The Girl in the Glass (8 page)

He locked his eyes on mine. “I know you do. I’m working on it. I want you to know that. And I’m thinking it might work out to go this summer.”

My first thought was that I’d heard that before. There had been a few other times in the last decade he had said we were going. But it sounded different this time. He sounded a bit less sure, which actually made it sound more like he truly meant it.

“Really?” I finally asked.

“I think it might work.”

It was an odd way to say “Yes, let’s take that trip to Florence!” but excitement began to build inside me nonetheless, and I struggled a bit to rein it in.

“That’s … that’s great!” I said. “When? When do you want to go? July is better than August as far as crowds go. And June’s better than July. That’s what our books say.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I think so.” His reply was distant and detached, as if he were only half-listening.

“What? You think what?” I said.

He nodded. “The earlier, the better. I’ll get back to you on it. Okay? Can you get away?”

The summer months were busy at Crowne & Castillo as we prepped for our winter catalog. By August we were taking infant steps toward spring. But I’d convince Geoffrey and Beatriz to let me go. There was no way I was going to miss out on this.

“Sure,” I said.

He held my gaze with intensity, as if he wanted to say more but couldn’t or was perhaps at a loss for the right words.

“I mean it this time. I
am
working on it,” he finally said.

“I believe you.” I needed to say it; he needed to hear it.

He seemed to relax then. And he sat back again in his chair. “Is there anything else I can do for you? Anything at all?”

His tone was strange, as though he owed me a stack of favors and was itching to pay some of them off. I had never seen my father so mindful of his past. He’d always been attracted to the present moment or the dazzling future. “The past is for the History Channel,” he was fond of saying. “And let them have it. You’ve got today and you’ve got tomorrow. Don’t let go of either one to hang on to the past.”

Something had changed since the last time I saw him. It worried me a little—this abrupt transformation—even though it seemed like a nice one.

“Is everything okay?”

“It’s nothing that you need to worry about, angel. What can I do?”

I didn’t believe him, but to press the matter would’ve been to perhaps break the spell. His eagerness to please me was endearing. I wanted to give him the absolution he was longing for, but I also knew that for him, it had to be something tangible. I couldn’t just tell him that I had forgiven him.

I pondered for a moment what I could ask him for that was big enough to let him feel like he had paid a debt but that didn’t cost him any money. It took a couple of seconds, but when I came upon it, I knew it would not only give him what he wanted but also fill an emptiness I had carried since Nonna died.

“Do you remember the painting of the little girl and the statue?”

He blinked. “The what?”

“It was one that Nonna had in her living room. Her grandfather had painted it. Remember? The little girl is reaching for the statue, and the statue is holding out its hand to her.”

I could see him mentally picturing the placement of the artwork that had been in his mother’s living room. Then he frowned, no doubt trying to remember what became of that painting after Nonna died and he and the aunts emptied the house. I don’t know what my father inherited from my nonna, but I know it wasn’t her art. I never knew what happened to the paintings.

“That’s really what you want? That’s it?”

I nodded. “I loved that picture. It was my favorite.”

He studied me for a moment, brows crinkled. “Why didn’t you say something when she died?”

A tiny pain sparked inside me. “I was twelve, remember? And no one asked me what I wanted.”

He opened his mouth to say something and then closed it. “I’ll find it.” The resolute tone of his voice surprised me. He picked up his bagel.

“You will?”

“I’ll find it.”

“But I take it you don’t know where it is.”

“I’ll find it, Meggie.” He bit into his bagel and began to chew with purpose. “I think I’ll have another one of these,” he said a second later. And I stood to slice another bagel in two. We didn’t speak of the painting again. Or the promised trip to Florence. He didn’t ask about Mom. I kind of wanted him to and kind of didn’t. He asked about work, if I was dating anyone, and if I ever hear from Miles. I told him work was mostly okay, I wasn’t dating any one person, and that Miles had gotten married the night before.

He left on his motorcycle half an hour later, saying he needed to get back to LA. He wanted to start looking right away for the painting, starting with talking to his sisters. We hugged good-bye. He assured me that he’d find the painting and that this was the summer I’d see Florence.

My father was in debt when he married my mother—so I have heard. My grandfather, Cosimo, refused him my mother’s dowry, assuming my father would use it to pay for his careless choices prior to the marriage. I don’t think my grandfather cared much for my father, even though he chose him. The marriage is never about the man. Or the woman. It’s about the binding of families who might otherwise be at war with each other.

There is a painting that still hangs in Lorenzo de’ Medici’s bedchamber of the Battle of San Romano. I do not like it. I would never hang it in my bedchamber, and I would never paint such a thing myself. Warriors are spearing one another as they battle on horseback. But the horses are the ones who are wounded and dying on the canvas. And they have no quarrel with anyone. They are merely doing as they are told.

