The Demon Catchers of Milan (20 page)

We were scattered among the stalls, Nonno and Nonna stopping to look at some marzipan saints, Anna Maria and her father arguing good-naturedly about a lamp, and for a moment I thought nobody was near me. The too-familiar feeling of fear started to seep into my gut, but then I felt a hand on my arm.

“Drop this?” asked Emilio.

“Yes—oh,” I said, seeing the bracelet had broken apart in its short fall.

“They always sell crap—pretty crap,” he said. “I’ll show you a better place to get jewelry, a few stalls up. Why do you look so sad?”

“It was for my mom. I couldn’t tell …”

“Don’t be silly. You’re new to all this. You should be more patient with yourself,” he said firmly.

I felt much better. I was surprised a guy would know where to get good jewelry, but on the other hand, if any guy knew that kind of thing, it would be Emilio. Between the stalls, I saw Francesco talking to someone familiar, and I stopped to look. I didn’t know the person, but I knew what she was, now that I knew I had seen one.

“A messenger,” I said softly.

“What?” Emilio looked up from a table full of scarves. “Oh, yes.”

It was a woman, a messenger like the man who had warned Emilio about the spirit returning to Signora Galeazzo’s house, though she looked as unlike him as possible. She was tall and curvy, with a huge mane of red-brown hair and a fierce expression. But now I noticed small things that I had seen with the other one, like the way the shadows on her face fell differently from those on Francesco’s face, as if her face couldn’t remember exactly where the faint winter sun should be. She seemed angry, pointing and gesturing.

“What are they talking about?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen her before. You can recognize them now?”

“I think so,” I said, feeling proud.

At last, she gave up and stomped away, her feet making no sound, and vanished among the stalls.

“Uh,” grunted Francesco, joining us.

“What was that about?” Emilio asked.

“She doesn’t want to do the job.”

Emilio shook his head.

“What job?” I asked.

“They don’t always like the task that is set them,” said Francesco. “They don’t have a lot of choices, though.”

“What do you mean?”

Emilio spoke, his eyes on the direction she had gone, his voice distant. “They are suicides, Mia.”

He swung to face me. “They have to do the tasks appointed them before they can find peace.”

“It’s a horrible joke, really,” said Francesco dispassionately. “They couldn’t stand the world, so they took themselves out of it, and now they’re stuck here until they can earn their way out.”

I stared at them, feeling sick.

“One way is to keep watch and pass messages,” said Francesco.

“But why?” I asked. “Why do they have to? Is this like the law of the road and stuff?”

“Something like that, as far as we know,” said Francesco. “It just seems to happen.”

“How do they know? Who tells them?”

“They seem to just know,” said Emilio. “Like we know that things fall downward. When they are done … Nonno saw one finish, once.”

“What was it like?” I asked.

Emilio reflected. “Nonno said he heard what sounded like hundreds of tiny bells jingling in the open air, and voices calling the messenger’s name as if he were an old friend. The messenger smiled and said, ‘I suppose I’d better go,’ and spread out his hands. Nonno said it was ‘as if he were pronouncing a benediction on the whole world.’ Then the light on his face changed—you know how they never seem to have the right light on their faces—it changed into the light of this world, and he just faded away, until there was only one last bell ringing, one last voice calling, and then they were gone, too.”

For a moment, the three of us stood in a tiny pool of silence in the crowded market. Then the sounds of the fiera around us came back, and Francesco said, “Heavy thoughts for a light day,” and Emilio smiled. I felt the same way.

“Hey,” I said to Emilio, “can you show me the stall where I can get a better bracelet for my mom?”

He did, and I found a bracelet in the same style, but even more delicate and stronger at the same time, if that were possible: a string of tiny flowers floating on a silver chain, with pale blue stones set in the middle of each flower. It cost four times as much as the bracelet that had broken, but it was worth it.

Then I bought my cousins hot crepes with chocolate, and the rest of the day was good, except for the part where we ran
into Alba, shopping with some friends, and she carried Emilio off with her. I felt annoyed with myself for being so happy when he came back to us, smiling and shrugging. “They want to keep shopping, I want to go home and eat Nonna’s dinner.”

