“Would you do this now?” Mark tries not to sound too eager. Now would be perfect. It would mean time away from the whole Nico problem.
Stefano laughs. “Oh no, no. Next summer. When I hope, Mark, that you and Catherine will come stay here, in beautiful Tuscany.”
Catherine gets very close to the statue and crouches to look up into the boy’s face. “Mark! Look.”
Mark crouches down next to a smiling Catherine. “What?”
“You haven’t seen him yet, so you can’t appreciate it, but this boy looks exactly like I imagine Nico will in a few years.”
Mark stands up and stumbles.
“Mark, are you all right?” Catherine touches his forehead, which is damp with sweat.
“I’m fine. Stood up too fast, I guess.” But his heart is racing. Something is very wrong here.
After two days in the car, they’ve arrived back at Giulia’s, or what Catherine now refers to as “our place.” Mark’s dull headache could be from the traffic. He was supposed to rest when Catherine drove, and he did try to nap, but always with one eye open watching the road and one foot on the fictional brake. Or maybe the headache has come from returning to Macri, the Nico problem not only unsolved but deepened. He can’t even tell—is Nico really there, or are his own nerves so shot from this whole awful lie he’s living that he’s seeing Nico in every boy who crosses his path? Or maybe he’s hallucinating. And with that thought, that admission, he understands with a sickening flash of clarity how Catherine has been feeling, how he has made Catherine feel with his deception.
Mark carries one suitcase from the car to the cottage while Catherine carries the other, walking a foot or so ahead and to his right. When she drops the key and stoops to pick it up, Mark gets a quick view of Nico standing off to the side in the middle distance. The child looks straight at Mark, his face blank, his stare blunt, stopping Mark in his tracks for a long, stomach-turning moment. But Mark recovers and continues to walk, glancing back several times at Nico, whose intent stare does not waver. Mark quickens his pace to catch up to Catherine. “Hey, Cath, everything OK?”
“Hm? Yeah. Why?”
“I saw you stop . . .” And I wondered how you missed seeing that child over there.
“Oh, yeah. I dropped the key.”
Beads of sweat cover Mark’s forehead. What had been an ordinary headache before has grown into a throbbing assault on his skull. “Cath?”
“Yeah?” Catherine is busy trying to reattach an ornate brass knob to the key chain.
“I—Nothing.” Mark looks over his shoulder and, as he was sure would be the case, Nico is gone.
The cool part of the day is gone, and the summer heat is building by the time Mark drags himself out of bed. What he wouldn’t give for an air conditioner in this bedroom. What he wouldn’t give for their own bedroom back in Brooklyn.
It’s no surprise that Catherine is already up and probably in her studio. The tables have turned: now he’s the one with nightmares, waking up every night in the week they’ve been back drenched in sweat and heart racing. Luckily, Catherine had accepted his explanation, given his lack of appetite as well, that the problem must be viral or something he ate. But she’s getting worried about his recent weird behavior, and so is he.
Trashed from the past several weeks of seeing Nico wherever he goes, the idea of what might be coming today exhausts him. He goes through the motions of showering and dressing, almost finishing before he’s even conscious of starting, and walks out to the kitchen. Of course, there’s no coffee to reheat because Catherine has taken to dumping it now that Giulia has let her know what a crime it is to drink leftover coffee. A little crime doesn’t sound so bad right now. As he grinds the beans and boils water, he begins what is already the third go-round of the day of fruitless obsessing about how to deal with this mess. Something his mother used to say to them when he and his brother were kids keeps going through his mind: “You’ve made your bed, now lie in it.”
He has the rest of this wretched day and all of tomorrow before he needs to be presentable enough to meet with potential clients as something other than a pale, sweaty guy with shaky hands who sees little boys around corners. That kid! What does he want? How does he get where he gets to? He must want to intimidate Mark and make him suffer for lying to Catherine. But what if it’s more than that? It feels like more. Why else would the kid track him down in Florence, for God’s sake? Or halfway up Mount-Goddamn-Etna. What ordinary—no, what normal—child would do that? Or could? If it’s even the same boy every time—if he isn’t just losing his mind.
