Chapter 2 - The Logic of Yellow Boots
The rain came on Thursday night, a cold, persistent downpour that swept in from the northern mountains and battered the slate roof of the estate for fourteen hours straight.
By Friday morning, the grounds were soaked. The twelve oak trees along the drive stood in dark, saturated pools of muddy water, their wet bark looking almost black against the grey sky.
Allesandro had slept poorly. His lower backached with a dull, persistent throb—a phantom pain that the doctors told him was merely his brain attempting to process signals from nerves that no longer functioned. He sat in his heavy mechanical wheelchair in the small library, a room lined with three thousand volumes of leather-bound Roman history and tax law that he had never read.
The door to the library was open three inches to allow the warm air from the central hallway stove to circulate.
At precisely 10:15 AM, he heard the faint, distinct squeak-squeak of yellow rubber boots against the marble floor of the corridor outside.
He did not call out. He did not move his hands from the armrests. He simply watched the narrow three-inch opening of the door.
A small, dark hand appeared on the carved edge of the mahogany frame. The door swung open another eight inches, and Lucia stepped into the room.
Today she was not wearing the red dress. She wore blue denim overalls that were faded at the knees, a white long-sleeved shirt with a small print of a strawberry on the collar, and the same yellow boots, now speckled with small specks of dried garden mud. In her right arm, she cradled a battered cardboard shoebox tied shut with a piece of blue wool yarn.
She looked at him.
Allesandro did not speak. He gave her his dark, formidable glare—the look that had once caused a mayor to rescind a zoning ordinance in less than twenty minutes.
Lucia walked in, entirely unbothered by the glare, and sat down directly on the Persian rug three feet from his wheels.
"Mama said I am not allowed to talk to you," she announced, her voice echoing in the high-ceilinged room.
Allesandro leaned forward slightly, his heavy dark brows knitting together. "If your mother told you not to talk to me, why are you sitting on my rug?"
"Because I am not talking to you," she explained patiently, as if explaining a basic rule of arithmetic to a slow student. "I am talking to Bernard."
She held up the blunt yellow pencil from her overall pocket, setting it carefully on the floorboards between her knees.
"Bernard says it is very wet outside today," she murmured, leaning down until her dark curls brushed the carpet. "He says the big tree near the gate is getting its feet cold."
Allesandro stared at the top of her dark head. "Trees do not have feet."
Lucia looked up, her brown eyes clear and exasperated. "The roots are their feet. Everybody knows that. They drink the mud through their toes."
"That is ridiculous," Allesandro growled.
"It is not ridiculous," she said, leaning back against the base of a bookshelf filled with eighteen volumes of 19th-century trade records. "Bernard knows about trees. He used to be part of one before they turned him into a pencil."
Allesandro opened his mouth to deliver a sharp, logical refutation of her absurd statement, but the words died in his throat.
He looked at her small, unconcerned face.
For six months, every adult who entered his presence had approached him with an invisible armor of carefully constructed behavior. The doctors brought clinical efficiency. The therapist brought professional detachment. His brother had brought calculating distance. The servants brought terrified submission.
None of them looked at him. They looked at the chair. They looked at his motionless legs under the dark grey wool blanket. They spoke to him in the careful, elevated pitch that people reserve for the terminally ill or the mentally unstable.
This child was looking at his eyes.
She did not look at his blanket. She did not ask why he was sitting in a mechanical chair instead of walking through the garden. To her, he was simply the large, dark-faced man who lived in the house with the twelve trees and allowed her pencil to sit on his carpet.
"What is in the box?" Allesandro asked, his voice slightly less harsh than it had been three minutes before.
Lucia’s eyes lit up instantly. She pulled the cardboard shoebox into her lap and untied the blue yarn with nimble, quick fingers.
"These are my collections," she said proudly, lifting the lid.
Inside the box were six objects resting on a bed of dry cotton wool: a remarkably round grey pebble, a shiny copper washer, a dried oak leaf that had preserved its bright red color, a blue plastic button from a coat, a small piece of green sea glass, and a broken metal key with three teeth missing.
She picked up the key, holding it out toward his hand.
"This is the key to the cloud house," she informed him.
Allesandro did not take the key. He looked at the rusty, broken piece of zinc alloy. "That is a key to a cabinet lock. A cheap one. Probably from an old filing desk in the cellar."
Lucia sighed, a long, dramatic sound that caused her shoulders to rise and fall inside her denim overalls. "You don't know anything about keys."
"I owned five security firms before you were born," he said flatly. "I know everything about keys."
"This key doesn't open doors," she said, holding it higher so the grey morning light from the window caught its jagged edge. "It opens the clouds when it rains too much so the sun can come out. I found it near the water pump behind the kitchen."
"It is rubbish," he said.
"It is not rubbish," she insisted, setting the key carefully back on its bed of cotton. "It is very important. If I lose it, the rain will never stop and the trees will drown."
She put the lid back on the shoebox, re-tied the blue yarn with a messy knot, and stood up. Her yellow boots made a small clack against the wood as she adjusted her overalls.
"Mama is finishing the dishes," she said, picking up Bernard from the floor. "I have to go before she finds out I was in here."
She turned and walked toward the door.
Just before she stepped into the hallway, she stopped and turned her small head back toward his chair.
"The third tree," she said.
"What about it?" Allesandro asked.
"His name is Barnaby," she said. "Because his leaves are big like elephant ears."
She stepped out into the corridor, her boots squeaking away toward the servants' staircase at the end of the hall.
Allesandro sat alone in the library for twenty minutes.
Then, slowly, with an immense effort of his upper body strength that made his arm muscles strain beneath his wool jacket, he turned his heavy mechanical chair around and rolled it to the window facing the drive.
He looked at the third oak tree from the left.
May you like
The trunk was thick, dark with rain, and near the first major fork, the bark split into a wide, curving shelf that did look—if a man were sufficiently foolish, uneducated, and seven years old—vaguely like the drooping ear of an elephant.
Allesandro Romano let out a low, rough breath that sounded almost like a laugh, though his face remained entirely stone.
