Chapter 7
I woke up with a gasp, my heart thudding in my chest and my hands reaching for something I had already lost. The locket I wanted to find was still gone, my fingers touching only the thin, interlocking links of scars looped around my neck.
Unlike other dreams, this one was still clear and sharp in my memory. I could still see the strange girl’s piercing eyes, hear her fluttering laughter. I felt I should remember who she was, but I was exhausted and my emotions were tangled up in a messy mix of anger, confusion, and impatience. I was tired of living with so many questions. I wanted answers, and I wanted them now.
I sat up and looked around at my new surroundings, surprised to see I was in a shop of some sort. A heavy cloak had been folded into a makeshift bed for me.
The morning light spilled in from two round windows. Hanging outside one of them was a sign that read Casella Apothecary.
I lifted my eyebrows in surprise. That was part of Orlando’s name.
The sign was edged with an intricate band of squares carved into the wood, each one joined to the next in a repeating pattern of angles. Trying to follow the carved lines with my eyes made me dizzy and I blinked several times to clear my vision.
The air tasted of something bitter and metallic, and also something sweet. Almonds, maybe. Whatever it was, the combination set me at ease. I got to my feet and, once I found my balance, I explored the shop in a little more detail.
It was smaller than I had first thought. A fire crackled in a hearth tucked away in one corner. Rows and rows of glass bottles were displayed on smooth wooden shelves lining the walls. The bottles were different colors and sizes; some had liquid in them, others contained what appeared to be small rocks or crystals. A few even appeared empty except for the smoky smudges on the inside of the glass. Each bottle was neatly labeled and organized.
I caught my breath as a memory stirred. A comfortable place. A row of glass bottles. A gleaming counter spanning the length of one wall.
Looking up, I saw Orlando behind a counter, grinding something with a mortar and pestle. A large cup rested off to the side, surrounded by an assortment of bottles and boxes, some half open. He hummed a light tune, but when he saw me, he dropped the pestle in the bowl, and his song turned into words.
“What are you doing up? Are you all right?” He came out from behind the counter, concern wrinkling his face.
“I’m fine,” I said, holding out a hand to forestall his hovering.
He glanced past me toward the windows, then hurried across the room. He peeked out one window and then quickly closed the shutters.
“What happened? Did I faint?” I asked.
“Collapsed is more like it.” Orlando frowned and returned to his work at the counter. “One moment you were standing beside me, and the next . . . you were gone. All of you. You vanished.” His voice trembled, shadowed with amazement and a little fear. “But just for a moment. Then you came back. You were unconscious, so I picked you up and carried you here.” He drew his eyebrows together. “Are you sure you are all right?”
“I’m fine,” I said again, but with less conviction than before. I hurried on, before he could call my bluff. “Is this where you live?”
Orlando hesitated, then shook his head. “Not anymore. Not for a long time. This is my father’s shop. I’m hoping that if the guards are still looking for us, they will have already checked here. We should be safe here. For now.”
I glanced at the closed shutters and nodded. “Won’t your father mind us being here?”
“Father always spends this time of year traveling to the other villages and towns to sell his wares and to gather supplies and ingredients. He shouldn’t be back for a couple of days.”
“Ingredients?” I asked. “Is he a cook?”
He smiled and another flash of memory burned. But strangely, it wasn’t a memory of Orlando, but of someone else with the same smile, someone whose eyes made me think of shadows and storms. Not a raging winter storm filled with ice and razor-sharp wind, but a summer storm filled with blown clouds skidding across a blue sky.
“No, my father runs this apothecary. He sells medicines, poultices, and custom blends for all kinds of illnesses, aches, and ailments. You were in pain; I thought if there was anything that could help, it would be here.” Though he waved in the general direction of the counter where he had been concocting some unknown potion, his blue eyes remained fixed on me, their expression hard as steel. “But clearly you’re suffering from something far more serious than headaches and exhaustion.”
“I . . . I had a bad dream.”
Orlando looked at me in disbelief over the bridge of his nose. “My brother used to have bad dreams. This is something different. Something more. You disappeared. What happened?”
I blew out my breath, trying to organize my thoughts. “I don’t think I have a simple answer.”
“Then be complicated.”
I picked at the seam of the cloak I wore. I didn’t even know where to begin. I barely understood what was going on myself, let alone knew how to explain it to someone else.
“Yesterday you said that you couldn’t remember your past. Is that part of it?” he prompted.
I nodded.
“So tell me what you do remember. Maybe that will help.” He led me to a pair of chairs close by the fire.
