Belladonna

by Anbara Salam

  “It’s so hot,” said Isabella, pouting. “This was a dreadful idea, Briddie.”

  My pulse shot into my throat. I balled my fists. Greta’s breath was heavy, her cheeks pink with concentration as she searched for safe places to tread. It had been a dreadful idea. Why had I agreed to it?

  Ahead of us a nun standing by the convent gate turned, and I saw she was one of the black nuns I’d noticed in the refectory. Nancy waved, and to my surprise, the nun raised her hand and gave her a thumbs-up. I’d not realized before, but the sister was quite beautiful. Her skin was dark brown, with freckles under her eyes. She had a high forehead and fine cheekbones. Her jaw was sharp like the bottom of a heart.

  Nancy and the sister began talking in rapid Italian; then Nancy waved at us. “Hurry up, slowpokes,” she yelled.

  Isabella groaned and broke into a trot. Greta and I followed, loping over uneven hillocks.

  “This is Sister Teresa,” Nancy said as we approached. “The speaking liaison.”

  “How do you do,” we murmured politely.

  “Where would you like to tour today? The lake’s beautiful, but perhaps you’d rather visit where our founder originated?” Sister Teresa said.

  All three of us blinked at the sister.

  Nancy grinned. “Wow. Your English is swell!”

  Sister Teresa smiled. Her front two teeth were larger than the others, which gave her a vaguely rabbity look. “As is your Italian. You must’ve studied for many years.”

  “Gee, thanks.” Nancy blushed.

  “But how on earth did you learn English?” said Greta. “You don’t even get to speak Italian, do you?” She clapped her hand over her mouth. “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  Sister Teresa was still smiling. “Don’t apologize. I learned English in my infancy.”

  Isabella stared at her. “Jeez—how long have you been here?”

  Nancy frowned. “Look. Never mind that for now. We have plenty of time to get to know each other.” She folded her arms. “So. Lake or shrine?”

  Given the heat, I had no interest in climbing the hill, but it seemed impolite to say so in front of a nun. And since Sister Teresa was looking at me, I said, “The shrine, I guess?”

  “Great. Lead the way, Sister,” Nancy said, pointing up into the distance.

  Sister Teresa walked ahead of us. She was slim and tall, even taller than Nancy. What I had taken for a habit was merely a white tunic over linen pants. She was wearing heavy black boots, scuffed at the toes. Nancy took a few long strides and joined her. They wove through the deep grass, and Sister Teresa spoke to her, pointing into the apple trees down below.

  “Do you think they can all speak English?” Greta was whispering. “Like, secretly?” The color in her face was hectic. “Can they understand our phone calls?”

  “I don’t know—maybe.” I shrugged.

  “Could they read our mail?” she said, her voice strangled.

  Isabella pushed her arm through mine. “Is she afraid they might read the thrilling secrets about her pony?” she muttered.

  * * *

  We followed Nancy and Sister Teresa over a stile and farther uphill, away from the orchard. From above, the apple trees looked puny, stunted even. Then I realized they must be cut deliberately short, to make picking the fruit easier for the nuns. Even up on the hill there was the odd apple tree, leaves already blotchy with ginger freckles. Smaller fruit lay concealed in the grass, sodden and browning, attracting wasps. Every now and again, Isabella or I slid on the peel of disintegrating fruit or stamped straight into a crust of mushy caramel pulp.

  Sister Teresa brought us to a stone ledge, which we clambered over one by one. The path became narrow, passing through blackberry hedges studded with blind stars where berries had already been plucked. I took a deep breath of the air, coppery and sweet with rotten fruit, like old pennies dipped in honey. Isabella tipped her head back so the sunlight caught her face. She opened her eyes and found me staring at her. She smiled.

  “OK, maybe not such a dreadful idea,” she said, lacing her fingers through mine. I traced the outlines of her ragged thumbnail, my stomach jittering. We walked along the bramble path, swinging our arms. Isabella began whistling tunelessly. The light ruffled through blousy dog roses and towering pine trees, swallows fluttering in alarm from the branches as we passed. After half an hour we approached another crumbling wall dotted with stringy weeds.

