Page 25 of The Unraveling of Julia

She set her phone on the night table and was too tired to botherfinding her charger. She pulled aside the coverlet and sat down, then turned out the lamp, plunging herself into darkness.

Signora is ’ere too. The dead are always with.

Julia found herself looking around, for what she didn’t know. The bedroom was Rossi’s for fifty years. The woman had died in this very bed. The pillows made a faint whiteness against the dark headboard. If Rossi’s spirit would be anywhere, it was here. The screeching outside burst into sound, a weird animal noise.

Julia startled, jittery. She forced herself to ease back onto the bed, then lowered until her head hit the pillow. She started to pull up the coverlet but stopped. It was one thing to sleep on Rossi’s bed, and another to sleep between her sheets. She replaced the coverlet and lay down on top.

Julia eyed the Sforza family fresco on the ceiling. She couldn’t see any of the Sforza family except for Caterina, because the dim outline of her figure was life-size, lying opposite her.

A wave of fatigue swept over her. It had been an endless first day. She’d drunk too much Chianti. She’d cried in a vineyard. She’d found a pearl. She’d missed Mike so deeply, acutely, painfully. She had to sleep. She closed her eyes, beginning to doze.

A chill fluttered over her bare legs.

She looked up.

Two gargantuan, enraged eyes glared down at her from Caterina Sforza’s face, their gigantic irises glinting electric blue. The tree was growing bigger, its branches reaching down to her. The dragons in the coat of arms breathed fire. The vipers opened their fanged maws to eat her alive.

“No!” Julia jumped out of the bed in horror. She bolted away from the fresco.

She flattened her back against the wall. Her heart pounded. Shetrembled uncontrollably. The fresco roared to life before her terrified eyes. Branches zoomed this way and that, growing in superspeed, their wooden limbs sharpening into pikes threatening to impale her.

No, no, no, no.

Julia tried to scream. No sound came out. She shrieked and shrieked for help. She couldn’t utter a word. She fled to the corner of the room, quivering in fear, gasping for breath. Vipers snaked from the living fresco, hissing and hissing, more and more of them, growing heads after heads after heads like hydras, whipping them around, rolling black eyes, flicking long red tongues, and opening their mouths wider and wider, their jaws positively unhinged, showing the pink of their endless gullets and the ivory of their fangs snapping as they lunged toward her, their spikes only millimeters from her face, trying to devour her.

No, no, no, help me God.

Julia curled into a ball, reduced to a quivering child, crying and praying she wouldn’t be swallowed whole, stabbed, burned alive by the black dragons breathing fire into a larger and larger conflagration, spewing fireballs of red orange and gold at her, superheating her, scorching her skin, incinerating her very flesh. She screamed in pain and agony but couldn’t hear herself, and a white-hot sun glowing bigger and bigger and bigger seared her eyes, blinding her, and she covered her face with her blistering and blackened hands, her skin falling charred from her flesh, praying for the end to come, praying for death itself.

End this pain, end it, kill me now.

Julia cried uncontrollably, curled as tight as she could, tortured and dying, her body torn apart by the vipers and stabbed by the pikes and burned to an unrecognizable black crisp by the raging sun and finally her last breaths leaked from the scraps of char that used to be her lungsand the breath turned into air and then into ether and then into a blue light that vanished in the night.

Julia woke up in bed with a start. She wasn’t curled in the corner. She wasn’t burned or stabbed or bitten. She blinked, wondering if she was awake or asleep.

She looked around. The bedroom was beginning to lighten. The muslin curtains were pale yellow squares, as if it was dawn. Her eyes itched like she’d been crying. Her nose was congested. She didn’t understand. Had she cried in her sleep? Was that even possible?

She held her hands up in front of her. She could see them in the dim room, then fingers intact, her skin covering her flesh, her bones underneath somewhere, her body animated again. She was alive.

She looked up at the fresco. The blue eyes were back in Caterina’s face, her gaze rigid and lifeless. The Sforza tree was no longer moving. Its branches and limbs were two-dimensional, painted on the ceiling. The dragons and vipers returned to the Sforza coat of arms, a Renaissance frieze.

Julia realized she must’ve had a nightmare. She felt exhausted even though she’d just woken up. She was drenched with sweat. Her Eagles shirt stuck to her body.

The sheets were wet with perspiration under the coverlet.

She told herself to calm down. She knew she’d had a nightmare but it had been so real. She averted her eyes, afraid to look up at the ceiling, terrified it would come to life again. She’d never had such a harrowing dream in her life.

She squeezed her eyes shut, praying for the first time in a long time.

15

It was a sunny morning in Croce, and Julia had her appointment with Franco the realtor. She’d gotten dropped off by Piero on a perimeter road that held the realtor’s office, a bank, and a parking lot. She looked around nervously, but there wasn’t another person on the street. The density was so much less than Milan, and there’d been almost no traffic on the country road here.

It had been all she could do this morning to shower, dress, and eat breakfast like a normal person. The nightmare last night disturbed her to her core and made her feel more anxious than usual, even a little crazy, but she was trying to get it together for the day.

She crossed to Franco’s office but it wasn’t open yet. She checked her phone and saw she was twenty minutes early. She was curious about Croce but didn’t know if she could deal with walking around. She hated being so afraid and she had to be able to function. Plus she needed another espresso, since she hadn’t slept after her nightmare. Even her horoscope this morning unsettled her:

You never know what’s around the bend. Why would you want to?

---