The Blind Contessa's New Machine by Carey Wallace Page A

of surprise and sympathy. “I am so glad you were wrong,” she said, as she had the first time he had told her.
    With great emotion, he had taken her hand in both of his.
    No word had come yet from him today. The little storm soon blew itself out. When the slim rivers in the driveway had grown still, reflecting the white sky, Carolina rose and went out.
    Turri stood at the water’s edge, soaking wet, his thin shirt sticking to his skin in large patches.
    “You could have gone inside,” Carolina called.
    Turri glanced back at her and grinned.
    “Have you been swimming?” she asked when she reached him.
    He shook his head. “I was studying the rain.”
    “What did you learn?” she asked.
    The sun was still hidden by a thin haze that covered the whole visible sky, but even from there it burned bright enough to make the water on his temples shine.
    “I was sleeping on the bank,” he said. “I woke up when it started to rain. I sat up to go to the house, but then I thought, I wonder what I’ll see if I just lie here and look up?”
    “What did you see?” she asked.
    “Rain,” he said, grinning again. “And then it gets in your eyes, and you can’t see anything.”

    Turri didn’t ask about her absence, and she didn’t mention Pietro to him, although it was impossible that he hadn’t heard the rumors. Instead, they flipped her rowboat upright and pushed out onto the lake together, Carolina at the oars and Turri sprawled in the bow. His damp clothes dried as the sunlight burned off the remaining clouds. Carolina let the oars drift, hypnotized by the thousand ways the forest changed each time the boat swung a breath to the right or a breath to the left. Finally the sun broke free from the clouds completely. As she raised her hand to shield her eyes, she realized she had no sense of how much time had passed. Suddenly wide awake with worry, she rowed the few strokes back to land and then, at Turri’s request, pushed him back out onto the water again.
    When she returned to the house, a servant told her that Pietro had already arrived, and that her mother had taken him to the greenhouse. Her father had built the glass structure on the back lawn when Carolina was seven, again over the objections of his exasperated gardener, so that her mother could always have the southern blossoms she remembered from her youth. Today, the glass panels were still fogged from the rain.
    “Carolina!” Pietro exclaimed, as if she were a ship returning from an indefinite journey.
    “Where have you been?” her mother asked, a note of warning in her voice.
    Carolina paused in the door of the humid room. On their damp wooden tables, lilies, freesia, and a gang of waxy orchids waited for her answer. “I went to the lake,” she said. “Turri has been investigating the rain.”
    “Turri?” Pietro said broadly, as if helping a friend to set up the punch line of a well known joke.
    “They have been friends since she was a child,” Carolina’s mother added quickly.
    “So have I!” Pietro said, soldiering through the joke himself since nobody else had chimed in. “He filled the river with soap bubbles when we were boys. All the reeds were choked with foam. I saw a red finch fly off with a bit hanging from his beak, just like an old man with a beard.”
    He paused, listening for laughter, and seemed surprised, as he so often did, to find that the crowd he had been speaking to had dwindled again to just the two women who had been in the room with him when he began. When neither Carolina nor her mother spoke, his face clouded. Then an explanation seemed to come to him. He strode quickly through the plants, took Carolina’s hand, and kissed it. “When will you take me to your lake?” he asked.
    Because she could not imagine this, Carolina did not answer.
    After a moment, Pietro smiled indulgently. “That’s all right,” he said. “It is better if sweethearts keep some secrets.”

    The following weekend, as a small choir of