Belladonna

by Anbara Salam

  “But she’s missing out on the party,” Patricia said to Mary with some truculence.

  I frowned.

  Patricia looked at me. “Your mom’s Thanksgiving party,” she prompted.

  “Oh.” I pretended to scratch an itch under my sleeve.

  Greta leaned forward to address Mary. “It’s why they had to let go of the summerhouse—too much work.”

  “Oh.” Mary nodded sympathetically.

  I blinked. Had I said that? I’d have to check with Isabella. “Well.” I rubbed my face. “I don’t want to miss any more school.”

  “You’re such a good student,” Greta said mournfully. “I’m simply dying to get dressed up and go to a proper party.”

  “Yes, Bridge, do tell us about the parties! Did you meet any boys?” Mary batted her eyelashes.

  “She’s not allowed any boys, are you, Bridge?” Sylvia said. “Remember? She’s locked away like a good Catholic girl.”

  I smiled. “No boys. But look.” And I pulled the fur out of my suitcase.

  Sylvia swooped upon it. “Glorious! Can I try it on?”

  “Of course.”

  She shrugged it over her shoulders and examined herself in the closet mirror.

  “It looks spectacular on you,” I said. And it did. The color brought out the gold in her eyes. “Borrow it anytime you like,” I said, flushed with philanthropy. Sylvia beamed. She plunged her hands into the pockets and twirled in front of the mirror.

  She withdrew a folded piece of green paper from the pocket and examined it. “Gosh, Bridge, you’re just as forgetful as me.” She winked, handing over the paper, which I now saw was a fifty-dollar bill. Blood roared to my cheeks. Where had that come from? Had Rhona left it there deliberately? Or had it been lingering in the coat since Aunt Mary died?

  “You should get a lockbox, you know,” Sylvia said, arching her eyebrows in the mirror. “Or you can share mine if you like.”

  My mortification receded. “Thanks,” I said.

  The door to my room had been left ajar, and I kept one eye on the corridor as we spoke. But as the sun set, the girls peeled off to pin their hair and change their outfits until it was only me and Greta.

  “So have you seen Isabella?” I said, pretending to search in my nightstand drawer. “I have some mail for her from her mom.”

  Greta yawned. “I think she’s in the chapel.”

  “Oh?” I tried to sound casual. I pulled the sweaters from my case and shook the wrinkles out. They still had the stale, cabbagy smell of the boat about them.

  “I’ll go fetch her,” she said. “She must not even know you’re back—she’ll be so surprised!”

  “No, don’t worry.” I yawned as well, catching it from Greta.

  “I’m so stupid,” Greta said, jumping off the bed. “Here I am banging on and you’re probably dying for a nap.” She looked down at the candy wrappers that tumbled onto the bedspread from her lap. “Golly, now I don’t even need supper.” She snatched them up and ironed them out with her fingers. She paused. “Can I take a couple for Sally?”

  “Help yourself.”

  Greta smiled. “I’m going to hide them in her pillowcase for a surprise when she gets into bed.” She crinkled the wrappers in her fists. “For sweet dreams—get it?”

  Her expression was so eager, I felt the urge to congratulate her. “It’s adorable. She’ll love it.”

  Greta cocked her head to one side. “Bridge, can you keep a secret?”

  I tried to smother the indecent curiosity I could feel brewing on my face. “Of course.”

  “My mom’s writing to Sally’s mom to see if she can come with us to France after graduation!”

  “Oh?”

  “But it’s a surprise and she doesn’t know yet. She’ll think she’s got her place on the United States booked, but really she’ll be coming with us!”

  “How lovely!” I gave her my most congratulatory smile. But there was a strange ache in my throat. A disappointment that she hadn’t asked me and a shame at my meanness of spirit.

  “I’ve been dying keeping it a secret. You have to swear not to tell.”

  “I swear.”

  Greta squealed and planted a sticky kiss on my cheek. “I was desperate, waiting for you to come back—I thought I was going to burst.”

