Page 7

“Come here, Izzy,” Cassie said again, her voice strangled and tight.

“What is it?” Izzy asked. “Oh shit, have we got rats again?”

Cassie didn’t reply. She forced her eyes shut, counted to three, and then opened them again. The street was still there. The rain, the cobbles, the man in the bakery. Cassie saw now that the sky above was not full dark, the day was coming, and a detached voice at the back of her mind said:Of course, Italy is six hours ahead of New York. It’s morning.

Then Izzy was standing beside her. Cassie turned her head to watch as Izzy’s eyes widened, as she processed the same impossibility that Cassie was still struggling with.

“Am I having a stroke?” Izzy said, her voice a monotone. “Cassie, am I fucking high?”

“It’s impossible,” Cassie said slowly, not answering Izzy’s question. “It’s amazing.”

“What the fuck is this?” Izzy asked, the question a gasp of incomprehension.

“It’s Venice,” Cassie exclaimed. “It’s the place I was just telling you about.”

“Why is it in my apartment?” Izzy asked, skirting around the edge of hysteria. “I need to pee! Where’s the bathroom?”

Cassie let go of the door handle and reached forward with her hand. Izzy grabbed her.

“What are you doing?”

“What?” Cassie asked in reply.

Izzy released her and they both watched as Cassie stretched forward through the threshold of the doorway. She felt the tickle of a breeze, the tiny kiss of raindrops. She wiggled her fingers and then turned her hand over, palm up. She giggled in disbelief and delight and pulled her hand back into the room. Both she and Izzy inspected it closely.

“Rain,” Cassie said, peering at the droplets on her skin. “I felt the breeze,” she said, smiling, looking back through the door again.

It was unbelievable. Another place, a city in another country across an ocean, was just beyond the doorway. Cassie’s mind chewed on that slowly, like someone savoring a favorite meal.

“What are you saying?” Izzy asked.

“I’m saying my hand was in Venice,” Cassie said. “My body was in New York, but my hand was in Venice.”

Izzy was struck dumb.

“How can this be?” Cassie asked herself in a whisper.

They gazed through the doorway in silence. It was impossible to look away. Across the street there was a second person in the bakery now, indistinct shapes through the rain-streaked window, like scribbles in charcoal.

“What do we do?” Izzy asked, and Cassie thought it was the first time she had ever heard Izzy sound uncertain. She was always so confident, and so obvious about her confidence.

“I want to go,” Cassie murmured.

“Go? Go where?”

“Go to Venice,” Cassie said, gesturing ahead of them. How could she not want to go? It was another place, far away, a place she loved, and it wasright there,right in front of them.

“We can’t go to Venice!” Izzy gasped. “I am in pajamas and socks. And you... I don’t know what you’re wearing but you don’t have any shoes on either.”

“I need to know it’s real,” Cassie said, barely hearing Izzy’s protestations. It looked real. And it felt real. “Stick your hand in, Izzy.”

Izzy regarded the world beyond the doorway warily.

“Please,” Cassie begged. “I want to make sure it’s not just me, I’m not hallucinating this.”

Izzy crossed herself—something Cassie had only ever seen her do once before, when a pedestrian had been struck by a car on the street many years earlier—and then stretched her hand out. Her fingers breached the threshold and Izzy narrowed her eyes, like she was expecting pain. Then her hand was out into the street that shouldn’t have been there, and Cassie put a hand over her mouth anxiously. She wanted it to be true, this miracle, this impossibility. She wanted to believe things like this could happen.

Izzy laughed in disbelief. “It’s cold,” she said. “I can feel the air.”