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By Root 896 0

she was just about to move. But it wasn’t enough. Phoebe’s stomach would clench as she watched the familiar list-lessness steal across her father’s face, a glazed inattention his illness left him powerless to hide. Then the merciless exhaustion would enfold him and he would begin nodding off, pencil in hand. “Daddy,” Phoebe would say gently from her stool, and his eyes would jerk open, murky apologies at his lips, but he couldn’t shake the drowsiness, or rather, Phoebe couldn’t keep it off him. If he slipped away a second time, a sick panic would seep through her. “Daddy,” she would say sharply, “Daddy!”—hoping Faith would wake up, afraid something would happen to their father and the fault would be Phoebe’s. Because she wasn’t enough. In Faith’s presence alone was he safe.

“I was a bad subject,” she said. “Faith was the natural. She had motion in her face.” Why was she going on like this? She felt ready to cry. Wolf just listened, eyes on the road. “You think I didn’t know my father,” Phoebe said bitterly.

He looked at her, his face tense. “I think he should’ve had more patience.”

A painful silence filled the car. “Anyway,” Phoebe said, struggling to recover herself, “that’s not what I even was asking. I meant what did you think of the quality?”

“Of the paintings?” He seemed surprised.

She nodded. “As art.”

Wind yanked the smoke from Wolf’s cigarette. “I think he should’ve varied his subject matter.”

The road dove sharply. Before long they had left behind mountains and even foothills, moving past them onto flat, dull farmland. Phoebe melted into sleep thinking of Corniglia, where Faith died. Phoebe had circled it years before with a black felt-tipped pen in the atlas at home, a move she later regretted; it seemed blatant, undignified. But on the Michelin map of Italy she’d bought in Munich, the town was disturbingly absent. Corniglia, she thought. A tricky coil of a name—ideal, somehow, for a place no one could find. Her mother had been there, of course, right after it happened, but that journey seemed unreal to Phoebe. She had pounded on Wolf’s door, herding the giant crackling map to where he sat among his X-rays of curved teen-aged spines, which looked like cats’ tails when Phoebe held them up to the light. With his needle pen he made painstaking drawings of these crooked spines, taking hours sometimes to finish one. “Don’t worry,” he’d told her absently. “We’ll find it.”

“But how? It’s not even in my guidebook.”

“We’ll ask around, go to a tourist office if we have to. I was thinking we’d stay a night in Milan anyhow, otherwise we’ll hit that coast in the dark.”

“What if nobody knows?”

Wolf had stared at her. “Phoebe, it’s a place. It exists. We can find it.”

He’d laughed then, shaking his head, and Phoebe’s spirits had lifted. Laughter induced in Wolf a momentary helplessness, a flash of yielding she liked having been the cause of.

Phoebe woke after sunset, sore-necked, a warm wind on her face. The sky was frantic with color. She looked at Wolf, so gratified to see him there, driving, and found herself filled with a sharp, peculiar longing; it rolled through her body, leaving a pounding sensation deep in her belly. Phoebe lay still. She swallowed uneasily and tried to think of Faith, but her sister seemed far away, as if, rather than heading toward her as Phoebe had imagined, they had been driving the opposite way.

Wolf glanced over, smiled when he saw Phoebe awake. “Welcome back,” he said.

Milan gathered around them slowly, then abruptly, like Christmas. The streetlights were puce. Combined with the heat, their bath of steamy light gave the city a stagy, lurid aspect. Wolf parked on a quiet street and took their things from the car, refusing to let Phoebe carry even his own small bag. The smallness of it depressed her. This was all so temporary, their being here, so purely circumstantial.

“You’ve found a chauffeur who not only hauls your luggage but knows the cheap hotels,” Wolf said as they made their way under the gaudy trees.

“You’re hired forever,” Phoebe said, then blushed in the darkness. It