The Infinite Now

by Mindy Tarquini

  “You feel it. You said it yourself. Like rocks.” I touched my chest, then clapped a hand to my head. “Stop pounding that nail.”

  Carlo put down his hammer and touched a finger to his temple. “Belief is a house for which the mind provides the mortar. You look for meaning where there is none, invent a bubble, decide you’ve trapped us all there, and now you are looking for a way out. But we live in a real world, and it moves from day into night whether we wish it or not, whether we notice or not. This bubble exists only in your mind. And when you decide it is finished, it is finished.”

  Men. Able to make the true untrue with a declaration.

  Carlo stood. He stowed the shoes into his satchel, threw the satchel over his shoulder, then smacked his forehead. “You have me so turned around with talk of magic bubbles, it’s a miracle I remember my own name.” He dug into his pocket and pulled out a packet. He laid it on the table. “The don’s pills. The druggist said you forgot to take them with you on the day you picked them up.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I took them with me.” I rummaged among the awls and punches. Looked beneath cartons, shook canisters, upended baskets, until I found them, torn between relief and annoyance that once again, the old man had left them far from where he might need them. I held the envelope out to Carlo. “See?”

  Carlo examined both packets. “The dates are the same. The druggist is very busy. He must have forgotten.”

  Reasonable. Hardly worthy of consideration. But Carlo’s explanation refused to settle into its slot. I snatched back both packets and opened them. The pills were white as they should be, round as I remembered, the envelopes square and brown, with instructions on the outside written in a clear hand, in every respect the same. Yet, Carlo’s packet presented as good, proper. The one I’d just found deep among the cinnamon sticks had an ominous feel, off-center, out of balance. Just. Not. Right.

  My gut got crampy, my chest tight. Something pricked at my thumbs, and in my mind’s eye, the packet I’d picked up on Parade Day suddenly glowed red, toxic and threatening. I dropped it. The pills scattered across the floor, the way my apples had scattered across the cobbles on the day I first met Carlo. Like that day, Carlo dove after them.

  I dove after Carlo. “No. Leave them. Don’t touch them.”

  He reached to where I held him by the shoulder, covered my hand with his. “What is it, signorina?”

  I sank to my knees. “I’ve been so stupid. What have I done? No wonder the old man is so sick. It’s not his heart. It’s his pills. They come from the guaritrice.”

  Twenty-Seven

  I doubled over on the floor beside the old man’s table, wanting to crawl under it, wanting to lose myself amid the baskets and boxes, leather scraps and dust bunnies. “I was so focused on the tea, so lost in the guaritrice’s kindness. The old man warned me. He figured it out right away, but he never thought to question the pills, and I didn’t believe the danger.”

  Carlo dragged me out and stood me up. “Who is the guaritrice?”

  I explained and I explained. Carlo listened, his gaze growing cloudier as I went. Finally, he threw up his hands. “Magical tea to go with magical pills because of your magical curtain.”

  “Her mother’s magical curtain.”

  Carlo whipped around. “Don Sebastiano.”

  The old man stood in the doorway. “There is plenty in this world you understand, Carlo, and plenty you don’t need to. Signorina Vicente is worried about the pills she brought me from the pharmacy a month ago. I’d like you to go to the Children’s Bureau and check on the boys. Check on Etti. He got very sick from one of those pills.”

  “All due respect, Don Sebastiano, I don’t think you should encourage the signorina’s notions.”

  “Then humor an old man and visit the boys because you miss them.”

  Carlo’s face went tight and stormy, like he still had plenty to say. Whatever it was, he kept to himself. He turned on his heel, stomped out of the old man’s apartment and on down the stairs.

  Carlo’s departure didn’t stop me. I grabbed his satchel, headed onto the old man’s landing, and let every thought still roiling under my surface explode in an exasperated and steaming eruption, emphasized with plenty of finger-pointing. “You met the guaritrice. You know who she is. You spoke with her. But you don’t remember because she made her daughter brew you some tea.”

  Carlo slammed the street door after him.

