by Ian Caldwell
“The gendarmes think there was no break-in.”
She growls. “And I suppose the furniture just threw itself on the floor?”
I steer clear of what the gendarmes think. “They didn’t find any signs of forced entry.”
She winces as if stung. “That is true. There was shouting and banging, then the door just seemed to open.”
“But I locked it when I left.”
“Yes, I remember.”
“And you didn’t take Peter anywhere? Not to Brother Samuel’s apartment for dessert?”
“No.”
“There’s no other way the door could’ve been unlocked?”
“None.” She seems flustered. The memory is returning. “I grabbed Peter as quickly as I could, but the man was already inside by the time Peter and I locked ourselves in the bedroom.”
The prioress calls, “Sister Helena . . .”
Helena places a hand on her cheek in dismay.
“You did everything you could,” I assure her. “Let me take it from here.”
Behind her, Maria Teresa is descending on us. I step away, but Sister Helena grabs my wrist and whispers, “She won’t let me watch Peter anymore.”
“Why not?”
“It scandalized her to have a gendarme come here. I’m trying to change her mind, but I’m so sorry, Father.”
Before I can answer, she is backing away. The prioress gives me a heavy look, then guides Sister Helena to the door. Six silhouettes peep down at me from convent windows as I return to Leo on the unlit road.
He veers down the path toward Lucio’s palace, asking me with a glance what Helena told me. But I motion him in the other direction.
“Where are we going?” Leo says.
“To my apartment.”
* * *
THE WINDOWS OF THE Belvedere Palace are still shot with light. Televisions flicker. The Argentine woman who married Signor Serra on the second floor is dancing in her kitchen. Before Leo and I reach the door, two teenagers loitering in a corner release from an embrace. I feel a spontaneous burst of happiness to be back here.
Home.
Inside the back door we find one of my neighbors sitting like a porter. “Father!” he cries, leaping to his feet.
“What are you doing here?” I ask.
Ambrosio is the all-hours computer repairman for the Holy See Internet Office.
He lowers his voice. “After the gendarmes stopped guarding the building, a few of us began taking turns.”
I give him a grateful clap on the arm. At least they believe Sister Helena.
Ambrosio asks if I’ve heard any more news, but I tell him no and quickly mount the stairs, not wanting to attract more notice. At the top floor, someone has replaced a broken lightbulb on the way to my apartment. More vigilance. When we reach my door, I kneel and inspect it. The strike plate looks untouched. There are no signs of damage to the door frame. I have the key, but I turn to Leo and say, “Know how to pick a lock?”
He smiles. “Better than you.”
We give it a crack, but the mechanism is old and scratchy. The pins don’t like to move.
“Embarrassing,” he says. “I used to be good at that.”
I step down the hall to the next apartment, where the brothers of the pharmacy live. This is what I’ve been afraid of.
“Where are you going?” Leo says.
I pull up the doormat.
“Damn,” he whispers, seeing it.
Since my parents first moved into the Belvedere Palace, this is where we’ve kept the spare key. Ours beneath the brothers’ mat, theirs beneath ours. But not anymore.
I turn and lift my own mat. The brothers’ key is still there. I rub my temples.
“How could someone know that?” Leo asks.
“Michael,” I murmur.
“What?”
“Michael Black told them.”
He told them where I live and how to get inside. Father was always forgetting his keys. Michael knew about the spare.
“I thought he was a friend of your family’s,” Leo says.
“Someone threatened him.”
Leo sneers. “Coward.”
Hearing a distant sound on the staircase, I drift back to my apartment door and unlock it. Then a thought comes to me. Someone still has our key, which means someone may have been coming and going from this apartment for two days. Or may even be inside.
“Your neighbors have been guarding the building,” Leo reassures me when I tell him as much. “Whoever broke in wouldn’t come back.”
“Right.”
Inside, nothing has changed. Leo reaches for the lights, but I nudge his hand away and point to the windows. “In case someone’s watching.”
Not liking the sound of that, he says, “Then what’s the plan?”
The moon gives the furniture an eerie glow. Without touching anything, I try to visualize what Sister Helena told me about the chronology of that night. She was sitting at the table when she heard a banging at the door. A voice calling for Simon and me. With my eyes I follow the path she took, carrying Peter toward the bedroom. The door opened before she got inside. That distance is less than twenty feet.
A breath slips out of me.
“Leo . . .”
He turns his eyes to the staircase, thinking I must’ve heard something. He doesn’t understand.
“Peter saw him,” I say.
“What?”
“Last night he woke up from a nightmare. He was screaming, I can see his face, I can see his face.”
“No. He would’ve said something, Al.”
“Sister Helena carried him. That’s what she told me: she carried him to the bedroom.”
She has always carried him the same way: pressed against her, with his head looking back over her shoulder.
“You really think?” Leo asks.
The telephone begins to ring, but I say, “When the gendarmes were here, he was too upset to talk. I didn’t bring it up after that. I didn’t want to worry him.”
