The Girl in the Glass

by Susan Meissner

  I went downstairs and then out the front door to take the walk I said I was going to take, holding my cell phone in my hand and waiting to hear back. After ten minutes Lorenzo texted me that he had left a message for Renata to call him. She was in a meeting with the editors of the magazine she often writes for. He also asked what had happened.

  “We need to drop the call to Emilio today,” I texted.

  A few minutes later, he texted me back.

  “She already talked to him.”

  My heart sank.

  “What did he say?”

  “I left before she hung up. On a shoot.”

  My mind began to race with how I would be able to convince Sofia that we had contacted Emilio before she told me she didn’t trust him. It was too late to think we wouldn’t have that conversation. My phone vibrated in my hand. Lorenzo had sent me another text.

  “She just texted me.”

  And then another text.

  “Come over tonight after 9:30.”

  “Good news or bad news?” I texted.

  It was several minutes before he texted me back.

  “Neither.”

  How could it be neither? If Emilio could help us and would help us, that was good news. If he wouldn’t or couldn’t, that was bad.

  How could black-and-white Renata say it was neither?

  I walked slowly back to the flat, at a snail’s pace, to convince myself “neither” surely had to be more good than bad.

  I pushed my upcoming rendezvous with Renata far out of my mind so that I could enjoy seeing the Medici Chapels and the stunning beauty of the Santa Maria Novella. The afternoon was resplendent with grace and beauty, as all my Florentine afternoons had been.

  We stopped for cappuccinos on the walk back to the flat, and I bought a couple of unframed paintings—one for my mother and one for Beatriz—from one of the many artists painting and selling their work in the piazza of the coffee shop.

  Sofia was making headway with her chapters and wanted to get back to them as the day began to edge toward twilight. I wasn’t looking forward to three hours in her flat waiting for the clock to read 9:30 p.m. I told her I wanted to explore on foot a little bit and that I’d get a bite to eat and be back later that evening. She was visibly grateful for the privacy and again gave me her entry key. I took with me a volume of Lord Byron’s poetry, which I found on one of her bookshelves, in English, so that I figuratively wouldn’t have to eat alone.

  I was starting to know my way around and confidently ventured farther away from the flat. A little riverside restaurant caught my eye, but I couldn’t figure out how to get down to it. I found a valet at a nearby hotel who spoke English and asked him if he knew how to get to the little restaurant on the river. His English wasn’t perfect, but he told me to look for the “green door on the left.” I went back to where I could see the restaurant’s patio, found the green door, and rang the buzzer, not sure what I was going to do if someone answered in Italian. Instead of a voice, I heard a buzz to let me in. I opened the door and found a set of winding marble steps that led to an area below the street.

  I passed empty rooms and a hallway full of trophies and pictures of men rowing and arrived at a counter where a thin man with spurts of gray hair stood bent over a ledger.

  “Is this the right place for the restaurant down by the water?” I asked, sincerely hoping he spoke English.

  To my joy, he did. He told me I was in the building of the Florence rowing society, and this was an exclusive restaurant for rowing-club members only, but as they were uncharacteristically not busy for a Friday night, I was invited inside.

  I was shown to a table on the patio, under a canopy of ivy-like vines with only a handful of other guests, no doubt all members of Florence’s rowing club.

  After an appetizer of stracchino cheese and prosciutto, I had a salami-and-fig pasta dish that my English-speaking waiter recommended, paired with a Tuscan white wine. He also recommended the tiramisu for dessert, which he promised would be better than anything I had ever had in the States. And he was right.

  The amazing meal and Byron’s poetry were a welcome distraction, and when I left by the way I had come, it was twenty minutes after nine.

  By the time I got back to Sofia’s building, it was a few minutes after nine thirty. I came up the stairs virtually on tiptoe and quietly knocked on Renata and Lorenzo’s door. I didn’t want Sofia to hear that I was back and decide to join me.

  Renata called from within her flat, welcoming me in.

