The Demon Catchers of Milan #2: The Halcyon Bird (26 page)

“Of all the people in the family who should be learning those techniques, you are the one,” she said. “Don’t you think?”

I just sat there, still gaping. After a long moment, I hazarded, “Maybe we haven’t gotten to that yet. I’m just starting with the basics. I’ve only been here since September, after all.”

She gave me a look that was hard to read, and I remembered that she’d had to sneak her way into an exorcism before they’d agreed to teach her. With that kind of persistence, I thought they were lucky to have her in the family business.

We both sat quietly for a moment. I am embarrassed to admit it, but my mind was roaming the streets of Milan, on the back of a
motorino. Focus. You want to survive this, don’t you?
I said to myself.

Anna Maria seemed content, for now, to let her words sink in, and we paid attention to our lunch. The panini were delicious. I don’t know how one thin slice of cured meat and a slightly thicker slice of cheese can taste so much better than the pile of meat and cheese you get in American sandwiches—and fill you up the same, too, especially if you are eating slowly. I looked across the stream, wondering what Gina would be doing right now. She’d still be deep in sleep, I thought. Right there,
facing the moat of the Castello Sforzesco, I remembered the smell of our school’s hallways: metal lockers, old sandwiches, cement, institutional paint, stinky sneakers, orange peel. I didn’t miss that at all, I realized, thinking of the smell of Bernardo’s leather jacket.

Anna Maria asked, “What are you thinking about?”

I couldn’t help myself. I smiled.

“You went out with Bernardo Tedesco last night, didn’t you?” she said.

“Yes.”

“No wonder your mind isn’t on the job.” She laughed reluctantly. “You had a good time.”

“Yes.”

“I’m glad. I remember when he was a pain in the butt, always dirty. Francesca hit his brother on the head with a huge squash once. Did you know that? Whatever he did, he must have deserved it, though.”

I smiled again. I knew a story Anna Maria didn’t, about her own family; I knew Rodolfo had tried to kiss Francesca. I couldn’t help feeling smug.

She shook her head. “Maybe now isn’t the time for us to discuss this.”

I dragged my mind back and looked her in the eye.

“There are things to tell you, to show you,” she repeated. “You are right, we have to go carefully. But I think you have a right to know.”

“Okay,” I said uncertainly.

She blew out an exasperated breath between her perfectly made-up lips.

“You do want to survive, don’t you? You want to defeat this bastard?”

For a moment, I resented the question. She hadn’t been inhabited by this being. She hadn’t been there, inside my head, when he had made me throw my own sister at the wall.

She saw the hard glint in my eye. “Then let me help you,” she said.

“Okay,” I said finally.

She breathed out a long sigh of relief. “Okay,” she echoed. “I will think about what’s best to start with. We’ll have to be careful about when and how we meet. I may talk to my brother, if that’s all right with you …”

“Let me think about it,” I said. “This is still a lot to take in.”

She looked impatient, and I turned to her. “Anna Maria,” I said. “Thank you. Thank you for this.”

“Niente,”
she said, shrugging. “So. Tell me about this date. Where did he take you for dinner?”

That’s all it took. I ended up telling her exactly where we went, and what he wore, and what I wore, and what we ate, and how the waiter teased me for not wanting the food too hot. I wished for all of my life to be this ordinary—sitting in the sunshine on a spring day, telling a girlfriend about my first date with a guy. We sat for an hour or two, I don’t know how
long. Then we went back to the bike stand, and she took me to a bookstore in the Via Ulrico Hoepli and bought me a novel.

“You have a lot to learn, but you might as well enjoy the language you are learning,” she said. “Italo Calvino, he’s one of our greats, and this is a very good one
—Il barone rampante
. See what you think.”

I tucked it in the purse she had given to me for Christmas. “Thank you,” I said. She punched my shoulder as if I was her brother. Her cell phone rang.

“It’s the professor,” she said, surprised. She pursed her lips at her phone. “Let him leave a message,” she said.

On the way home, she entertained me with gossip about all the people in the advertisements we passed on our way back toward the Brera. I went to sleep turning her questions over in my mind.

The next day, Bernardo turned the book over in his hands, picking it up from the desk in the shop.