I sat down and leaned into the warmth, watching the flames dance to the crackle and spit of the burning logs.
Between the flickering motion of the fire, the heat, and the rare feeling of sitting still for a moment, I was able to open my mouth and let the words spill out. I told him everything I could think of, everything I could remember. It wasn’t much. And it made even less sense when I tried to string it together into some semblance of a timeline or a story.
Orlando listened to me intently, without a single interruption or pause for clarification.
When I finished, I leaned back in the chair, the sweat on my forehead not entirely from the fire’s heat. Exerting that much pressure against the dark block in my mind left me feeling like I had run a hundred miles. My head throbbed in time to my heartbeat.
“Can I have something to drink?” I asked. My mouth felt sticky and dry at the same time.
Orlando took a few steps and plucked the cup from among the jetsam on the counter. He handed it to me. “This should also help with your headache.”
“How did you know I have a headache?” I asked. The cup felt oddly heavy for all that it held no more than an inch of liquid.
“Because I have one too,” he said.
“Sorry,” I said. “I know it’s a lot to take in.” I sniffed at the cup, identifying a combination of rosemary and lavender. I took a sip. The liquid felt a little like oil on my tongue, but it was soft and cool sliding down my throat.
He watched me take another sip, a considering look in his eye. “May I ask you something?” He hesitated, waiting for me to nod. “How do you know Lorenzo? Do you trust him?”
My hand reached to my throat where my locket used to be. I thought hard about Orlando’s questions. Yes, there was a part of me that trusted Lorenzo—or at least thought I should. But the more I examined the dark part of me that told me I wanted to be close to him, the more false it felt. It didn’t feel real. It didn’t feel like me. It was a paper-thin want rather than a solid reality.
I remembered Lorenzo’s face when he asked me for my locket and his kiss that felt more like a bruise than a caress. I remembered the taunting sneer in his voice when he fought with Orlando. I remembered the darkness in his eyes when he broke the angel statue and left us behind to clean up the mess.
I clutched the cup in my hands until my knuckles hurt. “Do you?” I countered quietly, but curious. “He said you were both known as the Sons of Italy. He also said you should have stayed in prison. What was that all about?”
The blood ran from Orlando’s face, draining the blue from his eyes and leaving them gray. He lowered himself back into his chair like an old man.
His expression shuffled from anger to shame to resignation. “That part of my life is over,” he said quietly, looking away. “What’s done is done.”
I touched his arm and made him look at me. “Lorenzo said that too. What does it mean? What have you done?”
He thinned his lips to a hard line. “It doesn’t matter. But I don’t trust Lorenzo, and I know you shouldn’t trust him either.”
“I don’t,” I said bluntly. “Not anymore.” At my words, I felt like a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders. The darkness was still there in my mind, but perhaps not quite as dark as before.
I looked down at the cup in my hands. I drank the last drop, and while my headache disappeared along with the liquid, my heart still hurt—and so did my soul. I felt turned inside out and rubbed raw.
“So what am I supposed to do now?” I asked, not really expecting an answer. “When am I finally going to find solid ground again?”
Orlando was quiet for a time. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you want me to say. I don’t know if I have the answers you need. I’m as confused about what’s happening as you are. I have questions too.” He touched my wrist, applying enough gentle pressure to encourage me to lift my eyes to his. “And I hurt too.”
He did; I could see it in his eyes, in the creased flesh around his mouth. I could hear it in the sound of his breathing, in the space between his words.
“I feel like this is all my fault,” I said. Tears slipped down my cheeks, hot and salty; the back of my throat held the lingering flavor of rosemary.
“Oh, lady,” he said quietly, brushing away the tears.
His kindness only made me feel like crying harder. I felt a deep, unexplainable loneliness. The part of me that was struggling to break free from the darkness in my mind felt like there was someone else who should have been there with me. Someone who knew all the answers I didn’t, who knew the real me.
“It will be all right,” Orlando soothed. “We will be all right.”
“How? When?”
“Eventually,” he said.
“Oh, great. That makes me feel a lot better.” I scrubbed at my face with one hand, trying to force the tears back into my eyes.
“This is not your fault. Pain like this doesn’t last forever—it can’t last forever—and when it’s gone, you’ll feel better. We both will.”
“I’m tired of waiting,” I sighed.
“So am I,” he said quietly. He brushed away my final few tears and leaned back. “So maybe it’s time to do something about it.”
“What do you suggest?”
“I think we should play a game.”
It was perhaps the last thing I expected him to say, and my tears vanished in the wake of my small laugh. “A game? What kind?”
