One Thing Stolen (12 page)

They are remembering the flood. They are remembering all that was ruined and piled into trucks and taken to tobacco barns and textile plants and heated up, dried out. They are talking weights and smells and all the people who came to Florence to help. Mud Angels, she calls them. The saviors of the flood.

The city’s worst moment, she says.

The city’s best moment, he says.

Yes. And they look at me.

How are you? Dad asks me.

I’ve taken your whole— I start. I’m— I can’t finish.

Katherine lifts her hand. You don’t have to talk, she says. Just relax, if you can. We’ll talk later. Start tomorrow. Get at the heart of this. We can do that, Nadia. We’re on the same team.

She crosses her arms at her chest and leans back into the dim light of the white room. I hear a car on the street outside, a quick rumble of laughter. I listen for the boy.

I suppose it’s getting late, Dad says.

Too late to walk all that way now, Katherine says.

She fiddles in her pocket and finds her phone. She dials quickly and speaks Italian. She offers me a cookie, and I take it, watching her, watching Dad. It takes a while before the taxi rumbles up the hill, but when it does, Dad stands first and helps me with my chair. He puts his arm around me.

Tomorrow, Katherine says. We’ll start fresh.

She finds the envelope with the braid of grass. Gives it to me. Says, It’s really something. What you have done with grass.

It’s just—

The taxi is here. The door is open. Dad is helping me into the backseat that smells like licorice and ham. The taxi slings to the ground, like it’s missing some parts. The door slams and the driver U’s, and we take the hill down. The lights of Florence are twinkling on. Lamplight is reflected in the Arno. A group of students grows rowdy in the street; a boy plays an accordion to a hotel window. We’re back to the Vitales’, where everything is missing, and where I cannot hide anymore.

Jack is out.

Mom is asleep.

I need to know who—Katherine is, I say.

A friend, Dad says. You can trust her.

She was nineteen, Dad says. I was twenty.

He presses his hands into a temple beneath his chin. Pours wine into a water glass, goes to the window and stands and watches because a new storm is rolling in, rain is streaking the windows, and Jack is out there somewhere. Every time Dad checks his phone, every time he texts Jack, nothing happens, the phone stays silent, and I know that Jack is out there begging for mercy but I say nothing. I have asked Dad to tell me Katherine’s story.

Dad puts his big hand into his white hair. He checks the phone again, puts it in his pocket. He says, Katherine Goldrath, and then he says, Mud Angels. He says there were hundreds like her who came to Florence after the flood. November 4, 1966. The Arno had spoken.

But rivers don’t—

They do, he says. Rivers, he says, are always speaking.

Katherine was a sophomore at Penn, Dad says. I was a junior. We were taking the same class with Frederick Hartt, the leading authority on Renaissance art, the bon vivant. When news of the flood broke—when it was the front page of every newspaper, the ruinous flood, the death of art, the loss of culture—Hartt left for Florence at once, to help plan some kind of rescue. Katherine left school one week later. What was the point, she said, of knowing anything about the past when a city was in need right now. When arms and legs and hands could help. Lifting and sorting and drying.

She left to—help.

Katherine knows how to help, Dad says. You can trust her.

I need to know that I can trust her.

Tell—me.

She was driven from the airport in the back of a truck to the brown outer slick of the city. The river had sucked itself dry, left its dark teeth everywhere, according to Katherine in the letters she wrote and sent. The city stunk of the rotted flesh of capsized fish, the bloated loaves of floated bread, the sewage that had risen out of its medieval pipes and slithered into houses, curtains, pots. It burned to breathe. The stench went to her throat—the toxic
nafta
, the devil’s incense.

There were mounds of martyred cars, brown lakes, empty places where the old stone streets had been. She wrote more letters:
You should come. We need you
. She was an American woman
among the many who had come—from Fiesole, Siena, Roma, Milan, Sweden, Paris, Scotland, West Berlin. Some of them carrying transistor radios and letting the Beach Boys sing.

She was . . . Dad stops. She was . . . And now he stands at the window, thinking, and I sit here waiting for the rest of this story about this girl who was once just a little older than me and chose a city of ruin and made ruin the place that she lived. I wait and Dad says nothing, watching for Jack, until he turns around and continues.

There was a boy Katherine’s age with a beard who had rafted in from the country on the back of an old road sign, Dad says. Sixty kilometers, he told her. No other way in. There were four Italian Boy Scouts who had wedged a piano onto the street and were playing duets for the sweepers. There were Red Cross stations and rusted machines, poor pumps, heaps of buttons, the springs of mattresses. There were unrescued people up on their roofs, a baby born beneath stars, children lowering
damigiana
from their windows, calling,
Bread. Fresh water. Warm milk. Take what we have
.

She slept one night on a thin mat on the cold stones of the Palazzo Pucci.

She slept in the back room of a flooded store, the birds still dead in their cages.

She slept among nuns in a monastery, fitting her stiff boots and black bandanna onto the rack above her head.

She slept in a rubber boat with two other girls her age—Danish girls.

She made do. They all did.

Dad circles through the room, pulls at his ear. He walks in and out of the shadows and returns to where he was, by the window. Watching the streets for Jack. Watching the shadows.

Dad?

