Abroad (35 page)

But she wasn’t dead. Her friends came upon her—her flatmate and her lover. She was there, still breathing, blood burbling at her throat.

*   *   *

How did Colin know I was beyond saving? Which was the truth—no ambulance would have gotten to me in time; no doctor would have pumped enough blood back in. Was it the thin trickle of air escaping from my windpipe? Something in my eyes? The fact that I couldn’t even speak?

I could hear Claire sobbing from the doorway. Colin told her to stay away.
Take off your shoes
, he said. Ervin, in his haste and perhaps out of horror, had left the knife right beside me. Colin took my jeans and, using them to keep his fingerprints off it, picked it up. He cleaned the blade on the cloth, then cut off my bra, which was up around my neck. I suppose this was to help my breathing. It didn’t. He looked at me, holding that knife with a shaking hand, then leaned over me and whispered something.

“What did you say?” Claire screamed. “Did you just fucking say you loved her?”

*   *   *

“
Misericordia
,” the man whispered to the dying girl. “
Et ego ducam te. Iam ut relinquamus. Ut in aeternum dormias.
”

Tabitha understood. It was the same Latin she had heard him chanting in the meeting. It was important, what she had seen. It meant something.

For Colin Bancordia was one of the youngest members of the Compagnia. An order, two thousand years old, that was now only ritualistic. The men met for tradition; they learned the ritual of mercy killing as an homage to history. They held balls that raised money for hospices and burial of the poor. But in this era of peace and modernity, there was no practical reason for the Compagnia. Not anymore.

Yet here Colin was. A girl, suffering in his arms. He had an oath, one he’d been told was a formality. To serve a good death, so that the trapped soul could go into the next life.

“Tabitha, I’m going to help you,” he said. “Are you ready for me to help you?”

*   *   *

Claire had run to the bathroom to get towels. As I’ve said, she had a tracker’s walk, thereby, just by sheer habit, leaving no presence at the crime scene. She brought towels in and was stuffing them under me, trying to stop the blood.

“Don’t you fucking die on me!” she screamed in my ear. “Oh, God, I can’t believe I’m actually saying that.
Fuck!
You fucking bitch! I love, you, okay?
Wake the fuck up!
”

What is it, really, that feeds a friendship between women? Perhaps the place to look is in their very beginnings. When Babs and I were three—babies, still—we would clutch each other in our cribs like lovers. Our mothers would come in spilling glasses of gin, pulling us apart with embarrassed laughs. Then, minutes later in the kitchen, we’d be screaming—grape-faced, Medea cries—beating each other on the head savagely with wooden spoons. There must be something rabid about the love of a true friend, something poisonous in order to sustain it. Sweet friendships, they dull and eventually sputter out to a point of inertia. Yes, I believe this. You can’t love another woman honestly without some element of hate.

And it
was
love, between Claire and me. We had done this horrible thing to each other, yet her cries were the last human sounds I heard on earth, and at the time there was no one else I’d rather have had near. And I needed to hear something. I clung to the sound, tinged as it was with despair. Dying is a private matter, and I can no more explain it to you as I could losing my virginity at sixteen all those years ago. But I can tell you that in my case, I knew what I would be missing. I would never fight with my sister again over clothes, or hear my father chastise me for being late, or feel the steaming water of a good shower. I would never be split open to have a baby, never struggle through my first job. There would be no wrinkles, no arthritis, no more letting my mother cuddle me, no more hushed Hebrew songs. I knew all of it was ending, and the knowledge was unbearable. It’s not the pain that’s the hardest. It’s all the things you suddenly know you won’t ever have.

Claire will never know what she did for me. Later, drunk and high as she was, she wouldn’t even remember it. But we were there, together in the bleeding place, and it was as if it
had
to be her. Babs would have been too sweet to bear it, and the others, as dazzling as they’d appeared, were liars. I knew that now. But of course, at that point, I knew everything. When dying, you’re separate. You are the most knowledgeable person on earth.

“Stay still,” Colin commanded sharply. “Leave us alone, Claire. You’re too high to help.”

My flatmate slumped over, her face in her hands.

*   *   *

“Tabitha?” he said. “Are you ready?”

