One Thing Stolen (19 page)

“Why are you telling me this?” Mrs. C. said. “Why all this talk about a composer?”

“Because Nadia may be like him in some ways,” Dr. Miller said. “She may have the condition Ravel may have had.”

“Which is?”

“Frontotemporal dementia, primary progressive aphasia.”

“But Nadia’s young.”

“Yes.”

“You said
dementia
.”

“I did.”

“Dementia is Alzheimer’s. It’s old people.”

“Not always, Mrs. Cara. Not in some very rare cases, it isn’t.”

Dr. Miller had a model of the human brain on his desk—a plastic version of mental cauliflower. He showed Mrs. C. the front left, the language center. He showed her the right, a node in the back, the visual and spatial processing department. “The scans,” he said, “are suggesting that, in Nadia’s brain, the language center is shrinking. They’re suggesting, too, that the part of the brain that
generates art is growing, gaining weight, thriving. One thing lost and another thing gained. A brain rearranging itself.

“The plastic brain,” he said.

“Art as the mind’s great disinhibition,” he said.

“The erupted artiste,” Mrs. C. said. The erupted artiste. Our Nadia.

There are others out there, with what Nadia might have—that’s what the doctor said. A couple hundred sudden painters, sudden landscape designers, sudden musicians—these ordinary people who, little by little, become less of themselves and more of something lovely-strange, their words and inhibitions going away as their artwork flowers. There are experiments being done with some kind of machine that changes the magnetic field inside the brain and temporarily creates brain states just like Nadia’s. The volunteer subjects become insta-artists for an hour. Their one thing lost, their other thing gained.

But for them, the lucky ones, it’s temporary.

The Caras spent a week in San Francisco. They spent a week, and then they returned. To Katherine, on the hill. To the Mud Angel and the blessed.

I want to go

                     home,

Nadia said.

And every time they asked Nadia what home was, she said, or tried to say, Vit—. Vita—. Santa—. She said, or tried to say, something else, too.

Nobody understood the second something. Everybody understood Florence.

I’m here because Nadia asked, because one day after all those days my phone finally buzzed and it was her. All those weeks gone by, all my e-mails and no answers, texts and no answers, days I was sure she’d forgotten.

“Too good for me now, Nads?” I’d started to say, to the quiet zone of my phone. “Too big for her own Italian britches,” I kept saying, to my mom, who told me to leave it alone, to think bigger than mad, to remember that people can struggle. I made a new friend at Penn, a guy named Denny. I went out photo hunting with him and I stole into the med school pond with him and I took him Clark Park shopping and I gave him some peas from my garden and I let him kiss me and I didn’t bother texting the news because he wasn’t that great anyway and two weeks later he wasn’t my friend. I didn’t tell Nadia any of that. She was too far away. She was gone.

Then, early November, that text came in, five words: I
need
yu plese com. No yellow smileys and no bouquet of red hearts and more spelling mistakes than my Ivy-League-at-fourteen best friend had ever made in her responsible life.

About an hour after that, Mrs. C. called. About an hour after that, I was on a Skype call with Nadia’s new friend. Meet Katherine, Mrs. C. said. And there was Katherine—one of those women with very white hair whose face is so young you’re sure she’s white-bleached her glorifying tresses. About an hour later and my mother and father were on the phone too, and it was settled and the tickets came, courtesy of the Caras.

I had three days. Packed myself. Tarped up my garden. Got on the plane in Philly, watched the seagulls in the sky, took off, didn’t sleep, flew into Rome, trained into Florence. Met the prof and Jack on the Florentine track. Hustle and bustle, like a Hollywood film.

“You must be tired,” the prof said.

“I want to see her,” I said.

The prof ran his hand through his wild hair and pressed on his eyebrows and decided.

“Jack,” he said, “take Maggie’s suitcase to the flat.”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“But I . . .”

“Now, Jack.”

Jack fit his hand into the suitcase handle, scowled but didn’t look back, and Second Mile Style rolled east, through the painted city toward the lantern of the Duomo, which I’d already read about in
Lonely Planet
on my plane ride here.

The prof and I took a circular south. Past the first church near the train station, past its piazza. Past the Grand Hotel Minerva, down the Via del Fossi. To the Lungarno Corsini and over the Ponte Vecchio and up the Costa dei Magnoli to the Via di Belvedere. I’m big on names. It was about eleven in the morning Florence time. I was blister-toed and disoriented, despite my pre-studying all the maps.

They call Philadelphia and Florence sister cities, but there is nothing in their DNA that comes close to even a species match. Philadelphia is squares and grids, predictable angles, flat. Florence is Spirograph swirls and little-kid squiggles, roads that change names just like that, a sturdy set of climbs. I was glad every time the prof had to stop. I’d turn, try to get a view, suck in some breath.

“We’re grateful to you for coming,” the prof said.

“She’s my best friend,” I said.

She’s my primo.”

Both of us standing there catching our breath.

It was misting in Florence. I could feel my blisters split and peel inside my patent-leather boots—with buckles, seventies style. I could feel my thumbs and pinching fingers cramp in the folds of my coat. That Belvedere wall is one hell of a wall—worse than the
henchman Jaws in
The Spy Who Loved Me
, another seventies giant. We approached it from the west. We stair-climbed and angle- stalked. And then we got to Katherine’s. Just as pretty as she was on Skype. And just as super kind.

