CHAPTER NINE
Camogli is the kind of town that postcards were invented for, a vertical stack of painted houses falling into the sea, yellow and rose and faded peach, with a pebble beach and a basilica and one road in, which is either comforting or terrifying depending on whether you’re hiding or hunting.
I’m hiding.
I drive the last hour with the windows down and the salt air coming in and the music box riding shotgun in its sweater, and I think about nothing.
It’s a skill. My mother had it too, the ability to drive through the worst day of your life admiring the light on the water.
It runs in the family, apparently, like everything else.
Rae’s flat is up a staircase that should be illegal, five flights of Ligurian marble worn into soup bowls by three hundred years of feet, and she’s standing at the top of it in paint-stained overalls holding a coffee.
She looks at me, and at the folder under my arm, and at my face, and she doesn’t say one word about the fact that I’ve arrived unannounced, out of nowhere, with my whole life in a folder.
“Okay,” she says, and takes the music box out of my arms, and stands aside to let me in. “Coffee first. Then you tell me who I have to kill.”
Rae has been my best friend since Milan, since the workshop above the bakery, where she lived in the apartment next door with a revolving door of terrible boyfriends and an espresso habit that funded the owner’s boat.
She’s a photographer. War zones, mostly, then weddings, which she says are the same job with better catering.
She is the only person I know who once made a refugee camp laugh and a duchess cry in the same afternoon.
I last about forty seconds.
The coffee gets poured. The folder gets opened.
And I tell her everything, from the nine tests to the ring on the marble table.
Somewhere around the osteria, somewhere around the freezer keys and the police in the hallway, I realize I’m telling her the part I’ve never told anyone except Troy, the whole cracked foundation, and my voice is doing things I can’t control.
Rae keeps refilling my cup and saying, “Keep going. All of it. I want all of it.”
I saved it for the dark, the screaming and the crying, just like I predicted, back in the bedroom with the file, when I thought both of those will come later, in Camogli, in the dark.
I’m punctual if nothing else. It comes at two in the morning, on Rae’s tiny terrace, with the sea doing its slow breathing below us, and it’s ugly and it’s loud and it lasts a long time, and Rae sits next to me with her arm around my shoulders.
“He signed it,” I keep saying, into her shoulder. “Whatever else. He signed it.”
“I know,” she says. “We’re going to find out why. And then we’re going to ruin everyone.”
It’s the best thing anyone’s said to me in months.
The practicalities take two days, because Rae is frighteningly good at disappearing a person, the way war photographers are good at things you never asked about.
The phone goes first. Off, SIM out, into a drawer, replaced by a thirty-euro brick from the tabaccheria, calls and texts and nothing else, a phone so dumb it’s a witness.
“No cards,” Rae says, counting out her own cash next to Lina’s. “No toll roads in your name. The villa knows your plate, so the Fiat needs to stop existing.”
The Fiat ends up in the long-term parking lot at Genoa airport, wiped, locked, keys posted to the rental desk in an envelope with no note, sitting in row H like a rumor that I flew somewhere.
Let the investigators work. Give them a trail to Genoa and watch them run it down, forty seed pearls at a time.
I have money, it turns out. Not Hurley money.
Boyd money. The workshop, when I sold my half of it, paid out enough to live carefully for a year, and it’s been sitting in an account in my maiden name for four years like a life I forgot to cancel.
I stand in a Genoa bank, Rae glaring at the clerk like a bodyguard, and take out cash in my own name, Aliza Boyd.
It feels like meeting an old friend who kept your stuff.
“Aliza Boyd,” Rae says, reading my face. “She’s good. I liked her.”
“She’s on sabbatical,” I say.
“She’s back,” says Rae.
“She’s hiding in Italy, broke, with a fictional psychiatric history,” I say.
“Same thing,” says Rae.
The lawyer is Rae’s find, and she’s perfect.
Avvocata Marcella Doria, family law, Genoa, an office above a print shop with a view of a wall, sixty years old, with a face like a judge and a laugh like a maniac.
Rae found her through the usual Trieste connection, and Rae vetts people the way airports vet luggage, so I don’t ask follow-ups.
She reads the whole file, all six pages, in silence, while Rae and I sit on her battered sofa like kids outside the principal’s office.
Then she reads the consent with Troy’s signature.
Then she looks up at me over her glasses, and she says the sentence that I have been waiting three weeks to hear from a single professional person.
“Signora. This is fraud. This is criminal fraud.”
I have to leave the room. That’s the truth.
I have to go stand in her little kitchen with the kettle and cry, because someone with a law degree and no reason to protect me looked at the whole machine and called it what it is, and I hadn’t known how much of me was still waiting to be told I was hysterical.
When I come back, Marcella has a legal pad covered in her own handwriting and the manner of a general mobilizing.
“Now. We do three things. First, we protect you. I file the separation this week, and with it a request that all medical decisions regarding you and the pregnancy are yours alone. Second, we build the counter-record. Your doctor in Milan—”
“Ferretti.”
“Dr. Ferretti’s notes, every visit, every scan, certified.
Real medicine, on paper, from a doctor who has actually met you.
That is the first thing a judge reads. Third.
