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“Tell me about your favorite day,” Izzy repeated. “What was your best day ever?”
Cassie thought about the question, gazing out the window to the snowy world, cradling Mr. Webber’s book in her lap.
“I tell you whatwasn’tmy favorite day,” Izzy said, interrupting Cassie’s thoughts. “That day on the Greyhound.”
“Oh god.” Cassie groaned and smiled, remembering the trip she and Izzy had taken to Florida several years earlier to visit Izzy’s cousin. The two of them had spent almost twenty-four hours together on a Greyhound bus to Miami, alternating between terror and hilarity at theevents they endured. “Remember that man who smelled like he went to the toilet on the bus without leaving his seat?”
“Oh, don’t remind me,” Izzy said, covering her mouth as if she wanted to be sick.
Cassie turned her mind to better days. She remembered when she was much younger, days in the house she grew up in, just her and her grandfather, or just her and a book, but she wouldn’t talk about those. Those memories were too precious. She thought instead about the traveling she had done before she had moved to New York, after her grandfather had died. She had taken a trip to Europe by herself, partly to grieve and partly to work out what she wanted to do with her life. She had backpacked from city to city, mostly by herself but occasionally making friends: a handsome German boy in Paris, a young Japanese couple in London. There had been a couple of middle-aged Dutch lesbians she had met in Rome whom she traveled with for a few weeks because they seemed to think she was innocent and in need of protection. Cassie had promised to keep in touch with these people but never had. They were walk-on parts in her life. Although they were lost to her now, those people and those warm, sunny days across Europe were among her happiest memories.
“I remember when I was in Venice,” Cassie said.
“Ooh, Venice,” Izzy said. “Nice.” Izzy had never been out of the country, but she had often spoken about going back to Italy, to where her family originally had come from, talking about it in the way people speak of dreams that they know will never really happen.
“I was staying in this hostel,” Cassie said. “And I had the room to myself. Just nobody else there, not at first. It was run by this middle-aged couple with young kids. They were so nice. I can’t remember their names now...” She thought for a moment, searching her memories but coming up empty. “But they treated me like a daughter.”
Izzy rolled her head to the side, resting it on the back of the sofa as she listened.
“The street I was on,” Cassie continued. “It was a narrow, cobbled street with all these yellow and orange buildings with big wooden doors and small windows with shutters. I’d probably never find it again if Iever went back there. Well, there was a bakery across the street, and I’d sleep with the windows open because it was so warm.”
“Mmm, warm is nice,” Izzy said, sounding sleepy.
“And in the morning, I’d wake up to the smell of baking bread and pastries.” Cassie sighed at the memory. “Just the best smell in the world. And you’d hear the locals talking and laughing as they met each other. The coffee shop at the end of the street would put out tables and chairs, the waitstaff clattering and banging even though it was early, and all the locals would stop by for a cappuccino on their way to work or whatever.”
“I want to go to Italy,” Izzy said.
“Every day I’d jump out of bed and run down the stairs,” Cassie continued. “The property had this big old wooden door. You’d open it and the bakery was right across from you, usually with a queue of people waiting to buy whatever they needed.”
“I love bread,” Izzy murmured. “Can’t eat it. Goes straight to my hips. But I love it.”
Cassie ignored her, caught in the net of her own memory for a few moments.
“I’m going to put this away,” she said, nodding at the book in her hand. “And I’m going to make a coffee or something, otherwise I’ll be asleep before you.”
“I’m not sleepy,” Izzy said, with her obviously sleepy voice. “It’s a lie.”
Cassie smiled and pushed herself off the couch.
She was remembering Venice again, thinking about the coffees she’d had at the café on the corner, the crusty bread she’d eaten for breakfast, and as she reached for the door to the hallway she felt a shudder, a moment of oddness where the world seemed to tense and release within her.
And then she opened the door and found herself gazing out onto that small, cobbled street in Venice she remembered from her holiday, quiet and dark and glistening with rain.
Venice
Cassie’s brain did a backflip and asked her what her eyes were playing at. Then her mouth fell open in disbelief.
There was a world where her apartment hallway should have been. There was cool air and moisture and the slightly damp, fresh smell of a different place. There was darkness, but it was closer to light than the snow-filled darkness of New York City.
In front of her, in the bakery she had visited during those days in Venice, a light came on, punching a hole into the drizzly gloom. She watched as a man moved about inside, a blurred figure beyond the rain-streaked window, and she realized that this wasn’t a picture she was looking at—this was moving, this was real!
“Oh my god,” she said, astonished.
“Are you coming or going, babe?” Izzy asked, in a world that still made sense. “Close the door; there’s a howling wind going right up where it shouldn’t go.”
“Izzy,” Cassie said, in a voice that sounded very far away. “Come here.”
In Venice, in the bakery that shouldn’t have been there, the man beyond the glass was taking off a dark coat, walking through a doorway at the back of the store to hang it up somewhere.