  “Shall we visit the spring?” Nancy said, pointing farther uphill to the left.

  “Um.” Greta swallowed. “Is it a detour from the shrine?”

  “A short one.” Sister Teresa wiped her forehead with her sleeve. I felt vindicated that even she was sweating, and she must have to climb up the hill all the time.

  “Thanks, but we’ll wait here for you guys,” Isabella said. “Us indoors pets aren’t used to being let off the leash.”

  “We shan’t be long,” Sister Teresa said, giving her a thumbs-up. Where had she learned that? Perhaps the bikini-wearing chapel-smoking alumni had tutored her.

  Isabella and I balanced on the uneven slate wall and Greta sat heavily on the ground, wiping her grass-stained hands carelessly on her linen pants. “We should’ve brought a picnic,” she said, smiling at me. “Next time you can be our expert picnic adviser.”

  I laughed. “My true calling.”

  Greta twirled a hollow piece of grass between her fingers. “How long will your mom stay at your summerhouse?”

  A jolt of electricity ran from the base of my spine to my skull. “What?”

  “Is that where the big Labor Day party is?”

  Isabella stared at her. “Um. No.”

  Greta grinned. “I love that you’re such good friends you even talk for each other,” she said.

  Isabella shot me a look as if Greta was an idiot dog scrounging for scraps that you had to humor because the owner was watching.

  Greta had noticed the look. Her voice took on a pleading, explanatory tone. “Poor Bridge was feeling awful homesick, and I said she should just call and speak to her mom, but of course her mom’s not there.”

  “Oh?” Isabella’s eyes moved over my face, a question in the tilt of her eyebrows.

  “Because. Because she’s at the summerhouse,” I supplied woodenly. I radiated a silent plea for Isabella’s mercy. My lip twitched.

  Isabella’s eyes flicked to and fro as if she were tracing something onto a map. “Sure,” she said eventually. She turned to Greta and said brightly, “It’s such a great house.”

  I wanted to cry.

  “Anyway.” I swallowed. “Let’s not talk about home anymore.”

  Greta reached forward and put a paw on my ankle. “I know just how you feel, Bridge. Is your family coming for Christmas, at least?”

  “What?” My mouth hung open, but she seemed not to have noticed my tone. She had picked another stem of grass and was occupied tying it into a bow.

  “For the vacation.”

  I yanked a piece of grass myself and tried to snap it in half, but it was so springy it merely bounced between my fingers. “No.”

  “Izzy, are yours?”

  “God no,” said Isabella, fumbling in her pockets and pulling out a pack of Lucky Strikes. “They’ll be in Colorado with my grandmom.” Isabella lit a cigarette. “I didn’t even invite them here anyway. I pretty much want to get away from them.”

  Greta’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh, Izzy, what a dreadful thing to say.” Her tone was mocking, but her expression was fearful, as if Isabella’s disdain might be contagious.

  The dim sound of a bell tolled in the distance. Greta sat up on her knees and began threading a daisy through the knot of grass. Suddenly she dropped her arrangement and turned to me. “Bridge! You should write and ask your parents to come for the vacation,” she said, beaming. “Mom and Pops are meeting me in Florence.” Greta clapped
her hands. “We could all go out for dinners together—it would be so much fun.”

  I winced, not daring to look at Isabella. I flashed to an image of my family arriving at the grand wooden door of the academy. Mama conspicuously overdressed with that long chain of pearls that went out of style a hundred years ago. All the girls’ eyes switching between her and Dad. Convoluted explanations about Egyptian Christians. Sylvia measuring Rhona’s tiny wrists with a perplexed kind of envy. Rhona sleeping in the bed next to mine. Listening to Rhona rise in the night, the sound of her soft footsteps as she paced back and forth across the tiles.

  “No,” I said finally, my eyes prickling. “They won’t. They have—we also—they can’t, this year.” My stomach was tight.

