One Thing Stolen (6 page)

Breakfast, he repeats.

I slip into the chair across from his. I cup my hand around the mug of hot chocolate already on the table, and there are split places in my fingertips, cracks in my hands. I think of the dahlia nest, and the snow and the sled and the lamps in windows.
Focus, Nadia
. Dad piles French toast onto two plates. He grabs butter from the refrigerator, syrup, two forks, and he looks like a clown act, off
balance, but nothing falls. He slides our plates into their places. He hands me a fork. He puts the syrup and the butter down between us.

Never made them so good, he says, about the only dish he’s ever mastered. Eat some.

His tundra hair is sleep-smooshed. His glasses are crooked on his nose. He takes a sip of his own hot chocolate, cuts a triangle of sopping French toast, and lifts it to his mouth. Chews. Swallows.

Your turn, he says.

He says he has a new angle on his flood. Says Mom has made some progress with Amir. Says something about the lady across the street and something about the dog upstairs and something about a book he’s read, and something about the weather, and now as Dad talks I am five or six or seven, and Mom is saying,
Let’s go surprise your father
. She’s taking Jack by one hand and me by the other and walking us down the wide wood steps of our Spruce Street twin house and through the leafy corridors of West Philadelphia until we reach the edge of the giant sleeping campus. We are a parade of three. We are young and smart, and the campus is silver and brick, moss and ivy, castles and courtyards, and at the far end of our forever journey sits the fine arts library, red and round and tall and chimneyed, something straight out of the Brothers Grimm. That’s where Dad is—through the heavy notched doors
and past the turnstile, in the massive reading room. It’s a courtyard space with a roof four stories high. It is arches and arched sun. It’s big books with thin pages and the smell of old things, cracked pencils, eraser nubs.

Oh, my loves
, Dad says,
here you are
. As if we’d wakened him from something. My mom leans toward him and lets her long hair fall, like a screen between their love and ours.

Hey, I hear Dad now. Sweetie. Are you listening?

Dad leans back, stands up, goes for another slice of French toast, as if what I need right now is a fresher version of what I already have. He sails a slice of butter over the egg-white skin of the bread. Drowns it in syrup. Switches my plate for his plate, sits down, and waits.

You want to tell me what’s going on? he says. At last.

I shake my head.

You want to tell me part of it?

I—can’t. I—don’t. Everything, I finally say.

Everything?

Is harder.

I hear my voice very soft and far away. I hear my words separating. I see Dad thinking, pulling his pen from his shirt pocket and snapping the ink tip in and out, his hands moving now, his fingers.

Is it?

Yes. Everything’s harder.

I close my eyes, and it’s dark inside. I wait for him to talk, to say something, to fix this, save me, but his words are far and I get caught inside his flood, a boat full of things passing by. Gears and gloves and bowls and scissors, the gold cylinder of a kaleidoscope and its broken, colored pieces, and silken ties and amethysts, the bright back of a moon and rose petals and royal dahlia and every nest I’ve made, every loomed cup, every whole thing, every infinite woven circle. Everything in the belly of this boat, on a dark night, on a Florence street, in the middle of Dad’s flood. I reach for the boat and the vision shatters. I open my eyes. Dad’s leaning close. Words like stones.

Honey, he says. What’s this?

He takes one of my hands in his hands, turns it over. Ruby dots of blood.

He clomps down the hall, to the bathroom, opens and shuts the cabinet doors, comes back with a bright white box of Band-Aids.

Give me your hand, he says.

He wraps each of the broken fingertips. One by one by one.

I don’t know what to do with you, he says, and so we sit there, the two of us, until the first raindrops come. Big splats against the windows, on the streets, against the white and pink sheets the
across-the-street neighbor hung, into the sound of the morning. Jack appears in the hall, rubbing his head.

French toast? he says.

Have a seat, Dad says. Stands at an angle, making the toast, keeping a close eye on me.

The rain is sideways—big nails of wet stuff. The French toast smog is still here and the dark rain is out there and Jack’s gone—left with his Almost Independent Study 101 euros in his pocket. Spice of the day: rosemary. Dish of the day:
Cappe santé con pomodor, agliog, e rosmarino
. Mom is standing at the window in her long nightdress, watching the street and the rain.

I hope he’s somewhere dry, she says.

So much rain, she says.

Now Dad is beside her, his arm over her thin shoulders. She leans and she’s so small and he’s so big, a bear. The nails of her toes shine like lip gloss. She whispers and he whispers back, and then they turn, four eyes on me.

On the floor of this room is Dad’s flood. All its pieces on note-cards, Xeroxes, newsprint. He toes the facts around—slides them across each other, looks for patterns and themes, looks up at me, expects
something
, because this is my Almost Independent Study,
this is my work while we are gone—to be Dad’s primo assistant, to collect the facts with him, and the dawn, to understand his flood. Fourteen thousand works of art. Sixteen miles of records. Four million books. Eighteen million cubic feet of debris. The big flood came. The city drowned. Parts of it were rescued. Find the start. My job is to help my father think in Florence. Nobody has to tell me that I’m failing.

It’s been two hours, Mom says now, about Jack.

You kids, she says, and your phones.

