One Thing Stolen (15 page)

I think of Mom and Dad and Jack at the Vitales’. I think of all the things that don’t belong, and all the things I’ve taken. The museum of nests beneath the bed. The beautiful strange. The shipwreck in the Barbie sheets. The sad bald lonely bookbinder and the chain I stole from Perdita. The boy who is real. I have to see him.

I need to—go, I say.

Nadia, I can’t let you do that.

I have to know—ifheisreal.

I’m not so sure, Katherine says. I’m not so sure that is a good idea.

She stands up, crosses the room. She stands there at the window, watching the world like my father watches the world, like all the answers we need are out there floating.

It’s important, I say.

I promise tocomeback, I say. I won’t leave again, justletmedothis. She sits back down in her chair for a very long time. She studies me.

Can I trust you, Nadia, to return to me?

I nod.

Can I absolutely trust you? Tell me.

Yes.

I have two phones, she says. A house phone, and a cell phone. I’m giving you the cell phone, and if I need to call you, you will answer. If it starts getting late, I will find you, I will bring you back. You understand?

I nod.

Don’t let me down, sweetie. I’ve been trusted with you.

I prom—ise.

This is the first and the last time, she says.

I nod.

She slips her hand into her pocket, finds her cell, cues up her house number, gives me a long hug.

I’ll be right here waiting, she says.

I’mcomingback, I tell her.

A leather shop in the basement of the cathedral. That’s what he said. Leather shop. Cathedral.

The hour is nine bells. I walk the plaza of Santa Croce. I find the dungeon doors. I hurry.

Past the well of light, down a few steps. Past a marble Christ wearing a crown of thorns. Now the hallway turns and becomes a long stone tunnel, green and gray, then red, until suddenly I am standing in an interior garden, and I think of Katherine at the top of the hill.

We’re going to work on this
.

Sun on my skin. The smell of olives. The sound of machines. The dull echo of a hammer, and now, at last I’m here: the garden of leather. I’m here. It’s real. I’m not completely crazy.

The garden of leather is a two-story well built of scrubbed-yellow brick. There are potted trees on the thick stone paving and cut eyebrow arches along the low first windows, a fraction of sky, two cats. Beyond the windows in the rooms that run along the
courtyard are long wood tables, sewing machines, needles, calf’s hide, snakeskin, an old man, and, beside him, his head buried in his work, Benedetto.

I have found him.

There.

See?

Proof.

SCUOLA DEL CUOIO
, a sign says. Private. Don’t enter.

I hear a voice and turn. A woman with silk hair and eyes the size of cameos is coming close. She’s talking.

She wants to know if I’m here for a tour. I tell her no. She wants to know if I’m here for the leather and I say no. She asks me my name. Nadia. She tells me hers. Laura. Says she is her father’s daughter, and I don’t know what she means or why she’s said so, but I say, somehow, in words she understands, that I am my father’s daughter too. What she really means, she says, is that her father was Marcello Gori, and this Scuola del Cuoio was his, and that for sixty-five years, in this Santa Croce annex, the Gori family has been teaching leather and selling what they make to the famous and to the locals and to the tourists.

That’s Carlos, she says, pointing out the older man in the blue shirtsleeves. That’s Carlos, but in the vaulted room, I see only Benedetto, working with his head tucked in close to a machine, his jacket slung across the back of his chair.

Turn, I think. But he doesn’t see me.

In the courtyard the fattest cat rolls to its feet and waddles our way.

You’re here on exchange? I hear Laura now.

No.

For pleasure?

My father— I say.

The flood, I say.

Of course, she says, like a fifty-year-old flood is the reason all Americans come to Florence, like this makes perfect sense, like I do. Such a terrible thing, she says. That flood.

The cat is close now, arching its back, then slinking in to rub its fur against my leg.

See that line? Laura says. She points to a thin trail of discoloration on the courtyard wall. The flood was there, she says. The water that high. The whole place like a big pool—but I’m not listening, because finally in the garden of leather, Benedetto has looked up, he has seen me. He stands, comes to the door, crosses the courtyard, through the sun, and the cat yawns, lazy.

You’re here, he says.

You’re
here.

I think he’s real.

The workshop is cool. Its floor is chunks of stone. The ceiling is a vault of brick. There are forms and tools and pelts, the glue and the nails, the soft, exposed bellies of half-made purses, the inside-outs of wallets, stitched leather. By the sewing machine where Benedetto was working is a long strip of chocolate-colored leather. Into it vertical pockets have been sewn, a double row of dark red stitching that separates one pocket from the next. The whole thing is too long and wide to be a belt, too short and stiff to be an apron, too strange for me to guess what it is. I imagine twenty-four tiny birds choosing these pockets as their nests, filling them with seed and twig. I imagine the songs of those birds. The breeze in their wings. How safe and tucked in close.