  Isabella tapped the ash of her cigarette in a crevice between the stones. “Briddie hasn’t told you?” she said. “Her parents throw this simply lavish party each Christmas. It’s famous in St. Cyrus. With big platters of lobster and a woman harpist wearing ermine fur.” Isabella batted her eyelashes prettily. “It’s divine. The event of the season. The whole of St. Cyrus would be devastated if it were canceled.”

  Greta’s eyes widened. “How dreamy. But you poor thing, you’re missing out?” She put her hand to her face. The diamond on her finger caught a shard of sunlight and pierced my eye.

  I tried to smile but it snagged at the edge of my mouth. “It’s fine,” I said.

  “It’s simply killing Briddie to miss out,” Isabella said. “She adores her family. I try not to talk about home so it doesn’t make her sore,” Isabella said in an artificial voice.

  I let out a deep breath. It was a nice swerve—a marvelous swerve. I wanted to kiss Isabella’s hand.

  “Oh, Bridge,” Greta sighed. “You’re just as bad as I am. Izzy, you’ll have to take extra-good care of Bridget over Christmas, then.”

  “I will.” She smiled. “We’ll have the best time, just the two of us.” She saluted me with her cigarette. I was dazzled by my sudden reprieve. I felt light, airy. Isabella had saved me. I wanted to bundle her up and hoist her on my shoulders.

  Nancy and Sister Teresa reappeared at the crest of the hill and began waving. Groaning, we climbed toward them over steep ground pitted where rabbits had burrowed into the earth and flung desiccated droppings that crumbled under my soles. The air was close and coarse, with a bitter, powdery taste, like brick dust. Sweat collected with my sunscreen and stung the corners of my eyes. Sister Teresa and Nancy were talking rapidly, Nancy gesticulating in stiff waves as if she were flagging down a taxicab.

  Panting, Isabella leaned on my arm as we struggled through sand-colored burrs and dodged ankle-turning divots. “Thanks,” I whispered to her. “For covering.”

  Isabella squeezed my wrist. “We can’t let the busybodies spoil our year of freedom,” she said.

  Finally, we reached the top of the hill. It was mostly bare, scattered with prickly, sunburnt shrubs. Below us, fields of chapped grass and spindly wildflowers stretched out toward the Blue Mountains.

  “This way,” Sister Teresa called, pointing to our right. Hidden behind a cypress tree was a whitewashed arch, where an oil painting of the saint was propped against the wood, faded and cracked from the sun. Candle stubs dribbled with fossilized wax sheltered in its arch, and around the shrine loose stones and pieces of flint had been piled to protect the candles from the wind.

  As Sister Teresa approached the shrine, the rest of us hung back. She touched the top of the arch, crossed herself, then dropped to her knees in front of the shrine, her lips moving in prayer. I watched the fragile skin on the tops of her eyelids fluttering. When she opened her eyes, her gaze met mine directly, and she smiled. I looked away in embarrassment.

  Then we each approached the shrine and made the sign of the cross. I took time to linger at the monument as if I were lost in contemplation, although really I was unmoved. How could one be sure St. Teresa had ever lived there? What if we were all observing a moment of reverence at a place of no significance to the real St. Teresa—her chicken coop, or her woodshed? Isabella was examining her cuticles. She looked up and, catching my eye, mimed a yawn.

  10.

  September

  Our first term at the academy stretched its back into the last of the summer. The apple leaves in the orchard crimped around the edges, and scarlet berries of mountain ash trees smoldered in the hedgerows. White daisies glazed the hills, and each day as the sun rose, their petals filled the air with the smell of toasting sage. We were conscious that the warm days of the year were numbered, and girls sunbathed down by the lake in a frenzy of oil and lotions that baked greasy blotches onto the hot stones.

  We had begun to split off into cliques. Girls coupled up and claimed their own territories in the common room. Katherine switched rooms to be nearer to Sylvia, and Joan only had sore feelings about it for an afternoon. Of course, Isabella was beloved. She entertained us by mimicking the darting movements of Donna Maria and became a hero after she picked the lock on the correspondence box so we didn’t have to sign out paper each time. And we were unbreakable, a pair. Girls would catch my eye during her hijinks, shaking their heads indulgently. “How do you control her?” Sylvia would say. I relished the assumed intimacy of being her ballast, the only one who could fathom her quirks.

