One Thing Stolen (13 page)

I lift the purple bucket with the yellow poppies off the floor. I hand it to her through the window. She loops its handle over a nearby branch and she laughs like Maggie does.

Bucket number two
, she says.
If you please
.

She hangs a blue bucket with red poppies. She hangs a green bucket with orange poppies. She hangs a white bucket with purple poppies. She hangs a red bucket with white poppies and every time she does it takes longer and longer as she works the branches and the twigs farther away on the tree. There is a crowd of kids below her. The mailman has stopped on his route. Two cats are in the across-the-street windows watching her every move. When she’s finally finished hanging the very last bucket—when the tree is lit up with poppies and buckets and the glitter of the sun, when there’s a crowd out there, and Mrs. Ercolani is home—Maggie stands, tall and completely triumphant.

World’s greatest miracle
, she says.

World’s best friend
, I say, and I sleep a long time, until I hear my name rising through the window.

My cheek against his leather. My arms around his waist. Florence a chessboard. We go north and south, avoiding the start of the crowds, the early businessmen, the shopkeepers, the nuns. We go east, where the tourists aren’t and the air smells like the chill inside unpopular churches, the abandoned storefronts. We cross the Arno and fly toward the Pitti Palace, and I hold on in this strange and early morning.

At the far edge of the city, Benedetto stops in the shade of triangle trees, swings his duffel bag across one shoulder, and takes my hand. Across the low part of a fence he leaps, then reaches his long arms for me.

We walk a pebble path, between trees, don’t stop at the signs. There are hedges now, and marble grotesques and a pond and an island at the center of the pond, and Perseus on a white marble horse. Above us the limbs of old tree branches lace together, into an arch.

Ascolta
, he says. Listen.

The running trickle of thin blue water. The dark squirrels scattering leaves. We step off the thin path and into the deep woods, and nobody is here but us—Benedetto and me, in the middle of a darkening morning.

On a bench deep in the woods, we sit—his legs too long for his hips. A crucifix hangs from a chain link at his neck, and when he pulls me close, I smell Vespa, leather, seeds—real things. He whistles—a real song, one fluttering tune, like helium streaking through the lips of a balloon. A long note. Three snips.

Look, he says. I follow the direction of his finger until I finally see them—a family of green woodpeckers beneath the trees, their long beaks and sticky tongues drilling the earth, their bodies the color of dried grass, their heads red as Maggie’s hair. Hammering and twisting, yaffling.

Per te
, he says.

We watch the birds in their clown heads, their green suits. We listen to them talk, the birds of Florence. The sky is so high above the leafy shield that we are cloistered in, but the storm is definitely coming. The birds know. They watch the boy and me, nervous. They crackle in the underbrush. They look up sideways and there’s a crack of thunder overhead, and the rain falls but not hard, not yet. Benedetto bends over to the bag at his feet. Unzips. Pulls a yellow rose from the neon pink, its bud still tight and new.

He has a Michelangelo face. He starts to talk and I listen. About the cats in Florence and the monks at night. About the
view of the city from the Duomo. About leather, something about leather, a shop in the bottom of the cathedral. Which cathedral? Santa Croce. Where? Past the Dante. Through dungeon doors. A man named Carlos. A leather workshop in a cathedral?
Si
. He says he never knew his father. He says his mother is a survivor. He says, You know about the flood? and I say, I know something about the flood, and he smiles.

Then you know me, he says. You know my history. You know my mother.

He tells me how it was, the stories his mother told him, which are the stories her mother told her, years ago.
Alluvione di Firenze
. Water rising from the river, rising from the basements and sewers, lifting the cars off the street, breaking the bridges in two, running up the ladders and the stairs, everything floating. He tells me about the men up to their waists in the water and the jewelry boxes they wore on their heads, the books they carried in their arms, the paintings on their shoulders, the bowls full of knives and spoons in their hands, the rescued puppies. He tells me like he was there, but he wasn’t there. This is his city’s story, his mother’s story.

She was, he says now, a baby in the flood. She was, he says, floating in
how you say?
In a—

He describes the shape with his hand—not a coffin, but a box, not a square box, a rectangular box, a box with flowers.

Window box?

Si
.

A baby floating in a window box. His mother, the survivor.

He talks—accidents, luck. He says—the tourists can’t understand. He wants—something, again, about his mother. The rain is falling in its own rain country. Benedetto is building his words with his hands, wanting me to understand, and now, sometimes, into his stories I slide my stories. Maggie. Philadelphia. The cat and the bowl. The garden after the storm. The finch who survived the storm. Maggie’s birthday present. Nests. I don’t know what he understands or how well I say it. I don’t know how much time is passing. I don’t know what I’m leaving out, yet somehow, with Benedetto, it doesn’t matter.

He lifts my hand like he did on the dam. He traces the blisters and splinters beneath the gauzy glove that Katherine wrapped on. Thunder cracks overhead and the rain slips through the canopy—small and cold in the part of my hair; beads, like pearls, on his collar.

