by Leila Sales
I couldn’t even laugh at that. “They weren’t trying to take her,” I said. “They were just trying to get to my dad. I told them she was my sister! How stupid am I? If I hadn’t done that, they would have left her alone. And when I saw that portal, I should have brought her with me. I shouldn’t have just left her there.
“But you know what, Jake? If she hadn’t been friends with me at all—if she’d taken the Film Stars up on their invitation—she wouldn’t even have been at my house in the first place. Bad things happen when people get close to me. Kitty should have gone with Betsy that night. That’s the truth of it.”
“Whoa,” Jake said. “What are the Film Stars? Who’s Betsy?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I told him. “It’s so far in the past.”
“Okay,” he said. “But none of that really makes sense. You know that, right? Kitty was friends with you because she wanted to be friends with you. You didn’t force her into it. And sure, it would have been great if you could have brought her through the portal. But from what you’ve told me, there probably wouldn’t have been time for that, and trying might have gotten you both killed.”
I nodded reluctantly. “I’ve just always felt like I did something wrong by making it out alive when she didn’t. That wasn’t fair.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Jake said.
“Who cares whose fault it was? It still wasn’t fair. But since she lived . . . since we both lived . . .” I trailed off.
“That means you don’t need to feel guilty anymore,” Jake supplied.
“Right,” I said. “And that changes everything.” I looked out the window for a moment, at the countryside unfurling before us, then turned back to him. “I’ll have these moments of absolute certainty, where I expect her to be right behind me in line, or sitting next to me at a café. And then I’ll have moments where I think—the world is too big, and we have too little to go on. It’s silly of me to think this could work. I need to grow up and get real.”
Jake chewed slowly and swallowed. “So, okay, what happens if you never find her?”
“I don’t want to think about it.”
“No, seriously, what happens?”
I leaned my head against the train window, feeling it rattle slightly against my temple. “Nothing happens. I go home. I go back to school. I find some new extracurricular now that the library is closed.” I find some new friends, I added to myself. “I keep living.”
“So, the same stuff you would have done if you’d never found that postcard,” Jake said.
“I suppose. Except that there will be this little bit of time when I had hope. And it’s easier not to get something when you’d never even hoped for it in the first place.”
“I know,” Jake said. His fingers started making little tears in his now-empty sandwich wrapper. “It’s like the last time I had a birthday party. It was a few months before you showed up. The theme was Star Wars. My mom and I spent ages planning it. She got a piñata shaped like the Death Star and these cool glowing light sabers for party favors.” He fell silent.
After a moment, I prompted him. “So what happened?”
“Oh.” He shrugged elaborately. “Nobody came.”
“Oh, Jake.”
“Well, okay, Tyler came. But he was really embarrassed to be there when he realized that no one else was going to show up. And then I was embarrassed, too. It was just like one big embarrassment party. Or one small embarrassment party? Whatever.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, no, it was years ago. I don’t even care. I’m just saying, that’s the last time I tried to have a party, because you’re right: It’s easier not to get something when you’d never even hoped for it in the first place.”
Then he pulled out his sketch pad and leaned over it, painstakingly drawing from a photo that he’d taken earlier of our hotel’s façade. I watched him for a moment, but he didn’t look up at all.
I turned to look back out the window, at the lush green fields, the blue sky dotted with fluffy white clouds, the low scrub trees, and the occasional village with its red-tile-roofed clusters of buildings. I listened to the scraping of Jake’s pencil and the beeping of Noah’s cell phone game and the rustling of Rachel’s book pages and the clatter of wheels on train tracks, and I tried not to think about how each repetition of those noises brought me a little bit closer to Kitty—or to nothing at all.
Chapter 30
After we’d checked into our hotel in Florence, a yellowish-beige building with awnings and big windows looking out over the river, the first thing we did was go to the place from Kitty’s postcard: the Hotel Firenze.
“I don’t understand why you guys are so obsessed with seeing a hotel,” Noah grumbled as Jake and I led the way down narrow, zigzagging streets, trying to find the address from the back of the postcard. “If you love hotels so much, why not just go back to the hotel we’re staying in?”
“I have to say that I see Noah’s point,” Rachel agreed, taking the map back from Jake and flipping it around. “This city is filled with art, architecture, history, food, shopping—there’s more than we could ever hope to see in six days. Is a hotel really the priority?”
“Yes,” I said.
“This hotel’s supposed to have great art in it, too,” Jake volunteered. “It’s more like a museum with rooms in it than it is like a hotel. That’s what I read on their website.”
“Is that true?” I whispered to him as we hurried around another corner.
“Sort of,” he whispered back.
When we finally found the Hotel Firenze, I saw that he was correct. Inside the stately lobby, the walls were covered in paintings, and Jake immediately pulled out his sketch pad to start copying them down. One in particular caught my eye immediately. It showed a dense cluster of small, colorful buildings—pink, green, yellow, red, purple—all stacked together on a sheer rock cliff over a sparkling aqua body of water. It was captivating. Like a rainbow brought to life. The painting was named Manarola in Primavera (Manarola in the Spring), and I thought that if I kept exploring the world after this trip, Manarola in the spring was exactly the sort of place I would want to go.
