in one moment, narrowing in the next, her free hand rising up and then dropping back to her knee each time she turns a page. With every gesture, she is a new painting. In a few minutes, we’re in the suburbs of Florence. We’re in the hills by the time she pauses for a breath and stretches her arm comfortably across the seat behind her friend, glancing at me wisely out of the corner of her eye as if she knows I am searching for a crack or a defect. Finding none, I close my eyes, glad to know these girls exist.
The sun is not quite up and the hills are swallowing us now, one side green and the other black like a shadow puppet theater. We are going south. Nothing sounds better and it feels good to know, as the train stops and starts at each city along the way and the sun emerges hazy behind the clouds, that I’m going somewhere new on this gray day. With each curve, we burrow deeper, the surroundings growing more remote, until the homes disappear and there is only land for long stretches broken by blocked letters on train platforms. MONTELUPO. EMPOLI. CASTELFIORENTINO. How many of these first impressions will come undone?
Across the way the listening girl slides out from under her friend’s arm and extracts from her bag an enormous cucumber and a pocketknife. She passes it to the first girl, who flips open the blade and begins to peel away the skin in strips without looking at it, still reading from the book somehow, no energy lost or wasted, and again she is a painting. She knows where she is going just as she knows how to peel that fruit, tracing easily the skin and losing none of the meat. Something in the gesture reminds me of my own history. Somewhere I had the confidence of that girl.
In Boston, I would look over the rooftops, leaning out my window with my stomach resting against the radiator. I knew that landscape, its edges and extensions and how they all connected. Knew the pinpoints within it—the people and places of my past and my present, the constellation of my existence. I held that periphery always in my mind. I did not realize then, but now I know how much I held. I did not think then, but now I know that every time I spoke the name of a street, a neighborhood, a friend, I was saying, too, This is mine, this is mine, this is mine. Now I am a single point and the distance of my gaze: that field to the left, that edge of trees to the right, these girls before me.
The listener reaches back into her bag and finds a little package of dried soup mix and a tin of crackers. The girl who is a painting finally abandons the novel and slices the cucumber thin onto a napkin on the seat between them. Then I watch them both, concentrated and silent, place the cucumber on the crackers and sprinkle the secret mix on top. It is a meal they have stolen from their mothers. Their task complete, they glance up at me and I turn back to the window, embarrassed. I am known somewhere, I want to shout. Late June. It is impossible that it was less than three months ago. I stood at my sister’s window, looking out. The world below was a toy set: the tops of trees, bodies stretched out on a square of green, a playground, and, beyond it all, half hidden, the Charles River. It was manageable, reasonable, ordered. I wished I were a child looking at those pockets of life. I wished I were a child reveling in spring, anticipating the summer, the days growing longer. I didn’t know what to attach my unhappiness to—loss, work, stress. Julian was the easy one. Leave me alone, I’d said. Until he did.
Kate’s apartment was a clean slate, untouched by wars and recession. You could stand in her living room—with its white couch, white walls, nothing to compete with the view over that toy world—and believe that none of it had happened. But it had happened. It was real. And what had happened to me was real, too.
“You can see the river in the winter,” my sister said, coming to stand beside me.
“I lost my job.”
“I know,” she said quietly.
“I embarrassed them in front of the board. That’s the only reason. They wouldn’t have cared otherwise.” There’s more, but Kate didn’t need to know about the rest. She wouldn’t understand.
“It doesn’t matter now. You need to take care of yourself,” she said. She was a mender, the mender since our parents split, our father disappearing into a new family, our mother disappearing into work, unshaken and unshakable. She was not a mender, my mother. She was a pull yourself together. Kate was both. A survivor and a mender.
“You can stay here. Give up your apartment.”
“I’m subletting.” I wished I’d beat her to it. “I have a plan.”
“What plan?”
“I’m going to leave Boston. Get away for a while.”
“For god’s sakes, Hannah. I’m sorry, but this is serious. You need help, not a vacation.” She said nothing for a moment, then softly, “When did this start?”
I stopped breathing. She was thinking, I knew, of my near tears over dinner, when I’d admitted to her what she’d already figured out. I was a child, a child.
“It wasn’t Julian, was it? He seemed so nice. I still don’t understand why—”
“Stop trying to blame something.” Julian was nice, had been nice for months, and then concerned, and then suspicious, like Kate. And now he was gone and the ache remained. It had been there long before him, and it always returned, like an old injury before rain.
“I’m alone and I’m fine,” I said, turning to face her, turning on her. “What else do you want?”
“I just want you to be—to be yourself.” Kate said this in the same voice she had used on the phone that morning. That voice that had found me in my bed where I’d been for three days, unmoving. It was a voice that could break my heart if I let it.
“I am myself,” I said louder. “Quit trying to help.” I should have stopped there, but I was angry. I was so angry. “Maybe you’re the problem. You think I don’t notice you watching me? You watch me all the time. I’m not an experiment.”
She dropped her head.
“I know what you’re doing,” I said, “and it’s not helping. I wish you’d leave me alone. You’re not helping.”
She put her hand to her face, but I continued throwing words at her, hard, until she whispered, “When did you slip through the net?” and began to sob. Still I kept going until she went into her bedroom, locked the door, and I could hear her on the phone. I stayed by the window. It was getting dark and people were leaving the park, filtering out through different gates with languid steps.
She doesn’t know what I can be, I thought then, looking out over that ordered world. There were these things that I could be. I just needed to get away from the eyes, from the watching.
Following signs that lead me through the original walls, I walk into the old center of Siena. It’s early afternoon, the church services are over, and the shop windows are dark. Only the occasional coffee bar is open, the interior a cool rectangle broken by no more than one or two bodies gripping espresso and glancing up at a small television. Soccer.
The streets are tighter than Florence’s and the buildings on either side too close to me, slicing the sky into narrow strips. Siena is an older generation, cloistered and closed, and I feel trapped with nowhere to look but up at the church towers or down at my feet. Medieval. So this is what it means. Tunneling between buildings, I find my way to the only open space, the Piazza del Campo, a cobbled Tilt-A-Whirl of a square edged in cafés. I visit the unfinished duomo, then drift to the edge of town, to a church balanced high on one of Siena’s hills. It is massive but plain, and a worn wooden door on its side is almost unnoticeable. The door is open a crack, and I enter to find a similarly sparse interior, cool and hushed. I like the simplicity of this space—the walls are light stone, the ceiling wooden beams. I would like to stay here to read and write and think. I would like to stay here to wait for answers. I breathe out and then in and catch the scent of incense. Halfway up the nave a woman kneels by a side chapel, but otherwise the basilica is empty. As soon as I take a few steps, however, a priest appears. He is small and old with tufts of white hair around his ears. He squints at me, smiling, his lips folding into his face, and offers me a tour.
“Grazie,” I say, and