“I liked
Le città invisibili
better,” he said. “This one is kind of intellectual. Well, all of them are. But this, it’s all about the Age of Enlightenment. I prefer Marco Polo and Kublai Khan chatting, and the images.”

“I haven’t started it yet,” I said, deciding to go back to the Libreria Hoepli and buy
Le città invisibili
first chance I got. “I’ve never been much of a reader,” I added.

“But you’re surrounded by books all day! Are you studying for exams in America or something? I meant to ask.”

“No, just keeping up with school, and studying Italian culture and history,” I said, hoping he couldn’t see I wasn’t telling the whole truth. “I don’t know anybody in my hometown who even speaks another language.”

I thought about how I had successfully dodged foreign languages for the first part of high school. I would have been in Señora Driscoll’s Spanish class this year, if my ordinary life had gone on. Instead, I’d learned a language by being sent to a place where many people did not speak English as their second or even third language.

“Do you need to stay and study now?” Bernardo asked. “Or can I take you out for an
aperitivo
? Promise I’ll have you back by dinner.”

Nonna waved her hand at me from the stove when I ran upstairs, breathless, to ask. On the way back, I tripped over the threshold into the shop and flew into Bernardo’s arms, stiff with embarrassment.

“Pian piano
,” he laughed. “They’ll still have something for us to eat when we get there, you know.”

So we climbed on the back of his
motorino
, and, once more, we flew down the streets of the city.

“I have a boyfriend,” I announced to Gina the next night when we Skyped.

“Excellent!” said my sister.

“You’re not surprised?” I asked.

She laughed. “Why would I be surprised? You’re different. I
can’t wait to see you in person. You’ve really gotten more confident since you went to Italy. And you look great.”

“Thanks.” Then, worried, I confessed, “At least, I think I have a boyfriend.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, laughing at me.

“We’ve only been on two dates. But he really likes me. He kept asking my cousins about me. It’s probably too soon. How did you know with Luke?”

Gina thought about this.

“It seems like forever ago. I think I knew when he called me his girlfriend to his mom,” she said. “Maybe a month after our first date. Seriously, what’s his name? What does he look like?”

“His name is Bernardo Tedesco, and he is the best-looking guy in Milan. He’s tall, and has kind of red-brown hair, and blue eyes. He’s sweet. He had me check with Nonno Giuliano and Nonna Laura if it was okay for him to take me out.”

“He didn’t ask them himself?”

I rolled my eyes.

“We don’t live in the Middle Ages,” I said. “Did Luke ask Mom and Dad, or did he ask you?”

Gina giggled. “He asked me. But when he came to get me, I had to snag my purse, and Dad gave him a Dad Talk.”

“Jeez. What did Dad say?”

“I asked Luke, but he just shrugged and told me Dad had said he’d kill him if anything happened to me. I think I was
way more freaked out than Luke was. He said he wished his own dad would talk that way about his sister Jenny.”

I remembered her telling me that Luke had spent Thanksgiving at our house because there would actually be a turkey, as well as stuffing, Aunt Maggie’s sweet potato casserole, and so on—as opposed to a twelve-pack of Miller Genuine Draft and a fight, which I guess was a typical Thanksgiving at his house.

“It’s weird, the stuff you take for granted, isn’t it?” I said. “Like how Dad will always be like Zeus the Thunderer when it comes to us. You know?”

Gina laughed. “It’s a pain. But kind of nice to know that if you chose a total jerk Dad would just
destroy
him if something happened, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. I wondered what Dad would have done about Lucifero. I had a sudden picture of Nonno putting his hand on Dad’s arm and saying, “He’ll have his own punishment.”

That would never happen; Nonno and Dad were separated by thousands of miles and, more importantly, by my grandfather’s anger. And maybe, now, my father’s, too.

“What are you thinking about?”

“I wish Dad were here,” I said suddenly. “And all of you.”

“You’d want Dad giving Bernardo a Dad Talk?”

“Sure,” I said. “Not that Bernardo would need it.”

“He sounds nice. Have you kissed?”

I blushed, wondering if she could see my face turning red.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Was he any good?”

“I don’t really have much to compare it to,” I pointed out.

She laughed. “How experienced do you think I am? I mean, to you, was he any good.”

