One Thing Stolen (4 page)

Hold out your hands.

See?

The petals soft as down and red as blood and real. I’ve glued one to one to one and dipped the edges into gold and strung a stolen tassel from the bowl, and what was lost is found, what was fractions is whole, what is beauty is perfectly strange.

See?

What is the name of this disease, the name for the girl who builds nests with stolen things, who sees what others do not see, who can barely, hardly speak?

Hurt like this is a terrible thing.

The night has come on. Through the window the darkness falls on the shrugging backs of the hidden courtyard. The loose screen door to the restaurant kitchen. The broken stones where the waiters stand. The butt end of the alley. The room where the bookbinder works among so many stealable things. Pretty papers. Spools of thread. Buckets of glue and glue brushes, a tick-tock
watch—old, heavy thing. He keeps the lamp off, his shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows. Streamers hang from a rack above his shiny head in every nestable color. He works late as I do, obsessed as I am, and I wonder what he makes, and for whom.

This one’s for you
, I think, the words rising up from the past of me.
Gift for the gifted
. Old words, and suddenly I’m remembering Maggie in West Philadelphia, last October. She is pulling up to the curb by my house on Spruce, with the canvas lid of her Dad’s Mustang down, her candy-apple hair blowing sideways.

The car is 1970s vintage and Maggie-style—the seat belts buried in the foam of the unstitched seats, the up and down of the windows only working on one side, a pile of towels tossed in the backseat to clean up whatever mess she might get in, including the bird poop that falls from the sky. Hang a flag from the thing and it’d be its own parade, and here’s Maggie.

Where are we going?
she asks when I climb in.

She has the wheels. I have the ideas. That’s how it is.

She ties a straw hat to her head with a pink ribbon. She wears a green sundress, a yellow sweater, and a pair of boots a la Cher.

East and south
, I say.
Queen Village
.

She drives. Through West Philadelphia, across our river, all the numbers of the streets going backward until finally she stops and parks at the city’s east edge, leaving the Mustang open to the sky. Stands beside me hooking her arm into mine.

Now where?
she says,
oh, Plan-ess
. Which is like Goddess, only smarter.

Here
.

We walk south toward the Village, past the little restaurants and the shops. We walk and Maggie tries to guess the name of the adventure.

Ice cream
.

No
.

Thrift shop
.

No
.

Gargoyles and phonographs
.

Not today
.

What, then?

You’ll see
.

She throws her head back and laughs.

We walk and we talk and we gossip. We discuss, like it’s thesis-worthy, the things we’re supposed to be and supposed to do as the professors’ daughters we are, the two best friends who skipped high school in favor of taking classes with the undergrads. Early Matricks, we call ourselves. Our parents’ idea of quasihomeschooling, because they want the best for us. Take the classes, take the tests, get the state to certify. We’ll never go to high school—not Maggie, not me. We already have what we need. Our future is a snap and a ping.

At a shop called Curiosities we stop. It’s a redbrick trinity way off the beaten path, three slender stories tall. Its door is tall and narrow. We open it and the bells chime sweet. We step inside, and it’s a brave new world—taxidermy and garden tools, glass elephant eyes, shark teeth on a string. There are the fine white bones of a coyote, the caverns of shells, the twisted horns of an antelope scratching at the walls, packets of seeds. There’s a bat trapped in a frame, feathers in a basket, the wings of ladybirds, and a cave-bear tooth, and the aisles are crooked, and a live bird is singing in a cage, and Maggie takes off her hat and throws back her head again and laughs and we are the two most uninsane girls in the world.

Jesus
, she says.
This is the best adventure yet. Why didn’t you ever tell me about this place?

Just heard about it
, I say.

Just when?

Dad was telling Mom
, I say.
A student told my dad
.

Leave it to you
, she says.

We walk through splintered aisles, single file, Maggie holding her hat out in front of her very careful, very prim, so that she doesn’t break a tooth, a claw, an eye. So that she doesn’t make the stuffed partridge fly.

Impossible
, she keeps saying, and we keep our arms tucked in close, we talk to the bird in the cage, we walk one behind the other. The back room of Curiosities is odd and lovely—plants erupting from glass vials and amber sitting in transparent tubes. The guy
at the desk has his feet up by the register. There’s a card that says
DON’T PRESUME. ASK
.

If you need anything
, the guy says. Then he goes back to the book he’s reading.

Jars, baskets, shelves, drawers, crates and frames and a tray of keys, like old prison keys, with mangly, iron teeth, and there’s a coil of stairs—metal and thin, and we climb them up to the second floor and we stop, and Maggie catches her breath.

Because the entire back wall is tinted yellow glass. The roof is glass and light. From vents a breeze is being blown up into the room, and from the ceiling, from hooks, from strings, hang the wooden heads and arms and legs and nobs of marionettes. Jesters. Angels. Clowns. Woodsmen. Old ladies with hooked noses. Carpenters. Sprites.

World’s greatest miracle
, Maggie says, reaching up and brushing the beeswaxed feet with her hands. She touches the hems of the skirts, the funny noses. Our heads tilt. The puppets dance.

How can anyone make anything this lovely?
she says, and we stand there wondering, the two of us, which hands made these, and how, until I take an angel off its hook, lift its wings, touch Maggie.

