I waited below, my purse cradled between my legs, while Frank petitioned him about our finances. I took out some eyeliner and blush and examined my face in my compact. I regarded myself dispassionately. I regarded my virtues, my flaws. I have large pupils, unusually so, that give me a distracted look, as if I am too intensely in the moment and can’t see what is in front of me. When I was young, I’d been referred to the school psychologist. There’d been a death in the neighborhood, a boy I’d known—whom I’d kissed once, while Johnny watched from the closet. The school called a number of us in for trauma counseling after they’d found the body. Me, because of my eyes, that distracted look—I was asked to come back. The psychologist called in my mother.

“I can’t get under her,” the woman said.

“My daughter’s very beautiful,” said my mother.

“Yes, she’s very striking,” the psychologist agreed, “but that’s not what I mean.” The woman had questions about our family life, the men my mother dated, my relationship with my brother. My mother didn’t like these questions, but the psychologist persisted. The shrink was concerned about certain blank spots, emptinesses, memories I skittered around, dissociative tendencies typical of certain kinds of trauma. My mother sat with her purse. Not too long after this meeting, she transferred me to another school and sent Johnny abroad.

13.

We were in the thick of summer. Anyone with any sense had left for the ocean or the lake country. It was just Frank and I who remained, and the tourists sweltering in the ruins. Isabella’s body, meanwhile, remained in New York. There were delays—technicalities at the coroner’s office and other problems, too, having to do with the transportation of human remains across the Atlantic.

Frank wanted to go to the Palio.

“It’ll be awfully hot on the trains,” I said. “And crowded. And Siena—this time of year . . .”

“The heat’s worse in Rome.”