My recovery was slow and painful, the days stretching around me, elastic. Basil came to my room bearing books, bags full of leather-bound classics he chose from the library. Stories became a place of respite, a refuge from the thoughts that swirled through my mind like acid in a stomach. I clung to these books with the same obsessive need I had felt for the genepy, reading them with an addictive greed. George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, the Brontës. I became lost in these stories the way one might get lost in the hallways of the castle: one minute I knew my way, the next I was subsumed in a cataclysm of darkness. I read Frankenstein many times that winter, enthralled by the tortured monster who climbed through the very Alps that rose outside my window, a creature betrayed and despairing, a wounded son and murderer, a thing wanting love but finding only death and despair. In this regard, I should be grateful for my injury. Had it not been for my time in bed, I might never have come to love books as I have, or developed the desire to write about my own tragic life.
A week or so after I began taking antibiotics, Greta removed my bandage to find the swelling had gone down.
“Good,” she said, as she changed the dressing. “Very good.” She brought me a crutch and placed it near my bed. “This is not necessary,” she said, sweeping away the porcelain bedpan. “Now you will walk to the toilet.”
At first, I used the crutch only to get to the green silk screen of my bathroom. Then, I began making small trips around my room, from the bed to the window, from the window to the fireplace, from the fireplace to the toilet, pushing myself a little farther each time. I began to venture out into the hallway, where there hung the portrait of my third great-grandmother—Flora Montebianco, 1819–1858—who was married first to Cosimo Montebianco and then his younger brother, Vittorio, making her my third great-aunt as well. Flora, Basil explained, had died giving birth to Vita’s father, Ambrose, a fate that seemed to mark her with a jealousy of the living. Flora stared out from her portrait with such bold intensity that I felt she was recording all my actions, slyly assessing me from the cage of her gilded frame.
During those painful weeks of convalescence, I longed for Luca to arrive, although in truth, I was beginning to accept that he might not come for me. My husband was not the kind of man to make false promises, but then again, our relationship had been so broken for so long that I couldn’t blame him for backing away. Still, I wanted to see him and to tell him I was sorry for everything. Sorry that my depression and anxiety had separated us. Sorry that I had not understood how much I needed him. But most of all, I longed to tell Luca that his love and acceptance had saved me from more than loneliness, more than being shunned by our community—his love had made me feel alive.
And then, one afternoon, it seemed Luca had finally arrived. I lay in bed when an abrasive whirring came rattling through the windows. I sat up just in time to see the dragonfly body of a Eurocopter descend. I grabbed my crutch and hobbled into the hallway, trying to stay upright. It was a slow and painful trip. I made my way down the corridor and to the central staircase, and was able to hop from step to step, clutching at the balustrade for support, all the while keeping my mind on my goal: the courtyard, the helicopter, my husband, home.
I had just made it to the landing and was about to embark upon my final descent when, from out of nowhere, an animal blasted past me, knocking me down. Fredericka, the Bergamasco shepherd, was loose in the house. I fell, shielding my head with my crutch. Fredericka’s teeth bit into the wood, gouging it. I had pushed her away with the crutch, and was trying to fend her off, when I heard a flurry of footfall on the stairs. There was a click of a leash, and Greta yanked the dog away. She wrestled her down the steps and tied the leash to a wooden finial.
“Jesus Christ!” I said, trying to catch my breath.
Greta shrugged, as if to say that it wasn’t Fredericka’s fault, that it merely was her nature to attack, and that I should know better. But I wasn’t swearing at the dog: through the thick, handblown glass of the bay windows, the helicopter lifted off and flew away.
“The monthly supplies,” Greta said, seeing my disappointment. It hadn’t been Luca after all.
I stood and began dragging myself away, but Greta grabbed Dolores’s wheelchair, stationed nearby, and pushed it to the bottom of the stairs.
“Sit,” she said, gesturing for me to get in. “I want to show you something.”
