Plague in the Mirror (10 page)

“Relax,
bella.
You know by now that my knife cannot hurt you,” Cristofana says, as if reading her thoughts. “You don’t yet know or believe it, but you are the merest kind of visitor here, a traveler without footprints.”

May looks in anxiously at the artist with the dark, sad eyes — alone, unaware of them outside his window.

“You worry for your flesh, but have you ever touched anything here, besides the ground you walk upon? Have you ever moved or altered anything or eaten a fig or”— she winks, gesturing —“stolen a kiss? You leave no mark, just as I leave none in your world. None is left on you.”

May winces, remembering her knees, the blood, the strength and gentleness in the artist’s hands, his smell.
You’re wrong. I have.

But what if Cristofana’s right? What if passing through all ghostlike and leaving no mark is the real story of May’s life — in Old Florence or New — in Vermont or Boston or anywhere else? Leave no mark and bear none.
He had touched her. He touched her and made her shimmer.

“But we can change that,” Cristofana offers, her voice hypnotic.

May shakes her head.

“Or do you imagine, as I sometimes do, that it was all just a very powerful dream — our trade before? Your meeting with Marco? For in dreams we have all we require.”

May’s eyes widen, and Cristofana continues cheerily, “Yes, I know him. I learned his name after you last left us. I made him notice me. Or helped him notice you? I should like very much to see your face when you cannot feel his lovely flesh as I can.” She sighs as if the whole subject is profoundly tedious. “As I will. To distract from all this”— she waves an impatient hand —“death and sorrow.

“I have tried again, as flesh, to find your world. . . . I have labored without your selfish help. Sometimes, my fingers brush its edges. I hear its echoes.
Strega,
I say to myself, you have only to give back what you take. That is the rule. Until then you’ll keep nothing. You don’t believe me? In spite of all you’ve seen?” Balancing the kitten on one shoulder, she holds out her hand, and May recoils.

“Touch, Ghost.”

“No.”

“Are you afraid? Or you despise me?”

May lets her eyes answer for her.

“If not me, then him. Go inside to your precious Marco and take his hand. We can change fate by changing places, by fooling fate —”

May gapes at her, bewildered, and again at the lone figure inside the workshop. “That can’t happen, Cristofana.” To say the other girl’s name is to humanize her somehow, make her real when she isn’t. She — this — can’t be real. “You know that.”

“If I must stay, then I will do what I will. I will
have
my will.”

May feels her pulse racing, desperation in every nerve.
No, but really, I want to give up modern medicine and hygiene, and the right to vote, and an education and career, and my family, and probably my life . . . to live . . . here . . . now . . . in filth and squalor and disease.
“Even if I could change places, I wouldn’t,” she says, staring in at him and fearing, even as she says it, that it’s a lie. “There’s a reason for all this.”

“There is no reason,” Cristofana snaps. “It is chance and my passion: I
will
you here. It’s a rip in the air, a quirk in your fiber, and you deserve it less than I do.” Cristofana stares at May and past her, stroking the kitten, with its wet whiskers and cloudy eyes.

Unnerved, May turns to the window again. She doesn’t even pretend to hold back, just stares in at him, stricken, and wills him to look back.
It’s me. See me. See me again.
She doesn’t even know him, not really, but May can’t persuade herself that it matters now. There’s nothing here she understands except him, probably because he made her feel safe . . . in a place where nothing and no one is safe.

Every time he lifts the charcoal — and now that he has, he works feverishly, tilting his head, his shoulder rising and falling, his Adam’s apple moving in his throat as he swallows — his black hair falls forward. He smooths it impatiently behind his ears, smudges the paper with his palm, his knuckles, and she feels his every gesture in her body as if her skin is breathing him, memorizing the way he moves, moving with him.

May has all but forgotten Cristofana, allowing herself to be careless around her for the last time. A cheery whistling calls her back, a little tune like a spell, and when May turns, transfixed, Cristofana is kneeling on the other side of the alley, smiling blackly. “You,” she says, “are nothing here,
bella,
and you will listen when I speak to you.”

Crouched beside the murky bucket by the door ledge, Cristofana holds the kitten under black water. It thrashes, its nails extended, raking the soft white flesh of her identical arm and drawing blood. Wet lines bloom on skin like marble shining in the Italian sun. The animal’s head bobs out once with a yowling, but Cristofana pushes like a baker kneading dough, and though May tries, straining every muscle, she cannot move or change a thing. She cannot silence the voice chanting the word or reach out or call to the man indoors for help or stop the white arm dipping, the black water splashing, the little bedraggled body writhing, the air constricting. She can only gasp in the white-hot light, her face wet with tears.

“Nothing.”

S
he is sobbing in the middle of a piazza, with strangers all around casting suspect glances. Pigeons bob and part under her feet as she hurries from alley to alley, finally slipping into the apartment. She retreats to her room and doesn’t answer when Gwen knocks for dinner.

“I thought we could try Cafaggio again. What do you think? They had some OK veggie options.”

“Give me a minute, Gwen,” May manages to choke out.
A minute to find my mind. I’ve lost my mind.

“Sure, love. We’ll go grab a table. I could use a glass of wine. See you there?”

“Yes. OK.”

“
Are
you?”

“What?”

“OK? You sound funny.”

“I’m good,” May murmurs. “Thanks.”

