But as he had told Mouse last night, Angelo was comfortable with not normal. He had never limited himself to the ordinary or conventional—his life had taught him that there was more beyond what we could see and explain. He always kept himself open to possibilities, maybe too much sometimes. At seminary they called him their New Age priest, teased him by humming the theme to The X-Files whenever he came into a room. Now all his senses screamed at him that Mouse was something special.
And he wasn’t a fool either. As he watched her lift the cup of coffee to her lips, he knew full well there was also something all too normal at work. His path to the Church had been unconventional, to say the least, and he knew exactly what he would be sacrificing when he finally took those vows. But Angelo had never questioned that part of his commitment to the Church—until last night in the shower when Mouse had really looked at him for the first time and said his name. He had to figure out what was going on, but spending hours trapped in his flat, alone with Mouse, wasn’t going to help.
“Hey, listen,” he said. “I have a friend who asked me to snap some cover shots for this album he’s putting together, and I finally had an idea last night. The Parco dei Mostri—Monster Park. It’s about an hour north of here. Bishop Sebastian might be a little brassed off about having to wait another day for the pictures of Santa Maria, but I can’t get this Monster Park idea out of my head. It’ll be amazing at sunset. Anyway, I thought maybe you’d like to get out for a while.”
He waited a moment for a response, but Mouse didn’t have one yet.
“If you don’t feel up to it, that’s all right. But the parking’s good and the walking’s easy,” he said. “And your ankle seems to be better today. I guess it wasn’t broken after all.”
Mouse knew she had to return to the real world sometime. Angelo and this flat were all just make-believe, and she was only delaying the inevitable by staying. “I’m not sure. All that walking—”
“Think about it. I’ve got a couple of errands to do, but I’ll be back in a bit.”
As soon as he left, Mouse considered taking off on her own. She tested her ankle and made it around the flat by leaning heavily on the wall. But when she came to the open doorway leading into Angelo’s room, the pictures drew her in.
The room was tidy and the bed claimed most of the small area, but the walls were covered with different sizes of black-and-white photos in simple black frames. The largest of these, covering most of the wall at the head of Angelo’s bed, captured the curve of a river with some buildings in the background and a garden in the front. The light in the picture made the water seem like it was moving; the leaves on the trees looked like they were rippling in the wind.
The other pictures were of statues, church exteriors, and faded frescoes—dead things. Mouse had studied as much religious art as she had religious history over the years, and she assessed Angelo’s work with a critical eye. He played with the light somehow, making the concrete and frozen figures seem as though they were moving and slipping beyond their constraints, past the boundaries of wall or frame. Mouse wondered what effect his style would have on a living subject.
“Found my pictures?”
Mouse jumped at the sound of his voice. “I’m sorry. I didn’t—I didn’t mean to snoop. I was testing my ankle, and then I saw the pictures on the wall and . . . I wasn’t even thinking. I just got caught in the pictures. I’m—”
“Mouse, relax. They’re only pictures. It’s not like you went through my stuff.” After a pause, he dipped his head close to hers. “You didn’t, did you? Go through my stuff?”
“No!” She looked up, horrified, but he was smiling. She smiled back, but it slipped away quickly; she was letting her guard down and it frightened her.
“So what’d you think?” he asked, nodding to the pictures on the wall.
“They’re . . . interesting.”
“Uh-oh.”
“No. I mean they’re more than beautiful. They make me think. Really interesting, you know. Engaging. I want to go to these places. I want to see them the way you did when you took the pictures. I want to know what you’re doing with the light.” The rush of words captured her enthusiasm for his work more than anything she said.
He sat on the bed next to her. “You sound like you know what you’re talking about. Do you take pictures?”
“No.”
He cocked his head, studying her. “You paint then? Draw maybe?”
Mouse gave a quick, tight shake of her head. “Not for a long time.” She needed to make him stop asking questions. “Where’d you learn photography?”
