The Lost Daughter

by Lucretia Grindle

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  For Charles

  Rome, 1978

  Thursday, March 16

  THE ALTAR WAS BATHED in shadow. Behind it a row of candles shimmered, their flames catching the white disk of the host as they guttered and flared. Oreste Leonardi shifted against the back wall of the church. The gun was digging into his hip. He did not believe. Not deep in his heart the way you were supposed to—not with the soul and fiber of his being. Still, he found it moving, this strange cannibalism. Eat of my body. Drink of my blood. Consume me, and you shall be saved.

  He looked to the rear pew where his partner sat. Domenico Ricci glanced back and tapped his watch.

  Their charge was up front, on his knees. Candlelight licked his back in its dark suit and caught the silvered hair of his bowed head. There was, Oreste thought, no question about Aldo Moro’s faith. He’d grown up with the pope, for Christ’s sake—pardon the pun, Father. They’d been little angels, boy servants of the Lord together half a century ago back on the hot white stones of the south. And now, who would have bet on it? One was the father of his church, the other father of his country.

  Oreste had actually heard Moro called that yesterday, on the TV news, or the radio. By the end of today it would probably even be true. If they made him president. Which they would. Five times foreign minister, five times prime minister. What else were they going to do with him? He wondered if he would go to the Quirinale, too. If the family would even agree to move into the palace. Or if Moro would commute back and forth, pater patria by day, pater familias by night. Now, that really would be a security nightmare.

  Even as he thought it, it struck Oreste again how strange it was, that he should be thinking about keeping the next president of Italy alive. Him. A nobody. Nothing but a policeman, an ordinary cop doing his job. Which was all he’d ever set out to be. All he’d ever wanted, really. The job, and what came with it. A little dignity. A good pension. And look where it had landed him. Thanks to what his mother would have called “an angels’ kiss.” “Angel’s wings,” she told him when he was boy. “Angels’ wings feather our lips.”

  Domenico’s eyes met his. Oreste shrugged. Cèrto, they were tight on time. But so what? It wasn’t like communion was exactly something you could rush. Hurry it along, could you, Father, this redemption thing? We have an appointment at the Chigi Palace. And what were they going to do, anyway, all those black suits and Andreotti who looked like a gnome? Wait, that’s what. They’d hardly start swearing in the government without Moro. After all, he’d put the damn thing together. Jury-rigged it with goodwill and promises. It wasn’t exactly elegant, but he’d hauled the Communists out of the cold and, grace of God, lured them into bed with the Christian Democrats. Lo, the lambs shall lay down with the lions and the hand of peace shall be upon you. Oreste smiled at himself. For a man who didn’t believe, he’d come over all biblical. Must be the time of year. Easter was next week.

  The tinny notes of a bell skittered down the aisle. Oreste watched as Moro stood and shook hands with the old woman in the pew behind him, exchanging the benediction. Holding her wrinkled paw in his, he smiled, his long horse face breaking into softness, an almost joy Oreste found himself envying. When was the last time he’d smiled like that, felt it glowing from the bottom of his belly? Maybe he should try harder. Maybe every now and then—on Sunday mornings, say, or Easter—he should forget the world, just for a minute, and make an effort to believe. The idea fluttered in his head, and left. Get thee behind me. Believing wasn’t his job.

  Pushing the church door open, Oreste Leonardi looked left then right, his eyes sweeping the street and the waiting car and the second car with the second group of bodyguards pulled up behind it. He felt Domenico slip past him, caught the signal from the escort and returned it as he heard the familiar intoning, Go in peace, go in peace, and looked back at the door in time to see Aldo Moro step from the shadow of God.

  * * *

  On Via Fani the forsythia had begun to open. And the pink stars of the oleander that had been Monica Ghirri’s favorite until she discovered how poisonous they were. She’d been just a little girl when a teacher had slapped her hand as she reached for the dusky spear of a leaf. At the time Monica thought it was anger in the woman’s voice. Now she understood it was fear.