  I stepped inside. She was sifting through mail at the island counter that separated her kitchen from the main room. I didn’t see Lorenzo.

  “Come in, come in,” she said.

  I closed the door behind me.

  “Wine?” She lifted a decanter.

  “No thanks.”

  She poured herself a glass and motioned for me to follow her into the living room.

  We took seats. Me on a chair; she on the couch. She kicked off her pumps and pulled her legs up onto the couch. Her toenails were painted a vibrant orange.

  She had a strange look on her face, as if she didn’t know how to begin.

  “What is it?” I said. “Just tell me what he said. Is he mad? Is he going to make trouble for Sofia?”

  Renata crossed her brows in surprise. “No, he’s not mad. Why should he be mad?”

  “Because … I don’t know. Sofia says that’s the kind of person he is. That he’s mad all the time.”

  She took a sip of her wine and then set it down on an end table. “I wouldn’t say that. He is not outgoing. He does not like silliness or foolish talk. He’s … serious. But not mad.”

  “Is he upset about the book? Is he going to make trouble for her? She told me she doesn’t trust him. That he only cares about money. And that he’d sell this building out from underneath her and her father if he could.”

  It had all tumbled out of my mouth before I could consider whether I should say any of it.

  Again, Renata’s brow creased in consternation. “She said all that?”

  “Yes.”

  Renata shrugged. “That’s not how he comes across to me. Yes, he’s rich. Yes, he’s done well for himself. But I don’t think he’d sell this building unless Angelo wanted to. He couldn’t. It’s only half his.”

  “Well, then, what is it? What is neither good nor bad? Are they not Medici? Is that it? Did Emilio tell you his family is not Medici?”

  I wasn’t sure what we were going to do if Emilio had said outright that the family ancestry did not include Medicis. Would Beatriz put the brakes on the whole thing?

  “He says it’s possible. But he doesn’t have any proof.”

  So we were back to square one and having to do the digging ourselves. I thought of the hours I had spent that day telling myself to relax and enjoy the sights. “You couldn’t have told me that this morning when Lorenzo texted you?”

  Renata fingered a dangling earring. “This is not all he told me.”

  “What, then? What else did he say?”

  “Even if his family was related to the Medicis, it wouldn’t matter, Meg.”

  That made no sense.

  Renata swung her legs around so that she could look at me fully.

  “Sofia is adopted.”

  I wandered the palace, seeking out my angels, inclining an ear to them to hear if they had words of comfort for me. Sometimes I could hear them telling me my mother missed me and spoke of me and sang songs about me. Sometimes I took Virginio by the hand to show him the angels in the paintings and statues, and I would tell him the angels were with Mama and they could take messages to her from us.

  But after a while, he stopped wanting to come with me. He couldn’t hear them. And he didn’t like it that I could hear the angels and he couldn’t.

  As the year ended, Nurse thought Virginio and I would be leaving for Rome because that’s where our father lived and Uncle Francesco said that’s where we belonged. She set about getting everything ready,
but he never sent for us.

  He misses Mama, I told Virginio. That’s why he doesn’t send for us.

  27

  The three words fell easily off Renata’s lips but landed hard on my ears. “She’s what?” I gasped.

  “She’s adopted. And she doesn’t know it. And it wasn’t legal. Emilio said this is a huge reason he and Angelo don’t get along. They don’t agree on this. Angelo never told Sofia. Natalia never told her. She doesn’t know. And Emilio thinks that is wrong.”

  Oh, Lord. Lord, Lord. “Are you sure this isn’t just something Emilio is making up because he doesn’t like her?”

  Renata looked intently at me. “Meg, what Sofia told you is not true. Emilio told me Angelo is the one who put distance between them. Emilio did not like what Angelo and Natalia did. It wasn’t right.”

  “Are you telling me they kidnapped her or something?”

  Renata shook her head. “No. Not exactly. But they didn’t adopt her the way most children are adopted. I am not sure it is even recorded anywhere.”

