Plague in the Mirror (2 page)

All her life she’s felt safe — more or less sure of herself and her place in the world — and now the people who gave her that are back in Vermont, dismantling home, stripping certainty away.

The idea that May’s freak twin might be more than a dream is a lot like the fact that her parents are splitting up and forcing her to choose between them. It fits no known pattern of security.

Li’s still waiting with her heavy pack on and a hand gripping the handle of her suitcase, so she offers one of her own hands like a hook, and he hauls her up.

Gwen’s rented a small, airy third-floor apartment in City Center East. They cab over and settle in, opening doors and drawers, calling dibs on rooms, napping awhile. Later they devour the biscotti and mandarin soda from their landlord’s care basket, enjoying the river view from the terrace. The sunlight has turned everything gold, and the temperature has dipped to bearable, so Gwen leads them outdoors and north toward the historic heart of the city a half dozen crowded blocks away.

Crossing to Piazza della Signoria is like parting the Red Sea. There are people everywhere, streaming in the same direction or trying to chisel a path in the opposite one. The narrow, shaded streets echo with the bleating toy horns of Fiats and the wasping drone of mopeds.

As they enter the piazza, May sees dozens, possibly hundreds, of people milling around in bright summer outfits. They chatter and squint up at carvings tucked in niches, pursue restless children pursuing pigeons, back into one another while framing photographs, and line up at carts to buy trinkets and limonata. High above them all, the sun-gilded tower of Palazzo Vecchio casts its long, welcome shadow over parched piazza stones.

As soon as she spots it, Gwen makes a beeline for Michelangelo’s
David,
lingering until Liam and May jar themselves out of whatever sensory stupor they’re in and sidle up beside her. She explains at length that it’s only a copy; the real statue was moved indoors to the Accademia long ago, and May dutifully takes in David’s furrowed brow and blank eyes. But she can’t help it; her gaze slips down the famous torso to the statue’s nether regions. She clears her throat and turns to Li, who’s pursing his lips with a considering nod. They shrug at exactly the same moment and steer Gwen away, marching her past the surging horses in the Fountain of Neptune in search of gelato.

The fountain’s spray cools May’s cheek as they pass, and she tries not to let the flags swaying high in a still-hot breeze or the writhing bodies and muscled lions and screaming women on tall marble pedestals in the loggia unnerve her. Instead, she focuses on the crop of art students sketching side by side on the stone base of a nearby building: heavy-lidded boys; fashionable girls; a middle-aged woman in a plaid beret. They seem so content there, alone but together.

May follows a few more blocks north, lingering on the street while Gwen and Liam duck into a narrow gelato shop. They find her sitting on unoccupied steps within view of the cathedral and hand hers over — chocolate, always — and after they all dig in, Gwen points out Giotto’s campanile and Brunelleschi’s dome, il Duomo, in the distance.

“The last time I was in Florence,” she tells them, “a friend brought me to a department store somewhere near here. Rinascente, I think. There’s a rooftop café there I’ll take you to. Seeing all this from on high is amazing, but you know that already. I think we’ll be right at home in the apartment, don’t you? We lucked out with our views.”

May and Liam nod vigorously but go right on excavating with their little shovel-shaped plastic spoons, eyes downcast, devoted. They’ll develop a pretty successful work pattern in the days to come. The two of them will take in another mosaic or waxwork or painting of the Virgin and Child; Gwen will buy them ice cream.

“You learn so much about a place through its art,” she’s rhapsodizing between dainty bites of lavender-fig gelato as they stand as one and start to walk north again. Looking at May, she asks, “Did you know your mother was studying art history when we met at school?”

Mom likes to paint — every few years she drags out her easel and invests in fresh tubes of acrylic — but May had no idea she studied art formally. Her urbane mother would appreciate it here — all these frescoes and gap-eyed statues, all these people bustling around in nice shoes — way more than May does.

