One Thing Stolen (10 page)

Itookawalk, I say.

Don’t do this, Mom says.

I’ll go—find Dad.

Not a chance. You’ll stay right here. Your father’s coming home.

Pesce spada come la fa la rita
, Jack says. Mom stands and walks across the room. Says something to Perdita, something to Jack, and now the door opens, and Dad’s here, and Jack announces the spice of the day, which is really an herb, and I can’t help it: Perdita’s chain makes its way into my fist. A perfect fit. The hall at the
Vitales’ is hurried with ivy. The closets are full of forgotten things. The twins’ door unlocks and then it locks again. I pull the chain from the sleeve of my sweater.

What the hell, I think. What the friggin’ hell?

If you cared about me, you would stop me.

The upstairs piano plays, but I don’t know the song. The smell of lit cigarettes floats. Invisible fog. The song stops, and there is a parade of sharp-heeled shoes, and I wait, certain now that they are coming for me, but there is only silence up above, and Mom and Dad in the room next door, talking.

We can’t wait
.

We have to go
.

Katherine’s ready for us
.

In the back the bookbinder works behind a wall of taped-up glass. Here, I work too, faster and faster—the freckled flower, the stolen chain, the tips of feathers, scissors and glue. The stalk bends and the bloom glows and everything is complicated, and I need the light of the moon.

Hey, someone says.

Is it you?

I wake to the sound of bricks being dropped to the ground, to glass things crashing. I wake in the bottom bunk, beneath the ship of steals. I listen for the sound of rain. No weather. I listen for the shoes above me, or a song. Nothing.

I lift the skirt of the twins’ bunk bed and the nests are there—the old ones, the new one—tucked into the museum of my obsession, the beautiful and strange. I stand at the window and see the empty patio, the string of Christmas lights, and two men, like policemen, dusting the edge of broken things, and now I see the bookbinder himself, his bald head bright in the morning light, his glasses hanging from a chain around his neck. The police take notes on thin pads. They slip dust and shards into a plastic bag. They talk—a grumble of Italian—and I step back, very slow. I hear the sound of something coming. I open the door, lock it behind me, and the front room of the flat is like a storm blew through. A couch pillow hatting the head of the TV. The TV yanked away
from the wall. The tubs and the buckets of ivy in the wrong places, pots and pans in a crooked stack near the sink.

Jack?

Can’t find it, my brother says. Can’t find it and told her I would.

A cord trails from the headphones at his neck. His hair is a mad porcupine. The dot on his chin is more like a beard. He shoves everything he touches—throws couch pillows onto the chair, chair pillows onto the floor, pots and pans into the sink. He’s as close to tears as I have seen him since last year, when Dad came home and announced his sabbatical and Jack started listing everything he loved about Philadelphia, everything he would miss—Restaurant School’s two-day-old muffins, that cat that came around, Wawa frozen cappuccinos, bluegrass at Fiume, the lights at Boat House Row, the chimney tower on Walnut Street, the man on Forty-Second who batons his cane and sings his Sammy Davis, Jr. tunes, the white house on Forty-Third that looks like it belongs at the beach.
We’ll make it up to you
, Dad said.
We’ll give you
—

You know what I’m talking about? You know that chain? Perdita’s?

I stand, useless, helpless, in a gunked-up nightshirt, ruby-tipped fingers, the smell of glue. Chunky gold, green feathers, he says. Family heirloom stuff.

He twists the headphones around his neck and my fingertips are beating like ten out-of-kilter hearts.

Christ, he says, and then his phone buzzes and he pulls it from his pocket and reads the text. Two. Three times. He texts back, waits. Another message shivers in. He texts again. His shoulders sag. Exasperated. Worried.

Worst timing in the world, he says. Get dressed, he says. We’re meeting Mom and Dad at the top of the hill.

What are you—talking about?

What do you think I’m talking about? Jesus. He tosses another pillow, pushes the couch with his foot, scratches his head.

Come on, he says.

Can’t.

You have to.

I don’t—want.

Jesus, Nads, do you think I want to go? Do you think I have time to babysit— And then he stops, like he’s supposed to feel sorry for me, be über nice to me, and that hurts worst of all. My eyes are wet spots, burning.

All right, I say. I’m—

Just get changed, he says. Don’t take so long.

Through the streets, with the schoolkids and the moms and the bikes and the bike bells and the nuns. Through the streets, my heart pounding. Jack is a shadow cast forward. He has the tuft of a lime-green feather riding high in his back pocket, the only evidence of Perdita’s chain he could find, and every time he turns, I’m still here, walking behind him, and still he turns, like he can’t trust me.

She thinks I took it, Jack says. Why would I do that? To Perdita? Shit.

My chest so tight.

At the Lungarno we cross to the riverside and walk west beneath the streetlamps. The sun is rising fast, splatting the horizontals of the bridges with a yellow pink. At the Ponte Vecchio the stacked boxes of the shops hang above the river. In the faces of the buildings along the Oltarno, the shutters are being pulled back, wood banging against wood and stucco and stone. I look for
Benedetto, for a Vespa, for dropped flowers, a sign, a way out of this, out of me.

