One Thing Stolen Page 3

  I unlock the door, crack it this wide, slouch into the hall, shut the door. Lock it. Jack stares at me through the shag of his hair, plays with the Skullcandies that he wears around his neck like a choker.

  You building a bomb or something? he says.

  I shake my head.

  You at work on government secrets?

  Could you—not?

  Look at you. He leans toward me and pulls a strand of tassel thread from my hair, flicking it back and forth, like a pendulum. He tells me I smell like a factory. That I’ve been locked in my room since yesterday, and now it’s nine-thirty a.m. It’s the Day of Chives.

  Down the hall, Mom watches with her at-risk eyes.

  So? Jack says. You coming?

  He goes into his room. Comes back with his Lunar Sprints tied on—silver and yellow. He grabs his keys and some euros from the dish that Mom and Dad keep on the counter—his Almost Independent Study account. I don’t know what is next, where I am going, what will happen soon, if Florence is still raining petals, if this day will be less strange than the days that have come before, if the boy is out there.

  Coming, I manage, and Jack wrinkles his nose.

  Talk like a human being, Nadia.

  10

  Lunch of the day: Sugo di peperoni e formaggio caprino. Ingredients: chives and peppers, cheese and pasta. Destination: San Lorenzo—river of leather and silk and chutney and spice. The high-in-the-sky birds circle the lantern of the Duomo. Jack hurries ahead. I lose him and find him and lose him, and there he is, with a fat sack of stuff in his hands and a funky look on his face.

  What?

  The splendiferous beauty of spices, he says.

  He turns back, looks over his shoulder. In the back of his jeans, rising up from the pocket, is a dash of green feather, the color of limes.

  I lose him, I find him again.

  Jack?

  We walk and the streets are broken. We walk in the shade, but sometimes the sun. We go down thin streets to wide streets and cross streets, and we reach the square and stop. This is the Piazza della Signoria. These are the crowds. Huddling by the fountain. Standing in the arcade. Sitting at the tables of the outdoor restaurants. On the upper floors of the Palazzo someone has left the windows open and I tip back to get a look at the ceiling frescoes, the tapestries, the stones, the wax, the painted flying birds, stuck in their brushstrokes. I tip back to breathe and think of Maggie and me, on our backs at Clark Park, looking up at the sky after a picnic. She’d brought snapped peas and zucchini bread. I’d brought peanut-butter-loaded Tollhouse cookies. It was a good day. We were half asleep. A squawk of hawks flew by.

  Did you see it? I asked her.

  Absolutely, she said, and now she was singing Penn’s Quaker song, and I was singing, too:

  Come all ye loyal classmen now

  In hall and campus through,

  Lift up your hearts and voices

  For the Royal Red and Blue

  Fair Harvard has her crimson

  Old Yale her colors too,

  But for dear Pennsylvania

  We wear the Red and Blue.

  We were best friends. The hawks were actual. She saw what I saw. I wasn’t crazy.

  Jack switches his sack to his other shoulder. He looks toward the elevated stage, where boys and girls are sitting on folded chairs, pulling instruments from cases, blowing air through oboes. They test their horns and saxophones. They whisk the skins of drums. A conductor in white shoes, jeans, and a blue T-shirt raises his baton. The crowd lifts its arms like periscopes. Cameras click. It starts—Beethoven’s Fifth—and we are caught in it. Sewn into the crowd.

  I watch the Palazzo Vecchio through its open windows, the birds in their brushstrokes. I look at Jack, that smile on his face—MasterChef, the splendiferous spices. The kids on parents’ shoulders clap and my mind goes in and out, lost and found, a strange and terrible beauty, and I remember another day with Maggie, in West Philadelphia, the two of us taking photographs of glass, reflections of glass, glass through glass, shattered glass, glass shattering.

  Snap.

  I hear a shout from across the piazza and turn.

  Everything is now.

  Cesare! Ladro!

