But May is gambling, in part, on Cristofana’s short attention span. (How long could her twin, however determined, realistically lurk around the portal entrance? She had to eat, forage, survive.)
Out May steps into the glare of yesteryear in her same drab dress and sandals, dodging the living and the dead in her haste. She knows the way by heart now, and she’s sworn to herself that she won’t upset him in ghost form again, so her visits are brief but heady. He can’t see her out there, even if he glances up from his corner toward the window ledge. (May often wonders why he chooses to work back there in the shadows; aren’t artists always after the “good light”? Not Marco, apparently.) She’s invisible in the relentless Italian sun. Present — and unbearably absent.
But one day Cristofana does catch May out. She’s loitering beside the portal when May emerges, and she sidles up before May can backtrack.
“There is only one way to be with him, you know.” She follows May out of the hushed alley, into the cobbled streets. “You know this, don’t you?”
May decides to play along. “If you want me to stay today,” she snaps, “don’t leave my sight. If you do, I’ll assume you’re out to trap me. If I stay, it’s on my terms.”
Cristofana smiles indulgently, bending at the knee as for royalty. “As you wish.”
They both know that all Cristofana has to do is get back to the portal before her and slip through, but May’s counting on whatever it is that’s been holding Cristofana back this long.
There has to be something.
It’s early, and the streets are hot and dry, deserted but for the occasional vagrant with downcast eyes. The sun beats down like a bludgeon. So May makes little effort to conceal her ghost self.
They pause at the end of an alleyway to let a carriage pass so it doesn’t mow Cristofana over, and the girl slouches against a wall in her weird array of rags and pilfered riches. May looks up, really, for the first time — at least on this side of time — and is shocked to find no dome. Il Duomo, the focal point of the city she knows, isn’t here. May’s never bothered to lift her head (or dared take her eyes off Cristofana for long), but apparently the first marvel of modern architecture, as Gwen called it the day they arrived in Florence, hasn’t been built yet. May’s uneasy gaze darts left and right, seeking the gold doors Gwen showed her. They aren’t here, either. Together with the general air of horror and decay in the city, the pestilence has halted all construction. There’s a chaotic, unfinished air about everything.
The carriage is stuck in a pothole, the driver whipping the horse while a passenger leans his weight against the wheel, and Cristofana stops to watch. May sees that the scratches on her wrist are still there, fainter but an ugly pink, infected probably.
“How could you?” May accuses now, remembering, most of all, her own helplessness.
“How could I what?” The other girl blinks back disdain.
“Do what you did to that animal. It trusted you.”
Recognition blooms on her mirror face. “Kitty, kitty, poor kitty —”
If May were flesh and blood, her fingernails would be biting into her palms. Cristofana surprises her then by stepping forward, standing as close as she can get without blurring with May. “That cat was skin and bones, riddled with worms, with none to care for it.” Her voice is low and dire, and May hates the truth in her words. In May’s future, kittens are routinely dewormed; it’s a common treatment, one she herself helped administer over and over during a veterinary internship the summer after sophomore year. The bony gray kitten had lived in a state of constant, nagging hunger, a hunger no food would solve, which is no excuse for murdering it, May thinks, but then again, there seems to her no excuse, no possible explanation, for tearing your holy men limb from limb, either.
“You live in an easy world, yes?” Cristofana complains, as if reading her mind.
Yes, May thinks, I do, but it’s all relative. Everything’s relative.
“You are full of goodness and generosity, but have you learned nothing here?” Cristofana turns like a dancer, her frayed silks twirling. “Come, let me walk you to the parish churchyard, where they’ve dug trenches down to the waterline, wide and deep. Every night, people of good conscience, or those paid handsomely for their trouble, haul the dead on their backs and hurl them into this hole without ceremony. Every morning, the bodies are sprinkled over with earth. Come night again, more are heaved on top . . . crisscross double-cross, as the good rhyme goes . . . and then more dirt, and so on, layered like a mamma’s lasagna. Gone are the processions and blazing candles, the pretty cloaks and mantels and veils for the lady mourners, the bells and biers and wailing multitudes. Instead, you vanish. You are plowed under and forgotten. Like that.” She snaps her fingers, gazing at them almost proudly, and then walks on.