As we walked home, full of crepes and sugar, Emilio explained that Sant’Ambrogio’s day was also the opening night of the Teatro alla Scala, a really big deal in Milan. Tickets were insanely expensive, he said, but sometime he wanted to take Nonna. He asked if I liked opera, and I shrugged. My grandparents used to take us, and we had to wear scratchy dresses and sit for hours while a bunch of people sang in a language we didn’t understand.

Emilio laughed when I talked about the scratchy dresses; he said he thought I should try it again. He reminded me he was planning to get tickets for La Scala after the holidays, and he would get one for me. But Francesca would need to take me shopping first, he added. That was all right by me.

That very weekend, Francesca organized a Della Torre posse to get us safely to the shops, but fortunately for me it did not include any of the other women of the family—I wouldn’t have been too sure of Laura’s fashion advice, for one, and I don’t think I could have handled Anna Maria at all, let alone her mother. In the end, Francesco and his father took us around, retiring to a nearby café and refusing to get involved any further.

The shop ladies scared me. The one time I had gone inside a clothing store with Aunt Brigida and Anna Maria, the ladies had hovered over me and barked anytime I had tried to touch
something. When Francesca and I entered the stores, the women crowded around, scolding Francesca instead.

“How have you let her spend the whole season in these raggedy jeans? And look at that sweater! It’s practically a dust rag. No, my grandmother wouldn’t even use it as a dust rag. How can you tell what shape she is underneath?
Boh!
She looks like a student from the Brera.”

I wasn’t sure I minded looking like a student from the Brera, but apparently I wasn’t allowed to look like one. Never mind that I was stuck inside most of the time and nobody would see me anyway. I wanted all the dresses that would show what shape I was underneath, but even when I was allowed to try those on (“No, no! Too old for you! I will hang that back up!”), I had to admit that I would never take them out of the closet. I wouldn’t have the courage.

The shape I was had changed, as a matter of fact—when they pointed out the raggedy jeans, I realized that not only were there holes everywhere, but that the legs were an inch too short now. All my sleeves were too short, as well, and I needed larger sizes of more embarrassing pieces of clothing. Francesca took me to a surly old woman who measured me in some very intimate places before I could say no and then brought out underwear and bras that my mother would never have approved of, since they were the sort that seemed to be designed for someone else to see. They were very comfortable, though. (What happened to “No! Too old for you!”? I didn’t get it.)

I have no idea how much Francesca spent on me. She waved
the little spending money I had away when I offered it. What she really spent on me was time, and in her abrupt kindness I could now read love.

Sitting on my bed after a long day of shopping, footsore and blank, I still found some energy to plan some future outfits. I tried on the dress I liked the best. It hadn’t looked like anything when one of the barking shop ladies had brought it forward, but Francesca had nodded at once, delighted. I couldn’t see why. It looked brown—what my mother calls “fawn-colored”—and shapeless and dull. It was the last thing I had tried on in the dressing room. When I had put it on I understood much better what Francesca had been trying to explain all day about well-cut clothes. I hadn’t recognized myself for a minute. I mean that, I really hadn’t. So I waved at myself, and gradually the features I had lived with for sixteen years reemerged from the mirror, along with the thought,
Oh! So that’s what I always looked like, underneath!

I wasn’t quite ready to part with my old, tattered jeans, but I had to admit that this was what I was really supposed to look like. I had occasionally allowed myself to suspect that I was pretty, or could be, a little bit, anyway. Now I could see, yes, I was. So, back at home, sitting on the bed, that was the dress I reached for. Looking at myself again, this time in the hall mirror, I saw something else, the second time I put on the dress. I thought of myself as the mousy-haired, dull-featured cousin of these strange, luminous Della Torres, Emilio the Apollo, Francesca with her precise dark hair, Anna Maria with her perfectly
straight back. Now I could see the family features in my own face, the high cheekbones, the thick, dark eyebrows with their peculiar arc, and the horizon-seeing eyes.

I thought about what my grandfather would have said to all this. He would have been really angry, I imagined. Now, having spent more than three months with the family he left behind, I thought about what I would say back.