It was bad enough before, but the day they’d come home was hard to ignore. Nico had been right there, but Catherine hadn’t noticed. Unless she’s gas-lighting Mark. Unless she knows he lied and is getting even. But that’s not at all like Catherine. Still, every time before, he’s managed to convince himself that there was a reason Catherine didn’t notice Nico or whatever boy looked like Nico that day. But yesterday—that’s tough. He’s terrified and not certain of what. He’s not even sure the kid is there most of the time, if he’s honest with himself. The thing that rattles him most is that he is forced to at least entertain the idea that Catherine is right and Nico is a ghost.
Mark stops when he realizes he’s pacing and possibly speaking out loud, that his breath is so ragged and so harsh that anyone who saw him would think he was having a heart attack. That last part’s crazy. Of course the child is there. Of course he’s no ghost. There are no ghosts. Catherine didn’t see him the other day because the sun was behind him. There was a glare; that’s all. Catherine’s shorter than he is by a good half foot. Surely that made a difference in her view. He’s wasting so much time and energy on this ridiculous crap. He’s got to pull himself together and go out to see Catherine.
Throughout the entire walk to the barn, he shakes his hands and arms, trying to get rid of the jittery sensation, grown all too familiar, that radiates from his heart to his fingertips. His stomach is in an uproar. He can’t recall—did he eat breakfast? At the barn, he stops before going through the doors, looking in to find Catherine working, and from all appearances, content and happy. Nico, who sits on the floor playing, looks up at Mark straightaway. There’s that face, that stare. That artless, frank, accusing, obnoxious stare. Words play through his mind in a childish chant—“malevolent, malodorous, malfeasant, malignant.” The image of an imposing evil witch—from a movie he watched as a child, one he can’t name and hasn’t thought of in thirty years—appears in his mind’s eye. It is only a moment before the witch looms over him, laughing, and his brain fills with a distorted sound, like music from a sad carousel slowed to a draggy dirge. Now, words from a nursery rhyme repeat in his head, slurred and deformed, ugly and threatening: “Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home. Your house is on fire. Your children will burn.” He clutches his head to make it stop, and when it does, he takes a moment to calm himself, covering his eyes to think. Nico has seen him, but Catherine has not. He checks, and she still shows no awareness of his presence, so he backs away, each footstep silent, ready to raise his hand and wave if Catherine should look up, relieved beyond words when she doesn’t. He can’t deal with this right now. When he’s sure he’s out of view of the barn, he turns back toward the cottage, defeated, hiding from his wife, doubting his own sanity but certain of one thing—he’s brought all this, whatever it is, on himself.
With the sun high overhead, a soaking-wet and exhausted Mark wades onto the northern shore of Mozia, Catherine a few steps ahead. Last night had been better than the previous half dozen—only one nightmare, and he’d gotten back to sleep after a single glass of wine. Catherine hadn’t ever noticed he was up. Mark drops to the sand beside her. “Well, it can be done.”
“I didn’t think quite so much of the last part of the road would be a full three feet under. It’s hard wa
lking in water that deep.”
“We’re taking the ferry back.”
“You won’t get an argument from me. But just so you know, it isn’t some big ferry. It’s a dinky little thing.”
Mark has just nodded off, but he jerks awake when Catherine stands up and takes a futile stab at brushing the coarse sand from the back of her wet jeans. “This isn’t coming off anytime soon. We’re going to look like mummies with all the dirt and dust here.”
Dragging himself to standing, Mark gives his pants a few lackadaisical brushes. Who’s going to see them, anyway? Catherine said the island is nearly empty. “You say where we’re headed isn’t far from here?”
“A really short walk. Come on.”
