The Girl in the Glass (20 page)

“Ha bisogno di dormire,”
Sofia said to Lorenzo, as we sat in her living room and my head kept lolling back on the cushions behind me.

I didn’t understand all the words, but
dormire
meant sleep. I knew that from my nonna.

It suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t packed a nightgown. And I guess I said this out loud. Sofia told me not to worry, she’d loan me one. She stood, took our cups to the sink, and then disappeared down the hall.

Lorenzo leaned in and kissed my forehead. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Have fun with Sofia. I’ve a photo shoot during the day, but I should be home in the evening. We can sit outside on my balcony and have a drink.”

I snuggled into him like a child and he laughed. Then he leaned in closer, as if to kiss me again, somewhere different than on my forehead. I was too tired, too emotionally bankrupt to process why Lorenzo would want to kiss me and would I want him to, but his lips brushed against my ear nonetheless, and I gasped.

But he was not kissing me. He was whispering something in my ear.

“It is good you are here with Sofia. Do not think you need to get a hotel
room. She will love having you here. She’s a kind soul. But be careful with her book and with what matters to her, eh? She is a bit fragile.”

My response was lightning swift. “Aren’t we all?”

Then he did kiss me. At the curly place on my ear.
“Ragazza buffa,”
he said, laughing.

He sprang up from the couch and yelled something to Sofia. I caught the word
domani
. Tomorrow. And she yelled something back.

He turned to me and winked.
“Ciao, cara mia.”

Then he was out the door.

Sofia appeared a moment later, and in her arms was a pink cotton nightgown frothing lace everywhere.

I was too tired to ask for just a pair of sweats and a T-shirt. I stood and took it from her.

“Thank you, Sofia. For everything.”

Her eyes glistened. “It is my pleasure.”

As we walked down the hall, I asked her what
ragazza buffa
meant.

She grinned. “Funny girl.”

Lorenzo thought I had been kidding.

I have some of my parents’ letters written when they were away from each other, which was nearly all the time. They spoke of missing each other and wishing the time would pass until they were reunited again. I read those words, and I hear what is said about my parents, and I wonder if it is truly possible to live two lives.

I know what people say happened to my mother when I was five. And I know what I want to believe happened to my mother when I was five.

If life is a series of choices and consequences of what you choose, then shouldn’t I choose carefully what I will believe?

When nothing else about your life is yours to orchestrate, shouldn’t you at the very least decide to believe the good that is possible? Especially if that is all you remember?

16

I awoke in Sofia’s childhood bed, disoriented, disheveled, and desperately thirsty. A brilliant sun was streaming in through a slender opening in the curtains like a knife blade, and I knew before even looking at my phone that it was late morning.

I sat up slowly, rubbing sleep from my face. I reached for my phone at the bedside table and saw that it was ten thirty and that I had two text messages from my mother and one from a number I didn’t recognize. I opened that one first, instantly hopeful that it was my father wondering where I was.

The text was indeed from him, but his short message was not the explanation I had hoped for.

Please forgive me, angel. Someday I will explain. I am borrowing someone’s phone. He doesn’t know it. Please don’t text. I won’t have his phone anymore when you get this. Plenty of money for you on the card. Enjoy Florence. Pls don’t come home until after Friday. Love you.

Enjoy Florence and don’t come home until after Friday? Don’t come home until after Friday? It was the most inexplicable thing my father had ever said to me. I read the message three times and finally switched to read my mother’s texts to see if she had also heard from him. But her first text was an angry lament about my being epically stood up in a place I’d never been before. The second was a rant that Allison had contacted her yesterday and she now assumed I was again protecting my father’s whereabouts by pretending
I hadn’t met up with him in Florence. I was going to have to e-mail my mother not to text me unless it was an emergency.

I could certainly manage to stay in Florence well beyond Friday, but why should it matter? Unless he was going to drop another bombshell on Allison she’d somehow blame me for.

I rose from the bed, listening for any sounds in the flat. I heard nothing. I opened the door and stepped into the hall. From the hallway I could see Sofia’s bed, freshly made.

“Sofia?” I called out. No answer.

I headed into the little bathroom and then made my way to the kitchen for a glass of water. On the kitchen table was a note, a plate of knobby rolls and round slices of blood orange, and a brown file folder.

Dear Marguerite,

I am canceling my tours this week so that I can show you Florence! I am just making arrangements for us, and then I will be back. Then this afternoon, I am taking you to the Accademia to see the statue of
David
. Lorenzo popped over this morning, but I told him to let you sleep. He will stop over later tonight. I printed some more pages of my book for you, if you would like to read them while you have your breakfast. And maybe after the Accademia, you can tell me what you think? You can use my bathroom to shower if you want.

Help yourself to anything in the kitchen. If you need to use the Internet, the wireless network password for the building is topo27&.

See you soon. I hope you didn’t have other plans for today!

Sofia

P.S. My little balcony is a lovely place to drink coffee and read!

I didn’t have other plans for the day.

