One Thing Stolen (8 page)

He touches the corner of his eye with a finger, like it’s all in there, everything he’s seen, everything I’ve done, everywhere I’ve been in Florence, everything I’ve stolen. He says, You took the corkscrew spring from the upholstery shop in the Oltarno. You took the kaleidoscope from the jeweler. You took the amethysts and the pillow. You took the hat and the tie and the stamps and the rubber pencil. You stole from Paperback Exchange.

You should be careful.

He fixes the bouquet in my arms and the bells in the cathedral ring.

I can’t stay, he says. Someone is waiting.

But—

I’m Benedetto.

Na—dia.

He nods. Be careful, he says.

Of—

Everything.

He touches my hand. He twists the flowers in their bouquet of three and now he’s running. The sound of his laces on the old, gray stones, the flowers in the duffel bag safe, protected.

In the window of the nearest shop stands a girl with pale hands and bright flowers.

I tell you this.

Tell me you see it.

And so the cat drags her in, Jack says.

He lies sprawled across the thin-cushioned couch, his bare feet hanging off one end and his ankles knobby. He lies there watching me, his Don’t Be Hating on Me T-shirt tight from too many trips through the Laundromat soaker. He points the remote at the TV and snaps off the soap and the upstairs stilettos tap like fingers on a phone and all the plates in the sink are gone and the table is perfectly clean, no sign of anything, except for the rosemary sticking up in the mug and one bright tip of a neon feather.

No Mom. No Dad. No Perdita.

Were you kidnapped?

I shake my head.

Were you lost?

May—

You know what time it is?

Words bang in my head like meteorites. I see Mom and Dad and Jack and me outside in the night, long ago.

Eight o’clock, Nads. Eight o’ Freaking Clock.

I step sideways, down the hall toward the twins’ room. I keep the sunflowers close, behind my back. Jack pulls out his phone, punches two texts, waits for the phone to buzz back. Once. Twice. He looks up and I see, in the wide brow beneath his shag of hair, his crooked worry line.

You should try not to do this, he says. Try not to mess so much with Mom and Dad. Who are, by the way, out there looking for you.

I didn’t mean—

Yeah?

I’m not trying—

Say it, Nads.

Like a needle lifting from a Maggie record, the song stops. I see the boy in the street. I feel the weight of the flower. I see break instead of color, and I can’t find the next word. It’s gone.

Yo, Jack says.

But I’m inside the borrowed room, locking the door. I’m lying down beneath the ship of stolen things. I’m holding the flowers that are hot as suns inside my broken hands.

The boy is real.

They’re singing in the space between the backs of things, two of the restaurant boys and a girl in a green dress with a hat pinned to her head. Italian words to American songs. I hear Mom and Dad in my head as they sing—the long talk after they got back from searching the city for me.
You don’t disappear like that. You don’t go without telling us where you are. You know how much we worry, Nadia? How far we walked, looking for you? What are you doing? What are you thinking? We can get you help, sweetie. Dad knows a doctor
.

A doctor?

A neurologist
.

Neur—o—logist
.

I chopped the sunflowers from their stems, see? I pierced each thistling face at two opposite ends, pulled one silver chain through the east-end holes and one silver chain through the west-end holes so that the faces of the flowers are suspendered and I have what I have—a three-story sunflower nest.

Which needs a ribbon—raw bright pink.

There are three faces of sun in a room lit by the moon. At the window I watch the waiters vanish one by one, until the songs are gone.
Neurologist
. In the great glass room where the bookbinder works nothing stirs. He has left his things within reach. The glue, the brush, the paints, the wall of wooden tools with their flat faces and their pointy ends, the heavy-handled scissors, the signatures, the threads, the ribbons streaming down from ceiling hooks, like the edge of a skirt, like feathers, like puppets from strings. It’s all right there, and I am so freaking scared and my heart is pounding harder and harder, and suddenly I remember Mom last fall when it was just the two of us, out on the porch in West Philly, waiting on the neighborhood cat.

