She willed him closer, aching for the moment he’d settle his big body on this stone bench, when he would finally speak to her in that voice she loved, about the dinner they would have eaten, the wine they would have drunk, the vineyard they would have toured, the drive they would have taken. He’d speak to her of Kiera’s growing confidence, of Kiera’s college plans, of the wonderful life they would all have lived together.
He was near. She was sure of it.
She missed him so much on this trip.
Finally he would come.
*
Monique did not know how much time had passed, sitting on the bench with her head leaning against the sun-warmed stones, waiting for that electric charge in the space where Lenny should be. It could have been minutes. It could have been hours. She knew her face had gone wet, because a breeze slipped up the hillside and made the tracks on her cheeks cold.
Then a shadow crossed beyond her eyelids.
She blinked her eyes open. Judy came around beside her. Becky followed more slowly in her wake.
“I see why you ignored your phone.” Judy settled on the bench. “This view is breathtaking.”
Monique lunged for her cell phone lying on the bench just before Becky, with her peripheral vision issues, threatened to sit right down on it.
Monique fumbled with her phone. “Did you call?”
“Judy texted twice,” Becky said. “But who knows about the cell service here? You probably didn’t receive them.”
Monique looked at the screen and saw that she had two missed texts. Texts she hadn’t even heard, though the phone ring was set on high.
“I must have dozed.” She tried to force her voice back to normal. “I suppose I missed the winery tour.”
“There’s going to be another one in English in an hour,” Becky said. “We changed our tickets. We didn’t want to do it without you.”
Monique canted forward to slip the phone into her daypack by her feet and hide the stupid trail of tears that still clung to her cheeks. She tried to wipe them off with the back of one hand while she rifled needlessly in her daypack with the other. She took a deep gulp of air—air somehow cooler and thinner than before—and then squared her shoulders and straightened back up.
“You know, Monie, I’ve been meaning to ask you a question,” Judy said. “It’s about something weird that happened last May.”
“Last May?”
“I was making sausage and peppers for dinner,” Judy continued. “I’d forgotten to pick up some onions at the grocery store. So I came over to see if you had one to spare.”
Monique frowned. “Judy, you do this every time Maddy comes home. I buy extras just for you.”
“Your front door was open so I let myself in. I was about to call out, but then I heard you talking to someone.”
Monique felt a painful little prickling at the back of her neck.
“I knew it wasn’t Kiera,” Judy said. “Kiera was upstairs. I heard her singing, really loudly. You were in the kitchen with your back to me, running a soapy sponge over a saucepan. You were talking in a low voice, like someone was in the room with you. I put my head around the door but there was no one there. No one I could see anyway.”
The prickling intensified and invaded her throat. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t look at either of them. She felt the shame of it radiating. She stared at the path of moss in the mortar between the paving stones, feeling like a thirteen-year-old whose diary had just been read over the school loudspeaker.
And she became aware, in slow degrees, of a ribbon of collusion between the women flanking her. Maybe it was the way they were both canted back on the bench, still as stone. They weren’t picking threads from the seams of their well-worn jeans or idly examining their ragged cuticles or closing their eyes and lifting their chins to the sun. Even their feet were equally still, balanced tensely on the heels of their sneakers.
Monique cocked her head a fraction toward Becky. “You knew this, too, didn’t you?”
Becky laced her fingers around one raised knee. “Two summers ago I fetched Brianna and Brian off your swing set, long after dark. The kitchen window was open and you were laughing out loud. I hadn’t heard you laugh in so long, Monie. I was so happy for you. I wondered what Kiera had said that made you laugh like that. That’s when I realized you weren’t talking to Kiera.”
“Neither one of us blames you,” Judy said. “God knows if something happened to Bob, I’d still be complaining to him that he never makes the bed.”
Monique swallowed the lump growing in her throat and pressed back against the stone wall. The rough edge of the mortar snagged in her loosening braids. She was a nurse; she was supposed to understand grief. A nurse saw grief up close on a regular basis. She’d seen it the very week before she’d come here, in the eyes of a young mother and father as she handed over the carefully swaddled body of their twenty-five-week infant—heart-size and far too young to live despite how hard everyone at the NICU had tried. There was no getting used to the distorted faces of the anguished parents. They pressed their hands against their mouths and bit their knuckles as if they could physically hold in the pain.
But four years ago, in that little room with Lenny dying in that bed, she hadn’t been the nurse who always sees grief up close. She’d just been Monique, the wife of a burly Louisianan who’d charmed her into his wonderful life. And she’d learned that this is what grieving people did long after they’d buried their loved ones: They pretended they were okay. They went through the motions of living as if their hearts didn’t lie dead in their chests. In secret they spoke to the ones they loved as if they were still living and breathing.
But no one wanted to hear the truth. So she’d hid it from everyone—her daughter, her neighbors, her mother, her coworkers, her best friends. What the world wanted to hear was that she’d started “moving forward,” or that she was at least working hard to “come out of it,” that she was definitely “moving on.” So she’d hidden from the world her urge to bite the back of her hand to keep in the words she couldn’t bear to speak.