I won’t wake him tonight. But I will have to find pictures for him to look at. Faces he might recognize.
The answering machine plays its message, but there’s no voice on the other end. Only a strange sound that resembles a door closing.
“Come on,” I say. “Let’s go.”
But suddenly I feel Leo’s hand on me. Pushing me back. He’s staring at something in the apartment doorway. The hulking silhouette of a man.
“Who are you? ” Leo demands. “Identify yourself! ”
I back up.
The shape doesn’t make a sound. It only extends an arm.
The lights go on.
An old man shuffles into the room. The pupils of his eyes flex. He has raised an arm in the air to shield himself from the light, or perhaps to stop Leo from attacking. It’s Brother Samuel, one of the pharmacists from next door.
“Father Alex,” he says. “You’re back.”
“What are you doing here, Brother?”
“I tried calling.”
“What’s wrong?”
He’s tense. His voice has a queer note of rehearsal. Of delivering a message that isn’t his own.
“Someone came looking for you.”
“When?”
“This morning. There was a sound in the hall. I came out to see what it was.”
“What happened?”
He fidgets mightily. “Father Alex, I don’t want to be in the middle of this. The arrangement was that if I saw you again, I would make a phone call.”
“What are you talking about, Samuel?”
“I made the phone call, Alex.”
I’m about to respond, when Leo murmurs something unintelligible. He’s staring down the outer hallway at something I can’t see. His face is p
aralyzed. Finally the sounds from his mouth resolve into words.
“My God.”
Samuel backs away. He slips into his apartment. I hear the door click shut.
I step out.
A human form stands at the end of the hall. It hovers near the stairs, dressed entirely in black. When I recognize it, my skin tightens.
“Alex.”
That single word comes echoing down the hallway. And the sound of her voice splits my heart like an ax.
She takes a small, hesitant step forward. “Alex, I’m so sorry.”
I can’t even blink. I’m too afraid she will be gone when I reopen my eyes.
“I heard,” she says, “about Simon.”
I say the only word my mouth will form. The only one that is etched on every particle of me like gospels on grains of rice.
“Mona.”
It is the first word I have spoken to my wife since her baby learned to walk.
CHAPTER 17
LEO MAKES HIMSELF invisible. They glance at each other in passing, my friend seeing himself out, my wife seeing herself in. Memories detonate in my thoughts. I’m standing at this door with her, holding groceries, holding furniture, holding our newborn son. Neighbors have come out to coo and pay compliments. Brother Samuel has hung so many balloons on our door that we can’t even climb inside.
At the threshold, she waits. She needs to be invited into her own home.
“Come in,” I say.
Just the smell of her, passing in front of me, restores electricity to the oldest districts of my heart. I know this scent. The soap she always bought at the pharmacy. A fragrance I’ve tracked down in every nook of her body.
I make sure we don’t touch as she enters. Yet the air vibrates. My body’s reaction is violent. But my mind is already registering the differences. Her hair is shorter. She doesn’t keep it drawn back anymore; it hangs down just past her chin. There are the first hints of wrinkles beneath her eyes, but her neck and arms are leaner than I remember, her lines tighter. Covering her body is the same sleeveless black dress, plain but flattering, that used to be her favorite: the rare garment that was both traditional and modern, respectful and liberating. Around her shoulders is the thin black sweater she used to wear when women were required to cover their arms. I wonder what message this outfit is supposed to send.
“May I sit?” she says.
I gesture to a chair and offer her something to drink.
“Water would be nice.”
As she glances around the room, there is a twinge in her expression. Nothing has changed, not even the photos in the picture frames. I kept it this way in the spirit of honoring her memory, of awaiting her return. Like all good Romans, Peter and I have built our roads around our ruins.
“Thank you,” she says when I return with the glasses. Again I make sure our hands don’t touch.
She waits for me to take the seat across from her, then she composes herself and forces her eyes to meet mine. When she begins to speak, the words come out rigidly, as if no amount of practicing has prepared her, as if she sees now that her husband is not just an audience of one. All the lost hours and days, the lonely weeks and months and years, crowd around me and stare across at her, waiting at my back to hear what answer there will be. What possibly can be said. The unrequited moments stretch so far into the distance that she realizes some of them can never be reached by words.
“Alex,” she begins, “I know you must have so many questions about what happened. About where I’ve been. And I will try to answer anything you want to ask. But first there’s something I need to say.”
She swallows. Her eyes seem desperate to look away.
“When I left,” she continues, “I truly thought I was doing the right thing for you and Peter. I was scared of what would happen if I stayed. My mind was so full of awful thoughts. But for a while, I’ve been feeling like myself again. I’m better now. And I’ve wanted to call, or come see you both, except that I was afraid. My doctor says the risk of a relapse is low, but even if it were one chance in a thousand, I couldn’t put you and Peter through that again.”
