One Thing Stolen (9 page)

The water is hot cold thin. The bathroom light is ginger ale. The time is dawn. I stand in the shower until the water ends. Until it is only a trickle. Until my heart stops thundering and I can breathe again.

In the mirror above the sink, out of the cloud of shower steam, I see who I am—square jaw, shallow chin, nose rising at the tip, ears busting through the wet streaks of my hair.
You are the spitting image of your mom. You could be sisters
, is what everyone always says, but the girl in the circle of steam is me.

In the twins’ room, in the Goldilocks drawers, I find jeans and a white tee, my nubby yellow sweater. I pull them on, stand in the window, look out onto the dawn. I watch the sun break and catch in the broken glass of the bookbinder’s room, where the pink streak of ribbon is gone, and where he already is—the bookbinder with his bald head and his naked wrist, his shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows. He has a brush and a pan in his hands.

What is our plan?
Maggie used to ask me. In her mother’s kitchen, making eggs, she’d ask me. In her Simplicity apron—orange plaid with angel wings. With the pan sizzling, the butter melting, the eggs cracking, Maggie was asking, waiting, sliding a plate in front of me and wriggling her feet out of her open-toed clogs and sitting down across from me, and asking.

I always had the plan.

I fit my feet into my flats. I ponytail my hair. I open the door to the twins’ room and lock it with the key. I walk very, very quiet under the ivy, past the buttons and winter coats and gallons of left-behind bleach, past spiceology and the blank face of the TV, past my dad’s blank book. Through the tall windows of the front room of the Vitales’ flat, I watch the neighbor’s laundry drip and the bruised hour brighten. I will weave that pink ribbon into the sunflower nest. I hear somebody calling my name.

I open the window that opens to the street and lean.

You, I say.

Vieni con me
.

He weaves through the early streets and the sky is breaking. He speeds, and I am holding on, my chest pressed to his leather back, his neon duffel bag like a folded wing. Through the alleys he weaves, past iron grates, over fat gray stones, toward the Lungarno, and now we are flying across the bridge, across the Arno. When the bridge ends, he slows, turns right then right again, onto a cement ramp that slopes straight down to the river, which is a bright blind spot, gold and pink. A concrete dam sits on the river’s back like an archipelago.

There are people on the dam, fishing and drinking. There are two kids feeding mini dynamite sticks to the low river, and lovers, and he climbs off the Vespa and takes my hand.
Da questa parte
, he says. This way. We walk the back of this concrete whale past the fishermen, the drinkers, the kids scaring the fish with their explosives. We walk, and my feet slip on the green moss and he catches
me and I slip again, and now I sit at his side, safe in the hands of a thief.

She saw me.

I left the bookbinder’s window in smithereens.

We watch a slow boat row. We watch the nearby buildings burning with the low sun and the fisherpeople giving up on their catch, reeling in, smoking. We watch the river and the birds, the river and the birds, and the birds, the hanging branches, gutters, and coves, and the woman with the stilettos cannot find me.

Bello
, he says.

The smell of coffee and bananas close. The scruff of a new beard close. The chip in his ear. He sits with his chin on his knees, his jacket short in the sleeves, the last inch of his jeans worn down to white threads, and time slides. The dynamite shatters the water and an egret hovers, and the smaller birds are like painted moles on the face of day. I see the valleys and hills of his toes beneath the leather of his boots. I see the gone places in the knees of his jeans and the hem of his T-shirt. Frayed. I see him, and this is not a dream. Benedetto.

Howdidyoufind me? I say.

I’ve been watching you, he says. Remember?

He lifts my hand and turns it over. He draws a finger across my palm.
Sei stata qui
, he says, touching a place at the base of my ring finger. You have been here.
E qui
. The joint of my thumb. And
here. The place where my hand connects to my wrist. Also here. The highest part of my middle finger. Each touch of my palm a corner of the city. My hand the map that he draws. Verrazzano, he says, the tip of his second finger touching the tip of my fourth.

Città di ladri
.

The boys with the dynamite send another stick into the low Arno and fish tails flap. Two lovers head down the concrete ramp and over the slick moss of the archipelago, and she slips, too, and he catches her, and they laugh. On the Ponte Vecchio, the jewelers have started to open their shops—clanging the windows and doors, and rattling the chains, and sending the seagulls into a squawk, and now an egret flies, its wings slicing the sky. When I lift my head and turn I see cars on the bridge behind us, rumbling and choking past.

Guarda
, Benedetto says now. He unzips his duffel bag and digs in with his hand and retrieves a big petaled, freckled flower, dew on its tiger lily face, a small green caterpillar lying against its hairy stem.

Per te
, he says.

I press the flower to my face and breathe. I feel the wet heat of tears, the blur of the day, and the egret flies again, overhead, and I look up and laugh.

Gli uccelli
, he says.

Gli uccelli
.