  It’s the boy running like a blaze touched off, the boy on the far edge of the crowd. I swear it. See? His bright hair zips. His pink duffel roars. He is fast, blinding, turning the corner on the crowd. He turns again, and now when he looks back over his shoulder he smiles so specifically at me, then takes off for the river—past the Palazzo, past the Uffizi, in through the dark tunnel of the scaffolding ahead. I hear his bootlaces slapping the stones. I see the bright faces of purple dahlia in the open space of his bag. I stand and it’s all over, it’s done, it’s not my fault or doing—my body pushes straight through the crowd. Something falls, topples, cracks. Something. Someone. My shoes run through the shadows of things. They slip in the scaffolding tunnel. They hurry across the stones of the street, through the honking of cars, through somebody yelling at me.

  The boy is near. I am not crazy.

  But when I reach the bridge there’s nothing in the face of the river but a girl looking down: me. There’s nothing except two dahlias on the ground. Dahlias, I think, for me.

  What the hell, Jack says now, breathless, running up behind me. What the freaking hell.

  Didn’t you—

  Didn’t I what? he demands.

  See?

  What?

  Him.

  Who?

  Him.

  Don’t do that, Jack says. Seriously, don’t.

  He yanks my arm, stops talking. Nobody talking to no one.

  11

  She just took off, Jack’s saying. Running. Wouldn’t turn around. It was crazy. She was.

  Is it true, Nadia? Mom asks. What your brother says?

  Not—

  Excuse me?

  Not just—took—off. The words like glue.

  Dad is walking in circles. Mom is sitting with tea. Mom is standing up, then sitting down, and Dad keeps going. Into the kitchen, out of the kitchen, along the streamers of Vitale ivy. The girl from the third floor is playing the piano and now she’s clopping around in her stilettos and Jack is flopped across the living room couch, until he gets up and unpacks his bag and starts washing the peppers, cutting them lengthwise, scooping out the seeds. He opens up Marcella’s book, turns to a page, leans in. He looks up and across the room and back at me, thinks something, doesn’t say it, raises his knife, chops one thing after another, square and even.

  Even though your brother asked you to stop, Mom says. Even though you were knocking into people, could have been knocking into cars, could have hurt yourself, could have hurt others. Running after nothing.

  Not—nothing.

  Jack cuts the peppers into strips. He throws some butter into the skillet and chases it with garlic. He stirs, mad and quick, and looks up and shakes his head. Keeps stirring.

  Two times in two days, Dad says now.

  Two? Mom says. This happened twice?

  I’ll explain, Dad says. Later.

  No, Mom says. Explain it now. I need the facts, Greg. What’s going on?

  I didn’t want you worrying, Dad says.

  What part of this am I not already worried about? Mom says, her voice so suddenly still that it frightens me more than anything she could yell. What part of this have we not already spoken about? What else is there?

  Jack adds the peppers to the garlic butter. He flips them over, stirs. Mom looks from Dad to me, turns the earring in her ear, and except for the sizzle of the peppers and the garlic, the room is shush, and no one is talking, and I have nothing I know how to say. The boy was there. He left me flowers. They are hiding here, inside my sweater. I can’t help what Jack can’t see.

  Lesson of the day, Jack says, very quietly, is chives.

  Chives, Dad repeats.

  I want to apologize. I want to say it won’t happen again, but you were there, you saw, didn’t you? There was a boy. He smiled. I ran. He left me flowers. He vanished. Jack didn’t look up in time to see.

  Say it, sweetie, Mom says.

  But I can’t say that I can’t say. Which is one more terrible thing.

  12

  They eat without me. They leave me here, in the borrowed room, with the ship of steals and these sweet, dropped flowers, these things I’ve seen, these words I would say if I could speak them.

  Listen to them.

  Listen for me.

  Not like her.

  Some kind of phase?

  I shouldn’t have brought you all to Florence, we should have—

  What else haven’t you told me?

  Nothing.

  What do you mean: mesmerized?

  You’ve seen her.

  But what did she say when you asked her?

  She said . . . she didn’t say . . . You hear how she talks. You know what it is. Hardly at all, and then like molasses.

  Yes, but.

  I’ll talk with her, love. I promise.

  Gregory, I’m frightened.

  I want to tell them everything.

  I am afraid of everything.