May lets her go.
“Well?” the other calls back haughtily, pausing again. “Will you not face what I do daily? Will you judge me from the safety of where you stand?”
“I’ve seen enough.”
“Have you?”
“There’s nothing I can do to help. It’s all happened. It’s over —”
“For you it’s over. Do you not see that our world is gone mad with the pestilence? We are no more good and evil. In this suffering and misery of our city, the authority of human and divine laws is no more. The ministers are dead or sick or shut up with their families. None do their duty, and to spite them, we do as we please, and who can blame us when we will die anyway, good or bad? God wills it, and He is cruel.”
Two huddled women in fine dress hurry past. If they don’t see May or don’t believe what they see, it’s a fierce lone girl in strange clothes they perceive, a stupefied madwoman ranting on a street corner. If May is visible — and who knows? — it’s all a trick of the light, and the women lower their eyes so quickly that they see two eerily identical girls, one flesh and one phantom, arguing. Either is cause to cross the cobbles, crushing sprays of herbs and posies under their nostrils. The air here reeks of death and sickness, so those who can afford to carry nosegays or vinegar-soaked rags to ward away the stink.
May stares back, unyielding, her lip trembling.
“If you will not look around you, will not take what I offer, then give me something. I love this city, loved . . .” A glimmer of sorrow, rare and compelling on the mirror of May’s own features, is all it takes.
May feels her anger recede, eclipsed by pity.
“Give it back to me, my city.”
“What do you want me to say? There’s no end to it, if that’s what you mean — sickness, war, violence — it doesn’t go away. It gets worse. There are machines in my world, so many machines, and everything’s faster.”
“But what of Firenze?”
“In just a few decades,” May explains, straining to orient herself in time, to access Gwen’s or Liam’s latest lecture on the Renaissance, “Florence will be one of the most celebrated cities in the world. There’s a rebirth of ideas here . . . and all these great painters and musicians and architects. There’ll be a huge dome . . . up there . . . and gigantic gold doors, there and there.”
“These I have seen with my own eyes. You forget . . . I am a traveler, too. But go on. It’s true, then, as Marco says, that men will one day care for more than sheep and wool and commerce?”
For a moment, May doesn’t register the name, and when she does, she feels a violent stab of jealousy. So they’ve talked? In their native Tuscan dialect, no doubt. “Yes,” she says, her tone cold, firmer, “and medicine. People won’t get sick so often or die from sickness, at least not in developed countries.”
“Developed?” She looks puzzled. “I knew you were not from Firenze, but from where? You learned your speech in England? I learned it from my English mother.”
“My country doesn’t exist yet. Or at least not the way it does later. Medicine could ease this sickness, but there’ll be another. Just as there are other wars. Nothing is easy. No time is easy. In the country whe
re I live, two vast buildings, taller than twenty of your city towers, were blown from the world with all the people in them. You have a choice.”
“A choice?”
“How you endure it.”
“You have a choice. I must make do with your word, it seems. You speak of history, not life. But continue.”
May thinks of the newscasts, the photographs, the smiling portraits of those killed in the attacks of 9/11. She was just a kid and mostly remembers her mom’s silence. Her dad’s tears. “No. I’ll give you nothing until you . . . apologize . . . for what you did to that cat, for who you are.”
“Then I make my choice.” Cristofana turns and sets off marching.
“Where are you going?” May demands, wrestling with foreboding, her voice shrill.
“With luck, I’ll choose to kill a nun,” Cristofana calls over her shoulder, an obscene smile on her face as she strides through the maze of streets and alleys with May at her heels. “I’ll slit her throat with my knife. Now, that will be a choice.”
