Plague in the Mirror

T
here’s a certain kind of silence when you wake in the deep of night, in a strange bed, knowing that someone has entered the room.

You don’t know how you know. Your eyes are closed, and whoever it is hasn’t made a sound.

But the silence is thicker than usual; it weighs more, in the way that a withholding friend is worse than one who’s just neglecting you.

With that weight, that knowing, on her chest, May opens her eyes to find a figure at the foot of the canopy bed.

At first, she can’t make out more than a luminous outline, but as her eyes adjust in the dark, she sees it’s a girl, looking as surprised as May feels.

The intruder’s hands hang at her sides, and the folds of an old-fashioned gown puddle on the Tuscan tile at her feet. May has the urge to clap her hands over her eyes the way you do when you’re a kid and think blindness and invisibility are the same thing.

You can’t see me.

Me.

Because as the other girl walks forward in the moonlight, it’s like looking in a mirror. The ghostly stranger might be her identical twin or a fainter version of May, who can’t look away or cry out or move.

The girl extends both arms and tilts her head. Her fingers open and close like anemones, and May helplessly watches her run a palm over the satin bedspread, fingertips disappearing into the fabric. Lifting the cloth of her gown to kneel, she works her way up the length of the bed with hands on either side of May’s rigid body, a mean, knowing smile blooming on her face. She sits down, weightless, right on May’s midsection.
“Ciao, bella.”

May tries to squirm free —“Get
off!
”— but there’s nothing to repel. The girl is both there and not there, and it’s paralyzing.

“So, you will speak to me in
inglese
?
Come mia madre
?” As if to answer her own question, she slides a short, savage-looking knife from the folds of her dress and holds it by May’s clenched jaw, the milky-pale blade never touching skin. “No? I would show you what Cristofana thinks of
no
”— the knife disappears again —“but I cannot.” Her voice dips as with a secret, an expansive gesture taking in what might be the room or the whole world. “I knew I would find you. But not where or when.”

May lets out her breath to object, but her voice is useless, gone.

“Oh, stop trembling,
sciocca.
I won’t harm you.” The ghost girl sighs theatrically. “Not today.” She rolls away, an acrobat springing to her feet.

May watches her — it — pass effortlessly through the closed door, dissolving into the wood. She curls toward the wall, feeling her limbs unlock, her breathing slow to normal. She waits for her voice, a sob or a gasp, an earsplitting scream, anything, but the middle-of-night silence wins out, and some sane part of May knows that’s best. She instead conjures her mother’s voice from childhood, that firm, low, loved voice, soothing S
hhh . . . it’s just a dream. T
he room is hushed, gentled, but only for a second, because this dream won’t behave like one; it won’t wear like dreams do.

Just breathe.

Fixing her gaze on the digital clock face, May watches an hour pass, and another. She tracks shadows on the ceiling, naming the shapes they make —
tree, wolf, teeth
— and every time she shuts her eyes, the scene loops through her brain again: a bleached, weightless figure crawling beastlike up the bed and over her; the transparent glow of the knife; but most remarkable of all, the face, her own exactly, and as alien as the moon.

So May keeps her eyes open.

S
tifling her yawns over continental breakfast, May comes to as Gwen folds her newspaper closed. Their summer rental in City Center East opens today, and May knows that Gwen will hustle them out of the temporary B&B to beat the heat and the lunch crowds.

“Dude,” May says, leaning too conspicuously toward Liam, “walk me to my room so I can pack.”

He moves to stand, no questions asked, but his mother halts him with a hand on his arm.

Gwen’s used to them, but it’s been almost a year since Liam and May have really hung out — that is, before he shuttled over on the Volainbus Monday to fetch her at the airport — and now May isn’t a part of anything bigger anymore. She’s just May, alone in Florence with friends of what-used-to-be the family, and her summer guardian is overcompensating. “You’re not packed yet?” Gwen asks.

May decides to just come out with it. “My room’s haunted.” Her voice is kidding — the morning light has calmed her, settled over the terror of night like a layer of snow — but she still feels it, the heat of fear. “I think.”

Li gives her that measured, bemused look May somehow forgot until this moment, the brotherly I’m-waiting-for-you-to-start-making-sense look. Li isn’t her brother. Technically, he isn’t family at all. Neither is Gwen, who went out of her way to help Mom and the teachers structure this as an independent study to sub in for May’s final exams. But May’s known these two all her life, and in a way, they’re better than family. Especially now.

“I guess I had a nightmare,” she admits, half believing it. “And I didn’t want to hang around in there and pack alone.”

Gwen’s smile is tight with concern. “It’s normal, you know, with stress. Bad dreams . . . insomnia . . .”

Oh, please. Don’t start.
May covers her ears, humming like an angry hive, and Gwen regards her watch with a shrug. “All right. I’m here if you need me. I’ll line up a cab. You two need to get cracking.”

There’s no trace in the room to suggest that the girl was there.

“Sleepwalking?” Li theorizes from the rumpled bed while May sits on her backpack to crush down its contents.

He looks like a deposed prince in jeans and Converse lying with crossed ankles under the antique canopy, at home as can be on a sea of silk covers. May hides her smile. She must have looked wrong in that bed all week, too, an imposter. The B&B villa is in the hills that circle the city, on the site of what used to be a vineyard, according to its brochure, and before that a medieval nunnery. Li and Gwen arrived exactly a week earlier than May did and hadn’t yet exerted themselves in her absence. They mostly enjoyed the villa’s blue, blue pool, the grassy hedges and banks of red flowers, or walked north in search of wine and olive-oil tastings in country farmhouse shops. The first thing Li did when May arrived was plunk down her bags poolside, and show off the pink tan line under his collar.

“Maybe you woke up,” he adds now, “or half did, and saw yourself in the mirror.” They both look over at the tarnished glass above the dresser, its dark frame carved with sinuous lilies. Their reflections stare back, expectant. “That would’ve scared the crap out of me.”

May struggles with the zipper on her pack and nods; as a kid, she was known to sleepwalk. “Yeah. That makes sense.” She feels stupid, pitiful — the way he’s looking at her — because if it was a dream she can’t seem to wake up from it.

On the other hand, May thinks, with a glance at her childhood best friend, she doesn’t feel invisible anymore, the way she did watching her mother deflate at the airport checkpoint when she thought May was out of range . . . or at the gate, locked in a half lotus on the hard airport chair, flip-flops askew on the carpet, iPod cranked to vibrate, trying not to meet anyone’s eyes because her own were wet. No matter how loud May had thumbed the volume, she still felt mute and vanished, locked in a struggle not to let her mother’s tired face, the obvious relief to be sending May away, be her last memory of her family. That invisible feeling was hard to shake even once she touched down in big, busy Florence. But Gwen’s kept them so occupied this week with walking tours that May’s had little time to feel sorry for herself, and they haven’t seen City Center yet, so today will be even busier.

On her knees, May works the zipper closed and rests her head on the overstuffed pack, yawning. She swivels and rolls flat on the floor, the intricate mosaic tiles cooling her back.

“You didn’t sleep,” Li acknowledges, “did you?”

May covers her eyes with a forearm. “Guilty.”

He heaves himself off the bed and lifts her backpack, gently prodding her with his foot. As he slings the pack onto his shoulder, May props herself up on an elbow. In the silence, she’s tempted to tell Li what really happened last night, or what she thinks happened, because unlike her parents or Gwen, he would at least
entertain
that something weird occurred (and May still can’t convince herself it didn’t). He’d joke it to death, sure, and rob it of every hint of strangeness and mystery; he’d make her feel silly, but he’d make her feel safe.