Chap. 5 The Strangeness of the Story (Beatrice)

The days of stories didn’t end when my soul flew out the window of our house on West Street. At first, I flew away. I looked for the places that my parents talked about over plates of food that our grandparents taught us to make. I looked for the places that we never saw with our own eyes, for one reason or another. Of course, the reason was always money. We never had it; we never had enough. It was the first thing I did when I could, and that wasn’t until I could fly away on my own.

There were so many holes in the story that I didn’t know where to go when I left. Mamma and Papa couldn’t tell me the proper names, so I had to fill in the blanks: the places where my grandmother might have walked, the church where all the children in the old family had been baptized, the crypts where they were buried. The stories were all there, but they had no particulars and no beginnings. I knew the endings, of course.

All stories end one way.

I came first to the shore of Mamma’s birthplace and stared across the straits into the sea. I could see the floating city shimmering over the water, rising up from the waves. It was just as Papa said, no fairy tale. I could have reached it with a thought from the shore, but I knew that I would find nothing but heat and air and the diamond surface of the sea. Still it was there, to my eyes, crystal buildings flashing and waving with the rippling heat on the horizon.

I could have stayed forever on the shore as the deceitful Morgana probably wanted, but I had more things to see. There was the old house made of white stucco with stone floors, where Papa had been born and where he’d left one day as a boy, never to return. It still stood, white seashells pressed into the concrete walk that led up to the front door. Wind still blew through chimes made from the shells of mollusks, bleached by decades of blinding sunlight. Bees still buzzed in the citron trees surrounding the house, bits of conversation between them reaching my ears. And just as Papa said, nobody was home. No footsteps in the house or yard, no shadows in the window anymore. Where had they gone?

Inside, I placed my bare feet on the cool floors, the speckled stone that my father and his family would drench with water and sleep on when the heat smothered the city and made it impossible to breathe. The lost breaths of the old family rose up to me from the floor, sighing around my ankles and lifting the hem of my dress. I stepped carefully around the absent bodies that once endured the heat together in that place.

There were marks on the wall of the kitchen, notched into the wall plaster with a small knife and colored with whatever materials had been at hand: candle wax, crayon, and what looked like beet juice. Each notch marked the progress of one child, and then another and another, but they had no names. They had sprouted and grown with only their mother’s memory to witness it, and now they were lost. I didn’t know what their names might have been. Papa left before his siblings were born.

I had become memory itself, nothing but memory. But I was memory patched with forgetting, something I had inherited. The great holes between stretches of time kept all of us apart, like relatives carrying on a feud though they can’t remember the cause of. I could stand there in the old house and see that it was real, I could even stare out from the shore and see the city that was not real, but I wouldn’t find the beginning of the story by looking. Without witnesses, the beginning had been lost to time.

It was in the church that I began to understand. I stood at the baptismal font and ran my hands along the marble. I put my face close to the surface and breathed across the lake of holy water, watching tiny ripples break its stillness. Had my great-grandmother’s body been lowered toward the water here? Had she screamed when the cold water covered her warm skin? Was this the bowl that caught the water that streamed off her hair? I couldn’t know. There were four other churches in the same city. I didn’t even know her first name.

So I turned my heels to the old house, and the church, and headed back to the shore. It is the place where the seas come together, where the Madonna surveys two dominions from her throne on the thrust of the land. It’s also the land that makes you choose between a rock and a hard place: the dangerous shore or the swirling waters of two seas flowing together. It’s no wonder that Papa chose the open blue waters beyond the unreal city floating in the harbor and the calm of not knowing what was out there.

* * * * * * * * * *

He was waiting for me there on the shore. His face turned to the water, watching the floating city change with the tide and light. He was smaller than I thought he would be. In a moment, I stood shoulder to shoulder with him and looked down at his hands. The fingers were long, the nails ridged and white like the shells littering the shore at his feet.

“I didn’t think I’d find you here,” I said.

He smiled without looking me in the face.

“Where did you think I’d be?”

I followed his gaze, only to see the floating city dissolve slowly on the horizon, leaving with the setting sun. The shore grew darker and cooler.

“To be honest, “ I said, “I expected to see you in the church. Was that wrong?”

His smile widened, an indulgent father too pleased with his child to offer anything but delight.

“You aren’t wrong. But I love this place. It’s spectacular.”

He raised his hands and spread them, palms turned to the skies. The setting sun cast a last shaft of pink light across his forehead. I wanted to stay with him on the shore forever in that moment.

“You are going, aren’t you?” he said. His sights had settled again on the distant shore, now a purple line on the horizon. The smile stayed on his lips as he spoke.