“I taught myself these last few years at seminary. I needed something besides dogma and theology. Not the best creative outlets, you know?”
“Why don’t you take pictures of people?”
“I’ve tried. They’re just not very good. They seem, I don’t know, dead, flat. I guess I’m just not good with people. Hey, look, I’ve got something for you.” He disappeared for a moment and came back carrying a wooden cane.
Mouse rolled her eyes. “For the decrepit old lady.”
He laughed as he handed it to her.
The car seat was stained with drops of her blood from the other night. As they merged with traffic onto the Autostrada A1, Angelo caught her rubbing at one of the spots with her thumb.
“Don’t worry about it. They match the coffee stains on this one.” He nodded down at the spotted seat.
Embarrassed, Mouse gave him a quick nod and then decided to beat him to the uncomfortable questions game this time. “So you sing, you take amazing pictures, you rescue strangers, and you’re giving up your life to God. Anything else? Master chef? Piano virtuoso? Juggler?”
“If I’m all that, I might need to revisit St. Benedict’s twelve steps to humility.”
“‘The eighth step of humility is reached when a monk only does that which the common rule of the monastery and the examples of his Elders demands,’” Mouse quoted playfully.
“Impressive. You really were raised Catholic. And I’m pretty sure I’ve completely botched that one,” he chuckled. “I’m not good at following rules that don’t make sense to me.”
“A rebel priest?”
“The Bishop would certainly say so. And to answer your question: I tried it once. Total failure.”
“What’s that?”
“Juggling.” He smiled. “But I do play piano . . . and guitar.” He sounded odd about the last, as if he hadn’t wanted to say it.
“Can I hear you play sometime?”
“I don’t have a piano.”
“How about guitar?”
“No.”
His answer was sharp and quick. Mouse understood instantly that she’d crossed a line, stepped too close to something personal. But she didn’t know how to recover their light banter, and Angelo seemed to have gone off somewhere in his head, so they rode in awkward silence.
Finally, as Angelo pulled the car through a sharp curve, Mouse saw the sign, an invitation in English: WELCOME TO BOMARZO’S MONSTER PARK. It reminded her of the SEE ROCK CITY bird feeder the former tenants left in the backyard at her house in Nashville. She and Bodie used to sit for hours in the early spring mornings watching the chickadees and nuthatches feed. Bodie would paw the window and chatter; Mouse had wondered what cat curses he flung at them. Her throat tightened at the thought as they made the turn into the park entrance.
Angelo came around to help her out of the car, but she waved him away, pushed her weight onto the cane, and managed by herself. While he gathered his camera equipment, she made her own way through the lot and up a worn path. A stone phoenix greeted her, taunting with its promise of renewal: You had to die before you could be reborn. Mouse believed in signs, too. Maybe it was time for her to leave when they got back to Rome.
As she broke through the line of trees, Mouse stopped. Huge stone figures jutted from the uneven ground. Parts of them were visible through the thick canopy, but she couldn’t quite make out what kinds of crea
tures they were. She knew about this place, Bosco Sacro, the sacred wood, but she had never been here. She had seen countless gardens and sculptures over the years, so she was surprised at her sense of wonderment. She knew the sad story of the prince who went off to war and, at the command of his pope, murdered the sons of a Spanish village and burned their daughters in the church. Not long after he returned home, his wife died. Mouse knew that most scholars believed Prince Orsini had built Bosco Sacro out of grief at the loss of his wife. But Mouse thought his inspiration came from something else—guilt and a hope of redemption. Inclusus came in many forms.
“What do you think?” Angelo asked as he came up the path behind her.
“I want to see the rest of it,” she said.
They wandered the park together looking at the exaggerated features of dragons and ogres, the mammoth eyes and swollen mouths of nymphs and gods shaped by some unknown hand out of stone tossed up by the earth as Fate would have it. Mouse understood the melancholy and anticipation hanging on them like the centuries of moss slowly eating their features. They seemed to be waiting for something and dreading it all the same.
