One Thing Stolen (14 page)

Your father, she is saying, is another lovely man. The smartest man I ever met. She sits by my feet on the floor.

Her book of pictures has wood covers. The pages between are gray-black, thick as construction paper, everything bound together with a leather cord, and when she turns the pages now some of the pictures fall out—square photographs, bleached colors, words written onto their backs. Words and years, lines and loops, ink like spiderwebs. There are girls in minis and boys in peace beads, thin ties, long hair, blue jeans, wide belts with brass buckles, and there is a girl holding two miniature turtles on the palm of her hand, and in this picture ten girls have made a kneeling pyramid. Four. Three. Two. One. The top girl is off balance, laughing. That was me, Katherine says. Ruining the pyramid. I squint. The almost-falling girl is a thin, beautiful girl and her hair is a black fountain and she wears a turtleneck tunic, a pair of climbing boots, two gold posts in her ears.

That was—you?

Me, she says. They shouldn’t have trusted me at the top.

She has stories for most of the photographs. She takes her time. She says, We were young back then. She says, What happened to us? She turns another page, and I wonder if crazy goes like this—back and forth, then and now, nothing absolutely sure about the stuff that happened.

There, she says, because she has found it at last—a photograph of a young man in a room of books and a single shining lamp. He is at work on a chipped library table, shirtsleeves rolled
to the elbow. His hair is thick and soft as a squirrel’s tail. His eyebrows are two boughs of a pine tree, crashing. The lamp is bright and some other dusty light comes in, and it’s like someone has said his name and he has just then turned, and maybe it was Katherine behind the camera, maybe someone else.

Smartest one at Penn, Katherine says. Knew everything before the rest of us did. That was him. Your dad.

On the back of the picture she gives me to hold it says
Greg. 1965
. He was always on the hunt for beginnings, Katherine says.

The red quilt with the gold threads falls from my lap and capes Katherine’s shoulders. A year goes by, and it is sophomore year at Penn, 1966, and it is November, and now every page is blank until Philadelphia is gone and Florence is next, my father’s flooded city. There are cars crashed into cars in the streets. There are the broken parts of bridges floating by, pots and pans in window boxes, mattress springs on balconies, a dead horse in a garden. Katherine keeps turning the pages, and the photos rain out—the flood is here, in that store, and there, in that girl’s skirt, and there in the pile of paintings on the back of a truck. There are people rafting down the center of streets on the faces of thin tabletops. Katherine stops, closes the book, sweeps the pictures from the floor.

You must be tired, she says.

When I wake, there’s the smell of chocolate rising. Under the one lit lamp in the room, Katherine is working—knocking the end of the flour out of a sifter, sponging the sugar off the counter, stacking measuring cups.

I thought you might be hungry, she says. Two plates. Two forks.

Nearly nine o’clock, she says.

She sits on the striped chair. I huddle beneath the red-gold blanket. She says there are things my dad has said and things my mom has said, and would it be all right if we talked a little about some of what has happened. I turn my fork around the plate, a slow dial. I watch the slow bruising of the skies. I look back at the blur of her. Everything is leaking.

Katherine stands. Walks away and comes back with a box of tissues. She takes my hands in her hands. She holds them until we can talk again.

Your dad says that you’re having some trouble remembering things. Street names. Time. Your phone. That sort of thing. Is he right about that? she asks.

I nod.

He says there are promises you don’t keep, secrets you do. Places you go, things you won’t tell him. Days when you get lost.

It’s—hard

—to talk. So many words in my head, broken words on my tongue.

Yes, she says. Let’s talk about how this began.

I take a deep breath. I say it: With a finch.

She leans back in her chair, lets my hands go, folds hers up beneath her chin.
What
would you say started with a finch?

Whatever—this is. Whatever I’m—

be—coming.

And what is that, honey? What would you say you are becoming?

Not me.

Tell me, she says, about the finch.

I tell her about nests. I show her, with my hands, how they are made. Purse nests and mud nests and throne nests and thorns. Looms and weaves and pockets. With the loosened threads of the quilt, I show her. With the spill of paper clips. With the blank pages of a journal book that is sitting on the table and the last
of the tissues in the box and the glossy pages of magazines, their cover gloss. I tear them, weave them, round them, fold them; she watches, she lets me. Time passes and I don’t know how much, I don’t know why she doesn’t stop me, how she can stand me, how I look to her—this girl who builds nests. She is sitting here, when I finish. She has not gone away. She takes the nest from my hands and places it in hers. She turns it around and upside down and then balances it on her two palms. The paper clips run in a circle around the edge. The bowl is paper, glossies, thread. No tassel. It is impossible. It’s me.