Now the truth pierced her like a needle. “You were right, Beck, about all that stuff you said on the cliff. I talk to Lenny now because I couldn’t really talk to him while he was dying.”
Monique remembered each time she’d pushed the chair away from the hospital bed in their den in order to fetch Lenny some pureed lentil soup or set the water to boil for chamomile tea or to check on Kiera. She remembered making a grim joke when he brought up the subject of funeral arrangements, chuckling as she waved the whole subject away. How many times had she done that? How many times had she walked briskly out on a weakening Lenny, who asked her to hold on a minute while raising his hand from the sheets?
“You know he’s still talking to you, Monie,” Becky said.
“No.” Her breath came in short fearful sips. She knew the truth now, sitting on this Italian hillside. “He’s stopped talking to me altogether.”
“Well that’s a relief,” Judy said. “Otherwise we’d have to call in a priest.”
Monique shook her head. Judy just didn’t understand. Lenny would never again come and sit on the mattress behind her, or materialize out of the corner of her eye to lounge in his chair in the kitchen, reading a newspaper with her rhinestone reading glasses perched on the end of his nose. She knew this deep down. The wisp of presence she’d sensed in this beautiful place was like the scent of incense lingering in a church long after the parishioners had gone.
“What I meant,” Becky explained, leaning into her, “is that Lenny is still talking to you through the bucket list.”
Damn the day she’d ever pulled that bucket list out of the drawer. “You guys are calling me out on talking to my dead husband, and yet here you are treating that list like it’s a mystic code to be broken.”
“It’s not much of a code,” Becky said. “We’ve talked about this. The first half is what you gave up, and the second half is what he wants you to do. If you jus
t thought about it for a moment, you’d see it too. You already figured out for yourself what he was trying to tell you with the gambling.”
“He wants me to throw my money to the wind,” Monique said. “Is that a lesson I’m supposed to embrace in my late forties with a kid about to go to college?”
“He specified the exact amount,” Judy said. “The man gave you a budget.”
Monique frowned.
“There’s also a truffle festival on that list.” Judy crossed her legs at the ankles and massaged her swollen knee. “And we all know how much you love truffles.”
Monique shook her head sharply. “You’re forgetting the details. The Alba festival is a wine and truffle festival. Mama likes the red.”
“There are plenty of wine festivals this time of year,” Judy argued, “but he’s urging you to go to a festival for a fungus that you just don’t eat.”
“It’s warm in Italy.” Monique held up her palms as if to pool the sunlight in her hands. “Lenny loved the warm weather. He smothered himself in sweaters come October in New Jersey.”
Sweaters that still filled his closet. A closet that she opened on rare occasions, slipping inside and closing it behind her, to breathe deeply of what little scent was left in the woolen fibers.
“If he just wanted someplace warm,” Judy countered, “I could have recommended a couple of fine Greek isles.”
“It’s sort of the same with the motorcycles,” Becky said in a tense little voice. “Lenny wanted you to try something new, something you once wanted to do.”
“Beck, he called motorcycle owners ‘organ donors.’”
Judy snorted. “He knew you wouldn’t do anything so crazy as to risk your life—even driving a hundred miles an hour on a German autobahn.”
“He didn’t supply the Porsche.”
“The car wasn’t the point. The point was to make you, Miss-I-never-drive-without-a-seat-belt-on, take a risk and do something crazy.”
Monique raised a brow. “Like hooking up with Austrian bikers and drinking absinthe?”
Judy pointed a finger toward the sky. “You don’t think he’s up there, laughing his ass off about that?”
Monique paused. She squeezed her eyes shut. “I can’t do this.”
“Do what?”
“Speculate.”
“It isn’t speculating.”
“It is. You and Becky are just making this up, reading Tarot cards, consulting oracles, putting words in Lenny’s mouth.”
“Like ‘laissez les bon temps rouler,’ for example?” Judy asked. “Think about it. This trip to Italy and the visit to Oktoberfest—they’re both festivals. What better way to urge you to take some time off to eat well, drink heartily, and enjoy what the world has to offer?”
Monique’s jaw began to hurt. “Let’s change the subject.”
“Not yet,” Judy said. ”Our last stop is tomorrow in Milan. Remind me again what the final two items on the list are.”
Monique played with the sleeves of her hoodie, her mind leapfrogging in its attempts to shut this whole conversation down. “We’re visiting the marble monuments at the Cimitero Monumentale di Milano.”
Judy murmured, “Ah.”
Monique resisted the urge to glare. “So, wise oracle, what do you think Lenny meant by sending me to some Milanese cemetery? It wouldn’t be something as simple as admiring the tombs carved by Leonardo da Vinci, would it?”
Becky leaned over, sharing a glance with Judy. “It is rather Dickensian.”
Judy shrugged. “Nobody said Lenny was subtle. And sometimes a person needs three ghosts to face the truth.”
Monique looked from one to the other. “Are you two really saying I’m supposed to act like Scrooge and finally face my own mortality?”
“No,” Becky said. “You’re supposed to face his.”
