I Hold a Wolf by the Ears - American Short Fiction

Margot’s destination is a walled medieval village several thousand feet above Trapani, overlooking Punta del Saraceno and the Mediterranean Sea.

The village can be accessed only by a single road and as the taxi winds its way up through the arid copper hills, her phone chimes in her purse. It’s her sister, Louise, calling from the airport in Rome.

“I’m not coming,” she says, her voice dwarfed by the echo of gate announcements.

Louise is scheduled to attend a conference at the village’s Galileo Foundation for Scientific Culture. Margot works for an environmental nonprofit in Minneapolis and hasn’t been out of the country in years, but a month ago her sister’s husband announced he was leaving and there came her invitation to Italy, all expenses paid.

“What are you talking about?” Margot hunches over, presses the phone tight to her ear. The taxi passes a sluggish van on a blind turn; she’s thrown into the passenger door. There is no guardrail and for a moment it looks as though the driver is speeding them straight over a cliff.

Louise is a theoretical physicist. She studies quantum entanglements, particles that remained connected despite being separated by billions of light-years; she has spent her adult life, quite literally, on a different plane of existence, far from the world’s savage rot.

“I’m going,” Louise begins.

“We’re going,” Margot interrupts.

“I’m going to—”

The call drops, or Louise hangs up, before she finishes. Margot looks out the window and is startled to see that the taxi has completed its ascent and is now puttering through the village, the cobblestone streets curiously empty. She glimpses a piazza, a scattering of unoccupied café tables with navy umbrellas, a lotto, a stone church. The sky looks alarmingly low and then she realizes she’s not seeing sky at all but a descending fog.

At the hotel, the lobby is empty. A man named Filippo checks her in. He’s wearing a red polo shirt and jeans and a silver watch, a little too tight on his wrist; he has an impatient manner about him, a darting gaze. Margot gives Louise’s name, since her sister is the one who made the arrangements, and makes brief mention of her traveling companion having been delayed. Filippo requests possession of Margot’s passport. He needs to make a photocopy for their records, but at the moment the machine is broken.

“It will be fixed soon.” He drops her passport into a large leather envelope that looks like a purse, without even checking her information, just as well since the photo was taken in front of a bright white backdrop in some remote corner of a drugstore, in the terrible afterlife of a hangover. She watches him stow the envelope under the desk and thinks about how happy she would be to leave the woman in that picture behind.

The automatic doors gust open and a giant white dog gallops out of the fog. The dog lopes into the tiled breakfast area, toward a table with carafes of coffee and a platter of tan cookies. Filippo grabs a newspaper and chases the dog back outside, but not before the animal rears up in front of the table and snatches a cookie from the platter.

“No one around here eats better than the strays.” Filippo shakes the newspaper.

On the front desk, Margot notices a sign, a sheet of paper crooked in a frame, stating that tomorrow the road will be closed to accommodate the annual Time Trial of Modern and Historic Cars. The only way to leave the village will be by funicular.

“A race?” She remembers the steep climb to the village, the absence of a guardrail. “On these roads?”

“The Annual Enemy of the Restaurateurs is more like it,” Filippo replies. Apparently the road closure prevents tour buses from journeying up to the village and depositing their lunch-and-souvenir-hungry passengers into the streets.

“Is that why everything looks so quiet?”

He nods, adding that they’re also nearing the end of the tourist season. In October, a month from now, the hotel will shutter for the winter and the staff will have to find new jobs.

“And what will you do then?” Margot asks him.

“This and that,” Filippo says with a shrug.

He hands her a walking map. He tells her to deal with him alone because he is the only one at the hotel who speaks English. She climbs three flights of stairs to her room, where the twin beds are low and hard and the shower floods and there is the most spectacular view she has ever seen. The fog has thinned and a small balcony looks out onto Punta del Saraceno, a blue hulk in the dusk, and the sea beyond. Wheat-colored hillsides, the valleys flecked with gold. Headlights porpoise along the roads.