It’s beautiful, she says.

I can’t stop them.

Them? Where are the nests, honey? What have you made them with? How many?

Beneath the bed, I try to say. With stolen things, I show her, somehow. With the boy’s flowers. The boy. Benedetto. I say his name. It takes forever.

She writes everything down. She takes a long time writing. When she looks at me her eyes are full.

A boy named Benedetto? she says.

I nod.

A beautiful name, she says. It means “blessing.”

Mine means—hope.

Yes, she says. Your father told me. He also said, Nadia, that no one but you has seen this boy. That perhaps he’s just a dream you’ve had. Is that a possibility?

No, I say. Nodefinitelynot.

She leans forward. She leans back and she doesn’t judge, she doesn’t blame me. I rub the tears out of my eyes with my fist and when I see clearly again, I see that her room is shipwrecked—torn faces in magazines, a trail of clips, paper shreds, all those books in the landslide mountain fallen even harder.

What do you suppose they mean, these nests? she asks.

Something whole, I try to say. Something sure.

How do they make you feel?

Calm. Afraid.

Those are two very different things.

Calm when I make them. Afraid because—I have.

I write some of this. I try to say it.

This is your secret, then.

Part of it.

What is the other part?

I can’t tell—

I’ll wait.

The difference.

It’s okay.

Between knowing and imagining.

Okay, she says. It’s okay. Sweetie, I’m here.

Someone’s crying. I feel Katherine’s arms around me.

You don’t have to say anything else, she says.

I’m crazy, I say.

Aren’t I?

She makes the room with the crinkle bed my room. She pushes the furniture around and trades the paper for sheets and finds another quilt, lavender and blue. She has an old nightgown for me to wear and a pillow in an embroidered case, and she asks if I want tea, and I say no, so she brings me water in a tall glass, four ice cubes.

Ten o’clock, she says.

I’ve called your dad, she says.

Sleep, she says.

I listen to the birds outside. To someone singing. I close my eyes and when I open them, I see the tree outside, the poppy tree—the sun trapped in the glitter of the buckets and the poppies wild and big and a thousand green woodpeckers yaffling and settling down among the poppies, two thousand wings, one thousand red heads. And there is Maggie—on the highest branch, with her
bright hair, singing. There is Maggie, miracle Maggie, among the birds, among the flowers, buckets like nests.

Look
, she is saying.
Your own beautiful thing
.

Look. I made it for you
.

Watch out!
I shout.
Something’s coming
.

A fire on its way. A bright blaze coming from the end of the street and turning the corner and hurtling fast—a red streak toward the tree and the poppies and the wings and everything beautiful and strange, and I say,
Maggie, watch it. Maggie—that’s him
.

Somebody is shouting.

Nadia.

Nadia
.

I feel a hand on my shoulder. A hand on my cheek.

I’m right here. Wake up. Shhhh. Sweetie.

Just a dream, she says.

He’s real, I say.

You’re here, she says, with me.

We sit on the living room couch not talking. She turns the nest I made with her paper clips and papers in her hand and gets up and makes us tea, cuts us each a slice of cake, sets one down on my knee.

It’s difficult, she says. I know.

There are mounds of books on the floor. Dog-eared magazines. Notes. Photographs of my father young. She is wearing the same thing she wore yesterday, and she doesn’t ask me questions. She watches me. Tells me to drink. Tells me it’s chamomile, which was her mother’s favorite. My mother, she says, was so angry at me when I went away to Florence. So disappointed. You are ruining your life, she said. But I wasn’t. I knew that. My life was just getting started.

I was young, she says, just a bit older than you.

I nod. I know. My father told me.

We have to be who we are, she says.

I don’t—Don’t want to be—This.

I know, she says.

Idon’twanttobecrazy.

Shhhh, she says.

I wait for her to tell me what’s next, to give this a name, to tell me the truth, but she watches me, holds my hand, tells me to have some cake, it was just a dream, we’ll get some answers.

I don’t know anything for sure, she finally says. But I’d like you to continue to stay with me, so that we can talk some more. All right? I’d like us to work on this together, Nadia, and I’m asking the advice of some friends. Would you be all right with that? How does that sound?