One Thing Stolen (22 page)

Now in the small streets of Santa Croce we walk the cobbled stones. There are three girls, arm in arm, singing some Italian song. There are cats on the stoops and in the flower boxes. There’s a wicker basket on a bike, piled high with onions, and I wonder what kind of stew is in store for that family, wonder how that house will smell for days afterward. We walk looking for a special boy, taking our chances. Walk in advance of the match-to-match, the Timex beating out the seconds on my wrist.

The houses are crooked and stuccoed, lopsided or square. The street curves around like a kitten chasing its tail, except for the one house that is different from the rest, its face painted blue, its trim painted the color of a warm cherry pie, maybe a cranberry pie, definitely pie. The people who pass keep their chins tucked in, their hands in their pockets, no flowers, no flames. The prof keeps pressing his eyebrows back, as if that will help turn on some superpower vision.

We don’t find a boy with illuminated hair, but we do find a shop, our feet already wet and the hem on my coat the color of coal. The shop is a hole in the wall—a cave of plaster heads and cornices, fireplace mantels and jewelry boxes, rings for gnarly fingers, old door handles and milk jugs, silverware and ironed-over tablecloths. Not antiques, exactly, and not thrift. Only everything that was.

“You think she was here?” the prof asks, when we stop at the door. I tell him nothing can be known for sure, but still, this is a chance, and so he takes off his hat, like he’s stepped foot into church, and he lets me do my business as I do my business now, asking the question about the Timex ’82. Ever seen one of them? Ever
sell
one?

The shopkeeper closes his eyes and rocks on his heels, regal and medieval, like a character from
Game of Thrones
, with no hair, Italian shoes, and a grandmother’s apron. He says he thinks maybe he remembers a watch like that, how he noticed it because of how strange it was, how they only ever built that watch for two months in that one year of 1982. “I might have seen that watch,” the shopkeeper says, in Italian, closing his eyes and trying to remember, and I stare at him hard to see whether he looks like someone who has been taken from, whether Nadia was here after all. It’s a tough call. It’s not clear. I’m on my own—the prof retreated to the back of the shop, to the books and magazines, stained as tea. I make the decision on my own: Nadia’s Timex is staying with me.

“Thank you,” I tell the guy in the shop. “Prof,” I say, and as soon as I say his name, he looks up and startles—not at me, but something beyond me, through the window of the shop.

“What is it?” I ask as we hurry out the door.

“I thought I saw,” he says. “I thought . . .”

“What?”

“Someone running.”

But there is nothing but three girls singing in the Santa Croce streets, walking down the cobbled stones with their arms like daisy chains.

When I get back to the Vitales’ on Verrazzano, Agnese is in the vestibule pacing, smoking her cigarette, calming her puppy. The prof is on his way up the hills. I’m alone with the watch on my Gumby wrist, alone with the chance we might have had, or maybe it was just the weird mist-light of Florence.

“He was just here,” Agnese says, in her Italian American as soon as she sees me, her dog on alert.

“Who was?”

“The boy you were asking for. The boy with the hair.” She kisses the part of her dog that fluffs up between his ears. His pink tongue falls out, like bubblegum taffy. He yips.

I take a
whoa
step back, settle my heart flutter, take a breath.

“Benedetto?”

“Si.”

“Did he knock? Did you . . .”

“No. He was down there. Looking up. I wasn’t dressed, and then I got dressed, and by the time I got down to the street, he was gone.”

“You’re sure?”

“Hair like light?” she says. “Hair that glows?”

I look at her face, her beautiful Italian face, and I know she is telling the truth. That she is trying to help us, like she is always trying to help us, playing music to appease us, keeping an eye out.

“Which way?”

She stomps through the vestibule in her high, open-toed heels. She presses the latch, pulls on the door, opens us up to the weather, points south toward the piazza. The dog yips. The cigarette’s finished. She stomps it to a smolder.

“Agnese,” I say, “thank you.” Throwing my arms around her quick. I take off at a clip, bunching my coat up with my fists. I reach the end of Verrazzano in no time, cut through the German market, between the red-and-white awnings, past the oompah band. Far away, near the four fierce lions at the base of the Dante-with-his-cap-on statue, I see what I would describe to you as supernatural color.

I see it. I swear.

I take off even faster now—eyes on the prize, painted clogs hard on the cobbles, hem dragging, who cares. I swing in and out of the morning shoppers until bam, bang, I’m stopped dead cold by a mother pushing a baby in a wicker carriage.