She tries Louise again, but her phone is switched off. She leaves a message and works hard to not let her anger break through. “I’m looking at the sea,” she says to the voicemail. “It’s beautiful here. Like heart-stopping, fairy-tale beautiful. Come.” Margot showers, ankle-deep in standing water, and then puts on a loose linen dress and a sweater. At the front desk, Filippo is having a hushed phone conversation; when he sees Margot coming down the stairs, he turns away, the cord winding around his waist, and speaks faster in Italian. Margot steps out into the evening, and she cannot remember the last time she walked streets so quiet. She notices plastic compartments embedded in the time-blasted stone walls, each housing an offering to a different saint. She looks up and finds the Virgin Mary entombed in an archway, her plastic case framed by electric blue lights. The great white dog, the cookie thief from the hotel, appears from around a corner and trots beside her for a little while.

She reaches for one of his silky ears and he darts away, down stone steps sloping in the direction of the sea.

In a piazza, she sits outside even though the air is chilly enough to make the hair on her arms go stiff, because she is in Italy and she has never been to Italy before and she wants to take in the sights, even if the sights presently include only a bakery and a freestanding bankomat. She is the restaurant’s sole patron. She orders a glass of wine and a plate of sardines. She eats too quickly, anxious about Louise’s whereabouts and what exactly her responsibilities are in such a situation. She hopes her sister just needs a night to get drunk on her own in Rome.

After she settles her bill, she tries to withdraw cash from the bankomat. Halfway through her transaction, the machine makes a terrible crunching sound and the screen goes dark and her debit card doesn’t come out. She jabs all the buttons, but nothing happens. Her wallet contains thirty euros and two overextended credit cards. A pressure builds around her mouth, under her eyes.

“You cunt,” she says to the bankomat.

She tries to call Louise once more, standing out in the cold as her sister’s phone rings and rings. This time, she does not leave a message.

On her way back to the hotel, she happens upon the Galileo Foundation for Scientific Culture. The foundation catches her attention at first because it is one of the few places in the village that appears to be open: a gold cone of light beams down on the heavy doorway, the wood studded with brass nubs, and the oval sign hanging over it. From the shadows, she watches the door swing open; a man in a dark suit and glasses steps into the gold cone. He ushers a couple in from the streets, speaking to them warmly in Italian. Margot glimpses people milling around in an illuminated room, open-mouthed and lifting glasses of wine. She smooths her hair, her dress, and approaches the man. She looks very much like her sister—the same height, the same wavy nut-colored hair, the same pointed chin—even as they are not identical (Margot has bigger feet, a tiny bump on the bridge of her nose). She will carry forward the plan that sprung upon her a moment ago and if he has met Louise before, if he refuses her claim, she will simply disappear into the night.

She extends her hand toward him and offers her sister’s name.

“Professor Allaway.” He clasps her hand. His skin is soft and warm. “Piacere.”

Inside she finds a table with laminated name tags. She picks up her sister’s and pins it to her sweater. She imagines Louise wandering the streets of Rome, no idea that Margot is currently roaming this reception under her good name. She eats fat green olives and salty cubes of cheese. She drinks three glasses of wine—even though, on the tarmac in Minneapolis, she promised herself she would not have more than two a night. Two and she is still herself. Two is civilized.

When she notices a man in a navy blue jacket staring at her from across the room, she hurries down a long hallway, vaguely in search of a bathroom. She makes a left, dead-ending into a dim corridor with an oil painting of green hillsides dotted with white sheep. There are other figures—a shepherd, an angel, she isn’t quite sure—in the background, but not enough light to see the entire scene clearly.

She hears footsteps racing up behind her and then a thick, starched cloth is bound around her eyes.

“Louise,” a man’s voice says. He has an American accent. He pulls the cloth tighter. He presses her to a wall. Her lips touch the cold stone. The man’s voice is right in her ear, his breath a blaze on her neck. “I’ve been trying to find you all night.”

The cloth falls away and she spins around. She can see the painting, the grazing sheep, over the man’s shoulder. He is holding a white linen napkin. He squints at her face and then at her name tag. His eyes are bloodshot, watering. He is very drunk.

“Louise,” he says again, as though he is trying to convince himself.