  That was what children did to you. The world looked ordinary, then you had them and it was filled with hazard. She wondered sometimes how any parent stayed sane, burdened with this love and its attendant terror. She could, for instance, perfectly well have let her son and daughter walk to school by themselves this morning. They were old enough, and it was all of three blocks, and what did she think was going to happen to them on a beautiful Thursday in the middle of Rome? It was one of the reasons they had moved to this neighborhood—bought the apartment she and Gio agreed they really couldn’t afford—because it was safe. Patrician. An ordered, secure place.

  Monica glanced at the bus stop. Two old ladies sat wearing headscarves and, despite the sun, fur-collared coats, each with a small dog on her lap. Beside the bench, a group of Alitalia stewards stood chatting, their travel cases at their feet. One of them, a tall guy with glasses and a mustache—and wasn’t that a sign of the times, they’d be bearded next—checked his watch, then looked down the road and shrugged.

  Furious honking erupted a few streets away. Something was niggling at Monica, like a stone in her shoe. She stopped, waiting to cross the street, and realized what it was. The flowers on the dining room table. They were wilting. She needed another bouquet, something cheerful, but the flower seller’s van wasn’t in its usual spot on the corner.

  She was looking down the road, thinking he might have moved a block, when she heard the crunch of a fender. A white Fiat had thrown its brakes on, causing the car behind to ram it. Idiot, Monica Ghirri thought, they really ought to improve the driving test. Then the shooting started.

  * * *

  To be honest, Oreste Leonardi hadn’t been thinking about anything. His eyes scanned the familiar road, taking in the intersection ahead, the bus stop that seemed to be filled this morning with Alitalia crew, the woman who, he thought vaguely, was pretty in a too soft kind of way standing by the crosswalk, the opposite corner where— His brain clicked. Where the flower seller’s van was always parked.

  But this morning, wasn’t.

  He frowned, suddenly completely aware of Moro behind him, lost as usual in his sheaf of papers. They joked that the backseat was his flying office. The flower seller’s van. Not there.

  Without even being aware of it, Oreste reached for the holster on his hip. He had opened his mouth to say something to Domenico—was just forming the words—when the car in front of them threw on its brakes and instead of speaking, Oreste thought This is it, and flung himself into the backseat.

  Oreste Leonardi was looking into Aldo Moro’s startled face when the first shot hit him. He felt the impact, a sort of dull thud, and then the unexpected frailness of Moro’s body as he shoved him down, covering him as the rattle of semiautomatic fire and shatter of glass ripped the car.

  The second shot hit Oreste in the back. Suddenly he was aware of words. They came whole, filling his head. Rising, white and perfect, f
rom somewhere deep in memory, when, holding his mother’s hand in the shadow of another church, he had believed.

  “Deus in adjutorium meum intendi.”

  Oreste Leonardi didn’t know if he said it, or if Aldo Moro said it, or if, in the brief moment before his life ended, they said it together.

  “Domine ad adjuvandum me festina.”

  God, come to my assistance. Lord, make haste to help me.

  Part I

  Florence, 2010

  Tuesday, January 19, to Saturday, January 23

  MOMMY!”

  The word repeated in its high child’s voice. “Mommy! Mommy!” It stretched, wailing like a siren. Mom-mee! Mom—mee! Until it broke into pieces: Mom!Me! And became something else. Mom and me. Mom is me. Or nothing at all.

  Kristin Carson rocked. Her hand closed over the little white bear, her fingers found the familiar grooves, the dents where his fur was worn completely away in places, exposing the hard nubbled linen of his stuffed-bear skin. Sometimes, when she let go of him, the siren stopped. Sometimes it didn’t. And sometimes it changed—blurring into the wind, or the rush of traffic, or the rhythmic swipe of a branch against a roof or windowsill. Tonight it kept pinging back, growing fainter as she surfaced out of sleep, but still there. Like the ping of sonar from something sinking, twelve years down into black water.

