CHAPTER TWO
The Woman Who Almost Had My Life
I spent the next six days making the east wing into somewhere a frightened person could sleep.
Ines had aired it out, but airing it was not the same as making it welcoming, and I knew the difference because I had once been a frightened person arriving in this house with two suitcases and no idea where the bathroom was.
The rooms were beautiful and cold. I changed the heavy green drapes in the larger bedroom for lighter linen ones so the morning sun would come in.
I had the second room, the smaller one with the window seat, made up for a child, and I went to three stores before I found bedding that wasn’t pink, because I had no idea whether an eight-year-old named Mia liked pink, and I didn’t want her first impression of us to be a guess.
I settled on pale yellow with small white stars.
On Monday afternoon, walking back from the pharmacy on Purchase Street, I passed a toy shop and went in on impulse and came out with a stuffed rabbit.
It was gray, with long soft ears and a slightly lopsided expression, as though it had been told a joke and wasn’t sure it was funny.
I put it on the pillow in the room with the window seat.
I stocked the bathroom with good soap and a new toothbrush in case they’d forgotten one, which people fleeing things always did.
I put a small vase of white ranunculus on each nightstand.
I left a note on the desk with the Wi-Fi password, Ines’s name, my cell number, and the words: Anything you need, at any hour. I meant it.
Dante came up on Monday night to look. He stood in the doorway of the little room with the stars on the bedding and the rabbit on the pillow and didn’t say anything for a long moment.
“You did all this,” he said.
“Someone had to.”
“I’d have had Ines do it.”
“Ines would have done the drapes. She wouldn’t have done the rabbit.”
He looked at the rabbit, and then at me, and he put his arm around my waist and kissed my temple. “You’re a good woman,” he said, and I felt it all the way down, the pleasure of being seen doing something kind, because he didn’t often say things like that out loud.
* * *
They arrived on Tuesday afternoon in an unmarked car that Grant drove himself.
Alessandra got out first, in a camel coat and dark glasses, and turned back immediately to lift her daughter down from the car seat.
Mia was small for eight, dark-haired and solemn, and the moment her feet were on the gravel she took hold of the back of her mother’s coat with one fist and did not let go.
Dante met them at the car. I watched from the front steps as he crouched to Mia’s level and said something that made her look up at him with the particular startled interest of a child hearing her name said kindly by a stranger.
Then he straightened and hugged Alessandra, briefly, one arm, and said something close to her ear, and she nodded several times fast and pressed the heel of her hand under her glasses.
I came down the steps.
“Alessandra. I’m so sorry for your loss.”
She took off the glasses. She had the polished beauty of a woman raised with money and grief in roughly equal measure, with sharp cheekbones and a composure that looked practiced, but her eyes were raw and she had a small cut on her knuckle that she hadn’t bothered to cover.
“Vivienne.” She took my hand and held it longer than a handshake required. “Thank you. I know this is... I know you didn’t ask for this. I’m very aware that I’m moving into your house.”
“You’re very welcome in it.”
“You’re kind.” She looked at me for a moment as though checking whether I meant it. “I’ll try to stay out of your way.”
“Please don’t. It’s a big house. It gets lonely.”
Something eased in her face at that. Mia was peering at me around the edge of her mother’s coat.
“Hi, Mia,” I said, and crouched down the way I’d seen Dante do. “I’m Vivienne. I hope you like yellow. I had to guess.”
Mia considered this seriously. “I like green better.”
“Green. I’ll remember that for next time.”
She nodded, satisfied, and disappeared back behind the coat.
I showed them up to the east wing myself. Alessandra walked slowly through the larger bedroom, touching the linen drapes, the ranunculus, the note on the desk. She picked the note up and read it and put it down again very carefully.
Mia went straight into the little room and stopped in the middle of the floor. Then she saw the rabbit.
She walked over to the bed and looked at it for a long moment without touching it, as though it might belong to someone else. Then she looked back at me in the doorway.
“Is this for me?”
“It’s for whoever sleeps in that bed. I think that’s you.”
She picked it up and held it against her face with both arms, and her mother made a sound in the hallway behind me, a small broken sound, and turned away.
