Plague in the Mirror (22 page)

Her waiting heart hammers, and when no one comes, she tries the door, terrified.

You can’t be dead. You can’t be.

The space has changed radically since May was here last. It’s dim and dusty inside, cluttered as ever, but now evidence of Cristofana’s scavenging is everywhere.
She’s like a raven,
May thinks, feeling wired and alert, circling the silent room, trying not to hate her twin and failing.

There are the shiny things, of course, what Cristofana steals outright from the deserted homes of wealthy merchants taken by plague: candlesticks with beeswax tapers, jeweled rings, an ornate dagger. There’s a Venetian glass mirror with a chipped gilt frame, a now-soiled oriental carpet, pewter plates and pitchers.

Looking more closely, as early daylight begins to spill in from the one high window that isn’t shuttered, she sees an unfamiliar — and gigantic — carved bed with a feather mattress, hung with rich curtains. Cristofana must have dismantled and transported it piece by piece, or bewitched an army of children into scurrying through the streets, hunched under their burden, in the dead of the night. As big as a barge, the bed takes up a quarter of the large studio space, and May’s tempted to run a hand over its rumpled silk coverlet and imagine Marco lying there, but then, it seems, she’ll have to imagine Cristofana beside him. If anything’s clear, agonizingly, it’s that Cristofana has taken things a step further with Marco. She’s moved in.

The stolen finery has no natural place in the jumble of easels and half-carved statues, paint pots and skinny chickens, silk and straw, but even stranger and more incongruous is the evidence strewn about of Cristofana’s own enigmatic craft: delicate eggshells still sticky with inner membrane, bird feathers and shells, bunches of dried herbs hanging, the dainty skeleton of a dead bird, owl pellets. These objects, together with the baskets of pewter flatware and tarnished jewels, tell of a feral, singsongy creature, and the desk in the corner where the master’s business was conducted is crowded with vials and beakers.
“Strega,”
she had called herself, and yes, when May consulted one of the dictionaries at the apartment, she understood.
Strega.
Witch.

Even odder than that barge of a stolen bed, that carved monstrosity, is what has to be the baby’s bed, a giant round market basket overflowing with feathers, as if someone had sliced open a dozen pillows and poured their contents inside.

It looks itchy, but May can see that someone has carefully culled through and left only the small downy under feathers, the soft ones, May knows.

Pippa is loved. But by whom?

Does Cristofana leave the baby completely in Marco’s care? Dump her there while she traipses about raiding dead people’s houses and murdering kittens and bullying nuns? What are they to each other? And does he even know that May and Cristofana are two different people? If not, what must he think of her? He can only have deduced that “she” is crazy and learned to live with it, the way he’s learned to live daily with death and deserted streets and the anguished moaning beyond his walls at night.

Remembering, May roots quickly through the wardrobe, extracting one of Cristofana’s crazy stolen dresses, the simplest, though also — and here May surrenders to a moment’s vanity or hope — bright red and fitted at the waist, with a low-curving embroidered front. She has to lift the hem when she walks, but no use alarming Marco any more than she has to. She stuffs her white sleep T and Old Navy bikini briefs, the last telltale artifacts, beneath a pile of linens in a basket.

How have they been surviving? How will any of them survive now that Cristofana’s abandoned them? Struck by her isolation, May feels like an interloper, a spy in their home — and what are they, some kind of family now? That’s how it looks. Except that Surrogate Mom has bailed ship and left a changeling in her place, one with absolutely no survival skills, one too sad and overwhelmed by good-byes unsaid to know which end is up.

Light-headed with exhaustion, May lies down, hiking the scarlet gown over her knees, sinking into the soft feather mattress. She takes in the already familiar room with bleary eyes (thinking how quickly a place can begin to look like “home,” or, for that matter, stop looking like one).

The effort of trying to block out mental images of Cristofana lurking in the dream, dark at the foot of her bed, of Pippa, filthy and feathered and drooping over her guardian’s shoulder, sucking her thumb, of Marco off somewhere, gaunt with worry, his eyes bruised and sunken, his sketch board blank, keeps her awake for a time. But in minutes, May is sound asleep.

M
ay wakes an hour or two later — the light is bright and stark — with Marco and Pippa still nowhere to be seen. Daylight has her on her feet in an instant.
Jesus!
She shouldn’t be here, not after the doctor.
Did you come here to save them, or kill them?
She shouldn’t be sleeping in their beds and touching their things.

So May grabs a crust of bread from the table and spends what must be the next twenty-four hours hugging her knees in the alley beside the workshop.

Even as it starts to get dark again, and the harsh cries and drunken singing of men entering and exiting the tavern a few doorways down ring through the streets, she resists going in to Marco. If she’s caught plague, she’ll infect him and the baby. May stares into space, willing herself away from the present. Even if she fled to the remote alley with its faintly scrawled symbol, the portal would be gone, she knows, dismantled, and if it isn’t, she couldn’t enter now anyway. Her life no longer belongs to her. Not for the next few days, at least. By then she’ll know if she’s marked or not, if that life is over.

May can’t muster an opinion — about this or anything. An emotion. Hope. Regret. Not even hunger. She might as well be in ghost form again, except that she isn’t, and at regular intervals May pushes her long, loose sleeve off her shoulder to check for sores in the soft crescent of her armpit, waiting for fever and sweat and black blotches. But nothing comes.

Nothing but the night again. By daylight, the alley isn’t worth remarking on. It’s not dirty, not clean, just damp and blank, a storage place for the stonemason next door. At night, though, it fills with sound, men carousing in the distance, yes, but also nonhuman snuffling and scratching, and May knows she isn’t alone here, that other travelers with teeth and tails pass this way to and from the garden. She huddles in her harlot’s gown, and waiting becomes her occupation. May settles in a hollow inside herself, like a hibernating animal, suspended in space and time. She isn’t sure how many hours pass before her dry mouth and the dull ache in her head inform her that she needs to get up and find food, find water.

