CHAPTER TWELVE
The flowers start on the Monday of the second week.
They’re not a bouquet. Bouquets are for amateurs.
This is an arrangement the size of a fire hydrant, white peonies and garden roses, delivered to Rae’s door by a man in a van who has clearly driven up from Sanremo, the flower capital, because nothing in Camogli produces peonies like that.
There is no card. There doesn’t need to be.
Cards are for people who need to be identified.
Rae and I stand in the doorway looking at it.
“What do we do with it?” she says.
We carry it, between us, puffing, down five flights of illegal staircase, across the piazza, and into the basilica, where the old women arranging the altar flowers receive it like a sign from God, which, in a sense, it is.
By evening, the whole town thinks the foreigner’s flowers went straight to the Madonna, and that the town finds this either very romantic or completely unhinged, jury’s out.
The flowers keep coming. Every Monday. White peonies, garden roses, then, as the weeks turn, ranunculus, then sweet peas.
Someone is doing research, someone has worked out what’s in season on this coast, and every Monday we carry them to the basilica, until the altar starts to look like a Chelsea Flower Show exhibit and the priest begins, hopefully, to thank the Madonna’s mysterious benefactor in the Thursday mass that Troy stands at the back of.
Then comes the gift.
It’s a box, couriered, addressed to me, no note.
Inside, in a nest of tissue paper, is a Victorian mourning brooch, jet and pearl, damaged, the clasp broken, one stone missing.
Mid-nineteenth century, English, the kind of piece I’d have killed for in the old life, in the workshop above the bakery.
And tucked under it, in its own velvet slot, a complete set of restoration tools.
German steel. The good ones. The ones I’d have had to sell the baby to afford.
Rae whistles. “He’s found the gap in the armor.”
“He has not,” I say, and I send it back, whole, untouched, via Marcella, with a formal note from her office saying my client does not accept gifts.
But I sit with that box for a full hour before I seal it, my hands aching with wanting, because it isn’t the tools, it isn’t even the brooch. It’s that he sent me a broken thing to mend.
It’s that somewhere in the wreckage, Troy Hurley remembered who I was before Villa Fortuna, remembered that I was a woman who mended things, and sent me work.
Four years of dinner parties where I said my choice, Troy never asked me to give it up, and it turns out the one who finally understood what I gave up is the man I gave it up for.
I send it back anyway. That’s the point of a siege. You don’t eat what the enemy throws over the walls, even when it’s exactly what you were starving for.
“You’re going to regret the tools,” Rae says.
“I’m going to regret everything,” I say.
“He sent a level,” Rae says, reading the manifest like a racing form. “A man who nearly had you committed sent you a spirit level. In what universe—”
“The universe where he listened when I said I wanted to hang the watercolors myself,” I say.
“Well,” Rae says. “That’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard, and I hate it.”
The crib arrives two days later, which tells me he’s stopped thinking.
It’s a beautiful crib. Walnut, handmade, from some workshop in the Dolomites where men with beards commune with wood, and it arrives assembled, which is somehow the worst part, three delivery men standing in the lane with a fully built crib at eight in the morning while half of Camogli watches from its shutters.
There is no note. There doesn’t need to be.
The note is the crib itself, and the crib says: I am thinking about the future, and the crib has not asked me whether he’s allowed in it.
We send it back. By lunch the story has grown into something operatic.
By dinner, Signora Bianchi informs Rae that the parish has a needy family with twins coming, and that if the foreigner wants to buy cribs, the parish has a list. I relay that through Marcella, word for word, because I am petty and, hey, it’s free.
The crib does not come back to us. It goes to the twins. I learn this from the basilica flowers women, who know everything, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t cost me something, the idea of his beautiful wrong crib in the right house.
The package that matters arrives on a Thursday, through Marcella, and it’s not a gift.
Marcella calls me in herself, which she doesn’t do. When I get there she’s got three folders on her desk and an expression I haven’t seen on her before.
“In twenty-six years,” she says, “I have watched many guilty men try to buy their way out. Money. Apartments. Once, memorably, a horse.” She taps the folders. “This is not that. Sit down.”
The first folder is my mother.
Certified copies of her real records, her actual records, retrieved from the practice that treated her for twenty years, obtained properly, with my written consent, which Marcella took from me last week without telling me why, the old fox.
I read them on the worn sofa with the print shop humming below, and I have to stop twice, because the woman in these pages is not the woman in the file. The file said committed on multiple occasions and died in care.
The truth is two hospital stays, voluntary, weeks at a time, and twenty years of outpatient care, and a psychiatrist’s notes about a patient of considerable intelligence and determination who never once stopped fighting to stay present for her daughter.
She died at home. An aneurysm. Lucid, at the end, and she said my name, which I already knew, but now it’s in a doctor’s handwriting too, witnessed, documented.
At the back of the folder there’s a letter.
The psychiatrist, retired now, in a village outside Oxford, wrote it herself.
She says she remembers my mother. She says, in twenty years of practice, few patients showed such courage.
She says she would be happy to state, to any court, that Aliza Boyd’s mother was a woman who managed a serious illness with extraordinary dignity, and that any document suggesting otherwise is a defamation of the dead.
