Chapter 7: The Shadow Under the Door

AMELIA

By evening I had unpacked my bag twice, because a girl who is told she can't leave needs something to do with her hands.

The little prepaid phone lay at the bottom of my winter boot, wrapped in a sock, and I kept looking at the boot as if it might ring. Outside my door a guard shifted his weight on the carpet, a soldier named Pino whom Rico had posted there at noon "for my safety," and every few minutes I heard the creak of his leather shoes and remembered that nobody posts a guard for the safety of a girl he trusts.

Three soft knocks sounded on the wood, spaced evenly, and I knew them at once.

"Come in, Mom."

Marina slipped inside and shut the door behind her. She carried a silver tray with a pot of orange blossom tea and two slices of dry toast, and she set it on my desk with the careful care of a woman handling something that might break.

"Mrs. Rosi says your breakfast tray came back untouched," she said. "And your lunch."

"Mrs. Rosi tells you a lot."

"She tells everyone a lot, that's her job." She poured a cup and held it out, and I took it because refusing would have started a conversation I wasn't ready for. "Vittorio told me about the gates. I'm sorry."

"Did you ask him to let me go?"

Her hands paused on the teapot. "I couldn't argue with 'everyone,' Amelia. He said it in front of the whole house, and a wife can't ask for an exception, even for her own daughter."

"That's what I thought."

"Drink your tea."

I drank it. It was hot and sweet, and it reminded me of the kitchen in our old apartment, where she used to make it for me on nights when my father came home loud, and I felt my throat start to close. I put the cup down.

"Mom, I looked at the phone you gave me."

She went still. "Did you?"

"There's one call in the log. Eight forty-two yesterday morning, eleven minutes long, to a number saved as L." I kept my voice flat. "Is that Aunt Lucinda?"

"Yes, of course it is." The words came quickly, too quickly, and she smoothed her skirt with both hands. "She runs the family calendar, darling, and she had the table plans for the gala. Eleven minutes is how long it takes to explain why you can't seat a Marchetti next to a Bellini."

"At eight forty-two in the morning."

"She's an early riser."

"On the phone you bought for me."

"It was in my purse, and the house line has too many ears." She tried a small laugh. "Lucinda asked me to keep that call off the house line, because of the gossip about the guest list. I used the phone I had."

"And her number is saved in it."

"I saved it for you." Marina sat on the edge of my bed and looked at the carpet. "In case you ever need her."

"Need her?" I stared at her. "Mom, she told me to enjoy my last night under this roof."

"Did she say that?" Marina's face tightened, and then her mouth made the polite shape again. "She's blunt, Amelia. She says what the rest of us only think."

"And what do you think?"

"I think you should drink your tea."

She had always done this, my mother. She'd taken a question and handed it back to me wrapped in kindness, so that I felt rude for asking it, and I sat down beside her and said nothing, because I'd learned long ago that silence was the one answer she couldn't turn around.

After a minute she put her hand over mine. Her fingers were cold, and one of them was picking at my sleeve, tugging it down toward my wrist.

"Mrs. Rosi says you helped Luca upstairs last night," she said.

"He was sick, so I took him to his room."

"And then you came back down."

"Yes."

"Good." She breathed out, and I felt the relief go through her like warm water. "That's good."

"Why is it good?"

"Because it's simple." She looked up, and her hazel eyes were wet and bright. "You're a good girl, you helped a sick man, you left, and that's the whole story. Isn't it?"

I held her gaze, and in that moment I understood that she wasn't asking. She was handing me a sentence, one she wanted me to carry in front of me for the rest of my life.

"That's what I told Rico," I said.

"You spoke to Rico?"

"He asked me where I'd been. I told him I looked for Sofia, and then I went to my room."

"What else did you tell him?"

"Nothing else."

"Good." She squeezed my hand until it hurt. "Say it the same way every time, darling. In this house, a story that changes is worse than a lie, because people start to wonder why."

"Mom." My voice cracked. "Is there something you want to ask me?"

"No."

"Mom..."

"No, Amelia." She shook her head quickly. "Whatever you aren't telling me, don't. I would rather not know, because if I know, I'll have to carry it, and I'm not strong enough to carry anything else."

It was the most honest thing she had ever said to me, and it hurt more than a slap. I looked down at our hands, hers soft and manicured and trembling, mine with the small scar on the wrist that she had never once asked about since the night the plate broke.

"I understand," I said.

"Do you?"

"I understand that you can't."

"I would if I could." She stood up and straightened the tray with absent fingers, setting the teapot an inch to the left, then an inch back. "I only want you safe, and in this house there's only one way to be safe, and it's to be small. Be so small that nobody thinks of you."

"I've been small for seven years."

"Be smaller."

"And when do I get to be big again?"

"When it's safe, darling." She said it to the tea tray, not to me. "When things settle."

"When will that be?"

"Soon." It was the same word she had used in the cloakroom, and it sounded no more certain now than it had then.

I laughed, a short, wet laugh. "Mom, you can't be serious."

"I'm always serious. That's my trouble." She bent and kissed my forehead, and I felt her breath tremble against my skin. "You'll call me on Sunday, as we said, from the little phone. Keep it charged, and keep it hidden."

"Why hidden?"

"Because a private phone is a private thing, and..."

She stopped, because the light under my door had changed.

The thin gold line along the bottom of the wood, the glow from the hall lamp, had broken in the middle. Two dark shapes lay in it, side by side, the way two shoes look when someone is standing still outside a door and holding his breath.

Marina saw it at the same moment I did. Her hand closed on my arm.

"Pino?" I called, as lightly as I could. "Is that you?"

Nobody answered.

"Pino's on the other side of the hall," Marina whispered. "He stands by the window, I passed him."

"Then who..."

Marina crossed the room in three quick steps and pulled the door open.

The corridor was empty. The lamp burned at the far end, and Pino was standing by his window, as she'd said, with his back to us, and his head turned in surprise. Nobody else was there, no maid, no footsteps, no shadow; only the long red runner on the floor, and in the thick pile just outside my door two hollows, pressed flat, still slowly springing back where someone had stood for a long time.

"Did you see anyone?" Marina asked him, in a high, thin voice.

"No, Signora." Pino frowned. "Not since you went in."

She shut the door and locked it, and then she turned and looked at me with a face I had never seen before, white to the lips, with her whole body held rigid as if she were bracing for a blow.

"Amelia, listen to me," she whispered. "Don't tell anyone about the phone. Not Luca, not Rico, not Vittorio, and not even me, if you think someone might be near enough to hear."

"Mom, who was that?"

"I don't know." She shook her head, and her eyes went again to the empty line of light beneath the door. "But whoever it was, they heard every word we said."