He slumps against her. She feels his erection through his dress pants. She has been celibate for the last six months, as part of an attempt to bring about a sense of spiritual well-being. This attempt followed a string of unfortunate one-night stands, culminating in a tryst with a man who worked for the Minneapolis chapter of the Sierra Club; she woke to him urinating in her potted philodendron and thought, I have got to change my life. She planned to quit drinking and dairy too, but had only managed to stay away from alcohol for two weeks, cheese for a month. She even went to a few meetings for the former and found herself disgusted by all that open, ravenous seeking, by the woman who stood up and spoke about how she believed in the basic goodness of human beings before going on to share that she had been raped while in rehab and that her ex-husband used to beat her with a tire iron. All those awful speeches, it was like watching a person who had been buried alive thinking they could talk or pray their way out. Optimism had never felt more deranged. We’re disgusting and stupid and weak, Margot had thought more than once, as she looked around that badly lit room. Let us suffocate under the earth. Let us all go extinct.

“Louise,” the man breathes into her hair, a little more sure this time, wanting to be. He begins to kiss her neck and she lets a hand drift across the back of his head. Her tongue is a stone in her mouth. Her arms feel heavy.

“Here?” he says, and she moves her head, not quite a nod but a gesture he takes as acquiescence. She tells herself that this is not her body but her sister’s, that she can be Louise for a little while longer.

The man unzips his pants. His hand dives under her linen dress, she feels his heavy fingers shoving aside her underwear, and then it is happening and then it is over.

After he zips up, he blots her forehead with the white linen napkin, which he has held on to the entire time. He says her sister’s name again, slurring the s, and then he takes a step back.

“Hey,” he says. “Wait.”

Without a word Margot gathers herself and slips down the hallway and out a back exit, the illuminated red sign a jolt of modernness in the otherwise archaic-seeming foundation. She emerges into a shadowed street, lights made milky by fog. She discards her sister’s name tag into a trash bin.

This is part of Margot’s problem, the way she can roll along for months and then be party to something so wholly fucked-up her sense of self is unsettled for a long time after, leaving her afraid of her own company, her own thoughts. Last winter, she went out walking in the middle of the night, for no reason that she could recall, and when the world came back into focus she was standing on the Stone Arch Bridge at sunrise, in a freezing wind, her lip split from the cold, her hands gloveless, knuckles skinned. She seemed to remember talking to people all through the night, there were so many people, but she had no recollection of whom she had spoken to or what had been said. And later, even though she had bathed and put on clean clothes and eaten a shriveled orange, her colleagues at the environmental nonprofit appeared vaguely alarmed by her presence when she reported to work. She kept thinking that she must have had some kind of look in her eye.

At the hotel, Filippo is still at the front desk, playing a game on his cell phone. The lights are bright in the lobby and she can see the bruised skin under his eyes, the tiny broken blood vessels around his nose. He looks very tried. She explains about the bankomat and her lost debit card—does he have any idea what she should do?

“Your card made a tasty meal,” Filippo says without glancing up from his phone.

“I’m sorry?” It occurs to Margot right then that she has yet to cross paths with another guest in the hotel. “Did you just say tasty?”

“Call your bank tomorrow.” He yawns wide. “They will figure you out.”

—

That summer, Minneapolis was haunted by a man who slapped women in the face in public. He did it outside the Franklin Ave. light-rail station and the Walker and the Soap Factory. Two women on Hennepin, less than a week between them. He would rush up to a woman, slap her with an open hand, and then run away. It took the police six weeks to find him. The fact that he did not stick to one neighborhood made it harder, they said; also he dressed like a jogger to make his running less conspicuous. For a time it felt to Margot like the slapper owned the city.

At the environmental nonprofit, some of Margot’s coworkers felt the fact of the slap made the situation worse.

“It’s humiliating to be slapped,” said Kiara, one afternoon in the break room. “Just fucking punch me in the face already.”

Emma, meanwhile, had enrolled in self-defense classes. Bianca had taken up with a neighborhood watch group comprised entirely of women.

“I dare him to come to our street,” Bianca said.

Two weeks later, the slapper would get Emma outside a bus stop. She’d planned to poke him in the eyes and then palm strike his nose, but when she saw that wide, flat hand take flight her arms stayed stuck to her sides. On the news, Margot would hear another terrible story about a woman who, as the image of a charging man swelled in her periphery, shoved her girlfriend into his path. It wouldn’t be enough for the slapper to terrorize women; he would make them turn on each other too.

On Margot’s walk to work, a route that left her feeling alone and vulnerable, she passed a sports store. Whenever she saw the window display with the blank-faced male mannequins in running clothes, her pulse surged.

