

  “Sure there are. But no one seems to consider that it matters. The family name is dead to them. What does it matter who you are if you don’t care that’s who you are?”

  She stood. “Let’s stop by the market and get some veal for supper. I will show you how to make Vitello alla Fiorentina.”

  I stood too, crumpled the napkin I had been crying into, and shoved it into my pocket.

  During those long years of my youth, as I tried to comprehend what happened the summer my mother died, I went to Nurse for answers and advice. She knew all the answers to my questions, and she had more advice for me than anyone—not because she was amazingly wise, but because no one else was interested in giving me counsel.

  When people whispered of my mother’s death, the name Troilo Orsini often appeared in the same breath. The more I began to understand the way of men with women, the more I understood Troilo was my mother’s undoing. He was my father’s cousin and was a very handsome man. I remember him in snatches of memory. Tall, muscular, and with laughing eyes the color of polished wood. Nurse told me that my father and Troilo were born the same year, but my father grew in girth as he aged, and Troilo grew only more beautiful. Troilo came to Florence after my parents were married—long before I was born—to impress my grandfather, win his favor, and improve his financial prospects. Many people came to Florence to impress Cosimo de’ Medici. And since he was family, Troilo was welcomed.

  Troilo was handsome, brave, ambitious. My father was not really any of those things. And he was not in Florence.

  19

  When we returned to Sofia’s flat, the exertions of the day had caught up with me. It was a few minutes before five, but I needed to lie down for just a few minutes to pacify my annoyed body clock. Sofia promised not to let me sleep longer than an hour.

  I don’t nap often during the day because when I do, I almost always sabotage the rest I might’ve gotten with disturbing dreams that leave me feeling worn out when I wake. On top of Sofia’s fluffy featherbed, I dreamed I was back at the cottage, but it wasn’t exactly Findlay’s cottage, of course. I kept walking into rooms that hadn’t been there before, but I was pretending that they had been. I awoke with a start.

  I sat up quickly, unsure where I was and groggy from interrupted sleep. I must’ve cried out because Sofia appeared at the door with a wooden spoon in her hand. “You all right?”

  I swung my legs over the side of the bed. “Weird dream. Probably just jet lag messing with my imagination.”

  “Want to help me make supper? You said not to let you sleep too long.”

  “Sure.” I followed her back out to the kitchen. I realized as the dream was fading that I hadn’t yet mentioned the statue in my grandmother’s painting. “Say, Sofia, when my grandmother was little, my great-great-grandfather painted her with a statue of a young woman. The real statue is somewhere here in Florence. I would like to try to find it, if I could. My grandmother thought it was in the Uffizi, perhaps. She wasn’t sure. She doesn’t remember posing for the painting.”

  Sofia was pleased to hear this. “We can go to the Uffizi tomorrow. There are a number of female statues at the Uffizi. And many more at the Pitti Palace if we don’t find her there. You can tell me what the statue looks like, and I can tell you if I’ve seen it.”

  Her doorbell rang at the moment, and she went to answer it.

  A conversation at her threshold began that I could not make heads or tails of. I decided to take a seat on the sofa while she talked in rapid Italian with a gray-haired woman wearing a yellow rain bonnet. The woman who had rung the bell was obviously upset about something. Sofia, it seemed, was doing her best to calm her. A minute later she turned to me.

  “Marguerite, could you move the garlic off the flame on the stove for me? I need to run upstairs for a moment or two. I won’t be long.”

  I nodded. The two women left, and I carried out my simple task. I turned the stove off and moved the golden garlic bits off to the side. Sofia’s wall clock in her kitchen told me it was twenty minutes to seven. I did the quick math and knew that it was nine forty in the morning in San Diego. The office had been open almost two hours.

  I knew I probably had an e-mail waiting for me from Geoffrey. I needed to know to what degree he was mad so that I could figure out how long I could stay, assuming it would make no difference to Sofia. And I certainly wanted to stay past Friday, as my dad had inexplicably asked me. Could I stay the week? Ten days? Would Geoffrey flip if I said I’d be gone ten days? Beatriz would be concerned and surprised about my sudden departure but not mad. Geoffrey, however, disliked surprises.

  I found Sofia’s note from breakfast with the Wi-Fi password, and I settled onto her sofa with my laptop. I logged on to my webmail. Geoffrey had e-mailed me twice. Beatriz, once. My mother, three times.

