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Helen

Milan

Two Years After Lorna’s Death

I am at a table in Brera when I think I see her in the distance—the long brown hair, same as it once was, her legs unending. Even the way she holds her glass of water tilted, like she doesn’t care if it spills. There is no alcohol on the table. A man is with her.

Lorna.

I pass the baby to Ciro and try to slip my body through the sea of tables, knocking into waiters and diners, muttering Scusi with what little patience I can find. Then I nearly bolt down the street to the café where she was sitting. But when I get there, they are already gone. A handful of euros tucked under the bill, a few coins tossed in for good measure.

A waiter comes by and shoos me away. As if I’m trying to take his tab.

“What was that?” Ciro asks me when I return.

He holds our son, Aaron, on one knee. A dribble of clear drool runs from his lips to his chin. I dab at it. I pull him away from his father. I blow kisses onto his neck and wonder, not for the first time, how my mother was ever able to leave me for so many years.

I have forgiven her, but it still stings. She stayed on the island, my mother insisted, for me. So she could see me, be in my life. Years spent at the villa in the service of just one week. It would have been easy, I know, for both of us—Ciro and me—to resent what was lost thirty-two years ago, to grow bitter, harden around the kernel that was taken away: our mothers. But it wasn’t their choice. And we were grateful one of them survived. We survived.

“Nothing, I just thought I recognized someone. That’s all.”

“Who?” Ciro asks.

But I shake my head.

“It doesn’t matter.”

We finish our lunch. We walk with Aaron back to our apartment. The courtyard is private: green and leafy, a tangle of vines and trees. We have views of a single Duomo spire from the edge of our bedroom.

My mother is waiting for us there. She lives, now, in a rambling Palladian-style country home in the Veneto. Some weekends, we visit her and meander the paths that crisscross the fields, the gravel walkways that frame the formal garden. She likes, I think, the space.

“How was lunch?” she asks.

“We missed you,” I say.

“I was meeting with a friend,” she says. My mother has begun to go out again. She has made friends both in the city and in the country. They come over to her house for dinner during the week, and on the weekends, she attends plays and readings. She travels for exhibitions, for joy. She has become something like an oracle for a group of artists and writers who are two decades her junior, and she doesn’t mind when they ask how she knows so much about Mamet or Ibsen, or why she has never produced work of her own.

Like Ciro says, we are always two people. But she is here now, and that is all that matters.

—

The second time I think I see Lorna, it is three days later and I am running errands alone in Porta Venezia. She is walking with the same man. He is older, white-haired, dressed in a linen suit, and she wears a simple black dress, her long hair a single, gleaming sheet.

I follow them past a school, past a neoclassical museum, and into the Montanelli Gardens, down gravel paths lined with planes and chestnuts, and when I am close enough that I can almost touch her, they slip into the Palazzo Dugnani. Even though it is closed on Tuesdays. I sit on the steps and wait. First for an hour, then for two. I ask a policeman walking through the park if he has seen them.

I describe Lorna, the man.

“I think,” he says, “I would have remembered seeing a woman like that today.”

I tell him thank you and go back to our apartment.

Ciro says: “Where were you?”

“I stopped to look at some galleries,” I say.

It seems to satisfy him.

Later, when we are lying in bed, I tell him the truth:

“I keep seeing Lorna.”

“In your dreams?”

“No. In Milan. She’s here with a man.”

“It’s not possible, Helen.” He reaches out for me in the darkness and pulls me in close. “She’s gone. We both saw her.”

But I think of my mother, of how people see what they want to see. Of the check Marcus gave to Lorna before she died. Of the missing ten million euros.

“It was her,” I say. “I’m certain.”

—

I am purchasing acrylics when I feel the hand on my arm.

“Have you been looking for me?”

She is standing in front of me, a statuesque brunette in a black dress. Her hair the same length as Lorna’s, her face with the same almond eyes, the same straight nose. She looks like Lorna in every way; she feels like Lorna. But she is not.

“No,” I say. “Have we met?”

“I saw you at Palazzo Dugnani the other day. You were followingus.”

“Oh,” I say. I’m flustered. The metal tube of paint in my hand feels sharp and hot. “I thought you were someone else.”

“Who?” she says.

“A friend. Lorna.”

“I am Silvia,” she says. She holds out her hand to me.

“How did you know where to find me?” I ask.

“A carabiniere stopped me when I left the palazzo. He said he sometimes saw you here.” She waves at the interior of the shop.

“But how did you know—”

I don’t finish my question. Milan is like that sometimes. Coincidental. Magical.

“I’m sorry if I bothered you,” I say.

“Not at all,” Silvia says. “I hope you find your friend.”

“Thank you,” I say.

She leaves me in the store, and I purchase the paints. The shopkeeper gives me a plastic bag, which rubs against my legs as I walk; every brush, every sound, feels like a small reproach for my foolishness. I think of how long I sat on the steps in front of the palazzo, of how certain I was that day we were having lunch. Ciro told me this morning that he thought it was my guilt trying to assuage itself.

“If you see her,” he said, “it makes it easier. Perhaps it’s just your subconscious trying to protect you from the horror of what really happened.”

Aaron had pushed a piece of peach off his tray and onto our green marble floors.

Ciro was probably right.

A week later, I am walking the same route home, past La Scala, the cacophony of the city unfolding around me, and for a moment, I think I see her again. Only she doesn’t wear a black dress now like she did last week, and she isn’t accompanied by an older man. She is across the street, watching me. She waits there until I meet her eyes—big and cunning, smiling, maybe, at the corners—then she holds up a hand. I do the same.

It’s Lorna, isn’t it? It has to be.

But our connection doesn’t last. A tram rattles along its tracks, a glossy yellow one that survived the war, the noise deafening. And when the car has passed, she’s gone.

If she was ever even there at all.