This one’s for you
, I say.
Gift for the gifted
.

It was so easy, being me.

Nadia.

Yo.

It is the cool part of the morning. Flies buzz. Sweat runs in small rivers down my neck, my shoulders, into the insides of my elbows, and I don’t know what time it is.

Just open the door, Jack is saying. For Christ’s sake.

Another night gone.

Another nest.

I run my fingers through my hair, push the window as high as it goes, fan the stale air out into the alley, and I’m coming. I knock the scraps of things off my jeans, collect the scissors, plug the bottle of glue, tuck the new nest into the dark beside all the other nests I’ve built in hours I don’t remember. The museum of the beautiful and strange.

I unlock the door, crack it this wide, slouch into the hall, shut the door. Lock it. Jack stares at me through the shag of his hair,
plays with the Skullcandies that he wears around his neck like a choker.

You building a bomb or something? he says.

I shake my head.

You at work on government secrets?

Could you—not?

Look at you. He leans toward me and pulls a strand of tassel thread from my hair, flicking it back and forth, like a pendulum. He tells me I smell like a factory. That I’ve been locked in my room since yesterday, and now it’s nine-thirty a.m. It’s the Day of Chives.

Down the hall, Mom watches with her at-risk eyes.

So? Jack says. You coming?

He goes into his room. Comes back with his Lunar Sprints tied on—silver and yellow. He grabs his keys and some euros from the dish that Mom and Dad keep on the counter—his Almost Independent Study account. I don’t know what is next, where I am going, what will happen soon, if Florence is still raining petals, if this day will be less strange than the days that have come before, if the boy is out there.

Coming, I manage, and Jack wrinkles his nose.

Talk like a human being, Nadia.

Lunch of the day:
Sugo di peperoni e formaggio caprino
. Ingredients: chives and peppers, cheese and pasta. Destination: San Lorenzo—river of leather and silk and chutney and spice. The high-in-the-sky birds circle the lantern of the Duomo. Jack hurries ahead. I lose him and find him and lose him, and there he is, with a fat sack of stuff in his hands and a funky look on his face.

What?

The splendiferous beauty of spices, he says.

He turns back, looks over his shoulder. In the back of his jeans, rising up from the pocket, is a dash of green feather, the color of limes.

I lose him, I find him again.

Jack?

We walk and the streets are broken. We walk in the shade, but sometimes the sun. We go down thin streets to wide streets and cross streets, and we reach the square and stop. This is the Piazza
della Signoria. These are the crowds. Huddling by the fountain. Standing in the arcade. Sitting at the tables of the outdoor restaurants. On the upper floors of the Palazzo someone has left the windows open and I tip back to get a look at the ceiling frescoes, the tapestries, the stones, the wax, the painted flying birds, stuck in their brushstrokes. I tip back to breathe and think of Maggie and me, on our backs at Clark Park, looking up at the sky after a picnic. She’d brought snapped peas and zucchini bread. I’d brought peanut-butter-loaded Tollhouse cookies. It was a good day. We were half asleep. A squawk of hawks flew by.

Did you see it?
I asked her.

Absolutely
, she said, and now she was singing Penn’s Quaker song, and I was singing, too:

Come all ye loyal classmen now

In hall and campus through
,

Lift up your hearts and voices

For the Royal Red and Blue

Fair Harvard has her crimson

Old Yale her colors too
,

But for dear Pennsylvania

We wear the Red and Blue
.

We were best friends. The hawks were actual. She saw what I saw. I wasn’t crazy.

Jack switches his sack to his other shoulder. He looks toward the elevated stage, where boys and girls are sitting on folded chairs, pulling instruments from cases, blowing air through oboes. They test their horns and saxophones. They whisk the skins of drums. A conductor in white shoes, jeans, and a blue T-shirt raises his baton. The crowd lifts its arms like periscopes. Cameras click. It starts—Beethoven’s Fifth—and we are caught in it. Sewn into the crowd.

I watch the Palazzo Vecchio through its open windows, the birds in their brushstrokes. I look at Jack, that smile on his face—MasterChef, the splendiferous spices. The kids on parents’ shoulders clap and my mind goes in and out, lost and found, a strange and terrible beauty, and I remember another day with Maggie, in West Philadelphia, the two of us taking photographs of glass, reflections of glass, glass through glass, shattered glass, glass shattering.

Snap
.

I hear a shout from across the piazza and turn.

Everything is now.

Cesare! Ladro!

It’s the boy running like a blaze touched off, the boy on the far edge of the crowd. I swear it. See? His bright hair zips. His pink duffel roars. He is fast, blinding, turning the corner on the crowd. He turns again, and now when he looks back over his shoulder he smiles so specifically at me, then takes off for the river—past the Palazzo, past the Uffizi, in through the dark tunnel of the
scaffolding ahead. I hear his bootlaces slapping the stones. I see the bright faces of purple dahlia in the open space of his bag. I stand and it’s all over, it’s done, it’s not my fault or doing—my body pushes straight through the crowd. Something falls, topples, cracks. Something. Someone. My shoes run through the shadows of things. They slip in the scaffolding tunnel. They hurry across the stones of the street, through the honking of cars, through somebody yelling at me.

The boy is near. I am not crazy.