“You’re going, too,” I said. “Aren’t you? Surely you don’t live here.”

It took me a minute to feel embarrassed at the assumption and to follow up with an apologetic, “Do you?”

“I do live here,” he said, “Why would you be surprised? What did your grandfather call these places?”

He paused for me to find the phrase, but I couldn’t. If Nonno had ever told me, it had fallen into a dark place in my mind. My companion reached over and tapped my forehead, carefully fixing his eyes over the top of my head.

The phrase appeared before my eyes, written in the sand.

“Luoghi sottili.” I said. “Thin places.”

He snapped his shell fingers. “Thin places. I live in those. Now you do, too.”

I considered this revelation. I lived between two dominions now, like the shimmering spires of the floating city. I could stay in the borderland for as long as I wanted to, as long as I needed to.

“Then yes,” I said. “I am going.”

He took my hand in his, allowing his long fingers to wrap over the tips of mine. The palm of his hand felt like a small, melting sun. I didn’t want to let go of it.

“Very well,” he said, “But you will come back. I will wait until you’re ready.”

He smiled again and turned my hand up to kiss it. When he let go of my hand, I felt as though the center of it had disintegrated. By the time I looked up to find him, he was already disappearing around the far side of the Madonna.

So I turned my face to the sea and set my thoughts on home.

* * * * * * * * *

When I returned to West Street, I let myself into the backyard first. I felt small and cold, too thinly dressed for the cold weather. It was evening. The shadow of the building turned everything in the garden gray and black. I’d become a child again, seeking the safety of my father’s arbor. Though it was covered completely in darkness, it seemed to call out to me. So I sat there, clasping my knees to my chest, shivering under my white nightgown. I’m not sure when the nightgown came in—I had been wearing my dress and sweater earlier. My nightdress didn’t protect my little body from the night closing in around me.

I stared up at the house, wondering what to do next. I was back, but what good would it do if I couldn’t work my way back inside? The windows were deeply black, the entire house sleeping. Even the light that had been burning in my room around the clock had been turned out. Then, a small movement in an upstairs window: the girls’ room.

I could see Chiara staring down into the yard. It looked as if she could see me sitting there, staring back at her. I blinked and she was gone. In an instant (and far too fast for such a small girl), Chiara stood in front of me. Her stare seemed to go right through me, as it should have. Yet she reached out her hand and touched my knee. Confusion flooded my mind. Had something also happened to Chiara? Was she like me now? It seemed the only possible explanation for her ability to see and touch me.

“Aunty,” she said, “Why are you so small?”

* * * * * * * * * * *

Chiara had never spoken to me while I was alive. Now, the words poured out of her mouth like there’d never been a problem. Many astonishing things had happened to me recently. This somehow surprised me most. I didn’t want her to stop. I certainly didn’t want to scare her.

“Kiki,” I said, “Because I’ve come to be your friend now.”

She seemed to accept that explanation without fussing and came to sit by my side.

“Is it warm where you’ve been, aunty? You are shivering and it’s not so cold.”

I couldn’t recall what time of year it was. The yard was in that in-between stage: the trees weren’t bare, but I couldn’t see enough in the dark to tell if they were green or changing. There was no frost on the ground, and no breath blossomed from Chiara’s mouth. No breath would be blossoming from mine.

“I think I must be tired,” I said. “I’ve had a lot of adventures in the last few days.”

Her eyes sparked at that and she almost smiled.

“Where’d did you go to?” she said. “Was it heaven? Did you go there first?”

“It wasn’t heaven in the sky,” I began. I wasn’t sure how much Chiara understood, if she understood anything. NoNo had us believing that Chiara didn’t know anything and never would.

“But it was the most beautiful place in the world. There was a city floating in the middle of the sea, very sparkly and colorful.”

This was the right thing to say. Chiara smiled and put her head close to mine.

“Okay, Aunty. You need to go to bed and get warm, if you want to grow up again.”

I trailed behind her, our hands clasped together under the moonlight. I could feel that I was drawing the warmth out of her body as we walked to the back door.

“Do you want to snuggle up in my bed with me?” she said.

I didn’t know why Chiara never offered this to me before I flew away, and I desperately wanted to accept. It had been a long time since another person had held me while I slept. But I could see that her hand was turning pale under my touch.

“Thank you, Kiki,” I said, “But I’d better go to my own room for tonight.”

“Rules?” she said, half-smiling.

I didn’t really know the rules, but Chiara astonished me. She always lived in a place outside the rules. It seemed she understood more than I had believed.

“Yes, amore,” I said. “For now.”