Mouse’s ankle finally forced them to sit. She kept a careful gap between her and Angelo. The park was a reminder that she couldn’t afford to play make-believe. Her world held far too many real demons.
“So what do you think of Orsini’s masterpiece?” Angelo asked again.
“He must have been in agony. Torn.” She let the sadness of the place seep into her voice.
“Torn?”
“You can see his conflict everywhere,” she explained. “‘Know yourself. Conquer yourself,’ he says in one place, and then tells us to ‘Eat. Drink. Play. After death there is no pleasure.’” And for some of us, not even the peace of death, Mouse thought to herself.
“He’s displaying all his appetites,” she continued. “Big mouths, big breasts, graphic violence—and yet he builds a placid temple for his dead wife. He’s full of reverence for his Christianity but the Church seems like a predator here. And the pagan images—the dragons, the monsters, the gods and goddesses—they’re the ones with all the emotion. His faith is trapped in Latin while his life is ripping at the seams.”
Angelo stared at her.
She smiled at him. “I guess maybe now would be a good time to tell you that I’m a professor. History and religious art.”
“How’d that happen?”
The deadpan look on Angelo’s face made her laugh and the sound startled her. It was a natural and spontaneous laugh, a normal laugh, not part of some crafted ruse or mask she was choosing to wear. It was just her, Mouse, laughing. Her surprise silenced her and she turned away.
But Angelo had seen the transformation in her face and eyes as she laughed; she had been fully alive for a moment. With him. He couldn’t deny how that made him feel, though he couldn’t explain it either.
He nudged her leg with his. “Hey, where’d you go?”
“Nowhere. In my head I guess.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“Look, Mouse, I’m sorry about earlier. In the car. About the guitar.”
“It doesn’t matter. I didn’t mean to pry.”
“No, it’s not you. I just don’t talk about that part of my life. I left it behind when I met the Bishop and decided to—” Angelo sighed and glanced over at her. “My mum had already started teaching me the guitar before she was killed. Later, I got really good at it, played at some local festivals, and someone from the Hampstead Fine Arts College heard me, offered a scholarship, and I was on my way to London. But it got—” He paused and blew another sigh. “It got really competitive. I was constantly practicing or travelling. There wasn’t time for anything else. I couldn’t make friends. It was all too cutthroat. So I quit.”
Mouse had the impression that there was something else Angelo was holding back. “And decided to become a priest?” she asked.
“Something like that.” He wouldn’t look at her. “Bishop Sebastian, the Father I spoke to on the phone, he’s the one who helped me discover my . . . I didn’t know what I wanted to do. He was there for me. He got me into seminary.”
“Isn’t God supposed to do the calling?”
“You haven’t met Bishop Sebastian.” He paused. “I guess some of us need help listening.” He pushed the hair back from his face. “So anyway, that’s why I don’t play guitar.”
After a moment, Mouse decided to ease the tension. “So you are a virtuoso. Good grief!”
“Hey, you’re the one who wrote a dissertation about Vicino Orsini’s dualism while sitting among the tourists in Monster Park,” he teased. “What else can you do?”
The intimacy of the question made her uncomfortable, but Mouse wanted to thank him for sharing something of himself with her. She knew how much that cost a person. So she did the same.
“You see the couple there? He’s about to take her hand and pull her toward the left fork in the path. She’ll reach up and tuck that bit of hair behind his ear and whisper something to him.” Seconds after she said it, they did it.
“Lucky guess,” Angelo said.
“Oh ye of little faith.” Mouse watched tourists for a moment. “See that little boy? He’s going to stumble just there past the sign. He’ll cry for his father.”
“Not the mum?”
“Nope. Just watch.” Mouse nudged his shoulder. “And there’s an old man who’ll come back down the path from the Proserpina statue. He’ll be walking fast, his wife coming behind him. They’ll be angry with each other.”
