The girl’s laugh is less amused than pitying. She stares back as if weighing every last one of her private options; the delay is maddening, and finally May can’t stand it anymore. There’s a roiling in her head, like a storm building. “Well, where do you come from?”
“I won’t tell you,” she challenges. “I’ll show you. You are ready?”
“Ready?” Are you crazy? May looks around… for a way out, a witness, a sane bystander. The street is strangely deserted.
“Come.” The girl — May remembers her calling herself Cristofana — holds out a hand and drops it again.
“Will I look like you if I go?”
“You already look like me, bella. Esattamente. ”
“I mean, will I be a ghost?” May can’t believe she’s even having this conversation.
“Will you know the difference?”
Staring back at the girl, she thinks, How do you know? It’s infuriating but also flattering, in a way, since everyone else, even Liam, would rather pretend May is fully present — a former, better version of herself — and not, in fact, a hollow automaton going through the motions. Her tired mind is playing tricks on her. “Is it safe?” she asks. “It can’t be safe.”
“Do you always carry on so? I am proof of this. Living proof.”
“If you call it living, Ghost Girl.”
Cristofana steps closer, her phantom basket swaying. “Spoken like a true authority.”
May won’t get up and back away. Part of her, the curious, scientific part, would like to reach out and see what happens.
If someone asked her to describe the ghosting precisely, she’d tell them it’s like looking at a black-and-white photographic negative. Before digital, Gwen used to keep a darkroom, and when Liam and May were old enough, she taught them how to develop the long reels of film and make prints. On her ghost twin, the areas of definition or shadow, what would be the blacks in a final print, are bleached; the highlights/whites and midtones/grays are transparent.
“Long ago,” the haughty stranger says, “in the year of our Lord 1347, I caught a sparrow in my hands and sent it through my portone — you have this word? Doorway, I think — to test this magic. In the bird flew and out again two hours later, still with the same piece of straw in its beak.”
Tell her no. “If I could actually see you, I’d call you nuts,” May complains, resorting to sarcasm to mask her fear. Just no. “But you must have turned sideways or something and the not seeing you part has me doubting myself—”
“You are bitter company, bella, a great disappointment to me, but I have picked you and have no one else to share my story with.”
“But why me?”
“Your soul remembers what you do not — and shone for me like a star in the dark of time. There is only one of it and two of us, but you live in this layer of time and I in another. A soul exists in many layers; the soul’s container or likeness in only one.”
“We share one… soul ?” And now May identifies that unfamiliar stirring inside: foreboding, dread.
“It would very much amaze you, what can be accomplished with our wills.”
Does May have a will? Real and unreal are seriously mixed up at the moment; they have been since she arrived in Florence, since home ceased to be a refuge and people started flinging untenable choices at her.
“I am a pale shadow of myself… without will or action or substance. I can affect nothing here.”
May looks away, lowers her voice. “Can anyone else here see you?” She feels the dread coiling now, like a dragon, all through her body. Don’t give yourself away. Don’t start shaking.
“If they do, it is as you see me, as a ghost. They doubt their eyes and hurry past. I try not to be seen. It confuses them and draws attention. You I enjoy confusing.”
“Clearly.”
“And yet I like you.”
“I can’t say the feeling’s mutual.” But a smile twitches on May’s lips. There’s a rush in all this, a crazy rush. Like it or not, she’s blundered into something extraordinary, impossible, and it’s hers. It might be scary, but it belongs to her alone. “Weren’t there other generations? You said something about 1347? If what you say is true, our… soul had other lifetimes, right? Maybe lots. Between mine—”
“Enough. Do you suppose you have earned my secrets? I assure you, you have not.” The ghost girl’s voice is clipped, but her smile’s indulgent. “I found you. That is all. And I offer to show you my Florence in turn. Do you accept?”
With dread before and behind her, May floats a moment in the ensuing pause, outside herself. “All right. Yes.”
“Then follow carefully.”
May rises from the bench like a sleepwalker and crosses to the archway. She trails Cristofana into the rustle and hush of the courtyard, into a tunnel of swaying, pale laundry shot through with light, toward an empty stone corner at the courtyard’s far edge — and then out again, with her head roaring.
May feels hollow and nauseous, held in check by gravity only. Cristofana, on the other hand, is solid, all color and hard line. She’s delighted with her trick. She applauds it, right there in what appears to be an alleyway behind an abandoned shop.
Luckily, this street at the edge of the city is even more deserted in Cristofana’s world than it was in May’s. As her twin marks a course, a sideways 8 on the stone near where the portal must stand — the sign for infinity? — May juts out first one arm and then the other, and her arms are a luminous outline. She looks just as Cristofana did on the other side… a pale shadow of myself… without will or action or substance.
But there’s no time for astonishment.
Cristofana’s off like a shot, navigating winding streets and alleyways at the edge of the old city, moving with a stealth and grace that seem remarkable now that she’s flesh and bone.
May floats after, faint and amazed, through the gate and along the river.
As they traverse the city’s undeveloped edge, Cristofana points out the rolling green hills beyond, where sheep graze and men stoop in fields, where distant, soldierly rows of olive groves cast stark shadows and larks swoop overhead. There’s not an airplane in sight. It’s profoundly quiet, even this close to the center of the city. The sky’s a rich blue laced with cottony clouds. May’s afraid to touch anything — afraid of what without will really means — but she can’t get over how beautiful Old Florence is, an alien, slimmed-down version of the city she’s only just getting to know back with Gwen and Liam. For the moment, she’s happy observing.
Without a word, they work their way back along angular, cobbled streets full of strutting roosters and rooting pigs, and soon there are people everywhere, though no buzzing mopeds or bleating horns, no blinking streetlights or shining glass.
May can’t help glancing down at her arms from time to time, pivoting them in front of her, milky-transparent in the shade but mostly not visible at all. She seems to fade completely in direct sunlight. When she finally finds the nerve to run her hand along a wall, her fingers pass effortlessly through stone and brick. She still feels hollow and sick to her stomach, a little headachy, but also light and free, more like water than flesh. Emboldened, she tries walking through a closed door. It works, and she turns on her heels in what looks like an empty peasant’s hovel lined with straw, and she walks out again, giddy with success.
Smiling at these antics, Cristofana cautions, “Stay in the sunlight. Remember, it confuses others to see you… what there is to see.” She squints at May as if taking mental measurements. “They think they see a ghost.”
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