We sit and the river changes color and the Ponte Vecchio fills with tourists hunting for a jewel, a chain, a deal. Along the
Lungarno the walks grow crowded, and on the stem of the flower the caterpillar scrunches forward, and I say that once a long time ago, in the place where I really live, I found a finch in a fig tree. I say a storm blew in but the finch and her eggs stayed safe. I say this, or at least I try to say this, and it doesn’t matter how we say what we say—neither of us fluent in English.

I like that story, he says.

I tell him that Philadelphia, where I come from, is a city of birds. I tell him everywhere you look there are feathers falling and there are nests made out of grass and rubber bands, spiderwebs and moss, the new branches of a fig tree, and in every single nest there’s the hope of something new or saved.

He nods. He watches the river. The chip in his ear catches the sun.

Where did you go, I say. Yesterday?

I tell him with my hands, my heart. Somehow, he understands.

Why have you—been watching me?

Because you’re interesting, he says.

Too interesting?

There’s something you should see, he says.

Back on the Vespa, up the ramp, over the bridge, we ride the rough stones. Through the half streets, onto the sidewalks in the alleys, where the pieces of the street have been hauled out by jacks and machines. My arms around his waist. My cheek against his leather back. My heart like fumes. The birds above us fly in a crooked
V
, like we have them on a string.
Like someone had you on a string
, Dad said. The flowers are safe inside the duffel. The silk green of the caterpillar is safe on the long stem of the lily, and the woman with the stilettos cannot see me.

The roar and then nothing. The clutch and the key. Stop. We climb off and leave the Vespa by a rack of bikes and the crowd is against us—the thousands herding in from the train station across the way, their colossal suitcases like pets on a leash. One door takes us off the street and down some interior stairs into sudden quiet.

Chiostro Verde, Benedetto says.

We duck the turnstile, let ourselves in. It’s like walking through a telescope toward a burst of solar, and I think, for one small moment, about the Vitales, the bookbinder’s window, the latest steal. At the end of the corridor we turn into the broad, painted arcade that wraps the cloister green on all four sides. In the high parts of the arcade there are birds and wings, a story told in old paint. In the square of green beneath the open sky, cypress trees grow.

There is one fresco after another. There is sky and stone, the silence and calm, and Benedetto is telling a story about the paintings here. This man and his terrified dog. This wrenched tree. These broken barrels, tables, walls. These pictures from hundreds of years ago, barely holding on.
L’Arca di Noe
, Benedetto says. Noah’s Ark. Painted by Paolo Uccello. A man named after birds.

He shows me the gray-grays and red-grays and blue-grays of the vanishing paintings. He shows me the strange world of broken things and corked perspective, birds and wings, and we are standing there together, and he leans against me and he takes my hand and there are bells ringing in the distance. He checks his watch. There’s still time, he says.

He cuts away, toward the cloister’s center. I follow him to the tallest cypress on the grassy green. He kneels, puts his fingers to his lips. In the shadow of the tree I kneel beside him and watch as he separates the branches of the tree, the branches like curtains, and now, in the dark shade, I see them—a pair of turtledoves,
their breasts expanding with every beat of their hearts, their faces flicked sideways. The first bird is more anxious than the second. It spreads its wings and a few white feathers fall, drift to the ground. The second bird
turrs
, its neck going fat with every note it sings.

Per te
, he says. I thought you would like it.

The birds hop the interior of the tree. They call to each other. They turr. Far, far away the church bells ring. The boy has to go.

Somebody needs me, he says.

Jack thunks Marcella down so hard that a bowl on the kitchen table jumps. Perdita looks up from under her pompodored hair. She wears big drippy sleeves and a short yellow skirt and ribbed tights, the same boots from yesterday, and in her hands she holds five swordfish steaks, one piled on top of the other. From her neck dangles that chain with its feather pendant—heavy and light, the tips of the feathers catching the steam that billows up from the oil in the skillet.

Nadia, Mom says, her footsteps coming quickly down the hall, a phone in her hand and lines in her forehead. Where the hell have you been? Sweetie. We’ve been worried.

Jack counts the mint leaves. Thirty-five. Perdita puts the garlic cloves into the heated oil. Jack reads Marcella slow and out loud, pretending nothing’s wrong here, this is just life at the Caras’, life with a mostly MIA sister. Mom asks me again:
Sweetheart
. She says Dad’s out there, looking for me, and did we not already have a
conversation, and could I not at least have left a note, and please, Nadia, answer. Jack chops chili peppers. He throws the thirty-five mint leaves into the pan. Perdita’s necklace flies forward.

It’s one o’clock, Mom says. She lifts her phone and calls Dad. Jack announces that mint is a cure for the common cold, mint is a cure for bad breath, mint is a cure for almost anything. Glares at me briefly.

Perdita watches him talk, watches me. She lifts one eyebrow and that’s when I see the tiny little loop at the end of one brow, like a period at the end of a sentence, and now when she leans toward the pan again, to stir the mint, to watch the garlic glow and the saffron stir in, her chain clinks against the edge of the pot. She quickly shucks it off. Strings it across the back of a chair like a purse. Stands beside my brother. Gives his cheek a kiss.