  Give me the words so I can save them. Save me.

  Far away, and closer, they talk. All around, in circles. It is the Day of Chives. It is Jack’s phone ringing, and doors opening and closing, and the upstairs stilettos, and now I hear Dad coming down the hall, his one side heavier than the other, and when he knocks on the borrowed door and I don’t answer he does not walk away. He stands there, on the other side, saying nothing.

  Tell him for me.

  Tell him what I mean.

  Please.

  13

  The moon sinks into the belt of clouds. The waiters, the cooks, the girls, the cigarettes, t
he bookbinder are sleeping. Even the girl on the third floor with the stilettos is sleeping, but I’m not sleeping, and my lungs are full of glue, and my fingertips are bleeding, but see, see what I’ve made, see who I am, explain me to me.

  I wove dahlia stems into the bowl of the nest. I used the dahlia blooms as buttons. I saw the boy. He left flowers for me.

  Beautiful.

  Strange.

  Outside the clouds are like snow. They are like back then, in West Philadelphia, another night in Maggie’s room. Maggie’s singing Joan Baez, a whisper. Her cashmere dress is mopping the floor. She has big hoop earrings on and a boy’s tie like a bandanna, and her eyelashes are broom-bristle thick. Dance, she’s saying, but I’m quiet and still on her beanbag chair, quiet and almost still, spaces between the thoughts in my head, and I am watching Maggie.

  Maggie’s style is Second Mile Style. It’s the stuff she’s rescued from the thrift shop four blocks down. The beanbag chairs that are lemon and mango and orange. The macramé banners hung over the foot of each bed. The shoe box in the closet where Maggie puts the accessories she has named for me: the Nadia choker, the Nadia beads, the Nadia feathered earrings. The two nameplates on the door that Mrs. Ercolani hammered in—M and N—like we’re blood sisters, maybe even twins. Mrs. Ercolani is Maggie forty years from now, her red hair with stripes of white in the front, her eyes bright, and her happiest stories about the places she’ll go, the places she hasn’t been yet.

  Hey, Maggie says. She’s dancing. She’s on the braided rug letting the vinyls spin on her Philips portable. She puts the needle down on Earth, Wind & Fire and rides the “Mighty Mighty” and now she’s singing into the pokey end of her hairbrush and pulling me up with her free hand. I feel the bump of the song in my bones, the high rise of the old funk, the easy “Mighty Mighty,” and the angel with the beeswax feet is dancing in her strings, her wooden knees clapping. Maggie touches her fingers to the angel’s feet. She throws open the big-sash windows and lets the snow fall in. It’s a snow-globe drift. It piles up on the sill and against the rug and Maggie sticks half her body into the night, puts her tongue out to taste the weather.

  Through the open window the snow falls and the wind howls, and it’s cold; the angel’s dancing. Don’t move, I say.

  What? she says.

  I have a plan.

  I leave Maggie in her room, the snow piling up near her feet. I go down the stairs, past the big front windows, where the snow falls faster, plentiful and silent. It is erasing the streets and the sidewalks. It is frosting the bare branches of the trees and blanketing the gutters and all up and down the streets the lights are on and West Philadelphia is snow-cold amber. In Maggie’s dungeon basement, stalactites drip and the washing machine rumbles and everything is damp, and at last I find what I came for—a length of rope. I take the steps up two at a time, find Maggie still singing, dig out extra mohair sweaters, one each. I unhook two striped scarves from Maggie’s closet, dig out two pairs of thick socks, hand Maggie one, and all this time, she’s just standing there, watching me, letting the snow fall into the room, a funky smile on her face.

  WTF, she says.

  No questions.

  We pull on our boots. We’re down the steps, out the door, we’re calling to Maggie’s mother, We’ll be back, and now I tell Maggie not to move; I have a surprise, close your eyes. From the alley I pull a lid from an old trash can. I tie it to the leash of my rope. I blow some heat into my cotton-gloved hands, and the snow is so new, my boots sink in deep.

  You sit, I pull, I say.

  She raises one eyebrow.

  Climb on.

