The Lost Diary of Venice Read online

  “What do you think, Henry?” Rose asked, watching for a sign. By way of response, he giggled maniacally and plunged facefirst into an artfully placed throw pillow. Rose glanced up at Joan, who stood nearby with arms crossed, mouth twitching in a hopeful half smile. She raised her eyebrows at Rose, a silent question. Rose nodded, feeling the same tingling buzz of excitement that’d come over her the afternoon she downloaded the app.

  Yes. She would do the unexpected. She would buy the couch.

  * * *

  The evening of his opening, William woke up from a nap feeling hollow. It wasn’t a numbness, but a letting go. The space created when what he’d been working on had been extracted from inside himself and handed to the world, like a gift.

  The smell of dinner wafted up as he made his way downstairs. In the living room, Jane and Lucy were sprawled out on the floor, heads bent over a puzzle. Restraint played across Jane’s face; she knew where the piece they were searching for was hiding. As William leaned into the doorway, she glanced up at him. Already, her face was changing fast, so fast. He could see himself in her, and Sarah too. She smiled at him, a quick blond flare, then ducked back to the puzzle.

  In the kitchen, Sarah moved in front of the stove, a faded floral apron tied around her waist and neck. She bent to open the oven door as he walked in, warm heat blowing her hair back, flushing her cheeks.

  “I know, I know, you said you didn’t need me to cook big dinners, but tonight’s special.” She pulled out the cast-iron skillet, filled with tender-crisp chicken thighs nestled in saffron rice, red skins of roasted peppers slick with oil. Fragrant spice unfurled immodestly from the pan.

  “Hey, we haven’t had this since New York.” He recognized the dish as one they used to order at a Spanish restaurant down the street from their old apartment.

  Sarah nodded. “I actually called them to ask about the recipe.” She smiled at him, cheeks pink, then brushed the hair from her face with a hand still in its mitt. “There’s that too.” With her chin, she gestured at a package on the counter wrapped in butcher paper and twine.

  “Can I open it?”

  She nodded again and pivoted back to the stove. His thick fingers couldn’t undo the knot; instead, he shimmied the twine up over the corners, then tore through the paper.

  It was the photograph of them both, framed. He’d absentmindedly tucked it into their closet after bringing it in from the studio—she must have found it. She’d had it edged in maple, their happiness preserved behind thick glass. As he slid the photo out, a stiff rectangle of paper came sliding with it. He held one corner, reading the script across the front. It was a gift certificate for music lessons at a studio downtown. William glanced up just in time to catch Sarah watching him.

  “Look in the pantry.” She had an expression on her face that he’d only ever seen her use with the girls, on birthdays or holidays, when they were about to open a present she knew they wanted. He turned to the narrow pantry door and swung it open.

  The light had already been flicked on, and there—perched on a stand, in front of shelves of soup cans and opened boxes of cereal—was a new guitar. It had a Sitka spruce top: pale and polished, inlaid with abalone and wrapped in gleaming rosewood. The type of instrument that would never be left out in a yard sale. William stepped into the pantry, was alone for a moment in the small room, warm and close with the faint smell of baking powder. He reached to touch the guitar strings, taut against his fingertips. Then he looked down at the photograph he was still holding in his other hand.

  The image of him and Sarah smiling.

  * * *

  It’d been a warm enough day that Rose hadn’t needed a jacket. She’d barely needed the thin blue cardigan she’d worn: summer was refusing to cede her crown of wilting blossoms, demanding a few more weeks still. But now that the sun was down, the air had chilled, and Rose was glad for the extra layer as she biked.

  The gallery was near enough to her usual route, halfway between the shop and home. It’d be easy to say she was just passing by. Still, she decided to lock her bike a block away and walk there so that if she needed to leave quickly, she could just turn around and not have to deal with chains or keys. She avoided thinking too much about the why of it; like a sleight of hand trick, her mind let that card remain facedown.

