She sees now that Mark’s very next step had been to come to her and say that Seth had begun bothering him—harassing him, he called it. If Mark viewed her interactions with a child as a threat to their relationship, imagine how he must have felt about Seth, a young man with intelligent eyes, a boyishly appealing face, and a host of interests shared with Catherine.
At first, Mark said Seth had shown up in a handful of places, looking at Mark and walking away. Later, Mark reported that Seth’s presence was growing more overt, more disconcerting, and ultimately, for reasons Mark could not fully articulate, more threatening. When Mark had used the word stalking, Catherine had panicked. Mark suggested calling the police and trying to get a restraining order, but she’d convinced him that they should go through academic channels first. If she’d had any idea how devastating even that would be for Seth, she never would have agreed. Afterward, Mark assured her that Seth’s suicide attempt had been driven by mental instability and proved that seeking constraints on him for their own protection had been the wise course. If Mark had been lying about Seth all along, the effect of those accusations on the young man must have been doubly devastating. If only she’d known his tragic story beforehand. She’d still like to help Seth, still like to try to make it up to him in some small way, but he hasn’t answered her letter, and she has to respect his desire to keep his distance.
So many questions: Did Mark lie about Seth, about Nico, about both? Did he imagine them to be threats? Has she missed signs that Mark is unstable, cold-blooded, or dishonest? The thought of trying to figure it all out is crushing. What’s worse, there are no good answers here, no explanation that doesn’t threaten the life she’s always thought they had and counted on forever.
Walking toward the house, Catherine sees Mark in the window, the warm yellow light behind him. Not long ago, that sight would have made Catherine happy, maybe even—it shames her to admit—more than a little smug. They were, after all, Catherine and Mark, the charmed couple, successful, attractive, made for each other. How sad that now her instinctive reaction is to slip away.
He’s waiting when she opens the door. “Thank God you’re all right! Where have you been?”
“I kayaked to Mozia to think.” She continues her grudging list, recited like the entries on a police blotter. “Came back—I guess you didn’t see me. Picked up the car. Spent the rest of the day in Marsala.” Catherine sits at the table, and Mark joins her. He looks better than he did this morning. “You shaved,” she says.
“For you.” He covers her hand with his, a gesture she once found comforting and endearing. Right now it feels confining, but she leaves her hand there. This is still Mark.
Her desire for this to be the same familiar Mark softens her. “I’m sorry if I worried you. I needed some time alone.”
“I understand. Can I get you tea or coffee? Or wine?”
“Sure. Tea. Let me help.”
In the kitchen together, they are as awkward as strangers. When they return to the table, Catherine leans back in her seat, holding her cup with both hands.
“I know you must have questions, Cath. But before you say anything, let me apologize again. Not just for this morning. I was awful to you today, and I can only blame it on the stress I’ve been under. I will get a grip, I promise. But also . . . for lying to you. I’d give anything if I could go back and undo that one stupid lie.”
“Was it only one?” Catherine places her cup on the table, one hand flat beside it.
“I know what you’re saying. I kept lying about it. But honest to God, Cath, it was because I didn’t know how to stop it without looking like a complete ass. Or worse.” He slides his hand across the table, closer to hers. “You have to believe me.”
“I don’t think you do know what I’m saying. I do believe you couldn’t find a way to back off that story of not seeing Nico. But . . .” She pauses, placing her hand over Mark’s. His warm fist twitches slightly under hers. “Did you lie about Seth following you?” His hand tenses, but she maintains her gentle hold.
“What the—? I don’t know what this has to do with anything, but no, of course not.”
“It has everything to do with what you said today. Did you lie when you said Nico is stalking you?”
Mark withdraws his hand and moves to clasp Catherine’s in both of his, but she withdraws hers, dropping them into her lap. He pulls back like a scolded child.
“Look at me. Look at what I was like this morning. I’m a wreck. I don’t sleep. I think about this night and day. This has been going on for weeks. I’m telling you the truth.”
“I want to believe you. But you keep telling only as much ‘truth’ as you feel you need to.”
“Why would I say he was after me if he wasn’t? You’re crazy about him, and this pits me against him. Why would I do that?”
“Because you did it before with Seth, and you won.”
Mark shifts in his seat as if he’d like to get up but knows he shouldn’t. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” His voice is sharp, and he takes a breath before he continues, his tone softer, almost wistful. “Cath, all that matters is you and me. That’s all I care about.”
“Oh, please! I’m not a starry-eyed teenager. Do you think I expect or want you to care about nothing but us?”
“OK, but you are the most important thing to me.”
“More important than being some kind of . . . of . . . real estate big shot?”
“Come on!” Mark’s voice rises. “Since when is wanting to be successful at your chosen career wanting to be a big shot?”
“You know what? I think you say I’m all you care about because you want to make me feel I should have no interests but you.”
“I can’t even follow this anymore.”
