One Thing Stolen (25 page)

Now, in Philly, Jack’ll have his Miss Florence list, and there’s nothing we can do about it, nothing he can say when Perdita slips her hand into her pocket and places a mini padlock onto his palm, like the kind that grows wild on the Ponte Vecchio, like the kind that says
Love you forever
. “Jesus, Perdita,” Jack says, and he looks away, then looks straight at her, and now Mrs. C. gets up and says we have a special presentation, and she disappears down the hall and takes her time and comes back holding a Liberty print dress in one hand, a Jean Muir special, circa 1970. She holds a pretty beret in her other hand, its band trimmed in leather the color of dark honey.

“For our Miss Maggie Ercolani,” Mrs. C. says, “who came and gave her all.”

I get all choked up, can’t talk. Nadia pulls her chair close and takes my hand in hers and one by one opens my fingers, and there, in the nest of my palm, places a folded photograph, like an origami bird. “Open,” she says, and when I do I find the two of us looking back at me—a selfie taken the night we came back from riding the snow of Philadelphia.

“Thank you,” she says. “Thank—you.”

“I have something for you, too,” I say, and from beneath my chair I slide a wrapped rectangle, Nadia’s name written on the tissue in gel pen. She sits for a moment, then slides her finger through the seam of the tissue paper, breaking the Scotch-tape seals. She does it with an expert hand.

“What is it?” Jack asks, from across the room.

“Sister cities,” I say, lifting the frame to show him how I’ve arranged the originals of the cards I drew, side by side, the architecture intensives.

“No,” Nadia says, shaking her head. “Just sisters, Mag. Just—sisters.”

“You and me,” I say. “Forever. World’s greatest miracle.”

We sit with our gifts in our laps. We sit remembering. We sit holding on to right now because we cannot know tomorrow or the next day—the trials in San Francisco, the mystery magic of the brain. The prof stands and disappears down the hall and returns
with a book, its cover built of Florentine papers, its belly wrapped in ribbon. A perfect bookbinder book.

“One of a kind,” he says, pressing his eyebrows down and holding the little book up, cracking its spine. He stands there and clears his throat. Looks down and starts to read.

“‘
Where the story begins
,’” he says.

He looks up at Mrs. C., then over to Katherine. He looks at Jack and Perdita and for a long time at Nadia, then turns another page and reads: “
‘And how the rains fell. And how the River Arno rose and how this cinnamon city vanished. Down the channel of the streets and into the cellars of Santa Croce and between the bindings of books, the running muddy waters. Crucifixes. Paradise. Lady Magdalene. How the rains fell.’
”

He pauses. Turns another page. The paper cracks. The glue.

“
‘But even that is not where our story begins. Our story begins, every story finally begins, with the possibility of rescue, with the goodness that is absolute and waits for tragedy to find it. Mud Angels,’
” the prof reads. “
‘Dirty boots and redheaded birds. That’s where the story begins. Always.’
”

“You found your beginning,” Mrs. C. says, softly.

“No,” he says, looking at Nadia. “We did.”

All the things lost and all the things gained, that’s what I’m thinking. All of us quiet here, turning the gifts in our hands, the memories we keep, the words we use to keep them, the hope we have, the work we do, our lives rearranging themselves. Time goes
by. Nothing lasts. The bells in the towers of Florence sing. Every bell in every tower, clanging on and on.

“Midnight,” Katherine says. A Christmas Eve tradition.

Nadia turns toward the window and stands. She cuts through the chair circle and past the crèche and stops beneath the Chinese lantern and the flames still burning on the sill. She fits her hand onto the window latch and presses down and pushes out and leans into the Christmas weather.

“Snow,” she says. When we reach her side, when we stand there looking out it’s birds we see—white birds with bright wings flying out of the towers, flying low and bright, the egrets of Florence. A half a moon and only a little rain, and bells and wings and bells.

