The Book of Second Chances

by Katherine Slee

  “Yes.” But her head shook itself no. Because she wasn’t sure. Not now. Not when she had brought them here by mistake.

  “We could always call ahead?” Phoebe suggested. “Just in case.”

  “No.” How could she call up a man she had never met—or had she? Something was there, a man’s voice, low and strong. But it was all hidden behind a layer of doubt, of confusion, so she wasn’t able to figure out if it was real or just the memory of something she was searching for but couldn’t reach, cobbled together from whatever story her grandmother had told. Reality and fiction always puddled together, making it so hard for Emily to try to see the difference between the two.

  “Giancarlo Delucci,” Tyler said as he read from the screen of his phone. “Together with his late wife Virginia, Signor Delucci wrote a bestselling collection of Italian cookbooks and opened a two-star Michelin restaurant in the heart of Verona.”

  “Sounds like our guy,” Phoebe said.

  Tyler turned the phone around, showed Emily a picture of a man standing by a workbench, rolling out sheets of pasta and smiling back at the camera. Back in Norfolk, there was a black-and-white photograph on the mantelpiece in the living room of Gigi wearing a lace wedding dress. She was being kissed by a man, tall and thin, with a sunflower in a buttonhole. The man was the same as in the photograph Tyler had gleaned from the Internet, only Emily had never seen his whole face before.

  All the people her grandmother adored but never took her to see. People who were a part of her world, her life, but became nothing more than memories after her parents died.

  Emily wondered why she had spent so little time with her grandmother before. What was it that made her such a fleeting part of her childhood? Catriona had spent her whole life traveling, exploring, living, and then all of a sudden she had stopped. It was as if she had simply cut herself free from the past in order to protect her family.

  “She’s dead,” Emily said, realizing that her mother wasn’t the only person her grandmother had loved and lost. She began to fear that there was something more about meeting Giancarlo than simply retrieving another book, another clue.

  “Who’s dead?” Phoebe said, rubbing at her leg and ignoring the look on Tyler’s face.

  “Gigi.” Despite the heat, Emily shivered, felt the hairs along her arms all stand up in a row, because she was beginning to think that this quest, this puzzle, had nothing to do with the books after all.

  “You just said the dedication was for Giancarlo.” Tyler began to gather all his belongings together, checked his watch, then his phone.

  “It is.” I think. She brushed at her arms, waited for the momentary chill to pass.

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  The problem was that Emily had no desire to arrive on the doorstep of an elderly man and ask him about his dead wife. And if she was wrong, if Giancarlo wasn’t the next person she was supposed to find, she would be subjecting him to painful, horrible memories that he had probably spent most of his life trying to forget.

  Emily pushed back her chair and stood up. “I want to go,” she said, picking up her suitcase and making sure it was zipped shut.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to call first?” Tyler tossed some coins onto the table as a tip.

  “No.” Emily started to walk away. “I want to go home.”

  Something was telling her to flee, to get as far away from Rome and Verona and all of her grandmother’s memories as fast as she possibly could. There was no sense to it, no rhyme nor reason for the murky sensation in her stomach. But it was there, a slither of fear mixed through with doubt. Something that seemed to be warning her about what was waiting just around the corner, if she didn’t run.

  “You can’t go home.” Tyler grabbed her arm, forced her to stop.

  “Why not?” Emily could see Phoebe hovering just behind, and she wanted to shout at her, to tell her to stop looking, stop listening, just stop being there, to leave her alone. For them both to leave her alone.

  He hesitated, looked away and down, which told her all she needed to know and more.

  “The money.”

  “No, not just the money. I mean, yes, your money. Your inheritance. Your home, Emily. It’s not there unless you see this thing through.”

  She shook herself free of him. “What if I don’t want to?”

  “You don’t have a choice.”

  Emily hated him in that moment, simply because he was right. “I could go to my aunt.”

  Tyler frowned. “The one in New York?”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re being ridiculous.”

  Probably true, given that Emily hadn’t seen her since her twenty-first birthday, when her aunt and her husband did nothing but talk about how fantastic their lives were. They were the sort of people who would point out a crooked painting on the wall, or say that the lawn needed mowing.

  Her father’s sister. A woman whose face was as starched as her shirt, with a choker of pearls around her scrawny neck, hair like a helmet, and two boys dressed identically in blazers and bow ties. Of course she couldn’t go and stay with them; it would be even more torturous than traveling through Europe with Tyler and his annoying girlfriend.

  “What’s one more day?” Tyler called out as Emily walked away. “Come on, Emily, you’ve come this far, it would be stupid to walk away now.”

  “Go home, Tyler,” she shouted back. “Or stay here, with her. Either way, I really don’t care.”

  The weight of summer fell over her skin as she walked. Heat stuck to every surface, the copper light of dusk that graced the surface of the water as she looked down from the stone wall of the Ponte Umberto bridge. She stared at the reflection of mottled clouds and black trees that stretched to the banks of the river and wished upon wish she could wake up to discover it had been nothing but a dream.

