Chapter 15
Hey. What did I do?
“What?” Sicily asked, her voice wretched. “What? Where’s Mom? Who are you talking to?”
Edith hung up and sat a moment. The lighting off the Christmas tree wasn’t doing her coloring any favors. She looked Merle Haggard, if you see what I’m saying, a lot less like someone on a bus advertisement and a lot more like someone who’d spent the night sleeping on the bench.
“Treatment,” I said, as the idea entered my head.
Edith looked up sharply.
“What?” Sicily said. “Someone tell me. I’m not a child.”
“Marisa told you she was going to check herself into rehab,” I said. “Again.”
Sicily turned to Edith, hoping I was wrong. I was not wrong.
“She’s got a go-to place? Standing reservation?” I said. “But if that’s where she was headed, why didn’t you take her all the way there? Why let a struggling addict make her own way?”
“That’s what she wanted,” Edith said. A note of helplessness had crept into her voice. If this was an act, it was a good one. “She said she was taking the train—”
Lying again. Suburban moms never preferred the train. “Are we sure that’s where she was really going?”
“What do you mean?” Sicily said.
“Maybe she just said she was checking into rehab for a top-off. Maybe she only said what would keep you from worrying—”
“I would worry,” Edith started. “I would—”
“Or to throw you off,” I finished. “So she could go enjoy a good bender.”
I could feel the vibe of the room shift as both Edith and Sicily decided not to give my ideas the time of day. They’d rather believe what? That she’d disappeared completely, poof?
Anything rather than believe that Marisa was out doing whatever she pleased. That she’d be willing to hurt anyone to do it.
Anyone but me. She’d already made me bulletproof.
Edith moved over on the couch to make room for Sicily, and picked up the phone again. Shoulder to shoulder, a duo.
I’d never been one for team sports, you know?
I went to the front door and looked out at the weather, thinking and not thinking, trying not to think too much. Trying not to go back for that feather.
I zipped my jacket, lifted the collar, and slipped out.
In this town, the sidewalks were salted and clear, and the train would be on time. A marshmallow world, spread out before me. A Bing Crosby song.
I couldn’t wait to get the hell out.
IT WAS A TWO-TRAIN RIDE home, and I had to hope my transit card wouldn’t scrape bottom. I hadn’t brought any cash. I didn’t have any, anyway.
On the first leg of the journey, I climbed to the second level of the train, where fewer people would jostle by.
The car I’d chosen was pretty empty, anyway.
Through the green-tinted windows, I watched the landscape turn from suburbia back to Chicago, a magic trick that calmed my nerves.
Back in the city, I transferred from the commuter line to the crush of the Blue Line L and rode the rest of the way home standing, grasping a grubby pole.
“Mommy, why is that lady singing?”
I looked down. In the double seat at my elbow, a little girl sat bundled up against her mother, her head tipped back to stare at me. The mother was trying to distract the kid with something on her phone.
I moved along the train car, catching a single seat when someone got up for their stop.
I sat with my shoulder cold against the window, doubt started to creep in.
Maybe I shouldn’t have just left without saying something to Sicily?
Even if Edith Maxwell hadn’t wanted me there?
Even if my offering of uncomfortable truths had only made Sicily feel bad?
I wasn’t used to seeing things from all the way around an issue, to be honest. I could admit it.
I was a lot more accustomed to looking out for number one, not considering, like, family.
Me and Alex, we had never been on those terms. We gave each other space, because he required it.
Alex was a bit of a houseplant. A little light went a long way, very little tending required. And Joey—
At the thought of him, my resentment flared. I never should have let him in. I’d compromised, I’d bent my life to include him, to be near him, and why?
Keeping everyone out there just beyond my fingertips—it worked for me and Alex, for me and Oona as roommates, for me and the band.
I had only a tiny pang, thinking of the girls that way. Whatever. A little distance kept things rock ’n’ roll. And Sicily—
Well, I hadn’t known she existed yesterday. What was different now?
At my L stop, the wind was a renewed assault, ripping across the elevated platform.
At street level, I hid behind the collar of my jacket and pointed my shoulder toward McPhee’s.
Thursday night, coming on. It might be a busy night, with the Advent calendars all counting down, single digits.
People would be out for stocking stuffers and holly jollies with friends, people from the office.
Things might be swinging at McPhee’s by now, the fire high behind the grate and everyone’s cheeks flushed from liquor and warmth. It would be good to be home.
Even if this home had a big ol’ X on it for demolition, if Edith Maxwell got her way. I didn’t know what I would do if she did.
Home couldn’t just be one place, though. What happened when you moved on, greener pastures and all that? There were people, I thought, who seemed to carry home within them. They didn’t know about the gaping black hole lying below us all, how quickly and quietly you might tumble.
I found myself thinking of that little girl on the train, cuddled up against her mother—
And that’s when I lost my footing.
It was almost a real wipeout again, scrape on ice, feet in the air, the whole deal.
