One Thing Stolen (17 page)

Tock
.

—togocrazy. To leave everyone I love. To leave myself. I didn’t mean for the nests not to save me.

Her eyes are olive-colored, and not serene. She rests her head against the wall and closes her lips in a silent hum. It’s as if she has nowhere to go, as if she has been waiting for me.

Sleep, someone says.

She takes another drag of her cigarette. She exhales. The dog blinks beneath two furry eyebrows. They used to come and visit, she says. Those Vitale girls. They liked my songs.

She lifts the dog from its warm, tucked place and presses its nose to hers. It bleats and sticks its little pink tongue through its teeth. She says something and I see her lips move but my ears don’t
catch on the nouns. She takes another drag on her cigarette, tucks the dog back into its warm cove, gives me another long look. A column of ashes falls from her cigarette and she disappears, through the door, into the night of Florence, the lights of Florence, all the people gone, and I hear someone crying on the floor above, in the rooms that belong to the Vitales.

It’s all right, someone says. I’ve brought another blanket. Here.

Shhhhhh.

Someone is crying. Someone is hurt. I run through the lobby and up the stairs and the door to the Vitales’ is open, a wind blowing through. The chairs and the couch and the table are gone, Jack and Dad and Mom are gone, the diary and the key are gone, and here, instead, is a forest of trees and leaves and ivy, tubs of ivy, curtains of ivy, buckets and buckets of poppies. There are nests built out of mattress springs and rubies, nests built out of hats and twigs, a nest built out of the hush and the mush of the moon, nests built out of flowers, feathers, ribbons, chains.
Tock
. There are two little girls, identical girls. There are two girls, and now, when they see me, they are running, they are leaving their whole lives behind.

Careful, I call. Careful! Watch out! Wait! But they run—through the trees, beneath the nests, toward the open window, they run, flapping and crying.

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Another blanket.

Here.

Four hundred billion birds in the world.

One finch.

Help me.

It’s always damp, or it will be soon. It grows dark, and the lights they string across the street tip in. People use their long umbrellas like walking sticks; everyone has three legs in Florence. The decorated tree beside the Duomo seems this side of squat when you’re far away, and then you get up close, and it’s like, wow, you can’t even see to the top.

Once the snow made it all the way to the ground. I was in the piazza and looked up, and first I saw the snow sticking to my eyelashes and then I saw the people of Santa Croce jamming their windows up and ramming their sweater arms out and catching the flakes with their fists. It was truly YouTube-viral-worthy. A girl ran to kiss the shoes of Dante, left little swoosh tracks with her boots. The smaller kid who ran after her swished across the swoosh, like she was being pulled on a sled. That was a good splice out of time, a gleaming of hope.

In the wedding shop the dresses are vanilla frosting. In the jewelry shop all the velvet collars are red and the only necklaces on display are emerald-stoned. Every church has its own manger scene, leaving Jesus to get born every day. People sing here—spontaneous song. They drink prosecco like it’s juice and there are long lines for hot chocolate at the Caffè Rivoire. This guy goes around with a saxophone, playing carols sweet.

But only once did it snow all the way to the ground.

I felt Ivy League–smart, bringing my tapestry coat—cornflower blue and rust, braided rope frogs instead of buttons, braided rope on its cuffs and double hems. I guess you could say that it’s a little long and I should have tailored it, but the truth is when I walk up or down, and there’s a lot of up or down in Florence, it gives me an excuse to go royal, to scrunch the fabric up with my hands, like a princess with a train, to teach these Florentines about Second Mile Style. Coat royale, I call it—way superior to anything they sell on Via Tornabuoni, despite the obvious factoid that Versace is cool, and so are Prada and Bulgari, and Ferragamo is so very prime that it has its own museum in the Palazzo Spini Feroni. But wherever I go, whenever it is, I wear my coat royale.

It’s wetter than cold; it’s always wet. There are all these old bones planted in the earth—monk bones, nun bones, priest bones, genius bones, even the bones of Dante’s first crush. You feel their souls wafting up, getting stuck on your boots, your tights, your socks, on the hem of your coat. I asked Perdita how she stands
it, and first she smiled, and then she looked at Jack, and then he translated, and she stopped smiling. You are born for it, Jack said, she said. Born for the weather, I think she meant, but that’s not what I was asking. My question was: How do you stand all the bones of the dead, everywhere you go, beneath your feet?

They do a very fine roasting of chestnuts here—
bruciate
. I stand by the fire, the smoky waft. I try to remember all the words on my burgeoned vocab list: excitatory, inhibitory, medulla oblongata, dorsolateral, orbito, ventromedial prefrontal. Katherine says I should make it easy on myself. Start with the four lobes of the cerebral cortex: occipital, temporal, parietal, frontal. Start with the neuron: cell body, axon, dendrites. Start with recognizing just how difficult this all will be to grasp: 100 billion nerve cells in a three-pound brain. The mind folded in on itself.

Anything could happen.

