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Anna arrived in Florence early Thursday morning and stayed alone in a shoebox Airbnb apartment near Piazza Santa Croce.
Ahh!!
In the afternoon and into the evening, she sat on a precariously thin half-moon balcony with her sketch pad stretched across her bare legs, trying to capture the soul of the skyline, until the wine she’d been drinking blurred the lines, and she set it all aside and went out to simply stroll. La passeggiata, they called it.
Mom and Dad’s flight from Ohio, via a changeover in Gatwick, landed at 7:28 A.M. Central European Summer Time—
Lol
She hit the galleries on Friday. L’Accademia. The Uffizi. Molto bene. Overwhelming in the best way.
“You sure you want to go to Villa Taccola?” he said as he cut off another car on a sharp right turn out of town. “I could take you … anywhere else.” “Should I be worried?”
“What’s fun to do around here?” “Everything is fun if you are fun,”
There was something careful about the energy here. Not calm, exactly. More … preserved in amber.
She could turn back, issue one more lie, say her flight got canceled, hang out in Florence, head elsewhere. Anywhere.
Justin was nice enough and had been borderline attractive nine years ago at the wedding, but he’d dissolved into a dad bod before they’d even had kids, and whatever charisma he’d used to win Nicole over was either gone now or reserved for the nine-to-five of his sales exec job. Some people were into that middle-of-the-road Ohio guy thing, no judgment, but not Anna, and she’d told her sister as much, which had not gone over as well as she’d hoped it might.
“Seriously, Anna, what specifically are your dreams? Your aspirations?” To be left the fuck alone?
“I’ve got this coworker nobody can stand,” Justin said. “Every time we go out for drinks and apps, he gets the bruschetta, but he says it ‘broo-sketta.’ Corrects the damn waitress, drives me insane.”
As he should 😆
even the walls. Definitely not the people.
Less amusingly, shadows had gathered over it, creating the effect of something dangling. Almost a figure. Hanging. But only if you squinted, which Anna decided to stop doing.
Just before she drifted off, in the in-between between consciousness and oblivion, she realized what had bothered her about her nieces whispering in the hall. They’d been speaking Italian.
Two days in Florence,
It seemed to Anna that the concept of “vacation” was antithetical to the concept of “family.” Vacation required vacancy. The abandonment of all scraps of everyday life.
“Kitty? You in there?” She felt foolish saying it. What did she expect? A meow for yes? “Gatto? Sei qui?” Because Italian cats speak Italian. She was losing her mind.
“I don’t speak Italian, not really. I don’t speak French either. I’m not fluent.”
“She speaks German too and she won an award for Spanish in high school.” “She’s the brains of the family,”
“I went to Ohio State,” Nicole piped up between sips of prosecco. “My tuition was less than an eighth of what Harvard would have cost.” “You turned down Harvard?” Justin deadpanned. “You never told me that.” Nicole glared at him.
There he leaned against the wall, hovering close enough to kiss her, dipped his chin, and whispered warm into her ear, “The tower. Do not open it.”
“La chiave?” and that she understood. The key. “My uncle will have given it to someone,” he said, intense. “Did you take it?” She thought she understood what he meant by that. Her, personally. She shook her head. “I wasn’t there when they arrived.” He nodded. “Be careful of your family. Do not open that door.”
Anna was sure now that what he’d said was “should not tell you anything.” Should not warn her. This was crazy. Maybe he was teasing her, flirting in his odd, rural Italian way.
She called after him, “Are there ghosts?” She wasn’t sure she’d gotten the word right. Spiriti could mean souls. Was it fantomi? Fantasmi? He paused, turned back. “Molti.”
Fight, flight, or freeze. Now she knew where she stood. Fucking fight.
Christopher was still talking. “The caretaker gave it to me. Handed it right over. Why would he do that if he didn’t assume I was going to use it? It’s not logical.” “He handed it to you.” Anna pulled up the bits of the conversation she’d been able to interpret from the waiter tonight. He’d wanted to know which of them had taken the key. Watch the others.
“Human shape. Dark. And then gone. But not gone, just not.” He swallowed. “Visible.” Anna clenched her hands tight, bracing against panic. “Okay.” “I thought I was dreaming, but then I felt it sit on the bed and it, it like, it dipped?” He sounded on the verge of tears. “And I reached out to feel it and it moved over me. Onto me. And I couldn’t breathe, it was like it was putting all its weight on me and it was not good, Anna, it was like a smothering … cloud? I don’t know. I don’t fucking know.”
It was modest, as Italian churches went, but still much richer in ornamentation and detail than the depressingly austere churches she was once forced to attend in Ohio. It looked empty, abandoned, but there was a faint telltale scent of incense in the
The kids’ cereal bowls were still on the kitchen table, abandoned in the morning rush. Anna set her bag on the counter, then turned to the table and flinched, fighting down a surge of bile. The milk was past curdled, well into rancid, a skim of green mold floating on the top. Maggots swam among the Rice Krispies.
“Can we go play with the neighbors?” Waverly called. “Yeah, sure, have a blast,” Justin said, then turned to Anna, conspiratorial. “There are no neighbors, right? I’ve got weird kids.”
The girls were in bed by eight, after which Anna faced a choice of evening entertainment: 1) sitting with Nicole and Mom while they gossiped about middle-aged friends in Ohio, the citronella candle Nicole bought at the market doing little to nothing to stave off the mosquitoes; 2) joining Benny and Christopher, thus risking an argument over whether they would share Christopher’s personal stash of wine with her; or 3) tapping on Justin’s door and asking whether she could also watch whatever action movie he was streaming on his laptop.
“I’m not doing Siena. Fuck Siena.”
The Uffizi Gallery was their first destination.
“I think Keira would agree we don’t have much in common these days. How many kids does she have?”