  Geoffrey’s first reply was short and terse. He wanted to know how long I’d be gone, and he wanted to know who was in charge of what until I got back. The tone of his second one—sent forty-five minutes after the first one—was noticeably different. He wanted me to make sure I connected with Sofia Borelli to find out how many finished chapters she had. And he wanted to know if she had records to prove she was in the Medici bloodline. Beatriz’s e-mail was like Geoffrey’s second one, only more polite and more to the point. She told me she had mentioned Sofia’s premise sans the ghost to a major book distributor in New York and they were now quite interested in a destination memoir written by a Medici descendent. She, too, asked me to please authenticate Sofia’s ancestry claims—as soon as possible—and to make sure Sofia wasn’t crazy regarding the talking statues bit. And Beatriz also asked me to make sure I connected with Sofia to see what her total word count was. If it was less than forty thousand, Beatriz asked me to help her identify enough content to punch it up to at least fifty. There was nothing to talk about yet if it was less than fifty.

  She also asked me to enjoy the time I was spending with my father. And to please be back in the office, if at all possible, in eight to ten days. She would
only charge me five vacation days because of the connection she was hoping I would make with Sofia. But they couldn’t spare me any longer with such short notice.

  Nervous anticipation rippled through me as I considered that Sofia’s book idea had gone from a crazed clunker of an idea to one that clearly Beatriz was enthused about, and which Geoffrey apparently wasn’t going to continue to ridicule. There was interest. A major distributor was interested. But I didn’t know how to prove Sofia was who she said she was.

  And I didn’t know if I could convince her to take a more subtle approach regarding Nora’s whispers.

  I also didn’t know how much of her manuscript she had finished.

  Still, Sofia’s project was making my surprise trip to Florence not a complete waste of time for Geoffrey and Beatriz. That was a good thing.

  I e-mailed them back jointly and got them up to speed regarding who I was spending my time in Florence with; that is, not my father. And since I was with Sofia in her apartment, I’d have ample opportunity to address the questions they had.

  I told them I would give them an update in a couple of days. Then I logged on to the Air France website and found a flight that left the following Monday, one week from today; the next available after that wasn’t for fifteen days. I secured the last available seat.

  My mother’s e-mails were next. The subject line of the one in the middle read “Your father.” I opened that one first.

  Meggie,

  So Allison’s decided to get a lawyer, and she’s hired a private investigator. She wanted to file a missing person’s report, but I don’t think the police believe there’s been any foul play. It looks like your father just took off on her. Although that’s not a nice thing to do, it’s not illegal. The money he took was in a jointly held account, so taking it wasn’t illegal either, just in very poor taste. She said the private investigator thinks he probably went to Mexico. And some not very nice men came to the house looking for him. She thinks they were loan sharks. I don’t know why she keeps calling me to tell me the latest. It’s like she thinks we now have this gigantic thing in common.

  She doesn’t think he’s in Florence with you anymore.

  Just thought you’d want to know.

  You don’t have to stay there, Meg. He’s not going to show. You can come home, if you want.

  I opened the first and third one before constructing a reply. The first one:

  Meg,

  I am just not comfortable with you staying with a woman you hardly know. I hope you brought your doorstop with you. Be sure you put it against the door when you go to bed at night. And sleep with your passport on you. And watch out for juvenile pickpockets. Devon said they work in teams. A cute little boy will create a diversion, and other little boys will laugh and joke with him. And while you take their picture, two other little boys who’ve not even caught your attention will rob you blind. Be careful.

  And the third:

  Devon fixed the hinge on your screen door. He went over to your place last night to take care of the litter box and cat food because I had a church thing I couldn’t get out of. You know how it used to catch and then not close all the way? Well, now it doesn’t do that anymore.

  And don’t forget to use the doorstop tonight. Love you.

  Mom

  Picturing Devon fixing my screen door and in my house taking care of Alex made me frown.

  I liked it and disliked it, that image. I wished I felt nothing but simple gratitude that my borrowed cat was being properly cared for.

  Sofia came back into the flat, and the image skittered away.

  “Sorry about that!” she said brightly. “Now we can get on with dinner!”

  “No problem,” I said. I wrote a quick reply to my mother.

  I am staying until next Monday. Geoffrey and Beatriz have some things they want me to do here. I got a very short text message from Dad on a borrowed phone. He apologized for not being here in Florence and said he would explain someday. I have no idea where he is now. The area code was Los Angeles, but he said he’d be gone by the time I read it. You can call Allison and tell her, if you want. She might like to know that one day ago he might have been in Los Angeles.

  Forgot the doorstop at home. Sorry.

  Tell Devon thanks for fixing my screen door.

  More tomorrow, maybe.

  Meg

  I closed my laptop and joined Sofia in the kitchen. She turned from the sink where she was washing her hands.

  “Everything okay?” I guess I looked like everything wasn’t.

