Page 6 of Nantucket Reflections
She remembered what her grandfather had said about CAT.
This time, Alessandra had less time to prepare. In a notepad, she collected a few sketches before throwing her stuff in a bag and hurrying into the night. Since it was later in the season, there were even more tourists, people clinging to the last bits of summer, and she again had to wait till all the foot traffic had died to stake her claim on a wall near the church where her cousin Maria had just gotten married. (It wasn’t the church itself, of course. Alessandra would never graffiti a church. It was nothing her grandfather would have approved of.)
Again, Alessandra decided to create a mural of something that felt deeply personal to her. It was a mural that hinted at how little time we had as humans and how we tended to waste it on trivial things. As she worked into the morning, her eyes filled with tears as she imagined how little time she might have left, how she’d fought and struggled through every stage of chemo, how she had to be willing to keep fighting, for the sake of her family. How much strength did she really have left? She didn’t know.
This second mural was smaller and took a little less time than the last, which meant she was back in bed by six in the morning, before Federico got up. She managed to sleep for a few hours before Federico kissed her forehead and woke her up for their big day ahead. By ten, they were in the car, heading for the chemo clinic, and by the end of that evening, she was throwing up.Here we go again, she thought.
Alessandra’s only relief over the next few days was the articles about the brand-new CAT mural. She read them voraciously, eager to hear what people thought about her art, about her messages. It seemed that people were excited to speculate about who she was, more than anything, even more than guessing what she meant by what she’d painted. Tourists around Positano were taking photographs of random Italian women and writing in posts: “Is this CAT? Is this her?” She laughed when one of the photographs was of her great-aunt Tatiana, who was half Russian and eighty-five and sweeping a broom over the cobblestones near the shop she owned with her great-uncle Leo.
“It’s good to hear you laughing,” Federico said from the other side of the sofa, smiling at her. “What are you reading?”
“Just a comedy thing,” she lied, then kept swiping.
When Alessandra had a little more energy that weekend, her mother and father came over with an enormous feast, which she struggled to eat despite her mother's urging. It wasn’t like an Italian not to eat, of course. “I know it’s delicious,” Alessandra told her mother over and over again. “It’s just that my stomach isn’t up for it. It isn’t an insult to you, Mama!” This was hard for her mother to fathom, and it was also heartbreaking. Alessandra wanted to take her mother in her arms and console her, but it felt odd since her mother was technically here to do the consoling.
Her father had a few things to say about the muralist that weren’t exactly nice. “We run businesses here. We need everything to look clean, like an Italian dream or a postcard from Italy. Not like a graffiti artist can do whatever he wants.”
But her mother said, “We can’t paint over them. And darling, the tourists love them. You’ve seen how they take photographs.”
“And CAT is famous now,” Federico said. “There’s no denying that. If we get rid of CAT’s murals, the tourists may get angry with Positano.”
“We don’t want that,” her father said, his eyes on his pasta.
Alessandra had to bite her tongue to keep from laughing. It all felt so ridiculous.At least she still had a horse in the race of life, she thought. At least people were still paying attention to her, beyond feeling sorry for her. It was often hard for her to gauge how long she would still be alive, especially when she felt so tired of fighting. But this was enough for now. She swirled a bit of pasta onto her fork and forced herself to take a bite, watching her mother’s eyes shine with joy.
ChapterFive
Summer 2025
Nantucket Island
Greta finally gave Julia the strength to enter the dressing room and demand answers from the so-called CAT. She scooped Julia into a firm hug and muttered in her ear, “She feels surrounded, whether or not it’s her or someone else. As the publisher, it’s up to you to go in there and look her in the eye and feel what it feels to know her.”
“Do you really think I’ll be able to tell if she’s lying?” Julia asked her mother, suddenly unsure about her instincts. Hadn’t she accepted a book that very well might be full of lies? Was it possible that CAT had approached a number of publishing houses, and Julia had been the only one who’d agreed—because she was that naive and optimistic about her mission?
Greta’s eyes flickered. “You can’t let her leave before you ask her enough pointed questions to get a feel for what’s behind this.”
“But what if nothing’s behind this? What if the public turned on her because that’s what the public does?” Julia stammered. Her phone exploded with another set of notifications regarding book order cancellations and anger over CAT’s performance and arrogant speech. It was probably that they’d already lost another million in the past ten minutes. By the look on Nicole across the hall, this was a crisis bigger than either of them could fathom. Nicole’s upper lip was glossy with sweat. Would it have been better if they’d checked CAT’s speech before she went out on stage? Probably. But CAT had told them she wouldn’t allow any pre-checks, which had fit her brand of anonymity. Julia felt unstable on her feet.
Before she could stop herself, she grabbed the doorknob to the dressing room and went inside. All the air left her lungs. The woman, who called herself CAT, was sitting on the sofa with her leather legs crossed, staring into space, still wearing her sunglasses. She was as cool as a cucumber, and uninterested, apparently, in the chaos she’d caused. Her Italian accent was thick when she said, “I don’t know why you think you can keep me in here.”
Julia closed the door behind her and tried to smile. “Can I get you a glass of water?”
The woman didn’t flinch. Julia went over to the corner table and poured them two glasses with lemon, then sat down opposite CAT’s sofa. She needed another way to refer to this woman. “Can I ask you what you’d like to be called? What name would you like to go by? Other than, you know, CAT?”
The woman arched her left eyebrow and coughed. “CAT is good enough for everyone else, isn’t it? It’s the name everyone wants to call me by.”
“Yes, but in your book, you have a first name and a last name,” Julia said. “Do you mind if I call you by one of those?”
The woman chuckled and took a sip of water. Her fingers were long and slender and filled with brash-looking rings. “You can call me CAT like everyone else.”
Julia wanted to roll her eyes into the back of her head, but managed, somehow, not to. “Okay, CAT. Can you tell me why so many people turned on you tonight? Why does that journalist say you aren’t who you say you are?”
“Those people haven’t read my memoir,” CAT said. “You have. Why don’t you tell me why you aren’t doing your job?”
The air in the room felt sharp and without oxygen. Julia cupped her knees and told herself not to believe CAT, no matter how good her argument seemed to be.
“People on the internet are saying that you can’t be CAT,” Julia said.