“They should take those mannequins down,” she announced to the break room. “At least until this is all over.”

When the other women turned to her, brows scrunched, she realized her mistake: she’d spoken about the mannequins as though her coworkers had been privy to her thoughts. She was pretty sure they included her in these conversations only because she was a woman, and therefore a prospective victim of the slapper, even as they suspected she was somehow not quite on their side.

When Margot called Louise to tell her about the slapper, her sister advised her to spend more time at the public library. “All those things he doesn’t know,” she said, after Margot asked why this asshole would show any respect for the public library. “I bet he finds libraries very intimidating.”

Margot was standing in her tiny backyard, struggling to remember the last time she got a decent night’s sleep. “Don’t you ever want vigilante justice?”

“Vigilante justice is rarely as satisfying as people think. Auribus teneo lupum and all that.”

Louise paused and then added, “The last bit was Latin.”

“I gathered,” Margot said, and then told her sister that she needed to go.

She hadn’t asked her sister to explain the Latin because that was where Louise was most at home, explaining complicated and arcane things to other people. When she looked up a translation online, she remembered that Louise had answered with the very same phrase when her twin daughters were newborns and Margot had asked how motherhood was going. I hold a wolf by the ears. She’d understood the phrase to mean something along the lines of—there is no easy way out.

—

Margot falls asleep with the balcony door open, to the sound of dogs barking and motorbikes stalking the night, and wakes at noon to find the hotel wrapped in the densest fog she’s ever seen. She can’t make out the hillsides or the sea and the land has been overtaken by a terrible buzzing. Through the glass panes of the balcony door, she watches the wind blow the fog around like smoke. The road race has begun.

She tries Louise again. Her voicemail is full. Five minutes away from calling Sam, she texts, and then phones her bank’s twenty-four-hour helpline. According to customer service, there is nothing to do but cancel her ATM card and have a new one mailed to her in Minneapolis.

It’s early in Boston. Her sister’s husband, Sam, has moved into his own apartment in Cambridge, near the river. Her nieces like the place because he has rooftop access. They can watch the rowers practice; they can see the Prudential. Sam is a trained historian who has never finished a book. He hails from New England money and is the kind of person who looks good in gym clothes. Margot suspects Sam has never understood her chronic unease, her relationship to difficulty—he who can drink all night with louche grace and never wind up sobbing at the dinner table or vomiting in the guest bed. He who thinks changing your life is as simple as, well, changing your life.

He doesn’t answer and to his voicemail she begins articulating a plan that she has not, in any way, rehearsed. She says that Louise is missing and she is going to Rome to find her. She mentions a friend of Louise’s who lives in Monti; she tells Sam this friend has offered to help and so at this stage she does not require anything from him, nothing at all. She is just doing him the courtesy of letting him know that his wife has gone missing in a foreign country and that the whole situation will soon be under control. As she talks, she imagines tracking her sister through grand Roman piazzas, down winding streets, and over stately bridges. She longs to feel capable.

The friend in Monti is real. Margot remembers this person from Sam and Louise’s wedding, a decade ago—a tall woman with heavy eyebrows and an emerald brooch pinned to her black dress. Oh, Margot thinks. What was her name?

She opens the balcony door, to let in some air. The hillsides are white and shapeless in the fog, the roads still buzzing. A siren breaks through the race cars and then a powerful wind slams the door shut. She surveys the clothes strewn around her room. The bra splashed across the tile floor, the sandal at rest on the nightstand.

“Today I’ll go to Rome,” she says before hanging up. “I’m very nearly packed.”

—

I’m afraid your passport has been misplaced,” Filippo tells her in the lobby, after she informs him that she’ll soon be checking out. He appears to be wearing the exact same clothes as yesterday. The red collar of his polo is crinkled, the back tail untucked.

“It doesn’t matter,” he adds.

“It doesn’t matter that you lost my passport?” Margot is incredulous.

“You can’t leave today.” He points at the road race sign. “I’m taking the cable car.”

“The funicular is closed, due to high winds and fog.” “I think I’d like to speak to a manager,” she says.

“Why! I am the manager.” Filippo claps and laughs, as though she’s just told a very funny joke.

Nothing she is saying seems to be imparting a sense of urgency.

