One Thing Stolen (24 page)

“It’s important that I find him,” I say, my heart thumping. “It’s—it’s absolutely necessary. Can you tell me where he lives? Can you call him for me, please? Can you—oh my God,” I plead. The words stuttering around like my best friend’s words stutter around. Everything broken. Everything a miracle.

The woman stands there a long time, considering. She shakes her head, very slow. She says that I must understand that they cannot give private information out to strangers, that that is not what they do in her country.

I feel the tears in my eyes, try not to beg. I ask her, please, again, one more time, isn’t there anything she can do, give me his number, his last name, anything—please. She shakes her head no. Asks if by chance my friend is the girl with the dark hair and the professor father.

“You know her?” I say.

“I met her,” she says. “She was watching Benedetto work. She seemed—nervous, perhaps. Not well. Fragile,” she decides. “That’s what she seemed. Fragile.” One word. Italian flares.

“Nadia Cara is my best friend,” I say.

“Ah, yes.
Si
. I see.”

“She needs me to find Benedetto. She needs to speak to him. Just tell me his last name. Please.”

“You must understand,” she says. “I cannot.”

She runs a finger around the inside of one hoop, like running a finger around the thoughts in her head. She looks terribly sad, terribly perplexed, terribly concerned, but there are rules, proprieties.

“The boy carries a pink duffel bag,” she tells me, quietly, finally. “Very bright pink. Drives a Vespa. Very old. If you look for both things, you will find him.”

“I’m running out of time,” I say.

“I am hoping for you,” she says.

“But you—”

“No,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

“Here,” I say, scribbling an address onto a scrap I find in my purse, scribblng a phone number over the address. “Call him. Tell him Nadia says hello. Tell him Nadia is leaving soon.”

I step back and back and back, backward. She holds the paper in her hands. She lets me go.

Like walking through an empty subway station. Past the garden and the bird, past the empty rooms of worship, the diorama rooms, past Jesus still dying, and up, and out, to the Christmas streets of Florence.

Please
, I said.
Please
.

There is no other more pitiable word.

Out under the sky I walk east and then north to the Sant’Ambrogia market. I file through the outside stalls of winter vegetables, climb the stairs, and wander under the bright lights, nothing supernatural here, no bright pink duffel, my heart down around my knees, my whole self sunken. I find the baker and order three panettone and wait while she wraps them in white boxes with blue ribbons. One for the Caras. One for Katherine. One for Nadia alone.
I didn’t find him
, I’ll have to say.
I almost found him
, I cannot say. This close.
This
close. But nothing.

Only a few days left until Christmas, and, after Christmas, San Francisco, an experimental intervention.

Hope.

I wanted to save you, Nadia. I wanted to be your best-friend heroine.

I wanted miracles.

I walk slowly toward the Vitales’, the boxes in my hands. I let the bikes with the streamers and the finger-flicked bells pass. The two nuns with tube socks and baskets, their thick bike wheels fighting the grooves between cobbles. The two men carrying a chunk of an altar in their hands, their hands like stirrups. A woman in a terrycloth coat with the belt strings hanging down, like she got lost on her way to the shower. It is gray and gray-silver and gray-white out here, dirt in the stones of Florence, and I am not far from the Vitales’ when I see it. Fluorescent as a traffic cone. Pink as a flamingo. The red tongues of a poinsetta in its mouth. The fumes of a Vespa.

“Wait,” I call after it. “Stop!” The three boxes of panettone in my arms, and the bikes and the terrycloth amnesiac in my path, and me calling
Benedetto!
Following the trail of the smoke, the turn of the streets, the grooves of the cobbled stones. The boxes earthquake in my arms. The hem of my coat drags and catches on the curb, and he is getting away from me, I am losing him again, vanquishing chance. “Stop!” I call, and now the nuns with their bells see what I need, see how I am, and they decide: They pull up their skirts and ride their bikes harder and flick their fingers at their bells. They disappear where he disappeared. I call and
everything is silent. Only the sound of my painted clogs echo across the cobbles.

The street has bent again, it has dodged left. I take the turns as they come, follow the smell of the Vespa, listen to my own sad painted clogs, until there, far away, I see him. The boy with the hair, on the bike, the pink duffel bag on his shoulder flying.

“Wait!” I call. “Wait! Wait!”

But he looks one way and then the other, and never once looks back, and now I think I am becoming Nadia, or I understand Nadia, or I can see inside her brain. Because what is a dream, and what is imagined, and what in this world is for real?

Actual
real?

I am losing my way in the heart of Florence.

These streets are so confusing.

December 20, December 21, December 22, December 23.