  If she lay very still, she could do it. She didn’t even have to be dreaming, she could will herself when she was wide awake, any time day or night. She could bounce on her toes like a diver on a board, and spread her arms, and lean farther and farther, until she fell. Down into the wound she was so officially, and so expensively, healed of. Go like a maggot to the cut. To the sacred place, where, under her bare feet she would feel not the striped cotton bedsheets, faintly damp with sweat and winter, but the basement steps, their grain soft and dusty and sweet with the smell of lumber, new and still pocked with the heads of silver nails.

  Then, if she closed her eyes—and, actually, even if she didn’t—she would see her hand, tiny against the glossed red paint of the door, its fat worm fingers splayed as it lifted and banged and beat in time to the words: “Mom!Mee! Mom!Mee! Mom!Mee!”

  Of course, she wasn’t supposed to. It was, officially, “bad for her” to go there. But she liked to. She liked to the same way she liked picking scabs. Pulling at the covering of dead skin her body worked so hard to produce. Peeling it back, then flaking away what was left with a fingernail. Digging until it bled. Sticks and stones. The singsong drifted, thin as a breeze. Sticks and stones may break my bones. But words will surely hurt me.

  The memory of sugar swelled the back of her tongue. Her baby hand itched from the bristly fur of the little white bear that had been brand-new then, with not only the gold button in its ear, but the tag, too. “See?” Mommy had asked. “‘Forevermore.’ That’s what it says. Because he’ll always be your friend. He’ll always keep you company.” Then she’d closed the basement door.

  Kristin sat up. She fumbled for the lamp. The room that swam into focus was pretty much a box. White walls broken by the wardrobe’s sliding mirrored door that seemed not to throw light, as it was surely intended to, but to swallow it. Suck in the shadows that streamed across the cheap white laminate bureau and matching desk and chair. Welcome to Italy, Kristin thought. Design Capital of the Universe, where they also have IKEA. The room’s single window looked onto a wall. Rain beat the glass. Somewhere near the San Frediano Gate a car alarm was going off.

  Theirs was the only student apartment in this particular building, but all the places the program used were pretty much the same. A lot of the girls had made a big deal of fixing up their rooms. In the first few days after they’d arrived, even those who’d been stuck in the dorms had gotten together and gone on shopping expeditions. They’d flocked off like crows, sharing taxis out to the box stores near the airport and coming back with throw rugs and beanbags in bright, startling colors. And with those paper globes to go over lights that always ended up hanging sideways. And with glow-in-the-dark stars that stuck to the ceiling. And wall clocks in animal shapes—cat faces with whiskers for second hands and fish bones for the hours and tails that swung from their bodiless heads.

  They’d bought curtains in geometric retro prints, interlocking lozenges of pink and orange, and framed posters from the Uffizi shop. How many fat kissy-faced angels with wings sticking out of their shoulders or stoned-looking naked ladies standing on giant clamshells could there be in one city? Lots, was the answer.

  Kristin’s roommate, Mary Louise, whose last name was “Tennyson-Like-the-Poet,” had bought chains of little blinky lights, too. Not chili peppers or mini howling coyotes, but snowflakes. And instead of the angels or the potbellied shell lady, she’d gone for some sappy-faced Madonna, who, now that Kristin thought about it, looked a lot like her. Dark haired, chubby cheeked, and about as smart. The little white bear frowned. Mr. Ted was Kristin’s better half. He didn’t like it when she was mean.

  “OK, OK.”

  She kissed the top of his head. His black eyes winked in the lamplight. The tag was long gone, but the button in his ear was still there. She ought to buy him a new ribbon. The one around his neck was pretty ratty. Kristin laid Mr. Ted down beside her. She tucked the sheet around him carefully, pulling it under his little bear chin.

  By now the dream had slushed away like dirty water. She could feel the slick of it though, as if she’d swum through oil. Sometimes the residue had a smell. It wasn’t tears, or snot, like you might expect. Or that sore-throaty smell from when you’ve been crying really hard. It was chocolaty. Not expensive chocolates from a box. But cheap. The smell of those supermarket cookies, the ones that came in plastic trays and had pink or green or sky-blue icing, and the smell had a sickly undertone of alcohol. Not gin, or whiskey, or beer, either. Vodka. People say you can’t smell it. But you can.

