Deborah Noyes - Plague in the Mirror

“È passeggiata, ragazzino.” His tone is equal parts nostalgia and dramatic scolding (tourists!), and when he turns back to his companion, the men bend low and commence gossiping — at least it sounds like gossip — in energetic Italian that opposes the languid, almost choreographed stroll taking place on the pavement behind plate-glass windows.

May rests her napkin in her lap, sits back, and enjoys the show. It’s a bit like running into a flock of rare birds out on a hike; you don’t know what to call them, and you don’t mind not knowing.

If there’s one thing Italy has taught May so far, it’s to value mystery.

She gets up before Liam does the next morning, and with Gwen already out and no one to muscle him out of bed, it could be hours, so May decides to take a slow stroll of her own. She scribbles a note urging him to swing by Pegna for picnic cheese and olives if she isn’t back by the time he wakes up. Then she grabs the most compact guidebook in Gwen’s pile — one with lots of pictures. For some reason, May has a burning desire to find some trinket for her mother.

Dad always says, “Thanks for thinking of me,” and politely files away any remembrance she brought him. But Mom loves gifts, not expensive ones, just what she calls “mindful trifles.” As a kid, May showered her mother with pictures, compositions of all kinds, handmade ornaments, feathers she found in the yard. Mom did the same, slipping cryptic notes into her school lunch, leaving a perfect round pebble in the dish where May kept her rings.

Mom and Dad have always been yin and yang, light and dark. Dad makes her laugh. Mom makes her think and feel — usually a frustrating kind of longing or impatience; Mom is so self-possessed, off somewhere else in her mind, even when out walking the dog. May isn’t invited along anymore. Not since she was about eleven, when she took to rolling her eyes whenever her mother enlisted her. Secretly, May loved the walks, loved racing ahead up the path to the conservation land beyond their house with their border collie, True, crashing alongside through the brush, but some defiant part of her wanted to be asked twice, begged even, wanted to be indispensable, and her mother never begged.

Maybe May blames her mother for that, too.

In any case, Mom is going. Leaving them both, if that’s what May decides — that her mother should move back to Boston, where May was born, alone.

It’s up to her to choose by the end of the summer which parent she’ll betray. Dad seems to expect it’ll be him, but May isn’t so sure. She only has one year of high school left. It doesn’t make sense to blow it all up now. Couldn’t her mother have waited one more year? Maybe it doesn’t matter since in another year May will go to college, but the choice is there, meanwhile.

Don’t make me choose. It was all she thought about, every time she looked at one of them, all through their tender, well-meaning lectures about why this thing was inevitable and how much they both loved her anyway and how she had nothing to do with any of it and they were sorry she would suffer in spite of that.

Still, May feels driven to find some small important object for her mother, who blames herself, May knows, though she won’t admit it. Dad’s more the grin-and-bear-it type. Maybe May blames her mother, too — for the divorce, for everything — and a gift, however thoughtful, won’t conceal that fact. But still.

She knows Mercato Nuovo is somewhere south of Piazza della Repubblica, that it’s nicknamed the Straw Market because people used to sell hats and baskets there. Now the stalls sell leather goods and souvenirs. Gwen said to get there early, before the other tourists wake up or the sellers shut down for the hot hours.

It isn’t a long walk, but it’s strange being out in the echoing streets by herself. The morning is overcast but warm and muggy, and she wipes sweat from above her lip, catching sight of what looks like the market loggia and the small fountain housing a big bronze statue, Il Porcellino, that she remembers seeing in the guidebook. Children flip coins into the water, some climbing on and caressing the boar. She remembers reading that if you feed it a coin, landing it in the grille below its snout, you’ll have good luck.

The air is slightly cooler by the fountain, and she sits enjoying its faint mist on her cheek and arm for a moment, dragging her hand across the murky, greenish surface. The market stands are beginning to open now, so she wanders north, nodding at the smiling vendors with handbags, colorful scarves, and jewelry to sell. Nothing seems a match for her mom, though May stops to admire beribboned boxes of marbled paper. It’s beautiful stationery but not special enough, so she makes a mental note to come back if she can’t find a more unique offering.

The city is really waking up now, with women in fashionable suits clacking past on heels and children clustering outside idling cars en route to school. She heads back toward Piazza della Repubblica, crossing under an arch and trying to avoid the crowds gathering outside sidewalk cafés where waiters in red jackets bustle back and forth.

Then, on instinct, she veers off course completely. She can always fish out her map and find her way back to the apartment later. She’s always been like this — at least since her parents learned to let her be independent on trips — willing to be lost. It makes her late a lot and frustrates other people, but it’s led to adventures over the years, like the time she wandered into a street cordoned off by a film crew in Montreal and got to watch them shooting a car chase. It’s also led her into some bad neighborhoods.

She walks a long, long time until she’s in view of one of the old medieval walls snaking and climbing along the city’s edge. Unlike some cities she’s visited, Florence never seems far from the wide open, and because it’s a hilly street, she can see green in the distance.

May stops to rest on a stone bench near the entrance to a residential courtyard, her gaze shifting to the early-morning light cupped inside it, a buttery, soft light saturating the white sheets and women’s silky slips hanging at haphazard angles on laundry lines. She sees glimpses of green in the courtyard, too, a massive climbing flower vine on a trellis, potted lemon trees, a jumble of terra-cotta flowerpots filled with plants. The golden light filters through their colors like a kaleidoscope, hypnotic.

And that’s when May sees her. The girl from the dream.

She’s standing among the rustling sheets, barely visible, a milky shadow of a girl identical to May, a girl who flickers and fades as she shifts position. May can’t ignore her. They’re looking right at each other.

The ghost girl stops just shy of the courtyard gate, out of view of others passing on the street. She waves May over.

May shakes her head, her heart loud in her ears.

The girl parks a phantom hand on a phantom hip. “Have you no curiosity?”

Home in Vermont, pinned on the corkboard over May’s desk, is one of her favorite quotes — by Dorothy Parker — about how curiosity cures boredom but there’s no cure for curiosity. Her parents fed her that line of thinking all her life, and old habits die hard, it seems, because May is curious, insanely curious, though she won’t say so yet. Not to this girl or anyone. It’s easier to stay under the radar, in Pityville, where no one expects much.

She hesitates.

“You do wonder, don’t you? Where I come from? Why I look like this?”

This? May thinks. Me. You look like me exactly. Only you’re not real.

The sun’s movement is beginning to affect the light. May can almost see a bar of morning brightness trailing the tops of the shuttered stucco buildings around the courtyard. She manages to open her mouth, breathing out the word, a question. “Yes?”