You’ve been crying, he says.

Can we—go somewhere?

He looks around at the shop, the machines, talks to Carlos. He fits his tools into a pouch and hangs the pouch on a hook and now he pulls his coat from his chair.

Vieni con me
.

Through the tunnel of stone. Into the sun. Above the Vespa
vroom
. He slices the streets. I wrap my arms around his waist and rest my cheek against his jacket, against the duffel strap.

The streets are long, broken, straight. I close my eyes and find the dot-to-dots my father used to make to keep us quiet on Sunday mornings when it was Mom’s turn to sleep in late. He drew them on the cardboard part of notepaper pads—big red dots and purple numbers that we’d connect with glitter pens, the lines tangling up like some cat’s cradle.

It’s not even a real shape
, Jack and I would complain when we were done, and Dad would make a fake big deal about how badly our imaginations had failed us.
Look again
, he’d say, and we could see it then—the tangled lines like starbursts or stream ripples or the scrabbled marks that gray squirrels would leave on Locust Walk after a snow. The Santa Croce neighborhoods are like the dot-to-dots, and I hold on tight.

On the far end of a medieval street, at a place between the rammed-in houses, an alley cuts through. Benedetto brakes and slows the bike and walks me like I am a girl on a pony. Above my head, more washed clothes hang. From down the street three girls with linked arms come singing. When their song stops the only sound is the water plunking off the shirtsleeves high on the line, plonking and slapping, and the sound of Benedetto’s boots on the stones.

Benedetto knows the guys at the next corner. He knows the couple pushing their wheeled basket of fruit and onions over the rough stones of the street. He knows the cats. He knows people, and they know him; he is real. One more snaking street and now Benedetto stops at a house like all the other houses, except the window trim is a cranberry color and the whole face of the thing is sky blue.

This, he says.

Here.

He helps me onto the street and through the door. It is the middle of the morning on a sunny day. It is dark in this house of Santa Croce. It is one window, one crack of light, pictures hung crooked on the wall and plates piled by the sink, and finally, finally, I breathe.

Tell me, he says, what it is, why you’ve come, and I have no right words with which to tell him. We have come all this way, and I can’t.

He wipes his brow with the back of his sleeve. He steps toward the alcove kitchen, where the refrigerator is the color of old mustard and wears a calendar like a hat and opens with a hard tug. He pulls a copper pot of soup from the smoky chill and warms it on the stovetop—cabbage, chickpeas, salted pork. He finds half a loaf of bread and two shallow bowls, spoons with round faces and slender stems, and now he sits beside me, the bowls in our laps, and he asks me nothing. It’s just him and me, sitting and
not talking, until he stands again, crosses into the kitchen again, and cracks black pepper into the soup. He stirs and cuts the heat. He brings the pot to where I sit, ladles more soup into our bowls, returns the pot to the stove, and now he sits, and we watch the room with all its broken things like we are watching a show.

His boots on the floor. The triangle of his elbow here beside me. His hair like a lamp in the dark. The silence fading in and out, and Benedetto is talking, far away, telling a story. His story. Three years, Benedetto says. Juliette, he says. His mother. A gardener. The survivor. Lupus.

He talks and sometimes I hear. He talks and I see Maggie in the tree and the sun trapped in the buckets and the wild poppies and the two thousand wings, the wreck of things, Katherine waiting. I see this room lit up with growing things and a mother dying: lupus. Remembering and imagining. Knowing and imagining. Is there any difference? Was there? Ever?

He leans so close. He kisses me.

I’m not whoyouthink I am, I manage.

Who do I think you are?

Idon’tknow.

See? he says. No worries.

Bene—

Shhhhh, he says.

He touches the lids of my eyes with a finger. I see an angel dangling from strings. I hear the clacking of her wooden limbs, the running of her beeswaxed feet, her wings flapping, flapping in the breeze.

I wake in a dark room, and he’s gone.

The dream that I have had is gone.

The angel is gone.

The bowls of soup and the pot are gone.

The floor above me creaks.

Katherine’s phone does not ring.

When he pulls the curtains apart there’s sun. A room like an antique shop. A chest of drawers with a drawer missing, cracks in the planks of the floor, fray at the edges, big things and small things, things without names.