Plague in the Mirror (27 page)

Slowly and gently, Li walks her backward to the wall, enclosing her there with an arm on either side, laying his palms flat on the stone, and she feels like some kind of wild animal he’s calming. They catch their collective breath, and May doesn’t try to get away or shove him back. She wants the warmth of him, the comfort in what’s familiar; she’s curious, too, about what’s not.

Normal but different.

“Did you even tell them how you felt before you left?” he demands. “I’ve been meaning to ask. Did you tell them you were pissed? That you had an opinion?”

“I go quietly,” she complains, looking away. “That’s what I do. What difference would it make?”

“Absolutely none, but it might’ve felt good.”

“No. I didn’t tell them, and I’m not telling you, either.”

He tries to cup her chin, and she jerks her face aside, feeling the closeness of his body, his ready warmth.

“Yeah, you piss me off,” she relents. “They piss me off. Everyone pisses me off.”

“Well, congratulations, May, and welcome to the real world. People get mad here and make mistakes and shit on each other and are even wrong sometimes.”

Now she does try to shove him, aware that to people passing at the mouth of the alley they must look like a crime scene in the making. He doesn’t budge, so she shoves him again. “Fuck you.”

“I’m all for it,” he says wryly, almost apologetically, under his breath.

She kicks him in the shin, not hard, but hard enough to take him off guard. He turns with a guilty smirk, back against the wall for balance, and gradually slides onto his rear, at which point she kicks him in the thigh, halfheartedly . . . a little kid winding down in a tantrum. He grabs her ankle and urges her down with his hands until she kneels in front of him, and for a second they jostle and bump heads until finally she lets him fold her in his arms, into his worn-soft T-shirt and his smell. “It wasn’t me,” she sobs, sloppy and ecstatic and relieved.
How could you do that? . . .
“It wasn’t —”

“Look,” he says, his voice low in her ear, “it was, for me.” He leans close and kisses her lightly, tipping up her chin to make her look at him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about half the time, but who the hell else would it be?”

“A
re you ready for this?” May asks, rolling to face him.

Their first flight’s delayed, the gate waiting room is all but deserted, and she and Liam lie afloat on a sea of carpet, heads propped on suitcases, surrounded by a fairy ring of drink cups and snack wrappers, cells, iPods, and essay fragments.

Across the aisle, Gwen hunches on her plastic chair, scribbling on a yellow legal pad and swilling espresso.

“Home, you mean?”

The sight of him sawing at an apple with a plastic knife suddenly rivets May; for half a second his concentration in profile reminds her of Marco, of that rush moment when she woke wrapped in his blanket with his liquid eyes intent on her over the green of apple.

“Life?” Liam asks, answering his own question. “Yeah, ready as I’ll ever be. What about you?”

May shrugs, thinking about the postcard in her backpack and of some myth or tradition Gwen related once about souls traveling in packs from life to life, through birth and death and rebirth, recycling and magnetically reengaging every chance they got.

She lets Liam stuff a jagged wedge of apple into her mouth and wonders irrationally — the thought making her giddy, almost sick — if maybe Liam was once Marco. She keeps thinking of them in tandem. Would that make
her
Cristofana?
We share the same soul.
She has to smile at the thought, chewing, and Liam gives up on the rest of the already browning apple. He rolls sideways, curious, propped on his elbow to look at her.

They speak at almost the same time:

“Do you believe in past lives?” she asks.

“What’d you buy in the museum shop?” he asks.

“Not really,” he says.

“Just a postcard,” she says.

“Not even a little?” she asks.

“Can I see?” he asks.

“No.”

“No.”
It’s playful, her refusal, but she means it.

On the one hand, showing Liam the postcard would explain a lot. It might even help him believe her. He’s never said outright that he didn’t, but Liam is a guy who likes math, formulas, certainty. He must figure that if he can make sense of physics, he can make sense of anything, but Cristofana inhabits a universe all her own, one stitched together with blood spells and lies and nursery rhymes. It’s no world for Liam. It’s no world for May, either, and maybe in the end, forgetting will be easier (for both of them) than just not getting it.

The postcard could be a kind of proof. But for some reason, May doesn’t want to explain it, doesn’t want it justified, dissected, categorized, or cured. She wants to keep it for herself.
What I did on my summer vacation . . .

According to the caption, the painting on the postcard
(Untitled; Italy, circa 1350; artist unknown)
was “an unusual/anachronistic early example of surrealist technique.”

On the postcard is the portrait of a young woman with long dirty-blond hair beside an ornately carved floor-length mirror with a little girl clinging to her leg. The woman’s expression is playful, withholding with a hint of wickedness. But her reflection in the mirror — identical, apart from a dress that seems a plainer shadow of its counterpart — wears a completely different expression. The features are the same, but the reflection’s face is grave and secretive, thoughtful, almost startled. The fact that the two don’t match makes the picture disturbing to look at. And fascinating.

To avoid Liam’s puzzled eyes, May starts organizing and flipping through scattered essay pages. Remembering the history lesson that Liam inadvertently gave Cristofana, May finds confirmation in the paper she started on bioterrorism and the path of the plague.
The Black Death ended in September
1348, she reads, smiling to herself. The painting in the postcard is dated 1350. Safe bet, then, that Marco, Cristofana, and Pippa all survived the end days of the plague . . . and managed to stick together. At least for a couple of years.

Maybe Cristofana managed to change, after all.

Maybe Marco tamed her.

Looking up, May notes Gwen asleep in her hard airport chair, her back straight and the straps of her handbag wound severely around her right hand. Sliding their trash aside, May pivots, shifting her weight to lay her head on Liam’s chest. She hopes he’ll reach around and stroke her face, and he does, looking down at her with eyes the same relentless blue as the sky in the wall of windows behind them. “You gonna miss Chicago at Princeton?” she asks, staring hard at him, memorizing him.

“Not like I’ll miss you.”

There it is, plain and simple, and now he’s waiting for an answer, for a sign.

“But Jersey’s closer to Boston,” he says, “than Second City.”

“I don’t know what school I’ll get into,” she protests, looking away. She’s actually kind of crazily thinking premed. “There’s so much. . . . I’m not sure I want to be with anyone now. Not sure I
can
be. But if I could”— he doesn’t seem to need May to say more, but she does, aware of his heat and his heartbeat beneath her —“it would be you.”

“Yeah. Me too,” Liam says, tilting his head in that rakish way of his. “Both of you.”

May mock pounds on him, and they roll and tussle. She pins him under, straddling him until a buttoned-up businessman formerly concealed in a seat behind a pillar — the only other human (now) in sight besides the snoring Gwen — leans to the side and clears his throat meaningfully as if to say,
Get a hotel room,
and May scrabbles like a crab out of view behind the pillar, Liam moving with her. They huddle back there like children, laughing mutely and hysterically, and May will never feel so extraordinarily normal again.

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