  I spent less time with Greta, as she spent more time with Sally from Florida. They brought out a silliness in each other and were always giggling and sharing jokes no one else understood. Joy grew terribly homesick, and one morning she was just gone. Her roommate, Mary L., said she had been crying at night and decided she wanted to go back to the States.

  This disconcerted me a great deal. I couldn’t believe Joy wouldn’t be willing to at least stay until Christmas vacation, when she was due to meet her parents in Switzerland for a week of skiing. It hadn’t occurred to me that girls would find their independence distressing. Finally, I was Bridget, alone. At home, I was “Rhona-um-Bridget” or sometimes, “Rhona-Rex-Bridget.” And Rex had been put down four years ago. How could anyone find autonomy so taxing?

  But homesickness had spread through our ranks like a cough. Girls began to complain about mundane parts of life at the academy: Italian soap didn’t lather as well as American soap; there were too many soccer matches on Italian radio. A rumor began that Italian milk was more fattening than American milk, and girls took to spooning the froth out of their morning coffees. Others submitted to maudlin reminiscences about their mothers’ cookies or their sisters’ cotillions, until their voices grew thick with emotion.

  “I don’t get it,” Isabella said, perched on her windowsill, smoking a cigarette. She stuck her legs out under her nightdress and scratched at the scab of a mosquito bite on her right knee. “I mean, I miss Ralphy and all that”—she wrinkled her nose—“but I’m not bawling myself to sleep at night. To hear Barbie howling, you’d think she was in Alcatraz instead of . . .” She waved her hand toward the flinty strike of moonlight on water.

  I pictured the carpet powder Mama sprinkled over the hallways before she vacuumed. The ceramic fish stuck to the tiles in our bathroom from when we were babies, which no one had ever thought to pry off. I pictured the dejected mealtimes when Dad cracked bad jokes and Mama fussed and Rhona sipped her water. There would be nobody there to ask for second helpings now.

  I lit one of Isabella’s cigarettes and crossed to stand next to her with my back against the window frame. I was suddenly irritable about the unexpected swell of guilt for not being there. I turned to see Isabella watching me with an amused expression.

  “You’re not homesick at all, are you?” she said, pointing her index finger at me while a ribbon of smoke wound out of the window and down into the night. On the other side of the building, the bells for Compline began to ring.

  “Honestly? No,” I said.

  She turned to face me with a mischievous smile. I let her observe me while I smoked. I had no idea why the ad
mission pleased her. And I hadn’t even been trying, so it was a real victory, solid and bright as a gold coin.

  “You know, Italy’s good for you, Briddie,” Isabella said.

  “What?” My cheeks grew hot. “What do you mean?”

  Isabella chewed her lip. “I dunno. You’re less sarcastic here.”

  I leaned back against the window, feeling petulant. I’d never thought of myself as sarcastic. It sounded mean and bitter, a quality befitting a homely schoolmistress.

  “Don’t be sore,” she said, her tone on the verge of exasperation. “I just mean, it’s good. You should loosen up more. Relax.”

  I stared at the painted wasp on the fresco panel on her wall. The tips of my ears were burning. “I am relaxed,” I said, hearing a sullenness in my voice.

  “Well, if you relax more, it’ll be easier,” Isabella said, “making friends.”

  I felt like I’d been slapped. “I do have friends.”

  “Other than me.” Isabella rolled her eyes.

  I opened my mouth and closed it again. That wasn’t fair to say. I had made friends with Greta before Isabella even arrived. Nancy often knocked on my door to say hello in passing. I pressed my nails into my palms. I’d have to focus on being less sarcastic. More relaxed. I should laugh more, I decided.

  “Anyway,” she said, stretching, “I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before the girls all love you.”

  The knot in my throat loosened, and all my truculence fell away. “They already love you,” I said quickly.