The Girl in the Glass

by Susan Meissner

I turned to Lorenzo. “I feel terrible.”

  “It’s not your fault, cara. She wanted to publish this book. This thing about her not being a Medici was bound to come out. If she had approached a different publisher, it was still bound to come out. She opened herself up to this when she decided to write a book that she wanted to see published. It’s not your fault.”

  “I still feel terrible.” My voice caught in my throat.

  He smiled, opened his arms to me, and I slid into his embrace.

  Sometime later that day, when I was still nine, I overheard two courtiers talking about why my father never sent for Virginio and me after our mother died. One said to the other that it was because he did not think we were truly his children because of my mother’s indiscretions with Troilo Orsini. Again I went to Nurse, and again she told me not to pay heed to people who’ve nothing better to do than talk about matters that aren’t their own.

  “They are saying I am not his daughter,” I said. And I remember my voice breaking into pieces as I said this. I didn’t know exactly what this might mean, but it felt like it meant I was no one.

  She took me to the looking glass in my room and stood me in front of it. “You see that girl in the glass?” she said to me. “You are the one who will say who she is, Nora. You decide who she will be and whose daughter she is and the kind of parents she has. You are the girl in the glass.”

  29

  The breakfast dishes were done, Renata was at the dining room table with her laptop, and Lorenzo was showing me the photos he had taken at a vineyard wedding when we heard voices on the other side of their front door.

  The three of us looked up.

  I heard a man’s voice. And then Sofia’s. A door closed. All was quiet again.

  “Is it Emilio?” I asked. Lorenzo nodded.

  For several minutes none of us moved.

  Renata said something in Italian and got up from the table.

  I turned to Lorenzo.

  “She said she wonders if Sofia has her kitchen window open,” he translated.

  Renata opened the balcony doors and stepped outside. I followed her. And a second later, Lorenzo did too.

  The noise of the city crowded in all around us, but we could hear faintly two voices from a nearby window. There was a flat in between Lorenzo and Renata’s place and Sofia’s, and an L-shaped wall. Both made it difficult to hear. Renata moved as close as she could to the railing.

  “He is saying the time to sell the building has come. She is not employed anymore. The rent checks alone are not enough to cover the upkeep. Sofia is saying something, but I can’t hear her … He is saying again the decision is not hers. It is his and her father’s, and they will do what is best.”

  An ambulance or police car on the street below filled the air with its punched wail. We could hear nothing from Sofia’s kitchen window for several long seconds.

  Then I heard Emilio say a word that even I understood.

  Medici.

  I could hear Sofia yell something.

  “What is she saying?” I asked Lorenzo.

  “I think she is saying her papa would not lie to her.”

  Renata leaned farther over the railing.

  “Oh, mama mia. He is telling her Angelo lied whenever he didn’t want to deal with the truth. That he has lied to her about a lot of things.”

  Sofia yelled at Emilio a word I knew. Andare! Go!

  But Emilio kept at it.

  “He is saying Angelo did nothing but lie to her her whole life.” Renata turned to Lorenzo and me. “This is not going so well.”

  Sofia said something else, and Renata shook her head. She couldn’t make it out.

  Emilio seemed to have moved closer to a window. Perhaps Sofia had moved into the kitchen and he had followed her. He said something and this time it was loud enough for Lorenzo to hear it. I could hear it too, but I didn’t know what he said.

  “He says Angelo lied to her because he thought it was what he should do, but it was still a lie,” Lorenzo said. “Again he is saying her father lied to her about many things.”

  Sofia said something we could not fully hear. It sounded like non fare.

  Don’t.

  “He is saying it is time to stop living this way. That she needs to face truth if she is going to live without Angelo. That she needs help,” Lorenzo said. “He is saying he knows the tour agency has been sold and that she pretends she still works there.”

  Sofia shouted a word I didn’t know. I looked to Lorenzo. Mostro. Monster. And then she said something else.

