Cross My Heart (3 page)

Happiness can be a cruel thing in the face of someone else’s grief. When I tell Annalena, she looks as stricken as if I’d hit her.

“I can’t believe it,” she says, her eyes suddenly wet and glassy. “I’m so happy for you.”

For once, there isn’t a hint of mockery in her tone. I clasp her hand, then rush back to my room. And as thoughts of Annalena are washed away by the onrushing tide of
excitement, I feel guilty. I know already that I won’t miss anything about the convent. Not even my
conversa
.

Back in my room, I lift the wooden floorboard that for six years has hidden my letters from Beatrice, and under which I’ve kept my ring of sisterhood. I open it and take out the tiny cloth-wrapped bundle in which it nests—a dull twist of gold. Beatrice has one too. When Mama realized she was dying, she slid the rings onto our fingers, murmuring “You must care for each other when I am gone.” I put my ring back on the small finger of my left hand. For a minute it feels cold and tight. But then it warms and settles back into place, where it belongs.

As I pass back through the convent, plumes of incense waft behind me for the last time. Mounds of chapel wax drip like tears as I say my final prayers. And the pungent baskets in the infirmary, full of holy herbs, creak a brittle farewell to me.

At six o’clock the carriage really is waiting. Sister Maria stands at the door and kisses me.

“Goodbye, Laura. I’ll miss you. We all will.”

It feels like someone is pouring something warm into me. The convent’s dark, cold skin peels away as soon as I run out through the thick studded door. I dive into the carriage almost headfirst.

The carriage is black and the driver wears a dark hat and coat, but everything else out here is a banquet of color: red, gold, blue, leaf-green. I look up to the windows of the convent’s cells. The silhouette of a nun hovers at almost every one of those small rectangular spaces. There’s a shadow in Annalena’s window, but I’m not sure it’s her.

Venice is alive with the festival of the Madonna delle Candele. Smells of perfume and aromatic oils mingle with other things—sulfur, I think, and ripe fruit. Each moment takes me farther away from the convent and closer to my home. I lean out of the carriage window and see serpentine lanes of small candles, their flames spitting with spray from the canals. But as I twist round my elbow whacks into a young man on a milk cart.

“Oh, sir, I’m so terribly sorry,” I shout, feeling my cheeks flush.

The young man smiles, calling back, “No need to be sorry! Always a pleasure to collide with a beautiful girl.”

The carriage crosses the rickety old Rialto Bridge with its orchestra of sounds and smells. This must be what it feels likes to be drunk.

When we come to a halt, I fall forward. I’m home.

It’s strange to be back at this once-shimmering palazzo of my childhood. When I was little, I would peep out my bedroom window and see servants and noblemen, old and young, rich and poor—all hurrying along. But they would always pause to look up at my home and almost all of them would smile, as if the very building were casting a spell of pleasure on them all. My home used to sparkle and glitter.

It doesn’t anymore.

The plaster has shrunk and peeled from the walls like moldy orange peel, and damp stains streak the walls beneath the shutters on the upper floors. The plants and flowers in the window boxes are dying.

The great front door is open and I walk in, my footfall echoing on the cracked marble floor. The cool of the house
slips its embrace around me. Where once portraits hung on the walls, now there are empty, pale spaces.

“Beatrice?” I call. There’s no answer.

Something large and dark has been placed on the table in the entrance hall. It takes me a few minutes to realize that it’s a coffin.

My father walks through a side door that I remember leads from his library. If the house has suffered, then he has wilted with it. His clothes were made for a bigger, broader man. They drape over him like threadbare blankets.

“Papa.” I hold one hand out to him as he approaches, but he doesn’t take it. There’s something new and grim about his face.

“Papa, who is it? Who’s died?”

He swallows hard, as if his words are caught in his throat.

It must be one of the servants. A lot of them were old. Renato, my father’s butler, was an alcoholic. And then I think of my beloved nurse, Faustina, and my mind fills up with images of her kind old face.

“Tell me, Papa, that it isn’t Faustina.” I shake my head and step away from him.

When he finally speaks, his voice is solemn, hoarse and faintly slurred.

“It’s not Faustina.”

My poor brother, then. He never was a strong boy. Perhaps he contracted some illness in Bologna. Almost as soon as the thought occurs, I realize my mind is performing logical contortions to avoid the truth. If he died so far south of Venice, they wouldn’t bring him all the way here.

So even before I see who is lying still and silent in the
coffin, I already know that this is somehow not the wonderful day I thought it was going to be. I’m not going to see Beatrice today. I’m not going to see her ever again.

I open my mouth but no sound comes out. My father shields his face with a hand.

I reach the edge of the wooden box. My sister’s hands are yellow and bloated. Her face sags, and suddenly it’s hard to remember any of the light that once danced in it. Her body is small but swollen, and it looks dreadfully wrong inside that cheap container for dead things. The exquisite mystery of her is gone.

The unsanded wood scratches my arms and hands as my father drags me away from the coffin, but I don’t care. I want the splintered wood to stick into me. I want to feel the rough slivers under my skin.

“What did you expect?” he asks. “Why did you think I sent for you? Did the Abbess not explain?”

She did not.

Beatrice died by drowning, my father tells me. I can’t speak. I can’t ask the questions that bang like demented drums in my temples. How could she have drowned? Where did she drown? And why? Beatrice, the best swimmer in all of Venice. She used to dart through the water, strong and shiny like a seal.