Before sunrise, she sneaks into the kitchen garden behind the workshop and picks cherry tomatoes from a vine, stuffing them into her mouth, juice and seeds spilling everywhere. They’re delicious. She licks dewy leaves until Pippa’s voice, the contented noise of a small child waking before the adults and talking back to her imaginary world, rivets her. May darts out of the garden and back to her grim hideout until Pippa’s happy shouts sound out front, and the pull of life proves too strong.

May watches from around the corner as they head out for the morning, deciding it won’t hurt to tag along. As long as she keeps hidden, keeps her distance. If she’s going to die, she’ll do it in the fresh air, with a view.

Marco carries a long, curved basket, probably some kind of fish or eel net, and heads straight for the southern edge of the city, walking a mile or two along a cart road running parallel to the river, past the bridges, till the sloping wall of buildings that crowd the Arno’s shoreline thin and taper out. With nowhere to hide in the wide open, May finally has to let them go on without her. She conceals herself beside a stashed rowboat flipped on its side. Stretched in the trodden grass, listening to the pull of the river, she feels exhaustion in every limb. Though it’s the last thing she means to do, she falls asleep again, and when she wakes, Pippa is beside her, weaving wildflowers into her hair.

Am I dreaming?

May sits up, inching away on her backside, her eyes wide on Marco behind the child. He has hollow circles under his eyes, a pallor below his caramel skin, and he looks terrible . . . and beautiful . . . and terrible. May fights the urge to stand and touch his face.
I can do it now,
she thinks — remembering her overwhelming urge to reach out to him the day she stood behind his easel at the workshop —
I can touch you.

And then she thinks of her own response, when the dying doctor reached for her.
Don’t don’t don’t touch. . . .

Pippa’s after a frog hopping along the shore, so May reaches and dips her finger in the river mud. She scrawls an
X
over the exposed hollow of her throat, speaking with her eyes, and when Marco tries to reach for her, pulls away fiercely. He sets his basket aside, his amber eyes hard to read, and before he can use them to convince her to stay, she gets up and strides off. She walks until she finds the strength to run, the sides of her gown bunched in her fists, and runs until, looking back, she can’t see them anymore.

But they’re all she has, so a bewildered May lurks in wait, learning to look and not be seen, watching from some hiding place or another till they pass. They’ve made a game out of finding frogs. Obviously distracted, Marco still takes the time to lay down his basket and fit a frog into Pippa’s pudgy hands, where it slides out again, a leaping complaint — and then he finds her another, his dark eyes as fixed and patient as a heron’s.

Pippa seems to have shot up overnight, become a toddler. The little girl manages a few steps and then topples over, whimpering showily until he plucks her up and dusts her off. That or she struggles upright again, soldiering on, oblivious and determined. Marco is neither gentle nor impatient with her . . . only present . . . attentive when he has to be. Mainly he lets her go about her business until the water or other trouble attracts her. They have a quiet, easy rapport, but there’s something too measured about his movements, as if his very life depends on the ability to concentrate. May can only imagine how confused he is, and she’s confused, too, not knowing what sort of presence Cristofana has become in their lives, what impact she’s had. Her domestic sprawl in the workshop certainly suggests that she’s wormed her way into their world completely.

They thought I was her.

Pippa falls again, twisting in the effort to get vertical, and looks right up the hill at May, her smile confirming everything. May ducks out of view until they set off again, then follows from a reasonable distance.

Marco never notices her, or at least he acts like he doesn’t, though Pippa often does and laughs and babbles. It’s a game to her. Hide-and-seek.

May follows through the winding streets and alleys as the pair meanders — Marco sometimes taking up Pippa’s hand, sometimes riding her on his shoulders, and when at last they reach the workshop, Marco hustles Pippa inside and bolts the door behind them. May stands paralyzed — the last thing she wants is to return to the stony gloom of the alley, but it hasn’t been long enough yet, not quite.

The front shutters open, startling her, and when he spots her there, his expression is intense, if no more readable than before. The door swings open, though he doesn’t emerge, and the unlit interior of the workshop looks forbidding from the walkway, where the sun now shines hard on stone and stucco.

When he doesn’t emerge or wave her in, May steps to the doorway and, with halting Italian and pantomime, explains that she’ll isolate herself in the garden for a couple more days and that he and Pippa must keep away. He nods gravely, and after she settles in, he opens the garden door and sets down a blanket, a steaming bowl of lentils, a crust of bread, and a cup of wine.

May isn’t sure how long she stays out there, with this feeding ritual repeated at intervals.

She sleeps and dreams and sweats, and is afraid of sweating, afraid of the tiniest headache, of the bug bites she mistakes as buboes. Luckily the weather holds out, and in the end it’s only the insects that plague her. May spends her nights swaddled in the blanket to ward them off, heat or no heat, and the wool smells like what has to be Marco, and it’s a good, strong smell that keeps her mind on life.

When she’s certain that enough time has elapsed, that she isn’t contagious, May stands up, uncertain about everything else. She waits for him to notice her out there, for his awareness to shift to her, for permission, and he opens the door almost immediately, waving her in.

His silence is ominous. May’s eyes are still adjusting to the dim when she spots Pippa hanging over the edge of the big barge of a bed, pulling the silk coverlet and a sea of clothes and cloaks off in a landslide that takes her with it. Hitting the floor with the rest of the pile, the toddler starts to wail.

Marco hauls baby and bedclothes off the floor, holding her and rocking her almost maniacally; he’s been left with this, a child, and must be confused, resentful, but he seems less overwhelmed than tired.