  “She is saying he is the liar,” Renata said. “Oh! He is telling her to look around and see who is telling the truth. He is asking her where are the records that say she is a Medici? Where does it say a Medici can hear statues talk? Where are her baby pictures?”

  At this, the three of us fell stone silent. My mouth dropped open. So did Lorenzo’s. Renata whispered a word I didn’t know.

  “Tell me he is not asking her what I think he is asking?” I said.

  Emilio said it again.

  “Dove sono le tue foto di quando eri un bebè?” Where are your baby pictures?

  “This can’t be happening!” I said.

  Lorenzo sank into one of the chairs. “Non buono, non buono.”

  “Sofia is asking him what he means,” Renata said. “He says there are no baby pictures of her. ‘What do you think this is,’ she says. He says, ‘That is just a painting of you. It is not a photograph of you. There are no photographs of you. You weren’t born in this house. You were four years old when you came to live with my brother and his wife!’ ”

  I could picture what Sofia was doing at the moment Emilio was saying these terrible words. She was showing him the painting of her and her mother, the one that shows her as a baby in her mother’s arms. The little painting on the wall by the sink. The one Sofia kissed.

  “Why in the world is he doing this?” I groaned.

  Renata whirled around. “I’m going over there.”

  As she tried to move past him, Lorenzo grabbed her arm. “So you are going to tell him you’ve been listening to their conversation from the balcony and you have a few things you’d like to say?”

  She shook her arm out of his grasp. “No, that is not what I am going to say! I am going to invite them over for lunch.” She stormed into the flat, and we heard her wrench the front door open.

  Emilio’s voice punctuated the air. He was very close to the kitchen window now.

  “He is saying it is time to live in the real world,” Lorenzo said. “The building needs to be sold, and she needs to come to terms with that. She needs to come to terms with everything.”

  Emilio’s voice stilled and we guessed that he heard knocking at Sofia’s front door.

  We heard no more of their conversation after that.

  It seemed like a long time before the front door opened and Renata returned, bringing someone with her.

  Lorenzo and I went back into the living room. With Renata was a man who looked very much like Angelo Borelli. Emilio had a few pounds on his older brother and less hair, but the eyes, chin, and nose were the same.

  “Emilio needs to talk to you, Meg,” Renata said.

  She said something in Italian to the man next to her. I heard her say my name. Emilio put out his hand to shake mine.

  “He doesn’t speak English very well. But he wants to ask you about Angelo. Sofia told him you and she were just there visiting him. He wants to know if you think he is capable of signing the bill of sale for the building.”

  I looked at the man in front of me, and I wanted more than anything to know why he had said what he did. I didn’t care if he knew we had been listening. I wanted to know why Sofia had to be told her father lied to her.

  “Tell him we could hear them on the balcony. Ask him why he had to tell Sofia she has no baby pictures.” My voice sounded thick with frustration.

  Renata translated my words to Emilio. When she was done, he turned to me and spoke with
out raising his voice. Renata translated as he talked.

  “She cannot live anymore in the dream world her father created. Angelo is not here to keep that world spinning. She must live in the world that is, the one that you and I are in, not in the world he made up. That world is gone. She must know that he created that world with lies. She will not believe me until she realizes this. You tell me how else I can convince her that I am the one telling the truth?”

  “Isn’t it enough that she had to hear she’s not a Medici after all?”

  “This is not your concern. I will do what I must to get her to open her eyes. And if you care about her as much as it appears you do, you wouldn’t let her live another day thinking she is a Medici who hears paintings and statues talking to her and who thinks she has a job as a tour guide when she doesn’t. And please, for the love of God, tell me you will not publish this book she is writing.”

  He waited for me to answer, and Renata waited to translate it. But I suddenly didn’t know what it meant to choose reality over fantasy, as though one couldn’t exist if the other were present.