  The sour feeling in my throat relaxed and I realized how ridiculous it had been. I hugged her with one arm. “You’re a doll. Well, I’m here now. You can talk to me about it whenever you like.”

  Isabella still hadn’t appeared before dinner, so I dressed with extra effort. I chose a peach cashmere sweater from Granny and a new scarf with iridescent blues and purples in it like a peacock’s feather. It was a little dressy, so I left my face bare, with only a touch of lipstick. Greta and Sally knocked on my door after the bells and we walked down to dinner together. As soon as Sally descended the staircase, Greta turned and wriggled her eyebrows at me, radiant with mischief, as if she thought me so overwhelmed by her secret that I might take to the chapel roof and begin chanting it for the whole convent to hear.

  In the hall, I sat on the other side of Sally and spread out my knees to keep the place next to me free for Isabella. But then Patricia approached. “Bridge,” she said, “can I sit here?”

  Nancy strode over. “Oh no, it’s my turn,” she said.

  Patricia pouted. “But she’s been away for so long. I need to talk to her about something.”

  I stared at the table, not wanting to seem like I was gloating over the luxury of friends. And strategically, it was a good thing. Isabella would come in to find me in conversation with the others. In demand. I thought about trying to say something funny, but I searched for a joke and came up empty.

  Nancy lifted her long legs and folded them under the table. “Yes, well, you had her all afternoon. Slide up, will you, Bridge?”

  I shot Patricia an apologetic look.

  “Later, then,” Patricia said. “I’ll come by your room?”

  I blew her a kiss. It was breezy, fun. Isabella wasn’t there to see it.

  “So. How’s your folks?” Nancy said, filling our glasses with cider.

  “Everyone’s fine. But I’m glad to be back. I’m so behind.”

  Nancy took a gulp of cider and I watched the liquid travel down her throat. I felt dislocated from everything, the benches lurching and the girls’ faces moving in the dim light with stuttering trails.

  “I can talk you through what you’ve missed, if you want?”

  I snapped back to attention. “Would you really? I could use the help.”

  “Sure.” Nancy shrugged. “Tomorrow, before breakfast?”

  “Before breakfast?”

  Nancy nodded.

  “You’re worse than the nuns,” I said, although her enthusiasm was reassuring. At least I’d get caught up quickly.

  Then Isabella came through the door, and my heart snagged. She was wearing her hair loose—I’d forgotten how long it had grown. She had rolled the cuffs of her shirt, and something about her air of scruffy sophistication made her look like a sculptor or an experimental painter. I felt suddenly fussy and prim in my sweater and silk scarf.

  She came behind me and hugged me. I leaned my head back under her chin. My chest pulsed.

  “Briddie,” she said, her hair falling on my shoulders. She planted a kiss on the top of my head. “So glad you’re home!”

  “Bella,” Sylvia called from across the table, gesturing to a place next to her.

  “Don’t go anywhere,” Isabella said, keeping hold of my hand, bowing over it and kissing the back.

  Dinner that night was buttered pasta with sage and thin shavings of white truffle. Nancy took her offer of tutoring quite seriously and launched into a detailed presentation of the lectures Signor Patrizi had given in my absence. I twirled the slippery n
oodles and said, “Uh-huh” and “OK” and “Yes,” as she talked. But I didn’t hear any of it. Down the table, I watched the candlelight shine on Isabella’s profile. The way she ran her fingers through her hair, tossing it behind her shoulder, leaning in to Sylvia. She licked her finger, stuck it to a shard of truffle on Katherine’s plate, and ate it. She glanced over her shoulder and caught me looking at her. And in the same moment, I realized I had been staring. I lifted my gormless, fixed stare into a grin, and her eyes lit up. She raised her glass of cider to me in a salute, breaking into a bright smile.

  She adores me, I thought.

  19.

  November

  Nancy was true to her word and arrived at my door the next morning with two cups of Nescafé she’d made with a heating coil in her bedroom. She sat on the bed and talked again about the syllabus they had covered. I made hasty notes in my notebook and was dismayed to learn I’d already missed a large section on the Baroque, which I hoped was going to be the subject of my special essay in the spring.