“It’s a game I used to play with my brother when he was little. He used to have bad dreams all the time, and when he woke up in the middle of the night, I would try to ease his fears.”
“By playing games?”
“Sometimes. Other times I told him stories. Or I gave him riddles to solve or poems to memorize. Anything to distract him and occupy his mind.”
“So what was this game?”
“We called it Impossibility. One of us would present an impossible problem and then we would both try to come up with as many solutions to the problem as we could. The best idea won.”
“And our impossible problem is . . .” I prompted.
“A girl has lost her memory. How does she get it back?” Orlando finished.
I raised my eyebrows. “And what is your solution?”
“She takes a magic potion and is instantly healed.”
I lifted my cup in his direction. “Sorry, that didn’t work. You lose.”
“I didn’t say it had to be a good solution—or even workable. The idea is to come up with creative solutions.” He gestured toward me with an elegant wave. “Your turn.”
Accepting his invitation, I folded my feet under me on the chair. “She finds a journal she kept and reads about everything she forgot.”
“Not bad.” Orlando smiled in approval. “But that’s assuming the girl kept a journal.”
“As opposed to assuming she could find a magic potion to drink, you mean?” I tilted a look in his direction. “I thought the only rule was creativity.”
“It is. Go again.”
I shook my head. “Not my turn.”
Orlando steepled his fingers and tapped them to his lips. “What about this?—the girl finds someone who recognizes her and has that person tell her all about her past.”
“How am I supposed to find someone who recognizes me when I don’t even belong here?”
“Interesting question. We’ll have to save that impossible situation for another round,” Orlando said with a grin.
I laughed. “And playing this game helped your brother sleep?”
“Actually, no, not very often,” Orlando said. “What did work, though, was when we’d come down to the fireplace, and I would brew up a warm drink for him to help him sleep.” Orlando nodded at the empty cup still in my hands. “He was particularly fond of Father’s special tea, too. Though when I made it for my brother, I always mixed in a wish.”
“A wish?” I repeated. A quiet memory chimed inside, a feeling of light and the taste of pink.
Orlando nodded. “He always took his wishes very seriously. He would stop and think for a long time about exactly what he wanted to wish for. And his wording was always exact—it wasn’t ‘I wish for happiness,’ but ‘I wish for the sun to shine tomorrow so that the flowers will bloom and make Mother happy.’” He shook his head in fond memory. “He was always more concerned about other people than he was about himself.”
“What kinds of things did you wish for?”
Orlando turned his attention to the fire, avoiding my gaze. “Oh, I never made a wish myself.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it was because I didn’t want to look at my life and see what was missing. Once you identify what you lack, then it’s all you see anymore. Wanting something I couldn’t have would only lead to unhappiness, so I tried to be content with what I had.”
“That’s terrible,” I said. “It misses the whole point of wishing. It’s not to focus on what you don’t have; it’s to show you what could be. Once you know what you want, then you know what to reach for, what to dream about. It’s how you change things.”
“What would you wish for, then?”
“A solution to my impossible problem,” I said without hesitation.
Orlando was quiet for a long moment. “What about this solution? Maybe if we go to the bank, and look back in the river, you’ll see something that will spark a memory, or even bring them all back.”
I bit my lip. My only solid memory of the bank was from my recent nightmare, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to go back to that barren wasteland again. What if the real thing was even worse? What if that angry girl with her cryptic warnings and threats was still there, waiting for me?
“It’s a creative solution,” Orlando pointed out. “Besides, it couldn’t hurt.”
“You don’t know that,” I retorted, feeling unsettled and off balance. “What if going to the bank is what is causing my memory loss?”
“What if staying in the river is making it worse?” Orlando countered. “You said that was one of the dangers of being in the river for too long—having it wash your mind clean. You also said that when we felt out of balance, we were supposed to go to the bank to find that balance again.”
“I said all that?”
He nodded.
I sighed. “All right. I’ll go. But promise me we’ll leave at the first sign of trouble.”
“There won’t be any trouble,” Orlando said with confidence, patting my arm.
But I wasn’t so sure.
Chapter 8
The bank was exactly as I had left it.
The river, however, was not. I remembered it as being a single flow of light an
d images, of time tumbling headlong from the past toward the future. Now, though, the light was dimmer, and I could see where a grayish film coated the surface in places, making it look polluted. Worse, a few faint silver lines had branched out from the main body of the river like threads fraying off a woven rope.
I looked at Orlando, but his eyes were closed, a furrow of pain crossing his forehead.
“Orlando?” I touched his arm and his eyes opened.
“I’m sorry, what did you say?”