  I opened the satchel and sprinkled the contents over the banister. “And. You. Forgot. Your. Shoes.”

  The old man yanked me back into his apartment. “The guaritrice can’t have a daughter.”

  “Of course she can.” Couldn’t she? “The guaritrice suggested we become friends.”

  “No.” He dug his nails into my wrist. “A child is good. A gift from God. The guaritrice is death. She is destruction. No good can come to one such as her. Whoever that girl is, she is no daughter of the guaritrice.”

  The way the guaritrice told her what to do, how to act, what to say. The way Tizi only obeyed when the guaritrice was around. “She sure acts like the guaritrice is her mamma.”

  “Because the guaritrice sensed that is the relationship with which you would be most comfortable. Because the guaritrice wants your trust. Because she wants the curtain. Guard your heart, Fiora Vicente. Guard your tongue.” He looked to the windows. “Because you do not know who might be listening.”

  “What the neighbors don’t overhear, they make up anyway.”

  “I mean the guaritrice.”

  “Even less. The curtain does what it wants, doesn’t care who it hurts, and try as I might, I cannot bend it to my will.”

  “Of course you can’t. You bear the curtain’s burden, but you are not the curtain’s master. You keep it safe, keep it secure, keep it from falling into the wrong hands, but you cannot command the curtain. The curtain belongs to me.”

  The old man still had me by the wrist. Good thing, or I might have fallen down.

  I started babbling. “How come Mamma had it? How come it’s my burden if the curtain belongs to you?” And, most importantly. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  The old man released me. He pulled the box off the shelf, the one where he’d put away the letter from my brothers giving permission for the old man to be my guardian. He pulled papers from it, some wrapped in ribbon, others heavy with official seals. “It is all here, a wasted life, now without meaning because I’ve lost the ones I loved. I cursed the day that curtain left and would have cursed the day it returned. But for her.” He pushed a photograph toward me, dog-eared, and worn.

  A girl sitting on a bench against a painted backdrop of flowers and forests popular in those days. She was serious, and somber, and looked just like me. “Mamma?”

  The old man nodded. “She was about your age. Arrived at our door, my wife’s and mine, much the way you did. Cold. Wet. Hungry. Brought by the guaritrice. She said she worried about contagion.”

  My mother. Like me. I couldn’t imagine her in that way. To me she was so capable, so sure. “Contagion?”

  “Cholera. The guaritrice arrived with her cures and her teas and her promises of help. Our community was isolated, superstitious, and very, very scared. So the village embraced her, allowed her into their homes, their lives. But not my wife, not me. We remained wary. So the guaritrice sent us your mother.”

  My mother. The guaritrice. “I don’t understand.”

  “They were sisters, or so the guaritrice claimed. Your mother was so young, the guaritrice working day and night with the sick, or so she appeared. She told us she did not want your mother with her.”

  My knees went wobbly, my hands shaky, my head got floaty, and the pit of my stomach hollowed out. “The guaritrice is my aunt?”

  “The guaritrice is nobody’s aunt. Nor cousin. Nor sibling. Nobody’s daughter, nobody’s mother. The guaritrice is a parasite. She arrives with sickness, and feeds off its fruits, sucking at the stricken, the hopeless, the poor i
n spirit. Then she leaves, devastation in her wake, latent until her next opportunity to thrive.”

  “The guaritrice is young. She is beautiful.”

  “The guaritrice is whatever will serve her. She is old as fable, and fresh as an open wound, and she will exploit any weakness, any dent in your defense. She sent your mother to us to play on my wife’s tender feelings, to make us more kindly disposed toward her. The guaritrice used your mother, as she uses everything, everyone, for her own gain, her own purposes.”

  The old man settled onto his bench. “In a land such as ours, traditions run deep. My grandmother was the village wise woman, as was her grandmother before her, and her grandmother before that. In my generation, there were no girls, so the curtain came to me. It clung to my window, sometimes offering insight, mostly regulating the light. People presumed because I had it, I knew something, so asked my advice on everything, from herding sheep to pastry making, and no matter what I told them, silly or serious, the curtain made it turn out all right.” He set his elbow on the table and his cheek on his palm. “Ridiculous when you take the time to think about it.”