I had hardly sat down when Greta walked down the hall, pushing me fast, the wheels of the old chair wobbling as if they might fall off. We spun around the edge of the west wing, toward the north side of the castle. There was no electricity in that ruined part of the structure, as I’d learned in my early explorations, and so Greta stopped to grab a lantern. I gripped the handles of the wheelchair until my knuckles went white.
Finally, we stopped at a set of double doors. Greta opened them and pushed me inside. I lifted the lamp and put it on a table, so that it cast a flickering light over a large room. Looking around, I found a nursery. Or, at least, it had once been a nursery. It was as abandoned as the second-floor ballroom. Cobwebs hung in the corners and a thick layer of dust coated everything.
And yet, from the doorway, I could see that it had been used in the not-so-distant past. The walls were covered with colorful drawings, the kind you see in a kindergarten classroom, only the large sheets were curled at the edges and mottled with mildew, some ripped, others hanging from one corner. Old-fashioned toys—rocking horses and Lincoln Logs and wooden blocks—were mixed up with modern ones: a doll house, its rooms fitted with miniature furniture; puzzles and picture books; a Playmobil village with hundreds of figurines; stuffed animals—monkeys and puppies and kittens with glass eyes. Along one wall, a muddle of dolls lay in disarray, abandoned babies waiting for their mothers to return.
I turned to Greta, who was watching me carefully. “Was this Joseph’s room?”
“Vita let him play here,” Greta said. “This was her nursery when she was a child, then her sons came here, too.” She bent down and picked up a wooden train. “Joseph loved this! He played with it for hours.”
I used the crutch to hobble to an enormous table filled with LEGO pieces. At the center of the table sat a castle, its towers tall and sturdy, its drawbridge raised. Nearby, small houses clustered together into a village. It was a reproduction of Montebianco Castle, with the village of Nevenero below.
Greta walked to the wall and pulled down a drawing. “This was his,” she said. “He liked blue. I don’t know why, but it was his favorite color. He always drew everything in blue.”
I took the drawing. A blue man with long hair and enormous eyes stood alone, surrounded by rocks. The hands were large and the feet enormous, out of proportion to his body. Below the picture, Joseph had written the word “Simi.”
“Do you know what this is?”
Greta shrugged. “Something he made.”
I walked to the wall of drawings. There were more creatures like the first, all drawn in blue crayon. Some climbed rocks. Others stood in trees. There were men and women and children, all with the same characteristics of the Icemen. The wall was full of Joseph’s drawings.
“Did he have a story about these drawings?” I asked. “They all have the word ‘Simi.’ Do you know why?”
“He was always making up stories,” she said, looking at the pictures with care. “And Vita did tell him many things that happened in these mountains. The local legends and myths and such. Some of these might be drawings of those stories.” She turned back to me, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Sometimes he liked a toy and played only with it for months. It was like that with the blue men.”
“Was he ever afraid?” I asked. “Afraid of Vita or . . . anything else?”
“Madame Vita is not all bad. She loves children,” Greta said. “She loved Joseph. She helped me. She hired me when I needed to leave Germany and let me bring a child. Not everyone would do that, you know. She was kind to my son.”
“Is this why you stay here?” I said, gesturing to the wall of Joseph’s drawings, to the abandoned toys. “In case he returns?”
“My son is coming back,” she said, and for a moment, hope burned in her eyes, giving her a look of a woman who believed with all her heart in a miracle. “You promised to help me find him. I know you didn’t lie to me, madame. I know you’ll bring him home.”
As we left, I stepped over a rag doll, ripped and stained, its arms torn off, its dress frayed. The cloth was so old it had begun to disintegrate at the seams, and I wondered if it could be the same doll Eleanor had given her daughter, Vita’s first friend. When I picked it up, I saw gashes in the face, the smooth skin deformed by Vita’s sharp teeth. The linen was stained with brown drops of dried blood. The eyes stared blankly, devoid of life.