I smiled. “Way better than Tommaso d’Antoni,” I said.

She laughed again, louder.

“OMG, you kissed Tommaso?”

“He kissed me,” I corrected her.

“I always kind of wondered what that would be like,” she mused.

“It was okay,” I said. “Bernardo is …”

I smiled, trying to find the right word.

“That’s the thing I like about Luke,” said Gina.

“His kissing?”

“Yes, but the way he’s all the way there when he kisses me. One hundred percent.”

“I know what you mean,” I said.

And I did.

About a week later, when I’d run into the kitchen doorframe for the fifth time because I wasn’t looking, Nonna said, “It’s a good thing you don’t see that boy every night! He’s gone to your head. Any more of him and you wouldn’t notice the stairs, either.”

I decided not to tell her I had already tripped on them more than once, thinking of Bernardo. I steadied myself and caught
her eye. Her lips were pressed firm, but her eyes were crinkling at the corners.

“Never mind,” she said. “Every day of your youth dawns only once. Come set the table.”

She was right, though. I still studied and searched for the demon’s poem, did chores around the shop, ran errands, helped cook, and paid attention to the follow-ups Nonno did with various clients—Signora Galeazzo was healing steadily, the
San Valentino
couple were doing slightly better, Signore Strozzi was about the same, sadly. Anna Maria and I had met once, but all she’d done was ask me to describe what I’d experienced in the Second House in as much detail as I could. Still—really even the important stuff was just a way of passing time until I saw Bernardo again.

One afternoon he suggested we visit the roof of the Duomo, so we went to buy tickets at the office across the street from the back of the cathedral. The line in front of us was like a mini United Nations, something I hadn’t quite gotten used to, even after living here since September. Now, in the Brera, the tourists were flying fast and thick; they seemed to spontaneously generate in the warm spring air.

Instead of the sprinkling we’d had during the cold months, we got flocks, crowds even, following guides holding up sticks with some noticeable object attached at the top, as if they were the priestesses of some odd new religion involving plastic flags and giant flowers. I was a tad overdressed that day, in a scarf,
linen blazer, and a cotton shift dress of Francesca-approved cut that even Anna Maria had swooned over. My new heeled sandals pinched a little, only because I was breaking them in.

Bernardo placed his long, broad hand in the small of my back. I leaned back, to be close to him.

Ahead of us, an older Asian couple in extremely well-cut clothes were struggling, in a combination of Italian and English, to explain that they wanted two tickets to the roof of the Duomo.

“Tourists,” he whispered to me with a grin.

“Yes,” I said. “Did I tell you I saw an American completely lose it in the Bar Brera the other day? He kept saying, ‘You call this pasta? You call this
pasta
?!’ ”

“Oh, no! The poor waiter.”

“Yeah. It was Sebastiano. He said, ‘No: I call that calamari.’ There was a special,” I added with a poker face. Bernardo burst out laughing, startling the French family right in front of us.

“In English, he said it? Sebastiano?”

“Yes. I love how he never lets on that he can speak it until someone gets uppity. Sometimes he makes me pretend to be his translator. I use my best Brooklyn accent.”

“Brooklyn?”

“A part of New York City.”

“Oh.”

He gently walked me forward as the line moved, his hand still resting on my back. I thought,
I have butterflies in my stomach, all the time
.

“I want to go there with you someday,” he announced.

The Asians left, tickets in hand. I watched an Indian couple who spoke English with Australian accents get their tickets. The French family selected a representative, who spoke in precise, heavily accented Italian.

Home, home, home
, my heart said, and I couldn’t be sure which home it spoke of, though I knew I was happy. I would survive my demon and live, and bring my handsome, pale Italian boyfriend home to meet my parents, to walk down the streets of Center Plains. He would fall in love with Gina like everyone else—that couldn’t be avoided, I thought, swallowing hard—but he would realize, just in time not to lose me, that he really loved me and not my sister, and they would end up good friends, sparing me and Luke a soap opera. Bernardo and I would come back to Milan quickly, because Bernardo wouldn’t like the bad American food. We would marry young, like Mom and Dad, or Luciano and Giulietta. We would trip through the Giardini Pubblici and get our wedding pictures taken by the big circular fountain, like any other couple.