Florence goes up. Florence goes down. Like the steam above the pots and pans that Jack and Perdita command. They can’t help themselves. Those two.

We go to Nadia in the early afternoon—one-thirty, two o’clock. We walk side by side, our hands in our pockets, my iPad in my wicker purse, and mostly we don’t talk, except for when one of those at-risks comes up. I’ll be eating my chestnuts and she’ll be talking, and it’s like the at-risks are Mrs. C.’s parables, her object lessons. They’re her proof.

The runaway comes home.

The dyslexic wins the scholarship.

The cutter stops stealing her father’s razor blades and finally stops cutting herself.

The OCD germaphobe takes the subway every afternoon to a part-time job in the station mall on Market.

And always last, in the stories, she tells, some guy named Amir sees it through.

“Amir,” she says. Cracking a borrowed chestnut.

There’s a girl who waits for us every day—five or six years old, always the same red sweater on. Sophia Loren lips. A pair of
beat-up cowboy boots. She lives in a house on the hill across from Belvedere. She must sit in the window waiting for us, because as soon as we’re close, she’s there. Pops out of the front door with a gappy smile on her face. Our own welcoming committee, and good Lord, given the way things are, we can use a welcome in triplicate.

“Buongiorno,”
she says.

“Buongiorno.”

Popping back out of sight and closing the door like some Ambassador of the Hills. I crack a chestnut.

We get three hours in most days. Intensives, we call them. We do the life work, the focus work, until the third hour winds down, or until doing more will hurt more than stopping where we are. Almost every day we do it—leave the apartment, cross the river, make the climb to Katherine’s house, settle in for the intensives with Nadia. Two weeks ago, two days in a row, there was too much storm and we couldn’t go, and those two days were the saddest days of all, holed up in the apartment on Verrazzano, listening to the piano playing upstairs like a dirge. Nothing we could do. No hills. No intensives. No nouns. No Nadia. My best friend in the world. My community garden assist.

We had ourselves a plan.

At night I keep up. I’ve switched over to the MOOCs for now. Massive Open Online Courses—a bunch of videos and message boards and crowdsourced e-buddies; ask a good-enough question and it climbs the board and the prof slaps you back with an
answer—live. I’m not saying that this beats shoulder-to-shoulder in the classroom, but it’s where I’m at right now, how I remain “academically greedy” (my parents’ favorite term). I stayed local with my MOOCs—signed up for the Penn-proffed, Quaker love and whatnot:

1. Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society
   (Professor Karl Ulrich)
   
2. Pay Attention!! ADHD Through the Lifespan
   (Professor Anthony Rostain)
   
3. Modern and Contemporary American Poetry
   (Professor Al Filreis)
   
4. Basic Behavioral Neurology
   (Professor Roy Hamilton)
   

I’m greediest of all for number 4.

Jack, when he’s not cooking, not reporting back on his spices, keeps up his work on the opus magnum:
Brunelleschi Rising
. Almost Independent Study 201. Studying the old books, Binging the net, going out and asking questions of old-timers in Italian, then coming back to the flat and plumping the room with his repertoire of new-to-his-own-self facts. “Did you know,” he will say, about the Santa Maria del Fiore and its famous biggest-in-the-world arched cap, “that no one thought it’d be possible to build a Duomo like that?”

“Knew it, Jack.”

“That years and years and years went by before anybody tried?”

“I read the
Lonely Planet
.”

“Did you know that there are seventy million pounds of marble, brick, and stone up there, all of it supporting itself?”

“Now I do.”

“They built it on air.”

“You mean on top of the air.”

“Called it a nest of delights. Called Brunelleschi crazy until they called him a genius instead.”

“Way of the world, I guess.”

“Had it bad until he had it good. It happens. Right? It happens. Anything can.”

“Happens.”

Brunelleschi Rising
. Jack’s thesis in a nutshell. His new proof of hope.

We sit when Jack goes on. It takes a moment before the dirge dies down. The bells in the bell towers chime. The ivy leaves chase each other’s tails, run through the silver stop signs of the Vitale thumbtacks. And then it will be dinnertime, and we’ll sit there close, at the Vitales’ table, and spew signifying metaphors.

(A phrase I picked up in the Poetry MOOC.)

Little-known fact (courtesy of Jack): There’s a subterranean river running through the soils of Florence, deep beneath the Duomo. A whole river down there that nobody sees, running on and on, and every day, tourists climb the tourist steps and think they are safe, high above.

(Nobody’s safe.)

Little-known fact (courtesy of the prof): After the floodwaters of 1966 were gone, there were half a million tons of mud in the streets of Florence, and guess how many citizens? Precisely. Easy math. One ton of mud to every person in Florence. And the mud got good and gone.

(Hope can be found.)

Little-known fact (courtesy of at-risks): In some cities in the United States as many as 60 percent of high school students ultimately drop out. If you start looking for the signs when the students are sixth-grade-young you can help them beat the rap. Early intervention. That’s the key.

(It’s right there, end of story: Early intervention is the key.)