But then:

“Bene—detto,” Nadia says, almost cries. She says it again, leans so far out into the sky that we must hold her here with us.
Don’t fall
.

“Shhhh,” I say.

But she points, she grabs my hand, she points again, and now I follow her gaze down the narrow channel of Verrazzano. Down the cobbled street, beneath the dripping laundry, in between the start of snow.

It’s the boy with the pink duffel, ripped to full with flowers.

The boy and sonic blooms.

The rain has been plenty all winter. The rain and sometimes the snow.

White flakes.

Drift.

The faces of the flowers press down like showerheads. The band of leather pockets that I made in the shop brim with the start of things—oregano, parsley, basil, dill, thyme, marjoram.

Skinny.

Green.

Alive.

“Sit with me,” Mama says.

Mama’s eyes on the new shoots and the old flowers. Mama’s eyes on the nests that I strung, one after the other, among the husks of stolen flowers, on the ledges of the limbs, in the hollow places of the plaster. Broken springs and half globes. Silk and string. Round and twig.

She wants you to have them
, Maggie said, the week after Christmas, when she came all the way through the minor streets of Santa Croce, pulling a big sled behind her, a sled full of the beautiful and the strange. Carlos gave her the sled. Carlos called me in time. Carlos is our hero.

Nadia wants you to
 . . .

. . . 
have these
, she said.

“Guardare,”
Mama says now.

The nests like Christmas globes. The nests like so many perfect homes.

The news comes. Jack to Perdita to me. San Francisco to Maggie to me. Mrs. C. to Katherine to me. The news comes. I write back to whomever writes to me.

Tell Nadia that I’m waiting
.

Tell Nadia that her nests are safe
.

Tell Nadia that I understand
.

Mama lies in her bed in the upside, in the down. She lies there and the seeds in the leather belt split some more and the sprouts wave their hands and the breeze through the window blows through the weaves of the nests, and the nests are so strong; the nests hold.

“So you’re a genius,” I said. Christmas Eve, just after midnight. “A genius. A bird girl. A thief.”

“I am,” she said. “Sorry.”

“I am,” she said. “Coming—back.”

“Please donotforgetme.”

I steal fresh flowers from the crypt, from the wedding shop, from the stalls of Sant’Ambrogio. I steal them out of window boxes and corner stores and baskets. I steal them and bring them here and hang them upside down, weave them alongside the nests, and every day, every single day, I think of Nadia, the genius of her, the courage in her, the nests she made to keep herself whole, to
keep her bound to this one earth. When spring comes I will go out and find her birds—the egrets and the turtledoves, the green woodpeckers. I will tell them the news, tell them what has to be true, tell them the size and shape of hope, my one confession:

Nadia is coming back.

Not long now, not soon enough.

It rains until the sun comes out.

The flood that raged through Florence in November 1966 did not just threaten an entire city; it sent ruinous mud and waters into the world’s great museums and libraries; devastated an estimated four million historic books and manuscripts; saturated 14,000 works of movable art; destroyed the homes of 5,000 families; and pushed thousands of stores out of business. At the same time it gave birth to an international corps of bighearted volunteers who would be known forevermore as the Mud Angels. These were young people, mostly, who had faith that a broken world could be restored. These were the faces of hope. That faith and hope inspired me deeply as I wrote the book that would become
One Thing Stolen
.

I was first introduced to the floods of Florence through the magnificent book
Dark Water
by Robert Clark. It filled me with the desire to study a city I had loved in passing years ago, and taught me about beginnings, Cimabue, Azelide, and many other things. Three additional books—Swietlan Nicholas Kraczyna’s
The Great Flood of Florence, 1966: A Photographic Essay;
Howard Greenfield’s
The Waters of November;
and Katherine Kressmann Taylor’s
Diary
of Florence in Flood
—helped me see the Florence of the flood with greater clarity.

