One Thing Stolen (5 page)

But when I reach the bridge there’s nothing in the face of the river but a girl looking down: me. There’s nothing except two dahlias on the ground. Dahlias, I think, for me.

What the hell, Jack says now, breathless, running up behind me. What the freaking hell.

Didn’t you—

Didn’t I
what?
he demands.

See?

What?

Him.

Who?

Him
.

Don’t do that, Jack says. Seriously, don’t.

He yanks my arm, stops talking. Nobody talking to no one.

She just took off, Jack’s saying. Running. Wouldn’t turn around. It was crazy.
She
was.

Is it true, Nadia? Mom asks. What your brother says?

Not—

Excuse me?

Not
just
—took—off. The words like glue.

Dad is walking in circles. Mom is sitting with tea. Mom is standing up, then sitting down, and Dad keeps going. Into the kitchen, out of the kitchen, along the streamers of Vitale ivy. The girl from the third floor is playing the piano and now she’s clopping around in her stilettos and Jack is flopped across the living room couch, until he gets up and unpacks his bag and starts washing the peppers, cutting them lengthwise, scooping out the seeds. He opens up Marcella’s book, turns to a page, leans in. He looks up and across the room and back at me, thinks something, doesn’t say it, raises his knife, chops one thing after another, square and even.

Even though your brother asked you to stop, Mom says. Even though you were knocking into people, could have been knocking into cars, could have hurt yourself, could have hurt others. Running after nothing.

Not—nothing.

Jack cuts the peppers into strips. He throws some butter into the skillet and chases it with garlic. He stirs, mad and quick, and looks up and shakes his head. Keeps stirring.

Two times in two days, Dad says now.

Two? Mom says. This happened
twice?

I’ll explain, Dad says. Later.

No, Mom says. Explain it now. I need the facts, Greg. What’s going on?

I didn’t want you worrying, Dad says.

What part of this am I not already worried about? Mom says, her voice so suddenly still that it frightens me more than anything she could yell. What part of this have we not already spoken about? What else is there?

Jack adds the peppers to the garlic butter. He flips them over, stirs. Mom looks from Dad to me, turns the earring in her ear, and except for the sizzle of the peppers and the garlic, the room is shush, and no one is talking, and I have nothing I know how to say. The boy was there. He left me flowers. They are hiding here, inside my sweater. I can’t help what Jack can’t see.

Lesson of the day, Jack says, very quietly, is chives.

Chives, Dad repeats.

I want to apologize. I want to say it won’t happen again, but you were there, you saw, didn’t you? There was a boy. He smiled. I ran. He left me flowers. He vanished. Jack didn’t look up in time to see.

Say it, sweetie, Mom says.

But I can’t say that I can’t say. Which is one more terrible thing.

They eat without me. They leave me here, in the borrowed room, with the ship of steals and these sweet, dropped flowers, these things I’ve seen, these words I would say if I could speak them.

Listen to them.

Listen for me.

Not like her
.

Some kind of phase?

I shouldn’t have brought you all to Florence, we should have
—

What else haven’t you told me?

Nothing
.

What do you mean: mesmerized?

You’ve seen her
.

But what did she say when you asked her?

She said . . . she didn’t say . . . You hear how she talks. You know what it is. Hardly at all, and then like molasses
.

Yes, but
.

I’ll talk with her, love. I promise
.

Gregory, I’m frightened
.

I want to tell them everything.

I am afraid of everything.

Give me the words so I can save them. Save me.

Far away, and closer, they talk. All around, in circles. It is the Day of Chives. It is Jack’s phone ringing, and doors opening and closing, and the upstairs stilettos, and now I hear Dad coming down the hall, his one side heavier than the other, and when he knocks on the borrowed door and I don’t answer he does not walk away. He stands there, on the other side, saying nothing.

Tell him for me.

Tell him what I mean.

Please.

The moon sinks into the belt of clouds. The waiters, the cooks, the girls, the cigarettes, the bookbinder are sleeping. Even the girl on the third floor with the stilettos is sleeping, but I’m not sleeping, and my lungs are full of glue, and my fingertips are bleeding, but see, see what I’ve made, see who I am, explain me to me.

I wove dahlia stems into the bowl of the nest. I used the dahlia blooms as buttons. I saw the boy. He left flowers for me.

Beautiful.

Strange.