Becky held Monique’s gaze. In the silence Monique noticed that Becky’s focus was off just a bit. Maybe it had always been like this. Maybe Monique was just noticing because her mind had gone still and her perception razor-sharp. Becky was looking at her like newborns did, intense on the fuzzy brink between light and dark.
Monique supposed she’d been straddling that fuzzy edge too, for way too long. She’d grown comfortable in a hazy in-between place where Lenny still lived in her mind, a place where she could visit whenever she needed him. She wondered how Lenny knew that she would behave like this. She wondered why Lenny thought—just by sending her to some cemetery far away from the one she’d buried him in—that she would then just let him go.
In the silence Judy dug around in her belly pack and then rustled open a stained and tattered piece of paper. “Yeah, that’s it for the list,” Judy said. “First it’s the cemetery in Milan, and then we’re off to see The Last Supper.”
Monique fixed her gaze on the staircases of red roofs. She didn’t have to think too hard about the meaning of that final item. It glared at her now, a one-hundred-watt incandescent bulb, but she sure as hell didn’t catch the significance of it while she’d been taking care of him. She’d been so absorbed making sure he had enough morphine to stave off the pain but not so much to cause his skin to itch or his worst imaginings to rise. So worried about Kiera and how the twelve-year-old was handling the slow wasting away of her father in the den. So worried about tracking the comings and goings of the hospice nurse and the home health aide, so worried about keeping the house together and monitoring what was going on in the hospital where she worked reduced hours.
Maybe all that time he was just trying to urge her to treat every meal with him like a last supper. Maybe he was just trying to say a proper, and final, good-bye.
Monique gazed over the far vineyards, the rows abutting at oblique angles. She heard the scrape of a shopkeeper’s broom on the stones around the other side of the building. She heard wind rustle the leaves of the tree canted at an angle off the mountain. She heard Judy rifling around again in her belly pack and the sound of a knife slicing through something soft.
Judy raised between two fingers a sliver of a white truffle so thinly shaved that it was almost translucent.
Monique narrowed her eyes. “You’re kidding me, right?”
“Dead serious.”
“Unless that’s a magic mushroom it isn’t going to make me just accept everything you guys are saying.”
“It’ll be a step in the right direction.”
“I hate you, you know.”
Judy smiled softly. “I hate you too.”
Then Monique opened her mouth wide. Judy laid the truffle on her tongue like a communion wafer. Monique forced down the rise of bile as the taste burst in her mouth—oddly fragrant and musky but not entirely disgusting. She closed her lips over it and attempted to chew. Becky’s arms came around behind her, and Judy leaned forward and hugged her so she was surrounded, encircled, engulfed.
Then, while the oddly fragrant taste lingered in her mouth, Monique remembered that there was one more item on Lenny’s list. One more task, beyond the trip to Milan, far more daring than taking a small bite of a warty little truffle. It had been scrawled on the bottom of the original list in a script so spidery it was nearly illegible. Lenny had added it in the last week he was alive, when the cancer had sapped all but the faintest spark of vitality. She’d read it later, tugging the list out from under his limp hands. She’d assumed he hadn’t really meant it. In that last week his attention span had shortened along with his ability to maintain the logic of a conversation.
This last task was too crazy to believe.
She was sure of this: It was the morphine that had prompted him to add number thirteen.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Judy walked into the refectory of the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie with twenty-four other tourists who’d just been ushered in through a pair of climate-controlled doors to view the famous Leonardo da Vinci mural, The Last Supper. They approached the fresco, painted on the end wall, with a communal air of awe. The mural itself was thirty feet long and
about fifteen feet tall, far bigger than Judy had ever expected, and the size had an impact that no photograph in any art history book could match.
Becky whispered, “My art teacher would talk about this fresco and his eyes would roll to the back of his head.”
Judy murmured, “Clearly he needed to get out more often.”
Becky ignored Judy’s comment, all hungry eyes. “It’s just been through so much. Da Vinci painted it on dry plaster and then sealed it in an odd way. It’s been deteriorating since the fifteenth century. They cut a door out of the wall and chopped off Jesus’s feet. And in World War II the refectory was bombed.”
“Wow. How long has it been since you took Art History?”
“My professor would ramble on about all the references to the number three. The Apostles are grouped in threes. There are three windows in the background.”
“Good things come in threes.”
“I wish there were more light in here.” Becky expelled a frustrated sigh. “I’ve never seen a real da Vinci up close.”
“They bricked up the windows to try to stave off the deterioration.”
“Good for you, Judy,” Becky said with a smile. “You read the placards.”
Judy let the comment lie. She knew about these boarded-up windows not from the placards in the little antechamber, but from listening to the guide nearby lecturing in a low voice to a group of fifteen or so tourists. She’d noticed the professorial-looking man as he’d stepped off a bus outside the church. He was dressed tweedy and he hustled his elderly Italian troops to hurry along to make their scheduled tour time. She understood his haste. She, Becky, and Monique had parked the Porsche in the street to make the tour time that Monique had scheduled back in the States. Only twenty-five people were allowed in the refectory at any given time. Monique had read that casual last-minute arrivals were frequently disappointed, even in the deadest winter of tourist season. This was one part of the itinerary they hadn’t dared to amend.
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