  Strolling the sidewalk, she was greeted on all sides by the bobbing heads of flowers: peeking over fences, edging the concrete, tumbling thickly from baskets the city had hitched to lampposts. Petunias and hollyhock, common yarrow and elegant pale roses that still held a bit of daylight in their petals. Rose thought of Alice’s looking-glass garden and half-expected the flowers to begin chattering—the roses advising her to walk in the opposite direction if she wanted to get where she was going.

  Where was she going? To William’s opening. Uninvited. Wearing a dress she hadn’t worn in years, with her hair, for once, down. After she’d closed the shop, she’d stood in front of the mirror in the small back bathroom and begun to retwist her bun. Then, inexplicably, she’d stopped. She’d looked at herself with her hair wild and tendriled past her breasts, and she’d left it that way—walked out of the shop with it swaying down her back, spiraling around her neck like a newfound familiar. Now as she turned the corner, her reflection confronted her in the darkened windows lining the street. Arms wrapped around her body as if she were cold or frightened, hair whipping out behind.

  Up ahead the gallery emerged, silhouettes crisping into view as she approached. People on the sidewalk smoking, cigarettes glowing red on the inhale. Light from the show spilled out into the street, the brassy sounds of jazz and conversation, a woman laughing, all of it just audible over the pounding of her hummingbird heart. She neared a pair of smokers, deep in discussion—and wasn’t de Duve’s stance on the avant garde perfection?—both of them exhaling great gray gusts that unspooled lazily into the night air. Rose eased to the window and peeked in. The small gallery was crowded, but through the shifting bodies she could spy fragments of the paintings.

  Suddenly, silence. No laughter, no jazz, not even the hum of blood in her ears.

  The tree and the bird! She would recognize them anywhere. She’d known he was painting Giovanni’s story, but seeing it made it real—brought back the afternoon they’d spent together looking at the images, standing side by side in the back room. The sharp, grassy smell of his cologne. Feather and wing, root and bough. She leaned in closer, caught the profile of a face on a canvas toward the back. Just glimpses through the window, through gaps in the crowd, but enough to see that he’d made something modern and stunning that still somehow spoke of late Renaissance technique. A swelling of pride bubbled in her chest as if she could claim some part in it.

  And then there he was, laughing, dark eyes lighting up as he gestured carelessly with a cut-glass tumbler of whiskey in his hand. His face looked like it had in the desert portrait, like it had with her once, reckless and glinting. A chorus of his paintings backing him up. Rose noticed a woman beside him with her back to the window, blond hair coiled up tightly. Below them both, a young girl completed the composition.

  With a start, Rose realized she’d never let herself imagine his children before, not really. Now there the girl stood, real as blood and bone, white-blond hair and a ruffled blue dress. She was holding a heavily frosted cupcake someone must have just given her. Rose watched as the girl took her first bite: small teeth bared like a kitten yawning, eyes shut tight. Between her grasping fingers, the cake pillowed and crumbled. Her face reemerged with frosting smeared on either edge of her mouth, a stiff dollop clinging tenaciously to the tip of her nose.

  William had seen the bite too, was on his knees now, whiskey set on the floor, using a cocktail napkin to wipe up the mess. As he dabbed at her face, the child squirmed; he shook his head and grinned down indulgently. At his elbow, another girl materialized. Years older, she had darker hair and a serious expression�
�until she noticed the frosting on her sister’s nose and started giggling, grasping William’s arm, flopping her head onto his shoulder.

  As Rose watched, a brief and unexpected memory surfaced. She’d been very young; she remembered the shapes of both parents towering over her, one on either side. Swatches of color and floating, faraway faces. Someone had been holding her hand. The warm sensation of comfort without fear—how could she have known that feeling would be so fleeting, so irretrievable? The world had still been safe then, full of unfolding wonders designed for her delight alone. By their expressions, Rose could tell both children were still swaddled in that same, tender cocoon.

  Then the blond woman pivoted, was bending to kiss the crown of the younger girl’s head. When she straightened, a wedge of hair swayed loose from its twist. Rose watched as William looked at his wife, as he raised one hand tentatively, then tucked the wayward strand behind her ear. The woman reached to catch his fingers in her own, turned her face, pressed her mouth to the center of his open palm.