She was fading. A bit of black was hovering to the right of her field of vision. She was drowning in her own blood.

“It hurts,” she whispered.

“Hold on,” he said. “
Adducam te
.”

Colin raised the knife.

*   *   *

“Fuck, no!” Claire screamed. “Please, no.”

*   *   *

It was a quick but large incision, eight centimeters long. Colin had paid close attention in his meetings, had learned well a skill no Italian ever believed he would use. The girl’s eyes closed instantly. Colin stood and said another prayer.

The American, sobbing, pulled the girl’s white duvet off her mattress and threw it over her friend’s body. Colin drew her gently away. As if offering a last moment of privacy, Claire pressed the inside lock on the bedroom door before closing it. In the mornings, Claire knew, Taz liked it quiet. Soon there would be a storm here. Her flatmate would want to be alone.

Tabitha Deacon, twenty-one years old, 21st century AD

27

According to Arthur, Etruscan funerals, particularly for those from important families, were celebrated with a typically audacious feast and party. Game was killed and served over three-day banquets; rivers of wine flowed; men, women, and children took turns sleeping and eating on sumptuous cushions; perhaps a stray orgy sprang up in the odd hours of the night. The men took the opportunity to stage huge funerary games—running, discus, and perhaps even a gladiator match. This all culminated in taking the body down to the tomb below, prepared decades before so that the dead could live in comfort. The corpse was then surrounded by his or her favorite objects, and the tomb was sealed until it was time for the next member to enter.

My own funeral was not nearly as grand or amusing, though it was a large Catholic affair in St. Andrew’s in Dublin. I became something of a martyr, though no one could make out what happened, exactly, and hundreds of people came. Jenny and Luka flew in for it, though Anna remained at her facility. My family, lined up in a grim row. Sean came from Oxford. In the afternoon, a small Hebrew ceremony as well. There were reporters there, who dispersed after a day or two, after which my hometown sank back into its pocket of quiet, albeit a bit more somber than usual.

As for the situation back in Grifonia: it would be safe to say that, in the days after my death, things unraveled for certain players at a blazing pace.

Jenny and Luka fled the day after I was found. The British consulate, upon hearing from the Enteria administrators that we were close, offered them flights to London. The girls took them without hesitation. They finished up their Enteria year in Portugal. They didn’t speak that language either, but the administration made an exception, given their claims of trauma.

Gia and Alessandra also put distance between themselves and the situation, by fleeing to their parents’ homes. They were Italian, and they knew the court system, how these things could work. Claire tried to contact them, but the girls didn’t reply, upon advisement of their families. They sent their friends for their things and never entered the cottage again.

Colin, also, went back to England shortly after he was questioned by the police. He told his father, who was always rather puzzled by his son’s interest in his heritage, that he was going back for a job.

The drugs, as far as I know—all twenty-thousand euros’ worth—still remain in the tomb behind the farmer’s house in the valley.

Claire was the only one who stayed. She wanted to be near Colin, not knowing that he was leaving. But more than that, she wanted to help find the man who had stabbed me. She really thought she could help the police, and that they actually would want to hear from her. Claire was a girl with strong, unshakable ideals—the sort formed under the cold, clear skies of Montana. For her, love meant loyalty. And for that, in the end, she paid.

*   *   *

This is all years ago now. And, likely, you know the rest. How I was found by Gia and Alessandra, whose lovers kicked in the bedroom door and discovered me there, dead in my blood under my comforter. How my flatmate’s uncharacteristic drinking binge that night ended up being the factor to condemn her. How, due to the whiskey, she never could quite remember what she had done that night, or where she had been. How it all came back to her in jumbled scenes of horror. How she clung to Colin outside of the murder scene and at the police station, increasingly damned by watching Italian eyes. How, pressed by the increasingly irritated authorities shouting in a language she couldn’t understand, she gave several different stories of what she remembered. How, after just one hour of the same interrogation, Colin—who had spent some time studying Italian law—gave a very clear, concise account of being at his apartment, an account in which Claire did not factor. How Jenny Cole, in a phone interview from Lisbon, said Claire had always been a strange, unbalanced girl. How the press, the police, and the public jumped on the American in order to formulate an answer to this mystery as neat as those in the thrillers I used to love. How there wasn’t one, because in real life, murders usually don’t work that way.