  “Do you think Patrizi will give me a catch-up session?” I said, a headache beginning at the corner of my right eye.

  “Maybe,” Nancy said. She raised her eyebrows. “But when would you do it?”

  “Jeez,” I said. “I don’t know. Weekends?”

  Nancy looked solemn. “That’s probably a good idea.”

  I threw myself back on the coverlet. “This is awful,” I whined. “I’m going to be the stupidest alumni in the history of the academy.”

  Nancy touched my leg. “Well, there’s always Bunny.”

  I laughed, although I didn’t feel any better.

  I went early to the Italian classroom to find Elena before our lesson. She had a smudge of lipstick on her teeth I couldn’t stop looking at. I made vague allusions to my family emergency, but I think she already knew and was pretending ignorance for the sake of discretion. She said she’d be available to me for extra tutoring on Saturdays if I wanted. Which sounded horribly depressing, but I was grateful anyway.

  As usual, Isabella was late to class. She came in rubbing a pink line on her face where the contour of her pillowcase was imprinted.

  “Hello.” She slipped in next to me.

  I smiled, but I was annoyed at her. She hadn’t been in her room the night before. Or in the common room. I’d stayed up, waiting, while Ruth insisted on showing me photos of her niece’s christening. After Ruth left, Mary Babbage came in with a pair of tap shoes she’d had sent in the mail from Milan. And then she put them on and tapped about until Nancy came by and begged her to stop. I ended up falling asleep upright in the armchair, groggily starting every time the corridor floorboards creaked. And then she hadn’t been at breakfast either. Neither had I, but that wasn’t the point. Isabella should have been at breakfast looking for me. Waiting for me.

  She wrote a note on the margin of her book and slid it over. Miss me? it said.

  I stared at the note. Was it a test? Should I say yes or pretend I hadn’t missed her? Which would she find more interesting? Course! I wrote. I examined it again before I slid the book back over. That was the right tone. Cheery but not needy. Then I wrote next to it, Miss me??

  She scribbled for ages on the paper, and my pulse raced. Why was she taking so long? Could she have missed me all that much? When she passed back the book, I pinned it under my elbow. I was desperate to read the note straightaway, but Elena was looking at me.

  “Don’t worry, Bridget,” she said in English. “You won’t understand this yet, but try to follow along and I’ll talk to you about it on the weekend.”

  I nodded. The paper was burning under my elbow. Patricia began to read aloud from the textbook.

  When I looked down at Isabella’s note, it was a paragraph of tight writing. I scanned it for important words. “Missed you,” “thinking of you,” “adore you.” But there weren’t any words like that. I had to read it twice to squeeze any sense out of it.

  SO much has happened! Betty was boo-hooing all night because she was homesick and she left practically in the middle of the night. Also Patricia has a very unfortunate-looking twin. And the academy has its own rowboat—the sisters have to row over to Brancorsi sometimes and it’s the funniest thing I ever saw. Rosaria fell in and I almost split a gut! Katherine isn’t talking to Mary L. anymore.

  Betty had been homesick and gone home—I already knew. Katherine and Mary L. weren’t talking—I already knew. How like her to assume nobody else would have told me. What did she think I’d been doing since I arrived? Sitting alone in my room? And Patricia’s unfortunate-looking twin—well, she knew I knew about that because we’d talked about it at length! How could she have forgotten? And the rest of it made no sense to me at all. I couldn’t even place Sister Rosaria. I decided not to ask her, as a matter of pride. I scanned the note again. There was another thing—she hadn’t asked me a single question. Had she even received my letters? My chest prickled. Rhona could have died for all she knew. Rhona could be dead and buried and she hadn’t even bothered to check.

  She yawned dramatically, and Elena looked up.

  “Sei annoiata?” she said archly.

  “No,” said Isabella.

  “Continuare da questa pagina, Bella,” Elena said.

  Isabella picked up the textbook and began to read. At one point everyone tittered and I searched the page for the joke, but I didn’t know what they were laughing at.