  The very same act Rose had wanted to do herself.

  He hadn’t touched his wife that way in a long time. Rose could tell without being told—it was written plainly across both of their faces, in their hesitant, uncertain smiles. The two girls shifted in the space below, and for a brief moment she comprehended the family as a whole, a complete and connected system, set apart from the crowd. Bound together by invisible atoms, as perfect and breakable as the still surface of a lake. Then her eyes refocused and she was staring at her own reflection in the glass. Her corona of wild hair, her stricken expression, and it wasn’t déjà vu so much as a sense of deep knowing: that she was always going to have ended up here, standing on the outside looking in.

  That she was always going to have had to see it to understand.

  In an instant, she spun away from herself and was off into the night—walking fast, fast, fast, back to her bike, past the wise white roses with their bobbing heads. When she finally got home, her face was streaked with mascara, though she didn’t remember crying.

  26

  REMEMBERING THE TIME BEFORE SHE left was like trying to recall details from a fever dream. He’d stayed by her side in the hushed room with the sounds of the city jangling and bright below. Because the light hurt her eyes, they kept the drapes closed and the windows open. The heavy fabric of the curtains billowed sluggishly in the breeze, splintering sun across the floor. Together they passed through time in an ambient, marginless drift. He read to her, talked to her about inconsequential matters, drew for her until her eyes drooped, the calm of sleep falling like a curtain beneath her bruises. Then a memory would surface, threatening and unyielding, and she’d call out and shudder awake at the sound of her own voice.

  In the first day after the attack, Veronica and Margherita would wander in every few hours to perch at her bedside—but Chiara didn’t have the spirit to entertain them, and they kept their gazes fastened on the small thistles embroidered in the bed drapes, unable to look at her bandaged and discolored body. Like cats avoiding a sick member of the litter, they quickly reduced their visits to brief nightly inquiries, a head poked through a crack in the door. Meanwhile, Aurelio had arranged for sentries to be placed throughout the house: barrel-chested, blunt-featured men who stood guard like overgrown mastiffs. Gio avoided making eye contact, though they seemed to do the trick. No one had heard from the Crow.

  One afternoon, nearly a week after the fire, Gio lay with Chiara in a drowsy lull. The half-drawn bed curtains swaddled them in a crimson tint. He was searing every part of her into his memory: the slender tips of her fingers, the pattern of blue veins on the insides of her wrists. The way she smelled now, without all her oils—musky and warm, slightly bitter, like the inside of a walnut shell.

  “Tell me a story.” Her voice was muffled by the sheet. At once, Gio thought of the story Torquato had recited, about the bird and the tree. He recalled it for her, trying to remember the exact phrases the poet had used.

  “Draw it for me—draw it with us in it. I’ll be the tree, and you’ll be my bird.” She smiled at the idea.

  “Do you know, I’d planned to do just that…”

  And so he had, sketching as she lay nestled beside him, supervising. She’d made suggestions as he went along: “Add more blossoms” or “Your shoulders are wider than that.” Eventually she’d approved, and they both leaned back to survey the pictures with a sense of accomplishment, ignoring the drops of ink he’d spilled onto the sheets.

  “And now we’ll always be together.”

  “Always.”

  Later, as she meandered in and out of sleep, he whispered to her what Aurelio had planned. A safe future, one full of music, with Maddalena in Milan.

  “And you’ll come with me,” she’d murmured into his shoulder, her breath feverish on his skin. He’d said more words then, vague phrases about setting his affairs in order, but the sounds carried no weight. He’d twisted a strand of her hair around his finger; without the constant tinting, her curls were already darkening, shade by shade.

  On the seventh day, Aurelio announced the time had come.