  Mending, starting businesses, who Carlo should marry. Soup. “So you’re not magical.”

  “No more than you. My sons took sick and left. No supplication I uttered, no promise I made, no sacrifice I offered brought them back. My wife was expecting. Very near her time. The guaritrice made an offer, my grandmother’s curtain for a healthy baby. My wife agreed. She gave the guaritrice the curtain, but your mother brought the curtain back. I didn’t know, didn’t know any of it. I was away helping at a farm in the hills. By the time I returned, my baby was lost, the guaritrice was gone, and my wife’s fever raging to such a height I feared I’d lose her, too.

  Every belief I’d ever had for any moment of my life swept me up and off my feet. They cast me into the maelstrom, and landed me in a strange, exotic world. “You’re saying my mother killed your baby.”

  “No.” The old man packed so much conviction behind the word, I had no doubt it and every word that followed would be the truth. “Your mother was a good and a kind girl. But misguided. She’d been with the guaritrice for as long as she could remember, had grown a harsh and brittle shell. Living with us changed her. My wife was kind. She was caring. She developed a true fondness for your mother. So when your mother saw her opportunity, she retrieved the curtain and escaped the guaritrice, then offered the curtain to my wife as the price of her protection.”

  The old man’s voice was strident, defiant, brimming with emotion. “Had I been there, had I known, I’d never have taken the curtain back. My wife had struck a bargain. Return of the curtain broke that bargain. My child paid the price. After my wife recovered, I never wanted to see the curtain again. I did not want to see your mother again. Your mother accepted her responsibility and took on the curtain’s burden. She worked as a seamstress and lived a quiet life on the other side of the village. Finally, she married. She had a family. She emigrated with the rest of us, and made sure to live far enough away that she and I would not run into each other on a daily basis. But our burdens are not so easily shed. The influenza swept into town, your parents were lost, and here you are. Along with the curtain.”

  No wonder everybody treated me so oddly. They knew the old man was distant and after what happened . . .

  I stopped. I didn’t have to think about it. Not then. Not ever. What was done was done. I couldn’t go back. Couldn’t change a thing. I’d learned that much from my time with the curtain.

  The old man shuffled through the cards and letters, documents and memories, his movements agitated, then calm, angry, then sad. A photograph fell from the fray. The old man picked it up, his expression wistful. He handed it to me. “This is my wife.”

  The photo showed a girl dressed in traditional clothes, delicate and overdecorated and decades out of date. My mouth went dry. I knew this girl, knew the gently sloping brows, how they always made her look so sad. I knew her in two ways. In a vision in the old man’s garden, the day I picked the strawberries, with wrinkles and age spots superimposed on this girl’s fresh-faced curves.

  And at the guaritrice’s. Her expression sometimes open and honest like in this photo, other times closed off and cranky.

  I looked like my mamma. Yet Tizi looked nothing like the guaritrice. Was it possible? Hadn’t the old man just told me? Tizi looked nothing like the guaritrice because the guaritrice was not her mother.

  The truth slammed into me with the force of a trolley. I looked to the old man’s face, to the mark on his cheek near lost to his age spots. Tizi had a mark just like that. I’d only seen it the one time I saw her without her mask, the time she knocked the red-tinged tea out of Benedetta’s hand and saved Benedetta. I looked to the old man’s pinky and ring finger, the way they crooked, like Tizi’s. I looked into the old man’s eyes, blue-gray and stern, and understood why Tizi’s always felt so familiar.

  It couldn’t be. I hopped up and pulled the photograph from behind the stove. The photo I’d hidden the day the old man interrupted me redecorating his apartment. The photo of his children’s funerals. I showed it to the old man.

  He touched the smallest cross. “I never saw the body. They burned her along with all the cholera’s victims.”

  No body. This spark of clarity made inaction intolerable. I couldn’t tell the old man. His heart might not be able to take it. Whatever I did, I had to do on my own.

