Chapter 22
Sicily wrestled the front door of her family house open and rushed in and away from me.
I came inside and closed the door behind me. I was always letting myself into places these days.
This house was nice, if not as palatial as Aunt Edith’s.
Inside, there were no peacock feathers stabbed into vases.
Lots of books, instead, but they were all paperbacks with cracked spines, books someone had read.
The front room was maxed out on overstuffed furniture with impressions where butts had spent time and lots of pillows and soft, fluffy throws.
Every seat faced the TV, per American tradition.
The air was made fragrant by the real Christmas tree, not a candle, but also by whatever had last been cooked in the kitchen.
The slightest hint of the trash bin needing to be taken out.
People actually lived here. And laughed and loved, presumably, and they didn’t need a sign out front to announce it.
I moved toward the tree. It had a paper garland, faded, from some other year. An impressive pile of presents already sat under the tree’s branches, all wrapped in red paper dotted with white snowflakes and decorated with stuck-on bows.
The place was cozy and cheerful and welcoming, and it was starting to tighten around me like a straightjacket. I turned from the tree and saw a piano in the corner, and Sicily’s face all over the room. A series of her school pictures stretched up a staircase to the second floor into infinity.
I listened to Sicily’s progress through the house, my throat tight. If only Marisa was here, then this search—this tether to Marisa and her new life—could come to an unceremonious end.
But no one was here. Sicily came into the room and flung her Arctic explorer coat onto the couch. “Her car isn’t in the garage. I thought—you know? Maybe she would just be home by now.”
Magical thinking. Didn’t I know it well? She was about to ask—
“Now what?” she asked.
“Can I get a glass of water?” I asked, for time.
“Um, sure.”
Sicily set off toward the back of the house and I followed, again.
“I think we have some juice,” she said.
“Juice, sure.” I had a headache and a fluttering somewhere between my heart and gut as I went along the hall, like I was getting closer to some secret.
We passed doors to each side, pulled closed or nearly closed, and I realized I was scraping the landscape for details when we entered the kitchen and I spotted a whiteboard where someone had written the week’s menu plan.
Sicily pressed a juice box into my hand. “What’s wrong?”
“Is that…?” A strange lump had formed in my throat. “Is that her handwriting?”
“You don’t know what Mom’s handwriting looks like?”
“She wasn’t writing so many checks back in the day,” I said.
“Huh?”
I mean, I had never balanced a checkbook either, but this kid had probably never even heard of paper checks. But I’d given myself an idea. “Where would she sit to pay bills or whatever?”
“At the counter,” Sicily said, gesturing to the peninsula between the kitchen and dining room.
“But is there a computer somewhere?”
“My … We already tried that,” Sicily said. She hesitated, like she wanted to say something more. But then she went to the counter and pulled a laptop out from under some newspapers and put it in front of me. “We don’t know the password.”
“When’s your birthday?”
“She wouldn’t—”
She had.
The laptop had only a sliver of battery.
Sicily went to fetch an adaptor while I sat at the counter to start shopping through the applications Marisa had left running.
Maybe snooping through her computer wouldn’t lead anywhere, but at least I could get a sense of where her head was the last time she’d used the thing.
The laptop had opened up to a spreadsheet, names and addresses. I scanned it, looking for significance. Family holiday card list?
“Cutting it close, Marisa,” I said to the screen.
Below the spreadsheet layer was a web browser frame with many, many tabs open. I sipped my juice box and settled in.
Email, first. I didn’t see anything meaty in the inbox, mostly promotional crap she’d signed up for.
I discovered a few messages from actual people and sorted through them, listening to footsteps overhead as Sicily searched out the charger.
There were emails from people who were checking in with Marisa, hadn’t heard from her in a while, wondering about getting coffee sometime or dinner when all the girls were back in town or just touching base on that thing she’d said she’d do for this group or that one.
Maybe she did need a break. To me, it all felt so heavy, your presence being demanded by so many.
I switched to the next tab, which was a recipe for a breakfast casserole, then the next, which was a grocery delivery order full of wine, precut veggies, frozen mini-quiches, and the ingredients for that casserole.
The next was another recipe—no, ideas for cookie decorating. Something for the whole family.
In other windows, Marisa seemed to be browsing for gifts. Someone was getting a fancy watch—the husband, probably. Or herself? The watch looked more like a woman’s. Or maybe everyone would get a pricey sweater from this alpaca-to-apparel site?
Decisions, decisions.
There was a page open for Northwest Illinois University—ooh, maybe the alumni association, right, Marisa? You liar.
But no, the page was about requesting student information. I read a bit of it without understanding what I was reading, before nearly falling asleep and moving on.
The next tab was for an electronics store with some sweet noise-canceling Bluetooth headphones front and center.
High-end cans that cost— Wow. I salivated over them for a minute, then clicked over to the next tab, a clothing store that sold, it seemed, bougie workout clothes that looked more like scuba gear.
The last open tab was for a different clothing store website, featuring a lush cashmere wrap in the softest inner-seashell pink.
I knew as soon as I saw it that it would be for Sicily. That color would look perfect on her.
I clicked away hurriedly as she came back into the room. I was Santa, now? Or at least an elf, not ruining the surprise.
“Looks like she was planning a nice breakfast for Christmas morning,” I said.
Sicily’s eyes started to tear.
“I mean,” I said, “I don’t think she was planning to cut and run. She had a casserole planned. People planning a casserole are not about to run away from home.”
“Oh,” Sicily said.
“What bank do you use?”
“Um…”
“Never mind,” I said.
I’d found it already. Internet browsers had a long memory, and a lot of internet users kept the same password for everything, despite it being a very bad idea—
Whoa.
“Is that our money?” Sicily said, coming around to look at the screen over my shoulder. “You’re not going to … rob us, right?”
“You’re asking me if I’m a con again?” I asked, not even looking away from the screen. “Really, kid? I can hop on a train again, real easy.”
“Sorry. No. But what are you looking for?”
“This.” I had pulled up the latest charges on their credit card account. “All transactions. Johnny Cash, here we go. There are charges here still pending, stuff she bought this week. What’s Stone House? Wait, here it is. There’s a pending charge from Wednesday for a parking meter.”
“Oh! Does it say where the meter is? Can we go there?”
“The car is probably in the impound lot by now. We can call and find out. Do you know your mom’s license plate number?”
Sicily drew her phone from her pocket and walked away from me, thumbing a furious message to someone. Her dad, I guessed. “But I’ve been to that street,” she said. “Twice. I didn’t see her car.”
“Were you looking for it, though?”
“I guess not.”
“Also, if there’s a Chicago industry that prides itself on a job thoroughly and quickly done, it’s the towing guys,” I said into the computer screen. I was scrolling Marisa’s transactions: department stores, boutiques, hair salon, restaurants, subscriptions.
A little whoosh noise signaled that Sicily’s message had been sent. “If her car got towed, she could have taken the train. Or a cab?”
“Maybe.”
“If the car isn’t in that lot, does that mean she drove away?”
When I didn’t answer, Sicily looked up from her phone. “What? Did you find something?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I mean…”
“What?”
“It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Just tell me,” Sicily pleaded.
“Was your family going on a vacation anytime soon?”
“Vacation,” she repeated, as if she was learning a word from a foreign language.
“She doesn’t have any charges here for a train or cab,” I said as gently as I could. “But there’s a pretty big charge Wednesday morning to … Well, it’s a website people use for arranging, you know, rental cars, hotels, flights…”
“Trips,” Sicily whispered.
“Getaways,” I said at the same time.