Mom and a bowl of milk on the porch.

Mom and a dish of crushed tuna.

Mom and a checkered blanket.

She’ll come
, Mom said.
She trusts us
.

Trust.

The cat came.

Trust is the word that keeps breaking.

There are birds nesting with thorns. There are birds stitching caterpillar silk. There are saliva nests and loom nests and milkweed nests and cattail nests and honeysuckle nests, nests loomed and folded and pounded and lined and feathered in and warmed,
and there was the finch who saved herself and the chicks from the storm. Every nest is a miracle. It is something whole. A place to hide. A rescue.

Across the alley, the bookbinder sleeps. Bright ribbons hang from a hook above his window, and it’s the dark start of another day.

Don’t you dare
, I hear you say.
Don’t even think about it, Nadia
. But I remember the first steal ever, and how I could not help it.

My very first steal.

It was our last day in the city. We were leaving what we loved. The Victorian twin and the Schuylkill River moon and the stray cat with the broken whiskers that drank the milk Mom left her, and the birds, the blue birds in the locust trees, the red birds in the magnolias, the crows like black keys on the roofs of white houses, the finch and her chicks. We were leaving. It was hurricane weather. The planes were bad karma, grounded by clouds thick as steel plates. Mom and Dad and Jack and I were sitting in the airport rocking chairs looking out on the puddled tarmac and the gulls that couldn’t break into the sky. We’d walked the terminals end to end—all of us, then me and Jack, then me alone.

My first steal was from the airport bookstore. My first steal was
Goodnight Moon
, the book my dad had read aloud when I was young, a lullaby song. The clerk was talking into her decalsequined phone. The people passing by were rushing through. I took one book, a single one, slipped it into my carry-on. The clerk never noticed. No alarm was rung. I didn’t run.

One thing stolen.

That night, high in the freezing sky, my parents slept across the aisle and Jack curled behind me and in the great green room there was a telephone and a red balloon and a picture of the cow jumping over the moon. And there were three little bears sitting on chairs and two kittens. It was so simple. I tore the pages from their bindings and the pages into strips, a muffled sandpaper sound. I worked the paper with the looms of my hands. The nest I built was the size of my palm. It was the calmest thing I’d ever seen.

Grapevine, oak twig, water reeds, snakeskin, rabbit fur. Straw, bark, lichen, milkweed fiber, fishing lines, milk crates, chimney hollows, riverbanks, holes, Easter grass. There are birds that sew. There are spit-building birds and mud architects and cream-colored birds that lay cream-colored nests into a scratch of cream-colored sand. High in that freezing sky everyone was asleep and Florence was coming and something was already wrong. A comb and a brush and a bowl full of mush and a quiet old lady . . . hush. The birds full of hush.

The skies were black and then they were bright, and this is how simple it was. Now, here, the sky is gallons of dark. It’s a few hippo clouds and a million stars and a moon that is rounding the bend. There are no lights on in the back-alley places. The bookbinder sleeps. I just need one pink ribbon to finish this nest.

There’s a steal coming.

It is not me.

It is all me.

You can’t stop it.

Nobody can.

The sound of running feet.

The ruffling of Vitale ivy.

The stink inside the vestibule.

The cool air on Verrazzano.

Past the Laundromat, and through that one single alley that runs between and straight into the backs of things, I hurry. Across the patio where the waiters sing. Underneath the bulbed-light string. Toward the window where the bookbinder works. In the rubble I find a stone and toss it, a quick arrow. The glass shatters and echoes, and I have to work fast—reach for that one pink ribbon that hangs from its dark hook. Reach, and it’s mine, and now I’m running again, between the backs of things, across the patio, beneath the lights, into the street, up Verrazzano, key in the lock.

Safe
.

Almost.

There’s a woman with stilettos just inside the door. She holds a small dog. She’s smoking.

Buongiorno
, she says.

Buongiorno
.

I have been seen.

Me, the thief, who can hardly speak.

My heart is wild in my chest.