“My sister is missing,” she tries. “My sister has gone missing in Rome.”

Filippo frowns. “You told me she was delayed.”

“That was before I knew she was missing!”

“Did you hear that one of the cars went over a cliff?” Filippo rubs the face of his silver watch. “The car was demolished, of course. The driver was thrown through the windshield and landed in the arms of a tree. He broke seventeen bones but stands an excellent chance at staying alive.”

“My sister’s husband just left her.” Margot feels like getting on her knees. She feels like a stiff drink. “She could be having a nervous breakdown. She could be suicidal.”

“A miracle,” Filippo says, smiling.

—

That afternoon, Margot rushes out into the sloped streets, the cobblestones slick with condensation. She wants to see for herself that the funicular is closed. In the village center, she smells ginger and almond before she spots the bakery sign. She peers in the window and discovers an elaborate display of marzipan: ducklings, baskets of pears, round red apples. The centerpiece is a marzipan lamb, remarkably lifelike and reclining on a bed of fake grass.

She crosses the village, passes through a tall iron gate, and takes a dusty path down to the funicular station: shuttered, just as Filippo said it would be. She watches empty black cars bounce on a still cable; even from the cliffside the roaring race drowns out all other sound. In the distance, she notices a red blossoming in the hillsides, almost like a chain of explosions; the wind ferries over the scent of smoke. Something is on fire.

She climbs back up to the central piazza, with the card-swallowing bankomat and the marzipan-crazed bakery, and follows the sound of the engines down a hooked street, past young men in black aprons offering menus outside vacant restaurants, even though it’s late in the day for lunch. At the base of the village, a flat stretch of asphalt has been transformed into a parking lot for Italian race cars. Large black numbers are pasted across the passenger doors. Men in satiny racing costumes lounge by their cars, or stand together in small clusters, talking and smoking cigarettes. Some of the cars are so small it’s hard to imagine a grown man folding his body inside. Margot sits on the edge of a low stone wall. The fog is gossamer-thin down here, and she feels exposed.

The wind lifts a red scarf from one driver’s neck, a man with a small paunch and a silver beard, and sends it down the road; he chases after it, hands outstretched, a bit awkward in his racing costume. A man in street clothes bends down and intercepts the scarf. He holds on to the scarf for a moment before returning it to the driver and then, perhaps as a gesture of gratitude, the driver gives this man a tour of his car. He lets him sit in the driver’s seat. He shows what’s under the hood.

It takes Margot several minutes to realize that she’s watching the man from the foundation, the man who mistook her for her sister in the corridor and pinned her to the wall, who never let go of that white linen napkin. She watches him grip the car’s small black wheel. She watches him crawl out and shake the driver’s hand. He looks around and around, surveying the landscape, and then his attention snaps back in her direction and sticks. She stands slowly from the wall, her palms scraping the stone, and the moment she rises, the moment her knees straighten and her lungs expand, he dashes away into the fog and she chases after him.

She scurries up a stone walkway, her back to the racing cars. The path is very steep; it is leading her to something. Through the gusting fog she sees the man slip into a squat marble castle. The structure resembles a chess piece, a rook. Margot shoves open a glass door and flies past a woman in black jeans and a white T-shirt, holding out a brochure for a tour.

“Venus bathed in milk,” the woman calls out. “I can show you where.”

Margot leaps up a short flight of steps and into a courtyard, the soil lumpy with rock. At first she thinks she’s stumbled into an ancient graveyard, with all the stone fragments, some marbled with orange lichen, jutting from the earth—and in a way she’s not wrong, given that the courtyard is filled with ruins. Just ahead she spots the man weaving through the fog. She has no idea what she will do when she reaches him, what she will say.

She corners him by a well, marked by a shallow impression in the earth.

“Who are you?” He’s wearing slacks and a houndstooth sports coat. He grabs himself by the lapels. “What have you done with Louise?”

“Who am I?” Margot says, her heart aflame. Her mind flashes back to those faceless mannequins in the sports store window and to Emma dutifully practicing her choke holds and palm strikes, nurtured by the belief that preparation could save her.

Her left arm swings away from her body, as though possessed, and then she feels the base of her palm crash against his nose.

A sound like tires over gravel.

She has no technique, nothing but brute rage on her side; the pain is sudden and immense, a flaming band around her wrist.