Angelo crossed his arms and leaned back on the bench and waited. Then watched it all play out exactly as Mouse predicted.
He turned to her, stunned and sure that his instincts at the church had been right. Mouse was something special. “How the hell did you do that?”
She wanted to tell him that, as they had walked the park and studied the statues, she had noted every person they passed, assessed their age, weight, height—and the level of threat they posed. She’d observed the tender looks the father had given his son while the mother seemed distracted and aloof. She could tell him every license plate she had passed in the parking lot and give him summaries of more than a dozen conversations she had overheard. But she couldn’t tell him the truth, and she wouldn’t lie to him either—she was sick of lies.
“A magician never reveals her secrets,” she said coyly.
“Come on, Mouse. Give it up.” He laid his arm across her shoulders; she muffled a groan of pain as his hand brushed her bruise.
“Don’t you have pictures to take?” she asked. “The sun’ll be setting soon.”
He leaned down, his eyes searching her face for an answer. Mouse started picking at a rough spot on the bench, but then he laughed and shook his head. “We’re not done with this,” he said as he grabbed his camera and tripod.
She followed him as he tested shots of different statues from various angles. The artist in him took over as he settled at the statue of a dragon frozen in combat with a lion and lioness, its breast forever mauled by the lion’s jaws. Mouse saw how Angelo moved to catch the fading sunlight as it hit the stone in specific places. His khakis pulled tight against his thighs as he knelt, his hands sure but gentle as they shifted the camera, the light playing in his hair—it woke something sleeping in Mouse. She’d fought against the natural cravings of a lonely body many times over the years, but this attraction ran much deeper, like some part of her was already weaving itself into Angelo’s life. But she couldn’t let that happen.
She left him and went in search of a distraction and found Vicino’s Mouth of Hell. The statue of a monster wept strings of moss, its mouth creased in a perpetual wail with Dante’s warning carved in its lips: “Abandon all reason, you who enter here.” But Vicino had gotten the line wrong, as Mouse knew well. Dante warned Hell’s visitors to give up their hope, not their reason. It was what she’d promised to do as she fled Nashville—give up hope of a normal life—yet her
e she was, hoping again.
Suddenly, the hairs stood up on the back of Mouse’s neck. She could have sworn she heard her name whispered in the ogre’s mouth. The sun had dropped below the tree line. She stood as still as the statues around her and tried to sense movement in the darkness of Vicino’s Mouth of Hell. She saw nothing, but every part of her was tensed, waiting.
After a moment, she started to make her way back to Angelo as quickly as she could on her bad ankle and hampered with the cane. She stopped every few steps to listen. The other tourists had already gone, leaving the park empty, so when she heard the footfalls moving through the woods toward Angelo, she ran. She moved more like a wild animal than a person, swiftly lurching from tree to tree for support and trying to ignore the pain in her ankle, but she meant to get to the thing in the woods before it got to Angelo, whatever the cost.
When she saw the darker silhouette slipping between the trees ahead of her, Mouse opened her mouth, a command already shaped at her lips, but the worry of what would happened if the power slipped free silenced her quickly. Any use of her power now would surely bring a host of real monsters to Monster Park.
Instead, she reached out, grabbed the nearest tree, and catapulted herself toward the dark figure. And then, too late, she identified the smells of pipe smoke and muscle ointment. More falling than running, she slammed into the back of the old caretaker she’d seen gathering trash earlier. The two of them crashed in a tangled mass, face-to-face on the ground, his full of shock and budding anger and Mouse’s full of embarrassment.
“Vattene!” the old man hollered in her face as he shoved her back. Mouse could sense nothing malicious about him, no taint of her father. He was only a simple, old caretaker.
Beyond the tree line, the clicks of Angelo’s camera stopped. “Who’s there?” he called out toward the darker woods.
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