I found bottled water in her fridge and unashamedly took one, downing the whole thing in one long guzzle. She had made coffee earlier, and I touched the carafe gingerly, hoping it was still warm, and was overjoyed that it was. I poured a cup, grabbed a slice of bread, and headed to her bathroom first and then to her balcony.

To study the history of my family is to acquaint yourself with the best and worst that mankind has to offer. Nora told me at Genga’s painting of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian never to spend too much time thinking about how terrible some people can be. Most are terrible not because of who they are; they are terrible because of what they had or did not have. I’ve heard it said that love drives people to jealousy. But I don’t think that can be true. Fear drives people to jealousy, not love, Nora said. Fear drives people to do a lot of things in the name of something else.

There are but a few reasons that people kill one another. Revenge, of course, is one. Greed, a second. Jealousy, a third. Envy and jealousy are not the same thing. Envy sets you to obsessing about the thing you want; jealousy sets you to obsessing about the person who has it. And jealousy like that can lead to murder. It did. Within my own family. What I learned about Nora’s parents, I learned from Papa and the history books. It is not something Nora ever speaks about. And why should she?

I don’t know if it was jealousy or revenge or greed that drove Nora’s father to kill Isabella, her mother. Some say it is because she refused to move to his home in Rome when she married him. Some say his longtime lover in Rome wished to take Isabella’s place as duchess. Some say he was jealous of Isabella’s longstanding affair
with his cousin. Some say her older brother, Francesco, wanted her out of the picture after their father died. Nora was just five and her little brother four when their father murdered their mother and then abandoned them. So little is written about Nora; she all but disappeared when her mother died. History books tell us that when she grew up, Nora married a man named Alessandro Sforza, that she played music, and that she bore him several children. But history does not tell us how she coped with losing her mother at the hands of a father who cared nothing for her. That is of more interest to me than anything. And while Nora speaks to me in ribbons of whispers, we do not have conversations. It’s not as if she hears anything I say back to her. It’s more like her words have been pressed into the stone and paint and have been waiting for someone like me, all these years, to bend to hear them.

I asked my parents once how a little girl so young could survive what Nora Orsini survived. Mama never knew what to say when I asked the hard questions. But I know this bothered her, too, what happened to little Nora. Because her eyes welled up with tears, and she looked at my father so that he could answer. My mother was always tender-hearted that way.

Papa said Nora found a way. Perhaps it was through her music. Or maybe art. Or writing. She was Medici, after all. Everyone whose heart is broken will eventually find the one thing that will mend it if they do not shut their eyes. “What happens when you shut your eyes?” I asked. And he smiled and said, “Close your eyes.” So I did. “What do you see?” he said. I laughed and said, “Nothing.” A moment later he said it again. “What do you see?” And again, a moment later. “Papa, I can’t see anything! It’s all dark!” I said finally. And then he said, “Open your eyes.”

When I did, I saw that he had put a chocolate bar in front of me and a pink rose from the vase on the windowsill behind him. And a shiny five-hundred-lire coin.

He pushed them toward me. “Shut your eyes to the world of pain, and you also shut your eyes to the world of delight.” I laughed and reached for the chocolate first.

My mother tsk-tsked him for giving me candy just before supper. But he smiled and told her there were worse things than sweets before a meal.

I kept that five-hundred-lire coin. Four decades later I still have it. In 2002, Italy went the way of the euro; no one uses lire anymore. I could have turned it in for the cash value of the euro, but I had no desire to do that.

I didn’t want to ever forget what my papa told me. There have been many times over the years when I might’ve forgotten if I hadn’t had the coin to remind me not to shut my eyes.

I set the pages down on my lap and just sat there on Sofia’s balcony, looking over the rooftops of Florence, captivated by Sofia’s prose. In my mind’s eye, I could see the chocolate bar, the rose, the coin, and even the little girl who found a way to keep her eyes open though her heart was broken. I was falling in love with Sofia’s book, and it scared me a little how much.

It was not a travel book.

It was not even a travel memoir.

I didn’t know what it was. But I wanted it. I wanted Crowne & Castillo to be the ones to publish it. And I had no idea how to convince Geoffrey and Beatriz to take a chance on it.

I had to find a way to verify her ancestral claims. She had mentioned that she was a descendent of Gian Gastone de’ Medici, the last grand duke of the Medici dynasty. Sofia said there had been an illegitimate child born to Gian Gastone’s mistress, or one of his mistresses. I was beginning to think all Medici men had multiple mistresses. Which mistress was it? What was her name? And how did Sofia’s family come to learn of their heritage? If I could validate her claim, I knew Beatriz would be more easily convinced.

I didn’t know if that would change things for Geoffrey.

Geoffrey.

Southern California wasn’t awake yet, but soon it would be. Geoffrey would get to the office in a few hours, and he’d see that I wasn’t there. Then he would open his e-mail and discover why.

I stood up and went back into the flat to shower and dress for the Accademia. I didn’t want to think about what Geoffrey would say. He wouldn’t be furious, since I hardly ever miss a day of work, but he’d be ticked that I had dropped everything because my dad asked me to. The sooner I made headway on Sofia’s book, the sooner I’d have something interesting to report back to Geoffrey that had nothing to do with my dad.