  “Everyone seems to think my dad has probably fled to Mexico with his second wife’s money.” Saying it out loud made it seem more real somehow.

  “Oh, Marguerite. I am sorry. He’s not coming to Florence at all, then?”

  “No.”

  “I can see you love your father very much,” Sofia said. “Even though he has hurt you. And this is not the first time, no? Still, I think you will see him again.”

  She turned to a cabinet, opened it, and began pulling out little jars of herbs. I wanted to slowly digest each of her four proclamations—that I loved my father, even though he hurt me, and has hurt me before, and despite where he was right now, I would see him again—but Sofia swiveled and extended a little jar toward me and jostled me from these thoughts.

  “Here. Smell this. Herbes de Provence. My favorite thing to cook with. It’s a lovely mixture of many herbs.”

  I took the jar and inhaled.

  I remembered that fragrance. Nonna cooked with this. She had done the same thing once. Lowered a jar of it to me and told me to smell it.

  Memories crowded in of those childhood years when I had no idea things were falling apart. I don’t remember much of the years before I was six; I don’t think many people do. But the years when I was seven, eight, nine—those years were the happiest for me. And yet those were the same years my parents’ marriage was disintegrating, and I didn’t even know it.

  I backed away from the scent. “Say, Sofia. I just had an e-mail from my publishers. They are actually really glad I’m here with you. They are interested in your book, but there are some things we need to work out.”

  The delight on her face was childlike. “Really? They like it?”

  “They like the concept. And they do like your writing style. But really, when it comes to getting a book published, the concept is key. And you’ve got a great concept.”

  “I do?”

  “Sure. You are writing a destination memoir about Florence from the vantage point of a Medici descendant. It’s a great concept. And you have a great writing style. Lovely, really.”

  This appeared to be more than she could take. She turned to the sink, set the little jar down, and laughed. “You’ve no idea how I’ve needed to hear that. My father always said I could write, but you know how fathers are. They tell you things because they love you.” She looked up. “I think you know what I mean.”

  I couldn’t think of an appropriate response. So I just continued with what we needed to talk about. “Well, what my publishers would like from you are all your finished chapters and a word count. And a few other things.”

  “Word count?”

  “Your total word count. If you put all the chapters together that you’ve written to this point, what would the total word count be?”

  “Oh.” Sofia stared off into the window above her sink. “I don’t know.”

  “No problem. We can figure that out. Are all your chapters about the same length? You know, the same number of pages when you print them out?”

  “Oh! That! Yes. They are all about the same.”

  “Great. And how many chapters do you have that are finished?”

  “Twenty. No, twenty-one. I have twenty-one.”

  We had a problem. Sofia’s chapters averaged a thousand words each. She didn’t have even half the amount we needed completed. I framed my next question carefully so as not to scare her off.

  “And how many more do you think you could
write?”

  She seemed pleased by this, not taken aback. “You want more? I have hundreds of stories to tell. You want ten more? Fifteen more?”

  “How about thirty more? Could you write thirty more?”

  She grasped me by the shoulders and laughed. “This is wonderful! Yes! Yes, I can write more.”

  “That’s great. Sometime this week let’s sit down and see what each new chapter would be about, okay? We’ll make a list, and I can send that to my publishers. Maybe Wednesday?”

  “Yes, yes!” She turned to the little oil painting by her window and kissed it.

  My gaze turned to the painting too. It was of a woman holding a baby in her arms. She was sitting under the shade of leafy boughs.

  “Your mother?” I nodded toward the canvas.

  “And me. I love this painting of her. It’s the smallest one my papa ever did of her and me together. But I love it anyway.”

  “It’s very pretty.”

  “The painting is more my father than my mother, yes? He painted it. All the love that he has for her is in every stroke. And he painted her—and me—while we posed for him. This canvas is like a fragment of real time, fixed here, forever. That’s how it is when I hear Nora whispering to me. She left her imprint everywhere. I think we all do.”

  I sensed a pulling sadness that this part of her manuscript might have to be scrubbed, or at the very least toned down. There had to be a way to keep it without destroying her credibility or reducing her to a delusional freak.

  “Do you hear any other voices besides Nora’s? Do you hear her in every piece of art?” I asked.

  She laughed lightly. “No, no, no! And I am very glad I don’t. No, the ones that speak to me with Nora’s voice are the ones that she and I are both a part of. Like, she can’t speak to me through my father’s paintings because she never saw them. She wasn’t there to leave her imprint. It’s different with the art we both have shared. But if all the art in Florence spoke to me, could you imagine? I would be a lunatic. Never a moment’s peace.”