  Like . . . explain it all to Tizi. Bring her back with me. Maybe . . . let her live in the old man’s attic. I imagined the scene in my mind’s eye. Imagined my reaction to be told my mother wasn’t my mother and some old man I’d never met was my father.

  But maybe Tizi already knew. Maybe she knew and didn’t care. Maybe she knew and hated the old man for leaving her with the guaritrice.

  Maybe I had no idea about anything. I sank back into my seat. “I don’t understand. The curtain chooses the window, yet belongs to you. How could my mother keep it? How can I?”

  “The curtain stayed in your apartment from a force of will. Your mother’s force of will. She didn’t want to pass the burden to you. You didn’t have it with you when you arrived. So I presumed your mother was successful.”

  “How could you know I didn’t have it with me?”

  The old man looked at me the way the nuns looked at a pupil who doesn’t quite get the equation. “Distance does not matter with the curtain. I always know where it is. It goes nowhere without my permission.” He plucked a verbena sprig off the table and handed it to me. “You, on the other hand, are more difficult for me to perceive.”

  And that was why I was unable to bring the curtain across the trolley tracks the time I tried to bring it to the guaritrice and get her help figuring out how to make it work for me, the reason the curtain disappeared from my hands when I persisted. I again looked at the photo of the old man’s wife. “But the curtain doesn’t tell you everything. The curtain keeps its secrets.”

  He gathered the photos. Put them back in the wooden box. “Curtains reveal, they conceal. They let in the light, or cast a room into darkness. Your mother’s curtain is no different except it shows you the world from an angle you may not have considered. And now I sense a reckoning, a convergence of all the angles my brain is not bright enough to perceive, and I do not believe I have the strength to face it.”

  Unfortunate. Because I doubted I had the courage.

  The doorbell rang. The top bell for the top apartment.

  The bell came again.

  I hurried downstairs to answer, released from the bubble’s pull by the force of my emotion.

  A messenger in a peaked cap, clipboard in hand, was at the door. He inquired after the don. He handed me an envelope, made me sign that I’d received it, then tipped his cap to me, and hurried on his way.

  I stared at the envelope. I didn’t want to open it, didn’t want to bring it to the old man. Whatever news it contained would be bad, whatever resulted would be worse, and at that m
oment, I’d have been content to never receive another bit of news from anybody about anything for as long as I lived.

  The old man was not such a coward. He descended the stairs, took the envelope from me, pulled out the message, put on his glasses, then held the message at arm’s length to read. His face grew serious. “It’s from Benedetta’s aunt. In Coatesville. She wants you to meet her at the train station on Thursday.”

  My heart shrank, collapsing into a cold, hard lump the size of a walnut. “The baby is dead.”

  “No. Her aunt wants you to meet her at the train station because she wants you to bring her the baby. She says Nicco’s instructed that he would feel better if the aunt cared for the baby until his return.”

  Relief washed in on a warm, welcome wave. It swept out again on a tide of confusion. “She already has Benedetta’s baby. How can she ask that I bring Benedetta’s baby to her?”

  The old man folded the telegram. He slid the telegram back into its envelope, then slid the envelope into his pocket, his stance resolute, his expression unflinching. “Because she doesn’t have Benedetta’s baby. She thinks Benedetta’s baby is here.”

  Twenty-Eight

  I needed to take the curtain to the guaritrice. Because she had Benedetta’s baby. Because she’d already made it clear she’d be willing to trade the baby for the curtain.

  I should have done so at first, instead of at last. Made the offer, instead of being forced to do it. Should have embraced the present, let go the past, admitted I couldn’t control my future. But I couldn’t get the damned thing to fold. I threw it to the ground and looked to the old man. “Why won’t it cooperate?”

  “The curtain senses your confusion.” He picked the fabric off the floor, his face gray, his hands trembly. He stuffed it into Carlo’s satchel. “Everything you need is already provided. You just have to find it. Be clear regarding your path, certain in your resolve, or you will be lost and the guaritrice will consume you.”

  “You always say lost, or passed, or left. Never die.”