One Thing Stolen (23 page)

I think of the world outside—the Christmas market, the Duomo tree, the dendrite lights, little Sophia Loren and her early Christmas present. Christmas is soon. Christmas and hope, maybe, a cure, possibly, a fix for the at-risk, good news. A chance presented,
a chance taken. But also: If Nadia leaves before she sees Benedetto, something I don’t understand will be ruined. Lost.

“Nadia,” I say. “Sweetie. I’m so glad.”

She hugs me again, harder, her scabby hand healed by now and her hair long to her waist and her bare feet pale on the planks of Katherine’s floor. She hugs me and stands back and looks at me with her sad-happy eyes, and then at Katherine, complicated Katherine, standing by the stove with the kettle in her hand, her hair pulled over one shoulder. When Nadia leaves, Katherine will stay. She will lose us. Every day. Alone in the hills of Belvedere.

“We need to be cautious,” Katherine says. “With our hope.”

“Of course.”

“We need to take one day at a time.”

“Yes,” Mrs. C. says.

Though Christmas is soon.

“Let’s keep to our routine for this day at least,” Katherine says, and now she steps forward with my mug of tea in her hands. I bring the steam to my face as she slips the deck of my cards from the pile of
Brain
magazines, tall as a column. She shuffles twice, hands the deck to me, and I place my mug on the table, reshuffle the deck, deal, sit down. I unfrog the buttons on my coat and wait for Nadia to pull out her chair, to pick up the cards, to scan her two sister cities—Florence and Philadelphia. She studies her
hand hard, rearranges things. She looks up when she is ready. I take in a long draught of tea and it runs down my throat, past my heart.

Mrs. C. starts. She asks for the bright-red face of the Fisher Library, and Nadia has this card, hands it over, an easy exchange. Katherine goes next, requests the Pitti Palace; I surrender it. I ask for the Woodlands and Mrs. C. makes it mine, and now it’s Nadia’s turn and everyone waits until she is ready to speak.

“Maggie,” she starts, “can I have please I have, canIhave Frank—lin Field.”

“All yours,” I say, pinching the card to lay it down, but she puts her hand on my hand and stops me, pushes back, stands and walks to where I’m sitting and works her hands up into my hair. She slips the gel pen free and unknots the tangles. She smooths the strands, begins to braid, her fingers going
whisk whisk whisk
—one braid beside the other, six long zippers, and I think of all the times I braided her hair and how never once could I braid like this—so fast, so efficient, the weave of an artiste. Like being inside one of Nadia’s nests, I think, and I wait for her to tell me what she wants.

She leans across my shoulder, slips a card out of my hand, lays it flat. Santa Croce.

“Gardenofleather,” she says. “Findhim.”

I have looked, I wanted to say. I have looked, I have run, I have followed Agnese’s pointing finger. Agnese who lives her
life in a cloud of smoke and a thrum of sad piano. Agnese who can’t be certain, whom I can’t be certain of. I have looked, Nadia, I am trying.

Maybe he’s not real.

Maybe . . .

But I hug her. I say nothing. She is my best friend. She trusts me most. We are each other’s miracle. World’s greatest.

I wake in the dark. So hard to sleep at the Vitales’. So hard to dream and not see Nadia. So hard to be alone, counting out chances.

Jack’s in the other room, rustling in his bed. There’s the
pop-pop
of the prof’s snoring. There’s Mrs. C. pulling a tea bag out of the canister she brought from the house in West Philadelphia, and as I wait the charcoal sky in the window grows pewter, and now a band of possible sun cuts through. I pull on my traffic-light dress with the triple flounces, circa 1970, and the Timex, 1982, which will never be unstolen, and the coat, its hem frayed.

I open the window, let in the cold air. I think of last winter, when the snow fell fast over Philadelphia and Nadia remembered the old coil of rope in the basement and the metal slick of the trash can lid and how she had said, “Climb on,” and I did. And how we went all the way through West Philadelphia and all the way around the Quad, and how we could look in and see the students
in their dorm rooms looking back at us, and how up ahead Nadia looked like a star. The light from the dorm was on her like a star. She had ice crystals in her hair and snow ridges on her shoulders and there were candles in her eyes and her skin was winter-colored. She looked like the angel she had carried home from Curiosities. She looked like she might fly away, except for the rope tied tight between us.

It is so cold out there in Florence. So cold and possibly wet; it could snow soon. In the glass room where the bookbinder works, a light snaps on, and I stay right where I am—in the cold front of the early day. He takes his seat on his tall stool with the wooden back. He sits at his long, crowded table. He stacks and unstacks his signatures, measures for holes, punches the holes, threads a needle, and I watch him work, his shirtsleeves rolled. His hands play at the work like piano keys. Ribbons flutter above his head. Ribbons: I’ve seen them before. I’ve seen—

Wait.

I’ve seen these ribbons
.

Careful, I think.

Don’t presume. Ask.

I watch him—very keen. I see how he reaches up to collect a tool, and when the cuff of his sleeve pulls away from his wrist I see a big clunky thing, a circa 1980s Timex, and that’s how I know for insta-sure. Suddenly, brilliantly, hard-to-breathedly, I have our match-to-match.

