Page 18 of This Vicious Hunger
“Your husband isn’t here,” Leonardo says, his eyes going to my wedding ring, “or you’d be in the base with the rest of us. Well, not me, not now, but you know…”
“No,” I say abruptly. “He died.” I watch his face as Leonardo carefully wipes his lips with a napkin.
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m not.” It comes out before I can stop it, but I soften it with a wry smile. I wipe my palms on my skirts beneath the table and fight the tremble in my chest. “That is—we were married only a few weeks. I miss him, but not the way you must miss your wife. Aurelio was… Well, he didn’t appreciate learning, especially in ladies. So while Iamactually sorry he’s gone—I’m not a total monster—his death has brought me here. And I like it here. New company, and learning.”
“Cheers to that, then,” Leonardo says, his voice full of false bravado. I can tell he wants to ask more questions, but politeness wins. He picks up his wine and clinks the glass against my water.
He finishes his meal with a flourish then, wiping the bowl with his bread. The ghost of his wife is gone from the table now, and I’m glad. Grieving is my bread and butter, but Leonardo is such a soft, gentle person, I don’t like the shadow it casts over him. I wonder if I have the same shadow—if it’s the shadow that all women wear until their hair grows back and they forget the dryness of Silence in their throats.
I look down at my hands, the same hands that held fast and unwavering for thirteen days; they’re still slick and shaking after talking about Aurelio. The glint of my wedding band reminds me, tonight, of him more than it does my father. I should take it off; I’d willingly slough off every memory of my husband, burn them all, if I didn’t think being visiblyunmarriedwould gain me more attention here than I already receive.
No, I don’t think my shadow is the same as those of other widows after all.
“Speaking of the campus”—I change the subject, pushing my bowl away—“do you know anything about the walled garden tothe east? I found it when I was out stretching my legs.”And I visited it again last night when I couldn’t sleep, but I don’t tell him that part. I’m already kicking myself for not asking Petaccia about it during our tutorial—but Leonardo is my next best option until next week. “I figure it must be part of the university, but I can’t find any information on it.”
“To the east?” Leonardo clears his throat. His eyebrows furrow slightly, a ghost flitting across his face. “Hmm, no. I’m not sure. I can do some research for you, though, if you’d like?”
When I meet his gaze, his brows are smooth again, his expression elastic—almost as if I imagined it.
Chapter Eleven
Iwake to the sound of paper being pushed under my suite door. It takes a moment to orientate myself; my dreams were full of the roar of burning, though I’m not sure now if it was my own—flames licking at the sides of a cradle designed by my father—or somebody else’s.
I slept with both sets of shutters open last night, hoping to stir the slightest breeze into the stuffy rooms, but the sun’s barely pinking the sky and the air is already soupy. I shake the dreams from my limbs along with the sleep as I shuffle to the door and pull the crumpled piece of paper from under it. It’s another note in Petaccia’s scrawl, familiar to me now that I’ve spent much of the last few weeks pawing through several of her messy notebooks.
Ignore lectures today, it reads.Come to La Vita. I’ll wait for you. Bring notes.
I puzzle over the letter for a moment, trying to work out what could have got her so riled up. Our tutorials are the highlight of my week and I’m often giddy in the hours that lead up to them, but they are normally like clockwork, more like mini lectures than the partnership she promised, and we’re not due to meet again until Friday.
Last week we spent the afternoon discussing pigmentation and photosynthesis. There’s a page in her notebook dedicated to how plants with darker leaves are able to produce the energy needed to thrive; some, she writes, are actually brown or red and have other pigments in addition to chlorophyll in their leaves that may mask the green to the human eye. The following page features a sketch of a plant with black flowers and dark, near-black leaves. In the margin she scrawledBlack eg. Nigrescens: protects itself by shielding chloroplasts against stress.
“She’s a genius,” I’d said to Leonardo afterwards. “I spent an hour just staring at that sketch. You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a plant with properly black leaves, but I don’t doubt they exist.”
“She wrote a paper last year, potentially from those notes,” Leonardo replied. “I’m amazed she lets you see the primary material. All I get from Almerto is proofing his papers as he’s writing them.”
“Right?” I gushed. “She wrote another one around the same time about toxicity in plants as a defence mechanism; what’s interesting there is the idea that there’s a tolerance level for animal exposure and how contact with intoxicating plant life can give extreme reactions at first, but with repeat exposure the level of tolerance builds—until it reaches a crescendo, at which point the body stops metabolising the toxins and the symptoms escalate. So plants that aren’t entirely poison, in theory, could be metabolised and tolerated, to a point.”
Leonardo was quiet at this, his face thoughtful.
“Honestly,” I said. “She’s making groundbreaking hypotheses as often as you or I make coffee. Do you think she ever gets tired?”
“Not like you or I do,” Leonardo replied with exaggerated remorse. “That’s why we’re the ones always making coffee.”
Discovery is invigorating, that much is true, so Petaccia must beup to something this morning if she’s posting notes under my door at dawn. I crumple the paper into the waste basket and get to dressing.
When I let myself into La Vita I barely have time to blink my way into the dimness before Petaccia is there, looming in front of me like a ghost. I jump and then let out a surprised laugh.
“You got my note. Good.”
“Have you been waiting long? I skipped breakf—”
“Don’t worry about any of that.”
I’m exhausted, limbs humming with tiredness after my restless night, but I nod anyway. There will be coffee today, and a lot of it. Petaccia drinks it near black most of the time, so thick it might as well be tar.
“I thought something was the matter,” I say.