  She sat up, swinging her legs over the bed. The floor was tile, and cold. Rain splatted the window. Wind ruckussed between the buildings, shimmering the bricks next door that were close enough to touch. Kristin knew because her first day here, before she’d unpacked even, she’d pried up the frame and leaned out and held her palm against them, feeling the next-door house, warm as an animal skin.

  By November the bricks had been lined with frost. She’d woken up one morning to see them rimmed dirty white, like gums in those ads about what will happen to your teeth if you don’t floss. For the last three weeks they’d been silvered with rain. It would freeze, if the wind ever stopped blowing. Which it didn’t. There were whitecaps on the Arno. Welcome to Florence, where nobody tells you how fucking freezing it is.

  Kristin tapped her phone. Two-oh-five a.m. She listened for a minute. The alarm had stopped. Either the car had been stolen or somebody had made the trek down and out into the street in their bathrobe or with an overcoat over their pajamas to turn the thing off. A shutter was banging. Creak, thud, creak. Too far away to be one of theirs, it must be on another floor or across the street. She got up, crossed to the desk, slid open a drawer, and pulled out the Swiss Army knife Santa Claus had left last year in her stocking.

  The little computer’s screen throbbed as it booted up, making it look almost alive. Like something from outer space, or a heart. Kristin checked the mute button. Her room was at the end of the hall, with the bathroom in the middle, so the bing-bong wasn’t going to wake Little Miss Perfect. Tennyson-Like-the Poet slept like a rock. She snored sometimes, too, in short purr, snort, purrs that wandered down the hall. Kristin waited for the screen to be fully lit, then typed in the password and the Hotmail address.

  The computer was the first present he sent her. Back then, before she’d heard his voice, she’d imagined it, speaking through the screen. Coming like the sound of the ocean when you held a shell to your ear. She’d suggested Skype a bunch of times. But he’d always said no. Dante, he’d said, wrote to Beatrice.

  Kristin clicked on the mailbox. Sure enough, there it was. He had promised she wou
ld love the sound of his voice, and she had. He had promised she wouldn’t be disappointed when she met him, and she wasn’t. He had promised he would know what she was thinking, and would know what she needed, and he did. Always.

  She’d told him once that it was magic, the way he made her feel. That it was like she could lean back, and back, and know that she would fall, and that he would catch her. When she’d said that, he’d smiled. And then he’d said, “No, Cara, that isn’t magic. That is love.”

  The mail had been sent just minutes before, at one fifty-seven a.m. Kristin felt a surge run through her. She had a feeling, an almost certainty, that if she opened the door of her room, if right now she stepped out into the hall and looked out of the little window down into the street, she would see him. Standing there. Looking up at her.

  That was the miracle of it. No matter what he said, that was magic. The fact that, somehow, in all the world, he had found her. And that now, out there—under one of those red-tiled roofs, while the nightmare unwound, while she banged her baby palm and screamed, “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy”—he’d heard her.

  Carina, the message read. It is late or early and the rain is like stars and I am awake and dreaming of my Beatrice.

  Mary Louise Tennyson sat at the pine table in the main room of the apartment and tried very hard not to be pissed off. Anger, her mom always said, was in you, not in the person you thought provoked you. Only you could make you angry, not them.

  Well, maybe. But then again her mom hadn’t met Kristin.

  What did I do? Mary Louise wondered. Karma. That had to be it. She must have way seriously screwed up in some former life.

  Mary Louise had been looking forward to this year in Italy for just about, well, ever. Her mom had promised it to her back when she was a freshman in high school. The deal was, if she got into one of her top three colleges, Smith, Vassar, or Bryn Mawr, on early decision, she could take a year off and her mom would pay. For any study-abroad course she wanted.