I wore something completely different to talk to Gina on Skype the next day: she could only see the blue shirt, a button-down with a crisp, huge collar and fabulous cuffs made out of smooth, fine cotton with a faint, intricate flower print. But I knew I was wearing some fantastic new jeans that not only went all the way down to my ankles, but seemed to be cut perfectly for me, as well as a pair of black, Italian leather slip-ons that would have made any popular girl back at school die in a fit of envy.

“You look different,” said Gina. My parents’ computer is old, cheap, and incredibly slow, so she was at her friend Sara’s house; Sara had her own laptop and had left Gina alone in her room. I had no privacy on my end, partly because the computer sat on a small desk in the living room, and partly because sound travels way too well in that apartment. At least we both had webcams. It was good to see her face, even if the light in Sara’s room made it look like she was underwater.

“I look different?” I asked, hoping this was a compliment. “How?”

“Well … your hair seems more stylish.”

“Francesca took me to get it cut.”

“And you have a new shirt that looks awesome. I love the blue, and the cut.”

“Francesca got it for me.”

Gina laughed.

“Did Francesca help you lose a tiny bit of weight as well?”

Ouch
, I thought, but I laughed. “No, we just eat differently here. Or something. Do I really look thinner?”

Gina shrugged. “You do, which is bizarre, because you’re the only one that ever thought you were fat. Me and Mom always felt like you didn’t have any weight to spare. Maybe it’s that you look—more confident? No, I don’t know what it is. There’s just something different.”

“Whatever it is, it sounds good.”

“It is,” she said, and smiled. “I miss you.”

“I miss you, too,” I said, but even as I said it I felt a small tightness in my stomach, because it wasn’t entirely true. I realized that, at least this last month, I hadn’t really had time to miss her. That first month away had been much harder. We sat still, both trying to figure out what we could say that could be heard by the rest of my relations.

We mostly talked by e-mail, for the privacy. I don’t have tons of friends on Facebook and, anyway, I couldn’t just post, “Mia Dellatorri is in Italy because she got possessed by a demon, and now she has to learn how to defend herself,” or, “I really hate demons today,” or anything like that. My family had agreed to tell everyone that our distant relatives had invited me to study
abroad, which was more or less true. I guess I had gotten a lot of cool points at school for having gone to live in Italy; it would’ve been the first time anybody thought I was cool.

“So how are Mom and Dad?” I asked.

“Okay, I guess,” she said.

“I never hear from Dad,” I said. “He just tells Mom to put something in her e-mail to me.”

Gina nodded. “He’s still angry. But he grills me, you know? He wants to know everything, what Milan is like, what the family is like. If I even come close to the subject of Grandpa, he acts all fake-uninterested, you know, the way he does when one of us mentions a boy. So I can tell he’s dying to know more about his dad and what happened.”

I looked around quickly. Nonna was in the kitchen, starting soup for supper; nobody else was home yet.

“I don’t know a lot more. It’s not the easiest subject to talk about here, either. But I have my suspicions. And Grandpa was raised with Giuliano and Uncle Matteo, who is Giuliano’s younger brother. Grandpa’s dad died in World War Two, and his mom died of grief right afterward, apparently.”

“Of grief?” asked Gina. “People don’t do that really, do they?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m starting to wonder about a lot of things.”

“And your suspicions?”

“There was a brother in between Giuliano and Matteo, named Martino. He died around thirteen years after the war, somebody told me.”

“That’s got to be around when Grandpa left Italy,” said Gina, pouncing.

“Yes. Exactly.”

I didn’t tell her who had told me. I had never gotten around to telling her about Lucifero, either.

“I’ll try to find out exactly when he came to America,” she said. “I think I can do it without asking Dad.”

“Thanks,” I said.

At that point, Sara leaned around the door, and Gina said, “We have homework to do. This time difference sucks.”

“I know, right?” I said. “Have a good day. I love you.”

“I love you, too,” she said. “Give my best to everybody.”

“Say hi to Mom and Dad from me,” I said. One last wave, and we logged off.

EIGHTEEN

The Novena