They’re probably upset because they wanted to get there first, but not only am I first, I’ve also got something they haven’t—and it’s something juicy. I wish you were around to puzzle over this stuff with me, the way you used to when you were a kid. I can still imagine the nine-year-old you, your straight black hair around your serious little face. Even then you had that laser focus; all you could see was the few fascinating inches right in front of you. I should have guessed you’d become a surgeon. For a while I thought you might turn out to be a historian like me, but you went for the knife instead. “Taking a history,” you doctors always say, in that proprietary way doctors have. We historians prefer to call it “borrowing,” since it’s not ours to take.
You’d love Siena, and it’s crazy that you’ve never seen the house. You should take a vacation and come help me with my little mystery. You don’t want to be in the hospital in July anyway when the new residents come and you have to teach them not to kill people.
It’s a great time to visit. The two Palios—the horse races that have taken over the city every summer for seven hundred years—are coming, and everyone is revving up for the event. We can read manuscripts together—medieval Italian is close enough to modern that you’d be able to manage. Good thing I took your Italian upbringing so seriously, right? There is no way that Beatrice Alessandra Trovato was going to grow up without learning how to speak and write her mother tongue. Maybe Dante was a funny way to learn it, but you can’t do better really.
Let me know. I’ll change the sheets on the spare bed just for you.
I love you, Little B.
Ben
* * *
After I got Benjamin’s letter I did something wildly uncharacteristic—I acted on impulse. It was after midnight when I finished reading, but I went online and searched for flights to Siena. The forty-eight-hour cancellation policy made me reckless, and I clicked on the “reserve now” button for an irresistibly affordable flight. Ben would be just waking up by now, so I picked up the phone and dialed.
“Ben, I bought a plane ticket. I’m coming to visit.”
“For real?”
“I’ll be there in three weeks.” I imagined Ben’s face with his habitual day’s growth of beard, receiver pressed against his ear.
“I’ll have to buy laundry detergent, but you’re worth it. Send me your details, and I’ll pick you up from the airport.”
“Great. And hey—I love you.”
“I love you too, Little B. Now go to bed. You have to get up soon.”
As I fell asleep, I imagined poring over old manuscripts the way we used to when I was a kid. But it didn’t work out that way.
* * *
I was orphaned for the second time a week later. The first time I had Benjamin; the second time I was on my own. The call from Ben’s lawyer in Siena came the day after I’d renewed my passport, and the strange echo of the international call made me hear every word twice. Once was almost more than I could bear.
There was no way I could have imagined Ben’s death—that moment when my one source of unconditional love collapsed into nothing and winked out like a dying star. Years before, when I’d first learned about Ben’s heart, I’d thought: I’ll go crazy if I lose him; I won’t survive it. But now that he was gone, now that I had gone from having a brother to having none, I did not go crazy. Or perhaps I did go crazy for those few seconds, as the world I knew tilted vertiginously sideways, and my legs slid out from under me. From the floor, I tipped my head back to look up at the haloed brightness of the hall light. One bulb is out, I thought, seeing the single bright circle where two should have been, how strange that I hadn’t noticed until now. One minute Ben had been there, and now he was not. Had I gone crazy, it might have lessened the agony of understanding the truth. But my mind did not allow me that relief.
* * *
The used bookstore around the corner from my apartment has served as my second home for years. It’s the kind of place that rarely exists anymore, with narrow aisles and big worn leather chairs where you can sit for hours getting lost in an out-of-print edition of some obscure writer’s first novel. I have the dubious distinction of adoring authors whose books are mostly out of print, so I spend as much of my little free time there as I can. That’s where I first met Nathaniel, who owns the bookstore and imbues it with unusual literary magic. Every time I go there I get lost in a book and look up hours later, having missed a meal, or the change from daylight to darkness. I’m cautious about who I get recommendations from, but Nathaniel knows how to pick a book, at least for me.
The first time I met him I was in one of those leather chairs, engrossed in a rare Jane Austen first edition, when a shadow fell over the pages. I looked up, blinking.
“Are you planning a purchase, or would you like to spend the night?” Nathaniel asked in his British accent. I felt the heat in my face as I leaped up out of the chair.
“How much?” He told me, and I sat down again, horrified.
“Why don’t you come back tomorrow and finish it,” he said. “Officially we open at ten, but you can knock at nine if you can’t wait.” That was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. I spent many hours in his store and, eventually, once we knew each other better, even more hours eating sumptuous meals cooked up by Nathaniel’s husband, Charles, a forensic pathologist with a deft hand in the kitchen and a wry sense of humor about the origins of his knife skills.
Nathaniel was the first person I told about Benjamin. I showed up at the front door of his shop at closing time on the day I got the lawyer’s call. Nathaniel had just bolted the front door when he saw me, but something about my face must have made it clear that he shouldn’t start our conversation on the sidewalk. He waved me in.
“My brother died and left me his house in Siena.” I said it all at once, before the words could retreat.
“Beatrice,” he said, and guided me gently to an armchair.
“I’m going to Italy. Will you take care of my apartment while I’m gone?”
“It would be my pleasure and privilege,” he said, his words formal but his eyes as warm as the hug I was not encouraging, though I clearly needed it.
“Thanks, Nathaniel, you’re my savior. Now I need some guidebooks.”
“Would you rather plan a trip than talk?” I nodded. He looked at me carefully, as if checking whether I was safe to leave alone, and then disappeared behind a tall bookcase. He came back with a pile of reading material on Tuscany.
“Try these,” he said. I leafed through them silently for a few minutes.
“There’s a lot to see in Siena.” I looked up from a color plate of Simone Martini’s Maestà.
“Indeed there is, Beatrice.” I was grateful he’d left the rest unsaid.
I kissed him on the cheek and left before I lost my composure entirely. I stayed up until 2:00 a.m. reading. Unfortunately, I had to wake up three hours later to operate on a tricky basilar aneurysm, but neurosurgeons are used to that.
* * *
An email from Ben’s lawyers arrived a few days later. I translated from Italian to English in my head.