  They packed only what could be easily transported. Veronica swooped in, somber and severe, to direct the servants with brisk efficiency while Margherita followed in her wake, puffy-eyed and weepy. They dressed Chiara in men’s clothing: plain black layers several sizes too large that made her seem even more fragile. Finally, all four found themselves sitting in the rose-colored room, silent except for Margherita, who from time to time stuffed a fist partway into her mouth to muffle her crying. Gio couldn’t help but note that the scene seemed like a terrible mutation of his first visit: all of them together again in the same room—but this time they were anxious, tired, afraid. Chiara squeezed his hand in her lap, her fingers wrapped around his thumb.

  As the light outside began to fade, the first cries of celebration could be heard.

  Gradually, the shouting grew nearer; at the window, Gio leaned his head outside. The whole city seemed to be swarming toward the harbor, torches transforming the avenues and canals into ribbons of flame. They could hear laughter, songs, and chants floating up on the air like steam, all of Venice boiling over with excitement as confirmation of a victory spread from house to house.

  Gio retreated from the window and strode to Chiara’s side. He extended an elbow, as if he were escorting her to just another dance; rising with a quick wince of pain, she took hold of his forearm. Shoulder to shoulder, they exited the room, making their way toward the wide marble staircase while Veronica and Margherita trailed behind.

  As they walked, images of his first visit ran through Gio’s mind, time skipping and bending, tripping over itself. His reflection rippled across the polished floor—now he was following Cecilia that first afternoon, now he was escorting Chiara away. For once, she didn’t need his help descending the stairs: her slippers were flat and silent. Still, she leaned into him, tucking her head under his shoulder. He looped an arm around her waist. Joined, they took the remaining steps together. An awful certainty—to know in the very act that his mind would surely circle back again and again to these minutes, the way a desperate creature returns to a place where there once had been water.

  Outside on the canal, a large gondola waited, its cabin draped in black curtains. As the sky faded into star-dotted dusk overhead, the boat seemed to absorb all remaining light. The gondolier kept his face down, the end of his oar hidden beneath the water’s surface. Other boats slid by, already-drunk celebrants leaning out, whooping, wearing masks as if it were Carnival again. White and gold and red faces streamed past, frozen smiles gliding through the dim. Gio glanced at Veronica and Margherita standing behind him, at their quivering chins, their clutching hands. The servants huddled in a cluster by the door. It all felt like a misstep someone would soon put right, a musician hitting a minor chord in a major key—only the conductor was missing, the minor c
hord kept playing. More servants emerged from the house, torches raised against the creeping night. In their flare, the boat itself seemed to flicker: trembling forward, retreating back into shadow.

  Suddenly, Chiara was in front of him, rising up onto her toes to kiss him goodbye. He’d be able to remember that image of her precisely, months later. Wet-lashed violet eyes, a narrow cut bright on her cheek, torch glare wavering shadows across them both. Garish dark bruises that still couldn’t undo the persistent symmetry of her face. One last time, she put her head to his chest.

  How perfectly she fit against him.

  Then she turned and ducked beneath the canopy of the boat. In the back of the cabin, her face became a pale moon, floating bodiless in the gloom. He took a step forward, to the edge of the water. He didn’t know what to say—what could he say? It wasn’t supposed to end like this.

  A quick elbow in his ribs. Before anyone could stop her, Cecilia had clambered into the boat, sending it rocking heavily side to side. Thin-lipped and determined, she sat down next to Chiara, hugging a large sack in her lap. Gio heard several of the servants behind him gasp audibly, but no one protested. With a dip and a thrust, the oarsman aimed the vessel out into the canal, straining against the current. The water swung the narrow boat around and carried it off, a wake of ripples echoing out from the stern.

  Just like that, Gio watched her slip away from him, as though it were easy. The gondola lost itself in an ensemble of hulls out on the canal, steered into the dark vignette of his vision and then—

  She was gone.

  * * *

  Noise from the street ricocheted against the walls and shattered the quiet of his room. Corvino lay in bed, skin burning, spasms of shivers turning even his sweat frigid. His men set bowls of food outside his chamber door each day, but he couldn’t trust them—their eyes shifted—and the meals went largely untouched. He let the fever rage through him.