* * *
The next morning I found Mia alone in the garden.
She was sitting on the low stone wall by the herb beds in a coat that was too big for her, with the rabbit tucked inside it so only its ears showed, watching Mr. Hinge on the fence. Rosa was twenty feet away pretending to look at the roses.
“That bird’s very loud,” Mia said, when I sat down beside her.
“His name’s Mr. Hinge.”
She looked at me with suspicion. “That’s not a real name.”
“Dante named him. He says he sounds like a gate that needs oil.”
She listened to the bird for a moment with great seriousness. “He does,” she admitted.
We sat there. I didn’t say anything. I’d learned a long time ago, with my own quiet family, that children talked when you stopped asking them to.
“Is Dante your husband?”
“Yes.”
“My dad died,” she said, in the flat factual way of a child who has said it to a lot of adults and watched their faces. “In February. He was in the hospital and then he died.”
“I know. I’m very sorry, Mia.”
“Mom cries in the shower. She thinks I can’t hear.” She pulled one of the rabbit’s ears through the top of her coat and turned it over in her fingers. “Did you have a dad?”
“I still have one. He lives in New Jersey.”
“Is he nice?”
I thought about my father, who had signed the papers for my marriage at a restaurant on Mulberry Street without asking me what I thought, and who called me on my birthday and at Christmas and to ask for favors. “He’s complicated,” I said.
She nodded as though that made perfect sense. “My dad was complicated. Mom says.” She tucked the ear back in. “Can I stay in the yellow room even though I like green?”
“You can stay wherever you want. And if you want, we can paint the walls green.”
Her eyes went wide. “Really? Is that allowed?”
“It’s my house,” I said. “I’m allowed to say yes.”
It was a small thing to say, and I said it easily, as simple fact. Mia beamed at me and ran to tell Rosa, and I sat on the wall a while longer listening to Mr. Hinge and feeling, for a moment, entirely sure of it.
* * *
Elena arrived an hour later. I heard her before I saw her, her heels on the marble in the foyer and her voice calling up the stairs, and Alessandra, who was sitting with me in the east wing sitting room over a pot of tea, stood up so quickly she nearly knocked over her cup.
“Alessandra. Tesoro.” Elena swept into the room without knocking and took the younger woman’s face in both hands and turned it toward the light, examining it the way a curator examines a painting just back from restoration.
“Look at you. You have your mother’s cheekbones now.
God rest her. She’d be so angry with that man for leaving you like this. ”
“Elena. Thank you for having us.”
“You don’t thank family.” Elena kissed both of Alessandra’s cheeks. “You never thank family. You come home.”
She said the word family with a small, particular weight. I was standing three feet away holding the teapot. She had not yet looked at me.
I had been a Moretti for seven years. Elena had never once held my face in both hands.
On my wedding day, she’d kissed the air near my cheek and told me my dress was very brave.
At Christmas she gave me cashmere in colors I didn’t wear and gift cards to stores I didn’t shop in.
She had never been openly rude to me, not once in seven years.
She’d simply never forgotten, and had never let me forget, that I had been brought into her family as part of a treaty.
I’d learned it at my very first Sunday dinner, three weeks after the wedding.
I hadn’t known where to sit, and nobody had told me, so I’d taken the empty chair beside Luca, who was twenty-three and just back from college and the only person at the table who smiled at me.
Elena had come in from the kitchen, looked at me, and said pleasantly, “Oh, not there, dear. That’s for family.
Come sit down here,” and moved me three seats down, beside Dante’s grandfather, near the kitchen door.
I’d spent the meal talking to the old man about painting, because it turned out he’d once wanted to be a painter, and he’d enjoyed it so much he’d asked Elena afterward why nobody else at the table ever talked to him like that.
Luca had told me that one Christmas, laughing. Elena had never moved me back.
“Elena,” I said. “Would you like tea?”
She turned then, as though noticing me for the first time. “Vivienne. How lovely. Yes, thank you.” She sat down in the chair I’d been sitting in. “Have you put them in the yellow rooms? I always thought the green ones had better light.”
“Mia likes green,” Alessandra said, glancing at me. “Vivienne was just saying she’d remember for next time.”