Outside the clouds are like snow. They are like back then, in West Philadelphia, another night in Maggie’s room. Maggie’s singing Joan Baez, a whisper. Her cashmere dress is mopping the floor. She has big hoop earrings on and a boy’s tie like a bandanna, and her eyelashes are broom-bristle thick.
Dance
, she’s saying, but I’m quiet and still on her beanbag chair, quiet and almost still, spaces between the thoughts in my head, and I am watching Maggie.

Maggie’s style is Second Mile Style. It’s the stuff she’s rescued from the thrift shop four blocks down. The beanbag chairs that are lemon and mango and orange. The macramé banners hung over the foot of each bed. The shoe box in the closet where Maggie puts the accessories she has named for me: the Nadia choker, the Nadia beads, the Nadia feathered earrings. The two nameplates on the door that Mrs. Ercolani hammered in—
M
and
N
—like we’re blood sisters, maybe even twins. Mrs. Ercolani is Maggie forty years from now, her red hair with stripes of white in the front, her eyes bright, and her happiest stories about the places she’ll go, the places she hasn’t been yet.

Hey
, Maggie says. She’s dancing. She’s on the braided rug letting the vinyls spin on her Philips portable. She puts the needle down on Earth, Wind & Fire and rides the “Mighty Mighty” and now she’s singing into the pokey end of her hairbrush and pulling me up with her free hand. I feel the bump of the song in my bones, the high rise of the old funk, the easy “Mighty Mighty,” and the angel with the beeswax feet is dancing in her strings, her wooden knees clapping. Maggie touches her fingers to the angel’s feet. She throws open the big-sash windows and lets the snow fall in. It’s a snow-globe drift. It piles up on the sill and against the rug and Maggie sticks half her body into the night, puts her tongue out to taste the weather.

Through the open window the snow falls and the wind howls, and it’s cold; the angel’s dancing.
Don’t move
, I say.

What?
she says.

I have a plan
.

I leave Maggie in her room, the snow piling up near her feet. I go down the stairs, past the big front windows, where the snow falls faster, plentiful and silent. It is erasing the streets and the sidewalks. It is frosting the bare branches of the trees and blanketing the gutters and all up and down the streets the lights are on and West Philadelphia is snow-cold amber. In Maggie’s dungeon basement, stalactites drip and the washing machine rumbles and everything is damp, and at last I find what I came for—a length of rope. I take the steps up two at a time, find Maggie still singing, dig out extra mohair sweaters, one each. I unhook two striped scarves from Maggie’s closet, dig out two pairs of thick socks, hand Maggie one, and all this time, she’s just standing there, watching me, letting the snow fall into the room, a funky smile on her face.

WTF
, she says.

No questions
.

We pull on our boots. We’re down the steps, out the door, we’re calling to Maggie’s mother,
We’ll be back
, and now I tell Maggie not to move;
I have a surprise, close your eyes
. From the alley I pull a lid from an old trash can. I tie it to the leash of my rope. I blow some heat into my cotton-gloved hands, and the snow is so new, my boots sink in deep.

You sit, I pull
, I say.

She raises one eyebrow.

Climb on
.

She eases down. The snow deflates, lets out a crunch. I snap the rope and Maggie is thrown back and now forward, keeping her knees to her chin.

Some plan
, she says.

Past the community garden, toward the edge of the Penn campus, between the towers, over the bridge and down Locust Walk. I pull and Maggie sits—the snow beneath us, our trail behind us, the snow falling. At the compass I turn toward Spruce and the massive Quadrangle dorms, where the street tilts and the building rises and from within the vast interior courtyards we hear the sound of snowball fights, laughter. Maggie’s red hair has turned white. Her mohair shoulders and arms and the bottom of her dress are white. Her boots are white and she’s disappearing into the night and the snow tumbles in and I see all this through crystal stars that have set between my lashes, through the melting of the night.

Then is now. Now is now. Everything is vanishing. Everything is disappearing. The new moon above Florence hides behind the belt of clouds and the first drops of rain have begun to fall, making splatters in the alley, leaving splashes on my cheeks. Somebody is crying. Through the open window I lean as far as I can and wonder what Maggie would think if she could see me now, what Maggie would do to save me, if anyone can save me.

Breakfast, Dad is saying. You awake? I hear him knocking on the door, sighing. I hear him rapping again until finally I open my eyes and everything is smudge and shadow and glue. Memory is steam. Dad’s down the hall. I open the door, and there he is—his big linen shirt cuffed uneven at the sleeves and his khaki pants crooked at the seams. He has an apron on. It’s a minute or two before he sees me, and when he does, he looks fake easy, like he’s trying casual on and it doesn’t fit him.