  Emily thought of all the lessons her grandmother had taught her. She was always asking her to look beyond the facts, to push her mind further than rational thought. Her way of teaching had shown Emily how everything in the world was somehow connected. Like water, which traveled all over the globe in a never-ending cycle of life and death, making you realize just how insignificant one life, one person, could actually be.

  A soft swish of leaves as a warm breeze stirred the sleepy city. Ahead was the silhouetted dome of the Vatican. Inside those walls was a ceiling painted by Michelangelo, a masterpiece that he never wanted to work on and that took him years to complete. It was incredible and ridiculous all at once.

  She could go and look upon it with her own eyes, search out all the clues, all the suggestions that there was more to the painting than you saw at first glance. The secrets Michelangelo hid in plain sight, just as she had done in all of her grandmother’s books. People have a habit of ignoring what’s right in front of them, choosing to see only what they want to, not what they should.

  Emily started to become aware of something that didn’t quite fit, that shouldn’t be—a sensation which made her stand a little straighter, hold her breath, because the dome seemed to be moving, vibrating, and with it came the sound of…of what? Emily stretched her neck to see, to hear a hum, a crackle, as thousands upon thousands of black dots emerged from the top of the church.

  It was like a cloud, a moving and expanding cloud that changed from one second to the next into fantastical shapes. Except it wasn’t a cloud at all.

  Starlings. A murmuration of starlings that seemed to expand and retract like an accordion, painting pictures in the sky as they swarmed up and over the city.

  Emily saw shadowy shapes that broke then fitted back together, deep pockets of black that fragmented into individual birds, all those wings that rustled and swooped in the darkening sky. The sound made her think of breaking waves on the shore back home. A storm approaching. The wind pushing and pulling the air back and forth. It seeped right into her soul, made her ache for the absence of her family, made her afraid to be alone.

  Then it was done. The bird
s moved on, and the city seemed too quiet, too still. Emily turned to see Tyler standing at the end of the bridge, waiting for her.

  17

  HUMMINGBIRD

  Trochilidae

  It was raining, thin lines of wet running down the train window as they sped through the Italian countryside.

  The rain was a completely inconsequential observation, it was always raining somewhere on the planet, but Emily realized the weather was something she used to pay attention to. It used to set the mood, the plan for the day, determined when to go for a walk, or if they would visit a garden center, plant some seedlings, bring the washing in before the storm arrived. It would make her decide if it should be meatballs or barbeque for dinner, and whether she needed to take a jumper when she cycled into town.

  Still dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, Emily felt the chill on her bare limbs as she rummaged through her bag for another layer. As she shrugged on a thin black cardigan, she thought about how unstructured, how spontaneous, her life had become, which seemed ridiculous, given she was being sent in a very clear direction.

  When was the last time I had a bath? she wondered. When had she last lazed underneath warm bubbles and lost herself in a book? She stared out of the window, rain smudging the view, and tried to think of the last moment she had spent at rest, at peace.

  Tyler had turned everything upside down. The feeling of being alone, of being separated from the world, had only intensified since Rome. She could still remember the sensation of being carried in his arms, feel the vibration of his heart, beating against her own.

  Her sketchbook lay open, revealing a few pictures earlier made of the starlings, all the shapes that she had seen. But they wouldn’t quite come together in the way that she wanted, and all she had so far was just a tangled mess of lines that vaguely resembled a tornado.

  Phoebe and Tyler sat close to each other in the seats opposite. Her legs were tangled up in his lap, and she stroked his hair while they had a halfhearted argument about Romeo and Juliet. Emily had tuned them out, tried instead to focus on the pitch and timbre of voices from the other passengers, not caring that she had no idea what was being said.

  There was a woman on the phone, having a heated discussion with someone on the other end. Her words were like staccato drums, every so often rising into a shout that seemed to explode, like the blast from a trumpet, and make the elderly man seated next to her jump.

  An orchestra of words. Emily swapped seats, peered behind her down the aisle as she mentally put each person in the carriage into a different section of the orchestra. The children would be the strings, all fighting one another for attention; the group of women hunched close together could be flutes, their whispers and laughter skipping over the surface of all the other instruments. Then the man at the far end, trussed up in a three-piece suit and frowning at his computer screen, a bass drum, perhaps, or even cymbals that he would clash together theatrically when he found the answer to whatever was causing that line between his eyes.

  “You agree, don’t you?”

  Emily turned as Phoebe leant across to her, tapped her lightly on the back of her hand.

  “Sorry, what?”

  “It’s a romance, not a tragedy.”

  “They die,” Tyler said. “Not very romantic.”

  “Yes, but it reunites the two families,” Phoebe argued. “It’s not romance in its purest sense, but because of what it creates. The sense of sacrifice, not only for the lovers, but their friends as well. It’s about all kinds of love, not just sex.”

  “It’s a catalog of errors, and they both kill themselves because they’re too stupid to realize what’s actually happening.” This last part was delivered while looking straight at Emily, waiting to see how she would respond.

  “What is it about men and Shakespeare?” Phoebe punched Tyler playfully, rolled her eyes at Emily.

  “What is it about women and their need for a happily ever after?” he said.

