The Girl in the Glass (16 page)

I yanked open his back door, pulled out my suitcase and carry-on, and pushed the door shut. The world around me was ablaze with taillights, headlights, blinking turn signals, shiny chrome and glass, all against a bronzed, pre-twilight sky. People at the curb toted their suitcases like pull-toys, dashing away from parked cars after quick kisses, to be on their way to distant places. No one leaves LAX after five unless you are headed somewhere far away.

I leaned in the still-open passenger-side front door. I wanted to quip something like, “I owe you one,” but I surprised myself by looking straight into Devon’s kind face and telling him he had been a godsend to me.

“Be careful. Be safe,” he said.

“I will.”

“You’re sure he’s there?”

“He’s there.”

“Oh! And the key to your house?”

I stared at him, flabbergasted. He wanted the key to the cottage?

“Your cat,” he said.

For Pete’s sake. Alex. The cat. I pulled my keys out of my purse and handed them to him. “Yikes. Thanks,” I said.

As I grabbed hold of the car door to close it, he called my name, and I ducked my head in.

“Just one more thing. He … You may not be able to convince him to come back with you.”

I swallowed. “I know.”

“Try to enjoy Florence, anyway. It’s so beautiful.”

I probably would have kissed his cheek had he been standing next to me saying good-bye. As it was, I could only nod and give him a thumbs-up.

I pushed the door shut, waved, and then stepped into the flow of people bound for the skies.

Nurse told me, that spring morning as we watched Maria ride, that my father was like a fine horse no one had tamed. I thought she meant my father was like a happy, wild horse that no one had yet caught, one that could run free in the countryside with the wind in his mane and never had a rider tugging him this way and that, telling him which way to go.

“I like wild horses,” I had said. I’d never actually seen a wild horse, but I knew that before a horse had been broken into submission, it was its own master. The unbroken horse was more like a soaring eagle than a beast to carry us here and there. This image of my father running through fields of dewy grass with his arms stretched wide, with no reins, no whip, no crop, made me smile. So I said it again.

“I like wild horses!”

And Nurse, who would shield me from the truth for yet a little while longer, told me we’d been outside long enough. It was time for lessons.

13

I have flown internationally a few times, and I knew getting to the gate might take a while, but the line through security moved quickly; a gift from the heavens. I arrived breathless at my gate just as coach was boarding. I felt like throwing some confetti in the air. A mere five hours earlier, I had been eating fish tacos at a sidewalk café, expecting to do a load of laundry when I got home, and now I was boarding a plane for Europe.

It wasn’t until I had my seat belt around my waist that I fully grasped that if I slept at all in the next few hours, I would awaken in Paris; at an airport like this one, with intercom voices I wouldn’t understand and directional signs that would take me by pictures to the second plane I would board—the one that would take me to Florence.

Florence.

I pressed my head against the glass of my little window, missing my nonna like I hadn’t missed her since I was a little girl. My dad was finally taking me to Florence, but he wasn’t with me on the plane, and I wasn’t sure he would be on the return flight either. Our days and nights would be shadowed by what he had done.

When we were airborne and cruising far above the dark land below us, I pulled out my laptop, willing to pay to use the plane’s Wi-Fi so that I could see if my mother or Gabe had a chance to see my e-mail yet.

My mother had, and her reaction was what I’d expected: shock that my father would leave for Florence ahead of me and force me to travel alone, followed by prognostications of bad weather, cancelled flights, missing
luggage, a stolen passport, and food poisoning. She told me to e-mail her when I’d arrived, and I assured her I would. Gabe seemed genuinely disappointed that he’d been out when I needed the ride to LAX that he’d promised. He, too, asked me to e-mail back or text him when I got there.

I checked the weather in Florence, used my credit card to buy an international data plan for my phone for the next several days—gasping audibly at the price but knowing I had to have it—and sent an e-mail to Lorenzo telling him I was on my way and hoping with all my heart he and Renata weren’t off on a research trip to Portugal or something. I couldn’t imagine making this trip after all this time and not even seeing him. I was about to log out and attempt to sleep when a new e-mail deposited itself into my inbox.

From Sofia Borelli.

I hastily opened it. She had sent me two additional chapters, as I had asked. Excited, I opened the documents to have them ready to read before attempting to nap. Then I e-mailed her back and told her my trip to Florence had been bumped up and I was actually on my way there. I asked if she’d be available in the next few days to meet, offering up a tiny prayer that she had at least some free time this week.

Then I logged off the Wi-Fi and settled into my seat to read what Sofia had sent me.

Florence, when you come to visit her, will not welcome you with showers of greetings. It will not matter to her that you are there, nor will she notice when you leave. She is not one for sentiment, and she does not need you to love her. If no more tourists came, the vendors and café owners and artists on the piazzas would miss the tourists, but Florence would not. She is indifferent to the visitor. What you take from Florence when you leave, you take for yourself; she does
not give it to you. That might seem cold to you, but to a Medici, it is not so hard to understand. Your life is what you make of it, not what happens to you. Papa told me this. And he told me that’s what Florence is and her people are.