And suddenly she feels overwhelmed by it all, not least the exquisite bulk of the domed cathedral they’re now approaching. With its dizzying stripes and bold arches, its geometric intricacy of white-and-pink-and-green marble, the structure Gwen identifies as the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore seems to take up several city blocks. They sit down on another set of stone steps to take in the view.

May has never seen anything like it.

The only stillness on these swarming streets, it seems, is the architecture: stone and stucco and salmon tiles, shuttered windows and ancient, crowding towers. Even the sun is moving, May knows, casting longer and longer shadows, marking time. She feels ashamed of her own indifference, of how little she deserves this.

When May doesn’t comment, Gwen stands up with a glance at Liam. “I’m off in search of a cup of coffee. Meet you back here in twenty?”

May nods up at her, heartsick somehow. The strangeness of her surroundings has taken hold, and with it a sadness she wasn’t ready for. Because it’s over now: the mindless quiet of a Vermont morning; waking to the smell of Dad’s coffee and a fuzz of green in the window, to Mom’s old radio playing softly in her home office, barely audible under the mounting chorus of the birds; all that ease and sweetness. “What are we doing here?” she asks aloud.

“Here on these steps?” asks Liam. “In Florence? On Earth? Can you be more specific?”

“Gwen never should have let you take that philosophy class,” May complains, with a knuckle-punch to his forearm. She doesn’t want to be lousy company. Not here. But before she can explain herself, the ghost girl from the B&B intrudes into her thoughts again.

“You know why we’re here,” Li says lazily. “To help Mom with her book.”

May’s gaze lights on a glowing figure in the shade at the edge of the cathedral, which turns out to be a little girl in a gauzy sundress, blowing bubbles with a wand. “Remind me?”

“Historical travel guide for eggheads . . . like the one she did about London? You know, what composer’s buried in what tomb in what cemetery, and where do all the bohemians drink their coffee, and where were all the queens beheaded. You get the idea.”

Gwen teaches medieval literature to grad students and publishes seriously wonky papers in her area of expertise, May knows, but also moonlights as a popular travel writer.

“My tuition’s coming due, so she signed on for two more guidebooks in that series. You heard it here: it’s all tombs and dungeons from now on. . . . Evidently everyone thought this would really cheer you up.” When she doesn’t respond, he adds, “Did you think you were here to soak up the Tuscan sun and eat ice cream?”

May tries to play along, but it’s more of an effort than usual. “And we’re really too old for camp?”

“I’ve been thus informed.”

“Why didn’t you stay home and work?” she asks seriously. “You’re moving out in the fall anyway.”

“Mom’s on sabbatical. You know what that means. She sublet the house. Home’s on wheels with her, always has been.” He meets her eyes intently for the first time all day. “Are you OK?”

She’s never thought much about Liam’s eyes, which would be like thinking about a zebra’s stripes. It’s inconvenient, in a way, to notice them now, but they’re a shocking blue. She glares at him.

“OK. It’s lame and sentimental,” he says — circling back now, aware that he’s pushed too hard — that May isn’t ready to talk about her family or the lack. “I guess I came because this might be the last time I get to really hang with my mom . . . and now you . . . before college. Even if it means I have to spend all summer in cathedrals.” They both look up at the vast structure in front of them. “You’re getting a stipend, at least. I’m doing this for free.”

“Sucker,” she jokes, because that’s what they do — joke, soothe, smooth it over, whatever
it
happens to be — but May is relieved when Gwen returns, jittery with excitement.

“I’ve found something.” She waves them off the steps, her voice soft, urgent. “Come, come. Quickly.”

Liam groans, heaving himself up and startling a pigeon pecking on the curb nearby.