But he’s gone quiet again. He’s standing there watching the one light in the flat across the street that never turns itself off when it rains. I close my eyes to listen to the streaming rain, and I think of Katherine, her fossil tracks in the mud, the blue and red flames burning in a city sick with cold, the letters she wrote home to Dad, and I wonder why anyone would hope, how anyone could. There is someone out on Verrazzano, drunk and singing football songs, and Dad strains to see if it’s Jack. He lifts the cuff of his shirt to check the time, and I stand up beside him now, look out on the street, and the song is gone and the street is empty—no Jack, no Benedetto, if there was ever a boy named Benedetto.

Outside the sound of rain is sliding from rooftops. Inside it’s Dad and me in the room and in the window glass, blurry, and now he pours himself another glass of wine and stands looking out into the street and I stand beside him and he says, I’m sorry I dragged you here to Florence, Nadia. You were so much happier at home. I’ve been selfish.

Dad, I say.

Dad.

It’s not your—fault.

You kids, he says. Making me old.

You’re not—

I’ve always been old. Your mom and you and Jack: you’re the closest thing to young I have.

He puts his arm across my shoulder, pulls me to him. His rumpled shirt, his worried heart, my tears flooding the cotton of his shirt. I’m afraid, too, he says after a long time. But we’re in this together, sweetie. All of us. The Caras and Katherine.

We stand, the story undone. We stand without talking, stand watching Verrazzano through the front window of the Vitales’ flat until finally, down the street, we see a pair of Lunar Springs running: Jack. He hurries through the rain, his hoodie up, his bright shoes splashing the puddles. The door below us opens and shuts, and the shoes squeak in the stairwell, and the key fits into the lock. Jack throws his hood back, kicks off his shoes, rubs the rain out of his hair, looks up and sees us.

Yo, he says.

Dad reaches his arm out toward him, and now Mom comes, sleepy, down the hall, and we stand in the circle of us.

In the bathroom I strip off my clothes and stand in the hot shower until the pressure falls away and the water trickles to a slow circle at my feet and I step out. In the fog of the bathroom mirror I see myself tipping over the ledge into the city. I see myself on the back of a Vespa. I see myself on the dam of the river. I see myself kneeling beside the boy to watch two turtledoves singing. I see myself breaking things, weaving things, losing things, crazy. I see myself, and I am too many people.

The air grows cold. I dig the key out of the pocket of the jeans I’ve thrown to the floor and unlock the door to the borrowed room and everything I fear is true.

Someone’s left her life behind.

And now, all of a sudden, I remember Maggie and me in Second Mile Style—weaving up and down the crooked aisles. We sit in the La-Z-Boys. We shake the button jars, like a pair of maracas.
We put the plastic dolls in the floppy hats and then we pose them on the rocking chairs, and now Maggie finds a pair of ice skates with a sniff of winter in them, but this isn’t what she came for. She came for the buckets in the aisle over, stacked upside down like party hats, the colors of Crayola. There’s a dozen of them and she wants them all—takes each one and holds it up to the window light so that it catches the sun, the fake glitter inside the old plastic, the little bits of sand that got caught in the handle or the rim.

This
, she says.
Here
.

Her hair in a ponytail. Her face brighter than her hair. Beads on the fringe of her faux-leather skirt. She spins. The beads chatter.

We carry the buckets back to her house, three on each of our four arms, like bracelets, and some of the kids from the stoops ask what’s going on, but Maggie won’t say.
You’ll see
, she says.

Her parents are gone. She puts some Carly Simon on. She covers the braided rug between the beds with old newspaper, then stacks each bucket one by one by one in a line across the old news. She tells me to stay where I am, and I do—stand by her window watching the skies of West Philadelphia, the birds of West Philadelphia—the peregrines and red-tails and finches and crows flying by and looking down and seeing me and I hear Maggie on the stairs and Maggie down the hall, breathing heavy and walking slow, calling,
Close your eyes
.

I close my eyes.

Okay
, she says.
Ready
.

It’s a cardboard box and it’s full. She bends down and slips it onto the floor—careful, slow—and inside the crepe paper faces of living poppies glow: orange and lemon and red and purple and white and pink. They have huge heads and their stems are so thin and some of them are still too shy to bloom.

Happy birthday
, she says.

She goes back downstairs, to her dungeon basement, and comes back up again, a bag of dark-chocolate soil in her arms. She goes down one more time and this time she has two of her garden shovels in her hands, and two pairs of gardening gloves and two aprons, everything for both of us.

We’ll plant them first
, she says.

We pour the soil into the buckets. We sing to Carly Simon. She puts another record on. Outside the kids are playing in the streets and the Saturday ice cream truck is singing its song several blocks off and the birds are up there in the sky and it takes a long time to fill the buckets just right and to plant the poppies just right along the edges of the buckets, out of the way of the handles. When we’re done Maggie has dirt under one eye.

She takes off her gloves.

Takes off her apron.

Check this out
, she says.

She pushes the window up high. We line the buckets up on the floor nearby—careful not to spill, careful with the fragile
heads of the poppies, and now she’s careful as she climbs, through the window, toward the sky, into the arms of the locust outside.

I need a bucket
, she says.

Wait till you see
.

You’re completely crazy
, I say. Like crazy is the funniest word in the world, crazy is other people.