But to get to the heart of the flood, I traveled to Florence itself and sought out the survivors, the storytellers. I am particularly grateful to Emily Rosner and Maurizio Panichi, proprietors of the Paperback Exchange, just off the Piazza del Duomo, for sharing their stories and for working through Italian phrases with me. I am grateful to the shopkeepers who answered questions I asked and to Agnese, who rented my husband and me her apartment off Verrazzano, near the Santa Croce piazza. Their stories are part of this story, part of the great obsession. Thank you, as well, to Mario Sulit, my talented brother-in-law, whose great facility with so many languages helped me tremendously here.

I have been taught the art of nests and birds by a number of authors: Sharon Beals (
Nests
); Tim Birkhead (
Bird Sense and The Wisdom of Birds
); Peter Goodfellow (
Avian Architecture
); Thor Hanson (
Feathers
); Joy M. Kiser (
America’s Other Audubon
); Rosamond Purcell, Linnea Hall, and Rene Corado (
Egg & Nest
); and Katrina van Grouw (
The Unfeathered Bird
).

I first came upon the rare brain disease known as frontotemporal disorder in a
New York Times
article by Sandra Blakeslee. In a story entitled “A Disease That Allowed Torrents of Creativity,” Blakeslee wrote of the Canadian scientist Anne Adams and her sudden obsessive turn toward art—an obsession later traced to an inexorable decline in her frontal brain area—and a corresponding
strengthening of the posterior regions. Bruce Miller, Anh Truong, Indre Viskontas, and Marie Foregeard—scientists on the vanguard—all took the time to answer questions that my student, Alice Ma, asked. I am grateful for their time, and for their interest. I am particularly grateful to Dr. Miller and the work he does as the director of the University of California, San Francisco Memory and Aging Center, where he advances the understanding of this disease. More about Dr. Miller’s work can be found here:
www.youtube.com/user/UCSFMemoryandAging
.

One Thing Stolen
is, of course, a work of fiction. I created Nadia to try to understand how such a condition might affect a person so young and to explore the power of neuroplasticity. Several books, including
Phantoms in the Brain
(V. S. Ramachandran, MD, PhD, and Sandra Blakeslee),
The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science
(Norman Doidge, MD), and
The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human
(V. S. Ramachandran) helped deepen my understanding of emerging brain science.

Thank you to Greg Djanikian of the University of Pennsylvania for trusting me to teach on the campus of my youth, and who changed the trajectory of my career. Thank you to my students for being continuing sources of inspiration—Stephanie Cara, the world traveler, who lends Nadia her spectacular last name; Katherine Goldrath—Katie—whose big heart as a doctor-in-training is
exemplary; Maggie Ercolani, who, at the age of just twenty, endured and with great grace recovered from an unexpected intercession.

Thank you to Kathryn Coffey, who sent me a copy of
Firenze su Misura
just in the nick of time, inspiring the character of the bookbinder. Thank you to Mike Cola, a true renaissance man, who saved, for me, the nests of birds, and who listened to me talk when this book was in its earliest stages. Thank you to Lori Waselchuk, the documentary photographer, for introducing me to the true West Philadelphia, Second Mile, Manakeesh, and Fiume. Thank you to Laura Gori, the gorgeous director of the Scuola del Cuoio, and to Carlos, who taught me how to bind the pages of a story together. Thank you to Wendy Robards, for asking, for caring, for waiting. Thank you, Ruta Sepetys, Patricia McCormick, and Debbie Levy for the work, the words, the friendship. Thank you, A. S. King, for sharing the adventure. Thank you to Kelly Simmons for the honesty and the ongoing conversation. Thank you, Jennifer M. Brown, for the glorious lunch on the day this story was finally done. Thank you, Amy Rennert.

Thank you, always, to Alyson Hagy. I can’t imagine this writing life without you.

Thank you, Bill and Jeremy, for being real, and for making my life so rich.

Thank you to Debbie DeFord-Minerva, the copy editor who sent words of encouragement at precisely the right hour and soon
became a friend. Thank you to Diane João, who patiently studied every space and dash and word.