The days go by, but the days are different. Suitcases in the hall. Mrs. C. on the phone, long-distance. The prof out in the early fog, walking the length of his river. Jack is near to the end of his Brunelleschi paper, and while he works, Perdita sits in the window making chains for the miniature tree that we rooted into a pot at the Vitales’. Upstairs Agnese plays Christmas songs like she is practicing for a concert, like she can help us. In the windows we’ve hung Chinese lanterns shaped like stars, and beneath the stars, on the sills, burn white candles. Between her calls and her arranging, Mrs. C. has pulled out all the Vitales’ pots and made a pigeon sauce, and that was enough for Jack to set aside his paper and return to Almost Independent Study 101—to take out all the pots, to buy up all the spices, to cook, Perdita as his sous chef. In the closet in the hall, behind a coat made of bearskin, I found the Vitales’ wooden crèche and it sits on the chest of drawers beside the TV.

In the mornings I walk the streets looking for Benedetto, hoping for another chance. In the afternoons, I go with Mrs. C. to the hill of Belvedere, and we talk nouns and play intensives, remember Christmas words. Mistletoe. Twinkle lights. Stocking stuffers. We sit warming our hands with mugs of tea and eating the raisins out of stollen.

“Ishecoming?” Nadia asks, as soon as I arrive.

“Not yet,” I say. “Don’t know.”

I lost him
.

I am my best friend’s best friend. I am here. It rains too much in Florence. Katherine says I should know that I’ve done all I can.

Love. Faith. Hope.

Which best chance, taken?

I walk the streets, I run the streets, I call his name:

Benedetto
.

December 24. Christmas Eve.

We’ve hidden the tier-fours that were never unstolen. We’ve fit the nests inside boxes we found empty in the bottom of the Vitales’ closets, wrapped each one like a gift, stowed them away. We’ve made the Vitales’ front room big enough—the couch pulled back, the chairs circled round, the tree pulled into the middle—and we’ve tucked a candle there behind the crèche. Jack has gone all-out crazy in the kitchen, and Perdita has helped, and Mrs. C., too, and sometimes she leaves her son and Perdita and walks across the room and stands so close to her prof, her long hair with the few new white streaks falling before them like a curtain. He fits his hand into the small of her back. She smooths his eyebrows down with a damp finger.

I’ve Skyped home. I’ve written cards. I’ve given instructions for my garden.
Go and visit it, please. Check on the fig tree and its straw
. I hear the echoes of my painted clogs in the streets. I feel the pull of the rain in the hem of my coat.

Faith. Love. Hope.

The terrible hurt of my infinite failure.

“They’re here,” the prof says, and we all leave wherever we are to see for ourselves. Upstairs, above us, Agnese’s piano song stops playing. The little dog yips, and down in the street Nadia hears it and looks up and smiles. Katherine, behind her, waves both her hands, like the girl on the hill with the doll.

“Look,” Mrs. C. says.

“My primo,” the prof whispers, his voice choked in his throat.

Nadia wears a long white borrowed coat and my patent-leather boots and her hair is swept back in a messy bun, trailing Christmas ribbons. Nadia the artiste, I think.

“Hey, Nads. Hey. Merry Christmas. Hey.”

“You look so so pretty,” I say, and Jack says, “Yeah,” and Perdita reaches up to fix one of the ribbons in Nadia’s hair, every fingernail painted a different bright rad color.

“Merry Christmas,” Nadia says. Her words soft and sticky as jam.

Mrs. C. bought everything for Christmas that the Sant’Ambrogio Market has to offer—every spice and sausage, every cake and pigeon bone, all the angel hairs of pasta, all the chocolate flavors, every bit of cheesecake with the bitter orange marmalade. My stomach feels like the round part of a question mark. Our eyes are on each other and on Nadia. Our thoughts are on now and on days from now, on who we were and who we’re still becoming. Jack and Perdita are holding hands. Nadia sits between me and the prof. Mrs. C. and Katherine have no words for the gain or the loss.

I have no match-to-match for my best friend.

“Should we do the Secret Santa?” Mrs. C. asks. “We should do the Secret Santa,” she answers herself.

We groan when we move. We hurt when we rise. We go wherever we have to go to find the secrets we’ve been keeping for each other, each of us taking care of the names we drew a week ago, when we were sure Nadia would come. Her first time leaving Katherine’s place in all this time. Her first time strong enough.

We stand up, ease down, reveal our secrets, one by one. A miniature Duomo and three jars of extra-hot on the scale of hot chili peppers for Jack (courtesy of the prof). A sterling silver
David
for Katherine (courtesy of Mrs. C.). A new phone for Mrs. C. because of her at-risk work (courtesy of the prof). A gold chain, bicycle-heavy and perfectly punk, for Perdita (courtesy of me) and also (courtesy of me) rad cable-knit tights, dyed lime green. Jack A-plussed his Brunelleschi paper—put math in it, history, a little neuro commentary on the wonders and the risks of genius, a Florence soundtrack. He put his whole heart in, and he loves Perdita, his bitter chocolate, his inch of punk.