  She eases down. The snow deflates, lets out a crunch. I snap the rope and Maggie is thrown back and now forward, keeping her knees to her chin.

  Some plan, she says.

  Past the community garden, toward the edge of the Penn campus, between the towers, over the bridge and down Locust Walk. I pull and Maggie sits—the snow beneath us, our trail behind us, the snow falling. At the compass I turn toward Spruce and the massive Quadrangle dorms, where the street tilts and the building rises and from within the vast interior courtyards we hear the sound of snowball fights, laughter. Maggie’s red hair has turned white. Her mohair shoulders and arms and the bottom of her dress are white. Her boots are white and she’s disappearing into the night and the snow tumbles in and I see all this through crystal stars that have set between my lashes, through the melting of the night.

  Then is now. Now is now. Everything is vanishing. Everything is disappearing. The new moon above Florence hides behind the belt of clouds and the first drops of rain have begun to fall, making splatters in the alley, leaving splashes on my cheeks. Somebody is crying. Through the open window I lean as far as I can and wonder what Maggie would think if she could see me now, what Maggie would do to save me, if anyone can save me.

  14

  Breakfast, Dad is saying. You awake? I hear him knocking on the door, sighing. I hear him rapping again until finally I open my eyes and everything is smudge and shadow and glue. Memory is steam. Dad’s down the hall. I open the door, and there he is—his big linen shirt cuffed uneven at the sleeves and his khaki pants crooked at the seams. He has an apron on. It’s a minute or two before he sees me, and when he does, he looks fake easy, like he’s trying casual on and it doesn’t fit him.

  Breakfast, he repeats.

  I slip into the chair across from his. I cup my hand around the mug of hot chocolate already on the table, and there are split places in my fingertips, cracks in my hands. I think of the dahlia nest, and the snow and the sled and the lamps in windows. Focus, Nadia. Dad piles French toast onto two plates. He grabs butter from the refrigerator, syrup, two forks, and he looks like a clown act, off balance, but nothing falls. He slides our plates into their places. He hands me a fork. He puts the syrup and the butter down between us.

  Never made them so good, he says, about the only dish he’s ever mastered. Eat some.

  His tundra hair is sleep-smooshed. His glasses are crooked on his nose. He takes a sip of his own hot chocolate, cuts a triangle of sopping French toast, and lifts it to his mouth. Chews. Swallows.

  Your turn, he says.

  He says he has a new angle on his flood. Says Mom has made some progress with Amir. Says something about the lady across the street and something about the dog upstairs and something about a book he’s read, and something about the weather, and now as Dad talks I am five or six or seven, and Mom is saying, Let’s go surprise your father. She’s taking Jack by one hand and me by the other and walking us down the wide wood steps of our Spruce Street twin house and through the leafy corridors of West Philadelphia until we reach the edge of the giant sleeping campus. We are a parade of three. We are young and smart, and the campus is silver and brick, moss and ivy, castles and courtyards, and at the far end of our forever journey sits the fine arts library, red and round and tall and chimneyed, something straight out of the Brothers Grimm. That’s where Dad is—through the heavy notched doors and past the turnstile, in the massive reading room. It’s a courtyard space with a roof four stories high. It is arches and arched sun. It’s big books with thin pages and the smell of old things, cracked pencils, eraser nubs.

  Oh, my loves, Dad says, here you are. As if we’d wakened him from something. My mom leans toward him and lets her long hair fall, like a screen between their love and ours.

  Hey, I hear Dad now. Sweetie. Are you listening?

  Dad leans back, stands up, goes for another slice of French toast, as if what I need right now is a fresher version of what I already have. He sails a slice of butter over the egg-white skin of the bread. Drowns it in syrup. Switches my plate for his plate, sits down, and waits.

  You want to tell me what’s going on? he says. At last.

  I shake my head.

  You want to tell me part of it?

  I—can’t. I—don’t. Everything, I finally say.

  Everything?

  Is harder.

  I hear my voice very soft and far away. I hear my words separating. I see Dad thinking, pulling his pen from his shirt pocket and snapping the ink tip in and out, his hands moving now, his fingers.