The tornado touched down a mile away, near a highway overpass. It skimmed along an empty oat field, fingering a deep rut in the damp soil, searching here and there, then found a farmhouse, and blew it to pieces.
She had lied to Phil; she had a little money, after all. Years before, an uncle had left her ten thousand dollars in his will. She had met him just a few times, and Mary remembered him only vaguely-a pale, perspiring man, who smelled like peppermint and sat on her parents’ patio in the sunshine drinking glasses of iced tea. He was a butcher in California, but did not seem like one. Her parents had put the money in a savings account, earning a dribble of interest, but even so, it had grown to a little over fourteen thousand dollars in the six years since Uncle George had died.
She left Twig in the summer. Curtis had come back to get the rest of his things; Russell had moved back to his parents’ in Bloomington and, in the fall, was starting graduate school at the University of Illinois. The day before her departure she held a yard sale on the sidewalk outside the shoe store, and by evening all that remained were some stained kitchen pots, an asparagus fern, Russell’s broken radio, the Cu-tee-pie her mother had given her for graduation, and a card table of paperback books. In waning light Phil helped her carry the pots and the asparagus fern and the radio to the Dumpster behind the Norway, and with a fat Magic Marker she wrote a sign for the table of books: FREE, TAKE WHAT YOU LIKE. THE TABLE TOO. She left it where it was and awoke that night in her empty room to the sound of rain, fanning over the pages of her books.
She drove north the next morning, a hot, wet Sunday in July, beneath a sky the color of milk. The air conditioner in the Citation was broken, and she drove with a damp kerchief around her head, listening as the Minneapolis stations came in clearer with each passing mile. She had thought about leaving the Cu-tee-pie behind, but she had had enough of that, and it sat on the seat beside her. In Bloomington she stopped at Russell’s parents’ house and signed the title of the car over to him.
“I should pay you something,” he said, opening his wallet. They were standing in the driveway in front of the house. He had been mowing the lawn, and wet grass clippings clung to the weave of his shirt.
She brushed some grass away. “You already have,” she said.
She accepted a dollar, and the next afternoon Russell drove her from her parents’ house to the airport in the Citation. He had not kissed her since the evening of the storm. She knew that he would want to, but also that he wouldn’t know if this was the right thing to do or not. It was. In the busy loading zone, her suitcases piled at their feet, they kissed each other, taking their time. Then she carried her things inside and boarded her plane and flew away, through the summer night to Rome.
In the fall she wrote him a letter. She was in Florence, where she had been since September. She lived near Santa Croce, sharing an apartment with her cousin, who was a student at the same school where Mary was taking courses: a seminar on Dante, Italian language and culture, figure drawing. From her apartment, in the old servants’ quarters of a great palazzo, she could see through the buildings the dirty Arno, and below her the small piazza where sunlight pooled on the cobblestones and old men gathered to listen to soccer games on the radio. She had a boyfriend, an American she’d met walking in the gardens behind Pitti Palace, where she had gone with a sketchbook to draw. He’d approached her where she stood, looking at a sign displaying a map of the gardens and park, and asked in a halting Italian that made her laugh: “Dove siamo?” Dove siamo: Where are we? He was blond and tanned, and had a broad, happy smile, and didn’t look at all like Curtis, nor remind her of him. He loved to talk, to tell stories about himself and the places he’d been. He had been out of college a year, worked in San Francisco as a carpenter, and was now traveling with friends. She never got to meet them. The two of them talked on a shady bench in the park, and when it grew dark he caught a bus back to the hostel to retrieve his backpack, and stayed; and though she did not make love to him then, she soon did, and knew that she was cured. She was twenty-three years old, an American girl in Europe making love to a boy from Ohio who was funny and kind and had no plans for her at all; he would find an apartment, a job teaching English, they would travel together to Rome, to Venice for carnivale, to Greece when the weather grew warm; she was cured, her heart was cured. Dear Russell, she wrote,
Thank you for your letter, and congratulations to you and Laurie. Your news makes me happy, and if I am back in the summer, I will come to your wedding.
It is just a few months later, but already those days in Twig seem like a distant memory. Is it the same for you? The mail is slow here, and the phone is impossible, so I have heard almost nothing from home; so perhaps that’s the reason. But I also know that our year there was like no other-it was like a year outside of time-and I’m glad we were together, to know that it happened.
She wrote this in a coffee bar, late on an October afternoon. She told him about her roommate, and about her classes and friends, and the way the trains were always on strike and it was always warm; she wrote him of her life. When she was done she sealed it without reading it, bought a brightly colored stamp from the young woman behind the counter, and slid it into the postbox by the phone. On the busy street the sun fell over her, and for a moment she stood still, tasting autumn sunshine. She closed her eyes, hiked her bag up high on her shoulder, and that was when she felt it, one last time: the lightness. It blossomed inside her and widened, like the rings on a pond, suffusing every thought, and she knew what it was, that it was a child. Then it was a second, and then a third, so that she knew that in her life she would have three, two girls and a boy. Motorbikes sped past, laughing students, tiny weaving cars; but their voices, their eyes-all seemed far, far away. She knew that people had stopped and gathered around her; someone had taken her by the elbow, in case she might fall. She stood on the street, on the old stones of Florence, her eyes closed, one hand touching her chest where her heart was, and felt the spirits of each one of her children, not rising but falling; they came from above. Then a fourth passed through her-different than the others, for it was a presence of great hesitancy, both there and not there-and she knew who this was, too. Good-bye, she thought, good-bye, and she turned from everyone and hurried down the street of the ancient city so they would not see her weeping.