“You can’t follow me? My head is spinning from all your stories. You’ll say anything to get your way.”
Mark gets up. He paces, his fear so frank that part of Catherine longs to comfort him. “Look, Cath, you make everything sound so black and white. But it’s not that simple.”
“I’d say this is anything but simple. But at least the basic facts—what actually happened—that should be something we can nail down with a little work.” The bitterness and sarcasm of her words shock her, and she shakes off a pang of guilt.
“Look. I don’t know. Maybe I made a mistake about Seth.”
“How can you—what does ‘maybe’ mean? If you don’t know, who does?”
“OK. OK. I . . . he didn’t stalk me. You’re right.”
She looks away, studying a small tuft of lint snagged in the rough edge of one of the floorboards. She needs this not to be happening. “I wanted so much to be wrong about that. Even though I knew I wasn’t. But it wasn’t a mistake, Mark. It was a lie. You lied about Seth.”
“I was worried about your safety. And about us, Cath. I thought you might be getting too close to Seth.”
So this is what it’s like to see all you have believed in and valued for a decade falling apart.
Mark sinks back into his chair, deflated, as if that last confession had been a revelation even to him, and voicing it had required more energy than he could afford. “I can’t even begin to describe the guilt I feel about Seth. And I know this sounds crazy, but sometimes I think Nico knows what I did. And he’s tormenting me for it. It’s like we’re locked in a fight for you. And I’m flat-out terrified he’s winning.”
They’d slept perhaps three hours between them last night, and walking into the studio, Mark looks it. No doubt she does too. Tossing and turning is miserable enough without pretending not to notice the other person in your bed is doing the same thing. She knows she hadn’t wanted any predawn talk about the crumbling life they’re living, and she suspects Mark had felt the same way.
/> Mark sits next to Catherine. He takes a brush from the closest jar and examines it. “New kind?”
“Made in Italy. I like them a lot.”
Catherine picks a few brushes from another jar. “These are a little different.”
They labor to make small talk, stumbling over words and, after long silences, choosing the same moments to speak. Mark says, “I haven’t felt this awkward with you since the night we met.”
“It’s no fun, is it?”
“Just don’t shut me out.” Mark arranges four paintbrushes into a square on the table. He removes one and uses it to coax the remaining three into a perfect triangle.
“Every time we talk about it, things get worse, not better.”
“Maybe we should get away from here for a break. Take that ferry to Tunisia for a week or two. It would be someplace completely new and different.”
“I’d like that. But . . . doing it now feels like running away. And this . . . Macri was supposed to be the break we needed. Right now, I need to be comfortable in my own mind that I understand what happened. Get back my confidence in you. If that’s possible.”
“Cath, you know me. Better than anyone. Nothing has changed. Sure, a lot of doubt has crept in because of this . . . this situation.”
“Were there other times you made things up? To keep me from doing something you didn’t want me to do?”
“No. The one and only time was with Seth.”
“Not that time three years ago when I was going to spend the summer in Santa Fe working in Tina’s studio? You told me she’d come on to you at the party, and I didn’t go.”
“No! Absolutely not.” He grabs the brushes from the table and holds them in his fist.
“What about Scott? You stopped inviting him over because you said he’d done something inappropriate at work. But that was right after I joked about how good-looking he was. Was that jealousy too?”
“Scott routinely came back from lunch completely drunk and then behaved like a total ass. I didn’t want him around anymore. You’re blowing this thing way out of proportion.”
Catherine looks Mark in the eye, trying to read what she sees there. Is the anger coming from him, or is it her own reflected back?
Mark checks his watch. He throws the brushes onto the table. “I have to get out of here for a while. Let’s talk later.”
“I’ll be right here. But please, Mark, when you come back, come back ready to tell me the truth.”
THIRTY-THREE
Mark
Mark drives into the parking lot, relieved to see only Paola’s car remaining, baking in the late afternoon sun. Otherwise, he surely would have changed his mind. Because this is crazy. But he’s desperate. He keeps reminding himself that no one ever has to know. He touches his shirt, feeling underneath it the corna he’s taken to wearing the last few days. Entering the building, Mark finds Paola, keys in hand and about to switch out the lights.
“Signor Lindquist. In one more minute, you would have missed me. Let me get you your mail.”
“Wait, Paola. Do you have a few minutes? There’s something I was hoping you might help me with. Something personal.”
Mark has received less-thorough appraisals in a doctor’s office. With a few swift sweeps, Paola checks his eyes, his skin, his frame—several pounds thinner than it was when she saw him last—and nods her head once. “It is your—illness? This is why you need my help?”
“It’s not really an illness, Paola. I was not—not fully honest with you. There is someone—someone bad—who is following me. He—he’s everywhere, and I can’t even sleep. I—”
“This does not surprise me. In my villaggio, and in many all over Italy, we know a bad person in your life can make you sick. This person, if he has the magic, he can place the evil eye on you and can do terrible things—visiting you in your bed when you try to sleep, giving you many frights and destroying your healthiness.”
