Plague in the Mirror (12 page)

“Always.” He studies her with more patience than she deserves. “Look who I was raised by. ‘Weird’ is my birthright.”

“Well, I’m having these . . . episodes.”

“What kind?”

“Time . . . episodes.”

He nods slowly. “All right, I’m with you so far.”

“Where I’m here, and then I’m . . . there.”

“‘There’ being what? West Virginia? Topeka?”

“Here. Florence. But back in 1348 or so . . . around the time of the plague. There’s this girl who looks like me, and she’s sort of twisted.”

“That I believe.” He shrugs when he sees that she isn’t kidding. “You’re messing with me, right? To get my mind off the fact that you’re willing to kiss me when you don’t really want to?”

“I want to, Li. Just not as much as you want me to.”

“What else are you willing to consider wanting less than I do?”

She sighs, and he sighs back.

“I wish I could explain . . . all of it. But I don’t understand myself. . . .”

“OK. So there’s this girl in 1348. Maybe she’ll be into me.” He shrugs, smiling wanly.

“You have no idea how much that disturbs me.”

Do you think he’s pretty,
bella?

“Then you’re jealous?”

“She’s not very . . . nice.”

“So she’s, like, some kind of mean, dangerous version of you? Even better. Maybe you can learn from this girl, dude.”

“Li. I’m serious. Something’s wrong with my head. This trippy thing . . . keeps happening.”

He frowns to get his face in order. “Well, what’s it like? Describe it. Maybe we’ll find something online.”

She nods gratefully — hadn’t dared go online before, alone; it made it too real — and they put their heads together in the Google glow of his laptop.

“You really are your mother’s son, you know.” May smooths the fox-brown hair from his eyes so he can see the screen. “It’s all about the research.”

Liam slaps her hand away lightly. “If you want my help, leave my dignity intact, OK?”

“’Kay.”

“But will you kiss me again if I find out something?” He leans sideways, just slightly, typing in keywords. “Because you smell good.”

“I’ll think about it.”

C
ristofana leaves the portal open in May’s bedroom to tease her, no doubt, and the new reckless May, the one willing to play Russian roulette with her life, actually does sneak through that week, twice, but only for as long as it takes to get to the workshop and back.

She does it to catch a hungry glimpse of him, assure herself the artist is still there, still alive — but she also does it to remind herself that the impossible is possible.

May lives in abject terror the entire time she’s on the other side, her nerves screaming because it would be easy, should Cristofana spot her floating along the cobbled, dead-strewn streets of Old Florence, for her twin to seize the opportunity and slip through to the present, closing the door with May stranded in the distant, terrible past.

But May is gambling, in part, on Cristofana’s short attention span. (How long could her twin, however determined, realistically lurk around the portal entrance? She had to eat, forage, survive.)

Out May steps into the glare of yesteryear in her same drab dress and sandals, dodging the living and the dead in her haste. She knows the way by heart now, and she’s sworn to herself that she won’t upset him in ghost form again, so her visits are brief but heady. He can’t see her out there, even if he glances up from his corner toward the window ledge. (May often wonders why he chooses to work back there in the shadows; aren’t artists always after the “good light”? Not Marco, apparently.) She’s invisible in the relentless Italian sun. Present — and unbearably absent.

But one day Cristofana does catch May out. She’s loitering beside the portal when May emerges, and she sidles up before May can backtrack.

“There is only one way to be with him, you know.” She follows May out of the hushed alley, into the cobbled streets. “You know this, don’t you?”

May decides to play along. “If you want me to stay today,” she snaps, “don’t leave my sight. If you do, I’ll assume you’re out to trap me. If I stay, it’s on my terms.”

Cristofana smiles indulgently, bending at the knee as for royalty. “As you wish.”

They both know that all Cristofana has to do is get back to the portal before her and slip through, but May’s counting on whatever it is that’s been holding Cristofana back this long.

There has to be something.

It’s early, and the streets are hot and dry, deserted but for the occasional vagrant with downcast eyes. The sun beats down like a bludgeon. So May makes little effort to conceal her ghost self.

They pause at the end of an alleyway to let a carriage pass so it doesn’t mow Cristofana over, and the girl slouches against a wall in her weird array of rags and pilfered riches. May looks up, really, for the first time — at least on this side of time — and is shocked to find no dome. Il Duomo, the focal point of the city she knows, isn’t here. May’s never bothered to lift her head (or dared take her eyes off Cristofana for long), but apparently the first marvel of modern architecture, as Gwen called it the day they arrived in Florence, hasn’t been built yet. May’s uneasy gaze darts left and right, seeking the gold doors Gwen showed her. They aren’t here, either. Together with the general air of horror and decay in the city, the pestilence has halted all construction. There’s a chaotic, unfinished air about everything.

The carriage is stuck in a pothole, the driver whipping the horse while a passenger leans his weight against the wheel, and Cristofana stops to watch. May sees that the scratches on her wrist are still there, fainter but an ugly pink, infected probably.

“How could you?” May accuses now, remembering, most of all, her own helplessness.

“How could I
what
?” The other girl blinks back disdain.

“Do what you did to that animal. It trusted you.”

Recognition blooms on her mirror face. “Kitty, kitty, poor kitty —”

If May were flesh and blood, her fingernails would be biting into her palms. Cristofana surprises her then by stepping forward, standing as close as she can get without blurring with May. “That cat was skin and bones, riddled with worms, with none to care for it.” Her voice is low and dire, and May hates the truth in her words. In May’s future, kittens are routinely dewormed; it’s a common treatment, one she herself helped administer over and over during a veterinary internship the summer after sophomore year. The bony gray kitten had lived in a state of constant, nagging hunger, a hunger no food would solve,
which is no excuse for murdering it,
May thinks, but then again, there seems to her no excuse, no possible explanation, for tearing your holy men limb from limb, either.