” She taps the file. “We keep this safe and we say nothing. Whoever made this will make more. We want to be very quiet and very boring, signora, while they build their house of cards higher. And then, when it matters, we show a judge the signatures.” She smiles, and it’s alarming.
“I have a handwriting expert in Turin who dreams about signatures like these.”
“And my husband?”
Marcella’s face does something complex. “His signature is genuine, you said. That is a problem or it is a story. We find out which. In the meantime, expect pressure. Money, lawyers, maybe charm. Rich families reconcile loudly when it suits them.”
“I don’t want to reconcile.”
“Then you won’t,” she says simply. “You are pregnant, not incompetent. The law, for all its faults, knows the difference. Your husband’s family has confused the two. That is going to be expensive for them.”
I could kiss her. Instead I pay her, in cash, Aliza Boyd’s money, and we walk out blinking into the Genoa sun.
Dr. Ferretti sees me the next morning, in Milan, in the practice above the shoe shop, and I don’t even get through the door before she’s got me by the shoulders, reading my face like a chart.
“Someone has been stupid,” she says. Not a question.
“You could say that.”
She does a full check. Everything is fine.
The tiny tenant is the size of a lime, apparently, which is the first time anyone’s given me a fruit comparison and I take it badly, crying into the complimentary tissues again, while Dr. Ferretti pats my hand and says, “Hormones. It’s hormones.
It’s allowed to be hormones.” Then she prints me everything, every note, every scan, every blood result, certified copies, a whole folder of real medicine, and she writes a letter, sitting at her desk in front of me, in which she states that she has examined me and found me, and I quote, mentally and physically well, and competent in every respect.
“For the court, if the court needs it,” she says, signing with a flourish. “And Aliza.” She takes my hand. “Whatever is happening in that house. I have been a doctor for thirty years. You are the sanest patient I have. You’re the only one who brings me documented evidence.”
The report goes into Receipts.
Everything goes into Receipts.
We bake bread in the evenings, Rae and I, from the lesson Lina gave me the morning the world ended, and it’s terrible, dense enough to tile a roof, and we eat it anyway, all of it, because Lina’s commandment is the law now. You eat. For the baby. I eat.
The news about Troy comes through Lina, on the brick phone, in texts that read like war dispatches.
He came home at midnight. He stood in the hall and looked at the ring for a long time. Then he asked me where you were. Then he went to the airport himself.
He has men looking. Hotels, hospitals. He checked every clinic in Switzerland. He fired the gate man.
Wait, I text back. Marco? Marco let me out, Lina, that’s on me—
No, she texts. Marco refused to say who opened the gate. He took the money and went. He is loyal. They do not make them like Marco anymore.
Then Troy calls Rae.
He gets her number from somewhere, some old email, some wedding contact list, and he calls her own phone, and Rae takes it on the terrace with the sea behind her, and I listen to my best friend lie to my husband for eleven minutes with a fluency that would impress a conclave.
“Troy. Hi. No. No, I haven’t, not since the gala.
” A pause. Her face is doing nothing at all, which is how I know she’s at maximum effort.
“Of course I’m worried. Everyone’s worried.
What do the police say?” Another pause, longer.
“Well, Troy, maybe that’s the question to sit with.
Why would a sane woman run? What’s the house like, right now, for her to come back to? ”
She listens for a while after that, and her face changes, just slightly, and she looks at me, and she doesn’t repeat whatever he says next.
“Okay,” she says finally. “If I hear from her, I’ll tell her you’re looking.”
She ends the call and sits down next to me, and we look at the sea.
“What did he say?” I ask. “The part you didn’t repeat.”
Rae picks up her coffee and puts it down again. “He said, I don’t know how to be in the house without her. And then he said it again, like it was news to him.”
We sit there for a long time. The Ligurian light does its golden thing on the water, the thing that makes painters useless, and neither of us says the obvious thing, which is that four years of marriage couldn’t teach him that sentence, and one week of absence has.
Then, three days in: Estelle moved her things into the blue room. She says to help. She is running the house now. She had your suitcase unpacked by the new girl. Your clothes are in the guest closet.
I sit on Rae’s terrace with the phone in my hand and the sea going dark, and I picture it.
The cream suitcase, unpacked at last, my green gala dress hanging in a guest closet in my own house, Estelle Marsh nested in the blue room, helping.
Running the house. Occupying my life in my absence like water occupying a footprint.
And Troy, somewhere in the same house, letting her.
Rae reads the texts over my shoulder and says nothing for a long time. Then: “You want to know what I think?”
“No.”
“I think he’s going to burn it all down,” she says. “I’ve seen men in that look. I’ve photographed them. He’s in the hallway with the ring, Aliza. The question isn’t whether he burns it down. It’s whether there’s anything left of you that cares by the time he does.”
I don’t answer that.
I don’t have an answer.
What I have is a folder, a brick phone, a lawyer with a maniac laugh, a doctor’s letter saying I’m sane, a music box on a borrowed nightstand, and a lime-sized tenant who is, against all odds, still with me.
Estelle wanted me documented. She spent a whole season documenting me, brick by brick, adjective by adjective.
Fine. Let’s see how she likes being documented back.
I open the Receipts folder, and I start at the beginning, page one, the cream envelope, photographed sealed.