  “Oh my gosh.” I was floored. “Tell me everything he told you.”

  “Angelo was a night guard at the Uffizi many years ago, back when their father was still alive and he still owned the building. Emilio was still in Florence then. Angelo found Sofia and her real mother attempting to spend the night in one of the Uffizi bathrooms. Sofia was only four. Her mother begged Angelo not to send them away or call the police because her husband was a policeman and he would beat her for running away. He would beat their daughter too, whom the mother called Serafina. She told him her husband said if she ever tried to run away, he’d kill her and their daughter. He often beat them. All she wanted was to get away from him.

  “So Angelo brought the mother and the girl, Serafina, to the flat and kept them there for several weeks. The mother was introduced as Natalia’s cousin, and the little girl was introduced as Sofia. The mother knew she couldn’t stay there forever so she began to come up with a plan to escape to the United States. She was sneaking back to her house to get things. Money. Papers. One day she went back and the husband was there waiting for her. He shot her, killing her, and then he disappeared. The newspapers said he was a model police officer and his coworkers could not understand why he had shot his wife. Everyone believed he took his daughter and fled the country out of remorse over what he had done.”

  I sat spellbound by what Renata was telling me. She took a sip from her wineglass and continued.

  “Emilio said Angelo knew when he read the papers about the murder that Sofia’s mother was dead. And the father probably would not return to Florence to look for his daughter. By this time a month had passed, and he and Natalia had both grown fond of the little girl, and they knew she needed them. She was prone to night terrors, and she’d spend hours in Natalia’s and Angelo’s arms, trembling and unable to speak. Natalia didn’t want to let the police know they had the dead woman’s daughter because they would take her and put her in some foster home. And because Natalia only ever had miscarriages and wanted a child so badly, Angelo agreed they wouldn’t tell the authorities. They just continued the story to the other renters in the building that Sofia was Natalia’s niece and they were adopting her because her unwed mother could not keep her. After a while people forgot that Sofia was a niece. There is nobody here in this neighborhood now who remembers her being anyone other than Angelo and Natalia’s daughter.”

  “And all this business about them being Medici? Are they?”

  “Emilio said there was this great-uncle on their father’s side who used to say the Borellis were Medici from way back—that’s why they were so smart with their money and had all the pretty women. But Emilio said it was just something the uncle joked about. No one ever really believed him.”

  “Angelo did.” But as soon as I said it, I knew that wasn’t necessarily true. I knew enough about Angelo to be convinced he had a compassionate heart, even if his compassion was to the extreme. If he thought telling young Sofia she was a Medici would imbue her with the resilience she needed to recover from her father’s abuse and her mother’s absence, then that’s what he would do.

  In fact, everything Sofia had told me to that point about her father revealed his desire to equip her to deal with the terrible hand she’d been dealt, from the lire coin to telling her the statues and paintings would whisper to her if she listened very carefully.

  That’s why he told her not to tell anyone; not to keep her from distancing herself from people, but to keep her coping mechanism safe. If it was ridiculed out of her, what would happen then?

  Angelo had empowered Sofia to believe Nora Orsini, a long-ago relative, spoke to her through statues and paintings. It wasn’t because she was a Medici that she could hear them. It was because she imagined she could. She needed to imagine that she could.

  “There’s more,” Renata said. “There are things Emilio says you should know. Because he doesn’t want you to publish the book.”

  It took me a second to ask what that something was. For a moment I had forgotten about the book.

  “You know Sofia was married once. You know the bum she married already had a wife, yes?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, when she found out and the bum left her, Sofia had a breakdown. She tried to commit suicide twice and had to be institutionalized. She was shouting all the time for Nora to shut up and leave her alone. Emilio said she was finally released seven years later. Her doctor apparently wouldn’t let her leave until she would admit Nora Orsini wasn’t communicating with her from within statues and paintings. Emilio knows Angelo let Sofia believe Nora talked to her. He didn’t like that either. When Sofia was released, Angelo told Emilio that Sofia did not hear Nora’s voice anymore. Emilio had no idea she thinks she still hears it.”