Meet them on the hill. Tell them the truth. Tell someone.

The air is cool, the sun is warm. On the other side of the river, at the Michelangelo Piazzale, the fake
David
lies invisible behind a tail of fog. In the arcade along the Lungarno, two gypsies are kneeling side by side, their lips kissing the old stones, their lizard hands begging. A taxi out looking for a fare rides the street too close to the curb and Jack grabs my arms, yanks me safe.

What are you doing, he says. Christ.

Halfway across the Ponte Vecchio we stop at the lookout and stand side by side, looking east toward the start of the Arno, which is just a muddy creek, so far down from where we stand on this bridge that any catastrophe story seems like fiction, and I think of all the times I’ve said to Dad,
Prove it
. Prove your flood, as if anyone can prove anything, but Dad tries, shows me photographs of November ’66, the bridges neck-high in the thick of river anger magnified.
The water ran twenty-eight feet high
, he said.
Higher. The bridge was like a dam
, he said, the capsized trees and cars and walls and windows of ruined houses pushing up against and through. Armchairs and jewelry boxes and portfolios and silverware and the split sides of sculptures and books all in the river by then. The river wanted nothing that it took. It dropped it, drowned it, pushed it, broke it, turned it into filth.

The river is a thief.

As am I.

The sun is blinking off. A fog is coming in. We leave the bridge and walk, feeling the fog’s soft gray fur as we climb, its dampness seeping into our hair and skin. Jack half disappears out in front. I see his skater shoes and his frayed jeans hem, the bend of his knees, a hand, the lime-green feather, and the rest is gone, sucked into the thick mist, and when a Vespa passes, I turn.

Nothing.

We head up the long ramp of the road that rises along the massive stone wall of Fort Belvedere. There are places in the wall that have fallen. Patches where green, leafy things have settled in, as if someone has hung the ramparts with window boxes.

We don’t talk. Sometimes a brother is a best friend, and sometimes a brother is a brother, and sometimes a secret is worse than a lie. There are olive trees on both sides of the road. Air the color of pearls and the sudden wild purple of flowers that erupt from vines tangled in the branches or caught in the thatched places of the wall. A girl with a bike appears at the top of the road and speeds toward us, a skateboard tied to her back. Jack turns and watches her fly. He stands there facing east and down, while I climb west and high.

Now Jack comes fast on the hard angle of asphalt behind me, passes me, makes his way up the hill and around the
compass points and parapets of Belvedere, where the fog is breaking. They’re not here, Jack says. Finds a stone. Kicks it.

Maybetheysaid—

Nine-thirty, they said. I talked to them. You didn’t.

He kicks another chunk of rock. He looks back to where we came from, as if he will be able to see the missing chain and its tip of lime-green feathers from up here, a new perspective. When he takes a seat on the ribbon of grass beside the stone wall, I sit too—my feet flopped out, my foot turning around my ankle, my heart banging hard.

Tell me the truth, he says.

What?

Was it you? You who stole the chain?

I shake my head. He stares at me, now past me, and I try to stop the pounding in my chest—try to keep from standing, running, escaping, and now on the road, near the bend I see Mom and Dad on the rise, a woman between them, her silver hair fluffed at the ends like a cashmere hem.

Jack stands and stuffs the feather deeper into his back pocket. I hide the weave my fingers have started to make with the grass that grows tall by the wall. Dad stops on the road, out of breath, and then Mom does, and the woman does, and her gaze is cool. She shakes Jack’s hand. She takes mine. She looks into my eyes.

This is Katherine, Dad says. A friend.

Ciao
, she says, but she’s American—dusty Doc Martens on her feet, a yellow cotton blouse that lets the muscles on her arms show through, and a pair of khaki trousers with scatter lines above the knee where the hanger was.

Good day for a view, Dad says.

A beautiful day, Mom says. Her eyes going from me to Jack to me like she can’t believe I’m actually here, like Jack just pulled off some giant magic trick, and now we’re walking—Mom and Dad and Katherine ahead, and Jack beside me on the incline, his shadow cutting the sun on my face.

Who? I ask.

Jack shrugs. He kicks another stone down the hill and watches it fall. He stuffs his hand into his back pocket, fingers the feather, and he climbs, and we climb until we reach the highest bend, the open door, the ticket lady, from whom Dad buys five passes, breathless.

Fort Belvedere is a Medici villa inside fortress walls, four-hundred-something years old. That’s what Dad says. It’s a museum for modern sculpture—the busts of naked women, a pinwheel of bronze in the sun. Look at us, Dad says. Here we are. Dad talks prof talk about the guy who designed this place for the rich Grand Duke. He says how many old walls are missing now, how the star-shaped fortress was mostly cut down to make room for the city’s growth. He points to a tunnel we can’t see—the
secret passages between Belvedere and the Pitti Palace and Florence proper over the bridge. He says the word again—
secrets
—then
fireworks
and
theater
, but his words are snipping into static. I head toward the cliff, the tumbled garden, the view. I stand there, leaning north, watching Florence click on and off, looking for the boy, Benedetto, who can draw my story on my hand, who will listen.