It’s not as if the city is uncaring or unfriendly. I had an American man tell me once that people in Florence weren’t friendly to him. They wouldn’t give him directions when he was lost or present him with the check for his meal or offer a table to sit at though he stood for many long minutes just inside the door of a restaurant.

I told him, as my father told me a very long time ago, that here in Florence it is customary to discover for yourself what it is you think you need. Asking for directions is not discovery. This same man told me, in a rather terse tone, that asking for directions is how you find your way. But I told him gently that asking for directions is how you rob yourself of finding your way yourself. In Florence you do not wait for your check; you request it. And you do not wait to be seated. You decide for yourself where you will sit. It is not that way in America, he said. Florentines are rude and unhelpful. He did not tip me.

It is all about perspective, isn’t it? It is how you see something that you decide what it is. And in Florence, perspective is celebrated, not reprimanded. Always.

In the time of the Renaissance, art and science were not separate views on life, but one and the same. Today, science is studied at one college and art at another, but the two disciplines were entwined in the days of old. The great artists insisted on correct proportions, and they were masters of perspective. Perspective is what the heart sees. Nora whispered this to me. Perspective is mathematical and precise, but it is also artistic and unfixed. I think she meant that we see all
the time what the great masters of the Renaissance saw; we just don’t know it. When you look at two parallel lines, they seem to converge in the distance, like a long stretch of highway that melts into the sky at the very end of what you are capable of seeing. Your head tells you these lines do not converge, but your eye tells you they do. And because your eyes tell you they do, you can imagine they do. This is what is called the vanishing point. Florence’s Leonardo da Vinci and Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi—you know him as Donatello—were the first to use it. Brunelleschi, the brilliant architect of the Duomo, was a master of linear perspective. Some say he invented it. Wise Brunelleschi merely discovered what God had already set across man’s path to stumble upon. And that is, what we see is not always what is. And what is, we often cannot see until we train our eyes to see it.

When Papa was teaching me how to paint, he said I must first imagine my drawing as an open window through which to see the painted world beyond. He drew a straight line to represent the horizon and then rays connecting my eye to a point in the distance, the vanishing point. The horizon, he told me, is where the sky meets the ground. I told him the sky never meets the ground. But Papa said, “But you can imagine that it does.”

In the Uffizi, once the Medici offices but now a gallery of the Medici art collection, there is a painting by da Vinci called
The Annunciation
. There are many paintings of the Annunciation and the Crucifixion in Florence. So many, I lose count. Christ is coming! Christ is leaving! as if nothing in the middle of His extraordinary life is worth capturing in paint.

If you look at da Vinci’s
The Annunciation
and don’t rush past,
you will see the vanishing point. And you will see where the horizon meets the ground. On the left side of the painting, an angel holds out a lily. On the right side, the Virgin Mary responds in graceful surprise and awe to the greeting. In between the angel and the Virgin is the horizon, the rest of the world. Da Vinci painted her calm and composed, as if she saw angels every day and had just been told only that the kitchen was fresh out of figs for breakfast.

The hills in the distance—beyond the tiny coastal city and the boats in the water that everyone in a hurry misses—represent all that is beyond the moment in time when the angel told the Virgin she would bear the Savior of the world. That is the vanishing point. Without it, there would be no sense that this moment is a slice of time.

When my father first showed me
The Annunciation
, he showed me the place in the painting where this moment in time and the rest of eternity collide. I was seven. And I stood there for many long minutes transfixed by the unseen dot on the canvas that held my gaze. Then Nora called to me, rewarding me for finding the place where the painting began and ended. She told me a secret that I share with you now.

The Virgin’s slender hand, the one not raised in astonishment at the angel’s words, rests on an open page of Scripture. The verses are in shades of red and black ink, like patterned stripes on wallpaper. The letters seem to be neither Latin nor Hebrew, nor any alphabet we might recognize. But the canvas whispered to me that the Virgin was reading from the book of Isaiah.

“But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and
with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the L
ORD
hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.”

The stripes. The red and black rows.

I began to cry when I heard this because I knew then the Virgin had to know what lay ahead. What lay ahead was written under her own fingers, and she was reading it. And I also knew why the angel carried a lily. It was the kind I had seen at a funeral procession, a flower that spoke of love and loss.

My father leaned down and asked me what was the matter, and I told him the painting had whispered to me what the Virgin was reading.

Papa always knew when to say absolutely nothing. He just put his arm over my shoulders and waited. After a while Nora’s whispering ceased, and the painting was quiet again.

Now that day we were there was my father’s day off, but a lady at the Uffizi knew he was a guide, and she sent a couple over to him because they had a question about the painting.