Trompe l'Oeil (4 page)

The concierge escorted them.
Call me
, he said. His thin angular face and large eyes reminded her of goats.
Please call, signora, if you need something
. In this same room she and James had slept the night before, unaware of anything, had in fact made love. In the morning he'd brought her coffee, and then they'd gathered the kids. She does not remember the lovemaking, only that it happened, and in that room, which was not the room where Molly stayed—though sometimes Molly did stay with them, on bad nights. Shuttered windows opened over a tiled patio, and bougainvillea climbed the side railing, and on the side table they kept a seemingly bottomless carafe of water. A double bed, a painting of a coastal harbor, a painting of women at a café. She told Theo and Katy to take off their sandals, climb up on the bed,
Okay? Just stay there
. She was parched; they too must have been parched, she wanted to pour them all glasses of water. Katy and Theo were frighteningly pale, and her hands were stained with blood and dirt; she could see now the traces her hands had made on their clothes,
her own clothes bloody and damp. How unspeakable the day had become.
Just wait
, she said.
Just wait
. She left the bathroom door open and washed her hands. Then she pulled off the bloody clothes, dropped them on the floor. She didn't know what to do with them. Wash them? The blood was Molly's. She must have rolled them up—this sensation later returned to her, of rolling her dress and underthings and wrapping them in a towel. There was blood on her body, on her torso, blood that had soaked through, and it was this that she didn't want the kids to see and that hurried her into the tub. She turned on the faucet. “I'm here,” she said. “Right here. Are you on the bed?”

“Yes,” Theo said.

“Katy too?” Nora said, and Theo said, “Yes.” If she turned just so, she could see their feet in the mirror on the door. She washed quickly, rinsed her hair; the water was at first pink, as if she herself had bled into it, and then clear. She watched the water spin down the drain, watched the reflection of the kids' feet in the mirror. She thought she would be sick, but managed to stave it off, to get herself a towel. “I'm right here,” she said, dried herself and slipped on underthings while standing with her back to the doorway. From the closet she grabbed a clean dress and pulled it over her head. Then she poured glasses of water for Theo and Katy. “Can you drink some of this?” she said. They took small sips, and Katy started crying again, and it seemed she was trying to gulp the air. For a time, the three of them stayed on the bed. In turn, the kids went into the bathroom, but kept the door ajar. She set out the almond cookies and oranges, sat on the bed beneath the painting of the café, peeling oranges.

Let's pray
. She did say that, on the bed. Though of course they'd just been to a church, at least she, Katy, and Molly had, and she'd crossed herself, some vestigial response from childhood. They'd walked the inner circumference, gazing at paintings and sculptures, a stone sarcophagus she'd hurried the girls past, and then they left, because Molly was so restless she'd pinched Nora's arm. Praying was something they did not often do. On the bed, she and Katy and Theo closed their eyes and held hands, but later, when they knew the praying hadn't worked, she imagined the first of several pacts had begun: her children would not believe in her answers, only in her need to explain. They'd indulge her. About the failed prayers they'd say nothing.

She tried calling the hospital, dialed the number on the card the medic had given her, speaking her bad Italian, and over the line the questions came rapid-fire in an Italian she couldn't make out.
Inglese? Inglese? Please
. She hung up and called the concierge.
Yes
, he said,
this is not a problem, I can help you
.

The concierge appeared carrying a tray of tea and bread and jam, and at first she thought he'd misunderstood, but then he motioned to the telephone, made the call, speaking quickly. His shoes had been shined: his shoes caught the light, and his hands moved fluidly as he spoke. “Signora y Signore Murphy,” he said, and then, to Nora, “They do not give me the information, they find someone to speak English for you,” and when he handed her back the phone it was a woman, who said Signore Murphy was with his daughter, she was very very sorry, they would want to contact the consulate. Katy and Theo watched Nora's face. “So we will have more information from Mr. Murphy?” she said. And the woman said, “Of course, yes.”

“Stay a minute?” Nora asked the concierge. She traveled as far as the next room, the children's room, not looking at Molly's suitcase or at Molly's scattered nightclothes, picking up Theo's and Katy's bags and carrying them back to her own room, where the concierge was coaxing Katy to eat bread and jam.