“Excuse me,” I say. “Sorry!” Looking down at the baby and up at the mother and hoping they’ll push out of the way. They don’t. The wheel of the carriage is stuck on the paving and for a moment we are hanging there, like a freeze-frame in a film, all three, until I jiggle the carriage free. I’m thanked, but I’m no hero. There was a chance, but I lost it. At Dante’s base only the lions sit and the eagle flaps its stone wings.

“Jesus,” I say, and the chimes go off, and I check the stolen Timex: noon.

I have an hour, still, to look around. I buy a ticket to the cathedral.

Not like I haven’t been here before. I’ve sat in the pews beside Mrs. C. staring up at the scaffolding and staring back into the Franciscan space, talking about Nadia and at-risks and big faith and not giving in to giving in. I’ve counted the tight arches and I’ve Our Father’ed before the tombs that are like houses. I’ve guarded the vapors of Michelangelo and Galileo and whatever else survives the genius soul. The paint on the frescoes in the sixteen chapels is the color of faded velvet in the windows of old homes, and it’s bigger than a soccer field in here. Bigger than any Ivy League graduation. So big, so too easily big, to choose to hide in shadows.

Take a chance, Benedetto. Show yourself.

It is not a busy day in the cathedral. Only small knots of people are here or there, before the Giotto, before the sacristy, before the redheaded Madonna, in the postcard store. I hear the church bell ring and check the Timex, and it is one o’clock. I take another tour through, remember the
Lonely Planet
caution box—the
sidebar on Stendhal syndrome, also called hyperkulturania. Basic story, in a nutshell: Stendhal, the French guy, came in here and saw so much beauty that he got sick.

Too much beauty can make you sick.

Show yourself, I think.

Show yourself, Benedetto.

Mrs. C. has already left for the hill. I call for her at the flat when I get back, but she’s gone, and I change my shoes and comb my hair—pile it up away from my face and nail the bun in with a gel pen. If Agnese is home, she’s not playing the piano, and Jack and the prof are at lunch, the way they do after their own intensives on the hill. It’s just me and the ghosts of the Vitales, looking out on Verrazzano, so I lock the door behind me and leave the flat, get on my way toward my best friend on the hill.

Down again, through again, over. Three kids grabbing a smoke on the concrete beach of the dam, the fisherman gone. Belvedere seems far today, too high up and tucked away, and when I stop to catch my breath I look back east, over my shoulder, toward San Miniato, like a toy in Legoland. A boy so fast even God couldn’t catch him. A boy maybe in the backstreets of Santa Croce. A boy maybe at Verrazzano.

Find him.

When I turn back around I see the little girl in the red sweater and cowboy boots. She’s farther down the hill than usual, looking concerned until she sees me. She raises one hand and waves, then raises the other to advertise a new doll, floppy and soft, and suddenly I’m filled with lonesomeness for the girl I used to be, the girl Nadia used to be. Girls who didn’t know how scary and random and upside down life can turn out to be.

“Buon Natale!”
she calls, and as I rise higher and higher up the hill, I see how the box of her house is lit from within by a bulbed evergreen. The girl blows me a kiss and turns on her heel, her skirt kicking up behind her and the lights in her house blinking on and off. Almost Christmas. She’s wanting me to know, thinking I’d forgotten.

In Katherine’s house they’re already at the table with a tin of cookies and three mugs of tea. I leave my coat on, the cold air caught in my hair; I shiver. Katherine stands to reach the kettle on the stove and Nadia stands too, steps forward, hugs me hard, says hello. Lights in the wells of her eyes, asking the question:

“Have you?”

“Still looking.”

“We have some news,” Mrs. C. says, interrupting. She has her red turtleneck on, her black yoga pants, her hair in a simple ponytail, her reading glasses halfway down her nose and the news she has is, I can tell, far more important than the news I can’t deliver.

“What is it?”

“We got a call from California.”

“Let Nadia tell,” Katherine says.

I turn, look at my best friend again, the light in her eyes changing, a slow smile on her face, a sad slow smile. She steps back, gathers her words, puts them all together in her head before she speaks them out loud.

“Dr. Bruce,” she begins. “Dr.—Bruce. The clin—ic. Clinical-trialopening.” The last words spilling in a crystallizing rush.

“When?”

“Just after Christmas,” Mrs. C. says, standing up now, hands on her hips, her arms out like the slight wings of a Cornish hen.

She has already made plans, I can tell. Already scheduled the trip in her head, put Jack back into the school in Philly, the prof back onto the campus at Penn, Nadia and herself in a sublet in the rusty hills of San Francisco, for a month, maybe two months, maybe three months, I don’t know, until Nadia’s progress can be monitored somewhere closer to home. The clinical trial is opening. The clinical trial for the pharma intensive that may bring Nadia closer to whole.