  “What is so terrible about thinking you can hear a statue or painting speak to you?” I huffed.

  “It’s not terrible until someone thinks you’re crazy. She can’t prove she is a Medici—even if she was Angelo’s daughter, she could not prove this. And if she comes under a firestorm of criticism, even in just the little niche world of travel memoirs, what will that do to her? This is what Emilio is concerned about. And, Meg, so am I.”

  I lowered my forehead into my upturned hand, kneading my temple. This was a mess. I could probably put the brakes on the project by just telling Beatriz and Geoffrey the family could offer no proof of Medici ancestry. But I was already dreading telling Sofia that the project was pretty much dead in the water. I didn’t want to be the one to tell her we’d contacted Emilio and he had said there wasn’t an ounce of proof they shared Medici blood, that it was far more likely it was a family joke.

  She wouldn’t believe me, for one thing. She could hear Nora speaking to her. Of course she was a Medici. How dare I suggest she wasn’t?

  She’d be mad at me for going behind her back and contacting Emilio.

  She’d be devastated at losing the book deal because I believed Emilio and not her.

  It was a boatload of multiple disappointments that I was about to hand her.

  Maybe we didn’t have to tell her we’d contacted Emilio. Maybe I could have Renata call him back and tell him I wouldn’t be publishing the book, so he didn’t have to worry about it, and we could just pretend we never brought it up.

  I could just tell Sofia I wasn’t finding any ancestral connection to Gian Gastone de’ Medici and, as I had told her earlier, Beatriz was pretty clear on verified ancestry. We needed documentation.

  I would encourage her to keep writing to finish the book for herself. I would tell her that she was a fabulous writer and that I could help her turn her chapters into magazine articles for travel magazines. We would just stick to the facts and edit the Medici stuff we couldn’t prove and the talking statues that people wouldn’t understand.

  And if I could convince Sofia to do that, maybe I could convince Beatriz to look at Sofia’s chapters as insights from a Florentine native who has been a tour guide all he
r life. We could keep the references to her wise father intact but just ease up a little on the Medici content and include more non-Medici people. Like Raphael. And Donatello. And Michelangelo.

  This could work.

  This didn’t have to end with Sofia having the carpet pulled out from underneath her.

  I started to spill my hastily concocted plan. “We don’t have to tell Sofia we contacted Emilio. We can just tell him not to say anything, and I won’t publish the book.”

  Renata was already shaking her head. “It’s too late. He’s coming.”

  “Here?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, tell him it’s no big deal. He doesn’t have to come. I’m not publishing it.”

  “It’s not just that, Meg. Emilio told me Angelo sold the tour agency to pay for his place at the facility. He doesn’t own it anymore. He put the money he made from the sale into an account that pays for his place at the facility and a generous monthly stipend for Sofia. Sofia doesn’t work there anymore. The new owners didn’t want to keep her on staff. She hasn’t worked there in over a year. But she has been able to pretend, even in front of her closest neighbors, that she is still employed there. She’s not well, Meg.”

  Stunned, I groped for words. “She told me she took the week off. She told me she left the college students to take her tours. She …” I didn’t finish. I was beginning to connect the dots. Sofia was the queen of being able to imagine that what you want to be true is true. How hard would it be for her to imagine she went to work every day leading eager tourists around the city she loved? She walked around in her illusions every day of her simple and happy life. She wasn’t just holding tight the memory of wonderful years, she was inventing wonderful where it didn’t exist. “What is Emilio going to do?”

  “Emilio wants to sell the building. He has a buyer. He says he can stipulate that Sofia gets to stay in her flat, if that’s what she wants. And he will put his half of the proceeds into a trust for her. He is a rich man. It’s not like he needs the money. This building is worth a lot. She wouldn’t have to worry about finances. Ever.”