Gwen’s long gray-white hair swings with her purposeful stride, and they follow past the office of the Misericordia to a narrow alley leading away from Piazza del Duomo toward Via dei Calzaioli. The fleeting daylight barely touches it. “It’s called Via della Morte.” She stops short. “Way of Death.” Gwen runs her finger over a plaque, paraphrasing in that clipped, breathless way that pays homage to their joint minuscule attention span. “Around 1343, Ginevra, a daughter of the noble house of Amieri, fell in love with a young man from an unsuitable family in an opposing order. Her father forbade their marriage and made her marry a man named Francesco Agolanti instead, who was of equal birth. During a rash of plague, she took sick and seemed dead, so her husband buried her in the family vault in that cemetery between the cathedral and the campanile. In the middle of the night, Ginevra came to in a panic, terrified. She managed to unwind her bandages, raise the stone slab, flee from the vault, and return to her husband’s home along this alleyway.”

Gwen regards them with wide eyes, turning to the plaque again. “When Ginevra knocked, Agolanti was understandably shocked and took her for a vagrant spirit, barring the way, so she hurried to her father’s house in the Mercato Vecchio, where she was also rejected. Finally she tried the home of her true love, young Rondinelli, and was received by his parents. Her marriage to Agolanti was annulled, and she was able to marry Rondinelli at last.”

This is the kind of morbid-romantic anecdote that excites Gwen beyond all reason. She already has her camera out and is trying to get an atmospheric shot of the alleyway before the light goes.

Unimpressed, May and Liam linger with their backs to stone.

“Yay for plague,” Liam offers. “I love a happy ending.”

“True,” Gwen agrees absently, framing another shot. “It’s a bit like
Romeo and Juliet
— only with a better outcome.”

Intervention is the trick with her, so after conferring behind her back, May and Liam wait for Gwen to let the camera rest on its strap around her neck; then they link arms with her, steering her gently out of the alley and into the waning sunlight of the piazza.

“You guys really cramp my style sometimes,” she complains, laughing. “Listen. You haven’t exactly worked hard yet, but why don’t you take tomorrow off? We’ll give each other a break. But only if you track down those photo permissions I asked for. This week. And, May, I’ll need at least an outline for one of the three papers you’re writing this summer. Also this week. Time management, dearest.”

May nods.

“What’ll you be up to?” Liam asks as they walk. It’s sweet, in a way, how he’s so protective of his mom. May supposes he’s always been that way, at least since his dad left. It’s just more noticeable here.

“I have an appointment at U-Florence. An old friend was on a team that recently exhumed a skeleton from a mass grave in Venice. They’re claiming it’s the first evidence of the vampires mentioned in contemporary documents.

“This is related to our friend Ginevra,” Gwen continues, “in a way. The focus of the dig was mass graves of plague victims on Lazzaretto Nuovo Island. Around the time this woman died, in the Middle Ages, people believed plague was spread by what they called vampires. Not the bloodsucking kind. These spread disease by chewing their way out of their shrouds after they died, so grave diggers muzzled suspects with a sort of brick. The skeleton my friend found had a stone slab in its mouth.”

“How’d they get the vampire idea?”

“I guess blood sometimes leaked from a corpse’s mouth, causing the shroud to sink in and tear. U-Florence says this is the first forensic example of these so-called vampires. It’s being contested, of course. Another archaeologist claims to have made a similar find in Poland.”

“Battle of the archaeologists,” quips Liam, rolling his eyes, and May tries to smile back.

Glancing vaguely down another twisting alleyway of stone and shadows, she thinks how strange it is that such a sunny country, with more tourists and flavors of ice cream than seem possible in one universe, has such an old, dark heart.

A
t dinner it takes a while to find a
trattoria, osteria,
or
ristorante
— all basically the same thing, Gwen allows — serving anything remotely vegetarian. Tuscans love their meat, their tripe and wild boar and liver and sausage, and May has a feeling she’s going to be eating a lot of white beans in tomato sauce for the next few months.
Thank God for olives,
she thinks, which is funny. As the child of confirmed agnostics, she isn’t one to contemplate God, but in Florence, images of sinners and saints are everywhere, and heaven and hell look like very real places.