  “I’m not taking sides.” Emily picked up her pen, began to recreate the idea she had about turning words into music, an idea she had first come across when sitting in a store back in Norfolk, listening to the bookseller telling her about the puzzle her grandmother wanted her to solve.

  Five days gone, Emily thought to herself. Only five more left to go.

  Turning down the volume on all the conversations, she began to hum a tune, one that her grandmother always played whenever she felt in need of a pick-me-up. Her magical go-to that never failed to see both of them leaping about the kitchen, then collapsing in a pile of laughter and exhaustion as “Dancing Queen” came to an end.

  Emily smiled as she realized she had been drawing an orchestra of birds. Hummingbirds, which were sort of her own go-to, her favorite. She had first discovered one on holiday in France and mistaken it for a giant bee. They were mesmerizing, with their incredible, iridescent colors, the speed with which those tiny wings would beat. It was a fascination that resulted in her disappearing during one trip to the Natural History Museum, when Tyler accused her of running away. All she had wanted was to see a real one, albeit stuffed, motionless, so that she might try to capture some of that brightness on paper.

  “So you do remember?” Tyler was smiling at her, at her work, while he sat forward in his chair.

  “Hummingbirds can fly in the rain,” she replied without looking up, then added a bow to one of the birds that sat at the front, holding a violin.

  “Can’t all birds fly in the rain?” Phoebe asked, picking at a cuticle on her finger.

  “They have no sense of smell, and their tongues look like feathers.” But it was their colors she loved most of all. The blur of wing which changed the pigment, the fragmentation of light that turned into all possible hues on the spectrum. Every time she looked at one, she saw something new.

  “She’s like a walking bird encyclopedia,” Tyler said as he stood. “Anyone want anything from the buffet car?”

  Emily shook her head and tapped her pen against the side of the can of cola she was yet to finish. It was her third and she could feel the caffeine inside her veins, making her jittery and nervous. Or at least that’s what she’d been telling herself. Nothing to do with where they were headed, or whom they were supposed to find.

  The possibility that she had got it wrong, again. Or even the possibility that she hadn’t. There was a feeling, a lingering feeling she couldn’t ignore. Gigi was dead. Her grandmother was dead. So what could be the message she was about to be given, by a man who had known them both, before tragedy split apart their love?

  “You two going to be okay while I’m gone?” Tyler asked as he looked between the two women.

  “You’re not my babysitter.” Only it felt as if he was, because she had never been trusted to do anything alone.

  Tyler left, and Emily did her best to ignore Phoebe, even though she could see her shifting in her seat, trying to look closer at what it was Emily was drawing.

  “What made you change your mind about carrying on?”

  “The birds.” The starlings, with all their movement, their frantic activity, yet still protecting one another, always flying as one.

  “You like birds.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

  “No, not bad.” She turned to look out of the window, at the blur of muted greens and yellows. “Did you always like them?” Phoebe said, breathing on the windowpane, then using her finger to draw a simple flower that slowly faded away.

  “I guess so.”

  The first picture Emily had ever drawn was of her favorite toy. Then butterflies and flowers and fairies. Hundreds upon hundreds of fairies whom she liked to imagine lived at the bottom of the garden. Tiny, magical people who rode on the backs of all the rabbits who came to visit and one day would take Emily off on an adventure, somewhere far away. Perhaps to their secret kingdom on top of a mountain, hidden by pink clouds spun like sugar.

  Emily turned to a clean page, began to create a series of concentric cir
cles that formed into a path that led to a castle made of stone. It was somewhere she had never been, but her grandmother once showed her the pictures and told Emily it was a clearing, a mystery of a place, near her childhood home. Then she sat with her by the fire and shared what she could remember about the folklore that surrounded the faery glen.

  Emily searched her mind for the first time her grandmother had told her the story, knew it was from long before. She could almost taste the chicken soup bubbling away on the stove in a kitchen, at the back of a Victorian terrace in London, where she and her grandmother would sit, dunking butter-laden bread into steaming bowls while the cat slept in the corner, in a circle of autumn sunshine. A house that once was her home, then was sold, passed on to a family new.

  So long ago. It felt like the memory belonged to someone else’s life. To a little girl who would sit on her parents’ bed, sketchbook open on her lap, watching her mother seated at her dressing table in a gown made from pale blue silk. A child who was mesmerized by the sight of her mother putting on her makeup, getting herself ready for a night at the opera.

  Emily shook her head as she ripped out the sheet from her sketchbook, scrunched it tighter and tighter, then tossed it aside.

  Phoebe watched without saying a word. She must have seen what it was Emily had drawn. The lines that seeped from the circles, twisted and turned themselves into a picture Emily had kept locked away. Surely she must wonder why Emily decided to destroy the image of a woman, seated by a mirror, brushing her hair?

  “It must be hard.” Phoebe picked up the discarded piece of paper, put it back down again. “To be the only one left.”

  You have no idea, Emily thought as she smoothed out a fresh page.

  “Sometimes pain is necessary, to enable you to recognize when you finally feel better.” Phoebe took a long, slow breath, the exhale coming out as a judder. “I used to hurt myself.”

  Emily looked up. Phoebe was staring out of the window, but Emily could see in the reflection that she was trying not to cry.