One Thing Stolen (20 page)

“Can you imagine?” Mrs. C. said, and I felt myself cracking with sad, but also wonder, and also eternal gratitude that they left the nests just as they were, thieving be damned.

There were fresh sheets in the top bunk of the twins’ room. There were the accessories to the crime in the corner—all the unused paraphernalia that I’d soon start tiering out, returning to their owners. There was the cell phone, dead to the world. A pileup of texts inside, I’m sure.

“Thank you,” Mrs. C. said. “For everything you’re doing.”

“Of course.”

“For coming.”

“She’s my best friend.”

“She has a chance.”

“More than a chance.”

“You’ll help her. We know this. We’re grateful.”

I left the nests just as they were. I gave the Caras the comatose phone. I peeled the boots off my feet. I climbed up to the second bunk and lay there with my coat still on, buttoned to my chin like a tattered blanket, the mist still in its hem. I closed my eyes, and it
was fall and winter, spring, and we were high in the eye of Franklin Field, for this was another Nadia plan. We’d stomped up the stadium stairs to the highest hot bench, and we were lying there, end of May, head to head, and Nadia said that she had something to say.

“Something bad?” I said.

“Something different,” she said.

And I sat up and she lay there, saying nothing.

“What?” I asked.

“Things are changing,” she said.

The sky was gallons and gallons of blue and a few clouds that she called hippo clouds and the scissor slice of a wing. Some runners were circling on the track below, some coach was blowing a whistle, and Nadia sat up and I started plaiting her hair, quick and even, starting at the top, by her skull.

“End of everything, will I always have you?” she said.

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“It’s my dad,” she said. “It’s a grant. It’s Florence.”

And there was a hawk. And there was a crack above our heads.

And there were six braids like six zippers on her head.

These things I know, these things I had been told, these things MOOC Number 4 remind me daily, thank you, Dr. Roy Hamilton, thank you, Internet.

The brain is small, and it is capacious.

A stimulated brain is a yearning brain is a learning brain—more neurons, axons, dendrites, not to mention: a warmer bath of blood.

The imagination is strong enough to rearrange the anatomy of the brain itself—the stuff that happens within the cauliflower folds, the connections between neurons. Pay attention, beat it back, want something, insist, practice a new skill, and you forge a new thinking path. Ask a stroke victim, an OCDer, a diagnosed panic attacker, Barbara Arrowsmith-Young, the half-brain lady. You can think some brains toward whole. You can imagine past yourself. You can put a patch on your good eye to make your bad eye work. You can use your left hand to trace the lilt of Persian letters if your
right brain is tricking you out. You can memorize long poems in a foreign language if you’ve stopped hearing as well as you should. If you slow down when you’re writing with a pen, you’ll elevate yourself into being a much more fluent reader.

I am not speaking, by the way, of fake science, or goo-goo myth. I am referring here to the proven stuff, the kind they prove with machines.

Until Dr. Bruce Miller can open his clinical trials for a pharma intervention for people who have what my best friend has, hauling Nadia’s brain off to the brain-exercise gym is all that we actually have. The stories we return to. The games we play. The afternoon intensives. Nadia had come to Katherine and broken down. She’d had a nightmare about birds, she had confessed to everything, she had said that she could not go back to the nests she loved, that words were like dropped crumbs in the forest.

These things I know.

I also know this:

In the top drawer of the twins’ desk there is a little-girl diary, its lock broken open. In the first pages, in thick gel ink, there is little-girl handwriting, in Italian. Sometimes the writing in pink and sometimes the writing in green, like the twins are one single person with one single secret stream, done up in two colors. All of a sudden, thirty pages in, the little-girl writing stops. The pages are blank, blank, blank, blank, and then there is writing again, one solo letter on every page, in scratchy, sticky ink:

B

E

N

E

D

E

T

T

O

Benedetto
, Nadia’s letters say. But no one I know has ever seen him.

In the afternoons the intensives. In the early evenings the MOOCs. In the mornings I try to figure out who Benedetto is.

This is part of what I’m here to do. This is what Nadia needs. She just hasn’t had the words to tell me.

Maggie Ercolani. On a mission.

The clues as I have them, as I have dug them out or provoked them, planted them into the back blank pages of the diary with the busted lock and the gel-pen Italian and the word that ends in the circle of a nest:

There was a boy, maybe there was a boy, Nadia said there was a boy; no one has seen him. His name, if he exists, is Benedetto. His hair, if this is true, is bright as light.

(Courtesy of Katherine, who has begun to sleep on her sitting- room couch, which puts her closer, she says, to Nadia in the night. Closer in case Nadia dreams harder and needs her worse, in case she reveals more in her sleep, which is when she talks the most, when her language comes back to her, sometimes.)

Mrs. C. says she knows nothing about a boy. Prof says Nadia had secrets.
Someone was running
. Jack says there were plenty of times when Nadia went missing and the millions of things she
never explained and the him she kept insisting on, so probably there’s a boy, but Jack has never seen the boy. Perdita has said, her hair in different stripes each time she’s said it, “This is Italy, where the love always lives.”