As they cross into the artists’ quarter, May feels a terrible, reeling sense of dread, a now-familiar sensation where Cristofana’s concerned.
“And you must understand that no one will miss her. No one misses anyone now. We disappear, and no one sees. Can you begin to know this feeling, bella?”
The city shops and guilds have all been officially closed, Cristofana explained earlier, to contain infection, but every so often as May follows on this fool’s errand, she sees individual merchants and craftsmen enter or exit buildings, and now and then she makes out the dim glow of torches or candles between shutters. When they reach the familiar street-level bottega, she pants, “Stop . . . please.”
Cristofana does and turns. “Oh, don’t look at me with those child’s eyes.”
“Your eyes,” May challenges.
“No, bella. Mine have seen more. Much more.”
May turns in frustration, running her palm along the wall, or trying, imagining the coarse drag of the brick she can’t feel. Her skin and bones and beating heart all scream to be here and impact things, to have power in this place, but they don’t.
“Oh, you are so good, aren’t you? You despise cruelty. You are like a good little nun. You are no use to him at all.”
Him. That pronoun again.
They have reached the workshop, and Cristofana peers around the loose shutter, spying.
May sidles up next to her, eager and afraid at once. She wants to see him again, badly, as always, and there’s a kind of shame in that. It clouds her judgment, and Cristofana knows it. She’s the only one who knows. May feels complicit in something, and this helpless craving for something to happen, for relief, is agonizing. “How can you stand to be you?” May hisses near the other girl’s ear.
But together they admire his lean back in a soiled linen shirt, the thoughtful tilt of the black back of his head, the geometry of his raised arm. There is color everywhere, streaking his clothes, the stiff chair and those beautiful hands, speckling the plank floor. The workshop is a sweaty, close space, full of wooden bowls of ground pigment and sticky paint, hunks of half-chiseled stone, piles of charcoal-marked pages, sheets of hammered bronze, dust falling through beams of light, the ubiquitous chickens picking through curls of wood for a dropped almond. Squat candles burn on an iron stand. “The same way I can do this. Watch, now. His light is burning for me.”
She has her hand on the door latch before May can blink, and suddenly Cristofana’s inside. It’s as if a real person has walked onto a television set, into the screen. He doesn’t flinch when she comes slinking up from behind. She lifts a leg and swivels, sliding between the artist and his easel, settling on his lap, facing him, and for a moment he looks around the empty workshop, stunned and bewildered, but he soon relents hungrily, hands moving over her neck and breasts. She kisses him hard, grinding on his lap, and May turns away in an agony of disgust. Is he kissing Cristofana because she’s there, because he can, the way May imagines she kissed Liam? Does he think it’s me? Doesn’t he know it isn’t? Why should he care? He thought I was dead. . . .
Her rage doesn’t make it any easier to look away from the spectacle in front of her, her artist’s strong, scarred hands roving over Cristofana’s face, in her hair. Mine, May thinks — and this childish greed is new and terrible — mine.
Cristofana breaks the seal of their kiss, arching her back, glancing up at the window for effect, wiping her smug mouth. The two exchange a few words May can’t hear, their foreheads touching, his mouth brushing her neck. Almost as quickly as she slipped away, Cristofana returns, adjusting her clothes. May stands speechless by her mirror image until it presumes to speak in that low, dire voice May hates, the one that purrs like a secret. “He will die, you know. More important, I will die, unless you save me. Save me, and take him for your trouble.”
Their eyes lock.
“Oh, his hands feel good, bella. I must tell you. He is an apprentice only, but a master with his hands, and he tastes like honey from the hills. His mouth is warm, and twice already he has painted me nude.”
“Shut up, you”— it slips out before May can stop it, a word she doesn’t use, just wouldn’t ordinarily use, but this anger is so rich, so comforting —“bitch.”
“Now then, my friend, what harm in it? In being a little dog, a little she-dog, licking his —?”
“Shut up!