When she hears their footfalls and the click of the ancient lock, she pads into the bathroom to splash cold water on her face. The bathroom mirror is still steamed from someone’s shower, Liam’s probably, since Gwen prefers baths, and May traces her own broad features — Cristofana’s, she thinks, disgusted — on the wet glass, alarmed when her own red-rimmed eyes look back through the smear.

When she has it together enough to step out, she leaves the lower hall cautiously, afraid that the strange unreality of the crowded city streets might suddenly shift again and leave her lost, with or without a portal, send her back where the little animal floated in a bucket of black water. Focusing hard on the streetlights shining shadowy pink on stone and marble, on the busy murmuring of people heading out for the evening, she begins reciting the old rhyme “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back,” watching one foot move and then the other, and soon she’s standing outside the restaurant, her chest taut with apprehension.

Gwen and Liam already have a table, so she threads her way through the dinner line out front and lets the hostess lead her to them.

Liam doesn’t look up when she sits down, so how can he see that she’s on the edge of tears, that every move she makes feels tentative, wrong, as if her limbs don’t belong to her, though she’s somehow in charge of them? Maybe Gwen sees that something’s wrong, but there’s no way to tell with her, and her cheerful chatter doesn’t hide the fact that Liam spends the better part of the night texting under the table, looking up only when the waiter brings his
arrosto misto,
a huge, steaming plate of every conceivable kind of meat.

About halfway through the meal, Gwen gets up to use the restroom. The second she rounds the corner, Liam reaches into his jacket for his phone, so May blurts out, as much for Gwen’s sake as her own, “Quit acting like you have friends.”

She says it jokingly: Liam has plenty of friends; he just isn’t the type to chitchat on the phone with them or text back and forth all day, especially from a foreign country when it costs a fortune. He’s avoiding her, and it’s time she called him on it.

But she isn’t prepared for how he responds — for the ice in his eyes and his ugly silence. When she stares him down, he finally blurts, “What’s up with you, May? Maybe no one sent you the memo, but I was only thinking we could have a little fun while we’re stuck over here together. Don’t let it go to your head.” He lifts a big chunk of lamb from his plate with his fingers and bites off a stringy corner, grease shining on his lips while he chews.

It’s hurt talking, she knows; it’s because she rejected him, but it doesn’t make this any easier; it doesn’t hurt her any less.

“You’re always so sure of yourself and your tidy little world.” He swallows, smiling like the Cheshire cat, taunting. “Well, you’re not my type. You never were. I like a woman with a little meat on her bones, right? Some iron in her blood.”

She concentrates on her dish of uneaten cabbage soup, oily and cold. May would explain if she could, erase what he’s feeling, make up for it, but he’s already paid her back in spades, and she’s tired, determined not to cry. She doesn’t owe him anything. What right does he have, expecting her to
have fun
and be available at his beck and call? Or did she lead Liam to think she wanted to? Is that where this went wrong?
Did I?
Do
I?

“Got it, Li,” May says, though she doesn’t. She doesn’t get anything anymore. “Loud and clear.”

Standing, she lays her napkin over her bowl, hovering a moment, too embarrassed to let him watch her walk away. The white fabric soaks up broth, drooping into the dish. Li looks tired, too, almost sad now, staring past her.

She finally collects her bag and sweatshirt from the back of the chair, saying, “You think you know me, but you don’t. You don’t know shit.”

He reaches for his phone again.

“Tell Gwen I went home with a stomachache.”

W
asn’t she ever lonely before? May can’t remember. She’s never really understood loneliness. It’s a word in songs — where people are so lonesome they can cry — especially the kind of folky songs her parents like, the kind that echoed from the radio on the cabin porch during summer vacations when they all sat watching dusk on the lake, when mayflies bumped against lanterns and nobody spoke, at least till the sun went down, because nobody had to. But in Maine, they were all feeling it together. They were wistful but content. That wasn’t this.

It might be what her mother’s been feeling, though. Maybe for years. Why had May never noticed? How could people walk around like this and no one notice? She’s felt sad before, of course, hurt, pissed, but never
lonely.
It leaves you looking too hard into too many faces, too questioning, and strangers turn their eyes from you.

May feels hollow and sore inside and wants her mother in that big metaphorical way that the little bird in the old children’s book wants his mother and goes around begging the dog, and the cow, and the steam shovel: “Are you my mother?” And they aren’t. They never are . . . until . . . someone is. There’s only one fit, one way to end that search, and finding that fit is the whole point, like finding a lock for a key you’ve carried around in your pocket your whole life.

Are you my mother?
May thinks vaguely, watching people flow past, feeling stupid sitting here on a bench thinking about a thing she can’t seem to do anything about. It isn’t really her mother she wants; it’s to not feel lonely anymore and for her mother to not feel lonely anymore. Why can’t they
stop
each other from being lonely when they would do anything else for each other?

May imagines herself reflected in the darting eyes of passersby, an unhinged stranger in a strange land, and suddenly she would do anything to not be here in a city, in a moment, when Gwen has to keep her nose buried in her notes because she doesn’t know what to say (Gwen
always
knows what to say), when Liam is God knows where, pretending to e-mail his friends, when her own friends back home in Vermont, Sarah and Jenna, are sending messages like,
Guess who I saw today in the Daily Grind! Lol.
Her mother isn’t calling or writing at all anymore, weary, no doubt, of the answering silence.