“Charlotte?” a voice said, and I managed to tear my attention away from the painting. It was Jake. “Are you going to ask about Kitty?”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “Right.”
I squared my shoulders, turned away from the painting, and headed to the receptionist’s desk. Like everything else in this hotel, it was shiny, tall, and imposing. I stood on my toes to lean across the thick wood and ask, “Do you speak English?”
“Of course, signorina,” she said. “How may I help you?”
“I’m looking for a guest at the hotel,” I said. “Catherine McLaughlin.”
The receptionist’s fingers flew across the keyboard. When she didn’t say anything, I tried, “She might go by Kitty McLaughlin. That’s her nickname, you see. But she likes Catherine better, I guess. Because of the anagrams.”
The receptionist ignored that. “My apologies, signorina. We have no guests with that name.”
“Oh. Well, did you have someone with that name before?” I wasn’t surprised that Kitty was no longer staying here. Disappointed, but not surprised. And whenever she’d been here, I imagined the hotel might still have her phone number or address on file.
“When was she staying with us?” the receptionist asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Within the past week? Past month?” she prompted me.
“I don’t know,” I said again. “Can’t you just search for her name and tell me when she was here?”
The receptionist gave me a tight-lipped smile. “I am afraid our system does not work that way. And regardless, we do not give out such information about our guests, due to privacy concerns.”
“Oh.”
A middle-aged couple came
up behind me. “Guten Tag,” said the man, and the receptionist seamlessly switched into German to check them in.
When they left with their room key a few minutes later, I tried another tack. “Maybe you’ve seen a girl in this hotel before,” I said, “who’s around my age, and has the same accent as me, and the same color eyes, but blond hair?” I widened my eyes so she could make out the color.
“I’m sorry,” said the receptionist, not sounding very sorry at all. “So many guests pass through here, I really cannot say.”
“I’ll leave you my e-mail address,” I said, my voice quavering a little. “And if you see the girl I’m talking about, maybe . . . maybe you could give it to her?”
“Of course, signorina.” The receptionist handed me a postcard—the same postcard that Kitty had used, but a fresh one, with no handwritten message on the back. “You may write your e-mail address on here,” she told me.
So I did. And then, after another minute, I walked away from the desk, because I didn’t know what else to do.
I wandered around the lobby, weaving through big potted plants and small marble sculptures, hoping to see a clue without having the foggiest idea what a clue might look like. I found Jake, who was sitting on a pink upholstered bench. He snapped shut his sketchbook when he saw me coming.
“Let’s go,” I said to him.
He squinted his eyes up at me. “What did you find out?”
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
“Huh. So what are we going to do now? Like, what’s the next step?”
I rubbed my eyes. My brain felt fuzzy and dull. “I don’t know.”
“Are you ready to start sightseeing?” Rachel asked, walking up to us and looking at her watch.
Part of me wanted to stick around, just in case Kitty might show up all of a sudden. But the rest of me knew that wasn’t going to happen. “Sure,” I told Rachel. “We’re ready.”
We walked a few blocks over to the Duomo. “This is the main cathedral of Florence,” Rachel read to us from her guidebook, as we stood outside, craning our necks back to look up at the massive white building with intricate pink and green detailing. Tourists streamed past us, reading aloud from their own guidebooks, which I assumed said the same things as ours, in their own native languages. “Construction was begun in 1296 and completed in 1436,” Rachel went on. “This is the largest brick dome ever. And we can climb to the top of it! It’s four hundred and thirty-six steps. Are you kids up for that?” She didn’t bother to wait for our answer before she took off.
The climb took a very long time, through narrow passageways and spiral stairwells. Every time we came to the end of a flight, there was another in front of us. My legs ached, but at least I wasn’t scared of the height or the cramped quarters. Noah was scared—I could tell because he kept saying things like, “Why isn’t there an elevator here? Is it even legal to have a building without an elevator? What if there was a fire?”
“They hadn’t invented elevators in 1436,” Jake pointed out.
“Yeah, duh, Jake, I know,” snapped Noah, wiping sweat off his brow.
When we finally reached the top, I pressed myself to a railing, staring out at the city sprawled below. We were so high up that the wind blew my hair around my face, and it reminded me a bit of the way the wind used to whip at me across the Downs, a long time ago.
I looked out over the tiled roofs, seeing other church spires and towers rising in the distance. In the piazza below, I saw hundreds, maybe thousands of people swarming around like multicolored bugs. If they were Italian or American, old or young, if they were fighting or in love or strangers, I was too far removed to see it.
Suddenly I felt like Noah in the stairwells: terrified, dizzy. I had reached a dead end, and there were so many people. How could I ever hope to find Kitty among them?
Chapter 31
As our time in Florence ticked by, my mood grew worse and worse. That overwhelmed feeling from the top of the cathedral followed me everywhere, and I had no idea what to do about it. I felt rotten to my core, trailing the Adlers from one museum to the next with no real understanding of or interest in what I was seeing there.
