Chapter 10
I woke up with a tongue in my ear, and not in a good way.
“Bear,” I moaned, pushing him away. I had a headache and had the exhausted feeling I had traveled a long, grueling distance.
But it was only a nightmare, a dream of a void, the world falling out from under my feet.
Tossing, turning. The bedsheet had pulled from all four corners of the mattress. “Go tell Oona you need out.”
The light behind my eyelids was too bright, though. I opened my eyes. The kids were both sitting pretty at the side of my mattress, hopeful.
These jerks. I hadn’t forgiven them for snuggling up to Marisa the night before.
Lemon yawned wide and whining, and their tails started wagging. It was Thursday morning. Oona would have already taken them for a walk before going to work, but it didn’t matter. I had said the magic word. Out.
A few minutes later I was standing on the street in my pajamas and leather jacket, my feet stuffed into some ski boots Oona used only when the snow was high. Just outside in freezing temps for dogs that weren’t mine, rethinking my life’s choices.
On our way out, I’d confirmed that the bundle of clothing that had been huddled against the bricks the night before was still gone. At a minimum, that guy with the dirty beard was on his feet, and I could forgive myself for the blanket I had not delivered.
The dogs sniffed along the front of the building instead of the narrow strip of parkway near the street, where the snow was tamped down to a hard, dirty shell over the grass. “Guys,” I said. “Over here. There’s a brand-name treat in it for you if you wrap this up fast.”
My hair, loose from all the pins and curls from last night, flew across my eyes.
I pulled it back to find both of the dogs staring up at the window in the empty storefront next door to the pub.
The brown paper in the windows had peeled away at a corner.
Someone was inside, right at that moment slapping the corner up to close off the view into the room.
The dogs sat on the ice, their tails sweeping the sidewalk.
Wouldn’t a breakfast place in that spot be nice? But maybe I thought so because I was hungry.
In the window, a hand smoothed down the paper, paused. I had the sense that whoever it was knew we were out here, and was waiting for us to move along.
“Are we doing this or what?” I said to the dogs, and tugged on the leash before we all froze our tails off.
THE BEASTS LED ME on their usual scent tour of the block.
Around the corner from the pub, Bear found a spot of grass poking out of the ice that needed serious attention, every single blade, while I stood shivering.
Nearby, a maroon mom wagon had badly parked, its tire up against the curb.
It had already been rewarded with a bright orange parking ticket under its windshield wiper.
Finally, Bear could be convinced to turn the corner toward home. Down at McPhee’s entrance, a young woman in an over-puffed black coat stood at the vestibule door, rattling the handle.
“We open at noon,” I called.
She jumped. People certainly were skittish these days. The dogs pulled toward her, eager to say howdy, but I held them back.
She looked down at them. “I need to talk to someone.”
“You don’t want to see my hourly rate for therapy, kid,” I said. Patsy Cline always called everyone hoss, and that was gender neutral, useful, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it on the street this early in the day. “Come back at noon and you can get the cheap kind, by the ounce.”
“No, I need to talk to a supervisor,” she said, trying to sound more adult than she was. “I’m looking for someone who came here last night. She’s not answering her phone.”
I could see this was about to become my problem.
She was a skinny one under the coat, thin wrists poking out, and young.
Her jeans were stuffed into high, suede boots, the kind that would be ruined by one interaction with sidewalk salt.
The coat she was wearing, though, was made for polar exploration, one of those expensive brands they wore in the Yukon or wherever.
Eight hundred dollars easy, except the logo on the shoulder patch, from a distance, looked exactly like the one on the coats for Chicago Transit Authority bus drivers.
“I’m sorry to hear it,” I said, for time. We got weird stories once in a while, and Alex would pour them a drink and listen—or not speak, which they took to be listening. But I didn’t have time for this now.
Well, I had the time. I just hadn’t planned on spending it this way. I had my life to figure out, and I couldn’t show up to the special songwriting session with the band empty-handed.
I looked at this little chick shivering on the sidewalk, big eyes under a floppy pom-pom beanie, and knew I would have to hear the story.
What was this empathy? It was probably the fault of that blanket I hadn’t taken out last night. This girl had caught me at a weak moment, and it was only getting weaker out here in the cold.
“Okay,” I said finally. “You can come in. But just for a few minutes.”
I unlocked the vestibule and then the bar, and let the dogs off their leash to wander around. The bar was cold, off hours, but it felt like a sauna compared to the street temp. The dogs’ nails clicked on the hardwood of the pub floor. A lonely sound.
The girl peeled off her long scarf and her hat. “There’s no one here.”
“I told you, we’re not open yet,” I said. “I’m not sure how I can help. Was your friend here for the show last night?”
“Show?” the girl said, looking around with a tuck in her bottom lip that I read as disgust. “I doubt it. To be honest, I have no idea why she would come here.”
“Most people come for a drink,” I said. I could use one, to be honest. I walked to the bar and ducked under the hatch. “You want one?”
“It’s nine thirty in the morning,” the girl said. But she followed me to the bar. “Also, she’s a recovered alcoholic. She’s not going to come all this way to have a drink.”