“Well, she’s very thoughtful,” Elena said, in the tone she used for waiters who got an order right.
* * *
Dinner that night was crowded. Paolo came, and Luca, and Dante’s cousin Nico, who never missed a family occasion that might produce gossip.
Alessandra told the story of the last six weeks because everyone asked her to, and she told it well, composed, faltering only when she got to the part about the man outside Mia’s school.
The whole table leaned toward her. I found myself leaning with them, moved, and when her voice caught, I reached over and put my hand on her wrist.
“You’re safe here,” I said quietly.
She turned her hand over and squeezed mine. “I’m starting to believe that.”
Mia sat between me and Paolo at dinner, because she’d refused to sit anywhere else.
Paolo, who had raised two sons and had no idea what to say to small girls, spent the first course regarding her with alarm.
Halfway through the pasta she asked him whether he was the boss of everybody, and the whole table went quiet.
“No,” Paolo said gravely. “She is,” and he pointed his fork down the table at Elena.
Mia looked at Elena, and then back at Paolo. “Is she nice?”
Luca choked on his wine. Paolo looked at me, and I looked at my plate, and he said very solemnly, “She is very nice to people she likes,” and Mia nodded, satisfied, and went back to her pasta, and under the table Paolo nudged my foot with his, once, the way his son did.
Later, on the terrace with cocktails, Nico sidled up beside me with his drink.
“You know they were supposed to get married,” he said, the way another man might mention it was supposed to rain.
“I’ve heard the story, Nico.”
“Everybody assumed. Since they were kids. My mother used to say she’d save the lace from her own wedding dress for Alessandra’s veil.” He sipped his drink. “And then she married Marcus and moved to Boston, and Dante married...” He had the grace, for once, to stop.
“Me,” I said.
“Well. Yeah. Ancient history, obviously.”
“Obviously,” I said, and went to find Luca, who at least had never made me feel like a footnote.
* * *
It was nearly midnight when I went down to the kitchen for a glass of water and found Alessandra sitting at the island in the dark with a mug of tea she wasn’t drinking.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t want to wake Mia.”
“Don’t apologize.” I turned on the small lamp over the stove, the one that made the kitchen feel like a smaller room, and sat down across from her. “I didn’t sleep for about a month when I first came here.”
“Really?”
“It’s a very big house when you don’t know where anything is. I used to lie awake listening to it creak and think somebody was coming up the stairs.”
She smiled a little. “I used to play hide and seek in this house. I know where everything is. That’s almost worse. Everything’s where it was, and nothing is.” She turned her mug. “Can I ask you something? You don’t have to answer.”
“Go ahead.”
“Is this strange for you? Having me here. With everything Elena and the others... I know what people say. About Dante and me. When we were young.”
I could have told her it was fine. I nearly did.
“A little,” I said instead. “I think it would be strange for anyone.”
“It’s strange for me too.” She met my eyes.
“I want you to know I’ve never... There was never anything.
Not really. We were children. I loved him the way you love someone you learned to swim with.
I married Marcus because I loved Marcus, God help me.
” Her mouth twisted. “Look how well that turned out.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I.” She was quiet a moment. “Thank you for the rabbit. She’s sleeping with it. She hasn’t slept through a night in six weeks, and she’s asleep right now with that rabbit’s ear in her mouth.”
“I’m glad.”
“You didn’t have to do any of that. You could have let the housekeeper make the beds and been polite to me at dinner and nobody would have blamed you.” She looked at me with a directness I hadn’t expected. “You didn’t do that. I noticed.”
We sat in the small circle of lamplight for another half hour, talking about nothing in particular: Boston, and what Mia liked to eat, and the terrible coffee at the hospital where Marcus had spent his last two days.
When I finally went back upstairs, I found I liked her.
I hadn’t expected to. I liked her very much.
Dante was asleep when I got into bed. I lay beside him in the dark, listening to the house creak around us, and thought about Nico’s mother saving the lace from her wedding dress.
Then I made myself stop thinking about it.
She’s grieving, I told myself. She has an eight-year-old who sleeps with a rabbit’s ear in her mouth.
You liked her. Remember that you liked her.
* * *