The stolen from was there all along, in the back alley.

The thief lived in this room, watched from this window, could not help herself.

Look up, Mr. Bookbinder
, I think.

Look up and see
.

My best friend is an artiste, like you
.

As soon as Mrs. C. slips back into her room, I slip out. Down the stairs, past the stink of bikes, into the cold, where I hear the sound of suds at the Laundromat. A waiter locks the door to his car, then carries a tray of lettuce in through the front door of the restaurant.

There is one small alley that leads into the back courtyard, and I follow the trail, hurrying now, my coat pulled to my chest, my pocket heavy. There is a wide sill beneath the binder’s window. I stand on my toes. I reach the sill. I leave the Timex right there, a long-lost present. I leave it with a note.

WE’RE SORRY.

WE TOOK FOR BEAUTY’S SAKE.

WE MEANT NO HARM.

WE’RE GRATEFUL.

No one out on Verrazzano now but a Bolognese pup, doing his business near the foot of the scaffolding. Somebody whistles and the furball scampers across the street and out of sight and I’m alone again, the white band of sun turning a cream-in-coffee color.

The Timex has been restored.

The clinical trials are starting soon.

The days are running short.

Find him.

Across the piazza, Santa Croce looks like a kindergarten drawing. There’s someone asleep on its steps—two students with boxes for guitars and backpacks for pillows. I stand at Dante’s feet looking up, looking around, and then I look straight past him. There, along the north side of the basilica, the east end, is a door I’ve never noticed—the color of copper over time. An older man is fitting a key into its lock, jangling the handle. The door opens, and then it shuts. Another way into Santa Croce.

I study the creamed milk of the sky. I wait in the shadows, take my time. When I reach the door and pull, it gives. I hear footsteps far away, and then the footsteps vanish and I’m standing here, in a frame of light, watching Jesus die in the arms of his mother.

I follow a hallway down, long and wide, smooth as the inside of a tulip, plastered arches overhead until the surfaces begin to break and the plaster is brick and there are small rooms furnished with marble and light off to the one side. When the hallway juts right I stop. The sky is here. A winter garden. The December bark of olive trees and oranges in hibernation.
Garden of leather
, Nadia had said. But everything here is green or dreaming green. It’s flora and not fauna.

I sit on the half wall, blow on my hands, wonder where Benedetto is hiding, if he is hiding, if he exists. A couple of brown birds, chickadees, maybe, have flown in from the sky above and are grubbing for crumbs on the stone floor, bobbing their heads, tweeting. One bird leaves the pack and hops up onto the last branch of the tree, then disappears, and now I see it again, higher. It hops again and I see how it leaves and returns, hunting.

“Can I help you?”

Startled, I turn and find not the man with the key but a woman with a summer tan and a fringe of white hair, her eyes so large and specific that it’s clear she’s been watching me watch the birds for a while in this open nest of weather.

“It’s early,” she says when I don’t answer. “The basilica doesn’t open for a few hours more. Nor the shops,” she says. “Nothing. You shouldn’t be here.”

“I didn’t realize,” I say, and I stand to go, but she looks at me like she wants me to stay, or like we are not done. She wears a short, furry coat and a blue pencil skirt. Black shoes with blue heels. A large gold ring.

“I’ll have to talk to Carlos,” she says, “about the door.”

Her English is perfect. Her eyes are so green. I think of chances. I ask her.

“I’m looking for someone,” I say.

Her eyebrows arch up, the hoops in her ears glitter.

“
Oof
.” She shakes her head. “Young love.”

“No,” I say. “That’s not what I mean. It’s not for me. It’s for a friend.”

“A friend.”

“Who isn’t well. And there’s this boy. Benedetto. Have you heard of him? She says he’s here, at Santa Croce.
Garden of leather
, she said. So I came here. I’ve come here. I’ve looked everywhere. And now I’m here, and now I wonder: Is there even a boy named Benedetto?”

She gives me a long look and then a nod. She touches the elbow of my coat and turns and I follow her, around another corner, another courtyard, toward another opening to the sky.

The rooms are stone here; rustic, not smooth. The windows are long, and through them I see a world of tools and skins, dyes and knives, old-fashioned sewing machines, a little row of plastic men on the brick sill, big windows; the old man, Carlos. We step into his workshop, and I wait while she speaks to the man in Italian, fast, and I hear the boy’s name, twice. Carlos looks up from what he has in his hands and he studies me with watchful eyes. He says a few words, just a few, and then they are done, and now she touches me again, and we step out of the workroom and beneath the sky, and she tells me her news, a quiet story.

“It’s as I thought,” she says. “The boy is still on leave. Something to do with his mother.”

“So,” I say, can barely say it, “there is a boy.”

“Yes, of course,” she blinks. “The boy we have been discussing.”

“A real boy?”

“Is there some confusion?”

“Named Benedetto.”

She doesn’t smile. She doesn’t nod. Her eyebrows furrow.

“Yes,” she says at last.
“Si.”