  Emilio clearly saw everything black and white, just as Renata did. Just as my mother did. Lorenzo was like me; Gabe was like me; Devon was like me. My dad was like me. We were the ones who saw the countless shades of gray. We didn’t choose reality over fantasy; we chose reality and fantasy. We saw the beauty in believing some things can be imagined and also the security that some things can be counted on. The things we counted on made the things we imagined possible. And those possibilities made life wonderful and wild.

  In my dream world, my father loved me my way. In my real world, he loved me his way. Either way, he loved me.

  I didn’t need to find a man like my dad to love me. I had a dad who loved me. And at those times when his way of loving confused me, I could imagine his love was one of the many shades of gray that gave depth to my world.

  The reality was I had a dad who could not be trusted with my expectations. In the amber light of my dreams, I had a dad who sent me to Florence rather than go with me, who brought me poppy-seed bagels, who called me angel, who took me out of school to go to Disneyland, who let me stand on his shoes while he danced with me. Who never meant to hurt me. If I wanted to list his flaws, it would be easy to do. But I didn’t want to list them.

  Sofia didn’t have to live without all her dreams. None of us did. She needed to face reality, but she didn’t need to turn her back on everything extraordinary that gave her life depth. It wasn’t a black-and-white world.

  I looked up at Emilio, and I spoke carefully while Renata translated. “If I publish anything by Sofia, it will be something she and I and my publishing house will be proud of. And as for your other question, Angelo barely recognized Sofia when we were there on Tuesday. She had to talk with him for several minutes before he remembered who she was. And he didn’t know he was at a care facility. He thought he was at work.”

  Emilio looked away, mumbling something. Renata said something back. I looked to Lorenzo standing next to me.

  “He is thinking he will have to get a lawyer. Declare them both mentally unfit.”

  No.

  No, no, no.

  “Emilio!” I said the man’s name with such force that he took a step backward.

  I turned to Renata. “Tell him I know how to get Angelo to sign the bill of sale. Tell him I will help him if he will promise me no lawyers.”

  She said this to him and he nodded, a pensive look on his face.

  “And tell him he needs to help Sofia find someone who can help her manage what she thinks she hears, not someone who will tell her she’s crazy.”

  He frowned, paused, nodded.

  “And he needs to let her think she’s a Medici, if that’s what she wants.”

  He sighed and nodded.

  “And tell him he must tell her he meant nothing by telling her there are no pictures of her as a baby. It was just a silly thing he said.”

  Emilio raised a hand and pointed a finger at me. He rattled off something, and I turned to Renata.

  “He says he won’t do it.”

  “Tell him after all these years, and all Sofia has lost—her parents, her husband, any promise of ever having a child of her own—that she deserves to have at least this. It is such a small thing. It will cost him nothing.”

  Renata repeated what I said.

  Emilio stood unconvinced, a black-and-white man.

  I reached out my hand. He flinched. I gently took his. “Per favore?”

  He tried to pull his hand away, but I wouldn’t let go.

  “Per favore?”

  He said something to Renata.

  “Before he agrees to anything, he wants to know how it is that you can help.”

  “Tell him to take me with him to the facility where Angelo is. And to bring the bill of sale. I can get him to sign it.”

  Renata looked bewildered. “How?”

  “Because he thinks I am Natalia.”

  In the next five minutes, we formulated a plan. Lorenzo would come with Emilio and me to translate for me and to whisper in my ear what I would say to convince Angelo he needed to sign the document. And to be a witness. We decided it might be best if Lorenzo and I went in alone and Emilio waited in the car until we had what he needed. He would visit his brother another time, under different circumstances.

  Renata said she would go over to Sofia’s to sit with her while Lorenzo and I took Emilio out to lunch to get him out of the flat and give her time to digest what he was proposing for the building. Emilio would go over with us while I got my purse and apologize to Sofia for saying what he did about the baby pictures. Then we would leave. Renata would stay.