“You live in an easy world, yes?” Cristofana complains, as if reading her mind.

Yes,
May thinks,
I do, but it’s all relative. Everything’s relative.

“You are full of goodness and generosity, but have you learned nothing here?” Cristofana turns like a dancer, her frayed silks twirling. “Come, let me walk you to the parish churchyard, where they’ve dug trenches down to the waterline, wide and deep. Every night, people of good conscience, or those paid handsomely for their trouble, haul the dead on their backs and hurl them into this hole without ceremony. Every morning, the bodies are sprinkled over with earth. Come night again, more are heaved on top . . . crisscross double-cross, as the good rhyme goes . . . and then more dirt, and so on, layered like a mamma’s lasagna. Gone are the processions and blazing candles, the pretty cloaks and mantels and veils for the lady mourners, the bells and biers and wailing multitudes. Instead, you vanish. You are plowed under and forgotten. Like that.” She snaps her fingers, gazing at them almost proudly, and then walks on.

May lets her go.

“Well?” the other calls back haughtily, pausing again. “Will you not face what I do daily? Will you judge me from the safety of where you stand?”

“I’ve seen enough.”

“Have you?”

“There’s nothing I can do to help. It’s all happened. It’s over —”

“For
you
it’s over. Do you not see that our world is gone mad with the pestilence? We are no more good and evil. In this suffering and misery of our city, the authority of human and divine laws is no more. The ministers are dead or sick or shut up with their families. None do their duty, and to spite them, we do as we please, and who can blame us when we will die anyway, good or bad? God wills it, and He is cruel.”

Two huddled women in fine dress hurry past. If they
don’t
see May or don’t believe what they see, it’s a fierce lone girl in strange clothes they perceive, a stupefied madwoman ranting on a street corner. If May
is
visible — and who knows? — it’s all a trick of the light, and the women lower their eyes so quickly that they see two eerily identical girls, one flesh and one phantom, arguing. Either is cause to cross the cobbles, crushing sprays of herbs and posies under their nostrils. The air here reeks of death and sickness, so those who can afford to carry nosegays or vinegar-soaked rags to ward away the stink.

May stares back, unyielding, her lip trembling.

“If you will not look around you, will not take what I offer, then give
me
something. I love this city, loved . . .” A glimmer of sorrow, rare and compelling on the mirror of May’s own features, is all it takes.

May feels her anger recede, eclipsed by pity.

“Give it back to me, my city.”

“What do you want me to say? There’s no end to it, if that’s what you mean — sickness, war, violence — it doesn’t go away. It gets worse. There are machines in my world, so many machines, and everything’s faster.”

“But what of Firenze?”

“In just a few decades,” May explains, straining to orient herself in time, to access Gwen’s or Liam’s latest lecture on the Renaissance, “Florence will be one of the most celebrated cities in the world. There’s a rebirth of ideas here . . . and all these great painters and musicians and architects. There’ll be a huge dome . . . up there . . . and gigantic gold doors, there and there.”

“These I have seen with my own eyes. You forget . . . I am a traveler, too. But go on. It’s true, then, as Marco says, that men will one day care for more than sheep and wool and commerce?”

For a moment, May doesn’t register the name, and when she does, she feels a violent stab of jealousy. So they’ve talked? In their native Tuscan dialect, no doubt. “Yes,” she says, her tone cold, firmer, “and medicine. People won’t get sick so often or die from sickness, at least not in developed countries.”

“Developed?” She looks puzzled. “I knew you were not from Firenze, but from where? You learned your speech in England? I learned it from my English mother.”

“My country doesn’t exist yet. Or at least not the way it does later. Medicine could ease this sickness, but there’ll be another. Just as there are other wars. Nothing is easy. No time is easy. In the country where I live, two vast buildings, taller than twenty of your city towers, were blown from the world with all the people in them. You have a choice.”

“A choice?”

“How you endure it.”

“
You
have a choice. I must make do with your word, it seems. You speak of history, not life. But continue.”

May thinks of the newscasts, the photographs, the smiling portraits of those killed in the attacks of 9/11. She was just a kid and mostly remembers her mom’s silence. Her dad’s tears. “No. I’ll give you nothing until you . . . apologize . . . for what you did to that cat, for who you are.”

“Then I make my choice.” Cristofana turns and sets off marching.

“Where are you going?” May demands, wrestling with foreboding, her voice shrill.

“With luck, I’ll
choose
to kill a nun,” Cristofana calls over her shoulder, an obscene smile on her face as she strides through the maze of streets and alleys with May at her heels. “I’ll slit her throat with my knife. Now,
that
will be a choice.”

As they cross into the artists’ quarter, May feels a terrible, reeling sense of dread, a now-familiar sensation where Cristofana’s concerned.

“And you must understand that no one will miss her. No one misses anyone now. We disappear, and no one sees. Can you begin to know this feeling,
bella
?”

The city shops and guilds have all been officially closed, Cristofana explained earlier, to contain infection, but every so often as May follows on this fool’s errand, she sees individual merchants and craftsmen enter or exit buildings, and now and then she makes out the dim glow of torches or candles between shutters. When they reach the familiar street-level
bottega,
she pants, “Stop . . . please.”

Cristofana does and turns. “Oh, don’t look at me with those child’s eyes.”

“Your eyes,” May challenges.

“No,
bella.
Mine have seen more. Much more.”

May turns in frustration, running her palm along the wall, or trying, imagining the coarse drag of the brick she can’t feel. Her skin and bones and beating heart all scream to be here and impact things, to have power in this place, but they don’t.