The man stumbles forward, toward Margot, as though he might faint into her arms. Blood gushes from one of his nostrils. His lips are coated in it. He brings a hand close to his face and then his fingers flutter away.

“I’m Louise’s sister,” she says, even more unsure of what to do now.

“My god,” says the man.

Right then the woman in the white T-shirt and black jeans comes running into the courtyard, waving a brochure and saying they owe fifteen euros for visiting the ruins, doesn’t matter if they took the tour or not.

“Something has happened.” The man touches his cheekbone and winces. He spits blood onto the ancient soil.

“Fifteen euros.” The woman points a brochure at him, then marches back inside.

“I don’t have any money,” Margot says. “The bankomat ate my card.”

He stares at her for what feels like a long time, the blood slowing to a trickle, and then takes out his wallet. She roots around in her purse and hands him a napkin. He twists the paper into a cone and pushes it up his nostril. Perhaps it is this exchange, reciprocal in nature, that makes it possible for them to leave the castle together and walk back into the village center, in total silence, that is until he turns to her and asks if he can buy her a meal, a drink.

—

Margot has always wanted to be the kind of person who can become too distraught to eat, but the truth is funerals make her hungry. They pick the first restaurant they come upon. By then it’s early evening, although the fog makes it feel later. There’s a cover for sitting outside, in the chill, so they take an unsteady table in an empty grotto. He sits with his back to the wall, the paper tail of the cone dangling from his nostril, blood crusted to his upper lip. The waiter lingers on his face while delivering menus, then returns with a thin stack of paper napkins and a glass filled with ice. The man glances down at the glinting cubes, but does not make a move.

“Don’t you want to clean up?” Margot asks.

“Not particularly,” he replies, and she gets it: he wants to make her look at the damage. In the well-lit restaurant she detects new details—the dawn of a receding hairline, the high arch of his eyebrows, twin bridges. Something about his eyes, deep-set and arctic blue, and the stubble darkening his cheeks gives him the look of a person who is exhausted in a way that sleep will not cure.

She goes to the bathroom and splashes cold water on her face. She hears birds chirping. She looks all around, thinking a bird has flown into the bathroom and gotten trapped, only to realize the restaurant is piping birdsong through the walls.

When she returns, the man is finishing a martini. Margot remembers his glazed eyes when he accosted her at the foundation and it is something like comfort, to sit with another drinker right now, to not have to pretend to be different or better.

She asks for a martini too and the least expensive pasta dish, one with tomato and mint, forgetting that he’s already offered to pay. The man orders another drink and the veal.

“You were impersonating Louise,” he says. “Do you have plans to blackmail me?”

“It was only a name tag.”

If she had cried out her right name, what would have happened? Would he have straightened her underwear, lowered her dress? She isn’t so sure. She finishes her martini and orders another.

“Where is Louise?” he says next.

“Gone,” Margot says. “Missing.”

Their food arrives. She eats a bite of pasta, cooked in a broth that tastes beautifully of seawater. She wants to drink from the bowl. She decides she will treat this meal as an interrogation, root out whatever he knows about Louise. She will take all the information she wants and offer nothing in return.

“She’s gone missing and I have to find her.” Margot pauses. “What can you tell me about my sister?”

He raises his fork, a clump of veal stuck to the tines. “We fuck.”

“Did you meet at a conference?” She takes a drink, holds the cold in her mouth.

“What else are conferences for?” A blade of accusation in his voice, as though anyone who attends a conference event should be prepared for whatever happens there.

“I think she might be in Rome,” Margot says. “Do you know anything about Rome?”

“Do I know anything about Rome?”

“She has an old friend in Monti, or she used to. If only I could remember a name.”

“I’m afraid Louise and I don’t spend much time in conversation.” They’ve both emptied their cocktail glasses, leaving behind a twist of lemon, a cool shimmer; he orders a carafe of wine.

“Are you a physicist?” she asks.

“Berkeley.” He fishes an ice cube from the glass and presses it gingerly to his nose. “You?”

Margot explains about the environmental nonprofit. “Aha,” he says. “A do-gooder.”

“It’s a paycheck.” Already she’s too buzzed to be completely dishonest. “The Earth is dying and we are too late to save it.”