She opens the window, puts out her hand. She says it’s hard as hail out there, and I close my eyes, listen to the rain, the drumming on the scaffolding down the street, the slosh sounds in the piazza, the faraway cry of somebody laughing, running. A game in the rain in the street. The weather is outside. The weather is inside. It is almost sleep. I hear Mom walk by in her bare feet. I hear her come back, close now, the white whish of her long dress, and now I feel her pull a blanket over me, feel a kiss on my cheek.

Let yourself sleep, she says, but I’m already gone, remembering another storm.

It’s Maggie’s garden. Her split of land off Spruce Street—four feet by twelve feet, and a miniature red picket fence, a scarecrow, an old rain barrel flipped to make a stool. A storm is coming on.

Some of the other gardeners in this community acre have built canopies out of woven sticks so only part of the sun will fall through. Some have planted planks all around the edges of their plots, like coffins without lids. Somebody’s put an easel where a garden should be, and on the brick face of an abandoned house are the flattening branches of an apple tree. Espaliers.

But Maggie’s spot is the prettiest—the straw doll and the barrel and all these hand-painted signs promising: Peas. Clover. Zinnias. Tomatoes. Poppies. In the middle of everything is Maggie’s fig tree, which we grew in a bucket on her porch until it was finally big enough for the Big Transfer. We bedded it down with straw a year ago. It’s lasted the winter, and now it is March, and a
storm is coming on.
Hail like eggs
, the weather guy says. Better batten down.

We work side by side. We undig the signs. We flip the barrel, unplant the scarecrow, lay a thick sheet of plastic down over everything and now we have to anchor the tarp with the broken plates of the sidewalk concrete that sit across the street in an abandoned yard. Back and forth we go with the weights in our hands, the dirty bits of broken sidewalk. Maggie’s wearing her denim flares and her checked shirt and her garden clogs. Her hair is pushed back into a red bandanna and flapping over her shoulders in the wind, because the wind has already started to blow, and it is getting hard to hear each other inside the storm that hasn’t happened yet. The skies stew. I stop.

Something in the fig tree has stirred.

Furry wings.

A mother finch, tucked down.

Maggie
, I say.
Look
.

She is a brunette with a streaked breast coat. Her nest is straw and twigs, a patch of moss, bits of colored paper, and she is perfectly still until I get too close and she spreads her wings. She hops. She returns. Her eyes on us.

Three eggs
, I hear myself say.
And it’s only March
.

Too early for eggs
, Maggie says.

The storm is coming—sneaking in beneath the tarp in the places between the concrete chunks. The easel that no one has battened has started to rattle. The branches of the espaliered tree are cranking from the brick. Maggie’s hair is a red flag streaming, and mine is one black knot.

Nothing we can do
.

Three chicks
, I say.
And a mother
.

They’ll have to ride out the storm
, Maggie says.
The nest will have to save them
.

But a nest is only twigs, I think. It’s only leaves and fragile things. The nest is so small and the eggs are so tiny, and the wind is blowing hard, and Maggie’s saying,
Come on
.

The weather is hard and thick. It’s time to leave. Between the plots of the community garden and up the street and past the mosque and Manakeesh, we run. Past the lady with the window boxes stuffed with pansies and around to Maggie’s house, where Maggie’s mom is waiting at the door with two identical towels.

You had me worried
, she says.

I made some cocoa
, she says.

We had to leave the—bird
, I say.

We sit there, the three of us, listening to the storm. The rain first, and then the hail the size of eggs, and always the wind. I call my mom, tell her I’m here, and then the lights flicker and the power goes and Maggie’s dad comes home and they stand, quiet, at the windows.

It rains all night. The gutters are full of things and the treetops are breaking. The fire-escape stairs bang against the brick behind the house and the trash cans are rolling, and everything inside Maggie’s house is very still except for the trembling flames on the candles. We watch the storm. We stand in Maggie’s flannel shirts and Maggie’s sweats, no music on, no lights in the street. Maggie goes to sleep. I stay awake, afraid for the bird.

The storm breaks before the dawn. The candles run out of wicks. No clocks are ticking. Out in the street the big branches of trees are down and the loosened trash can lids are rolling around and pieces of wash that had been left out on backyard lines are lying on the ground like empty people. I tiptoe down the hall, past Maggie’s parents’ room, and down the steps in the squish of still wet shoes. Pull open the door. Step out onto the porch. Feel Maggie behind me.

Going nowhere without me
, she says.

She wears her checkered gown over a pair of jeans. She’s stuck a tiara into her hair. She hands me a shovel, a rake, a bucket, and we go, and we don’t talk, don’t say anything about the bird, about the plot, about the too-ferocious storm, and when we get there, the community garden looks like the end of the world.

The easel smashed into sticks.

The canopies smashed.

The espalier yanked away from the wall like a spider’s web caught in a broom.

The planks between plots are down and the compost is sludge. Straw is everywhere, like chopped blond hair. But under Maggie’s tarp the plot is dry, her scarecrow and her signs are dry. Up in the tree, the nest is whole.

The birds have survived.

World’s greatest miracle
, Maggie says. We sit with our butts against the soaked rim of the barrel and watch the bird come back to life. She spreads her wings. She settles.

We didn’t have to worry after all
, Maggie says.

And something in my mind breaks loose and almost free.