Where does she get the stamina in this heat and humidity? Only the coolness of his sodden clothes keeps him going. The path, though, is beautiful enough to make him forget his discomfort. He suspects they are going to the cemetery she mentioned the other night. “Cath, look at these ruins over here.” It looks like there are some good places to sit, and he’s pretty sure it’s not the damn cemetery.
“Can we do it on the way back? I really want to be sure you see this and have enough time to appreciate it.” It’s not too long before Catherine stops at a flat, open area. “Here it is. A Phoenician cemetery. Isn’t that crazy? Why isn’t it fenced off? Covered with swarms of archaeologists? Nothing is protected. From anything.”
Mark squats to look at the pottery on the ground. “These jugs—urns—you say they’re for ashes?”
“Let’s go sit over here, and I’ll tell you everything I know.”
When she’s done, Mark is as shaken as a sinner at a tent meeting. “I’m stunned. I vaguely remember something about Phoenicians and child sacrifice—and, of course, you mentioned it the other day—but this is way too real. These people did this to their own kids.” He looks out over the field of sad, small jars, jammed at odd angles all around the site. Their wide, round openings look like so many mouths set in Os of bewildered surprise, or like hollow eyes forlorn with the heartbreak of the innocent. The thought that each one represents a dead child, betrayed and abandoned by the two people that child trusted most—it overwhelms him. No wonder this had moved Catherine so. It’s understandable she might overreact. Anyone might. Mark turns his head at the soft sound of scrabbling in the dirt. An electric green lizard, out of place among this field of somber browns and tans, runs into a half-buried urn.
“Mark, don’t you see? This has to be where Nico is from. This empty, desperate place—this is what he calls home.”
“As sad as this is, Cath, I don’t see that at all.”
“I never told you this, but a couple of weeks ago, I was doing a drawing—of that stele over there. Nico corrected it. He knew that stele so well, he was able to fix the details.”
“That doesn’t prove anything. Maybe he comes here with his friends.”
“You’re talking about him as if he were an ordinary child, not one you looked right through. Twice, Mark. Twice!”
“There has to be an explanation for that.”
“OK. Let’s say there is. How does he get between here and Macri, then? We showed today—he can’t walk, not at his height. And anyway, he’s not wet when he arrives, so he doesn’t swim either.”
“I have no idea, Catherine, I—this is confusing. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I think we’re going to look back on it and laugh someday. Because Nico as a sacrificed child simply makes no sense. The situation here—it’s tragic. It’s sickening. And I understand—it makes you want to do something about it. But we can’t. And it has nothing to do with Nico. To think that it does—it’s crazy. I don’t know what else to call it. Even if I thought he was a ghost, which I don’t.”
Catherine’s tone becomes all business. “I want to stay in Sicily, Mark. I’ve given it a lot of thought, and I don’t want to go back to New York. Not yet. Maybe after a while, we could go back and take Nico with us, but not now.”
“Take Nico with us? What are you talking about?”
“I want us to make a life here with Nico. His parents threw him away like trash, cheated him out of his life. We can make that right. We can stay here and give a needy little boy a chance he never had. We can raise him like our own son.”
Mark stands up and looks down at Catherine. “Do you hear yourself?” He paces, rubbing his face. “Stay here? Adopt a ghost boy? And live where? On a goat farm or something?” He stops and looks back at Catherine. “Tell me, if Nico is a ghost, well, how does that work exactly? What if I never see him? Do you expect me to be happy spending my life living in the middle of nowhere with an invisible son?”
“I think we can make it work, Mark. I—we—got chosen by Nico for a reason.”
“Yeah. To do penance for the sins of the Phoenicians. That’s nuts! The blood of those children is not on our hands.”
Catherine stands and touches Mark’s arm. He turns to face her. Her voice softens. “He’s a child. We have to at least try.”
