The Fifth Gospel(93)

            “And where have you been living?” I ask.

            “An apartment in Viterbo. I work at a hospital there.”

            Viterbo. Two hours from here. The last stop on the train line heading north. She went as far away as she could without leaving entirely, to be sure we would never run into each other.

            And yet she didn’t escape to the beach or the mountains. Viterbo is an austere medieval town. Its biggest landmark is a palace where the popes used to come to escape Rome, and it towers over the land like Saint Peter’s. She did this for a reason, I tell myself. To torture herself into remembering.

            Her eyes have found the pictures of Peter. As she stares, the corners of her mouth sag. She fights to raise a wall in front of her emotions, but suddenly she blinks. Tears hop from her eyelashes to her cheeks like water dancing in a hot pan. She refuses to give herself up to it, though. Merciless control is all that keeps her balanced on this wire.

            My hands want to stretch forward and hold hers. But I’m on the wire, too. So I open my wallet and pull out a picture of Peter. I slide it to the middle of the table.

            She picks it up. And seeing the boy our baby became, she says in a choked voice, “He looks just like you.”

            The first lie of our reencounter. He doesn’t look just like me. The softness in his features is hers. The dark lashes. The expressive mouth. But maybe she isn’t referring to the picture in front of her. Her voice is haunted, her stare distant. She’s venting some preconception of what Peter really is. He looks like me because I’m the one who clothes him, who cuts his hair each month and brushes it every morning. Even in the signed watercolor paintings taped to the walls, there’s a faint resemblance between his poor autograph and mine. Peter is the duet that Mona and I wrote together. The music sounds like me, though, because I have performed it alone.

            “Mona.”

            She is looking at me, but her eyes are vacant. She is retreating. Her body language now is a plea for going slow. She is strong, but this is harder than she imagined.

            I’ve waited years to ask this one question, and it rages inside me. She owes me this answer. And yet I can’t ask. Not when I see her this way.

            Her eyes close. “I know,” she says, “how you must feel.” She sweeps a hand through the air, gesturing at the pictures of herself in frames. “I don’t understand any of this.” Her body is racked by a sudden, heaving breath. “I had hoped—I know this doesn’t make sense, but I’d hoped you’d moved on.”

            Such darkness swims at the bottom of those words. As if she can see no happiness in this refusal to forget. As if she can even imagine an alternative.

            “Mona,” I say quietly, “did you find someone else?”

            She shakes her head in agony, as if I am making this so hard.

            “Then why did you never—”

            She waves her hands in front of her head. No more. Not right now.

            We are strangers. We share nothing but wreckage. Maybe this is as far as we can come in one night.

            “So,” she says in a choked voice, “is Simon okay?”

            I glance away. For years she and her family have kept secrets from me. Now she asks this about mine.

            “He didn’t kill anyone,” I say.

            She nods forcefully, to convey that this is self-evident. The brother-in-law she once considered so inscrutable, so unpredictable, now a clockwork saint.

            “I don’t know why they’re attacking him,” I say.

            For a second her expression is so tender. As if my loyalty to Simon is a beautiful thing to be reacquainted with, full of new meaning after these years of separation.