“He saw you then, but now he sees only me. He thinks I am you, and I will treat him unkindly in your name. I will seduce him and break his heart. I will ruin his good, damaged soul and take his smile forever in your honor, and he will think all along it was you, the girl who came from another world and loved him with her eyes.
“You should not go away so long, bella. You never know what will happen, and you care too little for him. You care too little for me when you might help me. You have but one choice and that is to make a choice.
“Stay here. Take your chances with Marco. The pestilence will pass, and he will be a great artist like his master, one of your Renaissance men — with all the best patrons one day, all the best commissions — and you will wear silk like my lady did, before she died in a puddle of filth, before the buboes came.
“Stay, and I will go, and we will cheat time, which will not otherwise let us each have what we want.”
“I don’t know what I want,” May admits, hating herself for it, and somewhere in the back of her head, she hears her mom’s voice intruding, calm and measured — on the day she and Dad broke the news — her own mother’s voice, saying, “There is no logic in love, no knowing when it will come . . . or go.” Even her father seemed to hold with this ridiculous statement, murmuring agreement, nodding meekly.
Is this love?
How tame May has been all her life, how trusting and well behaved and unimaginative. Always doing the right, expected thing. I am not myself. Even her parents are braver, and May feels the injustice of this like a red blaze, a fury she turns on her double. “Not that your plan is in any way, shape, or form sane. Has it ever occurred to you that I like my life?”
“Has it ever occurred to you? I have watched you — when you didn’t know I was there — sitting glumly with your loved ones, picking at your food (so much food!). You have everything. You deserve none of it.”
They stare at each other until Cristofana resumes in her headlong way. “But I digress. Only think: you and Marco will have babies, and you will keep kittens, fat kittens — you’ll be a hero to kittens — and I will have —”
What? May thinks, smelling or imagining the hint of sickness and decay in the air, the chill damp in the stones, easily eclipsed in her mind by the warmth of his hands, his hot eyes on her. I am not myself. She shakes her head, shakes herself sensible. “I’m going home to think. But first tell me — you’re obviously dying to — what you’ll have. What’s in it for you . . . after you’ve saved your sorry ass?”
“What do you suppose?” May’s twin blinks back at her, the soul of pat
ience. “I will have everything that is yours, bella.” She glances over May’s shoulder. “Now, go from me. I have an unpleasant errand.”
May glares at her. Cristofana is a schemer, a survivor, and it makes sense that assuming May’s identity would offer safe haven in an alien world. It would buy her time to orient herself. The more she knows about my life, the more prepared she’ll be to take it over. “Tell me how the portal works,” May demands, remembering that she has questions of her own. “How are you doing this?”
“The spells are here. And here.” Cristofana touches her palm to her forehead, her chest. “They can’t be told or sold or borrowed.” She walks away, calling over her shoulder. “Make the choice with your heart, bella, not fear, and make it soon. I grow weary, waiting.”
May watches her double walk away, the long tangle of dirty-blond hair laced through with tiny dreadlock braids, ribbons, and straw, her scavenged gown-of-the-day, a busty plum number, dragging in the muck. Watching her grow smaller on the horizon, a purplish speck, May panics. Letting Cristofana out of her sight here is like losing sight of herself somehow, and when the other girl veers down a crooked alleyway, May starts after her, a ghost streaking the air.
May follows through a stony labyrinth of streets, keeping well out of view, and then across a busy covered bridge. She guesses it’s an earlier incarnation (this version looks almost newly constructed) of Ponte Vecchio, but instead of the rows of flags and trattorias and stalls offering souvenirs and fancy jewelry, there are tables manned by burly butchers and tradesmen advertising their wares. Luckily there’s enough streaming light inside to conceal her as she dodges in and out of the shifting crowd.
Through the archways, May sees the river below, wide and flat and shining, dotted with tiny men rowing tiny boats (though May knows that up close they’re probably the long barchettas still used, in the future, to give river tours).
Plague in the Mirror Page 9