I cry on Marcella’s sofa for a long time. She pretends to reorganize her desk. This is why she called me in. She knew.
“He didn’t just destroy the lie,” I say finally.
“No,” Marcella says. “He found the truth and had it witnessed. One removes the weapon. The other—” she shrugs “—is for you.”
The second folder is the file. My file. Or rather, the death certificate of it.
Klinik Lindenhof, through its own lawyers, has formally retracted the entire document, declared it fabricated, and certified its destruction, notarized, filed with the Swiss medical authorities, alongside a complaint against Dr. Amler that has cost him his license to practice while it’s investigated.
The complaint is signed by the clinic’s director and supported by a witness statement. From Troy. His statement runs eleven pages, Marcella says, and it’s all there, the call, the twenty minutes, what he told them about my mother, all of it, on the record, under oath, no varnish.
“He’s confessed to everything,” Marcella says. “Against his own interest. His lawyers fought him. He did it anyway.”
The third folder is the one I read standing up, because my legs won’t hold me for it.
It’s an instrument, notarized, irrevocable, drawn by Troy’s lawyers and countersigned by Marcella’s opposite numbers in Milan, and in plain legal language it does a thing I didn’t know could be done.
Troy Hurley surrenders, permanently, any right to initiate, support, or consent to any medical or psychiatric evaluation, assessment, or commitment of me, ever.
He waives any claim to custody or guardianship advantage based on my health, my history, or my mother’s history, forever, for any child we have.
He binds himself and his estate to penalties if any member of his family attempts it, and he has had the same instrument served on Genevieve, in Geneva, by a process server, which Marcella says, with grim delight, must have been quite the breakfast.
He has taken the weapon apart, bolt by bolt, and had the pieces melted down in front of witnesses.
“He gives up every lever,” Marcella says.
“Legally, from today, you are untouchable. He can never do to you what was done. Nor can his mother. Nor can anyone, using him.” She looks at me over her glasses.
“In twenty-six years, signora, I have never seen a man sign away this much rope. I don’t know what it means.
I’m a lawyer, not a priest. But it’s not a horse. ”
I take the folders home in a canvas bag, heavy as bricks, and it’s not until the kitchen table, Rae making pasta and pointedly not asking, that I see the dates.
“Rae.”
She comes and looks over my shoulder. The instrument, the surrender, the whole rope-cutting, is notarized three weeks ago. The retraction request to the clinic, four weeks. The records request for my mother, five.
“He did all this before the flowers,” I say.
“Before the flowers,” Rae confirms.
“He led with the surrender. The peonies were the afterthought.”
We both look at the folders. The grand gestures, the ones the basilica is still wearing, came second. The real thing came first, in silence, through lawyers, no audience, no guarantee I’d ever see it. He didn’t open with a bouquet. He opened with the rope.
Any man can buy flowers. Flowers are the greeting card of guilt. This man walked into a notary’s office and sawed through his own leverage, on paper, with witnesses.
“Well,” Rae says, and goes back to the pasta. “That’s either love or a very sophisticated siege engine.”
“I’m a photographer,” she says. “I wait for the light.”
I read my mother’s psychiatrist’s letter one more time that night, on the terrace, with the sea going dark and the tenant doing whatever tenants do at seventeen weeks, and I think about Troy reading those records, reading twenty years of a brave woman he’d never met, understanding what the file had done to her, what his twenty-minute phone call had let them say about her.
He gave me back my mother. That’s the thing he couldn’t have known to do, the thing no florist supplies, the thing you can only do if you’ve finally understood where the wound actually lives.
I write in the notebook. Received, I write. All three folders. The file is dead. My mother is not the woman they wrote. He signed away the rope.
Then, after a long time, because honesty is the whole point of the notebook, I write: I wanted to go downstairs. I didn’t.
Across the lane, the light above the alimentari is on, and I wonder if he’s sitting at the little table waiting for a sign that isn’t coming, and I nearly, nearly text him, one word, thanks, from the brick phone, and I don’t, because thanks is a door and I’m not ready to open doors.
But I do one thing. I get the letter from the psychiatrist, and I put it in the folder with Dr. Ferretti’s letter, the one that says I’m sane, and I put both of them in the drawer with the music box. The drawer where the important papers live. Every woman has one.
The cramp wakes me at two in the morning.
Small. A stitch, low on the left side, the kind of thing the pamphlet covers in a breezy paragraph, ligaments stretching, perfectly normal, and I lie in the dark with my hand on the curve and breathe the way Dr. Ferretti taught me, in through the nose, out like fogging a window, and it passes.
It passes. It’s nothing. The pamphlet is breezy about it and I am determined to be breezy too, because I am the woman from the pamphlet, the sane one, the documented one, and documented women do not panic at two in the morning over a stretching ligament.
I go back to sleep.
I should know better by now. I should have learned, from a whole season of it, that the things you file under nothing are the things that come for you at two in the morning.
But that’s Thursday’s story. Tonight, the stitch passes, and the sea breathes, and across the lane a man who signed away every weapon he ever owned is asleep in a rented room, and I dream about my mother.
In the dream, she’s doing the crossword.
In pen.