Nadia’s thinner. Nadia’s dark hair is so long and her skin’s white as photographic paper before it takes its bath and her eyes are blacker than ever. It was cold and her thin feet were bare, but she was there at the door when I arrived. She’d heard me calling for her, because I’d started calling to her, because the prof had said that we were close—just a bend in the fortress wall from her now.

Katherine’s house is square and sweet, short as a stunted tooth. There are candles in the window, a bunch of plaster
David
s, two potted evergreens by the front door, the two pots bowed up in gold. In the door, in the mist, between the candles, between the gold, Nadia stood like that angel on strings. She wore an old sweater, a pair of turquoise jeans.

“Don’t—leave—me,” she said, wrapping her arms around me, tight.

“Look at me,” I said, pulling back, finding her eyes—dark but also burning with light. “I am Maggie Ercolani. I am right friggin’ here. I am your best friend. Always.”

That first day in the house on the Belvedere hill, we didn’t let a crack of sad break through us. I knew what I had to do, what they were counting on me to do—me bringing Nadia stories, whole. “Narrative continuity,” Katherine had said, in the pre-trip Skypes,
when she was preparing me for now. “Your together stories.” As if Nadia’s remembering were a dot-to-dot, and my remembering were a pencil.

“Let your remembering be a pencil.”

Katherine, who is so very modern, so still American, so kind to the old prof, said any story I had that could help keep Nadia framed and contexted was as good as medicine. She said to have them on the ready, not to be afraid just to talk. Nadia understands everything we’re saying, Katherine said. The words go in fine. It’s the words coming out that are harder. Receptive language. Expressive language. They’re two different parts of the brain.

We sat in the sitting-room part of the house on the hill—Katherine and the prof in chairs and Nadia beside me on the couch, a little satin pillow in her lap, like a cat. I told Manakeesh stories—
labneh
, shawarma,
kafta, tawook
, lamb
lahm b’ajeen
. I told about the painted squirrels along Locust Walk, and the broken button ahead of old Van Pelt, and the Ethiopian restaurant with the blues on top.

“Nadia, remember that?”

I told about the sled in the snow and the poppies in the trees and the corn-husk maze, the river in the winter and the river in the summer, more bluegrass specials.

“Nadia, remember?”

I told about the big storm and the finch nest and the night we went sledding, and Nadia said, clear as day, even if the words
were a little smashed: “World’s greatest miracle.” All the words all together, the little kitten of a pillow on her lap, and we laughed, and it felt so good that we laughed again, and out of nowhere and nothing I’d said, Nadia started to sing, waving her arm like a flag at the
Hurrah
like all true Quakers do.

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
.

“She’s singing ‘The Red and Blue,’” I said, and Katherine nodded, her eyes full as two cups of tea. “Yes,” she said, “I know.” Because (I know this now, thanks to MOOC Number 4) singing comes from another part of the brain than talking, and the singing wasn’t gone for Nadia, and neither were the Quakers gone for Katherine, who left the campus fifty years ago.

We’d gone from laughing to crying, all for various causes, but we had not cracked to actual sad, and I was holding Nadia’s hand, the scars on her hand, her scabbed skin flesh like the ridge on a crab. I was holding her hand, then running a stream of braids
down her long, long hair, skinniest braids you’ve ever seen; I’m good at this. She kissed my cheek with the strength she had, and I started another braid near the top of her head, and Katherine’s house smelled like warm cinnamon and raisins, and there were stacks of magazines, like Grecian columns all around.

And then Nadia was tired, and I was, too, and it was enough for one day. It was a lot. It was the prof standing, and then I stood, and fit my coat royale back on my bones.

“I’m coming back,” I said.

“Don’t—leave—”

“Look at me. Look at me hard. I’m coming back. I promise.”

I left Nadia, on that first day in Florence, with six perfect braids zippering up and down her head. I left her there—the prof’s primo student, Katherine’s patient, my best friend. The prof and I went down the hill, east. We turned and went north. We crossed over the river Arno. The mist had turned to rain by the time we reached the Piazza Santa Croce.

“You’re so good for her,” he said.

Mrs. C. was the one who had picked the lock to the twins’ room and opened the door and found Nadia’s world the way Nadia had left it, while Nadia made her new home with Katherine. Everything blown to bits and upside down, bashed and collided, except for the nests, in the dark beneath the bed, taking shelter.

“It’s like you see on TV after a storm blows through,” Mrs. C. told me, after the prof and I had made our way to the Vitales’, that first wet afternoon. “All the smash and unbelonging, the pieces that don’t fit, and then suddenly the camera cuts to a rosebush with unbroken buds or a stack of plates without a chip or a photograph that got tucked inside a child’s coloring book, not a tear or a ruffle. You don’t know, when you see the footage after the storms, which is more impossible—the smash or the save. You don’t know if order is more natural, or disorder. You don’t know,” Mrs. C. kept saying. “You can’t imagine how it was.”

Then she asked me to kneel before the bed, and I did, and she kneeled, too. She showed me the genius apparent in Nadia’s museum of nests, the handwork and ingenuity, the craft of Nadia’s miniatures, the intricacies, symmetries, deliberate deviations. There was the magnificent and there was the strange, zirconium-winking, little
ta-das
, like a Betsey Johnson necklace.