Jake was the exact opposite. It was as if he grew into himself the longer we spent away from Sutton—he smiled more, opened his eyes wider, stood up straighter. He could spend hours in front of a single painting or sculpture at the Uffizi Gallery as he worked on mimicking the shading and dimensions in his own notebook.
Rachel got audio guides and read aloud from her guidebook so we had a constant running commentary on whatever sights we were seeing. Noah downed as many cups of gelato and espresso as he could and took to calling all the waitresses “bella,” which he told us was Italian for “beautiful.” (“So bilingual,” Jake told him. “Wow, you’re just so, so bilingual.”) Everyone found a place for themselves in Florence. Everyone except for me.
When we had only two days left on our trip, Jake snapped. Or, I guess, we both did. We were in his hotel room before going out for dinner. Jake was flipping through a comic book. Noah was in the lobby downstairs, probably flirting more with the receptionist. And I was sitting on his bed, trying to read a book but really just staring at Kitty’s postcard.
Jake gave a long sigh and noisily turned a page. “What are you doing, Charlotte?”
“Just reading,” I said. “I can go, if you want.”
“No, I mean, what are you doing, here, in Florence, in general.” He threw down his comic. “You’re not even trying to find your friend anymore. You really think you’re going to stumble across her by sitting in my hotel room? Of course not. And if you’ve decided to give up on looking for her, well, that’s your business. But then you should at least enjoy being on a cool vacation and stop acting like it’s torture for you to see world-famous Renaissance art. You know?”
I stared at him, open-mouthed. “I have not given up on looking for her,” I said, stung. “I found her postcard, I did so much research, I worked out a way to get to a whole other country—how dare you accuse me of not trying hard enough?”
“I’m not accusing you of anything,” Jake said. “I just think being all sad and looking at that postcard for the millionth time isn’t actually making anything happen. Maybe there’s something we’re missing, and we’re not going to find it by moping around.”
“Well, yes, Jake, obviously there’s something we’re missing,” I snapped. “And if you know what it is, I’m all ears!” I slammed my book closed. “You want to know something? Kitty and I used to pretend that we were psychic. We would practice reading each other’s minds. But it wasn’t real. None of that was real. If we were psychic, then I wouldn’t be sitting here all by myself right now.”
“You’re not,” Jake pointed out. “I’m here.”
“Yes, but you don’t even like me! You think I’m mean and boring and selfish—oh, and now you think I’m lazy and mopey, too—and the only reason you let me come along was so I could help you learn more about time travel. And now I can’t even do that.”
“Okay, yeah, I used to think you were mean and boring and selfish,” Jake said. “But . . . I don’t know. You’re a lot different than you seem to be.”
I shrugged.
“Why do you even hang out with those girls at school, anyway?” Jake asked, leaning forward. “Dakota and all of them. The more I get to know you, the more I don’t get it. You’re a lot better when you’re not with them.”
“I like them,” I said. “We have fun together.” Or we had fun together, before they stopped liking me. “And when I’m with them,” I added, “I don’t have to be alone.”
“What’s so bad about being alone?” Jake asked.
“You tell me, Jake. What’s so bad about it that you would bring me all the way to Italy, just so you wouldn’t have to be alone anymore? I think you’d know better than I would.”
Jake blinked
a number of times. “That’s mean,” he said quietly. It was the first time his voice had gone mumbly like that in days.
We sat in silence for a moment. I picked up my book again, put it down, and crossed and uncrossed my arms.
At last Jake spoke again. “I just don’t get why you have to change who you are in order to get people to like you.”
“I don’t think you even know who I really am,” I told him. “I don’t think anybody does.”
And I stood up and walked out of Jake’s room, letting his door slam shut behind me.
* * *
Maybe I’d thought that fighting with Jake would make me feel better, as if a few of my problems could somehow become his fault. But instead I just felt worse, like I’d doubled my misery rather than halving it. At the seafood restaurant where we had dinner two hours later, his mother said to him, “Do you want to give Charlotte her present now?”
“No, Mom,” Jake muttered, staring down at his swordfish. “It’s not ready yet, okay?”
“I think it looks great,” she disagreed.
“What present?” I asked. Those were the first words I’d spoken to Jake all evening.
He shrugged. “It’s just a dumb thing.” He reached into his bag, pulled out a piece of paper, and handed it to me. “Here.”
I recognized it immediately. It was a drawing of the Manarola in Primavera painting that had mesmerized me at the Hotel Firenze.
“Jake noticed how much you liked it, so he wanted to give you a copy all of your own,” Rachel said. “Isn’t that nice, Charlotte?”
“Yes,” I said. It was. It was so nice, I felt like my heart was cracking in two. Here was Jake, being so nice to me, and I couldn’t even be nice back.
After dinner, I changed into my pajamas and lay down on my cot at the foot of Jake’s mom’s bed. I wished I could go to sleep and wake up back at home.
“Charlotte,” Rachel said. She’d just emerged from brushing her teeth and putting all her creams and lotions on her face in the bathroom. She had a very long nighttime ritual, I’d noticed.