But I caught myself at the last minute, finding balance by holding very still. I looked up from my boots. I was standing at the mouth of McPhee’s alley, again, breathing irregularly in white-smoke puffs.
A bundle of rags and blue tarp lay huddled against the garbage bin again. The guy I’d let down the night before was back for another helping of cold midnight. No decommissioned grocery cart this time. Nothing to cut the wind at all.
Down the block, McPhee’s radiated warmth.
Someone had tied back the red café curtains inside, offering all the light from within to the street and the people emerging from the door, laughing a riot.
The brittle weather made compatriots of those willing to be out in it.
The till would be extra busy, Alex run off his feet.
He might even be worried, wondering where I’d been all day.
I started off in that direction again. But I was split in two, the body heading toward the pub, the mind hovering back near the question I had asked myself—
What had changed? What was different?
What was different was that I didn’t have to peer into downcast faces anymore, wondering if one of them would be Marisa. Wondering what I’d even do, if I found her like that. I didn’t have to worry about running into her, or worry that she would need something from me—
She didn’t. Did she?
What was different was … Sicily.
My feet slowed until I was standing there in front of the dark, papered windows of the empty storefront next to the pub.
I didn’t know how I felt about Sicily being out there in the world. I felt … something. Like I could see past all the buildings, all the noise, to a wide horizon. What was that? Was this potential? Hope?
When I was six years old, I’d sat on a bus with Alex, just like that girl with her mom.
Just torn from my mother, though she’d been pushing me away.
On that ride into the city, I sat low in my seat, still smarting from the display I’d put on at the moment of separation.
I was strung out, didn’t know where I’d end up. Only the clothes on my back.
The first of many times, barely the skin on my bones.
That bus ride had felt like such a long journey to a kid, but probably hadn’t been.
When we’d arrived at the bungalow that day, Alex had showed me to my room, gracious but stiff, not showing even a hint of enthusiasm to have me there.
Which had made sense to me in a way a gushing welcome wouldn’t have.
When he left me in the bedroom he’d put together for me to get settled, I locked the door and crawled into the bed that Alex, this stranger, had said was mine.
I couldn’t trust it. He had put a new, pristine-white comforter on that bed, and new sheets just for me, blue. The color of home, that specific blue.
For a moment, I thought of the curtains at the window of the room I shared with Joey, of his sleepy smile as he woke up and reached for me—
No. Joey, it had turned out, was no home for me.
That day, arriving at Alex’s house, I’d buried myself within the safety, the cleanliness, the flowery smells.
In that word: mine. But I had had something before, too.
Hadn’t she been mine, too? I had crawled into that bed, pulling the blankets up and over me, cocooned within, and falling dead asleep for something like sixteen hours.
When I finally showed my face, I ate everything put in front of me, two big bowls of cereal and some toast—
And pocketed a butter knife, just in case.
A sharp cold gust sliced at my exposed neck. I was still out in the elements, drawn up next to the window of the empty storefront, my hands tucked into my armpits.
The distance between the child slipping the butter knife off the table and the little girl tonight on the train was a chasm I’d thought couldn’t be crossed. But now I wasn’t sure. I’d got something wrong.
Marisa had made it through, somehow. I was the one who still—
Who couldn’t—
I dropped my hands and turned back for the mouth of the alley.
“Hey, buddy?” I stepped gingerly across the ice. “They have a warming station a few blocks from here.”
My voice bounced off the bricks of the dead end and back.
“Or just come in to the pub for some coffee. Or a sandwich? Are you hungry?”
The wind howled past me. Threads of hair fallen from my ponytail lashed at my eyes. I brushed it away with stinging fingers.
“Sir?”
The bundle of clothes and rags did not react or shift. I couldn’t detect a chest rising.
Oh, no.
I would kick myself if one warm blanket the night before might have made the difference. If I’d got caught up in my little dramas and had cost someone everything.
The guy had burritoed himself up in a blue vinyl tarp—no, it wasn’t a tarp. A blanket? But a blanket was nothing against this wind.
I edged closer until I could reach in to peel back a corner of his covering. The weave of the blanket was coarser than expected, and stuck to the ice.
“Sir,” I whispered.
Somewhere in between the idea of tugging back the fabric and actually doing it, I had come to accept that it was too late for warming stations, for charity.
I knew. I knew it was too late. The first sight of his skin, a sliver of neck, told me everything I needed to know.
His skin was a terrible color, the cloudy gray of stone and death and the end, and his face—
I knew more and everything and nothing, standing there with a pinch of rough blue cloth in my fingers and the wind moaning over us, the both of us, here, together.
But it was not the air keening mournfully, through and around.
I stumbled backward. The low noise in my own throat rose up and up and up. I fumbled for my phone and was on the ice again, hands and knees, and scrabbling for the opening of the alley. Scraped hands, empty pocket, forgetting.
It couldn’t be and it was.
Joey.
My breath. I couldn’t catch it. My hands burning on the ice, my throat torn wide open and howling. I gulped, gulped at the night, until air finally returned to my lungs to scream again.