  Sofia wouldn’t need to know that the building had been sold until she had had more time to get used to the idea. It would be a month or more before the transaction would be complete. By then Emilio would have made arrangements for Sofia to see a therapist who could help her dial in to what was real and what was imaginary. She could have both. She just needed to know which was which.

  Lorenzo grabbed his keys and cell phone, and Renata did the same. The four of us made our way across the hall to Sofia’s. I knocked and waited.

  “Sofia?” I called.

  No answer.

  “See if it’s locked,” Renata said.

  I put my hand on the knob and it turned. We stepped inside.

  “Sofia?” I called out again.

  Renata strode down the hallway calling Sofia’s name. No answer. She came back to the main room.

  “She’s not here!”

  Sofia’s purse and cell phone were on the kitchen table, but Sofia was gone.

  I did not see my father again. He married his mistress, Vittoria, after the suspicious death of her husband. They fled north when the Vatican heard of the marriage, since Vittoria’s husband had been the pope’s nephew.

  The spring I turned fourteen, when word came that my father had died, I brought the letter to Nurse, though she was now in the employ of my uncle Francesco as my cousin Maria’s nurse.

  Nurse already knew that my father had died. The letter had come to Francesco first. It was she who suggested to him that Virginio and I be told.

  It had been five years since she had stood me in front of my looking glass. As I sat there now with the letter between us, she tipped my head toward the glass in Maria’s room and told me that I was not like fair Andromeda, chained to the rock of my parents’ choices.

  In that sad moment of weakness, I told her she was wrong. “But I am,” I told her. “I am chained.”

  She grabbed hold of my shoulders. “Outside, it may look that way, but not in here,” she said, and she tapped my chest, where under the folds of my bodice, my troubled heart was beating. And then she pointed to my reflection in the glass. “And not in there.”

  30

  Renata turned to Emilio and spoke to him words I could not understand. Lorenzo started to translate, but then he got drawn into the heated conversation. Tem
pers were rising. Even Lorenzo raised his voice. Three sets of arms began waving about my face.

  I could do nothing but stand there and listen, hoping to catch a snatch of a word here and there.

  “Can somebody please speak in English!” I finally yelled.

  The three voices fell silent.

  Emilio stepped away and shook his head, apparently not having won any part of the conversation. Lorenzo turned to me.

  “Emilio thinks maybe we should call the police. He doesn’t think Sofia is in her right mind. Renata and I think it is too premature for that.”

  Emilio rattled off a long sentence of disgruntled words, punching the air with his open hand.

  “You should’ve thought of that before you starting shooting bullets into everything she believes in!” Renata said, in English.

  Emilio just stared at her.

  “I think Marguerite and Emilio and I should do what we said we would do,” Lorenzo said. “We will go see Angelo. We will have him sign the documents. Renata can stay here and wait for Sofia to come home. When we get back, Emilio will go back to Rome. Today. Tomorrow we can help Sofia decide what to do next.”

  “I’m for that,” Renata declared.

  Emilio muttered something and Renata turned to him and, I assume, told him he had been overruled.

  He brushed past us, mumbling words that meant nothing to me and waving to Lorenzo and me to follow him.

  “I’ll just get my purse.” I retrieved my purse from Sofia’s guest room and returned to the living room. Lorenzo was waiting for me. Emilio was gone.

  “He’s gone to get his car. He had to park a couple blocks away. We will meet him on the street.”

  I nodded and then turned to Renata. “Sofia will be all right, won’t she?”

  Renata smiled, but there was an edge of nervousness there. “I think she will be fine. Go. I will watch for her.”

  I left with Lorenzo.

  A few minutes later, I was seated inside Emilio’s silver Fiat and we were making our way to the river’s edge to cross the Arno. It would take us only fifteen minutes or less to get there. Emilio had entered the address into his GPS, and traffic was relatively quiet for a Saturday at lunchtime.