It wasn’t that they didn’t find the man who killed me. They did, easily. Ervin Bogdani was not a smart man. He left his DNA everywhere, called his friends and told them about me, even confessed to the crime. He claimed connections with the B4, but of course, Jenny had been clever enough never to have been seen in public with Ervin. And besides, she was gone. No matter how much he protested, nobody could believe that he actually knew such upstanding girls.

“Who else did you know?” the police goaded.

“Tabitha. We danced.”

“Yes, yes. Who else?”

“Claire,” he said.

“You knew her well?” they asked, suddenly interested.

“I—”

“If she helped you, your sentence will be much shorter. But tell the truth, of course.”

“Of course,” Ervin said, looking at his barrister, who was nodding. “Yes. Her, I knew.”

*   *   *

Where are they now, my friends and lovers?

Older. A bit more tired. Jenny is working in an advertising office, though she doesn’t mind it as much as she thought. It turns out her ruthless business sense serves her well in the real world. Though I doubt she entirely appreciates the irony of it, given the elegance of her building and the rewarding pace of her social life, she is, in fact, a happy spinster. She works at a desk and lives alone with a cat.

Luka is dead. Such a wasteful surprise. Upon returning to London that fall, she stopped calling Jenny back. She had adopted a fondness for her father’s sedatives, which helped blot out the faces of Eleanor Peterfield and Tabitha Deacon. The housekeeper found her one morning three summers after my murder, facedown in her father’s modest swimming pool.

Anna is doing well. She moved to America to study classics in New Haven, where she married a fellow scholar in another department, an expert on Proust. She makes her own money through grants, never tells anyone about her father’s title, and hasn’t spoken to her mother or Professor Korloff in years.

Sweet Babs is a scientist, though she never did marry George. This story has proved that a person can, most certainly, change another’s life by entering it; the same can happen, it seems, when a dear sister violently exits. Babs was altered by my murder. She stopped wearing colors and took to living in the university lab most hours of the day. Her skin is almost blue from lack of sun, her hair a greasy brown. There’s a protein she is searching for; something to do with light hitting the eyes. She is almost thirty and one of the most promising biochemists in England.

Marcello stayed in the apartment below. He went to my makeshift Grifonian memorial with some friends, then went home with an Italian girl. He stopped going out with foreigners, as the consequences seemed complicated. He gained brief fame as my lover, but after university moved home and faded into Naples. He married a distant cousin. They run a small restaurant.

Claire was pardoned at twenty-seven, after six years in an Italian prison. She finally got what she wanted, I suppose, though hardly how she wanted it, in that she felt like a real Italian. She became harder, and so fluent it was difficult to remember her English when she got out. After her release she sank deep into the sharp mountains of Montana and married a rancher. She had a daughter, whom she briefly considered naming Tabitha. But after some conversations with her husband, that idea was abandoned.

Colin went back to England, choosing to finish his dissertation there. He teaches medieval Italian history at the University of London. He went on to marry a British law student. The two never go back to Grifonia. The wife, who knows vaguely that he knew Claire and me, never asks why.

Other than my mother, everyone in my family moved on as well. My parents divorced and my father remarried; my sister had a baby; my cousins also married and had babies of their own. My mother, unable to live with my ghost anymore, left my childhood home and put it on the market. There is a new family there now. They fear they will never be able to escape my shadow; the story remains too notorious for that. Still, life continues. The children, miraculously, don’t know of what happened to me yet.

My room, which has been freshly painted a sparkling white, is now occupied by a stout five-year-old named Melinda. As I once did, she favors toys that are expectedly female—dolls, plush animals, play houses. She found the ten pounds I left, caught in the edge of the carpet. She is meticulously organized and lines up her dolls on her wooden shelf, calling them nightly by name. Good
night
, Melly. Good
night
, Shira. She collects glass jars of buttons, and has two of mine that she found in corners of the room. One was to a blue shirt I wore as my school uniform; the other a shiny, fat black button that once belonged to the sleeve of a coat. She snatches them up, looking at each one carefully before placing it in its proper glass vessel. She is now up to three jars full, and they really are quite beautiful, particularly in the afternoon light.