“But have you seen the boy, Perdita?”

“No.”

“Do you know a Benedetto?”

She shakes her head. There are a thousand Benedettos.

“Is there a boy, Nadia? A real boy?” I’ve asked my best friend ever, the plan-ness, and she has nodded, and she has said “steam” and “leather” and “flowers” and frankly, her clues don’t help me much. I have said “Benedetto” and she has started to cry cry cry.

In the mornings, I’m on the prowl, keeping my eyes peeled. In the evenings, too, I spy. Walk down the streets and through the markets looking for an illuminated boy. They’ve brought the Weihnauchtsmarkt to the Piazza Santa Croce—hauled Christmas in from Heidelburg to sell German Santas and German crèche scenes, glühwein and wurst, stollen cake with thick white icing, poinsetta wreathes, Austrian strudel, dog bowls, candy in containers that look like Jetson-style hair dryers, embroidered tablecloths, pine-needle owls, wicker baby carriages. Germany in Italy for Christmas. This is the way of the world.

The pretzels hang from wooden clothes trees and the pompom hats are pinned upside down and the spices are sold out of
burlap bags. Every awning is red-and-white striped, and every booth is lit, sometimes by candlelight, sometimes by Chinese lanterns shaped into stars. There’s a pig on a spit and a live fire, a German band, metal chairs that are always wet, like the stones are always wet, like everything in Florence is drowning, memories of the flood, the prof says.

In the winter, in Florence, at night, it’s all shadows. In the undersides of bridges. In the porticos of buildings. In the awnings and the domes and the rooftops. They string the holiday lights across the alleys—side to side, in a crisscross. They cable over like axons, tangle like dendrites. I keep wanting to forum this up in my MOOC—the representation of brain circuitry in the lights of Florence—but my comment is not getting crowdsourced. For now, then, I will simply share this with you:

The brain is inside the head, but the brain is outside, too. Every single place you look there’s evidence of neurons.

“You go on ahead,” I tell Mrs. C., when we’re together, coming home from Katherine’s, crossing the river in the near dark, passing the Weihnauchtsmarkt. “You go and I’ll buy chocolate for dinner, Austrian strudel, bratwurst for all.”

She is exhausted, and she goes. She puts her arms around me, hugs me, slips some euros in my pocket, and I think how Nadia will look exactly like her some day, hugging her best friend’s daughter in an Italian market. Nadia will grow up to be just like Mrs. C. Nadia will grow up. Period.

I walk the Weihnauchtsmarkt by myself, looking for Benedetto. I check the crowds, I check the shadows. I spy, stealthy, into the windows all lit up around the piazza, checking for hair with a glow.

I’m looking for the boy Nadia needs.

I’m looking for the something she has lost. Not stolen.

Two weeks ago Katherine announced that it was my turn to design the week’s intensive—constraint-induced therapy, in case I lost you on that. Force the mind to do what the mind has stopped doing. Re-grid, re-groove the neuronal pathways. Convert unused brain space into something bright and smart. Pump up the acetylcholine. Help Nadia lose the vague and sharpen the vocab, keep her mind alert and on guard. Attentive. Retentive. Old Nadia.

Think of a mash-up of Crazy Eights, Go Fish, and Charades. Think of a thirty-two-card deck, and sixteen images twice repeated. You start with four cards each and you’re rooting for pairs. You have to ask, as specifically as you can: “Mrs. C., may I please have the spumoni card?” or “Do you have the tiramisu?” or “I need that picture of Lady Esquire, advertising leather shoe paint, 1974.” If you can’t express your wants explicitly, you express them as best as you can. If there’s a chance to go all extemporaneous, do. You’re
not just dealing out nouns with this game. You’re dealing memory and narrative continuity.

So it goes: “May I please have the card with the picture of pancetta? That’s precisely what I want—the pancetta that reminds me of Marcella that reminds me of parsley, which is maybe a spice, maybe an herb. May I please have that?”

Then: “May I please have the picture of the mohair hot pants? Good God, I remember those mohair hot pants; every girl at Penn had a pair. We wore them in September, we wore them in October, and I was wearing them still, on that day in November, when Frederick Hartt, my art history professor, showed up and said there’d been a flood. I was wearing hot pants that day; I remember. I never touched the things after that, that’s the truth. But still, right now, I would love the hot pants card, Nadia, if you happen to have it.”

Until: “Maggie, may I, Maggie, I would like the pic—ture of, you know, when we ate, at Manake—, and after we bought Second—, and you said, you said, I said, So you’ll remem—me.”

“The
labneh
!” I’ll answer. “The super-fresh, super-fine
labneh
. The yogurt cheese of Manakeesh. And you’re right, I bought you your sweater that day? The one you’re wearing, and it worked, because look. Here I am and here you are. Nobody forgetting nobody in Florence.”

We give each other the cards when we have them. We hope Nadia will win, every time.