“An optimist too, I see. Maybe you should teach self-defense lessons instead.”

She remarks that there might be a market for such lessons in Minneapolis, given that all summer they were menaced by a man running around and slapping women in the face.

The man opens his hand and a sliver of ice slides down his palm. He hunches over in his chair, hangs his head. His shoulders tremble inside his houndstooth coat. At first she thinks he’s crying and is alarmed, ashamed—but no, he’s laughing.

“It took a long time for the police to catch him.” Under the table she feels her fingers curl into her palms. She feels her voice get big. She imagines her words shaking the laughter right out of him. “You could never let your guard down. Not for one moment.”

He looks up. His eyes have that sheen again. The grotto is still empty, no sign of their waiter even, though Margot can hear activity in the kitchen, the hiss of steam, the clank of metal.

“You got slapped,” he says. “So you slapped me.”

“I never got slapped,” she says. “Leave Minneapolis out of this.”

“Then what possessed you?” He used the lip of his glass to gesture at his bruised face.

“You know what.” She hadn’t protested in the shadowed hallway—that was true. She had felt overwhelmed by the sheer gravitational pull of the moment: the weight of his body pressed against hers, the slur of Louise in his wet mouth, her failure to find the words to explain that she had taken her sister’s name for the night, even though the explanation was, in hindsight, quite simple. She had just wanted a warm room and a few free drinks and a little revenge on Louise for leaving her alone out here; she hadn’t considered what playing the role of her sister would require of her and hadn’t that been her first mistake, to not imagine the twisted and dangerous side paths she might find herself on should she veer off course. At the same time, she knew she was lucky that something like this hadn’t happened sooner, given the nights she had stumbled through, scarcely aware that she was still on planet Earth. She looked at the man sitting across from her and wondered when he had last felt the euphoria of having been spared.

He picks up the carafe and slops more wine into his glass. “Do I?”

“Why else would you run away from me?” Margot knows he’s trying to derail her, to throw her onto a different scent. She begs herself to not fall for it.

“So what will you tell your sister? You can’t possibly be planning on the truth.”

“What will you tell her? That you couldn’t see the difference between her and another woman? That you didn’t want to?”

“Like I said, we aren’t big on small talk.”

“Well,” she says. “I can’t tell her anything until I find her.”

He slurps his wine, narrows his arctic eyes. “You want your sister’s life. Is that it?”

She shakes her head. “No.”

He pounds his fist on the table. “Why else would you impersonate her!”

It’s true what she’s saying, that she has never desired Louise’s life. All she wants is to feel like she isn’t being destroyed by the world, even as she doubts she has any right to feel destroyed at all—she has a job and a place to live and she hasn’t even been slapped! She’s long believed her sister, her brilliant and effortless Louise, figured out the trick—and it’s only now, sitting in this damp grotto across from Louise’s bloodied lover, that Margot is awakening to the depths of her wrongness, to how much she has missed.

There is no telling where Louise is right now and she can see this man has no intention of helping her.

She stands, her chair clattering, and in the bathroom she vomits into the toilet, to the sound of artificial birdsong. In the grotto, she finds that the bill has been paid in full, as promised, and that the man is gone, his white napkin slung over the back of his chair.

—

Outside Margot is unsteady on her feet. Night has fallen; the goldish eyes of the streetlamps are pressed against the smoky fog. She can no longer hear the racing cars. At long last, silence. She feels something silky brush against her fingertips. The tall white dog trots past, pace brisk, ears alert—as though he is hurrying to keep an appointment.

Her mind feels mercifully blank, her muscles loose.

She wanders the village, gets lost in a tangle of dark, narrow streets, has a few more drinks in a restaurant, this one crowded with drivers in their satin racing costumes. She is heading back in the direction of the hotel when she sees a familiar man cross the central piazza and slip into the bakery, even though the sign on the door reads chiuso. Through the window she observes Filippo handing a leather envelope to a young woman in an orange faux fur jacket that swallows up her shoulders. Margot squints at the envelope, large and purse-like, and feels a clutching in her stomach. Yet when the young woman unzips the envelope she pulls out not a passport, but a thin sheet of paper. She disappears into the back and returns carrying what looks to be an enormous cake on a white cardboard sheet, covered in a red gingham cloth. Filippo peeks under the cloth as he talks to her, his free hand rising and falling like an orchestra conductor’s, though Margot can’t make out his words.