I push my father away and rush up the stairs to the room I shared with Beatrice. A hunched figure is standing over the bed, unfolding a linen sheet. She turns to me.

Faustina.

“Oh, my darling,” she says, dropping everything and opening her arms.

After a time, we sit beside each other on the bed and
talk. We speak of how we’ve missed each other. Of how I’ve grown and changed. I say she doesn’t look any different, but she does. I was wrong about everything. I thought I was coming home to Beatrice, but I was not. I did not think I was going to miss Annalena at all, but I do.

I feel that the dark serpent of loss has crawled inside my body; it lurks there, coiled and muscular. I do not think it will ever leave.

I
’m woken by a slant of sunlight blazing across my pillow. The sun seems to bleed through the cracks in the window shutters, like some ancient injured enemy who wishes to punish me for something that I haven’t done.

I sit opposite my father as we eat a breakfast of bread and cured meats. Bianca, a servant I haven’t met before, waits on us, filling our goblets with pomegranate juice and slicing oily ribbons from the leg of ham that rests at the center of the table. Her head is bowed and respectful, but I can see her blue eyes darting curiously between my father’s face and my own. I wonder if she’s also trying to recognize the proud man he used to be. Now he’s broken and bent and he speaks in a low mumble that I have to lean forward to hear.

“You and I will have to find a way through this dreadful situation.”

I reach across the table for his hand and he strokes my fingers gently, absentmindedly, with his thumb—he’s
somewhere else. When I speak, he almost looks surprised to see me.

“Papa, I’m lost. Lost without Beatrice.”

“I know, Laura, but there’s much to do. Trust me. You will be happy again. It may seem impossible, but you will recover, and we will be strong once more.”

I shake my head, unable to believe his words. “Not without Beatrice.”

He sits up and looks sternly at me, as if I’m a whining child who needs to be spoken to more firmly.

“You behaved exactly like this after your mother died. It wasn’t helpful then.”

“No, but …”

“Time heals. And it will heal now, just as it did then.”

I let go of my father’s hand and he slumps a little. I tear off a strip of bread, staring at my chipped plate as I swallow down a hot rush of tears. Time doesn’t heal; it destroys. The brightness playing through the windows shifts. I blink, dazzled, and for a moment the trembling light makes it seem that my mother is sitting with us.

In a rush it comes back to me—her face as clear as it ever was. I remember how she once sat on my bed in the middle of a winter night, stroking my damp hair, my five-year-old face wet and frightened after a dark nightmare.

“Mama, will the snakes come and get me in my sleep?”

“Hush, my angel, hush, there are no snakes. Go back to sleep.”

“But what if I dream of them again?”

“Next time, don’t wake up until the dream is over. If you see it through, you’ll find that everything is all right in the end. Nothing bad will ever touch you.”

Mama, you were wrong too
.

While Bianca clears the plates, I add this to the list of things I know for sure.

The fee is never paid.

Time destroys.

Nothing will be all right.

I’m building my personal catechism. I’m committing it to memory, these ugly lessons that life is teaching me.

I excuse myself from the table and step out into the bitter morning glow of the courtyard at the rear of the house. I walk over the flagstones and lean against the wrought-iron back gate, which leads to a narrow waterway. Thousands of tiny pieces of dust are turning in the sunlight, floating and falling around me: a lifeless dance of decay.

Later, I sit on the floor in the dressing chamber I shared with Beatrice, a linen chest open in front of me, and begin the sad task of sorting her clothes. My father has said that I am already taller than my sister was; since I can’t wear her garments, they must be discarded. Gently I take out her stays, her shawls and underskirts, and lay them in piles. Some will be sold, others cut up and sewn into something new.

Faustina comes in, a stool in her gnarled hands. “Sit here, my love,” she says, putting it beside me. “The floor’s no place for a lady.”

She gently takes a silken headdress from me as I move, then opens the tall, dark wooden cupboard that contains Beatrice’s gowns. As she folds rich velvet and soft satin, I ask her questions as they come to me.

“How did Beatrice drown? Where were you?”

“Stop, Laura, please stop,” she says. “Please don’t keep asking me. I can’t.”

But I have to know and gradually she tells me. Beatrice and Faustina had been to the concert at the Doge’s palazzo. Beatrice’s dancing feet quick-stepped home, the way I always picture her flitting around the courtyard.

“Faustina, was she with you? Was she beside you when she fell in?”

“Yes. I mean no. We
were
together, but …,” she replies, fumbling and dropping a blue gown. It lands in a collapsed heap, its empty bodice gaping wide. “Beatrice wanted to talk to someone she knew. You remember what she was like, chatting and laughing with every second person she met—day or night, she was the same. She told me to walk on ahead—that she’d return once she’d paid a visit to her friend. She knew I can’t move quickly anymore, and that I was tired and in a hurry to get home.”

Faustina sighs. She picks up the fallen gown, placing it on a dressing table, then puts her old arms around me. She murmurs that she wishes she could make everything better the way she always could when I was small and when the troubles I had were solved by a kiss and a pastry from the kitchen. But my mind is still on the night Beatrice died.

“Do you think she went to see Vincenzo?” I ask, thinking of her fiancé.

But Faustina shudders and holds her knotted hands up in front of her face.