War can come any way. If we let it. If we invite it. Not on land with horses and swords. But in our houses. In our bedrooms. In our hearts.

7

It has always filled me with wonder that my father and my aunts sold Nonna’s house when she died. Dad and Allison had a house in Santa Monica, and Therese and Bianca and their husbands had houses nearby too. But it just surprised me that when Nonna died, the house was emptied and everything in it was scattered.

“It was just a house,” my dad said when I asked him about it once, a long time ago. “In a run-down neighborhood. Who would want it?”

I told him I would have wanted it, and he laughed and said I only remembered the good things about it.

My memory of that house is not the neighborhood it stood in. My memory of that house is my grandmother’s presence, the fabric of home and belonging, the feel of arriving at the place where you are safe.

What’s there to remember if not the good things?

Dad told me, more than just that one time, that people who are in love with the past only remember what they want to, even if it’s not entirely true.

Geoffrey says that’s what makes memoirs lousy reading.

I disagree.

Remembering what you want about the past, even if it’s not entirely true, keeps you from giving up on the present.

After my father left the cottage, I felt both full and empty at the same time. I was paradoxically full of hope and empty of expectation. My father’s strange, new regret for past disappointments teased me to believe he was serious this time.

I wanted to call someone. Gabe. Kara. Lorenzo.

Somebody.

I stepped back into the kitchen and stared at the empty bagel plates. Alex meowed at me, and I told him I had no idea what to think.

I took the plates to the sink. When I turned back to get our mugs, I bumped mine, still half-full, and sent it toppling over. The spilled coffee spread toward the Manila folder I had brought home from the office the night before. I swept it into my arms, and several pages fell out onto the floor. I stepped over the fallen pieces of paper as I grabbed a paper towel. I tossed it onto the coffee puddle and then bent down to get the pages. I turned them over and saw that they were the first few pages of Sofia Borelli’s manuscript. I read the first line, and it stilled me.

I read the entire first page before I became aware that the paper towel was sodden and cold coffee was slowly dripping onto the floor.

All That Is Seen
by Sofia Daniela Borelli

Florence wakes up golden every morning, even when it is raining. At daybreak the honey-stone and blushing tangerine tiles seem warm to the touch, even in winter, even in a downpour. I have never lived anywhere else. I have never wanted to. I grew up in a flat six blocks from the Duomo, and I live there still. When I was little, I knew I could never be lost on the streets of Florence. The cathedral’s dome
and tower rise from the ground like a crown and scepter handed to us by the sun. They are the sky over Florence, and I could always find my way home if I just looked up.

I am a tour guide, just like my father was. Six days a week, I stroll along the downtown sidewalks and piazzas with my pink polka-dot parasol, leading groups of tourists on an excursion of an art lover’s paradise. I have stood before Michelangelo’s
David
six thousand times, and he still woos me. I know every molecule of his fair body. And I daresay he knows mine. He is in my blood.

I am a Medici. History books say the last of my family, childless Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici, died in 1743. But she was not really the last Medici. She was simply the last of the ruling dynasty. Dear Diana, the Princess of Wales—may she rest in peace—had the blood of Medici women in her veins, as many people no doubt do, only most do not know it. What you do not know, you cannot embrace.

Anna was not the last, and perhaps I am not the last either. But I am the last in my family who knows what I know. I’ve no brothers or sisters, and my beloved papa, who taught me how to listen for the echoes of the Florence of old, is disappearing into the folds of his mind a little more each day. Soon it will only be me who hears the echoes of my ancestors.

My family ruled Florence for three hundred years, and as patrons of the arts, we gave the world da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Botticelli, to name only a few. The Medicis were bankers who ruled like royalty, but they were not kings and queens. And while they loved the arts, most were not artists. Beauty spoke to them, and they understood its language even though they did not speak it themselves.

We Medici have always been at home in Florence. We may have traveled the length of Italy from its northern alpine mountains to the pebbled coast of Naples, but we always came home to Florence. She lured us back each time. I tell the people on my tours that once you have been to Florence, one of two things will happen to you. You will leave with her fragrance in your very skin and bones where it will haunt or delight you forever, or you will not leave.

Florence, my father told me long ago, is like a dance. It is more than streets and buildings and a steady river; it’s a presence you feel, a rhythm you fall in step with. My parents loved to dance. And they did not need records or a band or the radio. My father hummed the music they swayed to—the music of Florence. When I was especially little, I would wake from nightmarish images that would flee the moment I opened my eyes. And in my wailing, my father would come to me and soothe me with these tunes that had no words. They were the songs of the city, he said. He told me to listen very carefully, and I would hear the music in the air and in the paint and in the marble, and the music would chase the bad dreams away. If I listened very carefully, he said, I could hear the beauty all around me and I would know that in Florence I would always be safe.