  At lunch I decided to ignore Isabella, but she wasn’t there. Instead, I saw her loping across the courtyard, eating her sandwich from a paper napkin. All my determination to ignore her vanished, and I hurried from the refectory to follow her. Halfway across the courtyard I called out.

  She turned and saw me. “Hi,” she said, although her smile was not entirely genuine.

  “Sneaking off to smoke?” I said. It came out false and overly jovial.

  “I was going round the back.” She pointed vaguely to the convent gate.

  I stood and waited.

  “Want to come with?” she said.

  As we walked, I cleared my throat. “Did you get my letters? I know how bad the mail is.” I tried to keep my voice neutral.

  “Oh yeah, they were hilarious.” Isabella stuck her tongue out. “St. Cyrus is just the most tedious place on the planet.”

  I nodded, fixing my face into a smile. But the letters weren’t supposed to be funny. Despite all her protests, I thought Isabella would enjoy having updates about our town, our teachers, our old friends.

  Sister Teresa appeared at the gate. She squinted as she saw me, then broke into a smile. “Bridget,” she said. “Welcome back.” She crossed to take my hand and held it between her own. Her fingers were rough and calloused on mine. She looked carefully at my face and I willed myself not to blush.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  She bounced my hand up and down. “I’ve been praying for you.”

  “Thanks.” I focused on the flagstones under my feet.

  “And your family?” She was still holding my hand. I was conscious she’d feel my sweaty palm in her dry one.

  “Yes, thanks. Everything is fine.”

  Isabella was growing restless; I saw her walking deliberately within our periphery, kicking a loose stone at the edge of the courtyard.

  Sister Teresa released my hand. “So, have you come to see the garden?”

  I glanced at Isabella. Had she been going to the garden? “Sure,” I said uncertainly.

  We passed left of the bell tower, then around the back of the convent. I tried to snoop through the windows into the cells, but the glass was thick and mottled. The earth behind the convent building was muddy, and the grass had been trampled bare. As we wove past the laundry room, the scent of warm soap floated in a damp gust of air. All the while, Sister Teresa chatted about the garden and what a great help Isabella had been with the planting and weeding.
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br />   I glanced at Isabella over my shoulder. “Weeding?” I said, expecting her to grin, that we would pull faces at each other.

  “Yes,” she said, shrugging. As if she had always taken a great interest in gardening. The closest I’d seen her come to horticulture was clipping her split ends.

  Sister Teresa dodged another shed and we approached an allotment hidden from the orchard by a waist-high hedge. She pushed open a squeaky gate with patchy chicken wire wound between the bars. I didn’t know how to react appropriately. Was the yard dying? Wilted flowers tangled with mushy, browning leaves. The gaps in the wire fence shone with spiderwebs.

  “Has Bella shown you before?” Sister Teresa asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Here, for example, are herbs for cooking. We have rosemary and oregano and fennel and basil and thyme. Isabella has been helping me to dig here,” she said, walking to a rectangular patch of crumbly soil. The hem of her skirt dragged in the mud and I winced. She must have to scrub her skirt every single day to get the spots of earth out. “We’ve been planting garlic and winter lettuce,” she said.

  Even as I smiled and nodded at the indistinguishable lumps in the earth, I struggled to keep my amusement in check. I watched the focus on Isabella’s face as Sister Teresa pointed to furrows in the dirt. Had she really been so lonely without me that she was digging lettuce with a bunch of silent nuns? There I had been worrying about what a jolly time she was having, and instead she was acting like an old lady. Worse. Even Granny didn’t dig in her own backyard.

  “Isn’t this kind of a waste of your time?” I said.

  “Bridget!” Isabella snapped.

  Sister Teresa blinked at me.

  “I don’t mean it in a bad way.” I felt the heat rise to my cheeks. “Just—since you’re the only speaking nun, isn’t it kind of wasteful that you’re planting cabbage, instead of—” I hesitated. What was it Sister Teresa did exactly? I cleared my throat. “Conducting convent business?”

  Sister Teresa cricked her neck. “Ah. I understand.”

  “Growing food is still important work,” Isabella said defensively.