Mark leans back against the wall. “I don’t know what to do. I was hoping—I mean, you seemed to know something of this?”
“I can take you to someone who is skilled in the arts you need. Some call such people strega, some say maga—there are other names. She can help you.”
Mark nods. This is what he wanted, yet he’s having trouble keeping second thoughts at bay. “I hope—It’s very important that this talk we are having, that it stay between you and me only.”
“Of course! You may trust me totally.”
“I do. Thank you. Can we go right now?”
“Signor Lindquist, I am sorry, but tonight I—” She looks into his eyes and sighs. “OK. Tonight.”
Leaving their cars behind in a small pull-off area on the edge of a hilly village, Paola and Mark walk through the narrow, winding streets of a place as old and unchanged as Erice, but which is, in its plainness and scale, far less charming. As best he can tell, this place with no name—when he had asked, Paola had said it was “difficult to explain”—has one narrow main street with a handful of narrower side branches. He again has the sense of returning to the Middle Ages, but unlike Erice, where it had felt like a magical gift, here it seems more like a somber penance.
At the end of a tiny street, Paola stops in front of a wooden door covered with sprigs of dried herbs, bundled with cord and hanging from rusty nails. On the wall directly next to the door is a shallow wooden box with a glass door. Inside, a painting of a Madonna, pink-cheeked and wearing a crown of small gold stars, keeps a cheerless eye on any and all visitors. A white candle in a crystal jar burns to her left, while to her right a matching jar holds a tidy bouquet of fresh flowers. Paola signals Mark to stop a few feet back before she knocks. An elderly woman, her olive skin pleated and leathered from what must have been decades working in the fields, answers. Dressed in black, the woman smiles when she recognizes Paola who, he surmises, is explaining his plight. The woman turns her head sharply toward Mark, narrowing one eye as she looks him over. She fires off three or four questions to Paola, and when she has her answers, she nods and turns to go back inside.
Mark follows Paola through the door, stopping at the sound and feel of grit under his feet. “Salt,” Paola explains. “To keep away the bad luck that might come in with visitors.” The woman disappears into the next room.
“Flavia will be right back.” Paola stands, her hands together at her waist, like a child in the principal’s office.
Mark looks around the busy space. In one corner of the room a tiny window admits little light, since layers of red-and-black lace cover the glass and form a backdrop for three small tables. One table is a jumble of what he takes to be family photos, a single candle burning in front of the grouping, and a corna charm hanging over each frame. On the second table sit half a dozen jars containing bunches of fresh herbs. A head of garlic, three eggs, pins of varying lengths, spools of thread, an eyedropper, small glass bowls, and cruets of rich green olive oil and water vie for space with a collection of unlit black candles. The third table holds a lineup of very small dolls, featureless and made of plain beige cloth, along with scissors, a sharp knife, and a pile of sea shells.
Mark can’t even begin to take in the variety of icons hanging on the walls. Many are familiar, but others do not look as if they’d be at home in a church. He turns when Flavia enters the room carrying a folded white sheet and a small floral demitasse cup. She spreads the sheet out on the couch, then motions that Mark is to lie down and lift his shirt.
Flavia takes the cup, rubs the edge with garlic and a drop of oil, and presses it, rim down, over Mark’s navel. He looks at Paola, who says, “She is testing for the worms.”
“Worms! I—”
“The worms can be real or can be the black magic in your body from the bad person. Please wait. If the cup sticks to you, you have worms.”
/>
Flavia pushes the cup, and it does not move. She nods.
“She will now rid you of the worms.”
At Paola’s words, Mark feels the blood drain from his face. “I’m not sure about this, Paola. How?”
“Very simple and quick.”
Flavia returns from the altar with another small bowl filled with oil. She dips her thumb into the oil and makes tiny crosses, redipping her thumb when needed, all over Mark’s abdomen.
“This should work in one day, maybe two, but you must also wear the charm Flavia will give you.”
“I am already wearing the charm you gave me, Paola.”
“Yes, that is good to keep away the evil eye, but this new one—la cimaruta—this is a very powerful one and protects you against any magic used against you.”
Mark sits up, and Flavia hands him a small tin charm. It resembles branching coral, but at the end of each branch is a symbol—a dagger, a half-moon, a key, a rooster’s head. There are more, but Mark looks up as Flavia takes it and, reaching around his neck, slips it onto the chain he already wears. She says something to Paola while waving her index finger at Mark.
“She says never take this off for one moment. Not for the shower or to sleep or anything at all.”
“OK. Is there more we can do?”
Paola speaks to Flavia, then turns to Mark. “Come back with a picture of the bad person. A photo is best, but make a drawing if you have nothing else. And she will tell you how to do the banishing magic.”
Children of the Salt Road Page 15
