A Hope for Emily

I was amazed that Rachel actually agreed for me to come, just as I was amazed that I even asked. We’re not friends—at least, we weren’t when I asked to come. Maybe we are now. But still, I’d met Emily once before Rachel said yes. And I don’t regret coming, not at all, but I still wonder.

I still remember, and I keep thinking what if.

What if I’d…

But I can’t bear to finish that question, much less answer it.

I’ve texted James every day that I’ve been here, just as I know Rachel has. It feels important to keep him involved, even as I wonder what the state of our marriage is. When I told him I was going with Rachel, he didn’t even look surprised. It was as if I’d already shown him my where my loyalty lay, and this was just another piece of proof.

“I’m glad she’ll have someone with her,” he said, which would have been kind except it sounded so defeated. He wasn’t angry anymore, or icily silent, just broken. And I continued to veer wildly between a terrible, penetrating guilt and an exasperated self-righteousness. All I did was try to help. But of course we all know where the best intentions lie.

I turn my gaze from Rachel to the view of the outside—a world full of summer seen behind a plate glass window. The sky is an achingly bright blue, so it almost hurts to look at it, and the heat radiates up from the pavement in visible waves. I feel trapped in here, but I don’t want to leave Rachel alone while she waits to hear how Emily responded. She always insists on sitting vigil through her treatment, even though it doesn’t do any good and I think it might irritate Dr. Rossi. He’s here to do an experiment as much as he is to make someone better, something neither Rachel nor I fully realized until we’d met with him on the first day, and he’d explained in full how this was all going to go.

“Rachel.” My voice sounds loud in the stale stillness of the room. She startles and then turns to look at me. “Why don’t we go out for a bit? Get some fresh air? This can’t be good for you.”

“But Emily…”

“You’re not going to be able to see Emily for hours,” I remind her as gently as I can. “And meanwhile you need to take care of yourself, for her sake. Recharge. Relax, if just a little.”

Her teeth sink deeper into her lower lip as she starts to shake her head. I struggle against a well-meaning exasperation, because I understand why Rachel feels she needs to be here. The possibility of missing something, anything, is too terrible to contemplate. But she looks both washed out and highly strung, and she needs a break. So do I. I wait, and after another endless moment she nods.

“All right… for a little while.”

I suggest we visit MAMbo, the Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, a clean, open space dedicated to “visual culture and experimentation”, and, I hope, a place that will take us out of the realm of hospital and hope, illness and uncertainty.

But as we are crossing Piazza Maggiore, a huge esplanade, the central square dazzling under the bright summer sun, Rachel pauses, her gaze fixed on a sign, and then she heads down a narrow street towards a large church on the Via Clavature, the Chiesa di Santa Maria della Vita.

“I love old churches,” she explains, and she heads inside. I follow her a little reluctantly, because I don’t love old churches. I spent enough time in them growing up—church every Sunday, first communion classes, the whole good Catholic upbringing. I stopped going in college, although I don’t think I ever stopped feeling guilty.

I stand in the nave of the church, next to Rachel; it is a beautiful, Baroque building, all marble friezes and soaring space. As we start to walk through it, we don’t speak; this church, like every other I’ve seen, is a sacred space, an expectant hush falling over it and us like a gentle blanket. Words would feel profane.

Rachel pauses in front of a Renaissance-style oil painting of the Madonna and child. She is beatific with her blue veil and distant gaze, a slight Mona Lisa-like smile curving her lips. The child is a rotund baby with a serious expression and dimpled rolls of fat, a rumpled loin cloth his only clothing.

Rachel stares at that painting with a fixed expression that is starting to make me nervous. She almost looks angry, or at least determined. I wonder what she is thinking while looking at that mother and child, and then I wonder what I think.

Why was she so lucky?

But then I remember what Mary must have endured—the death of her son, painfully and publicly at that. But at least she got thirty-three years with him. Is it wrong to think like that? Blasphemous, even?

Finally, after what feels like a very uncomfortable age, Rachel moves on. I want to get out of the church, back into the bright sunlight and the sultry air, away from the echoes of footsteps and hushed whispers. Away from mothers and babies, whoever they are.

But we’re not done yet, for Rachel pauses in front of an enclosed space that advertises something called the Lamentation of the Dead Christ. I don’t know what that is, but we have to pay four euros to see it, and Rachel hands them over without a word. Feeling anxious for a reason I don’t fully understand, I do the same.

The Lamentation of the Dead Christ proves to be—what a surprise—exactly that. Instead of a painting, however, it is a set of life-size terracotta sculptures—Christ lying on the ground, and six figures surrounding him, each with an expression of grief or pain on their face as they behold him.

The realism of the figures is strangely shocking, far more visceral than a painting—Mary’s fists are clenched, and another woman—Mary Magdalene, perhaps—has an expression of pain, almost agony, on her face, her clothes blown by an invisible wind. One of the disciples is silently weeping, his chin under his hand.

We gaze at the figures in silence; they transfix me, but they also make me want to run away. How can a six hundred year old statue speak so rawly into our own experience? Because I know that is what is happening here—these statues are an echo of the grief that is surely waiting for Rachel, if not now, then one day.

Sure enough, after several tense seconds she turns and walks quickly away from them, and I nearly trip in my haste to follow her. Rachel strides right out of the church and into the street; the sunlight is dazzling, blinding, and the hot air has a baked feel to it that makes it hard to breathe.

“Rachel…” I begin, and then don’t finish, because I don’t know she’s feeling or how to respond to it.

She shakes her head and draws a quick breath as we stand there in the street. “I shouldn’t have gone in there.” I try to think of something to say, but no words come. In any case, it doesn’t matter, because Rachel keeps talking. “Eva, I’m scared.”

I can deal with that, or so I think. “Dr. Rossi said it would take several weeks before he could tell if the treatment was working—”

“Not about that.” She shakes her head. “I’m scared I’ve done the wrong thing.” She turns to look at me, her eyes dark and full of fear. “I’m scared I shouldn’t have brought Emily here.”