She takes a seat at a wrought-iron café table in the piazza and waits. The café itself is closed, the table lit by a single streetlight.

When Filippo steps outside, holding the cake, he pauses and looks both ways, like he’s preparing to navigate a busy street. Margot calls his name, her voice cutting through the darkness and fog. He crosses the piazza and carefully sets the cake down on the café table.

“Oh.” His face is pinched with disappointment. “It’s you.”

“Were you expecting someone else?”

He lights a cigarette and exhales skyward, looking even more tired than he had at the hotel. The single streetlamp illuminates one side of his body, leaves the other in shadow.

“What do you have here?” Margot imagines sinking her hands into a soft, sweet cake. She imagines giving herself, and then Filippo, a mustache made of icing.

Filippo lifts the gingham cloth and she sees that the cake is not a cake at all; rather it is a giant marzipan lamb, rendered in extraordinary detail: the white curls of fur, the seashell-pink color of the inner ears.

“Next week the hotel is hosting a wedding reception.” He flicks his cigarette into a thicket of shadow. He sits down. “The bride will want to inspect the marzipan.”

In the piazza, her head swimming as it is, the future feels like a fiction, a point on the continuum that’s been bundled in fog and pushed out to sea.

“I have to go to Rome,” she tells him. “I have to find my sister.”

“The race is over,” Filippo says. “I’ll call you a taxi in the morning myself.”

“I can’t go anywhere without my passport.” She has no idea where the closest U.S. embassy is located. Trapani? Palermo? “Did you take it? Are you going to give it back?”

“I suppose you’ll find out tomorrow.” He unclips the silver watch and places it on the table. He shakes out his wrist. “Do you people ever consider the possibility that none of you have anything that we want?”

She stares down at the lamb’s polished hooves and silvered snout, its round white belly. The longer she looks the more bloated the belly seems, so pink and swollen that if she found a knife and cut it open something alive would tumble out.

“This looks very real.” With her fingernail she taps a marzipan hoof.

He tells her it is not enough for the lamb to look real—it must look at once like a real lamb and like something sprung from a dream. It must have a certain aura. That was what separated the marzipan amateurs from the masters, the ability to create the right aura.

“An aura,” Margot repeats. Once a coworker at the nonprofit told her that she had an unsettled aura about her. She closes her eyes and is visited by a disembodied hand holding a white linen napkin. The hand shakes the napkin like a matador luring a bull.

Her eyes snap open. She sniffs the air and catches a hint of smoke.

“The hillsides are on fire,” she says.

“The firefighters only get paid if there are fires.” Filippo pulls the gingham cloth over the lamb. “So they start the fires and then run around putting them out.”

She hears a rushing sound and then the white dog gallops across the piazza, leading a pack of a dozen—no, two dozen, three dozen—strays. She watches the leader fling its massive paws into the night, white fur rigid as armor. Some dogs run in a long canter, others in a chop. They make her want to get down on all fours. They make her want to go fast and far. How do she and Filippo know that they are not just living inside a dog’s dream?

“Louise,” Filippo says.

She clutches the iron arms of her chair. It is a terrible shock, that name. She remembers walking through the automatic doors of the hotel, feeling jet-lagged and bewildered by her sister’s garbled call. She remembers setting her suitcase down at the front desk and saying Louise.

She looks down at the silver watch on the table, the hands clocking the changing hour. It is nearly midnight.

Through the cloth she strokes the marzipan lamb’s fat belly. “My name is Margot.”

“Margot?” He frowns. “Who’s Margot?”

When it happens she thinks, For as long as I live I’ ll never forget this sound.

In the village, all the church bells begin to ring. In the hillsides, the dogs howl.

Laura van den Berg is the author of the story collections What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us and The Isle of Youth, and the novels Find Me and The Third Hotel, which was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. She is the recipient of a Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Bard Fiction Prize, a PEN/O. Henry Prize, a MacDowell Colony fellowship, and is a two-time finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her next collection of stories, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, will be published by FSG in July. Born and raised in Florida, Laura splits her time between the Boston area and Central Florida, with her husband and dog. | You can preorder I Hold a Wolf by the Ears here.