It was almost evening when James returned to the hotel and found them all on the bed not sleeping, very quiet, and he could not tell from Theo's or Katy's expressions if Nora had told them Molly was gone. They gazed up at him and then seemed to focus behind him briefly, before refocusing on him. The apparent calm was temporary. Theo closed his eyes, and Katy, pale, began sobbing. There was a faint fetid smell—someone had been sick, and someone had tried to clean up—and pieces of orange rind littered the table, beside a tray awash in bread crumbs. He was not wearing his own clothes; he was wearing hospital clothes, and in the hallway outside the room he left a bag containing his things and Molly's. He told them Molly loved them. Katy scooted closer to the center of the bed, and the four of them stayed there. After a while Katy and Theo fell asleep. James didn't know whether or not he wanted to fall asleep, whether or not he was ready for the shock of waking again. For now there was a quiet numbing. He had stepped into the ambulance with his already-dead daughter, pretending she was not, because you needed to have that little stretch of hope, you needed time to adjust. Whether he'd pretended for Nora or himself he didn't know. Someone had to stay lucid,
and because someone had to stay lucid he had not screamed or thrown himself on the ground, though the outcome would have been no different, his other children no less traumatized. Maybe they all should have thrown themselves on the ground, he and the family and the piazza full of witnesses, weeping and shaking until the day vanished, or until they themselves lost consciousness and slept on the stone road awaiting some other resolution, say, the erasure of time.

In the ambulance he'd held her hand and stroked her bloody forehead, as though she were still occupying her body. The paramedics again tried to revive her, perhaps out of sympathy for him. In the ambulance he was weeping, though for a time he did not know it; there was only the feeling of illness, what he later understood to be shock, as if he had swallowed a balloon that was now expanding, pressing and cutting off his airway. No recourse. It required effort to breathe and to interact with the Italians, who might judge from his face and voice that he was a man choking.

At the hospital, he'd refused to leave her, refused to stop holding her hand even as they began to take her to the hospital morgue. This he objected to—he could not explain in Italian, he could hardly speak at all, clumsily repeating,
No no, un'altra stanza, per favore
, another room, please, until they let him stay with her in an empty exam room. This he did not tell Nora.

The paperwork he could do. There would always be more paperwork.

“We're here,” Nora had said on the phone. “We're at the hotel, we're here,” and for a blurry half instant he'd envisioned the usual “we,” including Molly, back at the hotel. He'd said,
“It's just me.” He had said, had made himself say, “Molly's gone,” but it was difficult to breathe, and Nora repeated, “At the hotel, we're here.” And
Molly's gone
seemed to him untrue, because Molly was still at the hospital, not entirely gone, but there and dead, and he did not want to leave her alone. That was the worst moment, leaving her at the hospital. The second worst moment.

When he woke up, Katy was holding out a glass of water.

In the morning they moved, all of them, to a pair of adjoining rooms on another floor, the hotel staff transferring their bags, Katy and Theo never reentering the room they'd shared with Molly. One of the maids helped Nora pack Molly's things, most of which smelled of Molly, that still-milky scent she had, the soap fragrance of her clean clothes, her soiled ones stained with fruit and gelato. A few stuffed animals, a small suitcase. The maid's name was Anna. They did not hide the suitcase; it stood in plain view in Nora and James's room. Later, a few pieces of clothing migrated to Katy's suitcase, and one of the animals to Theo's.

Nora knew from the calendar that days passed before they flew out from Rome: blank attenuated hours, a conversation in the hotel lobby with somber-faced police, slow card games at the hotel with Katy and Theo, the murmur of string quartets and symphonies from the radio in her room. James calling from the embassy to say the staff had helped arrange to bring
her
home—meaning Molly, at first not saying Molly's
name—his cousin Patrick making arrangements in Boston. To meet the casket, James said, to meet Molly. Nora had insisted Theo and Katy eat—whatever they chose, as long as they ate—though she herself could not and only pretended. She felt bound to James, merged in a way only briefly sustainable, as they shepherded Theo and Katy home, through the city, at the airport, not letting either child out of their sight. It seemed for a time they would never leave the half-life of airports and the long flight to Boston.

Katy had taken to carrying Molly's dolls with her. The stuffed koala was in Theo's bed each morning; on the plane he kept it beside him, half-hidden. Like the children, Nora took Dramamine, a nasty yellow liquid, the taste of it enough to bring on nausea, the too-warm feeling like a premonition. Time became an opaque block. On the flight she would forget and look for Molly, and Katy would forget and look for Molly: you could see Katy glancing about, then suddenly down into her lap, one beat too late.

At Logan Airport, Nora's sister, Meg, appeared in a blue-green summer dress and a woven sun hat, like a slender plant, a thistle—the thought came to her
Meg is a thistle
—but then Meg held her, and Meg's sweet bookish husband Louis took her arm and guided her and James toward the baggage claim, while Meg walked between Katy and Theo, holding their hands. No one spoke, and it seemed at first as if they were miming a family return, as faster-moving travelers streamed
around them, rushing into gleeful hugging reunions or onward into taxis. They would go directly to Blue Rock. It was difficult to imagine the present moment. It was difficult to imagine anything else.

After a few moments, in a keen imitation of himself, James inquired about skycaps.