What did you do to yourself? he asks.

I shake my head.

Tell me, he says. Touching the fraying gauze with the back of his thumb. Working a loose splinter free. Pulling a scab of glue from a fingertip. Showing it to me. He leans in for the truth, but words are so hard now, the stories I want to tell.

Trust me.

I do.

Tell me.

Siamo la stessa cosa
, he says, but we’re not the same thing, and the rain falls harder, and it is time to find my way to the top of the hill, to neurology, to answers. I have to get there before I disappear completely, before there is no hope at all, before I lose my way forever in this city.

I want to tell the boy that the girl I was could have fallen in love with the boy he is. I want to tell him in one long complete unbroken sentence. He takes my hand before I do and turns it in his. He puts one arm across my shoulder and we sit there and the church bells ring in the distance.

Something’s very—wrong, I say.

There are freckles on the ridge of his nose. There is a damp curl through his hair. We’re all running from something, he says, or I think he says it, and he lifts his hand to my chin and brushes the tears from my eyes and comes toward me, very close, and I feel his lashes brush up against my skin.

I’ll be here, he says. If you need me.

His lips on mine are fog and birdsong. They are the smell of leather and the raw, quickening rain. He holds my head with the palm of his hand—all that is broken and hurting.

Don’t forget this, he says.

Don’t forget me.

After a long, long time he divides the curtain of trees with his hand. He stands up, he helps me. The rain falls from signs, it falls from the ledges of my cheeks; it is forever falling.

Her white dress floats to her anklebones. The couch is green; its legs are swans. Her glasses hang from a beaded chain at her neck, and now she shuts the door behind me and turns off the sound of the rain, and says, Thank you, Nadia, for coming.

She leaves and comes back. The rain slides down the windows, past the Michelangelos, the three clay teapots, the china cats, and it is cold. I close my eyes. When I open them she is toweling the storm out of my hair.

Let’s get you into some warm clothes, she says.

I trade my shirt for one of hers, my sweater for another, my jeans for a skirt. I think of the hills I’ve climbed and the boy I’ve left behind, and the circle of Caras, and she brings me tea. Tells me it’s a little past noon. She has called my dad. I can stay as long as I’d like—no, actually, you will stay, Nadia. I lower my face toward the steam of the tea. I let the tea burn my tongue.

You’re still shivering, she says. She walks away and comes back, brings me a quilt from another room—red with gold threads.
Ancient. She pours me another cup of tea and now she fills a blue mug of her own, and she sits in the striped chair, a big fluffy chair, watching me, waiting.

One of the twins—left her story behind, I say at last, and she looks up and asks if this is still a worry.

To leave a story behind, I say. Toloseone.

What if the story is there when the girl returns? she says.

What if she doesn’t?

What?

Return?

This worries you.

Yes. Very much. IamafraidIwon’treturn.

The tea is dark orange. A lemon seed floats. Another burst of rain hits the windowpanes, and the glass looks flooded and cracked and a caterpillar of white fog rises. Everything else is still. Everything else is silent. Storm and smoke.

Getting close to one o’clock, she says. And every tick of time is less of me.

When I wake I’m on the old couch and the clouds through the windows are low and Katherine is in the kitchen, turning a spoon in a pan. Onions. Bay leaves. Garlic. Rosemary. Tock on the wall. A little past two, she says.

She’s wearing jeans now, an orange shirt open at the neck. She leaves the spoon in the pan and crosses the room and presses her wrist against my forehead—the blue beat of a vein. The rain has stopped. There is sun through the streaks on the panes. The face of a glass apple on the sill. Katherine carries a tray from the kitchen, two plates, and we sit side by side on the worn couch, and she says we should eat, or we can eat, if I want to, do I want to?

You were sleeping, she says.

She says the sky is set for a good bruising—so much storm, so much sudden sun. She says the days are often long on the hill, and that she’s glad I came, that lunch alone is never as good as lunch with a new friend. My husband’s specialty, she says, about the dish
she’s made. He was a fan of bay leaves, she says. Bay laurel. An herb that takes its time coming into its own.

I wonder if her husband is here, near.

She says he’s been gone a long time.

I wonder if he was American. She says he was Italian, short and very wide. A perfect man. He sang, she says. He cooked. Sometimes I talk to him, still.

She stands, crosses the room. She reaches a planked table with a single drawer and chooses a photograph in a silver frame. She sits beside me on the couch so that I can see what her husband looked like years ago. Irresistible, she says.

She has a long neck, a few freckles on her chest, a mole on one side. She has two gold posts in her ears, like the first earrings ever, like she’s never thought to buy another pair. She studies the picture and then she stands again, sets it back down into the dust ridges it came from and begins to dig through the pile of things on the floor. A mountain of books, a landslide. Some of the books are falling, and some are sliding, and there are magazines in there, illustrations, an envelope of paper clips that spill, and at last she finds what she was looking for, a book of photographs, and I wonder, is this it, the start of the cure? Nothing but us and slow time.