I begin to interrupt, but she raises a hand from the tabletop, asking me to let her finish while she still can. Her mouth is pinched. For a second she seems gaunt, every muscle in her neck tense, the hollows in her cheeks darkening as she clenches her jaw. In that second, it looks as if the years away have wasted her, as if the regrets have devoured her from the inside. In the sludge of my emotions, the portion that is anger weakens. I cannot forget how Peter and I suffered without her. But I see now we weren’t the only ones to suffer.
“I begged my family,” she continues, “to find out how you and Peter were doing. They asked around and heard you were doing okay. Doing well. So it didn’t seem fair to turn your lives upside down just because the time was right for me.”
For the first time, she lets her eyes fall.
“But then I heard about Simon.” She hesitates. “And I know how much you love him. How hard this must be for you. So I told myself that since things had already been turned upside down, maybe now you might need some help.”
These last words end feebly, almost as a question. As if this is a hope she isn’t sure she has the right to harbor. Mona swallows. She places both hands back on the table and looks at me again, bracing herself. She is done.
Faintly I ask, “You heard about Simon? How?”
Relief crosses her face. It is far less painful to answer this than so many other questions that remain.
“Elena’s new boyfriend works in the vicar’s office,” she says. “He saw the paperwork.”
Elena. Mona’s cousin. I wonder how far from that one office the news about Simon has already spread.
“And who,” I ask, “told you about Peter and me?”
Relief fades. When she forces herself to look me in the eye again, I prepare myself for difficult news.
“My parents,” she says. “I got back in touch with them last year.”
This is a blow. For a year those miserable people have hidden her from me.
“I made them swear they wouldn’t tell you,” she says, putting her hands in a praying posture, asking me not to blame them.
My anger subsides. But only because I see, on her upturned finger, the ring I gave her. She still wears it. Or at least, she wears it tonight.
“And where have you been living?” I ask.
“An apartment in Viterbo. I work at a hospital there.”
Viterbo. Two hours from here. The last stop on the train line heading north. She went as far away as she could without leaving entirely, to be sure we would never run into each other.
And yet she didn’t escape to the beach or the mountains. Viterbo is an austere medieval town. Its biggest landmark is a palace where the popes used to come to escape Rome, and it towers over the land like Saint Peter’s. She did this for a reason, I tell myself. To torture herself into remembering.
Her eyes have found the pictures of Peter. As she stares, the corners of her mouth sag. She fights to raise a wall in front of her emotions, but suddenly she blinks. Tears hop from her eyelashes to her cheeks like water dancing in a hot pan. She refuses to give herself up to it, though. Merciless control is all that keeps her balanced on this wire.
My hands want to stretch forward and hold hers. But I’m on the wire, too. So I open my wallet and pull out a picture of Peter. I slide it to the middle of the table.
She picks it up. And seeing the boy our baby became, she says in a choked voice, “He looks just like you.”
The first lie of our reencounter. He doesn’t look just like me. The softness in his features is hers. The dark lashes. The expressive mouth. But maybe she isn’t referring to the picture in front of her. Her voice is haunted, her stare distant. She’s venting some preconception of what Peter really is. He looks like me because I’m the o
ne who clothes him, who cuts his hair each month and brushes it every morning. Even in the signed watercolor paintings taped to the walls, there’s a faint resemblance between his poor autograph and mine. Peter is the duet that Mona and I wrote together. The music sounds like me, though, because I have performed it alone.
“Mona.”
She is looking at me, but her eyes are vacant. She is retreating. Her body language now is a plea for going slow. She is strong, but this is harder than she imagined.
I’ve waited years to ask this one question, and it rages inside me. She owes me this answer. And yet I can’t ask. Not when I see her this way.
Her eyes close. “I know,” she says, “how you must feel.” She sweeps a hand through the air, gesturing at the pictures of herself in frames. “I don’t understand any of this.” Her body is racked by a sudden, heaving breath. “I had hoped—I know this doesn’t make sense, but I’d hoped you’d moved on.”
Such darkness swims at the bottom of those words. As if she can see no happiness in this refusal to forget. As if she can even imagine an alternative.
“Mona,” I say quietly, “did you find someone else?”
She shakes her head in agony, as if I am making this so hard.
“Then why did you never—”
She waves her hands in front of her head. No more. Not right now.
We are strangers. We share nothing but wreckage. Maybe this is as far as we can come in one night.
“So,” she says in a choked voice, “is Simon okay?”
I glance away. For years she and her family have kept secrets from me. Now she asks this about mine.
“He didn’t kill anyone,” I say.
She nods forcefully, to convey that this is self-evident. The brother-in-law she once considered so inscrutable, so unpredictable, now a clockwork saint.
“I don’t know why they’re attacking him,” I say.
For a second her expression is so tender. As if my loyalty to Simon is a beautiful thing to be reacquainted with, full of new meaning after these years of separation.
“How can I help?” she says.
I try to keep all emotion from my voice. “I don’t know. I have to think about what’s best for Peter.”