“Someone in recovery might go quite a stretch to end a dry spell,” I said.
“She takes her sobriety, um, really seriously,” the girl said.
“You’re the one who said she was here.” I poured a shot and sank it. Irish coffee, without the coffee. Almost a legitimate breakfast drink. “So she didn’t like live music,” I said. “She didn’t drink … I think this might not be the best place to look for her, what do you think?”
“She called home from this place,” the girl said. “My mother was here.”
The first hum of bad news might have already started up quietly in the back of my brain, but now I had a literal bad feeling. Bad-bad, deep in the gut. I lifted the hatch and came out from behind the bar to slump onto the corner stool. “What time was that? The call?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Why? Will that help? I can look it up.”
“How do you know she called from here?”
“The line dropped, so I used the app? To see where she was? When I called this place, the guy who answered couldn’t hear me. It was too noisy here.” She glared around the room, searching for a place for her blame. Her eyes landed on the stage. “Then the app stopped being able to find her device.”
I wasn’t even sure which app she was talking about. “Your mother, you said?”
Something in my voice made the girl’s head snap in my direction. “You remember her.” She scrabbled onto the stool across the corner of the bar. “You do. I can tell you do. Please?”
Could it be? The kid was in every way the opposite of me, bright eyes and silken hair, straight off a Disney film, the girl who would be a princess before this was all through.
She had peaches-and-cream skin—it was a real thing.
The result, I assumed, of being breast-fed for the proper amount of time by someone who had heard of prenatal vitamins, who didn’t smoke, who didn’t score blow over the top of the kid’s head.
She was eighteen, maybe. Nineteen at best. Life hadn’t disappointed her yet. She still lived within an atmosphere of love, like an infant, breathing in pure adoration and exhaling only trust and hope and cotton-candy breath.
She was staring back at me, her glossy lips parted but not in a social-media-selfie kind of way. She was desperate. She had been loved, and loved her mother in return.
Like I said, the complete opposite of me.
“Your mother’s name wouldn’t be Marisa, would it?”
Her face contorted—relief and joy like she had tasted something sweet, but her expression kept moving past that. Pain, concern. “Yes,” she sobbed, then recovered herself. “Yes, that’s her. Marisa Young. Please.”
Marisa Young, was it? An updated last name, then. Just one more piece of her old life Marisa had been able to leave behind, even though she’d given me grief for doing the same. “And you don’t know why she came here,” I said.
“Whatever you know, even if it’s—maybe she was drinking?” she said. “We’ll get her help.”
“She wasn’t drinking…”
“Or if she … if she went home with someone,” the girl said, her eyes sliding away for the insinuation to land. “But you know what? Parents can work things out, right? We just need to know where she is.”
I couldn’t begin to unpack how little I believed parents could work anything out. “Well,” I said. “I don’t know where she is.”
“Whatever it is,” she whispered.
I could have left it there, with the barest truth. The woman this girl was looking for had been here, and now I didn’t know where she was. That was the truth. Goodbye and good luck to you.
Come on. That’s not what I did.
“Well, this might be new information for you,” I said slowly. “The reason your mother came here is because she’s, uh … She’s my mother, too.”
There was a beat of silence while the girl didn’t understand me, and then she did.
She folded herself away from me: body, expression, hope, and trust, all removed.
She slid off the stool and backed away. Bear hopped up to accompany her to the door, but she ignored him.
“You’re a bitch,” she said. “I’m asking for your help and you’re—I don’t know what you’re doing. ”
I checked my glass. Empty. Probably for the best. “Telling you the truth, buttercup,” I said.
“Don’t call me that.”
“Well, I don’t know your name,” I said.
“I’m not going to tell you. You’re a psycho.” Her eyes were darting all over me, noticing things she hadn’t noticed before: the wild bedhead hair tangled from the wind, the pajama pants stuffed into moon boots. The tats peeping out from under my jacket sleeve.
Sure, okay. I don’t exactly read as trustworthy.
“I’m not everyone’s brand of whiskey, I’ll give you that,” I said. “Our mother, for instance, couldn’t stand me.”
“Stop saying that. Stop saying she’s—” The girl looked a little queasy. Was it so terrible to learn you had a half sibling? Some people might be—
Nope. It was almost always going to be a shit story.
“Look, I’m sorry I had to break some news to you that you obviously didn’t want to hear,” I said.
“Let’s stick to the facts, what you came for.
Your mother came in yesterday to see me.
She was here for a couple of hours, tops.
And then she left. She’s not here. I haven’t seen her or heard from her since last night, either.
But then since I hadn’t heard from her for the twenty years before that, I wasn’t expecting to. ”
The girl held herself steady, one hand on the bar. I’d seen it before. Timber!
I slipped off my stool and went behind the bar to pour a glass of water, then slid it along the bar to a safe distance from me. She came up and sat again, and took the glass in a shaking hand. “It’s true,” she said. “What you’re saying.”
“It’s true.”
“I don’t know what to say,” she said.
“Congrats,” I said. “It’s a girl?”