Page 23 of The Unraveling of Julia

Julia paused on the stone footpath at the cemetery’s entrance, holding a yellow iris that Anna Mattia had given her for Rossi. Her chest tightened with grief and respect for the dead, her own beloved husband and all the beloved husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, friends, and children. She’d never realized death could be so fresh, so near, and sopresent. Once you lose someone unexpectedly, you learn the truth. Death wasn’t necessarily far away, on the distant horizon or at the end of some actuarial table. Sometimes it was right in front of you, in your very next step. Waiting around the corner.

Julia felt a faint breeze and for some reason, found herself glancing over her shoulder. No one was there. Piero was waiting for her at the car, and they’d driven here in companionable silence. She felt lessafraid of being outside than usual, maybe because there was no crowd. In fact, there wasn’t another person in sight.

Graceful cypresses three or four stories tall surrounded the cemetery. Piero had told her that cypresses were always planted around cemeteries to ward off evil spirits. It struck her that the supernatural was a given here, as if Tuscany were a different world. She carried the pearl in her wallet like a talisman.

She walked down a center path of tan gravel, surprised by the difference between a Tuscan and an American cemetery. There were headstones here, too, but the full length of each grave was covered by a long marble slab or a walled bed of mounded ivy. Each grave was different; some held a vase of sunflowers or a statue of the Virgin Mary, and others a frosted glass candle or a glazed terra-cotta dish.

Each headstone bore a photograph of the deceased, and Julia slowed her step and took in the pictures. Some of the men and women wore hats with net veils, since the cemetery was that old. A few of them held pet cats or dogs. She realized that each of the people was looking at a camera held by someone they loved. The mourned was in the photo, but not the mourner. The mourner was left behind, like her.

A drizzle began to fall, and Julia turned and headed toward a stone building on the right side of the cemetery, which held crypts and cremains, Rossi’s among them. It had a red tile roof and was open to the air on the one side, with three archways.

Julia passed through the third arch, and the walls inside were lined with floor-to-ceiling crypts. Each bore a small brass plaque with the name of the decedent, and his or her dates of birth and death, with a photograph mounted in a gold frame. The only light came from the bulbs shaped like flames, which emitted a dim amber glow from the crypts, next to built-in glass vases that held plastic flowers.

Whoa.Julia gasped, stunned. She found Rossi’s crypt instantly byits black-and-white photo of the woman, riveted by the resemblance. She hadn’t anticipated there would be a photograph of Rossi on the crypt, much less that it would look like her.

Julia scrutinized the photo, double-checking to make sure she wasn’t imagining the similarity. She and Rossi both had blue eyes, smallish and wide-set, and there was a slight sameness in the nose, too; Rossi’s was longer, but it was small and fine-boned like Julia’s. Their mouths and jawlines were decidedly different, in that Rossi’s was large. Unlike Julia’s, Rossi’s lips were thin, and in the photo they were pursed, not showing her teeth. But Rossi looked unwell, her expression drawn, her cheeks gaunt. Her hair was pulled back, evidently gray.

Julia realized she could’ve been looking at the only blood relative she had ever seen. The prospect made her heart pound. She used to wonder about her birth mother and father, wishing she knew what they looked like, what their names were, and why they’d given her up.

On impulse, Julia touched Rossi’s photograph.

Zzzzzzt!An electrical charge shocked her. She jumped back, dropping her yellow iris.

The electric candlelight on Rossi’s crypt and all the others flickered, off and on.

What?Julia blinked, shaken. She didn’t know what was going on. She didn’t know why she’d gotten shocked. She hadn’t touched anything but the photograph.

The candles stopped flickering abruptly, then stayed on.

Julia looked around, trying to understand. Rain was drifting inside the building, covering the tile floor with a sheen of water. She put it together. The electrical candles must’ve shorted out somehow, and it must’ve shocked her.

Julia touched the photograph again. No shock this time. The candle stayed on, burning dimly.

Suddenly the strangest sensation came over her, a tingling, an almost imperceptible vibration was conducted from Rossi’s photograph to her, as if on a metal wire. In that moment, Juliasensedthey were connected, just like the night Mike died when sheknewsomething bad was going to happen. She felt she wasofRossi, that they shared a twisted skein of DNA, tethering one to the other over time and space.

Julia lifted her fingertips. The tingling vanished, like an electrical circuit broken. Meanwhile the crypt was darkening, and so was the sky, casting the cemetery in a premature gloom. It had begun to rain.

Spooked, Julia got out her phone and took pictures of Rossi’s crypt. She picked up the yellow iris and stuck it in the empty vase. The sky had blackened to a storm, as if heaven itself had fled.

She bolted from the crypt and raced back to the car.

14

Troubled, Julia headed to the kitchen, passing a dining room table with a ceramic plate with green, blue, and yellow swirls, laid next to green goblets and bottles of Chianti and Panna water. A matching bowl held thick slices of rustic bread, next to tall golden sunflowers in a glass vase.

“Hello.” Julia entered the kitchen, where Anna Mattia was grinding fresh pepper into a small tureen of hearty tomato soup that smelled pungently of basil, lemon, and cooked onion. “Wow, what’s for dinner?”

“Acquacotta, soup with tomat’, bean, onion, litt’ bit cabbage.” Anna Mattia smiled, setting down the pepper grinder. “You find Signora?”

“Yes, I saw her photo, too.” Julia’s thoughts had churned the whole way home. “Do I look like her?”

Anna Mattia placed a domed lid on the tureen, scanning Julia’s face anew. “Yes, a litt’. This is why I say you are family.”

Julia felt validated, which only intensified the mystery. “Did she have blue eyes?”

“Yes.”

“And what color hair before she went gray, do you know?”

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