“Look, what we have to do is go back to New York. We have a life there. And I haven’t wanted to tell you until I was more sure it’s going to be doable, but I’ve been working on a plan—through the firm at home—to bring American investment here. Not just limit our involvement to providing plans and working with builders, but bring money to the table too. The firm would get healthy fees for setting up the investment. And with more capital available to the farm owners, they can afford to do more. We can modernize some of these places and set them up for tourism in ways some of these folks can only dream of. Not just Roberto, but others too, a lot of others.”
Catherine is shaking her head.
“Listen to me, Cath. We can make a lot of money on this. Us personally. Our life could be something—something you can’t even picture. I’ve met people—you’d love them. They’d love you. And they have it all, Cath. Time home in New York. Time here in Italy. We could live where we want in New York and come back to Italy all the time. Whenever we wanted.”
“And visit your new Club Meds?”
“That’s not fair. That’s not at all what I have in mind. Look, these are people who want to keep their family land, but they’re struggling. They need income from the land to make it work. They can’t have only one or two guests and make a go of it. They need to be able to accommodate more people—”
“So you’ll build a—a—fifty-room Holiday Inn where their barn used to be.”
“No!” Mark’s frustration grows as he sees that Catherine isn’t even listening. “Some places need to put up four guests. Some want room for as many as a dozen. Maybe a place to serve breakfast. Or even dinner using the produce of their own farms. But in every case, the new buildings will be modest. They’ll match the rural nature of the originals.”
“I never thought you would be willing to destroy authentic character for profit—”
“You’re passing judgment, and you haven’t even seen what I’m proposing. If you’d just listen for a minute—”
“It wouldn’t matter. I like these places the way they are, and I don’t want to make money by ruining them. Why would you? I don’t even know who you are anymore.”
All Mark can read on Catherine’s face is disdain. Never in his life has he felt so boxed in. He’s furious—with Catherine, with himself, and with that damn kid. He drops his head and rubs his eyes to soothe the pain behind them. When he looks up, he sees what he’s been fearing he would see all day. Near the road and to his right, Nico stands. Terror blends in with the anger, and a fuzzy buzzing begins in his ears along with fractured, distorted bits of the nursery rhyme that has been haunting him since yesterday—“Your house is on fire . . . your house is on fire . . .” His entire body gears up to run, a horrible sensation he does his best to hide. It’s close to more than
he can take. When the boy meets his gaze, the pounding in his head grows more ferocious than he thought possible, and he’s quite sure he’s about to faint for the first time in his life. He turns back toward Catherine, who shows no sign of noticing Nico. She looks so sad and so hurt that he loathes himself again, an all-too-familiar feeling lately. With a few moments of clarity to figure things out, he could get a handle on this whole fucking fiasco. If he doesn’t come apart first. If he doesn’t have a stroke on this godforsaken island.
Things have gone too far. There are only two ways out of this wreckage. He can undermine Catherine’s self-confidence and make her believe she’s imagined Nico—that’s one way. But he’d have to be a heartless monster to do that. The only other way is to admit he can see the boy.
They need to get in step again, and he needs Catherine back, the way it used to be. Catherine is the one he wants to go to, to tell her about Nico’s unnerving presence in his life, real or imagined. To seek her comfort. More than that, he needs Catherine to need him again. He can fix it if she’ll forgive him—something he’s never worried about before. Then he can meet Nico, and surely the boy will leave him alone after that. And even if it’s only a guilty conscience that’s been stalking him, well, coming clean about seeing Nico would take care of that too.
Catherine comes in and goes straight to the sink to wash the clay from her hands. Even after ten years together, small things about her move him—the slight asymmetry of her mouth, her unconscious habit of rubbing her right elbow when she’s thinking, the way she stands with one hip to the side as she does right now.
“Hey, come be with me, Cath. Please?”
Looking tentative, Catherine sits on the opposite end of the couch, turning to lean her back against the lumpy arm, feet up on the cushions, forming a barrier between them. Mark takes her feet into his lap and massages them. “Tired?”
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